What's it all about, Alfie?

It's been a wild and wonderful Christmas this year. It's amazing that all this has worked out so well. It's been one heck if a great Christmas. I got a few really nice things from the kids - visegrips, a tool belt, and some knee pads... and they got boatloads of goodies. I love this season!

It's always amazing and fun to spend some time off. I've had a lot of fun these past few days at home. I've been able to see lots of Trading Spaces on TLC on Christmas Day, and I've had a chance to look on the web for a nice plotting package for sherman on Mac OS X. I found pro Fit that looks to be a pretty good package for a reasonable price. I'm going to work with the trial version for a while and if it pans out I'll probably get it. It looks like a nice package with capabilities for both imported data and direct math functions. Could be really nice if I get a chance to port some of the simulations that I'd like to get ported. Looks very nice indeed.

It's been a really nice getting a break from the bloodbath at work. I've gotten word that management has come around after the bodies have been carried away and asked what they could offer us to make it a nicer place for us to work. They want us to know that they think we're important to them and their plans this year. Ummm... Duh! I'm glad that I don't have to be in there this week.

I've chatted with a few folks this week and it's incredibly empty there, and if you have to be there, at least it's a good time to do it as there's almost no chance that something will go bad. Then again, when I go back at the first of the year I'm sure they'll be thinking that things are all settled down and will be ready to get to work right away. So be it... that's then. But today, I'm enjoying the Season. Enjoying the well-deserved time-off. Tomorrow will come in the morning.

I was doing a little surfing the other day and came across a place selling SGI Indigo² power supplies. Now, this is a source of pain for me as I had to decommission barney my Indigo² this past summer due to his burning up a third power supply. Interestingly enough, this place talked about dual-head supplies. These supplies could handle two High Impact board sets or a Maximum Impact and a Solid Impact pair. This places them higher than the models I'd been putting in (and burning up) in barney.

So call me a chump, but I had to try it.

Last weekend I spent the time getting barney out of storage and powered up. He only lasted about 20 mins. before shutting down, but it was enough to convince me that he was back and ready for the new power supply.

This morning, I received UPS shipping information on the package and it'll be here tomorrow. I'm very excited about getting it in and having a complete 30 days to see it run before worrying about a blowout. I'm really excited about getting barney back in the picture again... there's just something about SGI machines that I really love...

OK... so I'm trying to get over the loss of barney and see what's coming up for me. I have several possibilities, but I'm not sure what path I'll be taking.

If money weren't an object, I'd simply get a better, newer sgi box. There are the Octanes which are reasonably priced and could have dual processors with graphics that are just as good. But if money is no object, then the new Fuel or even better yet, the Octane2 workstations are nice.

But money is an object... a scarce one.

So I have to realize that with my domain being DNS-ed at easyDNS I get all the things I really need without having to keep barney alive:

• I can have www.TheManFromSPUD.com hosted on sparky with a redirect to the specific URL. barney used to host this site, but with it moved, there's no need for him.
• I can do all my developing on sherman my iBook as it's got apache, PHP, PostgreSQL on it and that's all the development tools I used on barney.

So in the end, it's not really even necessary to replace barney. But as a collector, I feel a keen sense of loss.

I spent some time yesterday looking at the auctions on eBay looking for what things were going for these days. I was surprised to see that there were as many Octane power supplies on the market as Indigo² power supplies. This doesn't lead me to believe that they fixed their power problem. Also, let's face it... any reasonable Linux box these days can beat an aging sgi box. I was collecting it for the cache value, not any real need to have it.

So I was checking out other options such as the ultra-reliable SPARC 20. As it turns out you can get one of them for under $200 with dual processors, plenty of memory and lots of stuff. Not bad, but I already have a SS20, and it's fine and loaded with lots of goodies. So I don't really need one, and the collectible value is marginal as I already have one.

I looked at the HP workstations, and I know that I can get all the freeware (gcc, etc.) I need for one of them, but I'm less excited about having an HP box than I used to be. I've certainly thought about getting a nice Linux box, but that's real money (>$2000) and I'm not ready for that yet.

So it looks like I'll take barney off the desktop and put his parts in storage. If it's possible to bring him back later, I'll probably try and do that. But for now, it's time to say goodbye and realize that as a collector of working computers, it's time to move on and close the book on barney.

I want to love sgi stuff. I really do.

I've had barney my Indigo² for a long time. Heck, I've even replaced the entire box with a newer, updated one and kept the name but recently I've wondered at what cost.

You see, my original Indigo² was an R4400/250MHz box off of eBay and it cost $1495.00 at the time. I thought it was a bargain. And it was. Then that box went through 3 power supplies - at $300 a piece, and it wasn't so much of a great deal. I had fans blowing on it, I tried another $175 High Impact video card set - no luck, the original wasn't bad, and in the end realized that this just wasn't the best box to use.

