Daemons, spawning, and the reaper

Did you ever hear something said in a meeting that just seemed like it could be delivered in a completely different setting?

Today, ah what a kind of a strange day, but that's a story for another time.

But I digress...

So, I called a meeting today to try to get to the bottom of problems with the release of a new product.

Normally, my boss doesn't want me to micro manage, so I didn't. But this project, no micro management is required. Maybe I should have known that, but I'm still working on my ESP rating.

But I digress...

So in the meeting, the following statement was made "The spawned daemon had two parents because the reaper had not killed one of them yet."

No, I've been involved in software engineering for over 25 years, but that statement sounded like it should be coming from "Dawn of the Dead" or something like that.

It actually had to do with a defect that was logged against a Java service that was part of the application.
But taken out of context, who knows!

RSVP - New Meanings ,,,

So RSVP, more commonly know as Resource ReSerVation Protocol. A protocol used in VoIP. Oh another one, Voice over IP.
Oh another one, internet protocol.

But that is not the subject of this post. This is another case of mergers between traditional terms and hi tech acronyms
Traditionally, RSVP is the French etymology for "please reply". Trying google'ing RSVP. I think you go through a few pages before you find this meaning.

Well, at this juncture, it is the traditional definition that conerns me the most; "Please Reply".
This is because my only daughter, my only child, is getting married this weekend. In T-6 days she'll be married, new name, new home. So RSVP has been of great importance.

Who's coming, who's not?
How many are coming?
Where are they staying?
How are they getting there?
Where are they sitting?

Funny I don't remember worrying about all these things when I got married. I was probably too much in shock to worry about details.

I've tried to come up with other explanations for RSVP. You know. Funny ones related to weddings, marriage, etc.

Relative Surprive Visit Problems
Real Serious Virtual Planning

See, having a hard time with this one. Any suggestions?

Anyway, the countdown has officially begun. I've even praticed falling while walking down the isle.
Just in case I can tuck and roll and be back up without missing a beat. Of course, if I really tripped I'd probably land flat on my face and stay there.

Sync'd Up Follow-up

This is a follow-up on a recent post regarding the blending of the MAC, PC, and Pocket PC using Missing Sync as the blender.
Basically, this was done to allow me to keep all three platforms in sync with all my "important" data.

So far, it had been working pretty well. Couple glitches here and there with Missing Sync, but nothing I couldn't overcome or workaround. The new 2.0.2 beta release also helped.

Anyway, one problem I did run into was the partnership between my Pocket PC and my WindowsXP system got hosed. Now if this ever happened to you, you know what a pain it can be to change the name on the pocket pc, re-sync everything, and then re-authorize any software that was tied to the name of the PocketPC, which some of them are surprisingly.

I wish I had read the linked article ahead of time. It's a bit dated but still pretty much on the money regarding the registry entries used in managing the partnership. Trust me, it's better to have this stuff backed up then trying to recreate it by hand. Obviously, registry editing is not for the faint of heart. But exporting and importing valid data removes some of the risks.

Although there are many sights that say you can not re-establish a partnership between a PPC and host PC, that is not the case. I was able to do this by finding the correct PId value in the referenced partnership registry entries and re-enter that along with the host computer name on my PPC. I missed one step somewhere, because when I sync'd it saw all the contact entries as new. I think I should have just said to override with the host pc values.

Long story short, when you create an ActiveSync partnership between two devices backup the registry entries on both the Host PC and the PocketPC. If the partnership ever gets corrupted or lost due to battery failure, you can recreate it in short order.

FMP - What does it really mean?

FMP - another of those workplace acronyms. One that over the years has become all too common place, IMHO. In this case, it is Forced Management Program. Now that clears it up for you, doesn't it. Sounds like there are managers that don't want to manage, right? Yeah, not so much.

You probably know this by many other names: Personnel Reduction, Lay Off, Down Sizing, Right Sizing, etc.
In a twisted sort of way, it is forced management. I'm given oh about 30 minutes to review the past effectiveness, future potential, impact on current and future projects of a staff of roughly 70 people. In that time, I'm charged with determining who's lives I'm going to turn upside down. No second guessing, no sleeping on it, just decide. "And no. You can't discuss this with any of your managers for current assessments." Guess that's why I get the "BIG" bucks.

