Ntro’s Official Opinion

I finally found something better than Windows XP PowerToys Virtual Desktop Manager. It’s called Enhanced Virtual Desktops.

Monday was my first day at the new job, and so far it has been going well. The first couple of hours were spent setting up my computer and cubicle, taking the official office tour, and meeting people whose names and positions I don’t remember.

The next 15 minutes were a brief introduction to the data model, and an even more brief description of a query that has a severe performance issue. Apparently the query was the result of a last-minute requirement last Friday, and hadn’t really been tuned yet. After lunch, I took at look at the query, which was actually a function which queried a view which executed another function which queried another view which . . . I didn’t get that far. After sifting through the source for a while, I found part of the problem and improved the performance of the query by a couple hundred percent.

This is nothing to brag about, really. No one was stumped by the issue, because no one had taken time to analyze it, and any of the other developers would have been able to discover the problem if given the chance. But, the chance was given to me, and I was able to work with it and be productive, something I didn’t expect to do on my first day. This made its way up to my boss’ boss’ boss, which earned me a few pats on the back that afternoon. That was nice.

Other than that, I’m working on the Oracle DBA transition. More on (pun intended) that in a future post.

I’ve been planning a home theater system for the media room (aka The Bonus Room) for quite some time, and I now have almost all of the components I have planned for:

• Denon AVR-2105 receiver (Pictures: Back Front)
• Philips DVP-642 DVD/Divx/MPEG/MP3/pretty much anything that will fit on a DVD-R or CD-R player
• InFocus 4805 DLP projector
• 4 Cerwin Vega V-5M bookshelf speakers
• 2 Cerwin Vega V-15F 3-way floor standing speakers
• 1 Cerwin Vega V-5C center channel speaker
• 1 Cerwin Vega V-12S 12″ powered subwoofer

The speakers are on backorder and haven’t actually arrived yet, and we don’t have a ceiling mount or screen for the projector, just a blank white wall and a card table. Has that stopped us from enjoying it? Of course not.

The original plan was to purchase everything at once, paint the room, buy furniture, and have everything set up before we started actually using it. But, a deal for the projector came along on Woot! that I couldn’t resist, and as soon as it arrived we wanted to “try it out.” That put a bit of a kink in our plans of “doing it right.”

The projector, DVD player, and crappy speakers hijacked from my wife’s computer are all sitting on a table in the back of the room, wires all tangled up and surge protector suspended between the table and wall. Not the elegant setup I was hoping for, but it’s good enough to watch old episodes of Smallville.

Oh, yea, one more thing. “Light control” quickly became an issue, and instead of buying/making curtains, we tacked bath towels on the wall to cover the windows. Pathetic, I know. I’d provide pictures, but I’m pretty sure my wife would have a heart attack (Disclaimer: my wife had nothing to do with the towels. It was all ubu’s idea).

Friday is my last day with my current employer, and an interesting phenomenon is taking place. I turned in my resignation the Friday before last, and since then there has not been an official announcement of my departure. Instead, the news has traveled through the grapevine.

This has made my final days uncomfortable for a few reasons. It’s obvious that everyone knows by now, but very few people have actually congratulated me or affectionately called me a “short-timer” in passing. So, when I stop in the kitchen for coffee, I end up having conversations like this:

Guy in the kitchen: Hey, how’s it going?
Ntro: I’m doing alright, how are you?
Guy: I’m fine.
[ more than a few seconds of silence ]
Ntro: So, did you hear my news?
Guy: No, what news?
Ntro: I’m leaving in two weeks.
Guy: Oh, yea, that. I heard about that, but I wasn’t going to say anything.
Ntro: . . .
Guy: Well, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.
* Guy leaves.
* Ntro leaves.

That was it. I asked another person the same question over IM, and his response was “;)“. I’m still not really sure what that means.

If I were in charge, and someone like me resigned, I would have immediately sent out an email like this:

All,

Ntro has decided to part ways with our company.
He is leaving on good terms, so there’s no reason
to tip-toe around this. If you pass him in the hall,
wish him luck in the future.

That would have avoided any ambiguity about the motivations behind my resignation, whether or not I was “asked to leave” (I wasn’t) and, most importantly, make the subject approachable and eliminate the awkwardness that inevitably arises when your major source of information is the rumor mill. Instead, what we have is a situation in which everyone knows, but they all think they are not supposed to know, and therefore it is treated like secret information.

Normally, I’m not bothered by awkward silence. In fact, most of the time I would rather be left alone. However, recently I’ve discovered that I don’t have an aversion to conversation, I just don’t like small talk. If I have news to share, I like talking about it with almost anyone. That’s why these last few days have been so miserable– I have big news, and everybody knows about it, and therefore I am accosted in order to discuss it. But, therein lies the conflict. No one received an official announcement, and no one is willing to admit that they were discussing my news behind my back, so I either have to bring it up or it is not discussed. I don’t, of course, and then the small talk starts.

Are you beginning to see how this might be uncomfortable?