So I got an R10000/195MHz for another $800 and thought my problems would be over.

They weren't.

The power supply started to go and I talked to the used SGI reseller that I had used for two of the power supplies and the new R10k box, and he said he didn't have any more power supplies around. I'm not the least bit surprised.

For all the wonderful technology that the Indigo² is, I'm now convinced that they just can't run in normal conditions. What I mean is that in the standard, American home, with air conditioning, these boxes just get too hot and they take themselves out.

So I have two perfectly functioning boxes with great capabilities but no power to them. This is very frustrating to say the least.

I've taken out the drives to lower the power consumption, and I've removed 2/3^rds of the RAM to again, lower power consumption, but in the end, once the power supply starts to go it's a gonner and it's only a matter of time before it goes again.

In the end I have to conclude that while it's been a blast, it's over.

OK... the place I work is moving from one office building in Chicago to another office building and this past weekend my servers were moved. Nothing every goes really well, does it? This was no exception. I'm very tired from trying to hammer out the last of the bugs in the move and missing on some very important sleep. Nothing comes easy, I guess...

At the same time, I have to hold myself back from tagging a few goobers at work. Specifically, in this sleep deprived state when I tell a developer that they are hitting the Test version of my code because I can see the logs it's more than slightly annoying to hear them say that it isn't. I'm not asking for a confirmation here, I've already got my own confirmation by looking at Test and Production. Instead, I'm telling them that it's wrong and I'm getting attitude back?

More importantly, why is it that I'm supporting their users? Yes, I understand that it's because I will and they won't, but that's their problem and my burden. There's something terribly wrong with this situation if I'm supporting their users.

It's all about the Prodigal Son - the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Now I'm not trying to fish for compliments, but when an organization or professionals allows such incredibly poor performance then it breaks an implied contract to those that have worked hard and pulled their weight. The implied contract is we have worked and met your expectations - those expectations are for everyone - not just those that really work hard.

When I see professionals doing less than my 8-year-old and not being held accountable, then I have to think that the expectations were really not meant for anyone (i.e. they wanted to have high expectation, but didn't expect anyone to really achieve them), or they have expectations and then when people put out "average" work, they aren't taken to task about the fact that they missed the expectations by so much.

Now if this were a co-ed softball team out for a game every Saturday afternoon, I'd say that it's no big deal, we're out for the Fun and Sun. But when we're supposed to be professionals at this, it's entirely different. Professionals are supposed to be professional and not get attitudes, or whine, or complain... they are supposed to be good enough at what they do to continue doing it under severe and challening conditions. But what I'm seeing is what I once would have called a bunch of babys.

OK... I know it's been a long time sine I've updated the journal, but that's due more to my work level than lack of anything interesting happening to me. Things at work have been really hopping and then there's the kids and all their activities and with the end of school, things are only getting more hectic.

Office Space is on TV as I type this into my iBook, and it's strangely appropriate that such a movie just happened to come on Comedy Central as I was talking about how work was going. Coincidence? I think not.

So... work has been busy. New releases with a lot of new functionality and hopefully a lot of stability enhancements so that we don't have to worry about mid-day reboots. We'll have to see how that plays out this coming week, but I'm pretty confident that we'll be looking at a better system than we've been running. In any case, it's nice to get a release out that I've been working on for more than a month. That's a very long time in Trader-years.

We've also been making progress on a few other Black-Bag projects that are very close to bearing fruit. While they still have a little bit to go, it's nice to see them progressing nicely and know that when they do get completed there is going to be some really nice functionality that they'll add to the system. Probably just a few weeks now.

As for me, things are quiet today without the kids and Liza - they're off for a mini-vacation but I need to stick around for work tomorrow as I'm liable to be in at least a few meeting that need my presence due to activities this past week which didn't go as well as they should have and at the same time went better than could have. This means I'm missing the mini-vacation but at least this way I have a really good chance of taking at least part of this coming Friday off and that'd be really, really nice.

WWDC is happening in California now, and while I'd like to go, I can thankfully read up on all the happenings on the web. It's really amazing for someone like me that remembers the ARPAnet before it was the Internet, and to see just how far it is we've come. Amazing.

Anyway, WWDC is going on and there are a few nice surprises coming out of there for the Apple fans in the crowd. I like the news of the new
ProjectBuilder and InterfaceBuilder tools. I am interested in the new GCC 3 which should make it a lot easier to get FORTRAN and Java as compiled languages on the OS X platform. I like the updates to the tools just because new features are fun to play with even if you don't use them everyday. So there's a lot to be happy about with the news. Of course, there's no real specific details on what's happening, but it's nice to know what'll be coming soon, even if I don't know exactly when.

