• I am just getting this started here and I will flesh out the rest later with all my efforts in trying to get a Java Job that pays more than pipe-welding.
• Well, I got a very good idea that pipe-welding and OTR truck driving pays better and is a better job than your everyday back-yard-garden-variety Java programmer. I went to this real shit-ass debt collections agency that employs some Java gadget they purchased in Chicago. These folks gave me a fairly rigorous WPT on-line computer test which I passed handily. After the test they broke-a-dick-off-in-my-ass with a straight face and offered me a job @ $50k per annum. All of the blood left my face when I heard those words. I thanked the old guy that interviewed me and bidded him adieu and exited the building stage right.
• Probably yesterday sometime I must have sent out more resumes and created more online work applications as an all-time one day record. I only received one response and that was from an Indian guy that sent me over to that shit-ass ABS in Greenspoint a few weeks ago. I was interviewed at ABS very rigorously and I had to map out and design right-on-the-spot what exactly I was going to do to develope and code the application that they had in mind for me. Those people at ABS really suck.

• This rant/rave blog entry on Software Engineering and the I.T. industry in general will be an on-going project for a while and remain unpublished until I get it down what and how I want to say about the industry I have followed for the past 18 years.
• I went to Fluor today for a job fair. I briefly spoke with a man about my age that had been the manager of an I.T. department somewhere in Kingwood. He said that he went to work one day only to discover that his department had been dissolved and neither he nor anybody else had a job.
• The previous bullet only goes to show that Software Engineering and I.T. in general shows no loyalty to anybody or anything.
• I suppose the part that is the most disconcerting is the lack of or need for experience in Software Engineering or programming in general. Only prerequisite for working in this industry is by what the employers say is the skill or skills needed to work a project. No long term experience needed to be a programmer or Software Engineer.
• The employers claim that only skill is required and experience is downplayed and not important is just another tool to manipulate employees and the whole hiring/firing life cycle that is employed by most companies.
• This draft has been hanging-around long enough and so I am finishing off here with a rant light on the Chevron gig. In the final analysis the Chevron gig was appalling. I suspected the average I.T. department at your mega-corp O&G organization would not be exactly your cutting edge group of Software Engineers. What I did not know was how far the Chevron CBRES I.T. infrastructure was from being a cutting-edge group of Software Engineers. As part of my task assignment at Chevron I was instructed to interview all of the CBRES I.T staff in San Ramon, CA before digging into their systems to gather my findings and deliver a bound assesment of their production web applications. As a rule the inteviews did not go well. 2 people out of a total of 6 responded well enough to refer to the information collected as useful. Most of the interviewee participants stone-walled me and I was very reluctant to get pushy with anybody in San Ramon just to extract information. I wasn only at the Chevron Houston office for 4 weeks. And, thankfully the last week of my Chevron tenure I finally got a computer from the Chevron folks. I launched a barrage of tests on their applications returning very good tabulated numbers and an aggregated line graph or two to establish a respectable basline metric of the existing CBRES production systems. The entire so-called phase-I effort did not lead to a phase-II follow-up implementation of the recommendations put forth int the phase-I document deliverable. I suspect the CBRES crowd did not have a clue of what I was doing in-spite-of the fact that I had documented clearly all of my actions and deeds performed while at CBRES:
  • All of the Tomcat installations were default installs with the TCs running in client mode as opposed to the much preferred server mode. The default is client mode.
  • The JDKs were all very old versions - 1.3.x.
  • The Tomcat installs were 4.x.
  • The worst of all: the web service was running under Apache Axis 1.3.x!
  • All installation were single instances including the vendor Tririga's JBoss.
• My recommendations included absolving the above indented bullets with preferably vertical scaling (virtualized or gridded) computing model but I was ready to implement horizontal scaling with multiple core HP servers, multi-instance Tomcat with loadbalancing.
• Alas, non of the above transpired and I had to leave the CBRES bunch with their issues to be resolved by their own devices. Strangely enough I saw an ad in Monster my last week at CBRES that wanted someone to with all known programming languages (ASP, .NET, JAVA, PHP, PERL, C++, C#, etc., etc.) to be able to address server and application issues in Houston and San Ramon, CA.

Give me a break...

• This time around I must admit that Dean is not getting nearly as obnoxious as he was when he was doing straight drugs. Is the alcohol any better? No, because Dean has bad kidneys and drinking beer all night and playing poker does not work.
• Ultimately, he lied to me and his Mom and he lied to himself. He keeps saying that he will get better but come Monday night he will exit the P.O. meeting in The Woodlands evangelistic about what he has learned the what a good crowd he has in the P.O. classroom.
• Nobody in this family has healthcare of any description that will aid them in an emergency or any other time. Dean does not understand that if he gets in serious medical difficulty he will be on his own to get fixed. This means he won't be getting any help with medical financial problems from neither his folks, the state or the world.
  

