mj

fscked

One of the problems with working in ‘IT support’ is that the phone can ring at any time.

Sure - we sign up for this when we take the job and there’s no point in complaining that a Sunday morning breakfast in a little diner cafe turns into a 10 minute dash home, 10 minutes frustration with VNC and Contivity and a 30 minute drive into the office just so I can start a 6 hour long marathon getting things up and running.

I don’t mind doing support during the night, at weekends, whenever. It’s what I signed up for when I got into support in the first place. These days I’m on call around one week in three, previous to this job it was 24×7, 364 days a year.

I do mind, however, when the things I’m being asked to support are not within my control. Why do people reboot UNIX servers on a weekly basis? Why do sysadmins still rely heavily on cron for starting services (especially when there are FLOSS alternatives like launchd? Why did this process not start up the way it’s meant to - who changed the documentation? What’s the point in setting up two redundant servers when you need both of them up and running or your environment is fscked?

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

Posted in Annoyances | 1 Comment »

Lesbian islanders fight

Campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos are to go to court in an attempt to stop a gay rights organisation from using the term “lesbian”.
The term lesbian originated from a mythological goddess and poet called Sappho, who was a native of Lesbos.
Sappho expressed her love of other women in poetry written during the 7th Century BC.
But according to Mr Lambrou, new historical research has discovered that Sappho had a family, and committed suicide for the love of a man. BBC link

I’m somewhat speechless.

Posted in Made me laugh | No Comments »

Alumni

Steve (The Biscuit) provided this link to The Daily WTF:

“If you’ve worked at enough companies in the IT industry, you’ve probably noticed that the most talented software developers tend to not stick around at one place for too long. The least talented folks, on the other hand, entrench themselves deep within the organization, often building beachheads of bad code that no sane developer would dare go near, all the while ensuring their own job security and screwing up just enough times not to get fired.

…Bruce F. Webster aptly named this phenomenon the Dead Sea Effect.”

There’s a lot of wisdom in this. I worked for Nortel for 6+ years and when I left, the relationship was over. I still had a few friends (those who were bothered to be on instant messenger networks other than MSN) but for the most part, I was the ex and not an alumnus by any means.

I have hoped, in my management of Mac-Sys that this is different. I still speak to many past employees (the exceptions generally being those who left under a cloud because they wanted something the company couldn’t provide during the first year or so when we were fighting just to stay alive.)

I think when my tenure with $BIG_COMPANY ends, it’ll be similar to Nortel which is a shame. Big companies should have more resources to hook up with past employees rather than treating them like the Ex with the onerous personal habits.

Aidan, as a Thoughtworks alumnus (never mind Inktomi, Blackstar etc) gets a lot of street cred for being a developer who gets things done. I find it heartening that Thoughtworks has an alumnus system - it’s such a positive aspect of company-employee relationships and certainly colours the way the employee will speak of the employer in years to come.

Would I rather have a good relationship with a past employer? Hell yeah. So what can you do as an employer?

1. Don’t be a dick. People are going to leave and while it could be because of personal issues with you, it’s more likely it’s personal issues which they cannot escape
2. Don’t be a dick. This bears repeating because sometimes the employee will make an effort to make life difficult unintentionally. They may be in all sorts of turmoil in their personal lives and dropping the job may be their response. Don’t make it more difficult
3. Don’t be a dick. Keep in contact with these folk. Why not even start a mini social network for them? Create the FaceBook group, keep their Jabber login active. For security remove their logins to core systems but don’t be doing a global find/replace on their uid in the systems - that’s stupid.

Posted in Commentary, Startup | No Comments »

Back to the drawing board

I’m finding Cocoa very hard. A few months ago, Aidan spent some time to coach me through the basics and while that went on I managed to get a lot of ‘relatively’ advanced things done. Going back to the code I wrote, even with the benefit of several weeks of writing out the examples in the book I bought and I’m lost. So it’s very much back to the drawing board.

this highlights some things to me.

1. Programming is hard. There’s no escaping it. It’s not something that everyone will pick up.
2. Programming requires focus. You need to pay attention to it. Otherwise you won’t learn.
3. Programming takes time. You’re not going to learn overnight. You need to look at it daily.

