ee_geek

2005-03-08T16:35:00.000-08:00

Feeling Better

I think that my vitamin C flush worked. I started to feel a little better yesterday. That was rough. I haven't felt that bad in a long time.

More importantley, I placed my order for the neruos audio 20G/256M backpack. Neuros still does not have them in stock but I decided to go ahead and put my order in. Hopefully they show up soon. I e-mailed them and asked why so long on the backorder. They responded within 48 hours to let me know that they were making changes to their qa system and that orders would be continued once the changes were complete, early March. It will be cool to get this and start playing with it.

2005-03-06T05:24:00.000-08:00

Sick

The flu seems to be going around. I came down with it last Thursday afternoon. I had a 102F fever for about 2 days. I have afew things to post but haven't felt like posting much. I decided to check out wikipedias take on the flu. If you look at the symptoms listed, I have them all. The really bad thing about being sick is that the rest of the world doesn't stop to wait up for you, I still have things to get done, and doing anything is painful. What I really want to know is why this stuff only seems to spread in the winter? My theory is that people (at least in the midwest) go on vacations to warmer climates like Mexico, Jamaica, Bahamas etc. and are exposed to these viruses, then they bring it back home. Who knows.

My goal for the day is to drink about a gallon of Orange Juice and take around 12 grams of vitamin C, and do as little as possible. That should help. I have to go back to work tomorrow.

2005-02-28T04:22:00.000-08:00

Playing With Rails

I have been playing with writing a weblog using Ruby Rails. Rails is a little difficult to understand at first, but I am starting to get it. It really makes web app development simple. I wanted to note a few observations:

You can go from nowhere to someplace fast.

It is based on MVC, so if you understand that, you will not have any problems.

You have to use database adapters. I'm not sure why they did not use ruby's dbi instead. If they would have used dbi then there would be no need for adapters. There would only be one adapter that could use any dbd you wanted to use. Seems like a design oversight to me.

I didn't want to use a full fledged MySQL database for this, because I wanted something on the order of instiki. Given the options I decided to use SQLite. This is a cool little database. I have never used it before. I think that it is perfect for small apps like mine, probably apps considerably larger also.

My HTML skills need help. I need to learn how to use style sheets.

2005-02-24T04:28:00.000-08:00

Irony

I had a meeting yesterday with a bunch of the bosses. It was interesting. We all sat down at these tables and I was the only one there without a laptop and a pda with a keyboard extension. I was by far the most technically inclined person there, and I was using pen and paper. Strange. The deal is that I was the only there that is not considered a "staff" person. So, I do not have a company visa card to go out and buy myself toys. My boss does have a that luxury. He asked me for a list of things that I wanted him to buy, but then he never went out and bought any of it. Not sure why he asked for a list if he wasn't going to buy any of it.

2005-02-20T05:44:00.000-08:00

The Project

I started this blog to try to cover an engineering project that I am managing at work. It seems to have morphed into general technology subjects. That's ok. I will still talk about the project from time to time. Right now is one of those times.

I got in touch with my guy down south at the other company that we are working with. I was looking at our schedule and I have to think that all of our dates have slipped by a few months. This is not really a good thing. Why did the dates slip? The vendor put out a schedule that I said was too agressive to begin with. I'm glad that I told everyone I could that I didn't think that they could do the schedule. My ass is covered. The vendor that is doing the software is overextended. I call them, e-mail them, meet with them, and just generaly bug this piss out of them to get things to us on time. As a project manager, there is nothing that I can do at this point to keep these guys on schedule. In hindsight what would I do about these guys? At the start of this project I had some concerns about this vendor. One main concern I had was ensuring that they had a documented development process that they followed. What they had was a little looser than that, but they do have a process and they do use it for the most part. It is just your basic iterative waterfall model process. We should have used an XP process or one of the derivatives of it. If we would have used XP, I would not be asking for prototypes all the time, I wouldn't have to sweat the schedule so much because we would be making iterative progress that I could show to senior management. One saving grace for us is that we set up the conracts to pay out on deliveries. So, we haven't spent too much cash yet.

2005-02-19T05:35:00.000-08:00

Waiting For Neuros

I haven't ordered the neuros yet. They are out of them. They expect to ship mid-february. That would be about now, so hopefully I will be able to order one sometime soon.

I have been throwing around the idea of a weekly podcast that covers baseball news. I am not sure if I have the time to devote to it though. I think that it would take a considerable amount of research time each week. I have also been throwing around the idea of a baseball weblog. I think that there is a need for it. Check out MLB's website. It is terrible. It is bloated and poorly designed. Whoever designed their website needs to go take some lessons from google. Sometimes less is more.

2005-02-15T17:15:00.000-08:00

A Bunch of BS

I read this article today at siliconvalley.com. It is another FUD story about the future of engineering in the US. I am getting pretty sick of hearing this FUD.

U.S. shortcomings examined by the AeA include some often cited by corporate CEOs and policy-makers, such as inadequate science and math education at the kindergarten through 12th-grade level. The group's report -- ``Losing the Competitive Advantage?'' -- also lamented the decline in federal funding for research and development, slipping enrollments in university-level computer science courses and the barriers preventing skilled foreigners from obtaining U.S. visas.

Inadequate math and science education at the K-12 level? I really don't believe that K-12 math and science makes or breaks successful engineers. I've noted before, the most successful engineers that I have known are not the most technically brilliant. They are good communicators that can work just as well on a whiteboard in front of a room full of strangers as they can behind their desks in private. In addition I have not used that much math in my engineering career. A little bit of differential equations, but very little. One of my projects at Lockheed had a math intensive section. Lockheed would not let anyone without a Phd in mathematics touch it. So, what good would an awesome K-12 math and science program have done? None. I think the real deal with this is that the AEA has some Phd type researchers that have never done practical engineering work outside of the educational system. We keep it simple. Absolutely as simple as possible, but no simpler. If we need help with the math (hasn't ever really happened), we can hire consultants.

Slipping enrollments in university-level computer science courses? Hey guys, do you think that the lack of available employment in that field has anything to do with it? Want a hint? Yes. I'm not saying that the jobs are not out there, they are, but if you are entry level it has been tough to get a decent job since the tech bubble imploded. Something else to note is that most of these jobs are going to be located in major metro areas. The cost of entry level homes in these areas has more than doubled in the last few years, while the salaries for these entry level jobs has basically stayed flat at around $50k. What is the incentive to go into this difficult, stressful field and work long hard hours if you are not going to be able to make a decent living? One thing that the AEA types usually note is that baby boomers are going to start retiring and we will have a huge shortage of skilled workers. Unfortunately, they haven't started retiring yet, and those jobs are not available.

Barriers preventing skilled foreigners from obtaining U.S. visas? Does a lack of jobs qualify for a barrier? I have friends that I graduated with that have never worked as engineers. They could not find engineering jobs when we graduated in 2001 and took what they could get to pay the bills. I lucked out, my Linux/Perl hobby landed me a job. Every time I hear about big companies (Sun, HP etc.) lobbying to increase the H1B quota I have to wonder what the deal is. Have they advertised the jobs they are trying to fill?

Just my .02

2005-02-14T17:08:00.000-08:00

Not Buying New Tunes

I was thinking about buying some new CD's today. But I have a problem with it. Every time I spend money on new music, I give the RIAA companies more cash to bribe our congress with and push their DRM/Non-interoperable Microsoft/Apple only, mandatory packet sniffers everywhere, broken internet world. I just can't do that in good concience. I'm not going to jump up and down and yell RIAA sucks or anything like that. The most effective action that I think I can take is to not buy their merchandise. If I went to a restaurant or store and was treated wrong by the management, I would not go back there. This is not really any different. I would also tell everyone I knew to not go there. It's that simple.

So, I have this dilemna. I want to get some new tunes, but I refuse to give RIAA companies any of my income. These are the options that I can think of:

Buy used CD's from the used cd trader places. They usually have some decent stuff, and I can get rid of our duplicates.

Buy music from independent artists that sell their tunes directly.

Those are the only options that I can come up with. I haven't heard too many RIAA encumbered artists lately that I like anyway, so I don't think I'll be missing out on much.

There was a time when recording companies were needed for distribution. That time is long gone. Why any artists still sign with these guys is beyond me. If you compare the minute royalties that artists get from sales vs. getting close to 100% by selling independentley, it only makes sense to sell independentley. Even with the potential reduction in sales by being independent, I still think the artists would come out on top financially.

