Older blog entries for Boris (starting at number 108)

...and then there was one. Probably in 2 weeks there will be none. I've not been officially told yet, so I guess I'll keep coming in until they stop paying me...

Scott finished on Friday. Management have told me that they can't renew me or hire me after the year, but they can replace me with another contractor. How stupid is that?

Clinton didn't get called up (yet). There are a few linux guys still here, but none who are doing 32 bit validation. I guess one of them will have to learn.

So, now I'm the last contractor in our department. It's a bad situation too. The second last contractor, Scott, is a Novell guy. During the last round of layoffs they fired a Novell engineer, leaving just Scott and Clinton. Clinton is currently back in the army on reserve duty. Theres no idea when he will be back. This leaves us with zero Novell people. Actually half a person. One of the 64 bit linux guys will be taking over Novell duties, but he will be also have to do 64 bit stuff...

No word on my job, but I've only got a couple more weeks before I'll find out... Most likely I'll be looking for a new job soon...

It's a bad hardware day for me.

First fibre channel card I try to use isn't tagged, so it can't be logged in the database. I put it in the pile for tagging.

I pull another card to use, and I find that the insertion point (the shiny metal part) is loose and has broken the connections from the card to the socket.

Third one I pull is fine. So I try to insert a Adapetec 3950 into the system only to find that some idiot had screwed the insertion point in backwards...

I hate UnixWare.
I HATE UnixWare.
I HATE UNIXWARE.

I'd much rather be spending time with my wife than trying to get this damn unixware install going.

Ahem. Thank you. Nothing to see here. Move along...

So I woke up at 4am with hiccups. Then I got them again at 7:30am. Now to see if I get them at 11am.

I had a skin biopsy a couple of days ago, and got a few other skin problems sorted out. Now I need to wait on the results.

One last thing I've found is that writing Windows code in either Visual C or Borland Builder is a total pain. Borlands implimentation is somewhat better than Microsoft.

It looks we lost 2 contactors today (1 compatibility engineer, 1 tech-writer). That leaves just 2 (including me). Add that to 2 engineers that were let go, and our department is in pretty bad shape. Still a load of Microsoft people, a couple of Novell people, and a few unix people. Compatibility has been stripped of almost all Microsoft people. It's not good, and it's not pretty.

Bleh. I've got a real bad case of "problems existing between keyboard and chair" this week. My brain feels like it's shut down and decided to go on holiday without me.

I got a great example of the argument for open source:

I've been working with SCO Unixware. One of the cards I have to test has a broken driver. (It's a uniprocessor compiled driver, and I'm working on a multiprocessor system.) These drivers are closed source; the offending company won't fix the driver because they say there is not enough demand for these cards. They won't release the source to us so that we can fix it ourselves.

If this was an open-source driver I'd have a working driver ages ago. Probably all it needs is to be recompiled in a SMP environment.

Hmmm Found a Branston Pickle recipe.

Time to warn my wife that I'll be making something that she cannot stand, but that I miss quite a bit. What is it about America and Branston Pickle? If I'd realised that it was so hard to get over here, I'd have shipped a box or three...

I found out why my fonts were trashed. My default printer was a generic text only, so Word would only give me the fixed fonts. Oops. Well what do you expect from a Linux guy forced into a Windows 2K world....

Anyone know of a good palm programming book? Most of the ones I've looked at always seem to be lacking something.

Also to my amazement I just discovered that Starfleet wasn't animated (it was puppets). Somewhere over the years my brain had animated the series. Amazing the things the human brain does when you've not seen something in 20 years.

New firmware fixes make the new Intel platforms much more stable on Linux. I can run a server at 100% loading for 48 hours without the server breaking. I've not yet crashed a kernel, but every couple of months a driver will die under the load. Usually the very flaky DAC960 driver, but then the Mylex solution to the problem of the DAC960 driver killing processes was to suggest that we use a minimum of 512mb of ram. They won't fix thier buffer overruns. I just hope that Linux dosen't end up going down the long slippery Microsoft road of suggesting hardware upgrades to fix a software problem.

Of course now that the winter is over I appear to be getting a cold. Bleh.