If you read the other books in the field, will you derive most of these ideas yourself? Probably. But I still got a few good techniques from this book — among them, a new approach to what BCD calls my “Project Portfolio” — my lists of projects, tasks, and who they’re assigned to.

Worth reading. Not worth reading first, but worth the time and money spent on it.

The first is “Getting Real” by 37signals. If you’re doing web-application development, I’d say this is a book you should read. I’m not doing that, and thus, didn’t see a whole lot of value here. I’m making a mental note to reread this if I ever do get into a web development project, and it did make me think about ways I could make our current development procedures more agile — but if the question is “Was this worth the time it took for me to read it?” then the answer is “No.”

The second is “The Mythical Man Month” by Frederick Brooks. It came highly-recommended in every software management book I’ve read, so I figured it had to be on my list. While there is much still of value in this book, easily a third to a half seems completely out-of-date — advice on whether to use printed manuals or microfiche that seems as applicable as a discussion of which tools are best for shoeing horses.

While the concepts discussed in TMMM were clearly revolutionary, I’m not sure it makes the first cut for a software management reading list. Most of the ideas it contains are captured better in other, more current books, particularly “Peoplware,” “Joel On Software,” and “Managing Humans.”

First, and best is Peopleware, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. This is another one of those must-read books. I’ve been telling everyone that I can’t believe I’ve been allowed to have the job I have without reading it. If you are in the business of software (or in the business of managing any type of “knowledge worker,”) you must read this. Really. I’m buying copies for all the managers and execs at work.

Second is the second “Joel On Software” book, “More Joel On Software,” by Joel Spolsky. I wasn’t as wowed by this one as I was by the first, but it’s still very much a worthy read. Most of the articles in the first one were new to me, while I had already read most of the 2nd one’s content on Joel’s website. Still definitely worth reading.

(Shortest review I’ve ever written.)

While I don’t agree with everything Joel has written, I find most of what he writes to be a clear exposition of common-sense approaches to managing software development. No BS, just simple stuff that works. A small percentage of “Joel On Software” is mind-changing, opening your eyes to new ways of doing things or new ways of thinking about old software.

Highly recommended.

I of course already have passwordless SSH set up to connect to that server, and use ssh-agent to store the passphrase for my SSH key, as described in another entry. However, I could not get passwordless SSH to work from a cron job. If anyone has tips on how to do that, I’d love to hear it.

So I created a second SSH public/private key pair with no passphrase, (in ~/.ssh/backup and ~/.ssh/backup.pub) and figured out how to have Duplicity call ssh, scp, and sftp with the correct parameters to specify the new key pair. (There’s about a zillion different ways of specifying that, and only ONE that works across all three programs.)

The passphrase mentioned here is the one used to encrypt the duplicity backups.

PASSPHRASE=’YourPassphraseGoesHere’ duplicity \
–no-print-statistics \
–ssh-options “-oIdentityFile=/home/schof/.ssh/backup” \
/home/schof \
scp://johnmarkschofield@example.com/duplicity

On the other hand, I’ve met exactly ONE of the type he’s talking about in my career. Not sure where that leaves me as a managing geek who needs to hire brilliant geeks.

Building the VMware VmPerl Scripting API.

Using compiler “/usr/bin/gcc”. Use environment variable CC to override.

Unable to compile the VMware VmPerl Scripting API.

********
The VMware VmPerl Scripting API was not installed.  Errors encountered during
compilation and installation of the module can be found here:
/tmp/vmware-config4

You will not be able to use the “vmware-cmd” program.

Errors can be found in the log file:
‘/tmp/vmware-config4/control-only/make.log’

When you look at make.log, you see a series of errors like this:

In file included from VmPerl.xs:6:
/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE/perl.h:420:24: error: sys/types.h: No such file or directory
/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE/perl.h:451:19: error: ctype.h: No such file or directory
/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE/perl.h:463:23: error: locale.h: No such file or directory
/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE/perl.h:480:20: error: setjmp.h: No such file or directory
/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE/perl.h:486:26: error: sys/param.h: No such file or directory
/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE/perl.h:491:23: error: stdlib.h: No such file or directory
/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE/perl.h:496:23: error: unistd.h: No such file or directory
/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE/perl.h:776:23: error: string.h: No such file or directory
/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE/perl.h:925:27: error: netinet/in.h: No such file or directory
/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE/perl.h:929:26: error: arpa/inet.h: No such file or directory
/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE/perl.h:939:25: error: sys/stat.h: No such file or directory
/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE/perl.h:961:21: error: time.h: No such file or directory
/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE/perl.h:968:25: error: sys/time.h: No such file or directory
/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE/perl.h:975:27: error: sys/times.h: No such file or directory
/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE/perl.h:982:19: error: errno.h: No such file or directory

The answer is simple:

sudo apt-get install libc6-dev

Now Google has the answer.