2005-02-13T11:34:00.000-08:00

Another Contender

Thanks to Ben for pointing out the iRiver IHP-120/140. This is a nice unit. It supports MP3, WMA and ogg files. It can be mounted as a USB mass storage device, and therefore used for file storage in addition to media. It also has a built in voice recorder and FM receiver. The only downside to it is that it does not have an FM transmitter. My primary use for this will be listening to podcasts in the car, so an FM transmitter is essential. I should note that I spend about 3 hours a week driving back and forth to a class at the U of Iowa in Iowa City.

In addition I have found some more information on the neuros unit. Neuros Audio has open sourced the firmware, synchronization software and electrical schematics for the neuros. Neuros Audio is commited to providing the open source development crowd with the information required to innovate for their product. To me, that is just icing on the cake. Kudos to Neuros Audio. I would have bought the unit anyway, but now I am excited about buying it.

It only makes sense to open your products up. As a company you only stand to gain by providing hobbyists/developers/hackers with information about your product. Motivated and talented customers will innovate for you, for free, in ways that your engineering staff did not have the time or resources to do. How can free engineering be a bad thing?

2005-02-12T13:57:00.000-08:00

Portable Media Player

A few posts back I noted that I am searching for a portable media player and that my requirements were:

Linux Friendly

Plays ogg files

FM Transmitter

~5G of storage

I have been doing some research on the possibilities. Here is a summary of my findings.

ipod - The ipod can be used with Linux to some extent. There are reports of varying success with it. Basically you either get the windows model that has a FAT filesystem, or you install HFS+ support into you kernel. No big deal either way, however, ipod's do not support ogg files. No ogg support == no ipod. Why in the fsck apple would not build in support for ogg files is beyond me. Especially since ogg is unencumbered by patents/licenses etc. If the ipod supported ogg files, I would by one even though an FM transmitter is not built in. I have fonud transmitters for about $100.

Rio Karma - This unit looks really cool. It comes in a 20G model. It has a built in ethernet port so you can communicate with it over a network. Supposedly the transfer software that comes with it is in java, so it works on anything. It plays ogg files. There have been several reports of problems with it rebooting and doing other buggy things. Some people have noted that Rio released a bios upgrade that fixed many of these problems. The Karma does not come with a built in FM transmitter and I could not find one for it. The Rio can not be mounted as a USB mass storage device, so it's drive can not be used for any type of file storage. If it came with a built in FM transmitter, I would probably buy this unit.

Neuros 20G HD - The neuros has everything that I am looking for. Support for ogg, mp3, etc. A 20G drive. Built in FM transmitter with up to 250mW of output power. It can be mounted as a USB mass storage devie and used for file storage. There is an open source java app neurosdbm that can be used to manipulate the xml database files and transfers to the unit. I am not a huge java fan, but I figure that I can probably use the code as a reference and hack out something in ruby to download the podcasts I want and transfer them.

The neuros isn't as slick looking as the ipod, but asthetics are not really important to me since it won't be seen much anyway. My use will primarily be in the car, which is why the FM transmitter is such a plus.

2005-02-10T04:20:00.000-08:00

Fast Week

This week is flying by. Doing some more integration work this week. That means more Ruby code. I swear, the part of our facility that I am in is glued together with Ruby code.

2005-02-07T04:17:00.000-08:00

Ethernet Specification and Cable Length

I have 3 new computers in my house. The ethernet cards in all 3 of them fail to drive a cable even close to the length in the specification, which is 100 meters. One machine is a laptop, I can accept that it does not need to drive a very long cable, it has wireless. The other 2 machines are desktop models though. They should be able to drive 50' cables. Neither one of them can. One of them will function on a cable of about 25', but the data rate is slow, a lot of frame errors and retransmissions.

It seems to me that the hardware vendors are cutting every corner they possibly can to try to make money in a commodity market. You would think that they would still produce hardware to the specification.

2005-02-06T16:24:00.000-08:00

Podcasting

A while back I predicted that over the air analog radio would probably disapear in the future and be replaced by something digital over some type of wifi. I also predicted that it would probably take much longer than I wanted to wait. I have been researching podcasting in the last week. I can really see this getting very popular. I would really like to start listening to some podcasts while I am driving back and forth to school, but I don't have a pod. I have been looking around for one online but can't seem to find what I want. My requirements are pretty simple:

Linux Friendly - I don't want to have to use windows just so I can download to my pod.

Ogg Vorbis - It has to play .ogg files.

FM Transmitter - It has to be able to transmit on at least one FM frequency.

~5G of storage.

That's it. Pretty simple requirements. I would think that something like this exists, I just can't seem to find it.

2005-02-06T15:58:00.000-08:00

Instablog

I am playing around with the idea of creating a minimalist weblog in ruby along the lines of instiki. Most of the blogs that I have played around with require Apache and Mysql to run. Not a real big deal, unless you are at work and don't have a server, or don't want to deal with setting up Apache and Mysql.

The key to making this happen is the Webrick server that comes with ruby. I was playing around with Webrick a little. It is pretty simple to give it a directory to serve html out of, but I couldn't quite get it to interpret .rhtml files. I was sort of assuming that it would parse the .rhtml without any problems. Unfortunately it looks like it isn't that simple. One bad thing with ruby is that sometimes when you run it to problems the documentation can be a bit sparse. There is some documentation out there for Webrick, but, it is a little sparse.

2005-02-05T05:25:00.000-08:00

A Decent Week

Had a pretty decent week. I was able to get several little things out of the way, despite having more meetings than I thought was possible. We had a problem with data from one of our labs. We have a couple of instruments that take readings from a sample and transmit the results out through a serial port. The way things were set up the data only went to one place, which was a database. We have another system that needs to use this data ASAP. We didn't really want to try to pull it out of the database because it would be hard to find, our schema's suck and this database will be going away in the near future. So, I put together a multiplexer script in Ruby. It is just a TCP Server that let's an unlimited number of application connect to receive the data. It took about 40 lines of code. It could be done in around 30 lines, but I put some comments in.

Bare with me while I evangalize Ruby a little more. I also found out that it comes with support for Oracle and ODBC. You can download dbd's for several different database types, but I didn't have a windows compiler and didn't want to deal with trying to build it. I didn't expect the built in support to work. I needed to connect to an Oracle DB to pull something out. After a little trial and error, it worked. I was surprised. I think that I have gotten the attention of our IT guys. They almost seem interested in scripting with Ruby/Perl, as opposed to VB.

I wanted to have some sort of a notebook application. Wiki's are really good for this, especially if you want to share. I found instiki. This is a wiki implemented in Ruby. It does not require an external database or a web server. It uses the Webrick web server (built in to Ruby). Just type the command 'ruby instiki.rb' and you are running a wiki. A decent Wiki to boot. Since it is Ruby, it will run on about any platform. If you need a wiki fast, give instiki a try, you will be surprised.

I would like to see us go to Linux for cost savings. I'm not sure what kind of cash it would save us in licensing fee's, but I have to believe that it would be significant. One big problem we would face in such a transition would be the number of applications that we have that are windows only. Some of these are internally developed access database type things, others are vendor supplied windows only applications. I just don't see how we could ever make a transition. If we had some sort of an access wrapper to put around MySQL and could implement VB for Linux, and use wine to run all of our vendor app's, it might be possible. But, it would still piss off the Excel hackers. We have several people that use Excel as a front end for all sorts of strange things, and if someone has to learn something new, they will resist.

2005-01-30T05:19:00.000-08:00

Clarification

A few posts back I mentioned that our new company doesn't have a problem with us using Linux where it fits. This troll had a few comments:

Well, bravo little buddy! I’m sure you’re saving your company, what, a hundred bucks per machine? Nice!

So I thought I would say a few things.

Savings to the company was never really a consideration in choice of OS. Stability (uptimes of over a year are common with Linux), security (slammer costed us approximately $300k), and ease of maintenance (no weekly patches to IE or Outlook) are more important. I would still use Linux (or *BSD, or Solaris) if it costed more than Windows.

The last time we tried to use a shiny new Windows XP machine on a project it did not work out so well. We required 10 serial ports, so we bought a serial input card. Every time the machine booted Windows got confused and turned the first three serial ports into mice. Windows had a problem with read timeouts and multiple threads on the serial ports. Maybe some WinXP guru could have made it work, we don't have time for that kind of BS. We put the same card in a PII running Linux and everything just worked.

