A coworker recently remarked on my diary entries. To my current colleagues: No, none of the comments involve our current employer. Funny that miserable situations all sound similar.
A coworker recently remarked on my diary entries. To my current colleagues: No, none of the comments involve our current employer. Funny that miserable situations all sound similar.
Where did this month go?
Work:
More of the same. Tweaked and twisted the builds and our code to get a sane Java2 release then spent the month fighting a morass of delays and complications to migrate software. Internal efforts to block our use of Weblogic in favor of the Big Blue product have resorted to making an apples to oranges price comparison of the former's enterprise cluster software to the latter's single server edition. They wrung a big (>30%) discount from the latter while taking the first discount (<10%) from the former. This could derail an entire year of testing and configuration. Worse it justifies declaring WebSphere Studio the standard IDE. I can't even guess what these people think they are gaining... maybe nothing but proving that they can. All of us will move to a new floor Friday and there are already signs that it will go badly.
Play:
DSL installed. Excellent! Configured the router and my OpenBSD firewall. PF is good and I'm getting used to the changes from IPF. Reconfigured my wireless access point and renumbered the network and can now get hacking on NoCatAuth. Netbooted OpenBSD on a headless SS5/70 and set it up running Apache and redirected to it from the firewall. Amazingly, I was swept by two whisker scans in less than 14 hours from some unnamed addresses (probably in Europe, maybe in .nl). Worked on and off on nothing in particular. Tweaked Jproxy. Messed around with POE, again.
Used the gift certificate my wife gave me to buy motorcycle gear, it should be here in a few days. I can't wait for spring and oh, how I want this as my next bike!
Spent Saturday messing around with sockets and threads under Java. Didn't have my all reference books on hand (left them at work, I should get duplicate copies of everything useful...) Went searching for examples and put together a logging port-forwarder which outputs traffic in the classic offset/hex/ascii format. GPL-ed because the examples I looked at from were under the GPL and it's a pretty trivial hack. Registered it on Freshmeat anyway. Whee.
Sunday was beautiful, one of those rare perfect days. Maria and I took the car out, put the top down and drove backroads to Lambertville, NJ. We heard it was a cute town and had antique stores. We heard right. It's on the Delaware and the place reminds me of the Hudson river towns but much more dense and generally in better condition.
Slept badly, kept Maria up so now she's grumpy. Dread going to work.
Work:
The grind continues. $BIGCONSULTING is rampant. Interestingly, the emphasis on software maturity level is out of favor- that was quick! -and is considered a side-effect of organizational changes. Layoffs to be announced 1/17. Bonuses, if they exist, are rumored to be announced 1/18. Our group is apparently behind on two projects (very large scale software infrastructure changes, not seen by customers) because we provided assistance to other teams (real products, seen by real customers) and delayed to avoid collisions in production (which is also seen by customers). So we are refocusing on our own tasks and are instructed to not help other teams. The exception is if we can get their tracking codes for billing or the include our work in their estimates. I see the need, but question the benefit.
Personal:
Making a list of priorities and what I personally need to accomplish. Get a sense of direction. Maybe I'm fledging. Anyone hiring?
Discovered two links on the wonderful C2.com wikki:
Long time, no post. Seems like I have been very busy, but I can't recall what I was doing. Been going to the gym at least two to three times a week (but not this week). Hacked on my Perl script a little, found a bug, added logging. If I get around to it I'll upload to CPAN but it looks like I'll not get time until January. Visited friends in Virginia a couple of times- They had a baby and Maria is now the God-Mother (heh). At work, we're in the end-of-year grind to push everything into production before the cut off date and things are crazy. Also took part in a three-day Change Management and Leadership program which, other than the "drink the Kool-Aid" enthusiasm of the trainers, seemed fairly useful. I've added a dozen new jargon terms to my repertoire.
<Rant> Read this screed by Michael Lane Thomas of Microsoft (Google cache, original no longer online). All I can say is that it is grossly misleading and disgustingly self-serving to compare the events of 9/11 with the latest worm to target IIS. Side-stepping the mixed metaphors and the emotional appeals echoing recent events, I wonder if anyone can conceive that weak apologies for defective software that place the blame in the complexity of software and couch it in the "never-ending expansion in human knowledge" will make up for the time and effort wasted cleaning up the vendor's self-inflicted security mess. Touching upon individualism and competition, he jabs at "evolving" new ideas and here, at least, he is right. Evolution is taking place. The hard, unforgiving, Darwinian arms race of competition and coevolution that has left innumerable family trees without living descendants may be abrading Microsoft products as they expand beyond their desktop niche. And there is a certainy that the resulting offspring will be more adapted to that environment than their ancestors but there is very little to say that whatever spawned the latest troubles will be there to appreciate it. </Rant>
Started sending the resume around. The market may be depressed but so am I and this place is mostly the cause. My wife, having listened to me bitch and moan after work, tore a page out of her O magazine describing six signs it's time to change jobs. I answer 'yes' to four and vary on a fifth. I've thought hard about what bothers me and have this list:
Even though I'm non-essential staff and I didn't get the call to come in, I came to work early. I can't stand another day doing nothing but puttering around the apartment. Downtown is mostly empty and there are cops and national guard on almost every corner. I did spend Friday and Saturday visiting friends upstate and Sunday I went for a 170 mile ride on the motorcycle. It's easier to push the recent events out of my head when dealing with the immediacy of running through country roads at a fast pace. Think I'll go to the Super Sunday gathering at Marcus Dairy.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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