jducoeur

[Happy birthday to laurion!]

So my office is currently prepping to move. This is often cause for trauma, and I'm sure that for some people this one is. (Heaven knows, I don't envy the IT dept, who are pulling long hours getting ready for it.) But for me, it's an unambiguous win.

As it happens, the company is violating The Primal Law of Office Moves -- we are *not* moving closer to the CEO's house. In fact, we're currently about 2 miles from his house and are now moving to a bit of a commute. I quite respect the way the company dealt with the move (although I suppose it wasn't surprising for a company that has a math department): they apparently did an inventory of the employees and where they lived, mapped it all out, figured out the rough geographic center, and looked for a location around there.

That geographic center turns out to be more or less Network Drive -- the Sun campus in Burlington. They managed to find a sublet there that is utterly gorgeous: good location, excellent on-campus facilities (I am looking forward to exploring the "Sun Campus Amenities Center", which is the hyper-fancy cafeteria), a big sunny office, even exceptionally great-looking cube furniture. (The desks have eensy cranks that let you raise and lower the desktop!) And it's maybe four miles from my house, to boot. Kind of a sucky bicycle ride due to the hills and traffic, but I'm seriously considering getting myself a Vespa or something for it.

The only downside is, of course, that this week is a lot like the week before vacation: I'm almost counting the minutes until the move begins. This is only made worse by the current commute -- Route 62 in West Concord (a few blocks from the current office) is under Construction. Not little namby-pamby construction like you see in most places, with a little rough pavement and a few potholes. I mean a stretch of a mile or two that is randomly down to One Lane Dammit (with cops acting as traffic lights for which direction gets to move next), pavement simply missing in favor of rocks and dirt, and potholes that would do well for hiding an entire unit in the Pennsic Woods Battle. For five minutes a day, I find myself wishing I had an off-road vehicle.

Well, we're getting close. Thursday evening, we all get kicked out of the office so that IT can spend Friday ripping everything out; Saturday, the movers come; Monday, we start in the new place. And in the meantime, the place looks a bit like the last week of college, with everybody living out of the shipping crates that we're already packing in anticipation of the day...

In preparation for our office move, the folks who supply our water filtration system, who would *desperately* like us to buy coffee from them as well, have given us a week or so free with their top of the line Goofy Coffee Machine.

On the one hand, it's quite the impressive gadget. Any coffee maker that not only has menus on an LCD screen, but has multiple *levels* of menus, definitely qualifies as a toy. They supplied us with a couple dozen varieties of things to put into it, including mixins like Milky Way and Dove Bar, to ensure that one associates this thing with indulgent sins. (Of course, it loses gadget points by requiring you to do work -- you navigate the menus to select what you want, and then it pops open the door and tells you which packets to put in. And really, I would probably say that putting the words "coffeemaker" and "on-screen menus" in the same sentence qualifies as Wrong.)

OTOH, it's pretty horrifying from an ecological POV, managing to require one or more big plastic-and-foil pouches per 6 oz cup. Fortunately, this isn't an issue, because it's all pretty terrible: the coffee manages to be both weak and bitter, and the tea is watery and uninteresting. So I suspect we will go back to our Plain Old Coffee from our Plain Old Coffeemaker after the move...

Starting Monday, I'll be working at Memento Security, which is where I've been consulting in recent months. I got pulled into there by Tonytip, my co-Architect at Convoq/Zingdom, and we've been dancing around each other for a few months now, with them trying to hire me and me shying away -- the aforementioned four-day work week is the compromise we settled on, which I think will work well for everyone.

I'm not going to be able to talk about work in as much detail as I've typically done at previous jobs, by the nature of the firm -- Memento is all about fraud detection and management for big enterprise customers. Not as sexy as the Internet stuff I've been doing recently, but it seems to be a good company that can use my skills. And it does have the unusual quality of being a startup that actually has a rock-solid business plan that they are executing on quite nicely, well-capitalized and with an extremely high likelihood of long-term success at this point.

(In the meantime, I still have CommYou to keep me out on the cutting edge, both in terms of concept and technology. One reason why things have ground to a halt for four months is that I've been teaching myself enough to begin a more or less ground-up rewrite, in a new architecture based on Scala Actors and focusing on the XMPP interface. I'd been hoping to avoid it, but I've come to mostly think of the current system as a prototype; this version is going to be designed with a more plausible scaling model, and focus on work more correctly. Once the wheels start grinding forward, it should start getting rather interesting.)

Anyway, one of the major amusements of the new position is, of course, my title. I continue to be reminded that titles mean absolutely nothing in software. My past five titles, in order, have been:

• Director of Technology,


• Senior Software Engineer,


• Senior Principal Software Engineer,


• Architect,


• and now, Senior Consulting Engineer.

