What's it all about, Alfie?

I know I work in a little cardboard and steel box. It's a cube. Same as a million other cubes in the business world, but this one is mine. I've recently realized that just because it looks like mine, it really isn't mine - or at least the people that I work with seem to think it's as much theirs as mine.

Boundaries. Plain and simple.

If I go to talk to someone in their home, I don't re-arrange the furniture because I think it looks better one way than another. I don't even tell them I think they could do better with the couch, or chair in this location. I am a gracious guest and keep my thoughts to myself. After all, I could be totally missing the point of the sunlight in the room, or a heating vent, or any of a hundred different things that would make the choice they made the right choice.

At work it's the same thing. I don't walk into a co-worker's cube and decide that their phone is in the wrong place, or their papers should be stacked here. I try not to even go into the cube itself. They're barely big enough for a person in a chair, there's no need to walk into these tiny places and start poking, moving, and disturbing things.

But there are many that don't believe as I do.

There are people that simply walk into my cube, decide that they need to grab a pad of paper, borrow a pencil and start writing. They don't even ask. While I understand that they don't personally mean to piss me off, they're doing a good job of it and I want to tell them Hey, jerk! Do I go into your house and move your stuff? Take what I want without asking? But I can't. If I do that I'll be branded a trouble-maker, and while I wouldn't mind this branding, I know that there are folks that will be very glad that I keep quiet and simply put things back and get another pad of paper.

But I wish they'd just stay out of my bloody cube!

Today I put the finishing touches on the addition of Sedol, ISIN, and CUSIP identifiers to the server. While this isn't rocket science, it's nice that they were added so easily. All I needed to do was to pull it out from the instrument master database a little bit of code made it variables and sent it to the clients.

The Hong Kong users wanted one, but I knew that the coverage of these identifiers is not 100% on any one identifier set, so it was nice that all three were available in the instrument master. I've worked hard to make sure that I can phase things in without having to make a "big switch" where multiple systems are changing on the same day - today I put the changes in the server, tomorrow I can roll-out the changes to the middle-tier and clients. Nice.

There seems to always be something waiting in the wings. For the last few days I've been noticing a problem with one of my apps and while I was confident I hadn't made any changes, it was possible that it was the exchanges, or the software that I use to pseudo-normalize the data from the exchanges. It's only happened in 2008, so I sent an email to my contact in the group who maintains the code I use and asked him if anything changed.

Interestingly enough, things had. But he didn't find them right away. Eventually, he did see that the new backup policy they implemented in 2008 wasn't properly returning the configurations for the users. This was the source of the problems I'd been seeing.

Great that he found the problem and fixed it, but I'm wondering how many other users of this code were getting bad results and just not knowing about it. It's always important to watch what you're running.

It's been all I had hoped today would be - busy with lots of things to do, no time to sit around and wonder, and all good things to deliver to the users. I've gotten reports today of data issues that I've fixed in the market data server as well as things I noticed yesterday evening when I got a night-time call from the Hong Kong folks about F/X rates not being properly set. There were a lot of things to overcome - most of them non-obvious to the users, but it was a lot of fun hammering at them until they cracked open, and were solved.

Never give up. Never surrender. - great line from a very funny movie, and it's the way to approach these problems. You know you're going to figure it out, so let's just do it! In the end, it's been a great day. At this point I'm simply waiting on people to get back to me and waiting for others to do things for me. Not a lot I can do until they come through for me, but it's been a heck of a good day up 'til now.

Don't get me wrong, there were a lot of things that greeted me upon my return that weren't really pleasant. For instance, the network problems I've been having have simply been moved to another machine - it's clearly the wiring or the switch, but it's still taking one of my machines down a lot more than it should. Thankfully, I can control which machine this is and that's making it a lot more reasonable, but it's still a pain after all I've been through on this.

Also, there are problems that the users have been telling others about for a while and no one has mentioned them to me. I can't fix what I don't know is a problem. Simple as that. WHen I found out about it, I was able to turn out fixes for the problems pretty quickly, but there are limitations to the data sources, and even I can't get blood from a turnip.

So all in all, it's been a really good day.

This morning I head back to work after being off for the long Christmas week. What a wonderful break it's been. The kids have been great, the time was very busy, but it was good to get all the things worked into the schedule - trips, visits, family, friends. It was a really great break.

Mornings like this are what I love. Excitement about what the day holds... anticipation that there's something really neat and exciting just around the corner. I'll admit that it's like this most days, but today it's just extra-special due to the wonderful time off.

Today is the last day of work before a nice little break for Christmas and things are winding down nicely. I put in a few changes to the price feeders and helped out a few folks with some issues they were having - expiration weekend is coming up and they wanted to make sure that they'd have everything they need. They did.

The break is going to be good. I might rebuild my Macs - get a fresh install of Leopard to make sure I wasn't having any issues. If I have time, that might be nice. Simple enough to do, but it'll take a bit of time to rebuild two boxes. Thankfully, I'll have time this coming week. The kids will be playing with their new toys and I should have plenty of time to rebuild a couple of boxes.

A little rest... a little time doing nothing... just what I need for the start of the new year.

