What's it all about, Alfie?

Tomorrow is my last day at the Shop. More than seven and a half years here, and it's down to a single day. I've been on a bit of a slide these last two weeks, but I have to say, two things today made me feel like I really have done something right here.

First, I was going to get a Diet Coke, and passed by two of my favorite traders in the hall talking. As I passed, I said "I'm really going to miss you guys." To which they immediately responded "We're really going to miss you."

I was stunned. Happily. Never in my life had I expected that kind of affirmation from the traders. I know I have tried to be helpful, but that's a very subjective thing. I have built a few really cornerstone apps here, but to have them respond back like that was really very unexpected. It immediately put a smile on my face. Sure, I was leaving and was going to miss them, but they were going to miss me too.

The second thing happened when someone stopped by to ask me a few questions about one of the projects he was taking over for me. I'm not really sure how we got around to the topic of a certain manager in the group, but we did, and in the retelling of stories this guy mentioned that often he had the following exchange with this manager when discussing a task he was assigning to this person: (heavily paraphrased)

worker: That could be rather hard, and I'm not sure if it's even possible.

manager: It might take you two days to do the hard, but Bob could do the impossible straight-away.

While the relationship between myself and this manager has not always been wine and roses, I have done what he's asked, and it seems that even when he asks it, he must know that some of what he's asking is not just difficult - but difficult even for his better people.

This isn't going to make me stay, but it does make me feel good about the contributions I've made over the years. It hasn't gone unnoticed - which was a real possibility in my mind a few days ago. It's nice to know you'll be missed.

No doubt about it, there's blood in the water. This morning they let go two developers - one consultant and another employee. I'm guessing the employee got a decent severance package, but I have no first-hand knowledge on that point. The consultant, I'm guessing got nothing - it's the way of the employee/consultant world, as it were.

I don't know the details, but I'm certain this has everything to do with the markets and the staff cuts that started about a month ago in the Front Office. If it happened there, then I knew then, it eventually had to come to the IT group - developers and support staff. We just didn't know when.

What's a little shocking is that the employee was here for as long as I've been here - and yet I outlasted him by a single day. I'm guessing he had no idea it was coming, and that's no good for anyone. If you were at least in the process of making plans, then the layoff might not come as a complete surprise. But if you had no idea it was coming... well... then it can be a real kick in the belly.

No fun, in those cases.

I'm not sure I'll keep in touch with these guys, we weren't really close most of the time they have been here, but it's still sad to see the blood flow - for anyone.

UPDATE: I was amazed to learn that even more people than I knew were part of the layoffs. Also, that the management didn't even allow them the courtesy of clearing out their desks! I've seen some of the most unpopular people fired from this place - with security personnel standing by their desks as they packed to go. But they at least had the opportunity to pack their things.

What happened yesterday was nothing short of embarrassing. Any employer participating in this kind of behavior towards simple layoffs (as opposed to felony arrests) should be ashamed if itself. There's no possible, defensible, excusable reason for it. None. That it happened today is confirmation that this place has changed. And not for the better.

This morning I read about Amazon released an iPhone/iPod Touch app called 'Kindle for the iPhone' and I have to say I'm pretty darn pleased that they did. While the screen on my iPod Touch is not as big as my Kindle (1.0) screen, it's still nice that I can take a book or two or 50 with me on my iPod and read. The iPod screen is bright, easy to handle, and you really can't beat the convenience of having two ways to read my books.

I'm guessing they use the WiFi to talk to Amazon and permission the reader - not bad. I see that an iPhone would be a lot better at this, but that's not what I have, nor do I plan on getting one now. But it's a nice app, and I'm certainly going to try it out and see how it goes.

Good job, Amazon.

UPDATE: after downloading a few of my books from Amazon I'm really quite pleased with the interface. It's clean, easy to read, and a real treat. Not something I'd use all the time, but it's really not bad. Again, if I had an iPhone then it'd be great. The Kindle has the EVDO link, as does the iPhone, but my iPod is a little more limited with it's WiFi. But still - it's nice to have.

This morning Apple released updates to the AirPort Utilities and the Client. The tagline is the same - fixes and compatibility issues for the AirPort base stations and the clients hitting those stations. It's something that I need to update, but the station side of things is going to have to wait for the weekend when I have a little more time to get it installed - carefully.

Can't have the TimeCapsule down for long - it's way too valuable to Liza's machine.

Also included are updates to iLife Support, iPhoto, and iWork... it was a bumper day for Apple Updates.

A little while ago, Marc Liyanage looked at the ClickToFlash and saw that it was straight ObjC, and with that, he embarked on writing an ObjC plugin for Safari that views XML in a manner similar to how IE shows it - formatted and stylized. The result is XML View Plugin 1.5.

The result is pretty darn amazing:

There's also an automatic updater, as well as the ability to modify the style with CSS and Javascript. Pretty impressive, I must say.

I don't use XML a lot, but when I do, it's really nice to have something that will format and display XML nicely.

Today I was checking at HostMonster to see if Fantastico had WordPress 2.7 or 2.7.1 (the current release). Now I know that Fantastico is a little bit behind the latest releases, and even the better (more up-to-date) SimpleScripts that HostMonster brought on-line a few months ago. The problem was that converting from Fantastico to SimpleScripts was something that the user (that would be me) had to do the conversion themselves. You had to do a basic install in a location, then copy things over and reload the database... lots of grief, and lots of ways for something to go wrong. This kept me from converting to SimpleScripts.

Well... today I noticed that SimpleScripts has a new WordPress conversion feature. Basically, it reads the configuration information from the Fantastico install and then "takes over" for it and allows you to manage the install with SimpleScripts from that point on.

What a break!