Posted in Code | 2 Comments »

Equality

Due to my own experience, I have no assumptions that a person in business may be a man or a woman but I find myself wishing for a third, gender-neutral noun for use in English. I know we have ‘it’ but it’s less neutral and more potentially derogatory.

IrishFlirtySomething writes:

“So I have been desperately pitching for new business to lots of dusty old men who say things like;
“aren’t you a ‘great girl’, running your own business – do you work all on your own?”
Which roughly translates as;
“Is there anyone with a Penis involved or is it just you and your Vagina?”

When I started running my own business, I experienced similar sentiment. I ‘looked’ young. Having been burned before by competitors who went out of business, they wanted to know would me and my business still be around in a year. They wanted to know would I still be around when they needed me or was I planning to swan off on holiday - or would I have any backup?

I don’t necessarily believe that they were being ageist in my case just as I don’t believe the antagonists were being sexist necessarily in her case. I took a load of shithere and here last year because I think that equality starts with not patronising people or giving one sector of the community better treatment than others.

In her case, I don’t think she didn’t get the contract because of her cleavage.

P.S. Flame on!

Posted in Commentary, Made me laugh | No Comments »

Twitter: so how does it make money?

A thoughtful piece from 37Signals on the necessity to monetise Twitter

“That doesn’t exonerate them from building a more stable service. Especially not considering that they have five million dollars of other people’s money to do it with and a few years of practice.”

“If the growth in Twitter usage was mirrored by an equal growth in Twitter profits, the necessary investments needed for infrastructure would be self-evident. But when the money pot is an ever-shrinking gift-with-strings-attached, you can’t just blow your way out of the issue with cash.”

It’s true. Twitter’s scaling issues are a bugbear in their sides because as their userbase is growing, the Potential Value (in terms of Attention) of the company grows but the Actual Value (in terms of revenue) stays stagnant. And they have a huge amount of Virtual Debt in the shape of investors who will want a return. So, yes, the service itself is cool but is it sustainable?

It seems to me they have three options:

1. Someone buys them for a gazillion dollars. This is what happened to Jaiku. Google bought them and then kinda ignored them. I guess it was a defensive buy? It then becomes someone else’s problem at how to make money out of it? I must say I don’t mind the way Twitterific handles it - advertising sponsored play is good enough. This is the model that the investors will likely want.
2. They find out a way to make money. What about building in the feature that Twitter-ites (Twitterlanders? Tweeters?) could make their own adverts? Anyone can tweet but Tweetvertising allows graphics? Maybe even audio or video? Maybe even some opt-in tracking (as if I’m being forced to watch adverts, at least make them interesting to me!). Or maybe offer Tweets separate to SMS to mobile phone companies? Make it unlimited for people who have signed onto Tweet plans but limit those of us who slip in under the radar with data. That’s certainly going to reduce some of the ‘noise’. I am guessing here that they already get a percentage of every SMS sent them? Unless this is truly revolutionary, it’s probably not going to please the investors.
3. They break out the infrastructure and make it P2P. This could shift the responsibility for uptime to others and allow them to host their own options for advertising or value-added services. Maybe even license the software out so there are a bazillion twitter servers out there. This would be the method by which Twitter could sneak up and murder Instant Messaging in it’s sleep. I tweeted recently that Twitter was not Broadcast IM. But, of course, it is.

End of the day, it’s not my problem but I wonder what happens when they spent the last cent of the VC money they have received. Does the world go dark?

Posted in Commentary, Social | No Comments »

Here and where again?

The title for this blog post derives from the autre-title for “The Hobbit” which was “There and Back Again”. It details an arduous journey, full of frustration and friction, in order to have an adventure and then return home.

As the months pass in $BIG_COMPANY, it becomes clearer to me what I want to be doing with the rest of my life.

