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Ok, so even by my standards, this is just bizarre…

The IT department that I work in got moved out of the company’s main building and into one of our satellite buildings. This deeply offended a few of my peers, “We’re being evicted!”

Then, as it turned out, our team wasn’t involved in the construction planning at all so what we got was tiny little workareas (cubicles) carved out with old, hand-me-down cube walls forced on us by the Building Services people.

For those of you keeping track, yep, it’s classic Peopleware.

Upon seeing the “new digs” there was mass hysteria on the staff. You gotta understand, some of the oldtimers I work with have been employed over 25 years with the company (before they were evicted, that is) and have collected mountains of crap. It’s almost comical to watch some folks fit 25 years of crap (manuals to 15 year old mainframes anyone?) into a 5′ x 7′ cubicle.

Ok, ok, so you get the picture… crappy workarea: small, dirty… loud. Again, Peopleware 101.

Then, from the “insult to injury” department..

The Marketing department decided to shoot a TV commercial for the company in our office. Why? Because they were looking for the smallest cubicles in the building and we won. Seriously!

I have no idea how small cubicles are gonna play into their commercial but this morning the TV folks showed up en mass. Holy crap! Have you ever seen the set of a TV commercial? Someone asked me if there was really a TV commercial being shot, “Are you sure it’s not for internal use?”. Um, given the massive amount of lights, panels, carts of equipment… yeah, I’m pretty damn sure this is the real deal.

And noise… did I mention the noise?

So at about 10:30 the announcement was made, “You can work from home if you want.”

Duh!

But here’s the thing. You have a staff that’s already pissed off about the working conditions and you have a TV crew shoot a commercial that ridicules the working conditions… um, how well do you think this is gonna play?

As I sat Friday completely useless while our MS Exchange based email system went through its fifth day of fits and starts, a thought occurred to me….

Once upon a time when there was a system outage I could usually found in the mix, trying to make things right. Called in desperation, I — normally “just a programmer” — could lend my Open Source experience to address obscure issues that our sysadmin staff, for whatever reason, was unable to overcome.

Invariably, these rescues initiated some comment like, “we need to get rid of ’system X’ because we can’t support it,” from someone. Invariably ’system X’ was a Unix thing or Open Source thing left over from a former employee’s tenure.

So, here we are.

Two years ago (-ish) a friend and I spec’d out a generic web server for one of the web operations where I work. Nothing huge, something for low-end MySQL databases and local development and testing. Basic LAMP stuff. As we have a full-on, real-deal hosting operation, we knew this was for smaller needs.

I think we spec’d out a $4k 1U Dell or something, running Linux or OpenBSD (we were both OpenBSD heads), MySQL, Perl/PHP etc.

Then my friend left the company and overnight all that he touched that was once considered “good” was now “bad”. This server was no exception. On the very day after he left I was called in and told that Linux/BSD was unacceptable, that we only support Windows or Solaris and that MS SQL was preferred.

A pitched battle was quickly fought and Linux lost out… but MySQL stayed and it was decided that Solaris would be used (because we “support” it)… oh and the machine was CLEARLY not accepable as a database server (well, no if you were thinking about the pig that is MS SQL) and would have to be RE-spec’d.

I was furious. I got even more furious as I watched 3 months later as a new spec came in, a $10k dual-processor Sun box, I watched them actually purchace a MySQL license and I watched nearly a year later as the box finally arrived and then sat on an admin’s desk for at least a month.

And then it all disappered.

I had assumed that it found it’s way to a rack somewhere and that it’s indended users were using it and that my own anger and frustration were misplaced — perhaps the “new guard” was as capable as my old friend was.

Last week I was asked to configure Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl on a Solaris machine setup for one of the web departments where I work. That’s right, this was the server. It turns out that this machine laid dormant for almost two years, and it again falls to me to configure it.

I’m so glad we went with a system that we could support.

Today at work was exciting… after being told in a staff meeting that we’d need to provide a list every Friday of any changes that would be “going live” the following week a co-worker, already well known for his outbursts, out-bursted big time.