Environmental issues are very important to us. We have 20+ facilities and storerooms that are getting filled up with older PII and PIII machines that can not be upgraded to Win2K or WinXP. We try to give these machines away but they are hard to get rid of. If we are able to re-use 2 or 3 of these machines at each facility that adds up to between 40 and 60 PC's that don't make it to a landfill, which is much more important than saving the company a few hundred bucks.

I am not little. I am 6'0", weigh 230, bench press 260, squat 350 and deadlift 400.

I am not your buddy.

As for the apt-get dist-upgrade sound problem. That was at home, not at work. The machines at work don't require sound, it's so loud you couldn't hear them anyway. As the name implies, apt-get dist-upgrade performs a complete distribution upgrade to the Debian system. In five years of doing monthly dist-upgrades, this is the first problem I have ever had. Given the complexities of this operation, I would say that is an excellent record by anyone's measure. In addition I use the testing distribution. If I were to use the stable distribution, this probably would not have happened.

2005-01-30T05:05:00.000-08:00

New Boss

I officially have a new boss. There was nothing really wrong with my old boss. He didn't know much about the technical details, so he listened to my recommendations and generally supported my positions. Can't ask for much more than that. My new boss is an older guy. He is pretty easy to work for. He doesn't really mind too much when people slack off. Unfortunately he does not understand the computer/IT/technical side of things at all. To compensate for this he has always hired consultants. Hiring consultants for certain things is ok, but when you do it all of the time you don't keep any knowledge in house, and that is never good. I can't see the sense in hiring a consulting firm when I can solve the problem with a Ruby/Perl/whatever script in under a day or two. I think that we will probably run in to some disagreements over that. Oh well.

2005-01-20T16:42:00.000-08:00

The Road Ahead

As I mentioned in a previous post, our corporate entity has decided on a one size fits all information/reporting system to go into all of our facilities, including ours. The bad part about it is that this decision will have a serious impact on the final outcome of my project. To re-iterate, the main parts of my project are a dynamically optimizing control system, a web based reporting system and a supervisory control/tuning system. We met with the IT person who is in charge of the one size fits all reporting system about 2 weeks ago. The plan is to take a system that was internally developed at one of our other facilities and merge it with a commercial system that is currently in prototype stages. Talk about a Frankenstein system! I don't understand this decision at all. I think that it had to have been more political than technical. This thing is going to be one sorry/buggy POS. They are planning on having this in place in 16 months. That is approximately 15 installations (custom development required at each installation) in 16 months. They have not even started the merge yet. I just don't see it happening. I have been on a team that did a merge of 2 large systems. It was a hell of a lot of work and took over a year, not counting the regression testing. I doubt that these guys know what regression testing is. They will probably skip most of the testing and go right to installation.

Back to my topic. We have decided that even though we are getting another reporting system that will no doubt overlap and duplicate functionality, we are going to proceed with the project as normal. We are in agreement that we will not see the corporate system for at least 2 years, possibly more. During that time, we have a gap to fill and this project will do it. In addition, this project will provide process control that the corporate system can not do. Our challenge in the long term will be finding a way to install and live with the corporate system, but not give up any of the process control functionality. It is never easy.

2005-01-15T16:37:00.000-08:00

apt-get dist-upgrade Kills Sound

I did an apt-get dist-upgrade on my Debian box last week. Everything went ok, except that my sound quit working. I was not very happy about it. After doing some investigation, what I think happened was the dist-upgrade slipped alsa in to replace oss. That is fine by me, as long as it works, which it didn't. I know that alsa is nice, but it is difficult to get working, and I don't have the time to piss with it right now.

I got my sound back by doing an 'apt-get remove --purge alsa-base'. After a reboot all of the OSS modules were loaded ok and I was back to my 13G of music.

On a side note about this incident. I love Debian and Linux, and I would only encourage people to use this system. But, if things like this happen on a regular basis, normal users will not use it.

2005-01-13T17:14:00.000-08:00

Made Some Progress

I was actually able to make some progress today on some things that I have needed to get done. I needed to finish this integration thing that I was working on. I had a lot of trouble with it because I had to use a 16-bit embedded DOS platform. That really sucked because some of the numbers that I had to read in were 32-bit. A real pain in the ass. I wish that automation vendors would start using linux. gcc is a nice compiler for the price, free! Actually I may have been able to use gcc on linux and cross-compiled for the 16-bit machine. But, that would have been a lot of work to set up.

I was able to finish some ruby code for another integration project I am doing. Luckily this one is running on linux, so life is a lot easier. And I was able to write some documentation for something that I finished up a while back. It was a productive day. Hopefully tomorrow will go as well.

2005-01-12T16:47:00.000-08:00

A Long Day

Went in at 0700 this morning. Had a meeting from 0800 until 1730 with a short break for lunch. One of you corporate engineers was here to discuss some of our upgrade projects. That was a long day. My manager thought I should be participating more than what I was. Usually in large meetings I don't waste my energy trying to be heard over the people that love to hear themselves speak. I just never have. If someone has a question for me, I'm happy to answer, but I don't waste my time or others times telling them things they already know. I don't see that changing. Next time my manager tells me something like that I will eplain things to him. Fuck him. If he can find someone with my qualifications to do this job for what they are paying me, he should do it. This job is ok, but if it were not for my family being in the area, I would not be here. Actually, my family I can live without, they are usually too busy to do anything. My wife is the problem. Her father won't leave his little 300 person town for anything. So, we are here for her more than anything.

2005-01-10T16:33:00.000-08:00

Another Ruby Plug

To give you an idea of Ruby vs. java: In the last year I have written ruby and java classes to communicate with an Allen Bradley plc5. Both classes have identical methods. The java class has a bit more documentation. The Ruby class required 274 lines of code. The java class required 898. I was able to do the Ruby class in about a day. The java class took around a week. I'm not a java master, however, I'm not a Ruby master either. But, Ruby just stays out of your way and lets you get your job done. I find that with java I am writing support code that is just there in Ruby. In addition Ruby will let you get a lot closer to the system than java will. I'm not sure if that is always a good thing, but it sure is convenient sometimes.

I am going to try to convince my boss to let me release both of these as open source. I will post links to them here if I get the ok on it.

2005-01-09T12:05:00.000-08:00

Linux Is In!

Like you didn't know that? Actually, one big plus that I forgot to mention here is that since we have new owners, we are no longer shackled by what Doc Searls calls Big-Co IT. Our new company is very decentralized and doesn't really care what we use to get our jobs done. Don't get me wrong, everyone still has a windoze desktop with IE and Outlook and Office, but I am free to use Linux wherever I want in the shop now. The deal is that I am responsible for all care and feeding of whatever linux boxes I use. That is fine by me. So, I have been able to recycle 3 older PIII machines to use for various tasks. They run fine with linux on them. I used Fedora because we have a guy that has a little RedHat experience. I was thinking that if I wasn't around, he could handle it. But, I think from now on I will probably go with Debian. I have been using Debian for about 4 years now, and I think it rules.

Anyway, it is nice to be able to finally use Linux. If I switch jobs again I will never take another gig at an all windoze shop. It is just too painful.

2005-01-09T05:15:00.000-08:00

Hardware Access

One thing that I have learned over and over is that on software projects developers need to get access to hardware as early as possibe. Why? Because the documentation for the hardware is usually incomplete, confusing or incorrect. When I worked for Lockheed we never had access to the hardware until it was time for testing, then we would go to the location where the hardware was and get a day or two to play with it. During those few days we always found out that we had mistakes. When I was at Fermilab I had the hardware in a rack 5 feet to my left, that was pretty nice.

I am bringing this up because it just bit me in the ass again on this project. There are 3 pieces of external hardware on the portion of this project that we just completed. I made assumptions about the functionality of 2 of them. One assumption was correct, one was wrong. For the one that was wrong, it costed a few days. It was not a huge loss, but it costed us (the customer) about ~$3K extra because the developers needed to be on site a few days extra until we got everything straightened out. The developers were sent the manual for the third piece of hardware a few months in advance. The manual was poorly written and not easy to find the information you need, big surprise. I was responsible for the installation and configuration of this hardware. I estimated about 3 days to get everything hooked up and configured. Things did not go so well. Our maintenance people ran into problems with the installation. This set us back 2 days. Once they were finished, I had a hell of a time configuring this thing. I ended up working on this for 3 days with no luck. We were under the gun for time, so I called the distributor and had them send out a technician. He was able to get this going in 6 hours.