1. Not this. It’s not even that I dislike corporate wage slave culture. I actually have no issues with it. I loved my time in Nortel and only moved on because timing, opportunity and encouragement were right. This is just mind-numbing. And typical, of course, of worst-class pandering to executives while stripping the workers of their pay rises. Not good enough for me.
2. I’m also not sure about whether I want to get back into IT work. It’s something (I think) I’m good at, having done it for over a decade now and there are new areas of business I’d like to move into, certainly, but the allure of crawling around chasing cables in a dusty footwell under a desk just doesn’t have the same appeal.
3. There are some things I’m totally enamoured with. Ubiquitous wireless. Co-Working. Bedouin working. The ‘Presence’ aspect of social software. The tricky thing is how to get all of that to pay a mortgage and feed a dog. Yes, I have a plan. I just need the timing to be right (after all I’ve got a full dance card until around September).

At the moment, with someone leaving $BIG_COMPANY every week, it doesn’t surprise me that I feel this way (and that I’m obviously not alone). I do wonder what sort of job you have to be in to get the freedom to attend talks and trips like Paddy’s Valley. I asked to attend a 1 day Open Source event in Belfast and was told it would be annual leave - some companies have such vision!

The answer is therefore to figure out what I really want to do, get paid for doing it, and wander off into the sunset.

It’s the question that drives us.

Posted in Bedouin, CoWorking, Do Something Now, Social, Startup | 4 Comments »

Politics in Business

Reddit dredged up this gem which makes me wonder how close (or how far) business should be to politics.

Certainly makes their feelings clear. That will remain for a long time. If they use a colour-preserving detergent.

Posted in Made me laugh | No Comments »

Co-Working Belfast

The Co-Working Belfast guys (David Rice and Andy McMillan) are really hoping that some of you will pledge a desk in the co-working building they have planned for Belfast.

I’ve already pledged a desk (that I’ll be unlikely to use but will pay for anyway) and Mac-Sys is pledging a couple of iMacs. A lot of this depends on other people who are interested in finding an inexpensive workplace where they will meet other ‘working’ people.

Watch David and Andy’s blogs for more.

Posted in Bedouin, CoWorking, Do Something Now, Startup | 2 Comments »

Bedou-working…

The Economist on Techno-Bedouin.

“The proper metaphor for somebody who carries portable but unwieldy and cumbersome infrastructure is that of an astronaut rather than a nomad, says Paul Saffo, a trend-watcher in Silicon Valley. Astronauts must bring what they need, including oxygen, because they cannot rely on their environment to provide it. They are both defined and limited by their gear and supplies.”

“Urban nomads have started appearing only in the past few years. Like their antecedents in the desert, they are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it. Thus, Bedouins do not carry their own water, because they know where the oases are. Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, they don’t even bring laptops.”

This is parallel to the Co-Working strategy that David and Andy have been working on.

It’s a tall order to fill a co-working space. Even at an offer acceptance of £10 000 per annum, that still means the costs will likely be £18 000 per year (when you add £6800+ in rates and minimal electricity) not including broadband and heating - that’s £1500 a month! To bring the costs to a manageable level that people might want to pay, you’re going to have to aim for occupancy of around 15+. You could do it with less people (paying more) but you’re then really buying into the idea that people will pay for a co-working environment.

I’ve already said that Mac-Sys will put money down to secure a space (which will likely be used once in a blue moon) and we’ll also supply some of the infrastructure as well, if required. I hope it works out - I’m a little jealous of the guys involved as my dance card is totally filled at the moment (with work, babysitting, writing the new book, spending time with her indoors and trying to actually live life!).

I still have my own dreams regarding a Co-Work space that will likely never be realised due to the costs and time it would take to set up (and the fact it’s not an affair for an attic). My theory is that a co-work space needs to have it’s own identity and, if necessary, it’s own employees. Someone needs to be responsible for cleaning the loos, someone needs to keep the place running, chase up the co-conspirators for rent money - and just like in a shared house, that can be incredibly wearing on the patience. Hence you hire someone to do it.

This is why my idea for it was based around the coffee shop. The idea being to straddle the space between public coffee shop and serviced office. I was never 100% sure if Belfast was the right place for it but I still would like to give it a go.

It needs more than just an office though. It needs to be a network.

Posted in Bedouin, CoWorking, Social, Startup | No Comments »