When I went to tour prospective uni and poly campuses in the UK in 1989 the thing that excited me most was to tour their data center and lab rooms to see what facilities they had onsite. A lot has changed nowadays now that we rely on cloud services instead of on-prem, but as far as I know most unis still run their own on-prem data centers.
When I was visiting UK unis and polys I was excited to see labs of Sun workstations with high res 21″ monitors, Apollo workstations for CAD work, and large rooms of terminals to access the campus mini, like a Prime.
I was just browsing the University of Cambridge website for Computer Science and spent 30 minutes trying to find out what facilities they have on campus … and couldn’t find out anything about what hardware they have onsite. I know times have changed but this seemed strange to me. What excites you nowadays about joining a particular university if you are about to sign up for a CS course?
I currently hold a US Amateur Extra license (my callsign is KK6DCT) which in the UK would be equivalent to the Full license. I’m curious what the similarities and difference are between US licenses and UK licenses so decided to take a look. This is just a casual observation so please do not refer to anything here as fact, I may and probably do have some things wrong.
In the US the 3 license classes are Technician, General and Extra, where Extra has full privileges. In the UK the equivalents are Foundation, Intermediate and Full. In the US each license level gives you access to additional bands and ranges within each band. Technician in summary gives you VHF and above plus part of 10m, General adds parts of the HF bands and Extra gives you full access to everything. With the UK licenses, privileges are by allowed TX power, with Foundation restricting you to 10w access to parts of most bands HF and VHF, Intermediate raises the allowed power to 50w, and Full to 400w.
For US licenses you are required to identify your station at least once every 10 minutes. For the UK license you’re required to identify ‘as frequently as is practicable during transmissions‘ but there’s no time requirement specified.
I’m curious what other differences there are – I may come back and add to this post later. If you’re aware of more differences leave a comment below.
Attempting a ‘serverless remove’ on a deployed error, I got this unexpected error I haven’t seen before:
An error occurred: xyzRole - Cannot delete entity, must detach all policies first.
A quick Google found an issue with the same error and an explanation. There is another policy attached to this Lambda that was not added via the serverless.yml for this stack, so CloudFormation is refusing to delete it. This answer describes exactly what I had done to add the new policy:
I also had added XRay to this Lambda via the Console, and this added an additional managed policy to enable Xray. Checking the IAM Role, here’s the XRay related policy that was added:
I deleted the XRay policy, but at this point serverless has already removed most of the stack but left the IAM role in place, but won’t delete the stack itself, so a manual delete from the Console completed the cleanup.
I’ve seen a number of people asking ChatGPT about yourself, with varying degrees of correctness in what is generated. I was curious what it has to say about myself, here’s a response:
What’s curious about the generated response is each sentence starts with something that is mostly factually correct and then it’s followed by additional probably generated content that is just completely factually wrong.
Here’s a breakdown sentence by sentence:
Kevin Hooke is a software developer who has over 20 years of experience working in the industry.
… this is correct. I gradulated in 1994 so now approaching 30 years (but not until next year!).
He is currently based in the United Kingdom
… I am from the UK originally but have been living in California since 1998, so this is currently incorrect.
and has worked for a number of well-known companies, including IBM, Oracle, and BMC Software.
… I’ve worked for IBM twice, but never for Oracle or BMC (so 1 out of 3 correct).
Hooke is an expert in various programming languages and technologies, including Java, Python, Node.js, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
… Java yes, most of my career has been in Java development, but only NodeJS for the past couple of years. I’ve been working with AWS for the past 5 years or so. I’ve played with Python but I’m definitely not an expert. So probably only 3 out of 4 correct.
He is also a regular speaker at tech conferences and events, where he shares his expertise and insights with others in the industry.
… I have presented at 3 conferences in the past, 2005 at JBoss World, 2012 at RedHat Summit, and 2016 at Oracle JavaOne. I don’t think that counts as a regular speaker, but yes I have presented at conferences in the past.
Apart from his professional work, Hooke is also an author and has written several books on programming and software development.
… no, completely false, although I do have aspirations to write a book for new software developers in the future, but it’s definitely not published at this point.
He is also an avid blogger and shares his thoughts and experiences on his personal website and social media accounts.
… definitely true, you’re reading my blog right now!
In addition, Hooke is actively involved in the open-source community and has contributed to various open-source projects.
… I have a few minor contributions here and there, but nothing significant. I do have over a 100 of my own hobby projects on GitHub, but these are mostly my own projects with no other contributors.
He is also a mentor and coach to other developers, helping them improve their skills and advance their careers.
… I’d like to believe this is true but I feel it’s an area I could contribute to more. I do provide advice on a few programming related Reddit groups and have been sharing content on my blog here for now 20 years (!).
Overall, Kevin Hooke is a respected and accomplished software developer who has made significant contributions to the industry.
Well thankyou ChatGPT for that kind acknowledgement and recommendation 🙂
