Orwell, HR departments and the curse of middle management

Have a read of this. It's a Guardian analysis of the terminology used by Human Resource departments.

What would Orwell make of the modern workplace? It's not just HR departments - the insidious layers of middle management that are routinely inflicted on staff are also guilty of misdirection, dissembly and excessive use of jargon and euphemism. The implied involvement of higher powers is also rife among the middle management strata - ask to do anything slightly threatening, like working from home and thus removing yourself from their gaze, and you may get a response like "There's no policy on that, I'm afraid". Trust in, and respect for, employees was replaced by this passive aggressive system of command and control long since.

Maybe we should just stop and think about the term "Human Resource". Not a nice way to describe the people actually making your stuff, is it? I'd laugh, but it's so sad.

Putting our money where our mouth is on the environment.

Oil drilling is about to commence in a particularly important area of the Amazon rainforest. It happens, right? In this case, though, it didn't have to as Rafael Correa, Ecuador's president, appealed to the UN and international community generally, to set up an appeal for half of the projected USD7.2bn value of the reserve's oil. If that target was achieved, he said, drilling would be banned.

USD$300m was pledged. Pathetic. Just for contrast, USD1.3tn has been spent on bailing out the British banking system after the financial meltdown. That's roughly 350 times the amount Correa wanted investing in UN sanctioned projects in Ecuador. Global capitalism is obviously way more important than our life support system, the planet.

We should be prepared to sacrifice some GDP to help bring up the standard of living of peoples in environmentally sensitive areas. They look at us and think "I'd like some of those things" - then along comes the US or China with the offer of loads of hard cash for the oil and the pressure is on. If the developed nations just in effect rented the Amazon the pressure would be far less.

Sad, really sad.

Samsung's Sentry Bot

Samsung's Galaxy S4 is, according to Samsung, your 'Life Companion'. I don't know what the marketing spin is for another of Samsung's products, the SGR Series sentry robot.

Here's a nice video about the lovely Galaxy S4. Here's an inspiring video about the SGR sentry. Two products from the same company. One enhances your life, the other takes it.

Tomcat maxThreads and Apache MaxClients

A quick one this ...

Over the last few weeks our Sakai instance has been performing poorly when the number of sessions has gone over the 80 mark,  or thereabouts. We checked out the network, monitored response times , that kind of thing, but to no avail. In the end it turned out to be the maxThreads parameter to our AJP connector, or so we thought. We upped that to 500 which we guessed would be overkill, but still better than underkill, and we waited ...

Horror! The server still performed badly on occasions, slowing down and occasionally refusing connections. I did some reading on Apache configuration and realised that it might actually be the front end apache server causing the problem. After upping the MaxClients parameter on the MPM worker it was sorted. No more 'lumpiness' :)

The moral of this story?

If your webapps are doing lots of small requests, ajax type stuff maybe, there's a good chance you'll blow your maxThreads/MaxClients limit at some point and users will start getting a rough ride. So bump them up!

Sakai 3 Discussion Widget

I've been doing some Sakai 3 (http://www.sakaiproject.org) work for the last couple of days and I'm finding it quite liberating. It's nice to be able to just write new configuration settings to a javascript object and just post it away in a content repository, as opposed to actually having to modify your DB schema with every little change in functionality. Development speeds up no end.

More specifically, I've been working on the discussion widget as this is the kind of thing I've done already with the Sakai 2 forum tool YAFT. It's basic, but nice - and here are a few screenshots.

Full View:



Compact view:



Collapsed view:

Sakai in India

I've just arrived in India, Gurgaon to be precise. My mission is to install and configure a Sakai instance for a university called the GD Goenka Education City and who are partnered with Lancaster in the delivery and accreditation of various courses. Their campus is spread over 60 acres and is brand spanking new, although I've not seen it in the flesh, or bricks and mortar, as yet.

It's very very hot here. 41 degrees centigrade and it's forecast to climb as the week progresses. The monsoon's late you see and everybody's praying for rain so that things cool off a bit. On the way here I saw cycle rickshaw operators still plying their trade in the baking heat - amazing really. I also spotted a few curbside vendors surrounded by huge crowds of brightly coloured inflatable rings and animals, so it must be swimming pool weather.

More later, and hopefully some pictures.