Ssh-agent is a great program that lets you add the password to your SSH private key to memory, and then you don’t need to type in the ssh key passphrase every time. The basic usage is that you start BASH as a child of ssh-agent, and then use a program called ssh-add to prompt you for the password and store it in memory.

On OS X, there’s a GREAT program called SSHKeychain that handles this, storing the password in your OS X keychain, so it’s really seemless.

On Linux, you need to type in “ssh-add” manually every time you want to store the key, and after that your SSH sessions will be seamless.

However, I’m always forgetting to do that, and thus getting prompted for the password. Too many seams. I added the following code snippet to the end of my .bashrc file, and thus, every time I open a bash shell, it checks whether ssh-agent has any keys in memory. If it does, the shell starts as normal. If ssh-agent doesn’t have any keys in memory, it prompts you for the password. Simple, and as seamless as I can make it.

## Add key to ssh-add if it has not been added.

ssh-add -l &> /dev/null
SSHADDRESULT=$?
if [ "$SSHADDRESULT" -ne "0" ]; then
ssh-add
fi

UPDATE 2008-07-02: Here’s a much more succinct way of writing that:

ssh-add -l &>/dev/null || ssh-add

However, there’s some talk around Apple’s projections of selling 10 million iPhones in a year that are starting to bother me.

Regardless, Macworld’s Jason Snell has already detailed how Apple will likely beat the 10 million mark for calendar 2008. So the question really is just by how much.

Frankly I don’t care if Apple beats their projections or not. This won’t affect the quality of the iPhone, the quality of other Apple products, or anything else I care about. I’m not a cheerleader, I’m someone who wants to use products that don’t suck. And as long as Apple’s products suck less than anyone else’s, I’ll use Apple.

If you’re doing massive web stores in Java — well, you’ve probably already read this. If you haven’t I’d say this book is a must-read. Of course, my projects aren’t web-scale, aren’t e-commerce, and don’t use Java, and to this point, haven’t — so do take my comments with whatever amount of salt you feel is appropriate.

Even if you’re doing shrink-wrap software, I’d say “Release It!” has something of value for you — it appears to be a collection of hard-won, common-sense techniques for creating what Nygard calls “cynical software” — software that assumes that itself, and the other software it links to will all fail at one time or another, and is prepared for that failure. A number of failure modes spring to mind, but Nygard enumerates them, the anti-patterns that create them, and the patterns you can use to respond to them with exceptional clarity and obvious expertise.

In addition to being chock-full of good ideas and interesting concepts, it’s also filled with entertaining war stories about various failures and how Nygard and his team responded to them. And for a systems geek, there’s few more satisfying ways to spend an hour than reading about the nightmare series of cascading failures that ruined someone else’s weekend.

Highly-recommended.

The success of our company depends on my performance. If I do my job poorly, our company could go broke, and all our employees could be out of work. (Lest you think I sound grandiose, there’s a number of other people at our company who can make the same statements. I’m not unique; our company depends on the efforts of a number of very talented people.)

Our products improve the quality of life for thousands of seniors across the country, and there’s other groups of people I can’t talk about yet who may also start being helped by my company. If I do my job well, their lives get better, and if I don’t, their lives don’t improve as much.

Now, this is not life-or-death. I’m not a doctor or a  pilot, and nobody’s going to die if I mess up. But quality of life is important — in the best case, our products could give a grandmother a few more months or years of recognizing her grandchildren. In the worst case, our work brings a smile and a slight lift to a senior’s day.

So those are the stakes, and I have a challenging job I care deeply about. Where’s the problem?

My crisis of confidence is that I’ve realized recently that I’m just not smart enough, and I know there’s nothing I can do to get smarter. I reached the limits of what I could do with BASH programming — so I taught myself Python, and began using that instead. Almost everything that I do involves editing text of one kind or another, on multiple platforms. After working with Vim and TextMate, I’ve settled on Emacs, and I’m working hard to master it. It’s available on every platform I use, and becoming an expert will reward the effort I put in. I spend my free time reading technical or management books, trying to improve my skills. I can make myself both more efficient and more effective. But I can’t make myself smarter.

The answer to all this is to simply to do the best that I can, accept that I’m doing the best that I can, and move on. Usually I tell myself that it’s enough to make our procedures and our product a little better every day. And usually that helps. Not tonight.

If I were to suddenly have a 100-fold decrease in my job performance, could that torpedo the company? Yes. (Again, there’s other people at work who could say the same thing.) What effect could a 100-fold increase have, both for the company and the users of our products?  Hard to imagine, but it would be significant. But I don’t see how a 100 times increase is possible for me — I’m already busting my ass to get to where I am.