If you can't tell, I have a major problem with this. True there are departments that don't pull their own weight based on revenue and expenses. My team, since our acquisition 7 years ago, has continued to have stable or moderate growth in revenues; continued to have very good margins for software sales, continued to produce new products and updates to old products, and continued to "balance" the books for a lot of legacy software products with 1 or 2 customers. But I'm not at all bitter they also decided to cut my staff.

So for the next couple weeks, I am forced to manage my staff as if nothing is going to change. I will be forced to not react as my managers tell me we are short staff on committed deliveries. I will be forced to face those targeted in the next round of FMP's and act as if nothing is wrong. All this, wondering "Hmm, am I on my manager's list?"

The last I'm not so worried about. In some ways, it would give me some peace of mind. Part of me says "It's not your fault, don't worry about it." That's not the part that keeps me up at night and will probably do so for the next couple weeks ...
until I am forced to finally face those targeted by the latest round of FMP's.

PVS - Pre/Post vacation Syndrome

Still coming down from the recent vacation...

It seems to me that I always suffer from PVS, Pre and Post Vacation Syndrome. Let me explain. See if this sounds familiar ...

Pre Vacation Syndrome

So, its the week before vacation. Of course, the world doesn't stop while your on vacation either. The emails keep pouring in. Meetings continue to be scheduled for you, regardless of the fact that your "online calendar" shows that you are unavailable. So, you scramble to get all your ducks in a row; change the voicemail message; turn on the out of office assistant in email; get people to cover important meeting for you, etc.

Let's not forget all the planning and logistics on the home front. The mail, the pets, the house, the packing, trying to whittle down the list of "gadgets" and gear and their chargers.

So by the time the vacation starts you really need it due to the stress of getting ready for the vacation.

I have gotten much better at winding down and letting it all go once I'm at the vacation destination, or the last leg of the flight in the recent case. I still get chastised by friends and family for checking email on vacation. But now, I really just monitor it and really only reply to friends and family. Come to think of it, why are they sending me emails when they know I'm on vacation?

Post Vacation Syndrome

Ok, so now it's time to return from vacation. Can't believe it's over already! You had back with the euphoric silly grin on your face. Feeling refreshed physically and mentally.

My former boss used to wait for me when I returned. Usually welcome was "Have a nice vacation? Nice and relaxed? I can fix that!" Now by boss is remote from my location. Still sort of the same effect, but not quite so "in your face" with it.

It's now more my staff that has this effect. The larger the staff, the more issues, right? All the things they didn't want to bother me with while I was away are lined up waiting for attention. I've learned over the years to ease back into work, for the sake of my sanity and my wife's. Emails, well they can wait. Voicemails, they knew I was out when the left it. Let's just start with today's emails.

Well that works for the first hour or two. Then the daily grind kicks in with meetings andconferencee calls and a relentless stream of emails with their little reminders demanding attention. Usually, by the end of the second day vacation is a distant memory. Gone is the euphoria. Gone is the silly grin. Ah, but the memories remain.

I usually like to change my background to a recent picture just to remind myself I was on vacation.
Looking forward to planning the next one already even with the pre and post vacation syndrome.

In the shadow of Katrina

This is not my typical entry. Hmm. Not sure I have a typical post yet. I guess that's a good thing. Anyway ...

I happend to be on vacation in the South Eastern US during landfall of Katrina and its immediate aftermath.
Travelling to GA, there happened to be a large number of armed service personnel on our plane returning from Iraq.
The flight crew gave these brave individuals the recognition and consideration that they deserved during the flight.
Most were only home for a 2 week leave.

In hind sight, I couldn't helping wondering how many were flying into the eye of the storm, literally.

On our return flight, there were also a large number of service personnel. While waiting to board it was obvious that these people were saying good bye. Fathers and mothers saying good bye to their families and friends, some sitting alone ... waiting.

Once on the board, the flight crew again gave the troops the public recognition they deserved. The reaction from the troops was much more subdued, for obvious reasons.

I also realized those young men and women on the first flight, would be back here in these seats in another 7 days.

