A lack of parking at work

I have mentioned a shortage of car parking around the university. Indeed, the building in which I now work is sited on what used to be a car lot. Yesterday morning was rather eye-opening for me. This morning I parked at around 7h30 quite easily but yesterday I helped with the early-morning server upgrade from home, attended a 9h30 meeting remotely then drove into Dundee and spent quite some minutes driving around different university car lots observing the extra unmarked spaces that drivers had made for themselves. Fortunately I did eventually find a single empty marked space on the far side of campus but I wasted plenty of fuel and time finding it. I see now why a colleague who used to have to come in a bit later on some days because of childcare issues would end up missing scheduled meetings because they could not find anywhere to park.

From mentioning my experience in online chat I discovered that another colleague had tried to come into work from Angus that morning but failed to find a parking space on campus and returned home: they planned to drive back into Dundee at lunchtime to try again. The situation seems absurd to me. It is unfortunate that the university stopped renting an off-campus brownfield site that worked fine as overflow parking. I can live with not being able to park near my office but it is good if I can at least park somewhere.

It does not help that on moving to Scotland we could not find anywhere in Dundee to rent that accepted our cat so we ended up living in a village outside the catchment area of any good Dundee school. With our having to be able to pick up a sick child from school in Perth at short notice to take them back home, bicycling or buses are not practical alternatives. I certainly miss when I worked in Cambridge, MA, and could easily bicycle into work or, in the winter, commute on public transport that ran frequently.

Upgrade issues at work

Further to Tuesday's journal entry on timesheets, we failed to reproduce the crash on the local production server during yesterday morning's upgrade and we disproved my hypothesis about the previous crash's cause. After its upgrade the server's web front end exhibited a resource exhaustion issue so we downgraded that component. It is unfortunate that we missed this problem in testing. In the UK it is very difficult to ongoingly grant-fund research software projects at all but we do still put significant effort into managing software quality. While I expect us to promptly devise and release a fix it is unusual for us to not catch an issue sooner. We will look at ways to make such mistakes even less likely in future.

I am not much help for this particular unexpected problem: my understanding is that it lies somewhere deep in our session infrastructure that uses ZeroC Ice and Django/WSGI and my own experience with using mainstream technologies for web-based applications is rather more on the side of Spring and JSP.