Occam's Razor

Posted on 2007/05/02 21:51:36 (May 2007).

[Wednesday 2nd May]
Today I learnt Occam's razor the hard way. There was a large processing task I needed to do at work which was taking ages, so I'd decided to speed it up by throwing a lot more machines at the job. It had looked like it was working marvelously to begin with, until a few hours later I got a very stern email telling me I was killing off a load of production servers (affecting other completely unrelated teams). This was Very Bad. Whilst I think we managed to avoid a complete catastrophe, I think it did basically teeter on the brink of serious financial consequences. Oops.

So, lest we forget:

entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem

...or in other words, don't use more than you really need.

This little crisis was an unfortunate end to an otherwise very good day at work. We have a lot of meetings with the US team by video conference - the little room I share with the other guys on the London team even has it's own little video conferencing unit, which is really cool. So in the meeting today our boss in the US was congratulating us on getting to this milestone successfully, and pulled out a couple of bottles of champagne. Those of us in London initially looked on enviously, until the boss turned to our screen and said "if you look under your desk there's a bottle there too" - and amazingly there was. What a nice little touch.

Oh and one other great thing today - my Sony GPS-CS1 arrived. It's a really neat little gadget that keeps a track of where I've been when I'm out and about taking photos, so that later on I can annotate each image with the position it was taken at. So far I've only really charted my course to and from the office, but watch this space for fun with pictures and Google Maps!

Sorry Lox, had to delete your comment.

Posted by John at 2007/05/03 11:33:11.

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