April 25, 2006
Just before the rain
Commuting last night and tonight, I've managed to miss the raindrops. The sky menaces however. I plan to be caked in mud at some point this week.
Posted by Mark at 08:40 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 24, 2006
941
Only 941 emails in my Inbox after a week... but that's after filtering out as many into various lists and so forth. I'm tempted to delete everything not addressed directly to me and wait for folks to retry.
Posted by Mark at 09:00 AM | TrackBack
March 31, 2006
Score:5, Insightful
Slashdot had an entry yesterday on Lowering the Odds of Being Outsourced.
Somebody with username rsilvergun had the first 5-rated comment:
So the best way to avoid being outsourced IT is to get into management? doesn't that kinda defeat the purpose of getting into IT? That's kinda like saying the best way to avoid losing your job in the steel mill is to get a degree in medicine.
I'm not sure working as a doctor is worse than pouring steel ingots, but I get the idea.
Of course wasting spare time on Slashdot is not going to lower your odds of being outsourced either. That's why you have to get Slashdot as a feed at Bloglines.com. RSS helps improve your effectiveness by enabling you to waste time efficiently.
Update: Somebody with username Captain Tripps came out with another nugget of wisdom.
Maybe it won't be possible, but if I have to go back to school to retrain, the last thing I'm getting is an MBA. I'm gonna look around for another career I like.
And concerning the folks who right now don't have to worry about being outsourced (until we find competent people even cheaper), somebody with username Gopal.V wrote this:
My first job paid about 250 USD per month before taxes. I stuck to it because I was a geek with no great academics to speak of, coming from an outside (read as - not from IIT or NIT) college and hadn't got the financial backing to follow up my GRE score. And in about seven months, I'd end up replacing my father in the earning capacity. It was so scary that I was grabbing at straws with my first job - I'd worked for more than 40 days at a stretch, working weekends and taking five days off to rush home every quarter.
Okay, I give up. Time to water the potatoes.
Posted by Mark at 08:36 PM | TrackBack
March 25, 2006
Hmm
Out of idle paranoia and curiosity today, I wandered over to Patty Wilson's site CareerCompany.com. I'm not actively looking for a different job, just wondering as a shareholder whether I'd throw myself out on the street if it were my decision. My shareholding is more than partly tied up with continuing there at my job, so if I were to throw myself out, I'd be diminishing my shareholder position, too. Thus I'm not totally objective. (Philip K. Dick described the mindset well in A Scanner Darkly.)
Anyway, Patty lets you take a FREE! 7 Step Career Scorecard test, which I failed dismally. As you start taking the test, you get worried about two things. First you're basically hopeless at selling your labor, woefully far behind where you need to be. Help with this is what Patty's selling, however, so that'll be all right as long as you can pay. Second, you get worried that you won't be able to overcome the cynicism you developed on the job, that in whatever interviews you do it will shine through to the interviewer that you want to do the job not because your deepest values naturally align with the content of the company mission statement, but because you need the money. If you're lucky -- as I have been for my current job -- you get to pick work that you find inherently interesting, which helps to keep your mind off the grovelling obsequiousness.
If the economic powers that be no longer can profit from my current work, then I hope what comes next won't be any worse.
Patty's site linked me off to a Myers Briggs test, too. (That was her other FREE! test.) The first time I took one of these, I came up INFJ (introverted-intuitive-feeling-judging), with extreme I and N.
This time about half the statements seemed almost impossible to answer with Yes or No. It was rough. I think I lied on a few of them, because I was in disagreement with myself. (More and more, I am in violent internal disagreement with myself.) I came up a fairly extreme introvert, but the rest was different. I'm still intuitive, but it's weakening. I'm still oblivious to the outside world. Only with great difficulty can I see beyond my own interpretations. But I don't trust my interpretations or feel I can rely on them either. They're mostly illogical garbage and inner gibberish. One of the strange superpositions that now happens from time to time is seeing us as primates in human-like situations. This sometimes occurs when I find myself in a group and my mind wanders off topic. We're all in Ein Bericht für eine Akademie.
Next time I hear someone use the words alignment or leverage metaphorically, perhaps I should start acting out the part, but in the other direction, grooming the person next to me. It would no doubt fall flat. Nobody earnestly using the words alignment or leverage metaphorically will have read Kafka.