The bill for the technician was about ~$8k (after hours rates). So, on this part of the project the cost of not getting to the hardware early in the development cycle ended up being about ~$11K. Some of this could have been avoided. My point is this:

Don't make assumptions about the hardware if you can avoid it. If you have the time up front, do some testing to validate your assumptions.

Get the developers access to the hardware as early as possible. Prefferably at the beginning of development. Even if it costs you extra, it will be worth it. It is better to spend extra and be on time, than to spend extra and be late!

2005-01-08T12:42:00.000-08:00

Encoding CD's

I finally got around to encoding most of my music. I encoded everything in ogg format instead of mp3. It is a better format for sure. I am at 13G right now. That is a whole lot of tunes. An ls -R | wc -l returns 5423, so about 5400 songs encoded. Cool.

2005-01-08T11:57:00.000-08:00

It's been a while

I don't think anyone is reading this anyway. But, if someone happens to be, a whole lot has happened since my last post. Our company was sold. I won't say who owns us now, so that I can remain anonymous, but suffice it to say that I think this is a good thing because our new owners are focused on our core business.

Our problem child vendor finally made a couple of milestones. They were a little late, but able to pull through. The quality of their software is ok. Nothing spectacular. I think that these guys are seriously over extended. Our new owners have decided that they would like one information system package at all of the plants. This is bad for my project because that is what we were working on. Not real sure what is going to happen. It may get the axe. That would really suck because we have a few things in place already.

Our new owners have major upgrade plans for us. We are looking at the next 5 years to be a very busy time. I guess this is good, but I have been busy since I started at this place. I could use a break.

I completed some of the java code that I wanted to get done. It works pretty well. I'm not sure that I really dig java all that much. This was the first java project that I did. The language certainly has a lot of momentum and support behind it, but I really think that I prefer to code in Ruby. In fact, there were a few other projects that I had about 50% complete, and I chose to start over in Ruby. Why would I do that? It was a tough choice, but Ruby is so damm dynamic that it is empowering. With java, I felt tied down at times. I should mention that I was using javaRMI. I found it difficult to work with. I did not like the fact that I either had to put my classes on a webserver to be loaded by clients, or else distribute everything. I didn't have the server, so I had to distribute everything. With Ruby's DRB on the other hand, there is nothing to distribute. The client just contacts the server and requests a reference to an object, and that's it. You can then use the object like it was local. Very simple and sweet.

Since I am hyping up Ruby, I should mention some of the things that bother me. I think that Ruby suffers because it does not have a built in cross platform GUI, like swing. I think that it will be there someday, but these things take time. There are options, you can use fxruby, but it is something extra that users have to download and install, and nobody likes to do that. Another thing is that since you don't have a compiler, the majority of errors are runtime and you won't know about it until that code gets executed. That has bitten me a few times. Another thing is that the docmentation does not keep up with the new features very well, whereas with java, if you have a problem the solution is usually a google search away.

Anyway, I like using Ruby and I will continue to use it whenever I can. The nice thing about this job is that I have the freedom to use pretty much whatever I want. I could never have done this at Lockheed. One of the main reasons that I left Lockheed was because of the lack of engineering freedom.

I made it through my first EE grad class at the U of Iowa. It was a decent class, but I liked my software engineering program at the U of Mn much better. When I left the Twin Cities to come here I knew that eventually I was going to miss the TC and I would regret leaving the MSSE program half way through. Well, it took about a year and a half, but I have been missing the TC and I wish that I would have stuck it out another year and finished my MSSE. I was just soooo sick of Lockheed that I couldn't wait to get out of there.

Now, more than anything, I would really like to find a software job where I can work from home most of the time. I don't know what the chances of that happening are. I imagine that the best way for that to happen is to be in business for myself. That sure would be nice. To maintain our current standard of living I would need to bring in about $75K - $80K annually. I don't make that much now, but I would have to pay for medical insurance and save for retirement, and that isn't cheap.

I have a buddy in the TC that I used to work with. His wife has a nice gig where she works in NYC one week out of the month and works from home the rest of the month. She gets paid NYC wages, which I believe for her is around ~$125K. That would be an excellent deal. My wife has a cousin that has a similar arrangement with her employer in SF. She lives and works in Chicago and goes out there once in a while. So, seems like these jobs are out there, just not listed on Monster or anything like that.

I am rambling. Better give it a rest.

2004-08-17T03:54:00.000-07:00

A Trip?

May be taking a trip to our vendors facility to have a project meeting. I think that this is a great idea. We need to get the schedule pinned down. We need for this vendor to commit to some dates and stop bullshiting us on what they are capable of doing. At this point, I feel like these guys are not capable (technically or productivity) of delivering about 60% of this project. Why did we hire these guys? We didn't, our corporate people did, we didn't get a vote. So, if we have this meeting next week, it will give us 2 days to remind our vendor friends that the original schedule that they gave us is long gone and they have not delivered anything yet, and that they should come up with a realistic estimation of a schedule.

In software very few people actually do "estimates" which is why this sort of thing happens all the time. In software, people set goals, and there is a big difference between an estimate and a goal.

2004-08-13T04:23:00.000-07:00

Hard To Believe

Still trying to make it through life with our problem child vendor. They have one decent person working there, and unfortunately, he is a junior guy, so I can't work with him all the time. It is hard to believe that these guys are respected in their field. I lost all respect for them as soon as they tried to convince me that I should not have a problem with running a safety critical system on M$ windoze. I see that I am not the only person that feels this way, check out Paul Graham. You may not agree with everything that Paul has to say about hackers, but I think that he is right on the money for the most part.

So, working with these clowns is getting really old. I would really like to go work someplace else right now, someplace full of Unix boxes and geeks.

2004-08-09T04:24:00.000-07:00

A setback

Overslept this morning so have to make this fast. Figured out last week that the nice shiny new windoze box I received was installing 3 mouse drivers every time it booted up. The 3 mouse drivers were taking over 3 of my serial ports. Have to love it. Also, I am using a ruby serial port library for windoze. Aparantely there is some sort of problem with threading, and timeouts on the system call to read from serial ports. What it comes down to is that I will not be able to make this app. multi-threaded and blocking. So, back to the old school, one non-blocking thread. Oh well, it will be more efficient this way. Probably less error prone also.

The way I see it, if our IT group could not impose design constraints on us (making me use windoze) I would be done by now. So, I think that I should keep track of my rework time and charge it to the IT group. But, my boss is a MBA/PHB yes man, he won't do it.

2004-08-05T03:49:00.000-07:00

Windows Problems

I finally got one of the boxes I needed from our IT group. I was more or less forced to use windoze. I didn't want to because it never just works for you like Linux or *BSD or Solaris .... I hooked the damm thing up in my office and hooked up the peripherals to test everything out and it worked. I thought it was too good to be true. So then I unhooked the machine and moved out to where it will be living. I hooked everything up to it, tried to start up the application and, it doesn't work. WTF? How about that. The only thing that changed was the IP address, and I'm not doing any networking stuff with it. It is having problems with the serial port, it is denying me access to 3 of the 10 ports. Since I have administrative privileges on this machine I don't get it?

If I could just use Linux, I would be done by now. I think that this IT group and their restrictive policies are going to make me leave this company. Being a windoze programmer was not a pre-requisite for this position.

2004-07-31T04:50:00.000-07:00

Another week gone

Wasn't able to get a whole lot done this week due to meetings. Having a meeting in the middle of the day can just kill your focus. We did get some cabling done and I made some progress on some other software. Looks like my Java communications class is working well. I would really like to release that class on sourceforge. I am sure that it would be used. Hopefully I can talk my boss into it.

Had some discussions with our problem child vendor (PCV from here on out). Looks like they don't want to do too much in the way of helping us out with the missing component they "forgot" to include in their contract/quote. To be a little fair to them, we should have caught it before we issued PO's.

Found out yesterday that our corporate people decided to get rid of the moron that they had overseeing the project above me. Makes sense, he didn't do anything on it. Unfortunately they put somebody else on it from another facility again. Same deal, this guy has no experience. But I do know this guy, and he will be easy to work with, he listens.