“That’s fucking stupid!”

Well, ok, I don’t remember his opening volley specifically, but it did contain the afore mentioned f-bomb, that paramount of verbotten words. Then he preceeded to rail on our manager, our new (and abismal) help desk app (which should already be tracking the aforementioned changes, no?) and a few other hot-button issues.

Now, I’ve been accused of being a bit too… um… agressive in my approach to others (blame OpenBSD :)), and I may have “crossed the line” a time or two, so here’s a hint: if you look in your rearview mirror and you see me, you’ve probably gone way too far over the line.

But here’s the thing: He was right!

He was absolutely right, we have some serious issues where I work and if you try to be all “professional” about it then no one listens. It’s only when you speak up loud enough and drop a few f-bombs do people listen, but then they can’t get past those f-bombs to really hear what you’re saying.

For example, we spent a rumored $120k on a web-based help desk management thing-a-ma-jig that’s supposed to be all SOX compliant and do (among other things) exactly what we’re now being asked to do manually. It is, however, the only web software I’ve ever seen that will reliably crash MSIE and don’t even try Firefox — it doesn’t work at all. It’s a huge mess but no one want to hear this.

Well this guy said it (among other things) but of course no one heard it this time either. Everyone heard his f-bomb and was all appalled at the the gaucheness of it, but I doubt his his message made any impact at all.

What this really is is frustration.

So I wander into the “support” section of the IT department I work in to borrow a Windows XP Pro CD so that I can install the OS from scratch on a laptop. I like to do this occasionally. It’s like getting a new machine cuz you get to clean out all the cruft.

The senior admins were cool about it, but then one of the “techs” — the helpdesk guys — got wind of this. It wasn’t pretty.

Continue reading ‘Can the attitude, virus-boy!’ »

So at work (where I’m forced to use that other operating system) I installed IE 7 beta 3. Among the Firefox-esqe features I noticed this titbit: support for something called “High Assurance SSL Certificates”.

High ah-who-ance what?

As someone with some interest in SSL and certificates and whatnot, I decided to find out what exactly these things were. What I found were pages and pages of hype and yet no techological meat anywhere to be found. Hmmm, smells like vapor.

Continue reading ‘Who do ya trust’ »

So I moved cubicles at work today. No, my life is not so boring to rate an “I moved cubicles” post… well maybe it is… but that’s really not what this post is about.

Along with finally moving out of the left-over space, bastard mini-cube and into a Taj Mahal cube, I got to deploy Synergy on my primary WinXP machine and my OpenBSD machine.

Synergy - yes one of the boss’s favorite buzzwords, and that alone almost made me ignore the link when a friend sent it along.

Synergy allows you to share desktops across operating systems. It supports Windows, OS X and *nix. It’s very cool and with the move I was able to place my screens next to each other for the full effect.

At this point it’s a neat effect, I still haven’t decided if its actually useful or not. I’ve been told I’ll be moving again in 3 months, so it seems like a good test period. My only complaint so far is the screen saver syncing is a little jacked up (i.e.: it doesn’t work). Seems like it should be a simple fix… but I suspect it’s related to the domain security policies for screen locking that are in-place where I work.

Now all I have left is to find a suitable space for my monkey

At work I was talking with one of our web folks and he mentioned that he’d like a web interface to edit his Podcast XML files with. Hmm, I thought… a web form to make changes to an XML file… sounds like a good time to try out XForms.

XForms, for the uninitiated, is a new W3C standard for, you guessed it… forms. Judging by the “X” you probably also guessed it has something to do with XML too, and you’re right. XForms is, in a nutshell, user input done in XML, aka “forms”, and let me say they are damn cool.

And mostly worthless.

You see, it’s that “new” word. “New” means not really supported by anyone, least of all Microsoft’s hideous Internet Exporer, the one that my work expects everyone use.

I looked at three XForms “engines”:

• Mozilla XForms extension
• X-Smiles (Java app)
• formsPlayer (for MSIE)

And they all sucked.

