Lady Anne Blunt

Why are Sys Admins given such power?

2006-07-10T09:12:00.000+01:00

Following on from corporate IT infrastructures it got me thinking. In companies where its not about the IT and they don't do their own IT delivery then its perfectly reasonable for the Sys Admins to have control over everyone.

But in an IT company or an IT department? How does that make sense? People are Sys Admins for a reason, and its not because they are technical geniuses. If you've got people building systems for the business and probably even installing the server versions of the desktop operating systems then how does it make sense for those people in IT support to have any sort of control at all? Its like putting the guy who mixed the paint in charge of what Michaelangelo was doing.

System Administrators are a support function and they should be treated as such and behave as such. Rather than assuming that every user is stupid and needs to be protected they should look in the mirror. So fair enough bang down the desktop on the accounts people and HR, but 99% of the IT departments I know would love to be given full control over their environments and cope with the "pain" of occasionally doing a full reinstall (after all that is why God invented Norton Ghost).

Rather than bitch and moan about the users why don't Sys Admins realise that their job is to help people not to create an environment where nothing happens so they have to do bugger all.

Corporate Infrastructure is Useless

2006-07-07T09:21:00.000+01:00

Those who work for large corporates will be familiar with the uselessness of the corporate LAN. Only the mediocrity that is the 'Internal IT Department' could take the most powerful information sharing tool that humankind has ever created; The Internet and make it completely fucking useless.

Here are some anacedotes from friends working at some major blue chips. Anacedotes told in first person to protect the guilty.

----

I arrive at work every day at 8:45 and after logging in 6 times, yes six times, I can eventually read my email. What adds insult to injury here is the morons call this 'solution' single sign on.

So now that I'm in my email I have a massive 20MB of storage for my mail, calendar, to do list and address book. 20MB! My fucking phone has more CMOS memory than this. If Google can offer every person in the world 2.5GB of storage, for free, why can my big rich employer only afford to supply me with 0.8% of this space?

OK so I've logged in 6 times (with the same damn password) and check my 20MB of email. Fine so why can't I find an email that a client has sent to me? Now this client is important to us, he is listed in my address book he works for an other major blue chip who publish SPF records and he has cryptographically signed his message with a his verisign signed certificate. So how the fuck does my message end up marked as spam? I now have to log into our spam 'solution' portal and release this message. I have to do this everytime he sends me an email although I have requested that the clients domain be whitelisted. Ahhh

Another piece of pure genious from out corporate infrastructure team is the policy of blocking collaboration tools such as Skype, MSN Messenger, Y!, AIM, Google Talk and the like. When probed on why they do this they say security, they always said security when their reasons are indefensible, when we laugh in their face and point out the ridiculousness of this they are forced to admit that it was done to stop people spending time talking to each. I mean god forbid we actually engage in dialogue with people to carry out our jobs... fuckwits!

That's enough for now I need to go take some deep breaths.

Digg this

Hand me the shotgun, I'm going on a course

2006-07-06T22:16:00.000+01:00

Okay its time for another rant about morons, this time training courses. There is an old adage "those who can't... teach", and damn me in IT if that doesn't appear to be the case. You know the bit where you realise on day 1 that not only do you know more about the instructor about his chosen specialised subject but that what he knows is actually bollocks anyway.

Like prats teaching C# (or Java) who say that "multiple inheritance isn't in the language because it isn't something that matches to real world objects". Really? ohhhh so you've only got ONE fucking parent have you? And what about that CLOCK fucking RADIO that got your sloth ridden arse out of bed?

The problem is if you don't take the courses then you get HR quizzing you about it, so you pick the course, making sure its offsite in a decent hotel and start praying that it will be better than last time. So you go on an "advanced" product course, and spend the first two days installing the product on the bloody desktop machines when you've already done it on 20 production servers. It turns out the person giving the course doesn't know the right sodding patch levels but the good news is that the nice people in the bar are happy to put down the massive bar bill as "food".

Then you get the assessment and the smug git always makes sure he is there so the worst he will get is medium marks. Not from me sunny Jim you are getting a big fat zero and an email of complaint to the course providers threatening to grass their quality up to the HR department, which is a great way to get on one of those corporate jolly things BTW.

Occasionally you get someone who really knows their onions, but then you either get complete losers in the course wasting everyones time with inane questions and having a tough time breathing and thinking at the same time.

Why is it that I can't just say "give me the 2 grand in cash, and I'll stay at home for a week and learn this stuff myself", hell I'd even settle for 500 quid and the hotel bill.