2004-07-28T03:58:00.000-07:00

Purpose

I have been thinking about this blog lately. I started this blog with the intention of giving anyone who cared to read a view into the day to day working life of an average electrical engineer. To provide this view, I am trying to outline my current project in as much detail as I can. This project will take at least another year to complete. Probably longer. While I want to give as much detail as possible, I also need to remain anonymous, which means I can't specify exactly who we are and what we are doing. I haven't received any feedback on this blog. I guess I am just wondering if there is enough detail?

2004-07-24T05:26:00.000-07:00

Internet TV

I'm with this guy. I don't really care about a-la-carte tv. I just want the technology to get to a point to where TV can come over the internet around the cable industry. When that happens, I think that we will see an explosion of innovative amatuer entertainment that will cost next to nothing, if anything at all.

2004-07-24T04:58:00.000-07:00

Beetween a rock and a hard place

Things not going so well this week. Looks like our problem child vendor is now trying to pull some extra cash out of us. The confusion stems from an assumption on our part and a little misleading on their part. What it boils down to is that they claim that our contract with them does not include an essential lower level component to the main component they are putting together for us. I think this is crap. We had a meeting back in May during which we talked about the requirements for this component, as if they were planning to include it back then. During that meeting they claimed that it was a canned package that would take around 2 days to adapt to our environment. Now they claim that the package will take around 4 months. That basically puts us right at one of our deadlines. I really feel like they are trying to screw us for some more cash.

This could have been avoided through more careful reading of the contract and not 'assuming' anything. My boss negotiated the contract, I was not really involved with it. Even if I would have been, the problem is that I am not an accountant, I am an engineer. But in this position I am doing accounting work, engineering, procurement, management, etc. A little of everything. I am really unsure why our accounting group is not handling the accounting on this project. Or why our supply group doesn't handle procurement.

So what to do now? The money they want for this component is not there. We don't have it. Can we get by without it? Yes, but it will create quite a bit more work for us and our final system will not have one common theme/look and feel to it. That would be bad because when non-engineering type people look at this system, they only see the front end, and they will quickly pick up on a mismatched looking system. So, I think that our only course of action is to play hardball with these clowns and make them include the component, for free.

2004-07-22T03:57:00.000-07:00

Conference Call

Doing a conference call today with the problem child vendor. I need to find out where they are at on their development. This should be interesting. I have been thinking lately that since I am more or less performing software management in this position, I should probably be getting paid accordingly. I know that an average salary for software managers in the Twin Cities was over $100k/yr. Out here in middle of nowhere Iowa, who knows. But I am under that by a long long shot. So, how to approach the boss about it? I guess I should just tell him, pay up or I am out of here! I am putting in 10+ hour days, not getting any credit for it and it is starting to get old. My project 'leader' on the other hand (this is the clown at our other facility who has less experience and education than I do) doesn't do shit and if you talk to our corporate people, they believe he is running the show. What a bunch of crap.

2004-07-20T03:55:00.000-07:00

Tuesday AM

Doesn't look like I will be getting as much done this week as I did last. The boss is back. I think I was there about 15 minutes yesterday morning before he located me and asked me to do some stupid BS for him. I don't think he understands the magnitude of work that we need to get done if we are going to make our milestones on this project. Since he is not an engineer, that makes sense.

Looks like we are going to start babysitting our problem child vendor. I am going to try to set up a conference call every few weeks to see what kind of progress they have made. I would rather cut our losses right now and hire someone else but I don't have that kind of authority. We are going to get burned by these guys, I can feel it already.

I am working on my java project now, I am pretty happy about that. Seems to me that you can't go too far without having java on your resume. I didn't care for it at first, but now that I am starting to understand a little more about how it is put together I am enjoying using it. It does make a lot of things really easy.

I have a lot of wiring to do this week. Lots of hardware type work. I just can't get motivated about doing it though. Not sure why, I usually enjoy that sort of work.

2004-07-19T03:45:00.000-07:00

Monday AM

Last week went really well. I was able to get a whole lot of work accomplished. I wrapped up software development on one of my larger tasks and am ready to start testing. I was able to get several other smaller things out of the way. My boss was out of town for the last 3 days of the week. I wonder if that had anything to do with my productivity going up? Hell yeah it did. He always seems to find piddly shit for me to do. Like I don't have enough going on.

Our problem child vendor did not deliver as promised last week. I'm not sure what to do about them. I guess that they just won't get the work for that piece of the project. We need to get moving on this and we don't have time to wait for them.

I am also still waiting for the "Official" ok to use Linux on our parent companies network. Our parent company classifies anything running Linux (watch, pda, etc.) as a server. Nice overgeneralization. Our corporate IT people really like to apply one size fits all to everything. So, I need to say screw it, hook everything up and start testing, or put everything on hold until they get around to giving a blessing. What I would really like to see is for my boss to stand up and say screw it, do what you have to do, and then deal with the corporate clowns if we have any problems. But, being the "yes man" that he is, I just don't see that scenario panning out.

2004-07-15T04:23:00.000-07:00

Tuesday's Gone With the Wind

Such an awesome song, I couldn't resist. Any Lynard Skynard fans out there?

In my last post I noted that our problem child vendor promised us a document by Tuesday at the latest. Well, it's Thursday now, and no document. To reiterate, I didn't want to use this vendor. These guys were forced on to us by our corporate entity. I wanted to make these guys go through an audit by an independent CMM auditor before we used them. But, since I am nobody in my company, (just the guy running the project from the shadows) nobody beyond my boss hears me. The CMM is not perfect. But it is better than nothing.

2004-07-13T04:08:00.000-07:00

Software Metrics

Talked to our favorite vendor last Friday. They have gaurenteed that we will receive by Tuesday a document they were to deliver quite a while ago. We shall see. When we were negotiating the contract with these guys, I really considered putting a performance penalty in. Now I wish that I would have.

To be a little fair to these guys, doing schedule estimation in software engineering is hard. Very few companies can do it well (20% accuracy is considered good). When I was working on a masters in Software Engineering I did a research paper on estimation in software. The thing to keep in mind when doing estimates is that if you go talk to your people and then throw a number out there, and your boss throws a number back and you say ok, that is not an estimate, that is a GOAL and there is a difference. Estimates should be based on past performance as measured through metrics collection. Since so few software organizations actually collect metrics (our vendor is a CMM level 1), it should not be surprising that the discipline sucks at estimation. Typically at each process step there are 4 metrics you want to collect for each deliverable:

Time - How long in days did it take to generate the deliverable.

Effort - How many labor hours did it take to generate the deliverable.

Size - How large is the deliverable, i.e. LOC, Pages in document etc.

Defects - How many defects were found during inspection. Yes, we should all be doing peer review inspections of all deliverables.

That's about it. It doesn't necessarily have to be rocket science. But so few companies can get it right. At my last position (Full time developer) we did inspections on everything. But, we totally dropped the ball on recording our metrics. I used to tell my managers all the time that it was such a small step to record the metrics. But, they didn't care. They got paid the same either way.

2004-07-08T18:49:00.000-07:00

Confirmation

Had a phone conference today with our project group, including our software vendor. As I suspected, they are not going to make their first milestone. They are going to be 2.5 months late on their first deliverable. The funny thing is, this is their schedule! They put these dates together! So, now I am in ultra-pessimist mode. I expect that the entire schedule is shifted at least 3 months to the right. Now, I don't mind them being late. I would prefer that they take the time that they need and do a good job. My main concern is that they will rush things and deliver poor quality code. My mitigation strategy is to go through the test plan for every component with a fine toothed comb. I have to look out for my employer. I assume that they will deliver some very light test cases and we will have to duke it out with them over it. My friends at the corporate level may even get involved and tell me not to worry about it, after all, these guys are the pro's and I'm just a dumb EE, at least in the eyes of our corporate managers. A few posts back I mentioned 3 simple guidelines that I picked up in the military. Rule #1 was to CYA. The way I see it, as long as I make a decent attempt to ensure we have a good test plan, and document my attempts, and make anyone that may intercede sign off, I have rule #1 covered. What else can I do?

I saw this coming back in February.

2004-07-03T05:37:00.000-07:00

Another week down

Made it to the holiday weekend. Made some progress on the software and management fronts last week. This job is so much different than my last job. At my last engineering position my responsibilities were mostly to develop. That's about it. This job is much more encompassing. At this position I do:

Software Engineering - Requirements through test.

