(no subject)
A little over 13 months, actually, since the last entry. Sigh. There were such good intentions when I started. But then, there have been these little distractions like Work and my Mother dying over the course of the last six weeks.
At work, we have had five of the Principal Design Engineers move. Three to different parts of of the company, two to start-ups. There has been a great deal of flummery figuring out some the code and the (unwritten) process documentation. Add this to an aggressive roll-out schedule for new versions of old products and a couple of entirely new products and we have been rode hard and put away wet most weeks. I have started becoming a thorn on the side of a couple of the Senior Engineers, I keep believing that the Formal Documentation should match the behavior of the actual code. I can deal with 'documentation bugs' -- where to printed matter doesn't quite completely describe the actual behavior of the Program. It's when the Formal Documentation says "Use the CLONE command to produce an exact copy of a server ..."; and when I execute the command, the code says "I don't understand the command 'clone'...." So I dig into the source code and find that the actual command could be either 'clone-host' or 'clone-hosts', depending on whether I need the only the binary executables copied or both the binaries and the configuration settings. And, 'clone-hosts' appears nowhere in the Doc.... One of them made the mistake of telling me rather snottily that one of my foundlings was a known bug, reported back in 2003. He got an immediate 'That was two plus years ago, and you haven't bothered to fix it?'! His boss took a somewhat dim view as well. If I am not careful, I may find myself invited in as a maintainer if a couple of the hairier pieces of infra-structure. I don't have anything better to do than insist that my tools be usable by Mere Mortals.
On the home front, my Mother Died last Wednesday (5/9). In the first week of March, I got a call from my Sister in Buffalo; she had just heard from my younger brother in Denver that Mother had been taking into the Hospital with a diagnosis of 'congestive heart-failure' the preceding week-end. I did a quick 'drop everything and fly to Denver' for almost a week, while she stabilized. The three siblings had a discussion with the Doctors and moved Mother from the hospital into a recuperative-care facility rather than back into he apartment. The prognosis was not at all favorable -- at almost 93, the systems start shutting down. I got a call from my brother in Denver on May 1st, things were not looking good. So I flew back on the fourth and she died five days later. So it goes.
I rode up to Portland for the Open Source Convention again this year. It was a better ride this year, partly because I started two hours earlier in the day and did the "ride 25 minutes, rest 5" trick all the way up and back. I had no repeat of the borderline heat-stroke of last year, and I still made reasonable time. The OS Con was as it always is too much data and not enough time to absorb it all. I picked up a dozen books that I need to read (one of them that would have been really useful to have read six months ago); three or four interesting projects to keep on the radar; and (maybe) committed myself to a "Master's Thesis" project. We'll see.
Addendum -- all the best intentions; I wrote this a year ago -----
At work, we have had five of the Principal Design Engineers move. Three to different parts of of the company, two to start-ups. There has been a great deal of flummery figuring out some the code and the (unwritten) process documentation. Add this to an aggressive roll-out schedule for new versions of old products and a couple of entirely new products and we have been rode hard and put away wet most weeks. I have started becoming a thorn on the side of a couple of the Senior Engineers, I keep believing that the Formal Documentation should match the behavior of the actual code. I can deal with 'documentation bugs' -- where to printed matter doesn't quite completely describe the actual behavior of the Program. It's when the Formal Documentation says "Use the CLONE command to produce an exact copy of a server ..."; and when I execute the command, the code says "I don't understand the command 'clone'...." So I dig into the source code and find that the actual command could be either 'clone-host' or 'clone-hosts', depending on whether I need the only the binary executables copied or both the binaries and the configuration settings. And, 'clone-hosts' appears nowhere in the Doc.... One of them made the mistake of telling me rather snottily that one of my foundlings was a known bug, reported back in 2003. He got an immediate 'That was two plus years ago, and you haven't bothered to fix it?'! His boss took a somewhat dim view as well. If I am not careful, I may find myself invited in as a maintainer if a couple of the hairier pieces of infra-structure. I don't have anything better to do than insist that my tools be usable by Mere Mortals.
On the home front, my Mother Died last Wednesday (5/9). In the first week of March, I got a call from my Sister in Buffalo; she had just heard from my younger brother in Denver that Mother had been taking into the Hospital with a diagnosis of 'congestive heart-failure' the preceding week-end. I did a quick 'drop everything and fly to Denver' for almost a week, while she stabilized. The three siblings had a discussion with the Doctors and moved Mother from the hospital into a recuperative-care facility rather than back into he apartment. The prognosis was not at all favorable -- at almost 93, the systems start shutting down. I got a call from my brother in Denver on May 1st, things were not looking good. So I flew back on the fourth and she died five days later. So it goes.
I rode up to Portland for the Open Source Convention again this year. It was a better ride this year, partly because I started two hours earlier in the day and did the "ride 25 minutes, rest 5" trick all the way up and back. I had no repeat of the borderline heat-stroke of last year, and I still made reasonable time. The OS Con was as it always is too much data and not enough time to absorb it all. I picked up a dozen books that I need to read (one of them that would have been really useful to have read six months ago); three or four interesting projects to keep on the radar; and (maybe) committed myself to a "Master's Thesis" project. We'll see.
Addendum -- all the best intentions; I wrote this a year ago -----