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Print server saga part Dos!

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Well the mail man picked up the last print server. I should have a credit coming in a week or so. THe new one should arrive in another day or so. This time I read up a lot more. Did a lot more googling and cross referencing Amazon’s user reviews. I finally settled on this one.

This one is from Cables to Go. I’ve bought some of their other gear so I knoew it’s pretty well made. The description sounds a lot closer to what I’m looking for. Fingers are crossed. Let me tell you, going from the second floor (where the office is) to the basement (where the servers, and temporarilly the printers live) to get a print out is the pits. I’m all over getting excercise and all but crikey, That’s a lot of stairs. And remember I’m a mile up now, still gotta get used to this thin air.

So we’ll see, the new print server might arrive tomorrow, but more likely the day after. Which is fine, I have a lunch meeting with a client so tomorrow will not be too free for playing with print servers.

UPDATE

Why is it so hard?!?!?I may actually have to resort to buying a new printer for Charlie’s sake! Why can’t a manufacturer make a simple TCP/IP print server. THey claim they do, but they all involve some level of lame hackery to trick the clients into thinking the printer is local to the client. WTF?!?! Cables to go seemed promising, web based admin, DHCP, got an IP from my router. But from there could I add a network printer from that IP? Hell no!!! Piece of shit!

Back it goes. I’ll wait a few days though, see if I can talk to tech support, see if they have a thought or two. Otherwise we’re on to strike three!

Free?!?!?!?!

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According to this if you don’t plan to make any money from it, you can get a license for Flex and Flex Builder. Kinda cool, I hadn’t heard about it until I read it on another blog. Pretty cool of Macromedia since Flex is so god damn expensive. This gives developers a chance to play with it free of charge. Pretty neat.

Time Management & Invoicing

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Long ago in a galaxy far, far away I worked on a project for an employer. They wanted some way for us developers (and eventually QA, and such) to track our time. The reason was two fold; see what we were spending our time on, and capitalize any new development in order to manage costs.

Well as resident CF Guru the application we needed fell to me. Not only was I the sole developer, I was the technical architect, before such titles existed. Long story short I came up with a pretty damn robust time tracking app, with lots of reporting features. When I left there and the company folded, I modified the application (which I somehow accidentally left on a CD) to be my time tracking and invoicing app for my consulting business. The time entries I made, were then translatable to an invoice that I could print or email. This was all CF5, so none of the cool new features we have today.

A badly planned HD wipe and restore left me with a copy of my app that was 5 months old a few years ago and I never came back to it, since I was a full time employee. Well I’m getting back into consulting again so I’ve resurected the app and am bringing it up to 2005.

Once I get it back to mostly stable I’ll start posting Zips of it for download by anyone interested. Screen shots are available over at my other site.

Scope Creep! I damn near killed her!

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There really should be fines for those who indulge in either scope creep or over engineering a solution. I’m all for delivering a quality product, obviously. I’m a professional. However, delivering an over engineered solution that solves problems that people aren’t having, late, is not cool. In my experience users would rather have what they asked for on time, and then think about V2 to address the difficencies in the current version. Windows 3.0 wasn’t the last version of Windows. Too many developers out there, are so concerned with only working on cool new shit that they forget that if not them, someone has to maintain the beast they create. So they build this massive impossible to understand frankenstein monster of an application.

It really sucks some times.

He’s such a hard worker

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Perception really is a powerful tool in the business world.

Towards the end of my time with Direcfit (now defunct) it became very clear that our CIO, was more interested in who he saw at 6pm, than who actually did the work. We had brought some one onto the team from another department, he’s a very cool guy, but at the time was green. Super green, new to web development. He’s since turned into a good programmer from what I understand. At any rate, at teh time he did our HTML grunt work. He didn’t know ColdFusion (not Cold Fusion, which is a source of cheap clean power, and also currently pie in the sky), didn’t know JavaScript, didn’t know anything beyond basic web designer skills.

One day I was talking to our CIO and he says, “that Steve (Names changed to protect the innocent), he sure is a hard worker. He’s always here when I leave.”

“Steve comes in at 9 or 10 in the morning, and leaves after 8 hours” I replied.

“I know but he’s always here when I leave.”

“You typically work 8-5.” THis is going down hill fast.

“Well I know, but he’s just always here.”

I finally just changed the topic. Obviously Steve’s output, quality of work, or technical aptitude weren’t the important things to Directfit. The more important thing was who was here arounf 6pm.

