What's it all about, Alfie?

Life has been very, very busy for me these days - as evidenced by the time since my last journal entry. Lots of things have been happening and I have to say that most of them have been good, while still keeping things interesting with a curve here and there.

I'll try to hit the high points and not be too wordy along the way...

Work at The BANK is going well. Lots of work to do, which is nice. Keeping my skills sharp and putting more things in from of the traders. All this is good, and I can't complain about work at all.

The word amongst the consultants is that rates are being lowered which is interesting in that I got a non-trivial raise. I guess they are seeing that developers, in general, are getting less, but good ones are still worth paying more for. But of course that'd be my interpretation of it. 🙂

At home the machines are running well, but a few weeks ago I lost the 9GB boot drive on sparky which took a few days to get a replacement for. In the end, it was cheaper to get an 18GB replacement than to try and get an exact replacement. Funny how technology drives prices down then up again as the parts get more scarce.

I've also got my first Mac in a very long time - a 14" iBook. And by a long time I mean a decade. I did this because of Mac OS X and the Developer Tools that used to be thousands of dollars under NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP - both of which I love and continue to have in my office. So I was quite taken with the new iBooks and got one. Excellent move. With my 802.11b wireless LAN in the house, the AirPort card works wonderfully, and it uses the wired 10/100-baseT when I'm sitting at my desk. Very nice. The tools are as nice as I could have imagined though I have to say that they could have made the administration a little easier with the startup scripts if they had gone with Irix's or RedHat's chkconfig system, but that's a minor point and they have a feature, just not as easy to configure and use.

While it has taken a little getting used to, specifically in terms of getting the tools I got used to on Linux/Solaris/NT to Mac OS X, I think I'm over the hump on getting up to speed on the Mac world again. Oh sure, there are a lot of little details I'm unsure of, but I'm productive and have about 90% of the things I need up on the iBook and that's more than good enough to do all I need to do.

I'm impressed with the improvements in Project Builder since OPENSTEP, and am glad that they didn't mess too much with Interface Builder. Setting up the user preferences on this guy could have been a lot easier, but it's all a certain mind-set. Where to change the size of the icons on the Desktop? Don't look for it under the Desktop Preferences, you need to select an item and then select the view preferences for that item and it'll change it for all Desktop items. Not obvious, but there's a certain logic to it I'll agree. It's just getting into that logic that's hard.

The DVD/CD-RW on the iBook is very interesting, but I'm a little surprised that while the DVD is paused the iBook can't go to sleep. If you stop the DVD playback then it'll sleep and the play will resume where you left off. Hmmm... still a few bugs in the system, but they'll work them out or I'll work around them. Either way, it's still a nice little box.

My next box will be a new step up - gotta get a dual-Athlon XP with gobs of memory and a very nice video card with OpenGL acceleration. This will be my preferred desktop workstation in the office and I figure that I'll get it nearer to the Fall.

For now, I have to say that working with sherman is a whole lotta fun!

OK... I'm not trying to be unreasonable here, but I have to get at least a little of this off my chest. I'm working at UBS O'Connor, and these guys are a reasonably good lot - certainly the group I'm working in right now. But they have selected a vendor package that is maintained by the worst people I can imagine. Really... the worst.

If they were even slightly worse, it'd be OK, because then the management would see that their stuff is only marginally better than in-house works, and the cost and pains associated with it are far outweighing the benefits of the vendor's package. It's really incredible.

Without getting myself into a slander lawsuit, I'll just say this group is a vendor... a very bad one, but just a vendor. Their software is marginally better than nothing, but not much better than nothing. It's got a few nice features, but it's got a ton of problems, so in the end, I wish I didn't have to deal with it, or with them. But I do.

So... today I received a license file from my contact at the vendor. I was told to put it in place of the existing one, as it will expire at the beginning of the new year. What they didn't tell me was that it was keyed to a specific version of the software - the version that we now have in Q/A, but haven't yet put into production. This means that when I put the license file into production things started crashing. Luckily, I keep excellent notes and version control everything so that we got it back up and running within minutes. But the point remains that I don't have a license file for the new year, and I wish after all these months of dealings with these folks, they'd spend the extra 30 sec. to include in their email that this version only works with the newest version of their software and that there's another version coming for the older one still in production.