Sync'd Up

I happen to work for a company that had a marketing line referring to "Blended Lifestyles". When I first heard it I thought ... "Hmm, is that gay and straights living together or conservatives and liberals or traditional families and not so traditional families or ..." Nah. None of those. It was simply a blend of technologies seamlessly integrated, video, voice, text, data, etc.

Now you might be wondering what that has to do with being "Sync'd up". Interestingly enough, very little. But I too feel as though I have finally conquered some level of blended technologies on a personal note.

See, I am forced to use a IBM Thinkpad with Windows XP, Outlook and Exchange at work. But, as I may have said earlier, I've gone MAC and I ain't goin' back. I've come to use my Powerbook at work running RDC to access my XP system. But I also still use my PocketPC, which at this point, I'd have a really hard time giving up.

So my dilemma, how do I keep my PocketPC, Outlook on XP, and iCal and Address Book on the MAC all sync'd up?

Well it took some doing. Short answer : Missing Sync for Windows Mobile

But the road I chose to take was quite a bit longer. I tried a number of different "solutions" involving shared group calendars between the OS X and XP, setting up Apache and Tomcat on OS X, and different flavors of OS X to PocketPC sync software. Some other applicatons attempted were XCConnect and PocketMAC.

Either due to my inability to "configure" things properly or gaping holes in the functionallity all other solutions failed miserably. Believe me, I worked with each of these until I just couldn't take it anymore. Let me be the first to blame the failures on pilot error. If I can't get something working in a few days that I plan to use every day, it's probably not worth it.

While Missing Sync is working well now, it wasn't without its miss queues. But the latest release seemed to have addressed most of the issues.

So, I typically, use four categories in Outlook, or 4 Calendar Groups in iCal; Work, Home, Holiday, Birthday. Birthdays and Holdays can be imported into Outlook as add-ins. In iCal, they are add as read only calendars (Birthdays and US Holidays), which Missing Sync doesn't support. So, this is what I ended up doing...

Birthdays and Anniversary events in Outlook I categorized using a new category Outlook Birthdays.

I sync Work, Home, Outlook Birthdays, and Holidays from the Outlook on XP to the Pocket PC.
Under OS X, I sync Work, Home, Outlook Birthdays, and Holidays.
So under OS X, I actually end up with the six categories (Work, Home, Birthdays (OS X), US Holidays (OS X), Outlook Birthdays (XP) and Holidays (XP). I don't display the Outlook Birthdays or Holidays from XP under OS X.
On the Pocket PC, I end up with the same categories as XP.

Confused yet. Yeah, me too. But it does seem to work. Continuing on from here, it seems as though I can drop the OS X Birthdays and US Holidays calendars. I guess I want to wait a while to see how all this hangs together.

The only issue outstanding with Missing Sync is that it seems to have a CPU utilization issue. Waiting on a response to that.
But after several weeks of trial and error, I finally feel like I'm sync'd up on all three fronts.

Take stock in stock?

Well, that would depend on the company you keep ... or the company you work for.
Never, have I seen an industry (or company more specifically) where your CEO announces to the street that "Oh yes. We have made our numbers, but we did it in an unexceptional way." Oh yeah, the street loves to hear that.

So we all bust our humps for a quarter at a time. Make our numbers through cuts and hard work. Then our CEO comes out with a statement like that. Our whimpering little (once very large) company takes it in the shorts again along with all of our investors. But I bet the CEO's retirement plan is uneffected. Probably gets that in cash not stock.

Bitter you say? No not me. Not at all. There are some far worse off than I.

Its amazing to see some writers with online services hit the nail on the head siting unexciting or nonexistant strategic vision.
That's it. That's the ticket.

Oh well, take stock in stock, but not ours.

Well, at least Monday only comes once a week.

Twosday

So, here I am sitting in a mall, sucking a connection from a Dell store on an Apple. There's some kind of twisted justice in there somewhere.

I work for a rather large telecomunications equipment company. My group does not however make equipment. No we develop software. The soft forgotten underbelly of the internet. Its not just routers and bandwidth. Its software driving those devices and providing the underlying services. Such as the DNS server that probably pointed you to this site.

Yeah, I know. You keyed in Blog on google and eventually you selected this site. How do you think you found google site? DNS, that's right.