Hardware Engineering - Requirements through test.

I/T - Administration, Network design/implementation, etc.

Schedule

Budget

Procurement

Process Management - Internal personell, vendors, etc.

No wonder I am so busy. This is the first engineering position that I have had where I am responsible for this much. Overall, I would say that I am doing pretty well with it all. My manager gave me a good rating for the year, so apparentley he agrees also.

A few things are still bugging me though. Mainly one particular vendor that we are using for this project. We send them e-mails and don't hear back from them for days, sometimes weeks. We call and leave them messages and don't hear back from them. They are out of the country. They are not only developers but sales and support, and they are out on the road quite a bit. They have given us what I feel is an aggressive schedule. Coupling their schedule estimates with their apparent workload, I can not see how they are going to make it.

If they slip their schedule (I think they will have to) will this hurt the project? I don't really think so. We will just be delayed. What concerns me though is that we may get low quality software because they are doing a rush job. To mitigate our risk of getting low quality, I made these guys agree to write a standalone system test plan, and an integrated system test plan. As part of the process we have to sign off on the test plans. We will also be conducting the FAT testing and on site testing of each component of the package. So, if they end up generating low quality stuff and/or taking time away from their test group (they only planned on giving them 1 month) then we should be covered.

In the beginning of this project when I first came on board here I told my manager that we should not use these guys for a few reasons:

They are not geographically close to us. I would have preffered to hire a company out of Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City or the Twin Cities. That would make face to face meetings much easier. If we wanted to go see interim results, it would be possible.

They want to run this stuff on M$ windows. They don't understand my concern about not developing safety critical systems on windows. Since these guys don't agree, I feel like they are either not technically sound, or they are unethical. Either way it is bad.

Their reason for not using a UNIX based OS was that they could not handle the errors. WTF is that about? With a few exceptions the entire US National Airspace System is running on UNIX OS's.

2004-06-28T10:53:00.000-07:00

It's been a while

Wow, I haven't put up a post in over a week. That is terrible. Here is what has been going on. I spent a lot of last week doing the annual HR rating BS that we have to do here once/year. What a PITA that was. I think that I just got it wrapped up.

I have some deadlines imposed on my deliverables now. Nothing new, I just didn't that would happen here. This is not a development organaziation. It is not a problem. They are very doable.

I am re-thinking my decision to use Ruby for everything here. I like Ruby, it is a great language and will work out fine, but I could have used Java and gotten it on my resume. I think that would have been a good idea. It's a little late now.

I have another project that I need to do sometime between now and next year, I will probably use Java for that. Looks like Java is in demand, and I like coding in it.

That's about it. I need to put in some hours between now and the end of August to get this software wrapped up. The next 2 months have the potential to be long, so, to mitigate that, I will work like hell for the next couple weeks and get a jump on it.

Our vendor has not delivered anything yet. They haven't even started on a functional spec. I have had the feeling that they were too agressive with their estimates. I thought that in the begining but wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. I don't really care if they are late, just so they don't take time away from test to compensate for it.

2004-06-18T04:19:00.000-07:00

People Skills

I did really well in college. I graduated Summa Cum Laude, 4.0 out of 4.0. I actaully learned quite a bit, and some of it was even practical. But the one thing that my college didn't even touch on, and probably the singly most important trait for career advancement, people skills.

It seems to me that this is something you either have or you don't. I don't know if a person can develop this. In engineering your technical skills can only get you so far. Engineering talent just seems to be quite a commodity, and abundant.

2004-06-17T04:16:00.000-07:00

Some progress

This week has went ok so far. I was able to get part of our department on a completely isolated subnet, this has been on the backburner for a while now. The networking part of it isn't a big deal, the problem was getting some our 3rd party application software to work. You wouldn't think it would be that big of a deal, but this stuff is convoluted, buggy and poorly documented, and I only get about 3 - 4 hours/week where I can take it down to mess with it.

I also put together a department web page, this has been on the backburner for a while now also. I was forced to use M$ Frontpage and an M$ webserver to do this. I wanted to use PHP in a big way. But, our IT dept. gets to make rules and regulations, I don't get much say in it. Making a web page with Frontpage is like working on your car with your hands tied behind your back. Not much fun at all.

The rest of the week I need to devote to some HR related activities (employee ratings). At my company, we have to quantitatively show how our performance supports the bosses goals for the year. Sounds fun doesn't it? It is a royal PITA. It is especially difficult for me because my job is indirectly related to production (always the main goal). So, given no choice, I just have to BS my way through it for now. Anybody need an EE linux geek engineer?

2004-06-13T05:57:00.000-07:00

Made it home

The week actually went ok. Could have been better, could have been worse. Back to the salt mine tomorrow. I have a lot of work that I need to make progress on.

I have been searching around on the net for Microsoft licenses. I have read that MS came out and said that their OS is not adequate and is not recommended for use in safety-critical environments. Since I work in a safety-critical environment, and I don't want to see MS boxes in it, having a document from the horses mouth should help.

We are expecting to have a corporate restructuring announcement sometime in the next few weeks. So, I should know if I need to start looking for a new gig or not anytime now. There isn't much to choose from around here without a commute, one of the problems of living here.

2004-06-09T10:16:00.000-07:00

Predictions coming around already

Well, I called it a while back, but I didn't think that it would happen so fast. Looks like Tivo is going to stream content over the net. This is cool. I'm excited about the possibilities this technology will bring to entertainment. I just hope that the big providers don't find a way to legislate to protect their outdated business models, like the RIAA/MPAA has. I really hope that this paves the way for amatuer, free, low/non advertising entertainment. That would be sweet.

2004-06-08T18:23:00.000-07:00

The Lone Linux Ranger

I recently wrote an SRS for my project. One of my requirements was that the software should be written in such a way as to decouple it from dependence on any one graphics library. My reason for this was the following: I can not make this application run on some Posix OS at this time, but in the future it may be a reality. If the application is coupled to a particular graphics library this will not be possible. I was not very happy with the response that I received. I was told that the win32 library was tightly coupled into the system and would make independence from win32 graphics nearly impossible.

Ok, I can deal with that, I'm not happy about it, but whatever, I seem to be the Lone Linux Ranger at our company and I will have to live with it for now. What really pissed me off was that one of the developers then wanted to reassure me that Windows was secure, stable and reliable and that I should not be worried about it. Then I had to clue him in to the >$400K price tag that the Sasser mess caused us. He asked if we had anti-virus and firewalls. Well, we have both. Sasser spread so fast that anti-virus patches were not deployed in time, and the firewalls didn't catch it for some reason.

Here is my position. WTF would I want to go out and spend money on anti-virus and firewalls to secure an insecure OS, when I can use a decent OS that doesn't need all of this extra security, for free?

2004-06-07T05:13:00.000-07:00

Going to be a long week

Made it to the hotel that the training is being held at. I will be here for the week. It is pretty amazing to me that my company would spend so much money on training for this process but not follow up to ensure that people are using the process. This is a real departure from the CMM Level 4 company that I used to work for. At that place you either followed the process or got a new job. It's going to be a very long week.

2004-06-05T05:05:00.000-07:00

Going to training for the week

Have to go to a training class next week. I'm not too happy about it, considering it is for a process that we are not going to use. What a waste of money. The facilities that we will be staying at are nice, that is the only good part of the whole deal.

On a different note, got quite a bit accomplished last week. Will probably take my laptop and try to wrap up most of the software for this project next week while I am gone. I should be able to get most of it finished except for the parts where I need access to hardware. We used to run into this problem a lot at my last job. We never had access to the hardware there. We had to write simulators for everything. I was surprised at how well it actually worked to be honest. But, it is always nice to be able to test on a live system to make sure that everything is going to work in its environment.

My boss is an interesting guy. He is an MBA, not quite a PHB, but that may come in the future. He doesn't know anything about tech. He seems to have a hard time understanding that tech. stuff takes time to develop. He deffinitely does not understand that you can't work at 300% for a sustained period of time. I keep getting insignificant things dropped on me to do, and he doesn't understand that each time he drops one of these tasks on me, it takes a lot of effort to get back on track to what I was doing. That is the hardest part of this job. I am the only tech. person on staff. At my last job, anybody that knew how to use a text editor was a software engineer, so everyone understood that projects take time.