• This is another tale of the dysfunctional family that is getting more-and-more dysfunctional because of the antics surrounding Dean. I can't say that Dean is completely to blame but what he does from day-to-day is not helping the dysfunctional family status very much.
  
• For once though this tale is not drug-related. Dean's cat (Wiggles) has got a very bad infection of some type. In all-likelihood the animal as been in a fight and has gotten his eye scratched by another cat.
• Dean had gotten a vet to promise to come to the clinic tonight to fix up Wiggles. I told Dean to put the cat in something such that we can get him to the vet.
• Dean does not heed my advice and of course Dean's efforts to get the cat into the truck resulted in the cat high-tailing it to the woods. To get ready to take Dean and his cat to the vet I had to stop drop what I was doing, put on my shoes and start the truck.
• I got really furious about the whole thing. This cat incident in and of itself is not a lot to worry about but it is cumulative: on our way home I had to restrain myself when I had to explain to Dean why I cannnot cash his paycheck so he can have some money. Dean expects either his Mother or me to take care of his adult needs. I have even explained to Dean what he needs to do. The solution is simple. He needs to use the computer at night and get the phone numbers of some banks including his old bank and goto to lunch when he is at work and start making some phone calls. I go on further to explain to Dean that when he calls a bank he needs to request what are their operating hours and in particular do they have a night-of-the-week whence they stay open later to accomodate customers that cannot make to the banking facility during normal business hours.
• Dean's Mom gets very nasty about me getting angry about the rhetoric laid down in the previous bullet. This is quite amazing since she just got through yelling at Dean herself. But, this has always been the case with her children. Well, that's OK because someday it will all end and neither one of them will have somebody to blame for all the problems except theirselves.

• I got a call today from T.F. over at Sentigy (sentigy.com). The Sentigy/Chevron gig is just about the weirdest most wacked-out gig I have had in some time.
• As part of my duties @ Chevron I needed to conduct an interview with all of the Chevron I.T. crowd in San Ramon, CA. The top guy was OK and knowledgeable but some of his staff members were incredibly incompetent:
  • Case-in-point: I used a gridded sheet of paper with enough space in the table cells to write notes. I put the target applcaitons and their servlets servers along the rows and the issues and questions I had for the applications and their servlet servers along the columns. To compile all of the gridded interviews all I had to do is lay them on top of each other and the individual names of the contributors disappeared.
  • As a consequence of the previous bullet I interviewed the individual that was responsible for the so-called development section of the Chevron applications running on their production servers. The development go-to-guy at Chevron was IMHO one of the most incompetent people presiding over a large and complicated Java web application I have ever talked to. This just goes to show that the: good-ol'-boy-system is alive and well in the I.T. industry.
    

• The past few days I have been furiously trying to keep up with a technology that I have been chasing for 18  years.
• I would give up and seek employment elsewhere in another field but I realize my family would starve if I were to change careers now. Besides, the corporate system would not allow me to change careers to something like: an organic milk farmer.
• The past couple of days of working on a project I started back a fews days before Christmas 07 has been the biggest eye-opener-awakening I have had in quite some time. I have suspicioned that information-technology-information has been leaping ahead of me by leaps-and-bounds but nothing as I am about to describe here:
  • Back on the 24 Jan 08 I completed a 20 page assessment of a multiple web application, multiple servlet container system of business objects used by my client for their internal ERP/CRM architecture to conduct their internal business concerns.
  • I had suspected early in the project and my fears were later confirmed that my client's interest for hiring me were clear: they were looking for a Silver Bullet Java/Servlet container expert to put an end to their I.T infrastructure woes. Their are many folks out there in Blog-land (hopefully Software Engineers) that will agree with me that there are no Silver Bullets when it comes to assessing and overhauling an I.T. department that has allowed their systems to grow-and-grow without bound, without restrictions and without documentation. My solution search has lead me to: JMeter, MC4J and because of HP's SmartFrog I have been introduced to the MicroSoft System Service Center Manager.
    