Hitting delivery dates the Microsoft way

2006-06-29T23:28:00.000+01:00

With Office 2007 slipping, Vista slipping and Longhorn server fast disappearing I can't wait to see the next set of Microsoft adverts that talk about realising my potential and making everything easier. And as for Microsoft Project, its not exactly the greatest example in the world is it? "Use our project management tools, maybe you're input will help us get better".

Its pathetic, after all its not like they can make the normal excuses

Didn't have the budget - hardly likely
Requirements weren't clear - when have they bothered asking?
Pressured into setting a delivery date - errr 2003 for Vista? And Office 2007 was already called 2007 when they said it would release in 2006

Which leaves us with only one stalwart that they can fall back on

The technology was new, buggy and didn't work properly

Which is hardly going to be used as they wrote all of it anyway!

Its a frigging Office suite, if you make it ridiculously complex its your own damned fault.

Human Remains destroys Software Projects

2006-06-22T21:07:00.000+01:00

Human Remains, HR, Human Resources, personnel or whatever they are called in your company are the biggest waste of space around. Mostly they are laughed off with their review processes and touchy feel crap but actually they are worse than a joke its actually making software development harder.

Why? Well its pretty simple: All of the rules that they (and some governments) put in place make everything harder for anyone who actually knows what they are doing.

Back when men were men, women were women and your place in the organisation had nothing to do with your sex and everything to do with your ability. Actually there seemed to be more women developing back then, or was that just my projects? Since then the numbers of people in IT has risen, but the number of smart people in IT has remained constant at best.

Back when IT was about C, assembler and knowing how the computer worked you knew your stuff or just got put in the development creche (testing , documentation or just colouring in designs). If someone checked in code that broke the build (something that could take a while) you ritually humiliated them you made sure that everyone knew that it was a bad thing. Write stupid code that core dumps? Get ritually humiliated, be told that you are a crap idiotic prat who has just wasted everyone's time with your pea brained coding. Produce a design that is just rubbish, get told that its rubbish to your face. Change the config on the dev or test servers without telling anyone, be prepared for physical intimidation by the people who you've just wasted hours of their time. And lets be clear here this wasn't a macho thing, I've seen top female coders threatening to turn someone into a eunuch using only a mouse cable. If someone was truly awful then you bulleted them, no poncing around and worrying about their motivation, if you were crap, judged crap by a jury of your peers then you had no right to be on the project. Sure sometimes these people survived by being dumped into testing or admin, but they weren't allowed out into the wild again. The point was simple, don't fuck it up for other people and if you can't cope fuck off.

Now however we've got to worry about how people are feeling about development, we've got to worry about their training needs. If someone breaks a build we're allowed to discuss it with them one on one with them (hell I've even been told off for setting up an email system that broadcast who broke the build). And if they repeat this over and over again then its obviously an issue with the training and frigging communication that this bloody muppet has received. If the prat in question can't even follow a bloody stack trace to find the line that caused the exception then clearly they need more mentoring... DOES THIS PERSON GET PAID TO DO THIS OR NOT? They can't produce a decent OO model (despite having been in IT for several years) then again they need training, their code breaks every decent coding rule and DESPITE SEEING THE WARNINGS IN ECLIPSE THEY STILL CHECK IT IN. And when you ball the prat out for wasting everyone's time with their complete and utter turd of a development you get dragged in front of some HR pillock who talks about "brokering" a discussion between you to resolve the issues, and saying "X is crap at his job and I want him off my project" is apparently "not constructive", fuck me sideways with a steam train this pillock has wasted DAYS even WEEKS of time, costing tens of THOUSANDS of dollars or pounds and calling him out on it isn't frigging constructive?

For fucks sake IT projects are hard enough places without putting cotton wool around the shit developers and trying to put forward some laughable notion that everyone's opinion is equal. Well that might be true in the content free arena of HR but its certainly not fucking true in IT. My opinion on threading models is worth jack in comparison with Doug Lea, my opinion on processor design is worth spit next to Bill Joy and I'm not going to take on Stephen Hawking around physics either. So why the hell do I have to listen to fuckwits with shit ideas and have to convince them of the right way? When I'm dealing with people as equals and we disagree we have an argument, try and kick down each others approaches, work out the best approach and go for that, or most often we break it down to the principles and realise we're talking the same stuff. When I'm talking to the frigging stuffed toy brigade its like discussing with cheese, how do you talk to people who don't even know what encapsulation is? Why is it that HR and their brain dead allocation policy assigns developers to projects like pieces of meat treating everyone as equal, so one project its brilliant, the next your working with pond life and every single time you are cleaning up the shit that the muppet brigade left behind.

HR and its policies screw IT up more effectively than anything else out there. IT needs to get back some honesty and stop claiming that anyone can code or that everyone is just as good as each other, and HR needs to fuck off and get back to their coloured charts and policy documents.