I've been having a lot of problems lately with my Sun box at work. It's getting a lot of NFS errors, and on Solaris, that means the box locks up. If I unplugged the network, waited a minute, and plugged it back in, it would come back for a while. But it'd go away again. The Unix guys tried a new NIC in the box - no good... they tried different cables and ports on the switch... no good, finally we ordered a new box thinking that this was a bug we weren't going to find. Thankfully, I was wrong.

Yesterday, I looked at another box under my desk and noticed that it was on the same subnet as the troubled box. I decided to swap the network cables completely eliminating the network from the picture. Lo and behold... today my linux box (the one that I swapped the cable with) died. Yup... no pings. Never happened before in all the years it's been running for me. But it did today. So I called the network guys and told them of the problem. They found problems in the switch - maybe they weren't there before, don't know. But they found problems and they moved me to another port on the switch. Service was restored.

This was a super simple test that I should have looked into many months ago. There was no need to order the new box, but we'll keep it on hand as a spare, just in case. This test was able to completely isolate the network problem with a working machine and that's all it took. Now we know.

Whew!

This is great news! I wanted to try the latest beta of Firefox 3 - Beta 2 as I've been reading pretty nice things about it. So I go to get the source to compile it on my Fedora Core 5 x86_64 box and realize that I'm missing cairo-gtk, and don't feel like tracking it down right now. The reason I built 2.0.x from scratch was that the tarball of firefox 2.0.x for linux simply didn't run on my x86_64 box in 32-bit more. Simply would not work. I looked at a lot of things to try and get it to work, but no luck.

So I think Hey, I'll give it another try! and downloaded the linux 32-bit code for Firefox 3.0b2. To my complete amazement it worked! I was stunned. I then was able to link in the 32-bit Java plugin just as nice as you please, and Bingo! I'm running Firefox distribution on my 64-bit machine. This is really great news.

I'm glad they have done this. It makes it a ton easier for me to stay up to date with the fixes, etc.

I'd like to think that I'm not a fool. I know that capitalism is all about the smart, strong, clever, industrious, getting more from their efforts than others. It's Darwinism in business. So I'm not one to expect a lot of day-to-day patting on the back from the people I work with - or for. Every now and then a Thank You would be nice, and I get them often enough for me at the Shop. Yet today something happened that really upset me - and something I foresaw about two and a half years ago.

The CTO decided that he needed to have a Harvard Business School Org Chart for his part of the Shop. Why? Because he didn't want to have someone they are interviewing for his replacement look at the way things are now, and say "What kind of horrible manager are you?" Which to me begs the question of "I'm leaving, what do I care what you think?" or maybe even "The kind of horrible manager that instills great loyalty and affection in his troops, what kind are you that needs a Harvard Business School Org Chart to run an organization?" But I digress.

This Harvard Business School Org Chart acknowledges the alignment of the business into three pillars, and correctly identifies the technology leaders for each pillar. The org chat then takes a left turn there into the land of what might be, but isn't, and says that the pillar I'm in is then divided into three groups: development, production, and something else I can't remember for now so I'll call it 'candy canes'. Further, the head of development - because we have to have a head of an org chart box, is an old friend of the CTO and head of the pillar.

First, when they brought in this old friend two and a half years ago, I told my wife this was going to happen. When the going got tough, and they laid off tons of folks, they asked me to handle all the infrastructure of the pillar. Understandable, and I did it. Now they have a little breathing room and they want to put me back into a little box as if that's where I always was in the first place. Not so, Mr. Magoo.

The business isn't aligned like this. I do not sit completely in development - or production, or candy canes. I cover all three - and they want me to. They count on the fact that I cover all three and yet when they come to the Harvard Business School Org Chart, they don't want to draw it as it is - they want to draw it as they wished it were.

The truth is that we are aligned more by application in the pillars than by anything else. That makes the most sense in a small organization - who's responsible for what? That means doing everything for that project - soup to nuts. That's how it's really run. Putting in these mythical org charts about how they think it should be is just the caving into pressure to try t make a place that's unconventional look conventional.

Trust me, you may want to make this place look conventional, but the people in it are far from conventional, and like it that way.

So I was asked what I thought about this new org chart, and I told him it trivialized my accomplishments and daily contribution and sacrifice. He didn't expect me to react so personally, but when I reminded him that I take everything personally, and that's part of the reason I'm so good as my job, he knew I was right. This is a sham. I've got nothing against the guy that's now the Head of Development... he's a decent guy. He's just not my manager in any sense of the word. And putting it on paper in a Visio diagram is not going to make it so.

In fact, they don't want me to change how I do things. They want to leave things working just like they are - they just want a new org chart. Which comes back to the appearances factor. Trying to look like a cow when you're a horse. Silly. Dumb. And ultimately, disrespectful of those people that work very hard for you to make you a success.

A while back, I got some xray CDs from the hospital for Joseph and Liza and wanted to look at the images because I thought at least Joseph would find them interesting. My travels lead me to locate OsiriX - an incredible Open Source viewer of the DICOM images. Really quite amazing. Well... today they have released ver 3.0 of OsiriX for Leopard (10.5). It's 64-bit, got lots of new features, and in general looks again like it's an amazing feat of Open Source coding.

Now, I'll admit that when I start it I still get the indication "32-bit" in the About box, but again, I'm guessing that it's likely that the "64 bits" support is in some of the libraries as it's not really necessary for the GUI. Minor point.

In general, it's great to be looking at the work. It really is inspirational.