The ex-feeling-judging me came out thinking-perceiving. Thinking came out moderately strong, stronger than intuition. Perceiving only weakly edged out judging, as though I couldn't make up my mind. Maybe Jung, like Freud, was simply good at elaborating verisimilar theories. (INTP: 78%, 25%, 50%, 22%)
Myers's book Gifts Differing would, according to today's outcome, let me go back to school this time to do research. There's still a residue of INFJ in me, which is the idealist. Idealism and pessimism make a bad combination. You'd think they'd weed themselves out by suicide, because the universe is unending failure and impending doom. Didn't Martin Luther's nasty patches touched off when his doubts got the upper hand on his faith?
Posted by Mark at 03:58 PM | TrackBack
March 02, 2006
VNC latency: bandwidth, VPN, hops?, part II
Tonight, armed with sufficient patience, I did manage to get through with just ssh and X11Forwarding.
It takes so long for the applications to appear, I was giving up and shutting down the VPN connection before seeing them. So I waited.
First I opened a terminal. Eventually the terminal appeared.
Then, in the terminal window, I opened the SGML editor. Eventually that appeared, too. Had time to get ready for bed while waiting. It's that slow.
Then I tried some editing.
Nope, it just won't work for me.
Posted by Mark at 12:02 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 01, 2006
Working from home
As you can tell from my last post, I'm trying real working from home, not just meetings and email.
VNC over my line just doesn't cut it. I fixed some man pages and things in a doc, very specific changes. It's agony compared to the regular LAN. So I'm going in to work.
If I could avoid the X traffic and instead work with copies of the files, it could be done. I could work from here. But I'd need a local version of our SGML editor, or I'd need other people in the team to somehow not screw up the lines. Arbortext's application reformats the lines for it's own purposes, the main one I see being vendor lock-in, so that although it's SGML, you cannot really use a regular text editor such as Emacs + PSGML in practice.
Posted by Mark at 11:16 AM | TrackBack
VNC latency: bandwidth, VPN, hops?
I'm at home over the VPN to access a remote desktop with VNC. Anything more advanced than an xterm just crawls. My DSL throughput is about 512 Kb/s, a little bit dampened, but not much, by the VPN.
Traceroute shows 6 hops between my system here and the system I'm connecting to down at work. What causes the latency that makes using the mouse a study in frustration?
Posted by Mark at 09:30 AM | TrackBack
February 28, 2006
Where the job growth will be
Forbes.com has another article on jobs, this one about where the good job growth will be in the US over the next few years. If you dream of working in teaching, health care, or software, you may be able to maintain gainful employment in the US for a little while.
It will be a messy process for job seekers to navigate through. Jobs will come and go. There is no guarantee that available skills will match the openings, or that the openings will be where the appropriate skills are.
In other words, stay on your toes. Hope you don't ever get too satisfied and no longer be able to dream of spending most of your waking hours with the dying, the ignorant, or the hopelessly unusable inanimate abstraction.
Posted by Mark at 07:14 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
87% disgruntled
Forbes.com is running an article entitled Finding Your Dream Job. The suggestions are if your fed up with your current job to define just how, write up a clear description of what you want in a job, make sure it matches with what you do well or can learn to do well, and make a plan to switch as long as it fits wtih your family.
One of the guys interviewed, "Garfinkle, founder of Dream Job Coaching in Oakland, Calif., says studies have found that 87% of workers are unhappy with their job."
Suggesting it's possible to find a dream job is about 87% wrong. If they cannot find people who'd do it for free, which is probably why they're paying, it's not going to be anybody's dream unless the nightmare they've lived so far makes it look good by comparison. Problem is a more realistic alternative title, Finding A Job That Doesn't Keep You Contemplating Suicide (or Homicide), wouldn't be too catchy.
Posted by Mark at 06:56 PM | TrackBack
What is identity soon
Finally listened to the second annual Identity Gang podcast, from Gillmor Gang at the tail end of last year.
Although I'm not sure to have take much that's concrete away from their discussion, I understood one thing in retrospect.
On one hand, the longer I live over here in the land of Descartes, near where Hegel and Nietzsche scaled intellectual peaks, the less I can get in tune with the overarching nature of Kim Cameron's laws of identity and meta identity management and the more I feel comfortable with Dick Hardt or Johannes Ernst simplifying things for us intellectual lightweights.
On the other hand, like the hypothetical users in the discussion, what I'm most worried about is interoperability and participation in my own identity. Maybe even Buddy Guy practices JS Bach lute pieces when nobody's listening.
Posted by Mark at 01:57 PM | TrackBack
February 22, 2006
Drudgery of planning
This morning and part of the afternoon I began to consider what I'd ask for if this were mainly a plan-based economy rather than a market-based economy. Easier said than done.