I’m not beating myself up because someone else attacking the same problem could do it 10% better than I could. Someone else (I don’t know who, but let’s imagine) might do it ten-thousand times better. There’s no fixed endpoint, no race I have to finish. Part of this job is defining the endpoint, and a flash of inspiration could put it somewhere many orders of magnitude better than anything I can do.

I want to improve by orders of magnitude, and the best I can come up with is tacking on a few percentage points of improvement here and there.

Now realistically, I may not be the best, but I’m the best Dakim has, at least for my position. And Dakim would have a hard time replacing me if I left. But if there were some real rockstar to take my place (and people significantly better than me do exist), that rockstar could make my contributions look puny, and could take our product much farther than I’ve been able to.

Where does that leave me? It leaves me going to work in the morning, continuing to bust my ass and do the best I can.  And hopefully, able to forgive myself for my best being what it is.

Useful for all kinds of things. And I can never remember how the syntax changes between doing a for statement in a bash script and doing it as a one-liner on the command line.

First, lose the headphones. That didn’t affect our decision at all, but I could imagine it affecting it at other companies.

Second, you’re obviously intelligent and capable. You messed up on the unit test, but I’m attributing that to interview nerves - I’m reasonably certain you could handle the technical demands of the job. But that’s only the first hurdle.

The next is personality and fit with the company — and this is a sticky one. In an interview, I’ve got about an hour to decide if you’re the kind of person I want to spend the next three or more years with, in relatively close quarters. Can you argue a position strongly, but lose gracefully? You may be right about the technical merits of something, but the business reality means we have to do something else — can you live with that? On a good day, we go two steps forward and one step back — bad days it’s one step forwards and two steps back. Can you deal with that frustration? I received certain cues from you — interrupting, hitting the table during the coding test, etc. — that you might have been hard to work with. Is that true? I can’t tell in an hour. But saying “no” to a candidate who would have been terrific is a smaller risk than saying “yes” to a candidate who turns out to be a bad hire.

I hope you appreciate my honesty in writing this, rather than brushing you off with “not a good fit.” I did so because I think your question about your interview performance is sincere, and I’m hoping my answer helps.

If it’s not obvious from reading the e-mail, Rands has been a big influence on my management style.

I did share my own story — the story that kept me up Sunday night. I told parts of it to other people on Monday, and I wrote the whole thing down tonight — bright light slays demons, and I don’t want this in my dreams anymore.

You can read it here: http://www.sudosu.net/essays/no-more-guns/ .

@ 43:48

“We learned early on that much of the focus in infection prevention was on how you place the catheter. What we learned through our observations (and borrowing the processes from Toyota) was it was in maintaining the catheter. Once it was in, how do you take care of it? And what we initially discovered was, there weren’t reliable processes in place by which nurses and others took care of catheters. So now it’s very unambiguous, very clear to everybody where the catheter is in the person’s body, what the condition of the catheter is every day. There’s a specific person responsible each day for looking at that catheter site and making sure it’s intact. And any time there’s a question, that’s immediately kicked up to a higher-level person who can make a decision about whether the catheter needs to come out or not.

“So identifying a highly-reliable, unambiguous process in which everyone’s responsibility is made clear creates a much more likely defect-free process during the course of that catheter being in place.”

It’s not that Shannon tells us anything really new here. It’s that he talks about one aspect of what I’m trying to do at Dakim, and comes up with something better than a trunk of Strunks:

“A highly-reliable, unambiguous process in which everyone’s responsibility is made clear.” Damn right.

Despite the over-the-top nature of the letter, posting it here and picking on it started to seem more and more like kicking someone when he’s down. There was no larger message, no lesson to learn from the letter — just me making fun of someone who made an asshole of himself.

I deleted it. I don’t want to be that guy.

(Let’s not forget, I started at 255.)

And I’m up to 8 miles of strenuous hiking — did my house to Parker Mesa last weekend; doing a 7-miler with 1400 feet of elevation gain next weekend.

And I think it’s time to get back into Krav Maga. I’m in good enough shape now that I could get through a session without dying.

Me: I’m sorry, Dakim has a policy of not hiring from recruiters. Have a nice day.

Him: John John John JOHN! This guy was a .NET star at Disney! You’ve got to talk to him!

Me: We don’t use .NET.

Him: We’ve got a GREAT Java programmer from BofA.

Me: We don’t use Java. Goodbye.

I’ve had recruiters try every scummy thing they can think of — a common tactic appears to be lying to the receptionist (telling her you’re a client) to try to get through to me.