With that said, I am thinking that it is time to move on. I should probably try to finish out my part of this big project, but after that it's time to go. Working from home with a little travel in between sure sounds good.

2004-06-04T03:57:00.000-07:00

A few links

If you have never checked out Doc Searls you can read his weblog here or sign up for his 'Linux For Suits' collumn here

The wife really wants to go on a cruise. I don't care for boats too much, but I think that we have found a compromise here

2004-06-02T10:35:00.000-07:00

Working from home

I was able to work from home today due to a power outage. This is nearly unheard of in my industry. I like doing this so much that I think I should start looking around for a telecommute job. Just a few things that are nice about it:

Windows in the office with a nice view - Pretty rare in a supplied office

A comfortable chair and desk - Pretty rare in a supplied office

Good bandwidth throughout the day - Pretty rare where I have worked

Can listen to the radio - what a difference this makes

I'm not sure I would want to do this 100% of the time, but maybe 75/25 would be nice. My buddies wife has a deal like that. I think it would work out pretty well, even if you had to travel 25% of the time.

2004-06-01T10:44:00.000-07:00

3 rules to operate by

After I got out of the military I spent a few months thinking about what I had learned. What I came up with was pretty simple. There were three operating rules that kept me out of trouble and enabled me to cut through the bureaucracy. Here they are:

CYA - Cover your ass! Make sure that you leave a paper trail whenever you can just in case.

Skip The Middleman - This is really frowned upon in the military, but if you ever want to get anything done you have to go to the source.

It is easier to ask for forgiveness than to beg for permission - If you need to do something, just do it, it will all work out in the end. If you ask, you will probably be told no.

That's it. Pretty simple.

2004-06-01T04:27:00.000-07:00

A short week

Off to work I go. Only 4 days this week. I have quite a bit to accomplish though. Today I will be trying to put some nice windoze machines onto their own subnet. Should not be a big deal, but I also have to get on of our applications to work on this new subnet configuration. That will probably be a big deal. The vendor built security features into the application. I'm not sure why they didn't just use the windoze authentication (even though it sucks). That will make things difficult. But, for once, I have plenty of time to get it done.

2004-06-01T04:22:00.000-07:00

Another shot at our IT group

I probably shouldn't take so many shots at these guys, but they bring it on themselves through their arrogance. The IT guy that I have to work with most of them time believes that syntax highlighting is a feature of VB. This is the same guy that thinks that vi is a cracking tool.

2004-05-31T18:34:00.000-07:00

What's going on

I just realized that I really haven't said much about the project that I am working on at work. I should probably give some details. I need to remain anonymous, so I can't give out too many specifics.

The industry that I am in has seen a great deal of advancement in the last 30 years or so. Much of the advancement has been to the individual disparate systems that are pieces of the whole. In the last few years, some researchers, developers and managers were able to get together and theorize about an idea to integrate things at a greater level of detail. The basis of this integration is hinged on one new measuring device that is still under development, but has been shown to work in the lab. This new measuring device will provide a feedback source with accuracy that has never been seen in this industry. This will allow us to have much better control of our industrial process. The real goal is of course to cut some costs, and this device should help us with that also.

We are working jointly with 2 other companies on this project. Our facility will serve as a test bench. One company was chosen because of their incumbent control software, the other was chosen because of their willingness to soak up development costs.

I was hired to help with the enormous amount of integration work that has to be completed and to help with the overall management of this project. At least, that was the impression that I got from the interviews. I think that someone forgot to ask corporate what their plans were on this project. (See my post below about management).

As always, I started out with the requirements. Since I was filling more of the customer role on this one, (a first) I enjoyed writing the requirements document. I also did some high level design work just to make clear what would be acceptable and what would not be. Prior to delivery of the requirements doc. I thought that the developers would be happy we made the effort to generate a spec. In this industry it would be very rare for the customer to go to that much trouble. I was surprised when after meeting a few of their developers I realized they were not very happy about it. Not that it matters much, we are the customer! After thinking about it some more, what I really believe is that these guys are not used to dealing with technically proficient people, and that they felt threatened, or their egos were hurt or some other BS like that. That is behind us now, and we are moving on.

We are a complete Microsoft shop (Not by my choosing.) I pushed really hard to get Linux in the door, but at this company I am just an EE, not an IT guy, so my suggestions were not taken very well. In addition, the company doing the software has never developed for Linux and did not think that they could port their legacy code. I wanted to find a company that could, I know that they are out there, but again, at our company I am just an EE.

To be continued .....

2004-05-30T04:45:00.000-07:00

Hitting google through java

I got around to downloading the google api yesterday. Being able to do google searches through java is too sweet! Ruby can do this also, and I will be checking it out soon. Now, what to do with this? They limit you to 1000 searches/day, so between my family and myself, I should be able to get around 5000 searches/day or so. There has to be something incredibly cool to do with this api. I don't think anyone has came up with much yet though.

Speaking of java, I am starting to like it a little more. It is not as slick as Ruby, but Ruby doesn't have as many things built in to it as java either, yet anyway. Now, if we can just get Sun to open source java ... It would become the main language of most geeks. It certainly has capabilities. A few things I don't care for though:

Primitive types - why can't everything be an object like in Ruby?

Half Static - hard to change things on the fly.

Compiled - why can't it be interpreted?

Instantiation - between String, primitive types and objects, there are 3 different ways to do this.

2004-05-30T04:30:00.000-07:00

A problem with software

From the standpoint of business, software is difficult because it is not a consumable. It does not wear out. It does not go bad (on its own anyway). If it runs today it will do the same thing 10 years from now, everything else being equal. So, from the business end, how do you continue to have a revenue stream? Support, bugfixes, enhancements ... At some point though, you will have to innovate to make sales. You could also let your competitors do the innovation and just try to keep up, like our friends in Redmond.

2004-05-28T10:34:00.000-07:00

On the same wavelength

A few posts back I mentioned my predictions for the future of the wired telco's. A short reiteration: I predict they are going the way of the dinosaurs. Looks like someone else is thinking the same thing. Except that he didn't mention anything about the telco's making large campaign contributions and spending large summs of cash on litigation (like our friends at the RIAA and MPAA) to protect their outdated business models. This will surely happen. What sucks most about it is that you and I, the customers (not consumers) will suffer in a variety of ways.

2004-05-28T10:17:00.000-07:00

Taking the day off

I am thinking that I should take every Friday off. It is just too sweet to stay at home on a beautiful day and do what you want.

The software for my integration project is coming together nicely. If I didn't mention it before, I am using Ruby. If you don't know Ruby, I highly advise you to learn it, as long as you have a decent understanding of OO. I used to use a lot of perl, but I will probably never use perl again. Ruby has all of the power of perl, but is much cleaner and 100% OO, there are no primitive types, and it is completely dynamic. The more I learn it, the more mind boggling the possibilities.

So, the integration software is coming together nicely. I was worried for a little while that this was going to become a hack job due to time constraints etc. But, it is coming together nicely and I think that we will have a very reliable, maintainable system once I get finished.

2004-05-24T04:28:00.000-07:00

Monday 0630

Time to go off to work. Lots of things to try to accomplish this week. I may end up working this weekend (Holiday) if I don't get this stuff accomplished. At least my commute time is only 10 minutes now. Last year it was 50 minutes one way.

2004-05-23T13:27:00.000-07:00

Where I would like to be

I recently found this blog. I think that this guy is exactly where I would like to be. Working for google, living in half moon bay Ca. Sure would beat the industrial engineer gig. Time to work on the resume. Now if I could just convince some of my family to move to Ca.

2004-05-23T13:21:00.000-07:00

Paying for windoze

I recently did an informal survey of people that I know that use and swear by windoze. My hypothesis was that none of these people would actually pay for windoze and office if they had to. Roughly 90% of them admitted that the windoze software that they swear by was pirated. If anyone reading this is a Linux advocate remember this. The next time some dumbass windoze admin. I/T MCSE type wants to convince you that you should be using only M$ products, just ask them what software they use at home and how much they paid for it. I would be willing to bet that it was pirated.

2004-05-22T05:22:00.000-07:00

Saturday Morning, What to do?

The wife was kind enough to mow the yard yesterday. It was about 4 inches high, it has been raining for about a week now. So that leaves my day pretty much open. I think that I should do some hacking on my Linux boxen and probably work on my resume's. I can see that this job is probably not going to work out long term, so I should prepare now rather than later. Looks like it is going to rain some more. Spring in the midwest, have to love it.

