What's it all about, Alfie?

Work is quiet for the most part but I've had an interesting chat with one of the Unix SysAdmins on one of the several Linux boxes I have in production at the time. I can't have root access, but they allow sudo access, and that's good enough for me as I can do all I need on the boxes assuming that the sudo command is working. Well... late yesterday sudo started rejecting my password on one of my production boxes. No big deal - I'm still able to login to the box with SSH, but it's something I wanted fixed. Maybe it was in NIS, maybe not, but I wanted them to restart services to see if it was NIS. Big Mistake.

They looked at the box and couldn't figure out the problem. This is not a big surprise as these are not the very best admins I've ever encountered in my days and from talking to others around here, this is not an uncommon belief. Their 'solution' to the problem was to first upgrade the machine to '011' - their numbering scheme for semi-custom RedHat builds, and the second was to say that Linux really isn't stable enough to allow for the 201 days of uptime that this box had.

Clowns.

I told them just to reboot the box as that will most likely clear things up and leave it at that. They think it's important to move to their "latest" release when they don't have a good idea of the problem. Holy Cow! I know it's not a really high paying job, but given that these people have a lot of power, it's amazing that they don't screen them a little bit better than they currently do. Yikes!

OK... first, I can't imagine why on earth they make a custom build of the kernel as well as custom OpenSSH packages (to name just two). These can't possibly be kept as up-to-date as the developers of these same packages, but they insist that it's for security reasons. Amazing. Really.

Then when I have a reasonably stable system (on average > 200 days uptime) they want to rebuild it with yet another of their crazy distributions as opposed to just learning the systems they have and be able to fix them. I know there are some in the Linux Admins that are very knowledgeable and could probably figure out this problem, but they are not available to do this work because they are too busy doing hardware verification, creating new builds of the kernel (I still can't get over that), etc. It's amazing that a place like this is run this way.

But life goes on... slowly, and with great gnashing of teeth, but it goes on.

I read an interesting article today about the role of the Artisan in the human experience. Very interesting thoughts - lots that hit very close to home for me. It's a battle with frustration to be sitting in this place where so much can be done, and yet because of some (understandably) important decisions nothing is being done. I understand business decisions - I owned a business for 5 years, there should be the realization that the business of business is to keep moving forward on things. Never sit still. Unfortunately, that's not being done here. So we limp along.

Maybe I'll plan for what should be done and then see if it's worth implementing this. It'll certainly give me something to do while they make the decisions that will decide what direction we're going to take.

I've been around the Intel computing platform since the 8080 was hot stuff. My first computer had a serial interface to a teletype and later to a first-generation video display terminal. I've used DOS on Intel since version 1.3... I say all this to make a point that I've seen a lot and done a lot over the decades and for the most part things have gotten better. For the most part.

Case in point - hardware is much better than it used to be. Also, I have to hand it to Microsoft for coming up with significant advancements in the base OS such as abstracted printer drivers and such. Pre-Windows software had to ship with it's own printer drivers which is why so many Unix software dealt with only Postscript. It was on the network and a known language.

Still, many things haven't improved. This past week I've been "upgraded" at work from Windows NT to XP. Now I've had XP at home on a few computers I don't really use, and so I've gotten all the changes down and I'm pretty comfortable with it, but working on it all day long is another issue. So I was trying to keep an open mind about going to XP in the hopes that things wouldn't be as bad as I had thought they'd be.

Well... I hate to say it, but I was wrong. It's no different than NT, and in many ways, worse. OK, what's the big issue? Well... there are programs like PuTTY that I've used for a long time to access servers that is having a very hard time running well on XP. It could be the install of XP that the Bank is doing, but if that's the case, then there's another thing that Microsoft has done wrong with XP - allowing people to break it on install.

I have moved off NT/XP as my primary development platform, but all my apps have to run on NT/XP and so I have to deal with it every day anyway. This makes me realize what's good about it and what really isn't. I'm totally surprised that in XP the terminal sessions are "old style" window bar and not in keeping with the "theme" of the rest of the windows. Why in the world did they do that? They had to have seen it and known that it was inconsistent... It's totally amazing to me that they let this pass.

Sure, most of the suite of tools runs OK - Office, development tools, etc. But even then, there's the problems with certain tools and the backslash vs. forwardslash difference in Cygwin. It's enough to make a cross-platform developer cry.

But I also have a good upgrade story to tell - I've ordered the 17-inch PowerBook and it should arrive in a week or so. This will be a very nice upgrade and will carry me forward for at least another couple of years. I have been looking forward to this for quite some time and it's getting very exciting thinking about all new and different things the PowerBook has. Certainly, the display is important, but the backlight keyboard is going to be nice, as is the processor and memory. It will be nice to have all that drive space, and the DVD burner will be a nice tool to have.

It's just amazing to me that even when Microsoft sees what's better they don't take the steps to incorporate those changes in the same way that they've done with Office and the Browser and the TCP/IP stack - all these were separate products, but as they became more important to Microsoft, they started to provide them. It's amazing that XP is as bad as it is.

Anyway... back to try and get some more tools installed, or figure out why the ones I have now aren't working right. It's never easy with them...