Morning Pages: Friday, 12 August 2016
I’m contemplating going back into education again. It’s a bit late to be looking into it, really, but I’m wondering if there are any MSc courses starting in September that I can find some space on. About this time last year, I was looking into a course on Data and Computational Journalism at Cardiff University. That’s not ideal, mostly because it requires me to be in Cardiff, and I’m not sure how I could make that work.
I’ve been put off by the prospect of going back into education purely on the cost perspective. An MSc would cost me about £10k in fees, I think, and then there would be the cost of supporting myself while I’m too busy on the course to generate any real income. But now I’m wondering if I can just fund it through debt — a student loan — and worry about it later. I can set my burn rate pretty low, so long as I resist the urge to buy shiny toys.
Seeing as I’ve been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, I think that offers me a bit of support in the academic world. So that might help a little bit, too, though I’m not entirely sure what form that assistance would take. But it could turn out that having a label applied to me is useful after all.
I’ve got plenty of ideas around things that I’d like to research and prototype and build, which I could probably shoehorn into any CS-related MSc project. I quite like the idea of data journalism, just because it’s a nice crossover between computer geekery and writing, and I suspect I could do well by combining the two. It does kinda play into my desire to write more, though it’s a bit of a shift in potential topics. The main disadvantage from my perspective is that my knowledge of statistics is pretty weak, and that’s a course I struggled with a bit in University first time around. Perhaps I just wasn’t paying enough attention, though!
Closer to home, Plymouth University has an MSc on Network Systems Engineering. That certainly plays into my goals to write A Sneak Peek at The Internet. It would give me the opportunity to really bring my computer networking knowledge and skills back up to something useful, and could push me towards an interesting career in building decent scale data centre projects. I’ve always loved mucking around with this stuff, and I’d relish the opportunity to learn about software-defined networking. With IPv6 finally coming to the fore (thanks, at least in part, to Apple really starting to push hard from the client device perspective!) and an Internet of Things appearing throughout the home, there are definitely some interesting challenges afoot!
Y’know, that’s really got some potential, now I think about it. Especially when one chucks configuration management into the mix. Imagine an open platform for configuration management for the IPv6 Internet of Things. Something that enables device builders — from hobbyists using Raspberry PIs through Kickstarter projects with nifty wearable devices to large scale home monitoring and automation projects — to manage their fleet of devices. I’m envisaging some decentralised platform, so you’d have the option of on-premises nodes to manage devices locally, combined with a cloud system for global management. It’d push configuration out to devices, manage OTA updates, that kind of thing. I suppose these technologies largely exist, already, for Android and iOS devices, but I wonder if there’s scope for coordinating all the other wee devices coming onto the market…
Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked. I’ve sent a few wee emails to scope out the possibilities. I’m aware that September is looming fast, so the chances of me getting onto an MSc programme this year are negligible, and it’s a bit rushed a decision to be making anyway.
On a completely unrelated note, I was doing a bit of research into getting something to replace the aging HP Microserver that’s done its duty in various home network roles over the years. I’m rather keen on the idea of having a small cluster of machines at home, instead of one big box. I’d like to have the hardware around to play with OpenStack and its ilk, which really needs a handful of nodes to get going. I wound up spending much of yesterday discovering what Intel chips and chipsets there are kicking around these days. I’m still not entirely clear on what’s the best bang for buck in terms of making cores and memory available to virtual machines.
But I did happen across the Skull Canyon NUC which has an i7 chip with 4 cores, 32GB RAM and support for NVMe SSD storage. That sounds “fast enough” for the wee projects I’ve got in mind (mostly learning about network virtualisation and containers) so there’s one turning up tomorrow morning. I could imagine having a wee cluster of them sitting in a cupboard in the house, PXE-booting from a master node, maybe using the Thunderbolt 3 ports daisy-chained as a fast interconnect, reusing an old Thunderbolt (1) JBOD for storage, giving me a pile of VMs ready to do my bidding! :)
Of course, I could do with finding them some actual work to do first. ;-)