2004-05-21T10:27:00.000-07:00

An unfair comparison

I read a lot of people comparing windows and Linux. They always seem to gravitate toward the installation problems people encounter with Linux. They need to keep in mind that the only reason windoze users don't have the same problems is because their machines come with windoze pre-installed, and the hardware vendors write the drivers for windoze. If you buy Linux pre-installed on a machine you won't have installation problems either. If a hardware vendor provides a driver, you won't have problems getting hardware to work.

2004-05-20T18:16:00.000-07:00

How it went down

As I thought, pretty much a waste of 3 days. The big chief ended up not coming. Guess he found something better to do.

Day 1 - Argued with stupid consultant about process for the first 6 hours, then he decided to see things our way. Too bad he could not have saved us the 6 hours. I guess he needed to charge some time.

Day 2 - Redid most of the work (project plan) that I have had done since Feb. Reason was that we had new people on the project. Well, new people usually do set back projects, but if you start over every time you won't be finishing.

Day 3 - Stupid engineer from other facility tells everyone that accurate requirements are not important, we can iron it out later. I argued it for a while, he got pissed, fuck him, hopefully he won't come back. The dumbass followed this up with asking for completion dates in the absence of requirements, again states that it is typical engineering practice to set a completion date, clearly showing his lack of experience. There is a big difference between estimates and goals. I would never set goal dates with software because I prefer software that works. You can not give an accurate estimate without requirements. If you ever wonder why so many software projects fail, it is shit like this in the beginning. The requirements will get ironed out, but when they do, it will be too late and too expensive because there will be a lot of scaffolding built already.

When I took this job I was under the impression that I was being hired to manage projects. If I would have been told up front that I would be subordinated to an engineer with less experience and less education than myself, I would have stayed with Lockheed. Not much I can do now. Just polish up the resume and move on I guess.

2004-05-16T16:46:00.000-07:00

In for a rough ride

Our project colleagues are coming to our facility this week for 3 full days of meetings about the project. It is going to be a long week. Our company president is even coming to participate. You would think that he would have something better to do. Never had this many meetings at Lockheed. Lots of other BS to put up with, but the PITAMF (Pain in the ass meeting factor) was pretty low. This week will be a waste of time and very little will be accomplished. How do I know this? Too many non-engineers are going to be present. The meetings will be about politics instead of technical matters.

2004-05-15T03:39:00.000-07:00

The Rich Windoze Feature Set

I was talking with a contractor I know the other day. He was describing another project that he was working on. His client used a legacy program that was still running on DOS or WIN3.1 or something like that. They wanted to bring the OS up to W2K or WXP but couldn't because the legacy application could not perform adequately on the newer win os's because of all the system overhead. He told me that he had the source code for the application and that he was going to try to make some changes and rebuild it for Win95. Of course my position was why not build it for Linux 2.6.5? It would not have all of the overhead, it would be secure, and it would run on a damn 486 if you needed it to. His response, "We want to have that rich windows feature set". My response, WTF is he talking about? I am starting to believe that M$ pays these clowns to be anonymous marketers. It has to be a conspiracy.

2004-05-14T10:28:00.000-07:00

Well, command of my project has been moved to another engineer with less experience and less education than myself. The other engineer will be managing the project remotely due to the fact that they are employed at one of our other facilities. It just never ceases to amaze me.

I need to start consulting or start up a software shop on my own. If I can just find a way to make the house payment for a few years.

2004-05-12T10:56:00.000-07:00

One thing I would really like to pass on to kids thinking about making a career in engineering. Don't do it for the money. The money is not that great. There are engineers out there who have done very well for themselves, but I have never met any. We work a lot of hours. The work is difficult. There are never any easy answers. Politics always seem to find their way into every project. I have never seen an engineer promoted based on technical abilities. I always see promotions based on politics.

I love what I do, as a hobby. Not as a job.

2004-05-12T10:48:00.000-07:00

Motorola planning to make VOIP phones. Won't that be sweet. As I said in a previous post, the carriers won't take it lying down. We should be seeing some sort of lawsuit to block it in the near future.

2004-05-07T19:35:00.000-07:00

Got a gmail account for being a blogger. Pretty sweet deal. As far as privacy and targeted advertising goes, I never really notice the ads on Google anyway, which is why I have always liked it so much. It is easy on the eyes.

People complain about the possibility of Google using e-mail's for marketing, but the same people probably use windoze machines with about 10 spyware programs covertly logging data about their habits.

2004-05-06T10:19:00.000-07:00

My Windoze admin/IT guy thinks that XP home edition is a multi-user environment because you can log out and log back in as a different user. Swell. He also told me that active directory will even let you assign individual permissions to users. Wow.

Think about it, these are core features of any UNIX that have been around for at least 20 years. M$ is just now catching up. Unfortunately for M$ the Linux community has continued to innovate. See my post below.

2004-04-08T10:45:00.000-07:00

The Internet Is Not Dead

We are still at the infancy of the internet.

There was quite a while after about 2000 when I thought that the internet was dead. This is not the case. The easy money is dead. There will always be room for innovation. It is hard to believe that someone gave pets.com startup money. But it happened.

In the future the internet will be much more than what you see through your web browser. In the future your TV, radio, music, telephone, application software, .... you name it, it will make its way to you via the internet. Will it happen tomorrow? No. Five years? Doubtful. 10 years? Probably more realistic.

There was a time when people had to pay for e-mail service. Those days are long gone. This is what I hope to be saying about cable TV, telephone, music, radio .... in the future. It sure would be nice to be able to have free, amatuer TV from around the world, music libraries to connect the stereo to, as many phone numbers as you need.

In the US, the incumbent corporations will do everything posssible to prevent these inevitabilities. In some instances, they already are.

2004-04-07T10:31:00.000-07:00

Why Windows Sucks
This post could go on for volumes. What is on my mind right now is the lack of software that a consumer receives when purchasing windows. I thought I would start a list of things that I take for granted in Linux/BSD distributions that are missing in Windows.

Development utilities - Compiler, Debugger, Profiler .....
Servers - You name it, it costs extra if you get it from M$.
Office Applications - Costs a lot extra.
A decent, secure web browser
A choice of desktops - with M$ WYSIWYG.
Multiple desktops.
Burner utilities.
Archiving applications.
A decent calculator - Can't even do an arctan with their POS. GNU Octave typically comes with Linux/BSD.
A decent text editor. Try getting syntax highliting in notepad! How about just changind the colors? Compare this to Vim and Emacs, not even a comparison.
A shell. The DOS prompt is the most sorry POS that I have ever typed in. Bash, Tcsh both very nice. Even Ksh is a world above a DOS prompt.
Documentation - Every time I use the help utilities in windows I get pissed. It just can't compare to >man -k foo | grep -v stuff_i_dont_want | less ......
Anti-virus software - You would think that with as many problems as they have had with this, they would at least be decent enough in supporting their users to go buy a virus software vendor and give the applications away as a supplement.

I just wish I could understand why some tech. folks defend this OS. With its lack of applications out of the box, I can't think of a single place in the working world where it fits. Certainly not in engineering.

Total cost of ownership less than Linux/BSD? Are they adding in all of the extra shit that people have to buy? I don't think so.

2004-03-28T10:34:00.000-08:00

A geek living in Iowa. That's me. Working in the industrial sector. Steel to be exact. Much better than my last position which was at Lockheed Martin. Don't be fooled by all of the PR, working for Lockheed sucks. They haven't innovated anything in a long time. They just keep putting old wine in new bottles.

Living in Silicon Valley would be more my style I think, but my family is here. There are some real positives about living here. Lot's of bandwidth to go around. It is cheap. I mean damm cheap. It isn't crowded, plenty of elbow room. We are right on the Mississippi River. The problem with being here? Hard to find other geeks.

2004-03-25T10:25:00.000-08:00

IT != Electrical Engineer

I have ran into this situation more than I would like. My experiences with IT are that most of them are windows admins. There is a whole lot of difference between windows admin. and engineer. It sure would be nice if people would not reduce the field of Electrical Engineering to that of windows administration.

2004-03-22T10:47:00.000-08:00

A first post. Welcome to ee_geek. My blog about life as an EE.