After the previous post, we had one subcomponent that needed to be run, but the run failed, due to a file not being found (again).  The servers that our app is run on use a read-only networked filesystem to store code.  The people who run them have to follow a process of extracting code and releasing the files to the production filesystem.  Something in this obviously failed, causing some files to be missing.  This isn’t something we’ve ever had happen before, and I’m tempted to blame operator error.  But I did learn that the guy doing the install is also their on-call guy this week.  He’d been working 16 hours yesterday, so it’s likely he missed something.  I feel bad for him, but at the same time, it’s delaying the deployment of our application, and we have to answer back to our customer.  Anyway, by the time we got to that point, it was 2:30am (3:30am for one guy who’s in Atlanta), and we gave up for the night.  We were supposed to start again at 9:00am, but the deployment guy got called out on a severity 1 issue, so we’re on hold again.

Meanwhile, I feel like warmed-over death after only getting about 4.5 hours of sleep.  This is pretty frustrating, since our code has been through three test cycles and has been installed a number of times along the way.  We’re confident that the code is OK and that our installation instructions are good.  It’s just been a series of unforseen obstacles.

Sometimes, it seems like no matter how well planned and run a project is, it just has a dark cloud hanging over it.  We’ve had screw-ups from inexperienced developers, hardware failures, and various other setbacks, yet we managed to pull the schedule out of the fire through extra hours (and good planning on the part of the project manager who allowed some “contingency” time in the test phase).  However, it’s out of our hands now and we’re dependent upon the group hosting the application to get it installed.  All we can do is watch and offer advice and observations.  Unfortunately, I think we’re going to miss our deployment date, given the current situation.  It’s just a feeling right now, because it’s still possible to hit it, if everything comes together just right.  But I’m not very confident, and when it comes to project estimation, my gut feel is usually pretty close.

It turns out that the deployment guy messed up the extract of the code, such that some files were missing.  We don’t know how this happened, and it’s too late to spend a lot of time worrying about it.  At least it’s working.  Now all that’s left is some quick testing to make sure that everything is running correctly.

The installation of this one last component is not going well, since it’s giving a weird error that no one has seen before.  I’m sitting here listening to the deployment guy drone on about all the stuff he’s done, while my tech leads are trying to work things out.  I think part of the problem is that he did some weird stuff with symlinks that is causing all this grief, but I’m too damn tired to gripe at him about it.  If this goes on much longer I’m going to have to glue my eyelids open.

Unfortunately, I feel that dreary dead-tired nonsleepy state coming on (the one where it’s way past time to sleep and you enter that weird area where you can’t sleep anymore).

I’m sitting here waiting on the installation of our application, which means I have to be online, but I’m not really doing anything.  Earlier today, one of my coworkers asked me about my home network and I ended up drawing the diagram on the whiteboard in my office.  In the interests of killing time, I pulled up Visio and created a network diagram.

Click for obnoxiously large size.

What was the point of this post?  There is no point.  I’m bored and pointless…

I’ve had to be “available” today, since our application is being installed this weekend, even though I’m not the technical contact and I can’t fix anything if it’s broken.  I think it’s one of those “feel good” kinds of things.  Regardless, I’m stuck here until they’re done. 

My company gave me a new laptop yesterday (Thinkpad T30—2GHz/1GB RAM), so I’ve been passing the time transferring all my stuff from the old one (a two-year old Thinkpad T21—800MHz/768MB RAM) and installing all the software that I need to do my job.  I’m currently at my “command center” with three computers in front of me (the old laptop, the new laptop, and my Linux system).  If that doesn’t define geekiness, I’m not sure what would (I suppose I could bring in the laptop from the living room and fire up the game machine to make it five, but that would just be excessive ).

It’s amazing the amount of stuff that I needed to install, and some of it will have to wait for Monday, when I get back to the office and use the CDs I forgot to bring home (I can get to online images that my company has for internal use from here, but I’m not sure I want to download three products that require 400-500MB each).  On the old laptop I went through all the installed software listed in “Add/Remove Programs” and created a Word document with the status of each one (i.e. already installed on the new one, no longer needed, to be installed).  The list is almost two pages long (which would put it around 100 entries, although I’m too lazy to count it ).

If I didn’t have to stay here, I would have gone to an early showing (12:30) of The Matrix.  Oh well, I guess I’ll try again next weekend (maybe some of the crowds will have thinned out by then).

A few quickies…

• Ladies, picking your nose and examining your finger isn’t terribly attractive.  And no, you’re not in a privacy bubble in your driver’s seat.  I’m constantly amazed at how people forget that they can be seen by other drivers.
• Driving on a two-lane interstate is a game that must be played several moves ahead.  I’m amused by people who get pissed off at me and swerve into the right lane, thinking that they’re going to pass me while I’m in the left lane.  What they don’t realize is that I’m not the type to hog the lane, and I wouldn’t be there if I wasn’t passing someone slower.  I’m not terribly patient myself, but I’ve learned that you get ahead more easily by staying calm and driving smoothly than you do by being a jerk (and I’ve plenty of experience as Mr. Road Rage™).  Most of these hotheads end up getting jammed up behind a slow-moving car in the right lane, because they didn’t think far enough ahead.  Besides, it takes too damn much energy to be a hothead.
• I’ve noticed that more women seem to be coming to the range now.  That’s a good sign, but it still bothers me that it’s different enough to notice.  Maybe someday in the near future this will become a non-issue.
• I passed the Rave Theater in Hickory Creek on the way home and the parking lot was packed to the gills.  I guess the new Matrix movie must be raking in cash at a pretty good clip.

