Phasor Burn

I’m stuck in a conference call with surgient.com

They purport to have platform independent virtual lab environments. In actuality, they only support operating systems which run on VMWare or Microsoft Virtual Server. Excuse me? This qualifies as “platform independent” ?

What about sparc/Solaris, PPC/AIX, PA-Risc/HP-UX and so forth?

All the world is not Wintel/Lintel. Platform includes hardware.

AAeeeeeiiiiiii Major Crypto Algorythms Cracked

How long until the exploits are in the wild? Are they there already but are unrecognized, undiscovered, under-the-radar?

Not good. Not good at all.

But not completely unexpected either. Had to happen sooner or later.

“No. No. No. No-no. Not good. No, no.”

“Come on, find what you need and lets get away from here. We are running out of time.”

“Can not run out of time, there is infinite time. You are finite, Zathras is finite.
This is . . . wrong tool. No. No. Not good. No. No. . . . Never use this.”

-Zathras and Ivanova

Zathras had good sense of what tool is appropriate and was a “clumper” as defined in Bruce Eckel’s Web Log entry of Aug 16, 2004.

It is both strangely comforting to know that I recognize both of the organization anti-patterns mentioned towards the end of his article, and distressing that the company in question also began to recognize it but at a far too late stage to avoid implosion.

The following description also strikes home as to the kind of thing the organization in question was building :

I have consulted on projects where the technologists decided that they want to solve a much broader problem than what was assigned, and usually it’s a disaster. In fact, I would characterize the desire to solve a bigger problem than necessary to be an important flaw in the technical management of the project, whereas a desire to “do the simplest thing that could possibly work” is an indication, to me anyway, of a depth of understanding of how hard it is to just get something working, and how likely it is that you’ll fail.
– Bruce Eckel’s Web Log entry of Jan 1, 2004

I must try to recognize this stuff earlier and try harder to effect change or activate my trapdoor escape plan earlier if corrective change does not appear relatively soon. I was far too long in that unhealthy work environment. (Bad for stress, bad for career … other than “it was a learning experience” euphamism)

Next time . . .

I’ve been playing with some whizz-bang fibre SAN equipment over the last few days.

What a pile of flakey crud. And it’s not just one particular vendor. Sun, Emulex, Hitachi, Brocade, Sepaton. All have their quirks and quarks.

One should not need to repeatedly power cycle things to make them see each other.

Sigh.

I read an interesting article today about Microsoft interviewing Linux programmers. Put your tin foil hat on for this one, folks.

I think the real reasons are a little less dark and sinister than the article suggests. I personally know a senior J2EE person who is currently working for Microsoft. They want people that can help MSFT get into companies where interoperability is the name of the game. What MSFT does after they have their foot in the door is another story of course… but initially they just need people that understand technology xyz to help integrate that with their product line.

Nothing more.

For now.

(Insert sinister laughter in the far distance.)

Shut up Bill, I know where you live.