Tech Nibble

[Shu Manwill]

Overallit's a fantastic service! There's no chance of me coming up with this stuff on my own. It's always relevant content and formatted well.

Anybody that's on the fence should check out the samples or just sign up for the service.

I've participated in a newsletter service in the past. It was when I was with a Fortune 500 insurance company. Well Bryce, your newsletters blow them away! The content is much more relevant and you have multiple options to choose how you deliver the message, including MailChimp integration. I wonder how you accomplish your end so well because the newsletters are so timely and punctual.

Your white label newsletter was and is a great opportunity for companies like us to provide high quality content while saving a lot of time. Most of the posts and subjects you sent is fresh, usable, up to date and valuable for our clients. Although I can talk for hours about technology in a coherent way there just isn't enough time to prepare the content for web or newsletter.

I've previously explained the background and motivation of The Little Network That Could, but I realised that there are some implicit values that permeate my choices which would be worth making explicit. Here are a few which come to mind:

Espousing the Keep It Simple, Stupid principle is well-enough established in IT circles that I don't feel the need to justify my selection of it as a core design principle, but I will note a couple of things:

This is somewhat of an extension of the previous point, in that I value simplicity in a solution over feature-completeness, elegance, or trendiness, but it is also a value in itself: I have to live with my design choices, so they have to work. Once I have something working, I usually stop there and move on to the next thing on my ever-growing to do list. My code is littered with FIXME comments, and I'm fine with that. Very occasionally something might work inelegantly enough for me to come back to it and put some time into making it better, but that's the exception rather than the rule.

In my current day job I work on helping customers covert their applications into container- and serverless-friendly microservices. We try to work within the Agile Manifesto's principles as best we can, and usually this involves automating everything. This means we strongly eschew "pets", as they are typically termed - servers or containers or functions which are unique snowflakes, maintained by hand - in favour of "cattle", which are maintained via automation and easily able to be replaced with another unit at short notice.

When it comes to TLNTC the requirements are different, so the pets vs. cattle balance comes down in a slightly different location. I still prefer automating things, and I probably use more automation code now in TLNTC than I ever have before, but my services are still essentially one-instance - I only have one mail server, one public DNS server, one outside firewall, etc.

Because I don't replace them frequently it doesn't worry me that I might have to spend a few hours getting a new VM to the state at which it's a true replacement for its predecessor. Sometimes this involves trying out a new technology for the first time, or upgrading to a new major version of a software package which has a lot of new features and a few breaking changes, so often I'll roll these by hand the first time, and automate later when the need arises.

Again this value has some overlap with its predecessor: I automate to a point which is pragmatic for the problem at hand, but I don't feel the need to be ideologically (or aesthetically!) driven to have only cattle and to herd them using Declarative GitOps Continuous Delivery for Kubernetes.

This post is getting a little longer than I would like for a tech nibble, so I'll just mention that, despite the idea being more than 30 years old and the movement's founder being shown to be a terrible person, there's nothing more important for making it possible for humans to continue to thrive in the "software is eating the world" era than Free Software. So my default assumption is that everything on my network should be Free Software.

I no longer support the Free Software Foundation because of its founder's behaviour, but I remain ever committed to the principles he described. I remain hopeful that copyleft ideals will be stewarded more faithfully by the Software Freedom Conservancy.

In computing and digital technology, a nibble is four consecutive binary digits or half of an 8-bit byte. When referring to a byte, it is either the first four bits or the last four bits, which is why a nibble is sometimes referred to as a half-byte. The term nibble also carries on the "edible data" metaphor established with bit and byte. Due to its byte connection, a nibble is occasionally spelled nybble or nyble.

Because a nibble is made up of binary data, each of the four digits is either a 0 or 1, in any combination, as in 0010, 0110, 1011 or 1111. The total number of possible combinations is 16, calculated as 24. A nibble can also be represented by a hexadecimal digit. Hexadecimal is a base-16 numbering system that uses the digits 0 through 9 and the letters A through F to represent data, including nibbles and bytes. Figure 1 shows each possible bit combination in a nibble, along with its hexadecimal and decimal equivalent.

Two-digit hexadecimal numbers are used to represent bytes, which are made up of two consecutive nibbles. Figure 2 shows the digital data from a small text file based on American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) text encoding. Figure 2 includes both the binary data and the corresponding hexadecimal digits (in the rightmost column). Each row, except the last, contains four bytes, separated by spaces.

The first byte (01010100) in the first row is highlighted, as is its corresponding hexadecimal code (54). The highlighted byte is the ASCII letter T (uppercase), which is ASCII code 084. The first nibble in the byte, 0101, is represented by the hexadecimal number 5, and the second nibble in the byte, 0100, is represented by the hexadecimal number 4, resulting in a byte hexadecimal value of 54.

In communications, a nibble is sometimes referred to as a quadbit. As with any nibble, the quadbit is 4 bits and has 16 possible combinations. A signal might be encoded in quadbits rather than one bit at a time. Nibble interleaving, a process used in multiplexing, takes a quadbit from a lower-speed channel as input for a multiplexed signal on a higher-speed channel.

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