The Right to Repair

Posted on March 23, 2022 by way0utwest

I’m a do-it-yourself (DIY) person in many ways. I work on equipment on the ranch, repair or improve things in the house, and often tackle electrical or mechanical tasks. I’ve replaced hydraulic hoses, changed oil, replaced brakes, changed outlets, wired up lights, and more. I keep a hand cleaning degreaser handy and use it regularly.

I think many people who work in software development are the same way, and often I find they want to rebuild things themselves rather than adopt or improve what’s there. Many organizations have a fair amount of NIH Syndrome inside that results in money and resources spent on software that might be better used elsewhere. I think some of this is going away as current trends in software make use of APIs, OSS, and services to cobble together a workflow rather than just building something from scratch.

However, that’s not always something we can do. In fact, we often can’t take apart commercial software and fix it, not even when it’s broken and in need of repair. That same philosophy is starting to pervade products in the real world, which is disappointing to me as someone that likes to be able to repair something I own.

There is a good article on the right to repair over at Make magazine. In this case, the argument is that there are certain restrictions manufacturers put in place to limit the ability of individuals or third parties to repair products. In the physical world, I think this is a problem for actual devices, but it’s also becoming an issue as software pervades the operation of many physical devices. One of the higher-profile complaints has been with tractor service.

I don’t know how we reconcile the right to repair and own something with the intellectual property rights of software. It is a thorny issue, and one that I am not sure of how I would want to frame the rights, but I do hope that we at least ensure that physical products people own can be repaired by individuals, including the ability to “reset” software as needed.

Steve Jones

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Daily Coping 23 Mar 2022

Posted on March 23, 2022 by way0utwest

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

Today’s tip is to look around and spot three things you find unusual or pleasant.

I was lucky enough to travel recently a few times. One trip was to upstate New York to see my daughter, and I made it a point to look for a few different things. Here are a few things I noticed:

Cheese Curds

I don’t see these around Colorado (or many places I travel), but looking for a late night dinner on a drive between cities at 10pm I found multiple bags of these at a small rural gas station. At a few other convenience stores, I saw quite a variety.

Interesting, and quite tasty.

Cash Only

We drove a few towns over to bowl one day. We walked in, got our shoes and a sheet, and proceeded to bowl. The person at the desk said we would settle up later.

While we were there, my wife went to get a drink and was told that it was cash only. I had some in the car, and again, they said to settle up later.

It was interesting. They used old fashioned, mechanical cash registers to total our bill and then gave us change for the cash. They trusted us to pay, and I was reminded of times when I was a kid when that was how many businesses ran: cash, trust, and things totaled without electronics.

I miss those days sometimes.

Weather

The weather was rainy, chilly, and damp. The old house we were in was designed early in the 20th century, with older architectural elements, big floor heating ducts from an oil furnace, and a bit of a draft.

We looked over the weather, on average, for the area. It’s often cloudy, which made us miss Colorado but reminded us to be thankful for all the sun we get. I missed the sun last weekend and am glad to be home.

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Daily Coping 22 Mar 2022

Posted on March 22, 2022 by way0utwest

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

Today’s tip is to get really absorbed in an interesting or creative activity.

I try to engage in some creative pastimes in my life, but often I don’t have the time to work on them. That’s been especially true lately.

A couple of nights last week my wife was busy. Rather than read or watch TV, I got my guitar, opened up YouTube, and spent an hour working through learning a song. At least until my fingers were hurting.

Didn’t completely learn anything, but I did improve some skills and enjoyed the time doing so.

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Is CosmosDB the One?

Posted on March 21, 2022 by way0utwest

The question asked of Keanu Reeves in the first Matrix by many of the characters is whether he is the one. THe one that can save the world, and make a difference in their war. It’s a fun movie, and one I’ve enjoyed many times. Keanu doesn’t really believe he’s that special until the end. That’s in contrast to the products that most vendors build. Most of the times I think developers, marketers, salespeople, or all three think that whatever they’ve recently released is the best thing ever.

CosmosDB is mentioned in a piece as the potential one database to rule them all. The article talks about some of the basis and value that come from the platform, which Microsoft continues to push as the database that can store any kind of data and meet the needs of any application. Whether you believe that or not, I find many articles and blogs from developers that are experimenting and building systems on top of CosmosDB.

I do think the consistency models for CosmosDB are interesting, and having a variety of these models across a distributed RDBMS table would be great. I’d love to be able to insert data into a table, have it not available as a live value until committed on other nodes, and avoid locking my table. I realize I’m asking for something that seems like a bit of magic, but I bet Microsoft could add this to the SQL Server relational engine.

CosmosDB is very interesting to me, and it’s an item on my list that I want to learn more about. I think there are certainly domains of problems where CosmosDB would fit very well. If any of you are working with CosmosDB, I’d be interested in knowing why and how it fits for your particular environment.

There was a quote in the article that I thought was interesting. A Microsoft Technical Fellow said, “No data is born relational. In the real world, nobody thinks in terms of schemas — they think graphs or maybe JSON document if you’re an IOT device…”

That’s interesting. If I produce a JSON document, am I not thinking relational? Do I not expect that most strings, values or arrays will exist in most of the documents? Am I not thinking schema, even ragged schema, from the beginning? I’d think most data relational. It’s just not easy to get it into that format when you deal with many instances of data.

Of course, dealing with many instances of data is hard for most humans. That’s why we built relational databases.

Steve Jones

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