I treat bug reports this way... I make sure there is a repeatable problem and narrow it down for them. Even including code snips that reproduce the problem in their libraries as cleanly as possible. Yet I've still never seen page one of documentation on their system, I have to look at the compiled classes in the jars for any indication of the capabilities of the system... and in general, I'm getting absolutely crummy customer service.

Man that makes me mad... for all that O'Connor is spending on these guys and their software, you'd think that the least they could do is to give a little documentation... a little description of this and that... limitations in license files... But I guess they don't think that's important where these guys come from.

The World Trade Center was hit. The Pentagon was hit. As a nation, there is excessive pain, cost, and grief. Things aren't going to be better in the next couple of days, weeks, or even months. Yet there's every reason not to be fatalistic about these events. That is, I suppose, only a single point of view.

I work in the financial industry, and there are a lot of people that are really wrapped up in the theory of the market. To them, this is all a reason to sell... into an economic depression. But they are depressed about this. I find that more than a little funny.

A Trader sees what he thinks he must do and then is depressed about it. He doesn't even see that he has options - choices that are open to him. And that those choices would allow him to feel better about himself, and the work that he does. All he sees is that the theory - which he places so much faith in, tells him how to act. I feel really sorry for folks that don't realize that they are prisoners of their own choices. We are all free creatures... free to do what we want, when we want, accepting the consequences of those actions - good or bad.

Maybe the depression is focused at the faith in the market theory... if they didn't place as much faith in the theory, then they wouldn't be forced to do what they thought they were being told to do. It's interesting that people who may not think of themselves as faith-based tie themselves to their beliefs as much as fanatical religious types.

People are funny...

I have worked with all kids of people... I've even been all kinds of people over my 39 yrs. of life, so I think I'm pretty well exposed to my middle-class group of humanoids. Yet once and a while you meet someone that represents such a skew in your data, that you have to stop and study this person more.

I have worked with a person we'll call Steve (that's not his real name) for about two months now. He has shown himself to be a pretty reasonable developer. He seems to know the code he's delivering, and while his vision very rarely extends outside the box, he seems to be adequate for the job. Then came today.

Today, Steve came to my office to see that his code was running terribly slow. First off, he didn't believe me that it was, and in the all-too-often stance taken by some developers "it works fine for me", he had to see it. So I showed him. As it turned out, they weren't using very similar data for their tests, so that there was every reason why the results would be significantly different. That wasn't enough, oh no...

Steve then proceeded to sit in my office for the next several hours learning absolutely nothing because the tools he was using weren't going to tell him what his problem was. I tried to, but had he listened to me, he wouldn't have been here in the first place, so it wasn't likely that he was going to take my advice at this juncture.

Oh... and did I say that Steve has a serious personal grooming problem? Yup... probably hasn't brushed his teeth in... Oh... let's call it six months and be safely conservative.

So I'm trying to work with a guy that doesn't really listen to me - though I've been right every time, doesn't realize when he's got to go back and fix something, and carries with him an odor that almost makes my eyes water.

So today hasn't been a great day of personal highlights...

What I want out of this is at least a glimmer of a sense that he takes back the realization that there is a problem... that it's not us... and that they have the wrong data model. With that, and enough time, I'm guessing that they will figure it out. But that's my hopes... life rarely lives up to our hopes for it.

Here's an interesting thing I've run into again at work. No matter where I come across it I'm amazed. Here's the story:

We have a Java process that is large - both in memory usage and in the processor speed that's required to get the job done on time. It's a real-time datafeed system so if it's not fast enough, they simply won't use it and will dub the project a failure. So we need speed and we need a good bit of memory.

The benchmark is that if this process is run on a good WinNT machine (900MHz+ and 512MB+) then the machine is fully loaded, but it runs the app and things are reasonably good. Yet they don't want to load each of the user's machines, so they want a thinner client.

So I try to run the middle tier of this application on a Sun Ultra 2 with a 300MHz UltraSPARC and 256MB RAM. This is a good test and it yields bad results. The report that loaded in about 10 sec. now takes in excess of an hour and the trashing on the Ultra 2 shows that the 256MB is too small and the 300MHz too slow. So now the question is What to try next?

Here comes the problem...