They have all meant exactly the same thing, in practice -- very high-level technical non-specialist, with a remit to understand the company's technology broadly, be part of the leadership team, and work at mentoring the more junior engineers...

Thanks to mindways for the link to this fine little essay, about the fact that modern society, too often, separates activities too neatly into the buckets of "career" and "hobby", missing the fact that there are vocations that don't necessarily match either well.

This point comes quite personally to me right at the moment. Indeed, it's been the main focus of the negotiations over my new job -- I think they've been a bit puzzled over my demand for a four-day week. The CEO even said, when I was interviewing with him, "Never confuse your career with your hobbies". And that's true, but kind of misses the point.

For me, the CommYou project has become something of a calling. I've been forced to recognize that it's not necessarily a career: while I might someday make money off of it, I can't count on that. But it's by no means a "hobby", either -- there's a connotation of casualness about "hobby" that doesn't fit here. While the damned project is moving far, far slower than I'd like, it is something I *have* to do, just as much as a writer must write or a painter must paint.

Hence the four-day work week. If I tried to put CommYou purely on the back burner, I'd never be able to do a real day job: it would consume and frustrate me. So instead, I'm employing my long-practiced skill at separating the parts of my life: I can keep CommYou in a box if and only if there is a decent-sized box to put it into. Four days a week belong to the job that pays real money; one goes to the calling. I suspect it's actually going to work better than the consulting gig did -- by having clearer lines of what time belongs to whom (as well as physical separation of *where* I do each, and on what computers), I should be able to *focus* on both better than I've been doing, which will help me really get going on CommYou 2.0...

This month has been a somewhat tough one emotionally. This is largely because, about four weeks after I started, I now have a program that prints, "Hello, Mark Waks!" (plus, as of this morning, the last time I logged in).

Mind, I haven't exactly been quiet for the past month. The program:

• Uses Apache Tomcat to serve that string out via a servlet;


• Has a JSON-based Ajax interface to allow the static webpage to fetch the data from the servlet;


• Integrates the MooTools Javascript toolkit to signal when the page is ready (and will use it for lots of UI shortly);


• Runs inside of Facebook as an application, and fetches the user's data via the Facebook APIs;


• Uses Hiberate to generate all of the data-manipulation code, and to talk to a MySQL database on the back end;


• Implements the Ecology pattern that I'm so fond of as a program-lifecycle and discovery model, and has a bunch of specialty classes to make JSON and Hibernate and such all play together nice and transparently, and allows me to extend the program API trivially;


• and has automated functional tests that use Selenium to open the browser, navigate through FB to the app, and check the results. (No unit tests, admittedly, but that's intentional -- I've always focused more on functional tests than unit tests.)

So basically, I have a program that does nothing -- but does it *really* well.

This is all more or less according to plan. One of the precepts of at least some forms of Agile Development is the "slice of cake" model. You do your work in slices, and each is pretty thin, representing just a single bit of functionality, but each slice should cut all the way across the system, doing it all correctly. That first slice is always the hardest, because it requires you to set up the bulk of your infrastructure. With that done, it becomes much easier to add each feature as a proper little increment.

Realistically, I knew this was all going to take a while. I've never even touched most of those technologies before, so there has been a great deal of self-education in the past month, to get to the point where I can get each one up and running. It's taken about a week longer than intended, mostly because the documentation for this stack is rather less well-organized than the Microsoft stuff I'm used to. (And yes, that comment is as scathing as it sounds, but it's probably inevitable given how much open source I'm using here.)

None of which makes me any more content about having so little to show for a month's work. But with any luck, by the end of next month I'll have made quite a lot more progress...

So it's taken two months to sink in that, if I'm working at home, I can finally use Internet Radio to my heart's content while working, without an IT department grumbling about my bandwidth usage or someone in the next cube getting cranky about the noise.

I *really* hope I can make a go of this. So far, the process isn't sucking. But now I need to find some decent radio stations on iTunes. Any recommendations?

This morning, with no warning or notice, they starting blocking inbound port 80 to my house. Given that I am trying to get some work done here, that's more than a little rude, especially since the inbound traffic is essentially trivial -- it's just for test purposes, not a real public website, so we're talking something on the order of tens of K. No idea whether it was an across-the-board change, or specifically targeted at me.

Fortunately, it's easy enough to work around (the nice thing about developing a Facebook app is that the layer of indirection means that I can redirect the port at the FB layer without any change at the user level), but it continues to increase my desire to quit this annoying company. Do I understand correctly from recent conversations that RCN (for a small surcharge) allows inbound port 80? That alone might get me to sign up for them for Internet, given how incompetent Comcast has been lately. (Have I mentioned that outbound email through Comcast has been consistently failing for us for the past two days?)