We’re rethinking the policy of not hiring from recruiters (although we’re still in the air), so I thought up a way I can deal with them without wasting a whole lot of my time. I’ll update you later as to how well it actually works. (If this appears a little harsh, remember that this is NOT recruiters we’re hiring to help us find candidates — this is recruiters cold calling because they saw our ad on Craigslist. When they call, I’ll simply ask for their e-mail, and get off the phone and send them this.)

Dakim, Inc.
2121 Cloverfield, Suite 205
Santa Monica, CA 90404

Dear Recruiter:

Thank you for your interest in providing recruitment help to Dakim. We welcome your involvement in making Dakim a better, bigger company.

However, to avoid wasting either of our time, we’ve developed a few ground rules that make the recruiter/client relationship go more smoothly.

1) All initial communication will be via e-mail. I’ll call you when it’s time to get on the phone.

2) All e-mails providing information on a candidate MUST also provide the fee your company will take if we hire the individual.

3) Dakim has no problem finding decent candidates. We have a serious problem finding spectacular ones. You may send us up to three candidates, period. (If we make one of them an offer, the count resets to zero.) But if you’ve sent us three jerks, you’re obviously using the shotgun approach, and it’s a waste of your time, our time, and the candidates’ time.

The positions currently open are:
*
*
*

Thanks very much for your interest in recruiting for Dakim!

Sincerely,

John Schofield
Director, Information Technology

I need to start going to conventions, user group meetings, etc. — immediately I’m going to start attending the Los Angeles Linux User Group meetings and the local Python SIG. I’m not sure what else I’m going to do, but it’s becoming obvious that I don’t scale — that the long-term solution is NOT for me to increase my skills, as I’ve been doing, but to hire people who have the skills.

That said, in the short term, it’s clear that there’s three technical areas where I must improve my skills:

1. I need to be a world-class guru in apt-based package management.
2. I need to greatly improve my skills at low-level TCP/IP issues — packet captures, diagnosis of networking problems, etc.
3. I need to greatly improve my skills at dealing the Linux kernel, on all levels — compiling, kernel options, loadable modules & drivers, etc.

I guess it’s good to have a clear vision of where I need to go. Now I need to get there.

We’re now going to be able to focus on growth and moving forward; this will remove a huge number of the roadblocks that have been holding us back.  It’s big news.

(Unfortunately for my friends, it probably doesn’t mean I’ll be spending less time at work — we’re leaping into action like a sprinter leaving the blocks.)

But in general, I’m finding SPBS both challenging and a hell of a lot of fun. It’s turning into a bigger project than I expected — or perhaps, a better way of saying it is that SPBS is slowly revealing its complexity to me. I could get this done a lot fast by adapting pyBloxsom. But where’s the fun in that? {grin}

I’ve written an introduction to SPBS, and the reasons I’m writing it here, at http://code.google.com/p/spbs/wiki/SPBSIntroduction

My house flooded on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I’ve already cleaned up twice; there’s mud on my floor right now, on Monday morning. In addition, we’re late on a big project at the office. I worked 11 hours on Saturday and 9 hours on Sunday.

And we didn’t accomplish the thing that we spent all weekend working to accomplish.

If it looks like it won’t rain for a while, I may mop my floor tonight and clean up the mud for the third time.

(Oh, and my up-hill neighbor built a sandbag dike that sent a WALL of water down past (and into) my house, knocking down a fence, covering my brick patio and a small grass lawn with a layer of mud, and killing the fish in the fishpond.)

I got my landlord (he lives next door) and we went out to investigate. There was a big pool caused by debris against one side of the house, apparently that was seeping down next to the boulder and somehow into the house. When we cleared the debries and caused the pool to drain, the water stopped pouring through the THREE INCH HOLE in my wall. (Pictures to follow.)

Now, about that boulder. There’s a BIG rock, and apparently the hippies who built my house couldn’t move or blast it, so they just built the house around it. The boulder sticks into my house and is just plastered over. (There’s actually steps in it leading up to a little reading nook.) And as far as I can tell, the boulder is the only thing holding the house up. (I asked my landlord if the house was built on a slab foundation. His response? “Are you fucking kidding? It’s sticks on dirt. A couple of cinderblocks. And believe it or not, the place is legal. It’s old enough that it’s registered as a real residence!”)

He brought over a bunch of towels, and we swept up most of the mud on the bottom floor — thus far, my second floor has been blissfully immune to water problems. (Other than a few leaks, which just sprang up.)

Oh, one more thing. When I put my ear down near the boulder, I hear the sound of rushing water. And against the hillside wall of my house. Rushing water.

If I’ve struck some kind of underground stream, can I open a bottling plant? Want to drink Topanga Water?