Worst parts of my new job

February 8th, 2010 by Brian filed in work has no comments

Worst parts of my new job:

  1. No more personal bathroom
  2. Coordinating my attire
  3. Not being able to pick through leftovers for lunch
  4. I can’t (easily) hit the gym at say 11am.
  5. No laptop, no cell phone
  6. No one cared if I had bad breath when working from home!

Best parts of my new job:

  1. The people – incredibly smart, and unbelievable willing to take time out of their day to explain how something works or why something was done a certain way. The openness is infectious.
  2. Peer programming with really smart people, like David Black
  3. No email. OK not ZERO email, but with everyone working in the same place, email is rarely used.
  4. No conference calls. Literally none. I had one on my first day which was a “Welcome to Boeing” deal, but zero since.
  5. Ruby & Rails – No more Java, no more WebSphere Portal :)
  6. No laptop, no cell phone. My day is now done when I walk out the door. I can VPN in to check my mail, but see #3

It comes as no surprise to me that the toughest things am dealing with so far are all related to no longer working from home. I’m not completely over the fact that I now get up at 6 & get into the office at 7:30, but I think I am getting used to it. I feel like an old man sometimes going to bed before 10, but I could be doing worse.

Of course the title of this post was written to make you want to read it. I’m really enjoying the new job but need gimmicks to get people to come read my stuff  :)

New year, new job

January 8th, 2010 by Brian filed in work has 4 comments

A few weeks ago, after 10 fun years at IBM I left and took a new job with Skarven Enterprises, a Boeing Company. I call my years at IBM “fun”, because they were – I really did enjoy my time there. Tons of great projects, always playing with new technologies, building applications that targeted all 300,000 IBMers, and most of all, making so many good friends along the way.

At IBM I did a lot of development, in what I now realize was in a non-traditional environment, for better or worse at times. Skaven is hardcore into Agile. It’s actually a fairly thin layer on top of what I was most doing at IBM (other people are worrying more about the semantics of Agile right now), but it adds enough structure & reporting to make me feel like management is aware of what’s going on. It’s kinda cool to be learning about Agile at the same time as a Sprint is already in progress – it’s a great way to pick up on things quickly.

In my new position I’m going to be doing Ruby on Rails development, which means I have to actually learn it! I’m currently going through lotsa of learning: the system, the development environment, Agile, scrum… and the roads to get there! I’m really psyched, and I can’t wait to contribute some real work. That should be coming in the next few weeks after I “pass the Qualifications Board”.

I’m going to start trying to blog more as I figure out exactly what I’m doing  :)

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Game console idea

August 30th, 2009 by Brian filed in work has 1 comment

I love being able to install games to by Xbox 360. It makes playing much quieter & stuff seems to load faster. Unfortunately, like PC games I’ve played in the past, playing a game from the hard drive requires the disc to be in the player. Makes sense, as it proves that I didn’t copy it from my buddy & pass it around.

Here’s the thing…. it sucks!

I’m no more lazy than the next person, but come on! I mean, I can turn the console on & off with the wireless remote. I change the turner on my TV with my remote & I’m off & playing .. as long as the game is in the console.

So here’s what we do:  I usually keep my games close by my console anyway (for easy access – cuz they need to be in to play) so why not install some kind of RFID or wireless thing-a-ma-bob that is part of the game case. The console can just check if it’s in range – and preseto – I don’t have to get off my lazy butt to play!

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Proper timeout handling with Apache HttpClient

August 24th, 2009 by Brian filed in work has 5 comments

I’ve seen some really bad things happen when developers don’t code in proper timeout handling. Occasionally I’ve been asked what the best way to handle timeouts is – so I thought I’d share my take on it:

  1. MultiThreadedHttpConnectionManager connectionManager =  new MultiThreadedHttpConnectionManager();
  2. HttpConnectionManagerParams params = connectionManager.getParams();
  3.  
  4. params.setConnectionTimeout(connectiontimeout); //set connection timeout (how long it takes to connect to remote host)
  5. params.setSoTimeout(sotimeout); //set socket timeout (how long it takes to retrieve data from remote host)
  6.  
  7. HttpMethodBase baseMethod = null;
  8.  
  9. try {
  10.   HttpClient httpClient = new HttpClient(connectionManager);
  11.   httpClient.getParams().setParameter("http.connection-manager.timeout", poolTimeout); //set timeout on how long we’ll wait for a connection from the pool
  12.  
  13.   baseMethod = new GetMethod(…);
  14.   int statusCode = httpClient.executeMethod(…);
  15.  
  16.   …
  17. }
  18. catch (ConnectTimeoutException cte ){
  19.   //Took too long to connect to remote host
  20. }
  21. catch (SocketTimeoutException ste){
  22.   //Remote host didn’t respond in time
  23. }
  24. catch (Exception se){
  25.   //Some other error occurred
  26. }
  27. finally {
  28.   if (baseMethod != null)
  29.     baseMethod.releaseConnection();
  30. }

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Subversion keeps changing permissions of my files [FIX]

August 4th, 2009 by Brian filed in work has no comments

On my Unix machine whenever I did an “svn update” and files were actually updated, the permissions would change, rendering them inaccessible to the httpd process, therefore 403 Forbidden errors in the browser.

After much searching that yielded a lot of results about storing executable flags in SVN using propset. This didn’t help as I didn’t want it to be executable, just world readable. Turns out the problem was in my .profile, my umask setting was 077. Changing it to 012 solved it for me. Note: 012 makes files you create group writable.

Snippet from my .profile

#umask 077
umask 012
export SVN_SSH="ssh -l olore"
export EDITOR="/usr/bin/vi"

Read more about umask on Wikipedia

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