asty.org

Just checking in.  I’m still alive, and even happy usually.

On the health front it’s been up and down; the battle with Meniere’s has been hard recently.  In late spring and fall when the temperature (and more importantly it seems, the barometer) swings up or down rapidly I can still have a multi-hour attack and need to sleep it off.  Attacks nowadays now feel more like I’m not seeing things properly and it’s hard to concentrate on any task versus the old straight up room spinning, but it still doesn’t feel great especially for several straight hours.

For any other Meniere’s sufferers out there, if like me you find white-on-black text easier on the eyes, I might suggest the  InvertColors extension for Firefox.
I have had some time (and desire) to work on nano with previous maintainer David Lawrence Ramsey’s departure last year, and after reading some random person complaining about nano not having a real undo.   It turns out adding an undo implementation to an editor that really never intended to have one is hard to get right.  Especially in spaghetti C-code.  But I added some other fun things recently, being able to read from stdin like a pager.  Nano will actually be 10 years old in November 2009, party time.

Being a father of three (and second guessing every decision I make as a dad) is taking up the remainder of my time.  That, and trying to be thankful for my blessings in these times: a wife, three beautiful kids, a good job at a company I love 3 years in, a house, and good enough health that I can get myself to work and back every day without assistance.

Well, I’ve been silent because there hasn’t been that much to write.  No news is good news when you have three kids.  Monique, Bree and Joey are all in good health, and although I had a two hour Meniere’s attack at work yesterday, I was still able to recover in time to go out to dinner with friends, and the last one was probably a few months ago.

By far the most annoying part of the gentamicin injection treatment for Meniere’s is not that you are effectively deaf in one ear, it’s that you cant tell where sounds are coming from.  If you forgot where your phone is, you can’t easily locate it just by calling it.  It’s hard to tell which of your kids is talking when you arent looking at them, e.g. when you’re driving.  Anyway, it’s better than the alternative of sleeping on the bathroom floor once a week to be next to the toilet.

Work continues to be great, so I assume Im going to be fired or something else, because I’ve never liked any of my jobs after 2+ years in.  Who knows, maybe Bahhhhhhston is the place for me after all, in spite of the Red Sox and Pats.  I guess when you surround yourself with a bunch of other New Yorkers even that part isn’t so bad

So being the great and selfless (did I mention modest?) person I am, I decided to donate to the Red Cross to help with the earthquake relief effort.  This time, I used my relatively new bank card which I had maybe used once, and certainly had not yet used online.  I go to their spiffy web site, enter the info, and boom, donation done.  I think I’ve done a good deed.

Two days later I am checking my bank balance and notice that it’s showing $1200 less than I’d expect.  “That’s odd” I think to myself, so I give the good old bank a call and see what’s going on, since they have some odd issues with deposits being held some amount of time with new accounts, but everything Id deposited had cleared.  After a LOT of hold time and chats with the supervisor it turns out Overstock.com has an order with my credit card on it, except I didnt place it.  “That’s not possible” I say, I’ve just gotten this account and only used it at most twice.

Now dealing with my bank took one phone call, and overstock had to transfer me once to get to their fraud department.  That’s fine, and hold time is fine also, even if it was probably an hour or 90 minutes on the phone, fraud is serious business.

Try getting a hold of someone at the Red Cross to tell them you think you CC– was stolen after you donated.  It’s like a dummy corporation or something.  Should you use the “Fraud, Waste and Abuse” number listed on the web site?  No you silly, there is a separate number for that, no I can’t transfer you!  Call that number. “Oh, no Im not allowed to handle that type of incident, you need to call these folks”.  No transfer.  Third number you can’t even talk to a human being, you’re supposed to leave a message and they will get back to you.  I did, they didn’t.  Finally they have some  random web form which promises a response RSN.  It’s been a week, nada.

I am quite aware of the emergencies going on in the world, but if you expect people to donate you have to have SOME infrastructure in place which ensures

• People’s credit card info is safeguarded
• If it is compromised, you either let your donors know or at least give them a person they can call who can then give them false hope of resolution.

As it stands, Ill have to go back to donating to Doctor’s Without Borders.  Enjoy that money red cross, until I have proof that somehow my virgin credit card was stolen via some other means you’ll not be seeing another dollar from me.

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.

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.

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!