friday, crap... i mean yay
This week was somewhat bizarre (my new favorite word). Overally, it actually went fairly well. Not much stress, fairly smooth sailing. But there were some sharp edges here & there <!-- (at work, of course). Colin, asshat VP of engineering, was completely under the radar for much of the week, until this afternoon when he returned to his former bloated-ego, make-up-the-rules-as-you-go, torpedos-be-damned, self. Just more of the same crap from him, finding all sorts of flimsy excuses why his band of rented monkies can't fix the bugs that they created.<br />
Then there was the silly Fusion nonsense. Fusion being the marketing name for the already-year-late, and still year-away-from-final-release, beta release of SourceForge-4.0. So it was decided, in order to make an appearance of actually doing something with several million dollars or R&D, they'd set a date, and release whatever java turds they'd written thus far on 12/5/03 (today). As a result, it was flying by the seat of their pants, with no discipline whatsoever, as they rushed Fusion out the door. Engineering basically ordered Support to review the documentation for Fusion, which meant a lengthy, dry, unimaginative User Guide, that Doug reviewed last week, and then there was the Install Guide. We were supposed to receive it yesterday morning. Instead it was emailed to me yesterday night, as in 10:03PM. And to add insult to the injury, they wanted the feedback before 5PM today, for software that they didn't deliver until after 5PM today. Compound that with the stupid request that all the comments be placed in "M$-Word comments" within the document, rather than breaking each bit of feedback into a separate tracker artifact so that they could all be accounted for, and documented. Or in the author's words "none of that Tracker Madness!". Errr, yeah, right. Jebus forbid we actually edit our tech dox in a professional manner. Let's just put all of our eggs in one basket. *sigh*<br />
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So anyway, I also received the Fusion/Saturn server earlier this week. Its a nice box, with dual 3Ghz Xeons, 4GB DDR RAM, and four Seagate 36GB U320 hotswap SCSI drives in a RAID5 array, all in a 2U form factor. The box flies, especially since the CPUs are hyperthreaded, so they appear as 4 CPUs to the OS. After some discussion, DeWayne & I decided that it would be best to make it another UML box since we largely suspect it will sit idle, from a sales usage persepective, 95% of the time. I ran into some weird power fault & reboot problems, where the power fault LED would light up on cold boots, and the box would hang on a warm reboot with a cryptic watchdog timer error. The vendor came out today to check on it, but oddly none of the misbhavior happened while he was onsite. So we're stumped, and i'm hoping that it doesn't happen again.