You can buy a Sun Blade 1000 with a 750MHz UltraSPARC processor and 2GB of RAM for about $14,000.00. You can get a dual Athlon 1.2GHz with 1GB RAM for $2,200.00 and run Linux/Java 1.3.1 on it. There's no comparison in the price/performance - Intel hardware wins by a wide margin. Yet you don't want to run NT on it - you need something like Linux/OpenBSD or even Solaris x86. Yet none of those combinations are allowed. Only Windows NT on Intel hardware or Sun hardware and Solaris.

So the problem becomes how do you justify the cost within these arbitrary rules? Well... it's hard. Most of the time you just give up and the users have to suffer. For no good reason other than ignorance. Linux can be made just as secure as Solaris... it can be just as reliable - given solid, reliable hardware... and yet it's banned more than it's used. I'm constantly amazed.

---

Other than the hardware issue, things are going well at work. We're making progress on the app, and if this middle tier proves itself, it'll be a very nice tool indeed. I enjoy the server-side processes because that means that I don't have to deal with the GUI stuff, but that also means that my ability to interact with the user is only within the context of what the existing infrastructure will allow. Good and bad...

Well... it's Monday morning again... I can't say as I'm too happy with this series of events, but that's really not a surprise. I'm sure there are entire civilizations that didn't like going to work. I just wish I liked it a little more.

Part of the reason I'm not really in a great mood this morning is that I just finished reading Nelson DeMille's The Gold Coast and I have to say that while I was never a great fan of his other books, this one was particularly horrible. While I have to admit that the humor of the main character is quite funny at times, the book itself is filled with the most dislikeable characters imaginable. The main character is married into old money and his wife is totally unlikeable - even by the main character. The cast of supporting characters is weak, and I simply found myself wishing that this book would end. I finished it only because I'm a completion-oriented person, and I won't be worried about picking up another of his books for a very long time.

So when I'm reading a 626 page epic to stupidity, it's hard to be happy when you have to go to work on an early Monday morning. Now if I'd been reading a new Michael Crighton - or even a Tom Clancey then maybe... but it's Monday, it's early, and it's a terrible book. Thankfully, I finished the book and on this evening's train ride I'll be reading The Legend of Baggar Vance which promises to be a much more enjoyable read than The Gold Coast.

---

Well... it's just like a Monday for bad news...

This morning I checked the SpindleTop page where the guys at MIT are making the Blackbird machines. Basically, wonderful machines that are black cubes with dual Pentium III or Athlon motherboards and all-around wixkedly great boxes starting below $2400. I was planning on getting one of these as soon as I could afford it. Now it seems as though it won't matter when I get the money because they aren't accepting any more orders.

This is so depressing it's almost too hard to deal with...

I realize that I may still be months away from a machine like this, but I always felt better looking at the pictures and thinking about that special someday when I'd get a chance to order one. Now that hope is all gone.

It's so depressing to think about this... I just can't. Maybe it'll hit me tomorrow or the day after, but right now I'm just numb.

---

Patience is a virtue is what I remember hearing when I was a kid. Heck, I still hear it now. Yet there seems to be a lot of folks that either don't hear it, or if they do, they don't listen. Now I'm not someone who has a wealth of patience, but even I have a hard time dealing with folks that believe they should wait for no one.

I work with people that would rather fix a problem by spending $1000 today and another $500 next week, and every week in lost time until the right thing is done, than spend $400 and get the parts needed to make it work right in a few days. It's the "If I'm doing something now then that's all that counts" philosophy. And I just can't stand it. There's a time for action and there's a time for considered thought. I just don't see the second ever being done by some folks. It's just hard to be in the middle of this. But hey, that's what I get paid to do, right? Doesn't mean I have to like it.

Boy... what a weekend... When you work as much, and as hard, as I have been working, weekends seem like the idea time to slow down, catch your breath, and rest up for the week ahead. Yet, when it's the only really good time I get to spend with my kids, it's not a time to rest, but rather a time to play.

That makes it a very tiring time... I come home on Friday, tired from the 12+ hour days and want to rest. But that's just when the kids want to play. It's rough-n-tumble, or it's hide-n-seek, or it's reading books, listening to what's happening, or playing games. Whatever it might be, it's non-stop activity for me. Yikes! It's hard work, but I can't imagine not doing it. I just wish I felt I could hold up under this stress... I have a feeling that this can't hold up for long.