Oh and hint of the day: If PMD and Checkstyle both say your code is a pile of shit and you've been coding with PMD and Checkstyle Plugins in your frigging IDE highlighting your inadequacies at every fucking step then you should do us all a favour and apply for a job in HR.

Wiki isn't a revolution

2006-06-21T22:10:00.000+01:00

Lets get it straight, I like Wikis, wikis are cool, they are so much better than word documents its just unbelievable, but to hear people talk about it you'd think there was some fundamental change.

What is a Wiki? Basically a shared journaling file system, Christ VMS had a journaling file system. We used to have Text documents for design elements in VMS where you could quickly see the history. Linking to other documents isn't new, that is the whole point of www and the world that TBL created.

What is sad is that Wiki is the state of the art, companies have invested huge amounts of money in tools that are plainly rubbish in comparison to Wikis. I've even had people talk about "researching" collaborative tools and then say "do you know what a Wiki is?", for the sake of the children can we please move on in IT and get decent tools. A wiki is a decent unstructured multi-person sketching tool, because its got no formalism its not going to help in the long term, and it really isn't new.

And if I hear one more clueless person talk about "Web 2.0" and then the only content they have is to talk about a Wiki then I'm going to have to print Wikipedia out and make them eat it. It is a big a revolution as when people started raving about email in the very late 90s, welcome to the bandwagon folks, it left some time ago.

Wikis are great, wikis are useful, but wikis rate slightly below the number of a good pizza joint that delivers at 2am in the things that make IT projects better.

Windows Longhorn Server will NEVER be released

2006-06-14T22:04:00.000+01:00

Okay so Vista has slipped another 6 months, but there is info out there if you want to look that indicates that Longhorn Server is never going to see the light of day. There are a couple of things we know about servers of the future, and the biggest thing we know that impacts operating systems is multi-core. Sun are already doing 32 way, Intel and AMD are already looking at 4 way (with Hyperthreads). This means that we need operating systems that can cope with lots of threads....

Using the very unscientific approach of counting google hits for Linux and Windows "x way", eg: Windows "64 way" -linux -solaris -bsd, I've done the subtraction of solaris and bsd so we don't get "Solaris does 512 way, there is no way Linux could do that" type things. So what do we get out there on the internet as buzz around this?

So while there is a little bit out there on 128 way (hardly much) there is nothing out there beyond that and the story gets worse if you look at the companies you'd expect to be talking about this. If we take just ONE Linux company (IBM) and limit the searches for their site and pick 1024 way as our target we get 15 hits, 512 way gets 5 hits (as they scale bigger than this) and 256 way gets one, but in a redbook. So IBM score

256 - 1
512 - 5
1024 - 15

Now what do we get for Microsoft, 12-18 months before they are due to release Longhorn Server? Well they score 3 for 256 but all of these are about NUMAQ and don't actually say that Windows will run at that level, but lets at least allow that they've thought about the problem. 512 way gets us nothing as does 1024. In fact Microsoft have nothing that suggests windows, even in research has ever broken the 128 way barrier.

Writing SMP is a hard problem, this is why it really took people like IBM to get Linux up to scratch, they knew how to do SMP. The question is in an OS as large as Windows where the focus is on the bells and whistles can Microsoft make these sorts of changes under the covers.

They've NEVER even suggested that Windows has EVER even in a research project had to run on more than 128 way servers, Sun are shipping 16 Way CPUs TODAY. By 2008 you are 100% not going to be able to release a data center operating system that can only cope (assuming CPUs move to 32 way by then) with FOUR CPUs.

Windows Longhorn Server is going to HAVE to support at LEAST 2048 threads, especially as it is the .NET Application Server, otherwise it won't last 5 years, and there is NOTHING to suggest that Microsoft have any clue how to do this.

Longhorn server is dead... wait for Microsoft to start talking about clusters rather than data-centre servers (the push for Windows Server 2003), and then just releasing the 2003 stuff with a few add ons.

Tightwad Management's False Economy of Low Spec Developer Machines

2006-06-14T13:45:00.000+01:00

It never ceases to amaze me the way in which management budget holders will cut of their nose to spite their face when it comes to investing in developer's workstations. I'm constantly going into companies where every techie from their top developers (who like to call themselves 'Architects' but that's for another post) to their junior programmers are slaving away on some Pentium 3 piece of crap with less than 2GB of RAM.

Often I sit with these people to do some pairing or mentoring and it is painful in the extreme. Start the database, start the application server, start the IDE and before long the pitiful machine is having trouble rendering the screen let alone compiling the source code. Throw in an on access scanner for viruses and the machine is virtually useless (I say virtually because they would be perfectly effective for use by Word jockeys such as the management and procurement drones who insist that developers use these underpower machines).