While out running I realized that the near totality of what I have is not so much what I want but instead what I thought I needed at some point. Even on my bookshelf I found almost no books I would have on my shelf even if there were a big lending library of English-language books nearby. I'd surely keep Philip K. Dick's book VALIS and the collection of stories by Borges called Labyrinths in English translation. Yet those are only two books. Why do I have multiple shelves full? (Couldn't I share some of this stuff? Books are useless when sitting on shelves.)
Once I started looking at what I sort of feel I have to have, but do not really want (house, car, furnishings, etc.), I realized that figuring out my hypothetical, first draft request was not only not going to be easy, it was also going to be drudgery.
The market relieves us of this particular drudgery. As you can tell after spending a few hours with children who watch television, enterpreneurs see advantage in figuring out for you what you want, whether you actually want it or not. They've done a good job for me, and my own ability to determine what I want has atrophied. I sit there staring at a blank piece of paper and all I can come up with is, "Running shoes to replace worn out pairs."
Would the drudgery of planning be worse than the drudgery of working extra hours for capital's rent? Certainly the answer is yes if I leave it up to central planners. But am I not doing something very similar to that by leaving my planning up to entrepreneurs and salespeople?
Posted by Mark at 08:20 PM | TrackBack
February 18, 2006
Die on the job
According to Shripad Tuljapurkar of Stanford University, my kids will retire at age 85, BBC News reports. Shripad gives some sound reasons based on demographics, increases of life expectancy, and the cost of medical care.
In the US, the cost of social security and medical care would almost double if people retired at 65 under Tuljapurkar's scenario.But an increase in the retirement age to 85 would bring costs down to today's levels.
(See the seminars at CEPR.net for an explanation of why I mention medical care, but not social security. In a nutshell, social security costs make up only a tiny part of social security and medicale care costs.)
Maybe he's aiming to get us to commit mass suicide. That would bring down the cost of medical care, wouldn't it?
Seriously, the thought of a whole society of people working 60-65 years under approximately the same conditions as now has me recalling what Ripley said in one of the Alien movies about an aborted colony planet that got infested. She said something like, "Nuke it from orbit."
Posted by Mark at 06:00 AM | TrackBack
February 17, 2006
Some vacation
We have 25 vacation days a year in France, plus 12 instead of a 35-hour week. Plus I think I have some days for seniority. Estimating based on the legal working year of 215 +- 2 days, for the last year I kept track, I worked approx. 50-hour weeks on average. Yet I am out of the office therefore more than most of my US-based colleagues.
Next week is one of those weeks. I've learned that when you take a week off, people route around you. When you take a day off, you have to catch up as if you'd just gotten a day behind.
What am I going to do with my time off? Take care of the kids, maybe work in the yard. I also have some longer term plans, but it'll probably be impossible to achieve anything, since the kids are on vacation as well. The alternative was to saddle Nathalie with the three of them full time. Not a fair fight in winter.
Posted by Mark at 07:51 PM | TrackBack
February 15, 2006
Reassuring words
Forbes.com has an article on how to get fired, Stupid Is As Stupid Does. The themes are that you have no privacy, due to backups of everything you do on the computer, and that you'd better, "Be in tune with the corporate culture," according to a CEO of a coaching and out-placement company.
Blogging the wrong way is identified as one of the things that can get you thrown out.
I'm amazed this article made it into the list of things to publish. Clearly all of us have fully voluntary work agreements with employers, such that working for them is a contract we enter into freely on both sides. Employers trust us to try to do the right things, and we trust them to work unceasingly in our best interests.
So why would it be so easy to get thrown out that all you have to do is, like Bloomberg's employee, play solitaire on your computer during business hours?
Posted by Mark at 08:59 AM | TrackBack
February 07, 2006
Broken Gnome
Been having a strange problem at work on the SunRay. I cannot login to a Gnome session.
The tech support folks I spoke with couldn't figure it out. They did tell me one nice thing to know about the SunRay. Ctrl+Alt+Backspace twice kills your X server, so you can get back out to the login screen to try something else. CDE is still there, if unsupported.
I ran a cleanup script we have, but wonder what it's not getting to. It deletes a few of the configuration directories under $HOME. Maybe it doesn't get everything.
At work on the SunRay I notice that when I login there always seem to be two gconfd-2 instances running at the same time. On the laptop right here there's only one. Hmm. Not even sure what to google for.