---

On the work front, things are going well. When I was working in JDK 1.1.8 and read about JDK 1.3 (a.k.a. Java2) I was convinced that there wasn't a thing in Java2 that I couldn't do in JDK 1.1.8. Now that I've been working in Java2 for a month, I am convinced that I was right.

Oh sure, the HashMap is better because it allows nulls, but that's a marginal improvement in functionality as opposed to adding really new classes like built-in persistence, object-relational mapping, or even something as simple as altering the security system to allow JDBC connections from within the sandbox to a machine different than the one the applet came from. Those would have been changes that would have made the move to Java2 as compelling as the move to Java in the first place. And while I understand Sun's financial motivations, I can't help but wonder what Java would be like if it were backed by something more like the Open Source movement.

I think we'll never see all that I want in Java within the language. And it's primarily because Sun wants to sell these components that it feels are "add-ons" and I feel are fundamental parts of the language. Oh well... it's nice to know that my impression of Java2 was right on the money.

---

I finally got back to Slashdot today and caught some of the hub-hub about Mono, Ximian's new project to compete with Microsoft's .NET project. There are always folks that want to make life black and white... Microsoft is Bad and anyone dealing with them is, by association, Bad. And while I can't imagine I'd ever buy a Microsoft OS again, I can see that you have to respect the fact that Microsoft is the major player in the desktop market, and they will succeed if it's at all possible for anyone to succeed. They simply can afford to give it away until it becomes a success.

So in comes .NET - a sham in my book because I can't see the reason for it. The web is nice, the web is good, but there's a fundamental limitation in the web because of the page-based representation. It's good, but shouldn't be pushed into applications where it doesn't belong. There are plenty of web-building frameworks out there, and ASP/IIS is certainly as successful as any other. Why they need to make it accessible from all languages - and even create a new language (C#) to use it is beyond me. But they did, and if they want to, it'll be like IIS/ASP and be in every server (for free) they sell.

This means it'll succeed simply by having a large user base. Consulting shops will use it because it costs them nothing to deploy it, and their clients will already have it. It's a real no-brainer.

Yet to try and make it work with Open Source - specifically, to try and build an alternative is, I believe, very ambitious. I don't know that I'd try it. I don't think it's needed, but if I believed that it was needed, then I'd be very interested in having some competition to Microsoft. And I'd think Microsoft would be interested too, in light of their anti-trust issues.

But on Slashdot there are kids that still live with their parents, and teenage beliefs in good and evil are easily enraged by Ximian's move to try and fill the need as smoothly as possible. In this case, that means working with Microsoft as opposed to fighting them on it.

Again... I can't imagine why I'd ever want to do this, but if I did, I'd much rather it be through something like Mono - even if it eventually goes to Microsoft's systems eventually, than having to use a 100% Microsoft system from the jump. It's just like FreeTDS, or EasySoft's Bridges... it may be a fact of life that I have to deal with Microsoft at some point, I'd just like to be able to control what that point is.

---

OK... I've read more on Mono and I have to say that the hub-hub is even more overblown than I had thought. Also... I might like to have Mono.

The real project is about getting the C# language and APIs to Linux in an Open Source project. The real point for Microsoft is to create a VM that can be embedded within any language and therefore make shared components very easy to use. If you make a C# object that does authentication, then you could use it within Visual C++, VB, Ada, etc. No need to mess with recompiling the library, etc. It's a Java-like .class file and VM that makes it all work.

In that sense, it's a language and might be quite useful to have. If there is going to be a lot of code generated in it, it could be quite beneficial - like having f77... maybe you might not need it for a year, but when you do, it's nice to know it's there and will work for you.

Then in comes Mono and all they plan to do is to build the C# development environment, integrate it with CORBA and GCC, and get it going on Linux as well as it will be going on Windows. That's a reasonable goal. The design seems OK, and while it's nothing really new (when compared to GNOME) it's being backed by the 800 lb. gorilla, and that makes it something to think about supporting simply because of market share.

Interesting... and the Slashdot comments seem even more incredible...

Most importantly, Mono is not a complete .NET replacement... it's just the language, APIs, libraries and runtime. That's it. In that spirit, it's no different than putting Java on Linux - new language, new runtime, new libraries, and it took a long time to get Java stable on Linux. But it was, and is, a good thing. Mono may succeed, and it's just a C# environment, which is fine.

Now that I have the remote update working (I think), I'll fill in what's
been happening with me for the last month. It's been very interesting...

