So, as a nerd (I know what a shocking confession!), it was nice to see my employer sponsor the documentary Nerdcore Rising’s first showing here in Boston. It was also nice to they gave me a free ticket to see it. What was awesome is that the movie is actually really freakin’ good, and MC Frontalot’s music is pretty awesome to boot. So if you are interested in something new, I’d highly recommend taking a brief moment of your time and request a screening of the movie using this link. You don’t have to BE a nerd to appreciate this film of course, though if you need any more help understanding them (us) the film may help.
Well due to conking out in the afternoon for seemingly no reason (doctor think it’s related to sleep apnea which Ive had has as long as I can remember) now I’m up. Gahhh. Anyway, was thinking that I never heard back from Val about Pico’s passing away. Val if you’re out there please drop me a line, I hope all is okay with you.
Didnt get as much of the undo code wirtten for nano as I would have liked this weekend, may have to release 2.1.1 without it due to the number of fixes that are in it and to keep interest up.
Guess I’ll try to hit the sack again.
Oh, since all 0 of you noticed, the CMatrix site is now working again 
Well, I promised myself (not a New Years’ resolution, mind you) that I would donate to more open source projects these days, since I have been programming publicly less nowadays. Finally got a chance today as I booted up my neglected desktop yesterday to find out that my partition table had been erased. What fun!
Since the only data on there that really matters belongs to the wife, I had to make an attempt to recover those partitions. So first stop is of course the popup-ridden download.com. Plenty of commercial stuff out there, starting at $40 and going up to $200 for a reasonable recovery feature set. Or better yet, how about you pay by the megabyte restored! Absolutely unbelievable. This simply wont do.
So, after my search for ‘partition recovery’ turned up more than one page of results, as a laugh I clicked on the licenses filter and selected ‘Free’. Lo and behold I find a program called testDisk which actually had some positive reviews, and it was even Free as in speech (GPLed)! So I download it to a thumb drive, boot up an Ubuntu livecd, then extract the tarball on the desktop and run the testdisk-static binary, fully expecting it to throw up in my face. Surprisingly, it found every single Linux partition I had lost and recovered them without issue!
Needless to say I was impressed. So having just saved at least $4o I felt I had found my first project to donate to, and I did. I hope this will be the first in a series of entries about free software projects I feel are worth donating to. If you’re the go-to-tech support person for your friends and family, you owe it to yourself to at least try out testDisk. If it works for you and you realize how much money you’ve saved, why not throw em a few bucks? They suggest 25 euros, but accept any amount.
On my programming end, it’s rather unannounced as of yet (and since no one reads this I think it will stay that way) but I’m about 75% done with the implementation of rebindable shortcut keys on nano. Not sure if I’ll get the initialization file code written and debugged enough to commit tonight, but here’s hoping. Then it’s time to finally take a crack and a real undo function, and suddenly there’s a reason to have a new nano development branch.
So back in September of ‘06, I wrote a little post on how my employer ITA Software was the best place I had ever worked. At the time I was in what could be considered a ‘honeymoon’ period having only been there about six months. I figured since I’m approaching my two year anniversary, this would be a good time to look back and compare what I said then to today.
Ill keep the rehash short and just present the bullet points from the old post (which you can still access on the old page) and comment how how things are now. First the good stuff:
- No computer I use at work has any version of Windows on it. Check. And still just as important to me as it was then!
- Work environment in general. Yup. For the most part ITA feels like working at a dot-com without the stupid excesses of a dot com. Still no dress code, probably some implied rules for those that visit the airlines on-site (like hey no F’word on your shirt), but in my case there’s 0% travel and I’m quite happy about that.
- The company is okay with exprimenting with new things, even non-trivial ones. Yup we still do this. I think a lot of the major pieces of infrastructure are certainly changing at a slower rate now, but if something isn’t working we still seem to have people gutsy (crazy?) enough to try swapping them out en masse, once it’s tested of course.
- My manager is a genius. A few months after I wrote my article my genius manager was promoted to manage/architect a different group. We still see each other, and I love my new manager, but I’ll admit I miss taking orders from my old boss, my opinion of whom has only gone up with time.
- I sometimes feel like I’m not smart enough to work here. There are still people, both old timers and even new hires, who are absolutely brilliant, prolific hackers. That said, people don’t make you feel stupid, ever. We just have enough different code, installations and components that it’s possible to have been around for a long time and still not have much knowledge about something. The important part is realizing everyone is smart in their own way.
- Last but not least - No one asked me to write this. This is of course still the case. Even though we’re a much bigger company than we were I think ITA still has some very interesting positions open. I have referred every person I know who I think is good enough to work here and is not otherwise tied to a location.
Then there was the full disclosure stuff:
- To be fair, the rate at which things happen is unsettling… Still somewhat the case; actually since I’m more familiar with more stuff it seems like more things are changing than before. But with familiarity what would probably have seemed like a huge change seems not so huge today.