Posted by Mark at 08:08 PM | TrackBack
February 03, 2006
Imaginary burns
We ran a fire evacuation drill this afternoon. Didier and Bruno were on the phone in Didier's office. I completely failed to notice they were there. Christopher was doing the same hallway I was. I guess I noticed the door was closed and thought I'd seen it marked as closed with a PostIt, which is our code for defining a room as checked and emptied of occupants.
Had it been the real thing, the guys might have inhaled a bunch of smoke and died. Just to stay on the phone. Maybe they had the door closed to soften the piercing sound of the alarm. Next time I'll be more careful.
Posted by Mark at 08:54 PM | TrackBack
January 31, 2006
Going postal
If you were to walk down the street asking people about stressful jobs, what would they answer? Looks like another person who worked at the post office lost control. Terrible news.
Curiously, a bit of Googling for most stressful jobs brings me to another BBC article... about the stress of working as a librarian. Before the study leading eventually to the article, librarians were thought to have one of the least stressful jobs.
Posted by Mark at 09:18 PM | TrackBack
January 29, 2006
Children of multiple parents and XSL
One thing Matt did in his configuration mapping was to define a sort of object inheritence mechanism. Similar configuration objects inherit their attributes from abstract parents, so similar configuration objects can share children.
Big deal? Well, yeah, not really. Except in terms of how this works for documentation.
One of the output formats for the documentation of this configuration interface is man pages. My aim is to be able to let the reader type man configuration-object-name or man configuration-object-attribute-name and either way get the doc. The man command, at least on Solaris systems, supports two kinds of pages, regular pages, pages containing normal content, and shadow pages, pages that point to regular pages. Shadow pages can only point to one other page, however, not multiple pages. Thus for configuration attributes present on many objects, I created individual pages, which reference the parent configuration objects having the attribute as a child, but also document the child. Furthermore, the way the man command on Solaris systems works, I didn't want to reference the child-of-multiple-parent attributes in the RefName elements of the parent pages. That would've gummed up the works of our tools to build books from RefEntry elements, which is what I'm constructing.
Okay, if you're still with me, you'll see that I needed a way to determine which of Matt's XML children had multiple parents, and which did not. The language to transform his XML into SolBook (like DocBook) RefEntrys is XSLT. After struggling stupidly with XPath expressions for a while, I found somebody's email that put me onto the scent of xsl:key elements.
What I did in the end was first to write a first XSL transformation to flatten Matt's document. By flatten, I mean the first stylesheet leaves only concrete configuration objects that directly include their inherited attributes. Other than that it simply makes copies of the content. Making a whole new document is probably a waste in terms of system resources, but it sure makes things easier for the human being grasping to understand the problem.
Next I create xsl:key elements, one on the parents indexed by name, one on the children, indexed by name. Keys are created as top level elements. When I then come to the point in the stylesheet where I need to decide whether a child has a single parent or multiple parents, I can just select the parents of the child using the key() function. In the second stylesheet, I have the following:
<xsl:key name="children" match="child" use="@name" />
<xsl:key name="parents" match="parent" use="child/@name" />
...
<xsl:for-each select="parent/child">
<xsl:sort select="@name" />
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="count(key('children', @name))=1">
<!-- Child is unique. Make a shadow page. -->
<xsl:call-template name="shadow">
<xsl:with-param name="child" select="@name" />
<xsl:with-param name="parent" select="../@name" />
</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<!-- Child is a duplicate. Make a real page. -->
<xsl:variable name="multiple" select="key('parents', @name)" />
<xsl:call-template name="real">
<xsl:with-param name="child" select="." />
<xsl:with-param name="parents" select="$multiple" />
</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:for-each>
Notice the count() function is the test to check whether there's one or multiple parents.
Posted by Mark at 08:54 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 27, 2006
XSLT once every six months
XSLT, a functional language for tranforming XML documents, is one of those programming languages I use for a couple days no more than twice a year. Each time I use it I get faster at learning it.
Matt wrote a big part of one configuration tool as an XML file mapping a public interface for configuration onto the private, internal interface. He's write to do the mapping in a declarative language. Furthermore I can generate reference documentation directly from his map file.
The biggest problem I have with XSLT in this case is that the documentation generated from his map file consists of multiple files. You cannot do that in a non-implementation-dependent way with the 1.0 version of the language. In 2.0 the functionality is there, but the tools don't seem to recognize 2.0, yet.
So I'm dumping it all into a single stream of output, then writing a tool to clip the big stream into little documents.
Another problem I found is how I don't really know how to think in a functional language where the basic unit is a tree. Took longer than expected.
