V-Base Development Blog

Tracey sent me a nice link to read, probably to try to establish some inner rest in me after a week of struggling with hardware. It’s about wabi-sabi, a Japanese concept about imperfect beauty. What immediately caught my eye was the western use of this concept.

It’s employed in Agile programming to describe acceptance of the state of ongoing imperfection.

To deal with all the ongoing imperfections we have over time changed our requirements considerably. For example: because Oracle hasn’t released its product (11g) for Solaris OS on x86 platforms we decided to change the server OS to Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Edition) which does support 11g. This however has resulted in another ‘ongoing’ imperfection

The drivers to make the Red Hat server talk to the Sun StorageTek data storage array, which we bought together with the server, are not what you would say ‘production ready’ – I got the source code for the unreleased drivers sent to me by Sun engineers.  Compiled it, added it to the kernel, hmmm, this ‘not production ready I thought; it just doesn’t work.

The first result; we had to postpone the move of the hardware to our production environment at Imperial College here in London, were we would be connected to the JANET network.

Second result: Having a good think about how to deal with this…

This afternoon I’ll have to present this <understatement>small setback</understatement> to our project’s governance group, and see if we can come up with some alternatives or a solution.

I’ll keep you up to date.

Olivier