How did you get your IP address from your ISP? Probably DHCP, right? What's an IP address? Well for those who don't know it is simply your address on the internet. It provide routing information to the sites you contact so that they know how to reach you online. Kind of like a return address. (Yes, I know I'm oversimplifying it.)

So, where was I, that's right. DNS, DHCP, IP Addresses and more. That's what team develops. I'm sure this isn't the thread that I had intended.

I know I was going to go off about the injustice that the larger organization forces upon my little software team. But the above, may have been more infromative. (And probably served to calm me down just a bit....)

Afterall, its all just 1's and 0's.

PMSR

So, I mentioned PMSR before. I think that stands for Project Management Statistic Report. I think. I honestly don't think anyone really knows except the person that cam up with it. What was that report from Office Space, the TPA report? Well this one beats that out. Its not done in triplicate, but it probably takes 2 or 3 people to put it together twice a month.

This report attempts to summarize a software project into a single spreadsheet. Everything from estimated effort to number of "planned" defects is contained in the report. Well its true that defects are expected to be found in any software project. But expecting something and planning for it are two different things, right? My hope springs eternal with every project that it will have 0 defects.

The other factor that drives me crazy with these is the color coding:
Green - Good. On target
Yellow - Not so good. Something is being missed.
Red - You've been bad.

Now the teams not wanting to go all the way to Yellow or Red, start coming up with their own colors. Yellow-Red, Green-Yellow, etc. Gets to be like the National Threat level. And that applies to the general reaction to the colors in the review meetings.

PMSR, the 4 little letters that drive fear into the engineers working on the product. Counting defects, counting lines of code, counting test cases, count everything all the time.

Ok, I have seen a glimmer of meaning in some of these metrics when looked at as trends. But they can never tell the true status of a project. Or measure the dedication of the staff working on the project and the likelihood that we will make it on time.

My best measure of the projected status of a project is how often my quality leads show up in my office in a week.
Maybe I should add that metric to the report.

Oh well, done venting for now. Next maybe I'll need to focus on the process of purchase approvals.

Live 8 (just one of the countless masses)

I'm sure all over the world, on web servers everywhere, posts on live 8 will be popping up. Some, at least 1 million around Philly, may not pop up until much later. Me, I'm at home, watching what's available on the music video channels.

My daughter is in the midst of the 1 million strong in Philadelphia. Having recently moved into the no-travel zone, she had easy access. I'm sure she'd be there anyway.

The One Campaign is not necissarily new to me. I've heard about it before and support the direct aid approach.
The one thing that impressed me, I'd have to say, Is that on the Live 8 and One websites, it was nearly impossible to find a link where you could actually donate. This give a lot of credence to the theme, we don't want your money, we want you name.

The message is clear concise and well presented.
The music, well that's the motivator to get people to listen.
Pray to God that they do.

So if you haven't gotten your name on the list, what are you waiting for.

Yeah but No

So, what exactly does "Yeah but No" really mean? We all have our own little quirks when we speak, right? Little mannerisms that sneak into our every day speech. Insidious little phrases.

Mine, I'm told is "aswell". He's going to lunch, as well. We need to review that PMSR report, as well. (PMSR we'll get into later, as well.)

Well another co-worker tends to use "Yeah but No" a great deal, as well. Now, I've tried to determine what exactly this means. But to no avail. Sometimes, "Yeah but No" means Yeah. And, you guessed it. Sometimes it means "No".

And surprisingly, sometimes it means Yeah but No. In other words, I agree with you, but you are wrong. Which is a clever way of telling someone you to go to ... well you get the idea. But at the same time you're saying, "Hey, save me a nice warm seat when you get there."

Then again, it could just be the most milk-toast, politically correct, non-committal, insecure expression that I have ever heard.

My First Blog (I'm so proud ... hehehe)

So, it has finally come to this. Blogging !
Who would have thought it possible !

Anyway, I have been an early adopter for a long time now. Not always on the bleeding edge of technology, but usually, at least, on the leading edge.

Not really sure why I haven't up until now. So, I started to review some blogs of some technical corporate leaders and figured, why not.

Better late than never!

Although, this will be posted anonymously ( for now ), I'm sure the techno babble that finds it way into his blog will undoubtedly strike a cord with anyone involved with large corporate America.

Happy reading!

p.s. Like some "other" things, I'm hoping this gets better and better with time.