Posted by Mark at 02:06 PM | TrackBack
January 24, 2006
No caffeine
Drank no coffee or tea today. Almost fell asleep in my chair once this morning.
On the other hand, my heart was relaxing apparently. Before we went for a run this noon, my heart rate was 47-50 beats per minute while standing around waiting for the other guys to come out of the changing room.
Posted by Mark at 08:21 PM | TrackBack
January 23, 2006
Disappointing checkup
Went to the annual work checkup. We have a new doctor, who declared me apte to work, but not to run. She said my blood pressure was too high. She also said that I should go to any pharmacy a couple of times over the month, then go see my regular doctor, tell him what I found, and have him try again.
I'm glad she told me that after taking my blood pressure again.
Will have to look into things I can do to bring my blood pressure down naturally, like not drinking enough coffee to keep me awake even through meetings, and not discussing work with anyone, ever.
Posted by Mark at 06:05 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 20, 2006
Informal Directory Server training
Gave a day's training today with the next version of Directory Server, based roughly on training Rob Byrne gave the doc team back in 2001 or 2002. Of course the concepts are mainly the same. I didn't try to cover all the new features in detail. By standing on Rob's shoulders so to speak I managed to prepare the whole day's worth of content in about an hour.
It helps if you already know what you're talking about before you start. In the same vein I never studied specifically for exams, and am awful at cramming. It's like cooking. If you have to follow a recipe step by step you're either making something completely new for the first time, cooking something that may well be too complicated to be worth it, or getting out of your depth.
When we get closer to releasing a public version of this software I should prepare of version of the training you can do at home. The new CLI simplifies life immensely. You'll be pleased once you get your hands on it.
Posted by Mark at 07:54 PM | TrackBack
January 12, 2006
Biking and frost, part II
The weather had warmed up tonight, although it was still freezing. This morning I was convinced they'd have to amputate my fingers and toes.
I thought about people riding to work in Chicago in the winter, or in Minneapolis. It could be worse.
Posted by Mark at 09:21 PM | TrackBack
January 11, 2006
Upgrading a SunRay
Fabio upgraded me from a SunRay 1 to a SunRay 1G. Steps:
- Pull out the cables and JavaCard badge.
- Switch SunRays.
- Plug the cables and JavaCard badge back in.
It took about 1 minute. Didn't even have to log out, of course.
Posted by Mark at 05:04 PM | TrackBack
January 10, 2006
Biking and frost
Another bitingly cold morning commute with the bike and the train. My toes felt cold even after I had a warm shower.
But at least I wasn't sitting in traffic, which seemed backed up all along the autoroute. With gas at 1.215 euros/l, it'd be a shame to sit there getting annoyed while puffing even more exhaust out into the valley.
Posted by Mark at 09:32 AM | TrackBack
January 09, 2006
Star Wars in Paris
Didier told me he took Johan to Star Wars: L'Expo at La Cité des Science in Paris.
Tim wanted to know all about it. Unfortunately I'd not grilled Didier for enough detail, so I didn't have the answers. I guess we'll have to take him at some point when we're visiting up north later in the year.
Posted by Mark at 08:58 PM | TrackBack
January 03, 2006
An overabundance of patents
Jo sent a link to a Business Week online article about "The Patent Epidemic:"
Massive overpatenting, the professors say, "creates an unnecessary drag on innovation," forcing companies to redesign their products, pony up license fees for technology that should be free, and even deter some research altogether.
Apparently some companies are getting into thickets of patent infringement suits. Some are the same companies who pay their employees to come up with patentable ideas. I wonder how much a patent lawyer's firm gets when a patent the firm has written up gets accepted by the patent office.
This page about What things cost suggests it's a boatload more than the inventors get. Hmm.
Posted by Mark at 08:52 PM | TrackBack
December 26, 2005
More procrastination
While out riding, I thought more about Paul Graham's essay on procrastination. He's right about good procrastination being that you, "work on ... something more important," than the other things you could be doing with your time.
But I couldn't figure out how you decide what's important. Paul says you should drop the small stuff:
What's "small stuff?" Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary.
That's good in the sense that it fits for things like TV watching. Don't tell the kids yet that they don't have to go to school anymore. Maybe they shouldn't, but they might not come to the decision about careful reflection on their own obituaries...
...or about whether doing things that get into a eulogy are also procrastination, eulogies being governed by conventions and what we think other people would think is proper. Doing things you think other people will think was proper sounds to me like travel on the road to hell paved with good intentions. Paul writes of "the most dangerous form of procrastination" being getting a lot of the wrong things done. He leads back to the big question:
What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?