On the work front, there's another interview with another Hedge Fund and that may turn into something interesting, but I'm not holding my breath for it... too many uncertanties, and I've learned too much about Headhunters to get too excited about anything until I see an offer on the table. But from what the headhunters have told me, it sounds like an interesting place to work.

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!

Well... another year rolls around and it's my wedding anniversary. Nice.

Last evening I looked for the Solaris 7 disks on eBay and again this morning. It seems as though I'm never going to get my wonderful set of disks back and rather then get the set I originally got for $18.00 that included both the SPARC and Intel versions of Solaris 7, I'm going to have to pay on the order of $25.00 plus shipping to get a SPARC-only set of the disks.

Let this be a lesson to you, Bob... never, never, never trust someone else with things that are near and dear to you. I feel like a fool for having left the disks there. I should have kept them with me as he was never going to be doing an install anyway.

Oh well... I supposed I've had more expensive mistakes in my life... this one will only set me back the cost of a good dinner with the family. I've had worse, I suppose.

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Work is thankfully quiet and that's good. In these quiet times I'm going through the code and cleaning it up, adding accessor methods and such to just clean up the code and make it just a little more robust.

One of the problems with doing this is that you really can't change anything and that means you need to be very careful about what you change and be sure to make sure all references are checked. The upside is that after you've done this it's a cleaner design and you've probably caught a few mistakes in the process.

The big downside is that you end up burned out after a few hours. Since you aren't really doing anything new it's not like there's something to look forward to. It's a do no wrong mode and that's hard to keep up after a few hours. So I have to take breaks and pace myself. It's important work to do, but it's not the kind of thing you can keep at for eight hours straight...

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FLASH! - Joel called and the Solaris 7 disks have been found and he'll be bringing them to the City Monday. Yes! Good news.

Well... I've found a place that will basically build my system from the individual components that I want. It's not going to be as sexy as the Blackbird, but it will be as nice on the inside... For about $2500 I can get a dual Palomino 1.2GHz machine with all the memory and drive space I can ever need. Also it'd have dual NICs to make it easier to bridge my two networks, and a CD-RW for those times when I want to burn CDs.

Now I'm back to wondering when...

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I'm supposed to be getting a Sun box for work soon. I think it turns out that a guy left, and it was his box, but now that he's gone, it's free to be re-used. So I put my name in and why I need it and we'll see. I think it'll help a lot in developing/debugging the middle-tier that's coming from the InfoReach guys this fall. I just hope things work out - both with the box and with the code.

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I have been searching and fiddling around on the net today because we're just so darn good! Really, the app is running well, we have to wait on others to do things for our next steps, and so all's quiet. Nice, but it can get to be a little too quite as well...

So I've done a little bit of looking, first at the system that I was looking at. I read up some more on the motherboard, and it looks very nice. This might actually be a really good system to get! I'm more impressed with the box and my ability to configure it the more I think about it. The other thing I was thinking about was the Sun box that I'm hopefully going to get in the near future. It seems as though someone else has put in a request for it, but I thought it was tagged for me... Oh well... we'll have to see how things work out.

Speaking of Sun boxes, I've tried to track down my Solaris 7 disks with Joel... I'm almost certain that I left them at his house. Let this be a lesson to me... never leave disks lying around. You never know when you're going to need them.

Anyway... when I get the Sun box the conventional wisdom is to get the machine name, any configuration information off it, and then rebuild it from scratch. Then, install what I need and properly put it back into the NIS network. Nothing that hard, but it's something that needs to be done. What I'm thinking about is GNOME 1.4 and Sawfish window manager. It'd be really nice to be able to put GNOME 1.4 on this new box and let Ximian's Red Carpet take care of keeping things up to date. The Ximian folks say that it's coming, but have no date as to when it'll be ready. The alternative is to get the sources and build them with the tools from SunFreeware and go that route.

If I go the manual build route then I'm going to have to get Sawfish as well... Also, if I want to build anything with KDE, I'll need to get that. There are a lot of details that need to be thought of, and Ximian's installer was nice in that it took care of the GNOME and Sawfish part. All you had to do from there was deal with KDE and any other tools you wanted - gEdit, etc. that weren't included in Ximian GNOME.

So... I'll first have to get the Solaris 7 CDs from Joel, then see if I actually get the Sun box, then worry about rebuilding it from the disks, then getting the essentials from SunFreeware, and then getting GNOME from either Ximian or the sources. There's a lot of work there, and it's going to take time to work through it all. No rush on the GNOME issue today.