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Communicating DND, in a nice way.

A while ago I listened to Professor Daniel J Levitin give an LSE lecture, The Organised Mind: thinking straight in the age of information overload, which I’ve recommended to a number of people since. I’ll take this chance now to generally recommend a sub. to the LSE public lecture series to anyone reading this. Among many of the topics Levitin brought up, I’d like to write briefly about focus. Here’s what I do… I’ve adopted a number of productivity measures: checking emails, pomodoro techniques, kanban, and various others- even public academic writing accountability. Some have stuck, some haven’t, some are adopted ad-hoc. Here’s what I am going to do… I came away from the lecture knowing I needed to implement a daily “chunk” of time that exceeds anything else I do- something truly indulgent. I’ve opted for a three hour (minimum) chunk where anything that creates a notification is turned off. I’ve been trying to do it for a while, but I always break the chunk so I need to improve and I believe writing this post equals something I can hold myself to. My current full time concern is finishing my post-grad. thesis (like yesterday) whilst having other pursuits (that keep me sane) so I want a way to communicate when I begin a chunk as it won’t start at the same time…

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Plagiarism in Academic Programming: There’s only one way to implement this (mother fcuker)!

For my AFHEA accreditation I wrote a short essay on code plagiarism. Here it is on Google Docs and here it is in all its sic: Discuss.

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Slight relief

After 3 drafts of my proposal, due tomorrow on the 6 month marker of my Ph.D study and referred to internally as the Registration milestone I have some minor amendments to make this evening and I am good to go! I will though have to find out who my ancillary supervisors are and meet them and also pass my proposal to another professor, who may or may not end up as an ancillary. So I expect to make a few more changes after based on their feedback but at this point I am relieved as my Director of Studies has donned his Panama hat (Del Monte style) in regards to my proposal and even passed compliment on my progress, a 100 fold! Which either means I am better than better or I was nothing but a wandering fart when I started, I’ll opt for the former. The premise of my research then is to create the processes needed to manage on-demand failover and dynamic rejuvenation within a system-of-systems (SoS). It has several goals including:- i) Replace multiple failover points with on-demand instances of systems based on their last known good configuration and ii) gracefully terminate and restart services and systems based…