Tag: misc

After I wrote about a home lab recently, someone was curious about the amount of money that others invest in their technology lab, habit, or hobby. I thought that was fairly interesting, so I decided to ask others to get an idea of what amounts people spend and even on what.

How much do you spend on technology in a year?

Let’s skip cell phone and Internet service bills, but if you buy cell phones, tablets, computers, Kindles, or other gadgets, let us know. I’d be curious about your spending on your career, which might be travel and events, training, books, etc. versus the spending on technology for fun.

For me the amounts vary dramatically. The vast majority of my spending on technology is for replacement pieces and parts. I will buy hard drives or monitors or memory, but rarely anything more fun in most years. I don’t spend too much on learning as I get a Pluralsight subscription, and of course, I read SQLServerCentral. I rarely take training, but my generous employer usually covers that. In fact, most years, my total expense for technology is likely a few hundred dollars at the outside.

I have purchased a few Kindle devices for reading, and I’ve gotten cases and batteries for my cell phones. I do go through keyboards and mice every year or two, sot hose are expenses, but rarely anything more interesting. I did buy a Pebble watch a few years ago. This year was an exception as I spent a bit to rebuild a desktop that has been aging. I didn’t get everything I wanted, but I substantially improved the speed, which was the important thing. I’ll also likely add in a new tablet next year to replace my aging iPad Mini (non Retina) to help with coaching volleyball. I’d like a drone for some fun camera work with kids and sports, but I suspect that is not likely to happen in the next year. Those gadgets are expensive for a complete indulgence.

Let us know this week what you’re spending money on in technology and if any of those items have proven themselves really valuable, or just lots of fun.

Steve Jones

I was watching the San Diego Technology Immersion Group meeting in September, and found myself transported back into the past. This month was the first meeting of the Linux chapter, spending a few months working through The Linux Command Line.

Watching from home, I watched the hosts walking through the command line in Linux, showcasing various basic file comments. Seeing them explain and execute commands like ls, rm, alias, cat, tail, less, and other commands in a text session reminded me of learning Unix at university on SunOS. Slowly various bits of knowledge came back to me from my own experiments learning how to work with files, full of text data, interspaced with my regular visits to the “man” pages when something didn’t work. In fact, seeing the man pages come up on the YouTube session made me smile.

It’s funny to think how much the world has changed. Even now, I have an Ubuntu VM that I run at times, but it’s mostly a GUI shell, and my interactions with the command line are fairly minimal. That’s completely the opposite of my time at university and my first job where I pretty much lived in the command line. My code editors were vi and emacs that I ran across a dozen X Windows sessions open on various machines in the college computer lab. My interactions were really working with text and text commands. Even now, I might use SSMS and Visual Studio, but I’ll pop into a command line to check my git repo or spend time playing with PowerShell and executing commands in text sessions. While working with Python I’m as likely to use the REPL from a command window as I am to use an editor like VS or PyCharm. I really just like the interaction of the command line.

Not everyone feels that way, and that’s fine. I agree that GUI based systems are more convenient at times. In fact, I often use various GUI items in SSMS build up a task, such as an Extended Events session, and then script the result to give me code that I can execute. GUIs do some things extremely well, but allowing for repeatability is not one of them. They can also easily hide the actual commands and defaults being executed.

I think everyone working in technology needs to have some skill in working with a command line. Even if you want to use T-SQL to script all your tasks, you should be familiar enough with something like SQLCMD to execute a script in case you run into a situation where SSMS might not work. This might be especially true as you learn to automate more of the work your systems require and perhaps execute these scripts through other tools, like an Enterprise scheduler.

If nothing else, the command line teaches you how to work in a methodical, step by step process. However, I’d argue it develops new skills that might lead you to do solve a problem in more creative ways. Perhaps you’ll even grow to use a command line language like PowerShell to accomplish some repeatable task. You might find it works better than the old way you used to work.

Steve Jones

This isn’t data related, but a story caught my eye recently, and I suspect quite a few of you will enjoy reading it.

One of the tasks I had to do in university was try and rewrite the landing software for the Mars Viking lander. This was in a software engineering class, and we treated the task like a project, each of us having to work on different parts and integrate them together. We had the same requirements in terms of memory and disk space, though not CPU. We ended up building a small piece of software that worked in the professor’s simulation, but the real joy was going through the process and solving the problem. It was quite a challenge.

In the real world, quite a few people around the globe have been disappointed by the very limited space travel efforts of our species. After sending multiple missions to the moon, not much happened outside Earth orbit for decades. A few recent actions with rockets have gathered attention, and with the interest shown by SpaceX and other companies, it seems that we might be poised for more exciting opportunities in space across the next few decades.

A company’s application to send a commercial mission to the moon has been approved by the US federal government. There are rules that require each country to authorize and supervise space activities, and it’s quite a process in the US. However Moon Express has gotten the approval and they want to send a spacecraft to the moon. And not before the end of the decade, as the US tried to do in the 60s. They’re looking to land on the moon before the end of 2017. That’s just over a year away.

I think the idea of space travel is really cool. Well, it’s cool for others. Not for me. Until there’s artificial gravity, I’m not interested, but I know plenty of others are. Friends in technology dream of going. The DBA in Space contest from Redgate was a hit that many people wanted to win, and get the chance to ride a rocket. My son even wants to study aeronautical engineering in college, hoping to get the chance to work in space someday. Even as launching rockets gets to be commonplace, there are many people that dream of the chance to one day leave the planet.

The explosion in aircraft innovation came when a variety of private companies began to build and fly aircraft. I suspect a similar thing will happen with space flight, especially as the technology advances in computing, 3D printing, and more have become affordable for many private concerns. I expect that the next few years will start to see space tourism become a regular, expensive but affordable option, even as a few private groups will make the first steps toward moon exploration, and someday, colonization.

Steve Jones

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