LinLog

Things at work have been slow lately. Really slow. The fact is we're severely over-staffed and there just isn't enough work to go around right now. This has left me with an amount of down-time that I find...uncomfortable.

You'd think this might be a good position to be in. After all, it leaves me plenty of time to read up on development practices, the latest technologies, and keep up on my tech blogs. I have spare time to experiment with Ruby on Rails and play with Mono. I can browse through Code Complete or Refactoring at my leisure. What more could a programmer want?

As I've been discovering, this isn't quite as nice in practice as it seemed at first. For starters, there are still the miscellaneous menial tasks that need to be done - software installations, security and configuration changes, and just general support calls. These are excellent for knocking you out of the zone. Furthermore, the constant threat of them makes it a bit harder to concentrate in the first place.

Second, while reading and experimenting to build your skill-set is great, you need the right environment to make it truly profitable. You need some degree of freedom and some goal to work towards. Or at least I do. I find I learn the most when I have something I'm trying to accomplish. I also need periodic breaks to process and assimilate what I'm studying. It just doesn't seem to work as well when my "goal" is to stave off boredom and my breaks are scheduled.

Last, I've found that it's becoming a challenge just to stay sharp at times like this. You see, I need some sense of purpose to stay sharp. I feel like I'm chained in a room for 8 hours a day being forced to do nothing but pour water back and forth from one bucket into another. It feels like my brain is starting to rust.

This is exactly the opposite of how to motivate programmers. We need crave interesting progblems to solve. Or, at the very least, some problems to solve. Playing the point-and-click Windows monkey won't do it and I can only stand to read so many hours a day.

The problem is, the more I try to spend my time improving my knowledge and skills, the more unbearable I find my condition. I feel like I should be "out there" putting what I learn to use, but instead I have to sit at my desk for...no particular purpose. And what's worse, it's sapping my mental and emotional energy. After being stuck in the office all day, trying to keep from going stir-crazy, I feel like I've got nothing left when I get home. It's turning into a vicious cycle.

Have other people been in a situation like this? How do you deal with it? I mean, short of quitting (which I'd do if not for that damn mortgage). Are their any coping strategies to hold me over until I can get out?

Today I "discovered" a little feature in Opera that I didn't know about before. That was a nice feeling. It's always good to find something new in an application that you use every day. Even if you're not sure how useful it will be.

This particular feature is an item in the context menu for web page tab: the "create linked" command. This has the interesting effect of creating a new tab that receives navigation for the selected tab. So if you click a link on the original tab, it will remain unchanged but the new "linked" tab will go to that location.

By itself, this doesn't seem particularly useful. However, when combined with Opera's MDI, you can do side-by-side navigation, which could be usefule for checking references or documentation. The "linked" status of the tab also survives detatching into a separate window, so you can use multiple windows rather than the MDI if you're so inclined. In fact, this is probably better, since the MDI just doesn't feel right since they switched to the visual "tab" appearance.

This week, I'm doing product evaluations at work. Specifically, evaluations of highly enterprisey system management applications. Things like Microsoft System Management Server (though I'm hoping to find a package that's slightly less hideously complicated to administer). And you know what? It's really starting to piss me off!

It's not researching an evaluating these systems that's pissing me off. Although it probably should. After all, I'm a "systems analyst," not a network administrator. I don't touch the servers without explicit permission from the network admin, and therefore don't have a great deal of experience in this area. This is not because I don't know what I'm doing (though I don't claim to be an expert on Windows administration), but because the admin jealously guards his network, and he will strike down those who trespass upon his servers with great fury! Woe to any analyst or programmer who should mess up a server in even a minor way, for he shall never again get anything done on the network. So sayeth the Lord!

The real reason I'm pissed off is that I have no test hardware. Or, more to the point, I have test hardware, but it really, really sucks. To summarize, in order to set up a Windows Server 2003 box, I'm using an old XP desktop with a RAM module cannibalized from an identical desktop just to get it up to 1/2 a gigabyte. The client boxes I'm going to have to set up will have a whopping 128MB of memory a piece. And this is the best we've got available.