In my previous post I mentioned my friend with the computer problems (who also happens to be the one I wrote about on Sunday).  She’s been under quite a bit of stress for the past few months as she has been finishing up her undergraduate degree.  I’ve known her for nearly 14 years now, since we met when we were both in school at East Texas State University (now Texas A&M-Commerce).  She quit school about the time I graduated and went out into the “real world”.  A few years ago she decided to go back to school.

We’re both the same age (10 days apart) and sometimes we think spookily alike.  But what’s more interesting is that sometimes I just get a sense that something’s wrong and shortly after that she’ll either send me an email or call.  Or more interestingly, one time I had a dream that she needed my help and it was at the exact time she ran into the problem (it woke me up around 11:00pm one night, just a few minutes from the time she sent me an email). 

I know that a lot of people refuse to believe that these sorts of things are possible, writing them off as coincidence or delusions, etc.  However, I’ve encountered enough weird stuff in my life so far as to think that it’s the height of hubris to think that we know it all or to completely rule out such things.  My belief is that these things are actually natural phenomena, it’s just that our science is not yet advanced enough to understand them (hence the title of this posting).  Of course, that’s just a belief, and I can’t prove it.

I also commented the other day about coincidence, concerning getting an email from a friend I’d been thinking of contacting.  When I mentioned this in my reply to him via email, he replied:

You know, I don’t know if I’m so quick to dismiss things as “coincidence.”  I’ve seen some things that have concretely made me believe that there are things at work that we’re not aware of…whether it’s God or temporal distortions or little green men screwing with our heads who knows (but, any of these answers would be fascinating to KNOW for certain that they exist).

It would certainly be fascinating to know that they exist, but I suspect that that would open up a whole new set of questions to ponder.

Last week I was called in to examine the code for a project that had just entered the test phase.  Apparently one of the developers was disgruntled and reported his “concerns” about the code quality to management.  That’s the sort of thing you come to expect from time to time, so it wouldn’t have been a big deal if that’s where it had stopped (coders are a prickly lot, and managing them has often been compared to herding cats).  Unfortunately, he also told someone who told an executive, which is when the excrement came into contact with the rotary airfoil device.   The project managers needed to be able to come up with something to appease upper management and convince them that the code was OK.  At this late phase, my thought was that the best proof of the code’s quality would be whether it passed testing or not, since the time to inspect the code was during the development phase (and they had done peer reviews, where the developer in question had ample chances to make his concerns known).  However, sometimes the appearance of doing something is more important that what is actually done.  Therefore, I was assigned to review the code.

The code consisted of 340 Java files, so there wasn’t a chance in hell that I could manually inspect those in the time I was given (I was given a week, but I was only able to spend about 50% of my time on this).  Fortunately, we have a site license for Jtest, which when combined with our own coding standards rules gives pretty thorough coverage of the code (including dynamic analysis to find uncaught runtime exceptions).  The only downside is that this kind of analysis is very nitpicky.  Those 340 Java files generated over 11,000 warning messages. 

Of course, that kind of number sounds very alarming at first.  And it’s not something that you want to feed to upper management, lest they get the wrong impression.  As an example, many of those messages have to do with indentation or style standards.  While I consider those important to readibility, they don’t materially detract from the code’s function.  So, I had to grovel through all of those messages and categorize them based on severity.  When I was done, it turns out that there were only a handful of items that were severe enough to consider errors (like using “=” instead of “==” in a control statement).

That’s the kind of mind numbing task that leaves you drained, so when I left work on Friday my eyes were glazed over.  I went home, grabbed a cigar and poured myself some Jack and cola and did absolutely nothing.  And I stayed away from the computer most of Saturday as well, which is why I hadn’t updated this site since Friday morning.  I just didn’t feel like I had anything worth saying.

I got busy with work, and I’d had trouble sleeping the night before, so I just didn’t feel like posting anything yesterday.  I feel a little guilty, because I’ve begun to feel like I should post something each day.

I’ve noticed that I seem to get instances of deja vu most often when I’m really tired.  Maybe that’s when my brain is most likely to form these random associations.  I had a really strong one yesterday.  For me, it’s most often a combination of emotion and vision that triggers it.  I was waiting for a code scan to complete and reading something online while waiting.  I was thinking that I really needed to get that code scan finished so I could report the results, but that this stupid slow computer wasn’t going to finish in time.  This, combined with the text on the screen, triggered a memory of the exact moment, and I was convinced that I’d been there before (or perhaps I’d dreamed it).  Or maybe my brain, in its sluggish state, confused the new memory with an old one.

I also had a weird coincidence this morning where I’d been thinking about sending an email to a friend of mine.  When I opened my email this morning, he’d already sent me one.  I’ve always wondered how that works.

Today was one of those surreal days where despite the technical and professional stuff working out, nothing really registered, as I was distracted by something that I was told this morning.  I won’t go into the gory details, but I guess it confirms that I was a damn fool for thinking certain things.  Oh well, c’est la vie.