- The work we do is also very complex, and the learning curve is enormous. This is still the case, but in operations we have some very nice (and by now mature) tools to help make our lives much much manageable. New folks in my group seem to come up to speed a little faster than I did, which seems to corroborate this.
- On call can be murder. Here there is just no comparision. On-call in my group nowadays is a cake walk compared to what it was. Sure stuff still breaks, and we certainly have more customers and more machines which can have problems. But with our tools, redundancy, and improved monitoring, things just are just an order of magnitude more robust and we can often fix things well before customers notice.
- My commute is the longest I’ve ever had… Well, honestly my commute has gotten longer, but I like where I live much better. Each person has their own idea of what’s important and their own budget for housing. Based on those factors Im pretty happy with my commute and living situation all things considered.
Anyway, there you have it, most things better, a few things probably about the same. I have a longer commute, but that’s hardly ITA’s fault. Anyway, if you’re a Unix sysadmin or programmer (especially python), I dont think there is a better place you could work. Okay Google is probably better, though I am only going on what I hear and have never even set foot in one of their site, but I think ITA is basically the Google of Boston.
Since I was unable to find any information out there which seemed to be really independent about what people thought about game rental services, I thought I would post my findings after trying out two services this past summer/fall. I have nothing to disclaim anything here by the way, I do not nor did I ever work for any video game company, magazine, rental service nor in any field related to video games. No one is compensating me for writing this review.
First, let me describe my demographic. I am a casual gamer, or I am now. Sure I played NES for five hours a day in 1990 when I was fourteen. Now I’m 31, have three hours of commuting per day, three young children, and not surprisingly less time for playing games then when I was in high school. For people like me, online game rentals can be a godsend. You can try out new games risk free for as long as you want, no late fees or more time in the car to the rental store, how do you go wrong?
Well, anyone out there looking for a new handheld smartphone with SSH, you can give up on the Helio Ocean. You would think a phone with 3G, a full qwerty KB and a minimum $60/mo service fee would probably be a potential dream tool for your average sysadmin geek. I emailed helio about the possibilty of getting an SSH client on the device last week. After the usual initial ‘we don’t know what you’re talking about’ email, I politely asked again about whether they would either consider creating one or allowing a 3rd party developer to do so:
“…As a potential customer, one of many potential customers looking for a qwerty-enabled, SSH-capable 3g device, I do need to know quite specifically if any SSH applications are planned or already under development for the Ocean. Could you find out for me?
Regarding 3rd-party development, I’m quite happily employed actually, does your reponse mean only employees and no third party developers can write applicattions for the device, if no 1st party SSH client is planned?”
The last sentence was because the original reply said I could consider applying to the company in order to write an app. No, thanks for the thought. The response back to this email was even more disappointing than the first one:
“Hello from Helio, this is Randy, Thank you for your inquiry.
Chris, Secure Shell is only security programming, since Helio doesn’t allow you to access certain personal information such as bank sites and online shopping. There really is no need for the SSH client. Although, we may still be coming out with updates for this service, please continue to check www.helio.com and clicking the sign up for updates tab. Also, in regards to third party development some third party applications will not work with our services. Thank you and have a wonderful day.”
Now is it me or did he just say that the device is basically useless? You have a great network like 3G but you cant even check your bank balance? Is your device REALLY that underpowered that SSL encryption is beyond your capability? Wow, thanks for saving me the time and money from even considering your device!
I really dont have any nice way to say this, so I’m just going to say it straight on:
YOU FAILED US
and we will not forget it
Surely the only injustice greater than silence is continued silence. I will be silent no longer, and I only hope others do the same.
Much good to report, let me focus on the good part first. We finally sold our house in Albany, got moved out of our awful apartment in Waltham, and work is going very well. Now for the bad news. My dear cat Pico passed away last week (Liver problems…I would have suspected the bad pet food problem, but Zelda doesn’t seem sick and we only feed our cats dry food…) Personally I haven’t been able to deal with it yet, think Im still in denial. Perhaps when I pick up her ashes tomorrow and we scatter them, I can start to deal with it.
Rest In Peace
Pico “Boo” Allegretta
1996 - 2007
Ok, my blog will probably be going away soon, I simply don’t post enough to warrant keeping it, plus it sure seems like the importance of each post must at best vary inversely by the number of posts you make, and if not my life simply isn’t that exciting anyway Updates, updates. Well, our house still has not sold, not for lack of price drops though. Haven’t been able to sell the Impala yet, either, but for good reason (read on). The girls are sick, I’m sick and have been out of work for 3 days and counting. But the worst part is that Joseph has been hospitalized since Thursday due to Bronchiolitis (complication from RSV which apparently we all have, and during his stay managed to get a UTI/urine reflux problem as well…here’s a pic for ya, from before all this crap.
It’s the J man!