Of course, my ideal setup would be to just use a completely virtual test network running in VMware. However, I'm planning on 1 server and about 3 clients initially, and the most powerful box I have available is my desktop workstation, with a measly 1GB of RAM, which would be kind of pushing it. So I'll probably end up with 4 PCs sitting in the server room running VNC servers so that I don't have to physically walk back there and let the roar of the air conditioning system slowly destroys my hearing.

The second reason I'm pissed of is because of who this project is for. If our organization made any sense, we would be looking into system management software for the 300 or 400 (or whatever - I've never seen the exact number) desktops that we support. But it's not. This is for a collection of about 60 mobile laptop units that are scattered across the countryside and hardly ever make it in to the office. The idea is that we'd like to manage updates, installations, configuration changes, and so forth on them without having to drive them 30 or 40 miles to someone with administrator access. I have no problem with that, since only three people have admin access on those machines, and I'm one of them, so it saves me some effort. It's just that it would be nice to be doing something like this in the place where it would save the most work. But then, without the constant running around clicking "next" and such, our department wouldn't have an excuse to be grossly over-staffed.

I guess the take-away here is, "Don't work for the government. Especially local government." There may not be much stress in the Silicon Valley sense, but the frustration and futility levels are through the roof. But on the up side, you can pretty much take a vacation day whenever you want and nobody cares. It's just a matter of whether you prefer stability and flexibility or a feeling that just maybe your days aren't completely wasted.

Digital cameras are a great thing. They're easy to use, have a high picture capacity, and you don't have to pay for film. Plus, when you take a weird or interesting picture, it's easy to put it on your blog.

While at the Buffalo Zoo the weekend before last, I managed to capture two things I had never seen before. Here they are for the curious.

The first is a bear fight. On the way out, we witnessed the Grizzly bear and the Kodiak bear play-fighting. They would tackle each other, bite and paw, and chase one another around the habitat. They didn't appear to be hurting each other, just playing like dogs or house cats might. I never knew bears did that, though I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Still, it was quite the sight.

This second picture is of the alligator feeding. We happened upon the alligator habitat just as the zookeepers were going in to feed it. It seems like the kind of job that should include hazard pay, because they kept having to push the gator's nose back with a stick to discourage it from coming too close.

As for the meal itself, it was somewhat unpleasant: dead rats. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't that. Though I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I don't imagine an alligator would do too well on a diet of rice and tofu.

While all went well with purchasing that DVD set off eBay, all did not go well with watching it. The first disk didn't play correctly in either of our DVD players. Yet, oddly enough, it was fine in my PC. Isn't that the reverse of how it's supposed to work?

The DVD set is a Japanese release of the first season of Kyo Kara Maoh. It's an all-region disk that has both the Japanese and English dubs. I'd have preferred an American release, but they didn't have any boxed-sets available yet and buying the disks one at a time would have cost at least 6 times as much. The disks came in imaculate condition, with no visible scratches or defects, still in the factory shrink-wrap.

We have two stand-alone DVD players in the house, one for each TV. One is at least 5 years old, the other about 2 or three years old. Both of them displayed the same problem when playing the first disk in the set. During playback, I experienced random pauses, ranging in duration from just a moment to several seconds. The pauses seemed to become more frequent and longer lasting the longer than disk played. However, the pauses did not appear to be due to disk defects, because they never occurred in the same places. In addition, the entire third episode was completely unplayable. The video was garbled and the had frequent pauses and skips, eventually just hanging. And, of course, the menus are seriously messed up and only sort of work.

The weird thing is that when I put this same disk in the DVD-ROM drive on my PC, it plays perfectly. No pauses, no glitches, and both the third episode and the menus are fine. Normally, what with CSS and all, you'd expect it to work the other way, with the PC having problems while the stand-alone appliance works flawlessly. But not this time.

I'm still not sure exactly what the problem is. I've read that newer DVDs can expose bugs in older players. I do know that the DVD is a little wonky, what with having only 1 title, but 48 chapters, not to mention weird subtitle settings. But it seems odd that both players would have the same bug. So far, the all-seeing oracle, a.k.a. Google, has failed to turn up any answers. Does anyone else have any ideas?