First off, I got a job with Computer Horizons Corp. as a consultant placed in UBS O'Connor - formerly O'Connor and SwissBank. They have a lot of trading systems for the Hedge Fund and they are a big user of Java/CORBA (Visigenics). So I interviewed with CHC and they passed me on to UBSOC. They liked me and on a Friday I accepted. I wanted to start work right away, as CHC pressured me to make a quick decision - they wouldn't wait a week to find out if eFS Network would have come through. UBSOC wanted to wait two weeks before getting me in the door, and I voiced my concerns and reluctantly accepted the fate.

The CHC folks called back and I was starting the next Monday. Lucky me... the overlap between BankOne and CHC is less than a week. That was pretty darn close.

So... I've been at UBSOC from June 25, and it's a reasonably nice place to be. The people are nice enough, they seem to be doing interesting things, and in general, things are going well. I still don't like being new and I'm certainly that, but it's getting better as I get more things working and start to handle things by myself.

Working for CHC, however, is difficult. Their benefits are much less than the Bank's so we had to change doctors, and I won't get a vacation day until June 25, 2002. I get paid by the hour, which is nice for the money, but it's not nice in that I feel like an assembly line worker... Not treated with much respect, and someone's watching over me all the time. Interestingly, I don't feel this from the O'Connor folks, it's the CHC and the entire consulting business which I haven't been in since Port-to-Port. It's not a comfortable feeling. I'm just not the same kind of person that started Port-to-Port.

Working downtown is nice in that I get to eat at Panda Express which is one of my favorite places. They like me... I like them... the food is great... they pack it on for me, and remember my order... it's like Cheers... Who doesn't want to go where everybody knows your name?

It's been a busy few days with interviews. I'm hopefully getting close and if so, then it'll be nice to get things back to normal. I'm going to work hard to find something interesting to do today to keep my mind off this stuff... I sure hope it works.

Well... today is my last official day at BankOne and I have very mixed emotions. The package is nice, but I can't help wonder what would have happened if... Oh well... nothing I can do about that now.

I realized that I didn't have a consistent verison of PHP 4 on all three servers - sparky, barney and opus. Much to my surprise, sparky was the furthest from current running 4.0.3pl1. So I took the time to get opus to 4.0.4pl1 as well as building 4.0.4pl1 for sparky. I really like PHP and now that all the machines are at the current release we're in a good position to use either of the XML-RPC PHP clients. Nothing major, but since I had the time it seemed like a good thing to get caught up on.

I talked to Joel today - freshly back from vacation in the Florida Keys, and he suggested I get the CIA codebase up to the ISP and build it without PNG or FFTW support - as they have still not installed those components on the server. So I built a tar file and shipped it up with scp - gotta love those OpenSSH tools. Anyway, I get the code up and then go about modifying it for the above limitations. Not too bad, I think to myself.

Then I try to make it and get a ton of errors. Holy Cow! This server doesn't have the GTK includes installed on it! So I check and sure enough, the RPM gtk+-devel-1.2.8-7 is missing. So I send off a message to Joel to relay to them asking for this to be installed as well. I understand the desire to install 'less' rather than 'more' on servers where you're selling the free space, but the time they've lost in putting these on after the fact is more then offsetting the up-front lost revenue. Penny-wise, Pound-foolish.

When they get the GTK includes installed I'll be able to build CIA - with the limitations. If they get libpng installed, I can finish building Ploticus, and remove that limitation. Hmmm... service really is everything, isn't it?

UPDATE: - these guys at the ISP are amazing... I've been waiting to see when they get the GTK development package installed and have noticed that they only installed two of the four packages for VIM. Now it's true that they saved several MB of storage, but at what cost? Now gvim isn't there, nor is vim. The syntax highlighting is not there, but they have a form of VI... It's amazing.

They have a web-based technology look-up that does some kind of query to see what's installed on their machines, and it says gtk+-devel-1.2.8-7 was installed today, but the files aren't there, nor is the package listed in the RPM database for the machine I'm logged into. So they have a disconnect somewhere, and we're suffering for it. Oh well... what do you expect from a company that's doing this on the side... We might not have gotten a lot better service from a serious hosting site, but I have to wonder why it is that they are up and happy - with satisfied customers, and we're here fighting about what packages are installed. Holy Cow.