Who knows. Maybe on Friday we’ll have a party in the kitchen with nachos and cheap chicken wings. That would make up for everything.

I found myself in the market for an MP3 player, and decided on the Rio Carbon. Here is the article that convinced me. It’s 5GB, which didn’t seem like very much at first, but after I loaded it up with everything I wanted to carry around with me I still had two point something gigs free, so I guess it will do.

Now for the interesting part. I bought this little toy at CompUSA during lunch last week, and the guy at the counter asked if I wanted the purchase protection or warranty or whatever. Usually I immediately refuse, but this time I listened to his little presentation. Apparently CompUSA has followed Best Buy’s lead in their new warranty policy, and transformed it into something useful and attractive.

Here’s the deal: On a $199 purchase (minus $20 mail-in-rebate, but I never count on those things) such as this one, the new plan is $17. Like a normal purchase protection plan it covers damage to the unit, et cetera, but this one has an added benefit. Any time in the next twelve months, I have the opportunity to bring the device back, sans receipt, sans packaging, with only my identification, and tell the customer service guy I’d like a credit for the original purchase price. He gives me a gift card for $199, and I go pick out whatever I want. So, effectively, a year from now I’ll be able to sell my old fashioned MP3 player for $3 more than I paid for it, an appreciation which is unheard of in the world of useless technology.

I’m looking forward to my free 2006 version of the Rio Carbon, maybe it’ll have 20 GB and Ogg Vorbis support.

From digg.com: “A video filmed in the 1940s, shows how the Soviets successfully resurrected a severed dog head, also how they were able to stop a heart of a dog for up to 15 minutes and resurrect it again with blood circulation mechanism, with surprisingly no brain damage! From what I understand this is real historically documented footage. “

This is really neat, and it happened 65 years ago. A small warning: it’s mildly disturbing to see a severed dog head trying to lick lemon juice off of its nose, but it’s still very interesting. If you don’t want to see that part, just watch the first few minutes. There is an animated diagram of the dog head experiment before it actually shows it– stop there if you want, but you’ll be missing the best part.

read more | digg story

I’m starting a new job next Monday at a small firm in Addison as a DBA and Senior Developer. It’s going to be interesting, as it’s a .NET/WinForms/ASP.NET (Microsoft’s “New Stuff”) shop, and I’m accustomed to Unixy solutions. At least the Oracle database is on Sun Solaris, but there’s talk of migrating to SQL Server.

The purpose of this post is to share my official opinion on Microsoft and .NET. As a supporter of Linux and OSS, a general assumption people have is that I consider anyone and anything Microsoft evil. Though I haven’t bothered correcting that assumption, it’s not completely accurate.

Though I am reluctant to admit it, Microsoft is on the right path with .NET. Microsoft is only the enemy insofar as they attempt to prevent interoperability, and the New Microsoft seems to be coming to the realization that they are going to have to do business in a world in which they produce only one of many popular computing environments, not the homogeneous landscape they dominate today. Between the various distributions of Linux and Apple’s Mac OS X, competition is on the rise. The iPod Halo Effect is one oft-quoted piece of evidence of this fact.

In the near future, the Mono Project’s open source .NET runtime will have full WinForms support, and Microsoft is “friendly,” according to this rather ancient post and this article by Miguel de Icaza. I’m optimistic about running Office, Money, and other proprietary Microsoft products natively in Linux soon (not Crossover– emulation is merely a stop-gap, and please don’t flame me about how it’s Not An Emulator). I’ll even pay for them! I just want to have the choice of an operating system other than Windows (as ubu once so cleverly pointed out, “the operating system named for a GUI feature”).

I’m confident that some day I’ll be able to run our applications on Mono, but even then I will likely be using Visual Studio .NET, because it’s damn good. I love Vim, but man you should see some of the things vs.net can do. Maybe I’ll find a nice way to use vi keybindings, find and replace, macros, and “.”, or maybe I’ll just get used to the idea of leaving the home row more often.

I haven’t been on board with any Microsoft “initiatives” in the past, oh, six years. In retrospect, the only reason I favored Microsoft back then was an ignorance of alternatives. But I’m on board with .NET.

Do you remember Sun’s hype about Java back in the day (”compile once, run anywhere”)? Do you also remember what a flop that turned out to be? Well, .NET is basically Java Done Right. Let’s face it. If Microsoft is on board with this, it’s going to be popular. That much is inevitable. Microsoft’s enthusiasm about having “other implementations of .NET” is a sign that they’re finally “getting it.” You do the math, folks. At the risk of sounding like a bona fide Microsoft evangelist, .NET will have an impact on the world of technology that is greater than Java’s. Look at the numbers: according to indeed.com, there are 57,618 java job postings and 57,207 .NET job postings. I’d say that’s an impact. Just wait until all of that software “runs anywhere” and supports your favorite programming language.

Well, wish me luck on my new venture, I’m sure I’ll be blogging about it in the near future, so stay tuned.

Well, I guess I’m a blogger now.