For now, I seem to be back up and running. I'm tentatively assuming that they simply noticed my inbound port 80 traffic and chose to shut it down. (Although, in that case, I have no idea why they were allowing it previously.) If I find that my new port gets blocked as well, it means that they're sniffing my traffic and looking for HTTP, in which case I'm simply out of here -- we're paying them a small fortune per month, and if they want our money to go elsewhere that much, we can probably oblige them...

As things slowly grind into motion for the CommYou project, I'm realizing that I really do want to get a Linux box up and running here soon, to serve as my development server. There are a bunch of things I need to set up to get a dev server right, and I don't want to do them on the Windows box, only to have to repeat the process again in a few weeks on Linux. So I may as well move this along.

Problem is, I'm a total neophyte to Linux -- the last time I was deeply Unix-savvy was in the early days of Solaris, and there's a lot of water under the bridge since then. So I'm looking for advice, tips, and generally gotchas that I should look out for.

My current theory is that I'll take our old Windows desktop machine, and repurpose it. It's a bit behind the times, but not terrible: it was running XP just fine until we switched machines, and that upgrade was only because the hard drive was giving ominous errors. It's a very ordinary machine (a Compaq desktop from Costco), so I assume that the drivers are readily available. So I figure I'll buy a clean new hard drive, swap that in, and install a Linux distro over that.

That, however, is where questions come in. I know precious little about the distros, save that Red Hat is the old and famous one, and Ubuntu is reputed to have the least-bad UI. My needs are fairly straightforward: I need a machine that'll host Subversion, probably a Java/ANT build environment, and maybe Tomcat/Apache. (I'm currently serving Tomcat off of my development laptop, and may stay that way: it makes for an easier debugging experience.) This will be the machine that needs to be backed up, since it'll have the repository, so I'll probably want both an external hard drive with some kind of incremental backup software, and an online/offsite backup plan. I probably don't *need* much by way of an OS-level GUI, but I'm used to having one by now, so I have mixed feelings about how much I care.

Given all that, any opinions about which distro is most appropriate to my needs? Also, how does the process work? Do I just slap in the blank hard drive, put in a CD, and let it go, or are there complications I need to be aware of? I've never formatted a PC from scratch before (yes, really -- I am a wizard with software, but know bugger-all about hardware and IT), so I'm genuinely unsure of where to start.

Related to all this, I need to at least start thinking about an ISP for CommYou, that is used to reasonably normal JSP/Java/MySQL stacks. Ideally, I'm looking for a company that has both ends in terms of scale, and experience with rapid migration. That is, I'm looking for an inexpensive plan to start, while I'm still in alpha, but it is entirely possible that I might have to scale *way* up very quickly. So I am hoping for somewhere that has both an entry-level $250/month plan for now, and can kick up to a fully-hosted cluster reasonably quickly.

(Yes, I know: it is far more economically sensible to host my own machines at a colo if it gets that big. But it'll require hiring knowledgeable people and dealing with having a staff, and I do not anticipate that process being quick or smooth. So I'd like to have an option available to keep it hosted externally for a while, while the company grows into its feet.)

So, any recommendations? There are zillions of options out there, but I'm hoping for some information about which are better or worse.

As for the project itself, it's moving about as fast as expected -- that is, not as quickly as I'd like, but no major snafus yet. The initial "Hello, Mark" application is up and running on Facebook. That isn't especially impressive, but given that this is the first time I've done anything with Java/Tomcat, and I'm wading through large amounts of incomprehensible Facebook documentation, I'll take that as a first step for a week or so's work. Next comes writing the skeletal test harness, and getting the database hooked in. (Time to figure out if Hibernate really is the right tool for the job...)

Note to self: the interaction of cats and power switches can be unfortunate. I really need a new power strip, that's not quite so easy for someone chasing a ball to turn off.

(OTOH, the nice thing about using a laptop as my primary dev machine is that I didn't actually lose anything...)

[Happy imminent birthday to ladysprite!]

It seems that someone pointed Mass High Tech, one of the local high-tech newsmagazines, at my journal entry about the end of Zingdom. (Anyone care to own up to it?) Which is okay -- a little publicity is never a bad thing -- but I have to wonder what the heck they thought they were reading. The article:

• Calls me by my SCA name, not my mundane one (okay, a reasonable confusion, but in that case I wonder how they got to me -- did the unnamed source not tell them who they were looking at?);


• Thinks I was the System Administrator (I was one of the System *Architects* -- the admin job was quite capably handled by Steve Dukas, and I have no damned idea *where* they got the idea that I was ever an admin);


• Claims that my posting said that the company was down to a handful of people at the end (which it was, but I never actually said that anywhere);


• Mixed up the Relay and Spark projects (a plausible misreading of Chris' post, but indicates that they weren't reading carefully).

I appreciate that they have a lot of news to cover, so they have to read quickly, but I have to say, I hope this isn't representative of their usual accuracy level...