Below are the 5 most recent journal entries recorded in Big Hairy Bald Geek's LiveJournal:

Monday, March 22nd, 2004
10:57 pm	News from the front My team has been in severe death march mode for the last 3 months or so.  We're all working so many hours that getting sleep and seeing the people we care about once in a blue moon are about all we can manage outside of work. Personal geekly projects are a million miles away :) I'm studying for the Java Programmer's Certification test with friends and boy let me tell you it's a ball buster.  It is HARD. Hopefully if I get laid off though this will give me some leverage towards starting a new life somewhere as a Java developer.  I really enjoy working in the language and it's a world away from the endless shell script heque I'd been trapped in for the last few years. Also I'm installing Gentoo Linux on this box and so far the process has been pretty darn painless, we'll see how it all pans out :) Anyway, I should go study Java.  Be well all! (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 25th, 2003
7:24 pm	Riding the bus A piece of all this I forgot to mention in the last entry that I think is rather crucial is the object bus. It's important that every piece of this project be able to communicate with every other without specific knowledge as to that piece's identity. So I'm envisioning the front end encapsulating requests in object form and placing them on the bus with only generic destinations being specified (e.g. this is for the back end, etc.) Whatever we use for this should be language and OS independent and be as lightweight as possible. People are telling me that SOAP is the way to go but I have yet to understand it well enough to be sure that this in fact will do what we want. Again, this is all very hazy arm waving at this point but it's important to get the key pieces down I think, even just to provide a framework for further research. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
5:36 pm	A new project to get my brain moving again So as I said previously work has been busy. I've in fact been learning new tech and such but it's all very... Constrained :) Being in a release engineering capacity rather restricts the sphere of the apps I work on to a great extent. It's time I actually did something outside of work to keep my overall geek skills fresh and also to keep my resume glowing with that healthy zeal I've come to expect from myself throughout the years but have of late been sidetracked away from. Over the long weekend vacation I just took a good friend of mine reminded me of an idea I've had for years but never managed to implement. What I've really wanted for years is a pluggable system for processing mail. What I mean by this is a set of mix and match 'components' which can be plugged together with a modicum of configuration (Something an installer could do for an end user very easily after collecting their preferences) that would support the wide variety of environments people work in. For instance I envision a number of different front and back ends, each tailored to a specific category of user: Front Ends Rich local GUI client (written in something like Java or Ruby) ASCII based client for use over ssh connections or in text only environments Web/CGI based client a-la Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail Tiny client for PDA's and other small devices like cellphones Back Ends Simple plain text based storage. Slow limited searching. Near zero setup time and pre-requisites SQL RDBMS for much faster searching, better indexing and more automated infrastructure for doing back ups, replication, etc. Some sort of object repository? Ideally the front and back ends could exist on separate machines. So for instance you could run your front end (client) at work and have it readily communicate with the back end running at home, automagically slurping up and indexing all your mail. I can hear people asking why this new architecture when things like IMAP get you 50% of the way there today? The answer is that we're looking for a much richer level of interaction between user and mail. I personally think that the current systems in place for organizing mail are too flat. Often times merely siphoning it into folders can help solve the problem, but in my opinion what's needed is something more than that. As a start a more hierarchical, keyword based organization would help I think. The ultimate idea here is similar to what I've seen called agents. You could ask questions like "What was that piece of e-mail that had to do with X that I saw sometime last year?" and the back end would spit back an appropriate set of objects for your client to display containing a list of likely messages. Right now I'm thinking of trying to implement this in Ruby, however whatever communication mechanism we pick should be language independent and be able to exchange data/messages as objects. After consulting a mailing list or two people are saying that either CORBA or SOAP are the way to go for this. I realize this is a lot of mere arm waving at this point. I feel like I need to do some research on SOAP before I can comment intelligently any further. Once I have my head wrapped around all the necessary infrastructure I'll come up with a more concise, detailed write up and put it here. Until then though comments are welcomed (all but the "This is stupid why not just use existing tool X?" line which are less than helpful unless something REALLY does what we're trying to do already :). (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 23rd, 2003
1:34 am	QoTE (Quote of the Epoch :) "Working in high tech is like riding on the back of a headless chicken." -Jon Forsyth ------ (Ed. Aside - I have been working alot lately. I'm purposefully throttling back for the sake of my health and sanity, but even at a more measured pace things are pretty hectic. The good news is that I've been doing that forced-in-the-heat-of-battle skill set building thing and so the dust settles, watch this space for my take on Java, Eclipse, XML and Perl as well as more general geekly topics of note.) (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 9th, 2003
4:18 am	Unemployed geeks and helplessness. What's up with *THAT*? Ever since the shrub got elected and the economy went down the shitter I've been experiencing the rather unusual (for my industry anyway) phenomenon of being one of the few people still at the same job I started with before the dot boom went dot bomb. These folks are having (on the whole) a great deal of trouble finding jobs again, which isn't all that surprising because the number of jobs overall has in fact declined quite a bit. What is surprising, to me anyway, is the tail spin into total stagnation that I see happening with WAY too many of these folks. "Have you considered re-casting yourself into another position using the skills you have, and maybe taking advantage of this time off to gain some new skills entirely?" The reactions I get to this just blow my feeble mind. The amount of resistance to change I see these people exhibit regularly make me wonder if I was raised on another planet or something. Maybe it's because I was born on the wrong side of the tracks, raised by a working class family and taught that you do whatever it takes to earn your keep. Too hard to learn a new programming language or a new set of platform and tool skills? Tough shit. While I do have some college I am entirely self taught where tech is concerned so honestly I have very little sympathy for anyone who's too lazy to get off their ass and read a book or a web page and do some real hard work for a change. My mom made buttons at pennies on the gross and my dad shoveled snow at Hanscom field till the day he had a heart attack and died. You want hard? Talk to our parents and their parents before them. Most of us (myself included) are a bunch of out of shape couch potatoes and wouldn't know real hard work if it bit us. I did manual labor for one summer at UPS shoveling dirt and I thought I'd never make it :) As suckful as the economy is right now there are so many excellent opportunities for geeks with time and clue it's disgraceful for all these capable folks to be wallowing in their misery, passing the time playing the interview game and doing not much else. Get involved in an open source project! Write some code, invent something cool! Go for the gusto! What the frigging hell do you have to lose exactly? This is not an indictment of anyone nor is it a trivialization of so many people's very real sorrows and pain. My heart goes out to everyone tossed out in the cold - we've all been there in our lives but that was winter in Boston, now we're at the North Pole. I just wish people would come out of their holes and start taking advantage of some of the excellent things they could be doing rather than being paralyzed by the horror of it all. You may have to change the way you think and work. For instance the "Java sucks" crowd may have to suck it up and realize that it represents a huge step up for the average developer - and that there are jobs and money being made with it, regardless of how you view it technically). In the end analysis I say a proven success record on the battlefield of open source is vastly preferable to big gaps in your resume. Which would you rather see as a prospective employer? A portfolio filled with code samples and project docs, or a blank resume and some witty lines you hope will cause them to fail to notice? Current Mood: tired Current Music: silence (6 Comments |Comment on this)