He ends up suggesting, "Let delight pull you." Dad used to suggest that I aim to do work I enjoy; Paul is suggesting that work also be ambitious.
So far my work, like the rest of my life, is the dangerous type of procrastination.
Posted by Mark at 06:42 PM | TrackBack
December 25, 2005
Why not to write reports
Paul Graham wrote up something most of us realize about procrastination. It can be both good and bad.
Most of my procrastination is bad. Going to "work," cooking, jogging, reading, blogging, chatting with friends, etc. Some of it I've convinced myself I almost cannot get around doing, like working for money. That seems like the central time-waster around which we organize the rest.
Within the bad, there is however at least one tiny hopeful gleam of good. I've given up sending email status reports. That sort of coincided with awareness of how much time I was wasting in email. It was an instinctive move, but now I have Paul to back me up.
Posted by Mark at 09:18 AM | TrackBack
December 23, 2005
Constitutional, cultural differences
Nul n'est censé ignorer la loi, so you should already know this, but the current French constitution includes a prevision to legalize striking for most workers. In practice it seems like transport workers are probably more likely to strike than people in other sectors. I assume that if I ever went out on strike, my employer would either just find it amusing -- since all my work would still be there for me when I went back -- and laugh at me, or fire me on some pretext, or both. (I'm pretty sure my employer would in fact realize I was out, because the law requires that you give formal notice of your intention to strike.)
According to the BBC News, this is not the case for NYC transport workers:
The union had been faced with fines and jail terms for its leaders, as the law bans transport workers from striking.
You'd have to be in a difficult position indeed to want your crappy job so bad that you're willing to risk fines and jail for it. BBC News said the transport workers went back to work without a contract. Here in France, the talk is not about amending the constitution, but instead about mandatory minimum service. The idea is that you can continue to strike as long as you do the work anyway.
My take is that our management should go out on strike, threatening to come back only when we all agree to be easier to manage. They'd be out for quite a while, but we'd probably get a lot done in the meantime.
Posted by Mark at 09:47 PM | TrackBack
December 16, 2005
Reading light
The little headlight I clip onto my handlebars has a tendency to die pitifully, always at the beginning of the ride back to the train at night. I have not yet learned to anticipate how long the charge will last.
But last night, as this morning early, the moon was so bright and the sky so clear it almost didn't matter. This morning in particular one could read a book in the moonlight. Last night it was very slightly cloudy at about 7 pm when I rode home, though. I wondered what would happen if some utility vehicle had dropped a load of wood or bricks and forgot to pick them up before sundown. Or if a limb had fallen off a tree along the trail. Or if the cold had caused one of the persistent puddles to ice over right in the middle of a trail.
Posted by Mark at 07:48 AM | TrackBack
December 15, 2005
Short deadline
After uncovering a misunderstanding in the team that left us without much time to put things right, I volunteered to hack through a whole new document in a few hours. It ended up taking me a couple of days to get everything done and in place, but was refreshing to have a short, stretch deadline for a change, rather than longer ones.
In a short race you don't have to pace yourself as much. You also can leave email until after the race. I'm not sure that was the best part, thought.
The most fun I had was learning about, playing with, and then explaining a new part of the product I was only vaguely familiar with as late as last Tuesday. It's actually really cool. Too bad we cannot go public with it, yet.
Posted by Mark at 10:12 PM | TrackBack
Christmas at work
Yesterday the CE at Sun had the annual Christmas party for kids. We'd ordered their presents in June. Teko was Santa Claus; kind of funny for the kids to have a young, althletically built, black Santa.
Diane got a tent with plastic balls to kick around inside. Emma got a set of things to fix her hair. Tim got a microscope. Emma was terribly jealous. I told her not to worry, that Tim would soon forget about it and she would get a chance to use the microscope. But it's tough to wait when you're 6.
They also had a movie, complete with popcorn, for the big kids. For the little ones they had a special spectacle. Mom says it was too long. The kids were all up moving around and losing interest after the first half hour.
Posted by Mark at 10:06 PM | TrackBack
December 12, 2005
New stop in Lancey
The train was 10 minutes late this morning. I descended in Lancey up the road from Didier's house, where they're fixed up the station to open it to the public.
The ride's about as far as the ride from Gières, but unfortunately on a more travelled road. Felt like I was breathing salt for the first 3 km. Then I picked the wrong trail along the Isère. Should either have turned left before the bridge, or stayed on the foot path. The path for cars and trucks was like Minnesota, Land o' Lakes.
