Mark Staples

My University education is in Computer Science, but by professional life and renewed research career is in Software Engineering.  A lot of people (and perhaps some University departments!) probably think these are just the same thing, with different names.  But in my transition to Software Engineering I’ve discovered they’re very different, and I think their difference is not all down to the the normal arguments about science vs engineering.

In Computer Science, the “unit of analysis” is the procedure (in the sense of effective procedure, but I also mean to include non-terminating processes).  Entities of interest include algorithms and data-structures, interfaces, ADTs, types, and languages for expressing them.

In contrast, in Software Engineering, the unit of analysis is the whole software system.  Here the entities of interest include architectures, and system models. A whole software system is not just “bigger” in size than a single procedure/process.  It also has many more different kinds of functionality, many more developers, and many different users and other stakeholders.

There are a lot of common themes across Computer Science and Software Engineering.  For example, both are concerned with issues such as specification, construction, distribution, performance analysis, and verification.

The challenges for Software Engineering are not just dealing with the scale of the system, but also dealing with the scale of the development of the system. The challenges are not just technical, they’re also socio-technical.  So although Computer Science and Software Engineering both deal with software and have many common themes, their technologies and methodologies are usually quite different because they’re dealing with different kinds of entities in different contexts.

Computer Science and Software Engineering Software are very different disciplines.

Last weekend was bottling day for the full malt chilli lager.  Normally when bottling, you add some “priming sugar” to each bottle.  This is a small amount of extra food that the residual yeast will consume.  Yeast produces two important by-products in fermentation – alcohol and carbon dioxide.  The former is the goal during primary fermentation, but the latter is the goal when adding priming sugar to the bottle. That’s what makes homebrew fizzy!

However, I have a fantastic homebrew book from CAMRA which contains an intriguing suggestion. It says (p142) that “the priming of beers made from the 3kg kits is optional”, because there will be more residual dextrins than a brew made with cane sugar. It notes that there is a tradeoff – “the best beers, particularly bottled beers, are usually not primed”, but that to bring the beer “into drinkale condition in the shortest possible time” priming sugar is required.

I am using a 3kg kit this time, so it’s an interesting idea not to add priming sugar.  But if I tried it and didn’t pan out, I’d be left with 20 litres of flat lager!  So I’ve tried an experiment – some bottles with priming sugar, and some without.  I’ll let you know how it goes…

The NICTA lab where I work finally moved offices into a newly constructed building in September.

The new building’s great – it’s such a nice change to have some natural light, and they’ve also installed a world-class coffee machine in the lunch room. The “designer rust” panels on the side of the building tend to polarise people, but I love them.

There were a few teething problems. For example the “green” automatic office lighting switches were insensitive and on a short timer. That caused plenty of comedy moments with people having to regularly stand up and wave their arms around to escape from the darkness into which they’d been plunged while they working. But that’s all being sorted out now. Some of the finishing decorative touches are being applied internally.

All we need now is a grand opening!

Now I’ve settled in a little to my new place, I’ve had time to put on a new brew. On the train every day I pass a homebrew shop at Thornleigh, and recently I managed to visit.  A homebrew shop is a different experience to buying homebrew kits at the supermarket. There’s all sorts of specialist paraphernalia and ingredients. For example I finally managed to buy a test tube for my hydrometer, and a bottle filler.

I also bought a “full malt” kit – a 3kg tin, to which you just add water (and yeast) The result is supposed to be a richer more rounded taste than the more common 1.5kg kits which require the addition of sugar and/or “brew enhancers”.

It’s a lager kit from a local company called X-tract Brewing which I’d never heard of before. I threw in a half dozen small hot chillis, split lengthwise. Original Gravity was 1.041 to 1.043 on 2nd November. (Adjusted for temperature.) It was transferred to a secondary container (“racked”) a week later, with the specific gravity 1.011. I also removed the chillis then. Tasting showed a nice heat – noticeably tingly, but not overwhelming.

We moved house mid-year, away from convenient-but-noisy Leichhardt off to green-but-distant Thornleigh.

We were first home buyers. The increasing rental prices and soft purchase prices had been slowly changing the economics of rent-vs-buy decisions in Sydney. It might still not have been wholly rational to buy, but non-monetary issues tipped us over the line – issues like control over our own space, and slack landlords. That made it hard to deal with quality of life problems like rampant peeling paint, recurring mold, and increasing plane noise.

The subsequent financial crisis has put us in an interesting situation. Inflation is high (good in principle for home value) and interest rates are falling (good for repayments), but in practice home values are falling (bad) and unemployment/job security is worsening overall (bad). What will happen next? The only certain thing is that things will change! Still, the macro-economic issues aren’t as important as our individual circumstances, which seem to be fine at the moment (touch-wood).

As a place to live it seems to be working out fine. It’s great to have a back yard and a leafy environment. We can (and have begun to) do massive amounts of work inside and in the garden! But now we have the satisfaction of knowing we’re improving our own home value and not someone else’s.