The idea came to me to list the lab projects, their progress, and data.
You arrive here from the main page when you selected “Do It Yourself” .
Below will are links to read up on the details of any project journal.
Category: Technology
At a Bad Time ….
The phrase “at a bad time” seems to be the sweeping assesment of where we are in time and place right now. Many are the troubles of the ordinary people of America. Job loss, no healthcare, no money, no shelter, brutality, all seem to press hard against the American dream.
I would suggest that we begin all assesment with:”Is this at a bad time?”
A Good Read For Techies
I got this download today about Apache Kafka from this URL: https://assets.confluent.io/m/1b509accf21490f0/original/20170707-EB-Confluent_Kafka_Definitive-Guide_Complete.pdf
It is the open source of Confluents work. The guide is free. Give it a read if you make or maintain sites on the net.
A Good Read On Facebook Use
I had this pop up on an index page:
It seems UC San Diego and Yale researchers have identified how emotional health deteriorates with Facebook use. The nature of the virtual social environment creates an adverse emotional sense of well being.
It is probably better for you to talk to the person next to you in the coffee shop… BL
Core Competency…REALLY?
I was engaged recently in a project to identify the traffic on a global network to solve slowdowns in the work being performed by engineers on high performance workstations.
The most difficult part of the work was the total lack of tools. The second most difficult thing was the failure of the management to be concerned about that.
The mission was to gather requirements to be submitted to enterprise network plan, build, and run teams so that the slowdown problems could be remediated.
As I began the requests went in for basic information like a global network map, monitoring tools, and access to machines in order to place probes.
Network maps, either physical or logical, were non- existent.
The monitoring tool was a well known more than adequate management and performance monitoring system that I had used for many years. It was not set up properly, it could not retain much information for analysis, and custom reporting access was refused. It was installed in three regions without any joining together of the database backends.
Requests to get access to the machines to place probes was refused.
While this is going on I learn that the purchase of undersized, out of specification, equipment for a remediation of a site that was a decade overdue was being done so that a schedule was met and the money spent before the end of a fiscal cycle. The kind of work to be done on the site had no bearing on the decision.
One other interesting thing was that all datacenters were to be consolidated by collapsing them into fewer and fewer sites all colocated off-site from existing corporate sites.
Everyone in every technical discipline was concerned that the plan was inadequate and that given past practices the future was not going to be good.
The corporation was grown by acquisition. It was not grown by innovation. Decades old talent that had worked at the acquired organizations left in droves. Those that remained were waiting for their retirement.
When asked about why the organization would place their data centers into another organizations hands the reply was “It is not our core competency”.
Given the experience one wonders what is their core competency? I know! Pass the buck.
What My Cover Letter & Resume Should Say
The resume is too long. Yes the resume is long because I have worked for decades and all of it is relevant.
When using the Internet for collecting job offers one places resumes and cover letters on myriad sites. The fond hope is that carefully crafted work fits the requirements of the individual looking for talented people.
Unfortunately in this day and age the process is layered with several people or web forms prior to getting to the actual individuals that can judge one’s abilities.
This brings to mind thoughts of what I would rather have said when wordsmithing the erudite cover letter and resume.
What follows is a mixture of venting and fun at the expense of the reviewer of my submitted products. It is in the form of their response followed by my response.
1. The resume is too long. Yes the resume is long because I have worked for decades and all of it is relevant.
2. An inventory of skills is just a list of “buzzwords”? No you idiot they are the actual hands-on devices, applications, and systems used in my experience.
3. The form of the resume is not in the correct “person”. May I point out that the form is not in the correct person’s hand?
4. There are too many jobs in a short time frame. Yes consulting work runs a few months to a year or so; seldom longer unless hired into the organization.
5. There needs to be more narrative. Wait a minute. You just complained it was too long.
6. The content is too technical. Duh! Who is reading this?
7. I do not see any relevant experience. Could you if I gave it to you in any other form? A documentary maybe?
8. There are only successes shown in the resume. What?
9. You should have a professional write you a resume. Would you recommend your secretary?
10. You should have a professional write you a resume. You were right…….and the massage was fantastic!
The Coming Software Apocalypse
Please read this article:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-coming-software-apocalypse?utm_source=pocket-newtab
It describes the fundamental flaw in the way most code is produced today and what tools and methods have been produced and used to make software safer.
It is a “must read”!
Bad Men with Personal Agendas
I recently finished a permanent position after taking too much abuse. It was a toxic environment where my team was constantly overburdened without regard for anything but covering the boss’s incompetence, lack of honesty, rudeness, egocentric behavior, over commitment of our time, technological incompetence, and misuse of the corporate human resource process.
I cussed the man vigorously to his face. He was a liar and he only sought to eliminate my efforts to repair long standing technological missteps. In the guise of the pursuit of perfection, all team and individual efforts were regarded as insufficient or incompetent. I have lived too long and done too much to accept that assessment.
The really bad news is that this boss rides herd on the systems that take care of the collection and distribution of the blood supply. He is uneducated and only has the experience of that business and a limited previous work life.
The idea of work life balance is lost on that individual as they have no family, spouse, children, or significant other to care for in this life.
The same individual appears to not have any social skills related to mixing with people and having sensitivity or compassion for others.
A nerd run amok.
Undefined Expectations
The process of building IT infrastructure is particularly difficult when the managers you’re working for do not express specifications or expectations. To exacerbate this the method of tasking one to perform work and then roundly chastising them for not fulfilling the manager’s every expectation is somewhat of a manic behavior.
This behavior is common in the middle management of organizations today.The managers are ill-trained and ill-prepared to deliver the demands of their superiors. The demands or expectations exceed reason in that they do not have adequate specification nor do they contain the fundamental information necessary to produce the outcomes desired and expected by those managers and their superiors. This is largely caused by their ignorance of the technology.
The worst offenders in this case are those that once had their hands and minds in the work but now, in order to make the better paycheck, have been promoted to oversight and do not maintain a daily “hands-on” knowledge. They will spew things like “it must be perfect” without expressing any specifications whatsoever.
This all begs the question of how does one work in an environment like that? You would have to be able to take a beating on a regular basis without complaining nor being bothered by the fact that you are not appreciated. You would have to accept the fact that your skills would be deemed inadequate in the eyes of those managers. Lastly, your future paycheck is at risk.
Does this seem to be a reasonable observation?
Testing Without Touching
PSYCHIC SHOE REPAIR
That is a real sign on Thomas Road in Phoenix Arizona. It is also the summary of what some enterprise managers want in terms of obtaining telemetry for performance measurement in data networks.
One cannot use the network to measure the network. One cannot have access to capture data packets. Existing enterprise tools, that they provide, do not have any capacity to give one critical performance data. How then is one to do performance engineering?
The answer was there on the sign all the time!