So, I converted my WordPress install to SimpleScripts and in less than a minute, it was possible for me to manage it - and that includes updating it to 2.7.1! What a deal! Yes, I'm happy to say that I'm now off Fantastico and on SimpleScripts. HostMonster is still the provider, and I've never had any problems whatsoever with them, and can't imagine a better hosting experience. Super duper. Love it.

Well... I've been in the midst of this "brain dump" - the last two weeks of this job, and this morning I realize that I've had the final falling out with a co-worker that I've worked with more or less comfortably by for many years. It's not something I could have helped, really. Nor is it totally unexpected. The guys taking over my projects are being pressured to be able to build and deploy the codebase before I leave. Sounds like a good plan. Some are taking it a step further: they want to be able to re-create the entire environment I've used. That's a much bigger task.

To be able to go to a specific machine that has all the infrastructure set-up for the project, check out the code, build it and deploy it is a reasonable goal in a few days. But to understand the infrastructure - for example, one of my projects uses Tibco. In order to run Tibco, you need to get the license file from the higher-ups and then place it in the path, and then put in an entry into /etc/init.d for rvd and then get it added to the environment, and then running. It's possible, but it's not really as important as being able to build the code that uses Tibco.

When there's time, the deeper investigation of the infrastructure can be looked at. And at that time, there will be sufficient experience with the project so that there's an understanding of what the infrastructure components are doing and why. But for now, that's really a step beyond the initial cut of "check-out, build, deploy". It's a good goal, but it's not something that should be viewed as an absolute requirement.

But it seems to be viewed that way by this co-worker.

When he asked me how to get this one service going, I suggested that doing it on this one box was the right thing to do. When that wasn't sufficient for his desires, without further explanation on his part, he got mad. And stayed mad. I got the feeling yesterday afternoon that he was upset with me not helping him in this regard - but to be fair, even if it was in the plan for him, me doing it would be wrong because that means that the people left here are not learning how to do these tasks.

Either way, my hands were tied, and he didn't like that.

Understandable, and I can see a lot more of this coming in the weeks and months ahead. I expect to hear a lot of nasty things being said about me in my absence. This place was busy when I was here, and I was doing a lot of things. Remove me, and everyone's workload increases significantly, and that's not going to make anyone happy.

So it seems to have started here, in my last week on the job. I tried to talk to him about it this morning, and I can see that it's clearly just as sore an issue with him as it was yesterday. He's upset, and he thinks I'm being horrifically unreasonable. I think I'm trying to make it easier on him, and if he insists on going that extra mile, then he needs to know that I can't possibly help him without negating the effort he's putting forth.

Oh well... there's nothing I can really do about it. He's upset for what he believes are valid reasons. Perception is far more important than Reality - so true.

I know it's what was going to happen, but that doesn't make it any easier to live through. This constant barrage of questions from the developers and support staff is really quite draining. And it's not the stuff I've left out of the docs - that I can understand. It's the things that appear to be problems when in fact they are environment issues on the part of the developer that are inconsistent/incompatible with the project they are taking over.

It's a simple job to make a .cshrc file look at the name of the machine - and/or the version of the operating system, and then set up defaults for that box so that the user doesn't have to do any of the changes on his end. Take make, for example. On the linux boxes, it's the GNU Make that's shipped with the RHEL distribution. But on Solaris, you have to be careful, because GNU Make is installed in /usr/local/bin on all our Solaris boxes, but it's also on the shared file servers, and even in the Sun compiler suite - as we are licensed for that as well.

So you have to make sure that you're pointing to the right things, on the right boxes, so that all the simple development commands and such just work. It's not hard. But it takes a little effort. This is why I have told people about where my .cshrc and .login are, and they are free to look at them and see what they might want to pick up for themselves.

Of course, they don't have to do that - they are free to change anything and everything about these projects now that I'm no longer "actively involved". However, if they come to me and they think something should work out-of-the-box, and it's not... then debugging these issues is especially tiring as I was assuming that things are set up correct for the build.

But in the end, I only need to give it a few more days and then it's no longer my problem. It'll be up to the folks remaining to work through all the unasked questions and make sense of the codebase that I've left. There's a lot there to work with, and it's working just fine. But things change... Oh... things change.

This morning, between questions, I was scanning the WordPress site for a few themes that I might try out when I open this weblog back up for public consumption. I'm looking for a white background, two-column, simple layout. I'm really not into the flash and color of a lot of the blogs out there - it's just a place for me to put my thoughts and notes, as well as code samples, etc. Just plain stuff.

I do like the WordPress theme system, and there are a bunch of good themes out there on the WordPress site. It's just an issue of looking through the ones you're interested in and picking out the winners. Today I picked up a few (four) and we'll see what they do for me when I turn the blog back on. I'm hoping for a nice image boost from the default WordPress theme, but it has served me well for all this time. Can't really complain.

Well... I have four more days and then it's freedom. It's going to feel good to be looking forward to the new job.

It seems that the changes to WebKit, and it's ramifications to the rest of the system are really quite profound. This morning I read a tweet from Gus M. of Flying Meat Inc, and it's about a bug introduced by Safari 4 Beta into the NSAttributedString code for VoodooPad. Bummer. I can (unfortunately) relate all too well to this, and while it lies squarely at Apple's feet for not informing the users (and the developers) of the impacts of these changes, it's the developers (and the users) that have to live with the consequences.

In this case, there's a new pre-release version of VoodooPad out there that fixes this issue, but it's pre-release, and unless I end up hitting this bug, I'll stick with the regular releases as I think it's reasonable that he'll have 4.1 out soon. It certainly sounds like 4.1 is close. Good enough for me.

[3/3] UPDATE: I decided that I needed the update to 4.1 as I was having issues with the app and I wasn't going to get rid of Safari 4 - it's just too nice.