Snow

Okay, now we’ve got snow.

We had to postpone an install of my software this week because (thank God) I took the time to chat with the system admin for a while and learned that it was *far* from a vanilla cluster. Three kinds of hardware, two mechanisms for imaging nodes, three operating systems (Fedora, SuSe, and Solaris 8 for x86), nasty network, heavy, grouchy user load, no scheduled downtime to do the upgrade, etc. So, I balked and pushed back a couple of weeks to test various stuff. I hate wasting customer time and my reputation showing up and trying to fix code onsite.

So this week we’ve been busting ass, building clusters over and over on a variety of platforms in an attempt to build up to a simulated install on this nasty legacy nightmare. We’ve almost got it too. I do really like my company. I can’t imagine being able to pull off some of the crap we do with any other team.

There was an announcement that a company called “Six Apart” is buying the company that runs LiveJournal. The claim is that they’re totally friendly, they want to keep LJ the way it is, whatever. I still recommend grabbing an archive of your journal and a copy of the code. If it goes to hell, I’ll host an LJ-alike out of my basement for a while.

An interesting column at Joel on Software giving advice to the college-bound geek. It’s quite realistic in addressing a couple of things. Namely:

• The concept that your job needs to be personally fulfilling is a fairly new one, and it’s still limited to a select and lucky few. If you have a skill that you enjoy using, and you can make a good living doing that thing, count your blessings.
• Learn to communicate. In English, both written and oral. In any job, the people who can communicate end up in charge of things by dint of the fact that they define them to everyone else.
• Learn microeconomics. Sure, it’s not programming, but programmers who understand the business model are more valuable programmers.
• Learn C. Not C++. C. And I quote: I don’t care how much you know about continuations and closures and exception handling: if you can’t explain why while (*s++ = *t++); copies a string, or if that isn’t the most natural thing in the world to you, well, you’re programming based on superstition, as far as I’m concerned: a medical doctor who doesn’t know basic anatomy, passing out prescriptions based on what the pharma sales babe said would work.