Jump a few years into the future, my current job. Same shit. I used to work 6-3 with my friend TO. Routinely when leaving we’d get, “must be nice to leave early.” despite it being a full 8 hour work day. Now that Nicole lives with me, I’ve changed my hours to 7-4. It really amazed me how much difference that hour makes. I’m no longer lumped in with TO.

THe last week, Nicole and I have been playing with working 8-5, seeing how traffic is and such, since it’s possible her new employer will be a company that is strictly 8-5, no earlier or later.

I can’t explain why, but a lot happens between 3 and 5. Sadly working 8-5, seems more often than not to mean working 8-6 or 9. Why people wait until the end of the day to look at important things, I can’t really say.

I have concluded though that despite my increased productivity  at 6-3 (it’s quiet and I can work uninterrupted for about 3 hours), working 8-5 is the only way to be visible. I’ve had more interaction with my bosses boss, and even my boss in those two hours after 3 than ever when I worked 6-3. I’m the first to rage against the machine, but sometimes… You just have to go with it. :(

Change Management… ARG

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First things first. Backpack fucking rocks!! I’ve been using it to take notes where ever I am on topics I’d like to write about. Now I just gotta write about them. Here’s a rough draft of an essay I’m working on about Change Management in the Enterprise.

Change Management professionals have value… Everyone in the enterprise has value. They keep (in theory) developers out of the production environment. Which is good. As much as I like dropping a quick fix in on the fly, I don’t want that responsibility on my head. No developer in their right mind should. If it hasn’t happenned already, give it time, we all slip up and when developers have production rights, those slip ups can cause serious problems

This isn’t to say that CM is just as capable, if not more so of fragging up the works in production. Quite the contrary in my experience. But that’s a matter of training and culture.

It’s all about the benjamins, yo!

Recently I’ve noticed an alarming trend among the CM people at my office. They’re inefficient. Actually they are beyond inefficient, they’re slow and mostly incompetant. They take hours to complete any task. Tasks that they would historically spend hours on, have been canned into 20 minute processes. The key, that I have found… they’re contractors. It’s financially beneficial to be slow and inefficient. Every hour it takes to complete a build request and deploy code to INT, is money in their pockets. I can’t say I blame them, money moves us all (though for teh record, as a consultant, I’ve never billed for a mistake I made. Fixing my errors has always come out of my own time). This phenominon isn’t limited to the CM people at my office, or even to CM people. It’s everywhere. For reasons I can’t fathom, large companies hire contractors, who (in my experience) take much longer to complete tasks than their salaried counterparts. On top of this, most companies keep these models of innefficiency around well beyond a year. Often several years. A year is often the magic cut off for contractors. Keeping a contractor less than a year is cheaper than keeping a salaried employee the same amount of time.

The rules apply to everyone.

Recently one of our CM people made the call that application X was broken. Our latest build package had bad code. Without consulting development, he chose to “fix” the problem by taking a zip file he was given as a one time solution and apply it this time. The code in this file was old production code. He was “fixing” cert. In the strictest sense of the word, he did indeed fix cert. Application X was working. Of course it was working like old production code, so the functionality that was to be tested wasn’t present. Long story short, and believe me, it’s a long story. He broke two key tenants of the CM process.

  1. Don’t deploy code without a build request
  2. Don’t act without technical input. CM is not development.

By breaking the rules that they have strictly enforced on development CM, illustrated that they are no better at being the gatekeepers than developers are… at least developers know the system the are keeping the gate for.

Code pushing monkeys

I know this sounds harsh, but CM really is nothing more than code pushing monkeys. Yes, they can be more than that. They can be much more. Most seem content to not be all they can be though. Most seem happy being, “warm bodies” and nothing more. CM has the potential to regulate the flow of applications moving toward production. They can be the gatekeepers and keymasters.

Why do they stumble? I don’t know, it seems to be an enterprise culture type of thing. CM seems to infest an organization, grow in number, then stop. They become road blocks, or worse even, detours in the abyss. They’re not developers (wouldn’t that be nice if they were?!), they’re not technical in most cases. They deploy code. They copy zip files. They send emails asking DBAs to run scripts. They send emails asking infrastructure people to bounce servers. That is what CM does.

One day the enterprise will realize this, and the era of “Change Mangement” as we know it will be over.

I’ll clean it up a bit soon, expound on some thoughts, add some new ones. This is version one. But you can see where I’m going with it.

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