The Mozilla plugin was far and away the best, with full support for almost everything I threw at it. Where it failed, and it failed big, was not in it’s support of XForms, but the CSS that displayed them. For reasons I don’t get the display: table-row CSS directive made the chosen row just disappear. Um, WFT? Without a working table-row, the whole point of a table display fails.

X-Smiles was a decent sanity checker… even though it’s CSS support was weak at best. Luckily the table-row madness in Mozilla forced a layout change that X-Smiles liked as well. Colors and borders were gone however. What got me about X-Smiles was that it errored mightily on xforms:alert XForms tags within loops, even though the spec says that’s valid.

MSIE with formPlayer was an unmitigated disaster. Most of this no doubt was due to MSIE’s ridiculous support of CSS. In short I could never get the page to display even close to right. What really got me was the surreal fact that MSIE/formsPlayer crashed when it hit the same xforms:alert tags like those mentioned above (sharing code with X-Smiles are we?). In addition it would error on any XML Schema custom types, which is a key strength of XForms.

So even though XForms has so much to offer: strong type checking, data organization and massive flexability, it’s support is so lacking as to be reminicent of 1996 web standards. What’s frightning about that is while it’s tempting to assume that at any time XForms will just take off, there are enough sights touting just that… and dated 2003… to be wholly discouraging.

Ok, so today in a day-long vendor training session, the vendor guy mentions that because users shouldn’t have the root password, there was this command they shipped that could be used to execute commands as root.

It actually took me a few seconds to realize that, yes, he was serious. See, normally this kind of thing is considered a bad thing…

“So… you just gave users root access anyway,” I stated.

“Yeah, but this way you don’t need to give away the root password.” He actually sounded pleased.

As someone I once knew liked to say: You completly missed the point!

I decided to attempt to maintain my “sense of the ridiculous” and try to let it slide, but to his credit one of our junior admins was having a hard time accepting a truck sized security hole on our servers.

“Does this command log anything?” he asked, clearly hinting at sudo.

“Yes the application logs everything,” senior admin offered. Apparently, the senior system administrator was suffering from a case of cranial-rectosis that day.

“Perhaps I’m not being clear, does this command log anything?” to which the senior system admin pratteled on about how well the system logged and his tone was clear that the junior admin needed to shut up.

I snapped. “No, as a user I’m going to use this command to wipe out your logs and do whatever else I like with no controls whatsoever. This command unzips our fly and lets anyone have access and you are OK with this? That is insane!”

So I have no doubt I’ll hear about my little outburst again in the next few days because, after all, in the corporate world “being unprofessional” doesn’t cover things like not knowing what you’re doing, only pointing it out in no uncertain terms.

Nice.

So the other day I’m out at lunch with one of our Windows admins when he mentions that he’s been asked to inventory all the Windows software we use because his boss told him…

…wait for it…

Corporate is planing to phase out Windows on the desktop in favor of Linux by 2008.

Now this is patently absurd. As much as a fan as I am of OSS, the idea that a rather large, firmly entrenched Windows shop would just convert willy-nilly is just stupid.

Well this leads to a row over OSS, called “freeware” by this guy, and how it just sucks and not professional and all that.  Basic FUD 101. The best part is he references our less-than-stellar experiences with SpamAssassin for spam control but convienently overlooks the fact that our commercial replacement, Proofpoint, happily runs on what? Yep, Linux.

In the interest of fairness though, lets explore what the afforementioned boss could have misconstrued:

• Phasing out Windows servers as opposed to desktop - Um, yeeeaaaaNo. And where would we find all the new admins?
• Phasing out selected Windows server aplications - like Exchange. I’ve heard this talked about, but c’mon. Anyone know of a viable OSS Exchange killer? Remember, I said, viable.
• Phasing out MS Office for OpenOffice - certainly doable. Probably worth exploring. The most likely cadidate, however doubtful.

Ah well, having a non-Windows desktop at work is a nice thought… at times. But c’mon could you imagine this at my employer?