  • In an effort to reach the best possible solution for my client given their current baseline metric that I generated over the past few weeks I have come to the realization that my sources for almost anything to do with Software Engineering tools is condensing down to the major computing giants: IBM, HP, Sun, and Intel/Microsoft. I would include: Google and Amazon but these folks in-spite-of their software contributions do not have any direct hardware concerns that I can include in my rant.
  • My suspicion is the above named big 4 corporations will eventually offer a Silver Bullet for all-things-server-farm and their woeful conditions. The engineers and technicians that remain will be working for one of the big 4. Those companies for reasons of security that will retain and maintain their own data-centers will go over to the data-center software management solutions offered by the big 4. It is not my intent to mention any and all such tools here. Let it suffice to say that HP has gone a long way with the LGPL SmartFrog. Sun has the virtualization managment xVM offering and an open source counterpart: OpenxVM. Alas, the Sun offering is working only on Linux and Solaris. Microsoft is offering the System Center Service Manager. This software from MicroSoft may-or-may-not deserve merit. I may never know. The slated delivery date as pointed out in Steve Loughran's Blog posting is not until 2010. By 2010 HP's SmartFrog will have sufficient market share as to take the bite out of MicroSoft's contribution if the System Center Service Manager ever gets-off-the-ground.
  • The final analysis of all of this ranting is the real problem I have with the big 4 and good excellent Software Engineering offered by the big 4 to resolve the ever larger data-center problems that are arising more and more every day. As a result of my hunt for good excellent Software Engineering tools I have stumbled upon the Windows Server Virtualization Calculator. This online tool offered by MicroSoft is the most blatantly disguised sales-pitch I have ever seen. I understand MicroSoft's zeal for owning, controlling and manipulating all of: Software Engineering, Computer Engineering,  Network Engineering and the internet itself but I refuse to believe that MicroSoft will be able to attain the I.T. Novus Ordo Seclorem with the likes of gadgets such as the: Windows Server Virtualization Calculator! What happened to (using) Software Engineering?
    

• The past couple of days I have had emails from TF.
• Tentatively I was supposed to travel to Chevron downtown for a so-called brain-pick session w/ PC and the IT crowd in San Ramon.
• As it turns out I am slated to conduct a telephone conference w/ PC who is now in San Ramon. I suppose this means the entire IT crew will be participating in the phone gauntlet.
• The unofficial agenda is the so-called 12 points outlined in the TC Assessment document delivered to PC @ Chevron Houston.
• I have already started studying the 12 points document I sent to TF last week. This weekend I will contiue to  study the 12 points and also look at creating multiple intances of Tomcat/JBoss as a load-balancing solution for Chevron.
• My true hope is I can learn how to wield the exciting new tool from hp labs' smartfrog. This tool looks to be the real deal and I hope I can get a stake in the use of the tool for: performance tuning and monitoring of large open source java based business web apps and web services. I sent an email to the smartfrog ml as suggested by S. Loughran of the Ant fame.
• Now after allowing the initial euphoric I.T. wave to wash over me I am now adopting a FUD position on what I should do next. I do know that I am about to embark on my first blog that will make use of a TrackBack. I am curious as to who, what, where, when, why and how this is going to shape up in the next few days.

• All week I have been struggling with JMeter and now MC4J (for different reasons).
• To my dismay in an attempt to find something with a little more support I am finding that the Java based FOSS community is favoring users of their mailing-lists that represent a company over ordinary Joe-on-the-street.

I am a long time recipient of the JavaLobby newsletter. I am a Software Engineer and a longtime Java Developer (since 1998). I am very much dependent upon the FOSS community and the Java related sites: JavaLobby (Now DZone) and jakarta.apache.org. My user account no longer works at JavaLobby or DZone. I just discovered that JRoller is no longer accepting subscriptions! And, no avenue to pursue to ask: Why? Recently, I have been on a gig to assess the clients' Tomcat and JBoss dev and prod. servers. I have been dependent upon Java based FOSS the entire time (JMeter, MC4J et. al.). Now, I am being strangled because there are no avenues to pursue such as: mailing lists, wikis, and websites because I am now completely shutout from these sources. It appears the Java based FOSS community has become a specialized circle of friends, business associates and acquaintances that are allowed into the inner circle. Is this the way FOSS is supposed to work? I'm sure things work quite well this way in Redmond.

• We are all screwed again. Micro$oft is in the process of purchasing destroying Yahoo.
• I say destroy because it is not a purchase for the benefit of Yahoo.
• I have been in two small buyouts and the target purchase is always the the loser:
  • I worked for a small IBM hardware based software company.
  • The company got bought-out, my boss got fired and I resigned.
  • I worked for a 20b dollar insurance company (American General) that was bought by AIG.
  • We worked our tails off in hopes that AIG would like our trading floor software replacement for Bloomberg. AIG said: thanks-but-no-thanks.
  • I got the same package as a girl on the dev team that had been at my insurance company for 16 years.
  • AIG went from being a 200b dollar company to a 300b dollar company.
• In all-likelihood this is a move to allow Micro$oft to gain the Yahoo market share and ditch the employees when the time comes.

  

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