So cold my fingers hurt, then hurt more when I got to work and warmed them up. Had me gritting my teeth. Maybe somebody makes cycling mittens.
Posted by Mark at 10:36 AM | TrackBack
December 11, 2005
Must haves, part II
Metcheck.com predicts a wet week in Grenoble. But the commute should be all right. See the mud guards:
More worrying is the chain, which is already rusted. Hope it lasts the winter. I only clean it once a week. Probably should do that every night the weather is wet.
The SNCF is opening the station in Lancey today. Same distance to work, but 8-9 minutes less train ride. It's not clear however that I'll want to take the train from Lancey in the evenings. The 18h33 from Gières runs straight through to Pontcharra, whereas anything that stops in Lancey also stops everywhere along the way except for the stations that are normally closed to the public.
Posted by Mark at 12:29 PM | TrackBack
December 08, 2005
Adverse weather
The commute was reminiscent of the marathon in Lyon. Snow mixed with rain, strong winds, more mud puddles than semi-dry patches. Was already chilled just leaving the train station. Need to go beyond windbreaking fabric to GoreTex. And get the Comité d'entreprise to buy us a clothes dryer.
Posted by Mark at 08:55 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 07, 2005
SolBook with Emacs & PSGML
At work we have a great simplified DocBook subset DTD called SolBook. Internally we use tools on the network to perform checks and automate many tasks.
Sometimes I'm not on the network at work. Other times I have jobs that seem easier when done in a general purpose text editor. So I use Emacs & PSGML. I've started writing notes on the setup for SolBook (in SolBook).
If you can help with the chapters on customization or setting things up on Windows, let me know.
Posted by Mark at 10:14 PM | TrackBack
December 05, 2005
Winter commute
Rain's better than snow and ice. When I got to work, though, they asked me if I'd come cross country, like I'd swept the muddy water away with my face. Hope it doesn't freeze this evening.
Mick and Jeanne have agreed to let me sleep over before the Paris half-marathon in March. Now all I need is a recent certificat medical. If I go in to see the doctor right now, my cough might be taken as a reason not to run. Still cannot quite completely catch my breath.
Posted by Mark at 09:01 AM | TrackBack
December 01, 2005
More free software from Sun
It looks like our executives have announced in public that, "Our entire server-side software portfolio will be free of charge and open source. Not pieces, all of it."
You can download to your heart's content from Sun's website. Apparently you only have to pay if you want fasttracked fixes and support.
It was already possible to get our Directory Server software free, but it appears the license was for evaluation only or something like that. The news is that you can now use all this software as long and as widely as you want without paying. Pretty good idea. All we need now is to make it dead simple to install and configure so developers and sys admins at small sites can easily hack away at it.
Posted by Mark at 10:22 AM | TrackBack
Defeat
Took the car again today. It feels like a defeat, giving in to a technology I like less and less. Funny how three of the big technologies that led to huge build outs are in fact irritants: railroads, telephones, cars.
At any rate it's still tough to get my breath. My head's stuffy and achy. Great day to come to work.
Posted by Mark at 08:33 AM | TrackBack
November 29, 2005
Kudos to subversion
Recently I changed my password at work, the definitive version of which is stored centrally. I'd rather have one oft-changed password stored distributively, but we're still on Web 1.0.
After I did that, my mail knew to ask me, and my browser usually knew to ask me, but lots of applications that stored my password somewhere for their own purposes didn't. cvs was one of those applications. Maybe that's fixed in a more recent version, but I don't care to go upgrade my version just for that. subversion on the other hand did know, and prompted for the new password. How useful.
Posted by Mark at 01:33 PM | TrackBack
November 25, 2005
What I missed
This looks like the commute I missed this morning by taking the bike and the train instead of the car. Of course it took me more than twice as long to ride as it usually does, but there were lots of folks coming into work late. I think Christopher spent about 75 minutes going 10 km.
Too bad Nathalie didn't take any still pictures of the kids. They apparently played in the yard all morning. She shoveled out the driveway... a couple of times. Quite a bit of snow fell during the morning.
The folks who own businesses that depend on downhill skiing are probably feeling pretty optimistic at this point.
Posted by Mark at 08:29 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 24, 2005
When the NFS server dies, part II
After the server with my $HOME came back, Gnome was doing some really weird stuff. Boy, is there ever lots of stuff you have to delete to get rid of Gnome and start over...
Posted by Mark at 02:44 PM | TrackBack
When the NFS server dies
When the NFS server dies and nothing can be read in my $HOME dir, my ability to get things accomplished at work grinds to a crawl. That's a sign that I'm still in the industrial part of the economy, rather than pure services.