So how much time is wasted by using sub par machines? Having timed myself working on a rubbish desktop for an entire week (Pentium 4 1.8GHz /w 768MB of RAM) and added up the time I have had to wait for things like the screen to render, windows to minimise, for the mouse cursor to react I can give the figure as 45%. That is 45% of my time is spent waiting for the machine to give me back control plus the extra time it takes to do things such as long compile cycles. It doesn't include the time wasted because I forgot what I was doing because the machine locked up or took 5 mins to do a task that would take 10 seconds on a modern machine.

So forget how much I'm paid, because I'm not telling you, but I happen to know the going rate for a very junior developer is around 50,000 USD (40,000 EUR or 30,000 GBP). Therefore we have a loss of 11,250 USD... 11,250 USD per year!.

How much does a decent developer machine cost? Not much more that 3,000 USD for a dual core 3.75GHz with 4GB of memory and an 300GB hard disk. Therefore buy the decent machine actually makes a saving of 8,250 USD per year.

However managers get patted on the back for not spending money. And the last thing they want is things to get complicated, like doing ROI and making investments, as they get a little confused and so does their boss and that's why techies very rarely get suitable machines.

Languages that should live

2006-06-12T20:51:00.000+01:00

Okay we've done the languages that should die... so what should live. This is for ENTERPRISE developers, professionals who get paid to develop, not for Joe Schmo knocking up a "cool" demo to impress his also single friends.

Java - Odds are if you are being paid to develop that its in Java, good language, amazing libraries, huge open source support and the only place in the world where decent component and service based development research is going on. Its got the mashup technologies for the front end and its got the big heavy lifting functions when you need it. Best professional platform and language out there today. The only downside is the use of the old brain dead C syntax on the basis that it saves typing... oh yeah a real problem these days, its too damn easy for muppets to write unmaintainable code.
C# - if you have to develop in .NET, and I'm sure you have your reasons, then at least pick the Java rip-off that is C#. Just a shame that .NET developers can't be trusted with checked exceptions.
Eiffel - Its OO on steroids, the libraries are rubbish, but damn its a joy to develop with. Proper formal contracts and a decent syntax that just highlights bad development. Shame it never took off.
MIX - Lets face who is going to argue with Knuth?
Ruby - Your a bit of a loner and you like to code that way... Ruby is your language.

And if you want to continue in Perl, PHP or any of the other brain dead languages can I humbly suggest that you elect to use Brainfuck instead.... and if you want to use Basic can I recommend that you do us all a favour and don't.

Languages that deserve to die

2006-06-08T11:39:00.000+01:00

With IT there is nothing we love more than inventing a new programming language for no apparent reason, baring maybe continuing to develop in a rubbish old language just because that is what we used to do. The following is a list of languages that should be condemned, burnt, destroyed and generally removed from circulation. This is not about languages when they are used for one-man-band projects but when they are used in supposedly professional environments. Its not about a quick script to do something, its about using languages to build applications. This is about killing off languages that people shouldn't be paid to develop in.

Perl - Its a scripting language, if you need to do a quick bit of parsing then fair enough. If its more than 100 lines or in 2 files then Perl should be burnt, its a rubbish language, its difficult to read and is the refuge of people who can't be bothered to learn to write decent code.
PHP - Its slow, its bloated, its ugly and it isn't as quick to develop using as people make out. Sure if you only know one retarded language then its probably quicker for you to code in PHP than learn to work professionally but that isn't an excuse.
Python - is Ruby really that hard to learn? If you want a quick development language for scripting go for Ruby, sure Python is better than Perl, but that is just like saying Syphilis is better than Herpes.
Visual Basic - like announcing to the world that you've had a lobotomy. A language designed to teach people who to program procedural code. Horrific
PL/SQL - Oracle have said its dead, you'd be better off using Toplink or Hibernate anyway, the editors are rubbish the debuggers woeful, and its a procedural language. Get over it, PL/SQL is dead
ABAP - Same as PL/SQL but for SAP developers, do you really belive that it will be supported as much as Java/BPEL and the rest? Get a clue and start re-training.
Ada - I hate to say it as its a great development language, but really shouldn't we just admit that people like using C syntax and that having woeful GUI library support was a dumb idea?
C++ - time to move on folks, its not about performance these days, its about pig headedness, its time to move to a newer platform, and get rid of the memory leaks.
C - Apart from 1% of 1% of 1% of requirements there is no reason for C, people are doing Real Time stuff in other languages so the old speed argument doesn't hold up. Time to burn the K&R books.
COBOL, FORTRAN, ALGOL, LISP etc etc sure they might look nice and you might like them, but programming in them should be part of a history degree not computer science.