If I were pure services, like a manager, I could continue with just browser, email, and phone access. I would create product documentation, but would only enable others to do so.
Posted by Mark at 10:57 AM | TrackBack
November 23, 2005
More thieves and liars
From the ISP providing DSL, I got email that started out this way:
Pour plus de transparence et de simplicité, Wanadoo fait évoluer ses Conditions Générales de Vente au 21 décembre 2005.
11 pages of legalese with no change bars. I probably do have the old version somewhere, so I could spend a weekend afternoon figuring out how what they're doing.
The root problem is, you have no choice. If you're just a normal individual, you remain naked and defenseless compared to those with lawyers. If you're an ISP, you hire a lawyer to protect you from your customers. If you're a big customer, you hire a lawyer to protect you from your suppliers... and your own customers. We do it to our customers as well, giving them reams of contractual crap they have to agree to before using our products.
Isn't the rule of law great? It used to be even worse, though. Now they take you to court rather than beating you up.
Posted by Mark at 10:46 PM | TrackBack
Spellcheck duel
Jean Véronis examined the spellcheck capabilities of the French version of OpenOffice vs. the French version of Microsoft Word. It turns out that OpenOffice, the free-as-in-beer derivative of Sun's StarOffice product, does about as well as Word, which costs money. In fact, Microsoft Office 2003 Standard Edition seems to cost 400 euros at Amazon.fr. Hmm.
Posted by Mark at 03:24 PM | TrackBack
November 22, 2005
A compliment
Joachim came up to me after the presentation Monday to say I'd managed to do an interesting presentation on a boring subject. He thought that was commendable.
Nobody fell asleep. I wonder if they do fall asleep while reading my documentation.
Posted by Mark at 02:11 PM | TrackBack
November 21, 2005
Inconvenienced, part II
Looks like the strike's planned for only about 36 hours, at least on the line I take to work. The tough part riding in today was the cold. It's frigid out there. Even my knees were cold from the outset.
But at least I don't have to sit in traffic. Guess I'll be doing that tomorrow morning.
Posted by Mark at 08:58 AM | TrackBack
November 20, 2005
Inconvenienced
After having avoided the car 5 days in a row last week I might have to take the car to work this week. For an hour I've been looking for the lightweight, windproof hat I wear underneath my helmet. Without that riding at subzero temperatures will be truly, almost dangerously unpleasant.
Also there's a strike starting Monday night. I cannot determine from the information online which trains will be affected and for how long. There's a chance it wouldn't make sense to buy a ticket tomorrow, since I might only be able to use it Monday.
Posted by Mark at 08:58 PM | TrackBack
Working from home
A guy needs an office. With a padlock.
I was trying to finish up my slideware with two girls climbing on my desk, one little guy trying to get me to read about how to catch bees and to write out my part of his homework-related interview of me, the TV blaring some Disney movie, my wife asking me to decide which cooking utensils to buy, and to sign the kids notebooks from school. Meanwhile, I was supposed to be making lunch. Some of the time was less interruptful than that, but I'm not misrepresenting overall conditions.
Posted by Mark at 01:48 PM | TrackBack
November 19, 2005
Slideware blues
This morning while Diane is rolling around watching TV, I'm doing slideware to present Monday morning at work. OpenOffice 2, Firefox screen captures, and The Gimp are my tools. Easy to work with.
But it's not going to be a screencast. How much longer would it take to do that instead? What tools should I use (that work on Solaris and Ubuntu)?
Posted by Mark at 10:47 AM | TrackBack
November 14, 2005
Don't see what is there
The commute this evening was... different. I have a reflective vest, head light, tail light, warm gear. But I couldn't see much, and couldn't hear anything given the wind noise.
The first long road I take was dark, although the moon is shining tonight. Riding a mountain bike is a good idea under these conditions, because you cannot avoid gravel and other crud when you cannot see it. My head light's dimmer than the head lights of oncoming cars along the autoroute where that road runs. Glad I'd already taken that road many times.
Next I leave the road and ride along the Isère around the university campus. It turned out to be more effective to navigate by moonlight through the trees, and avoid looking at in the dim glow of my head light altogether. The eyes can become accustomed to very little light. I left the trail for the road before it turned entirely to loose gravel.
When I got to the train station in Gières another rider who lives in Chapareillan and who takes her bike every day told me she'd heard they're planning to pave that gravel area in the next two weeks. Looking forward to that.
Posted by Mark at 10:06 PM | TrackBack