Since 2009 is almost officially over here is a list of my favorite software engineering related tools I’ve been using this year. Most of these tools have been around for a while, and I didn’t necessarily just start using them this year. These are all things I just found to be very useful throughout the year doing my job.
Seth Godin wrote this ingenious analysis of market changes titled “It’s not the rats you need to worry about“. It got me to thinking about how I prefer CDs over downloaded music. Primarily I have this preference based on the quality of the content. I’d prefer not to have more physical media taking up space in my house, but until someone offers CD quality lossless downloads I feel like I’m stuck. However, I’m not the ideal customer. The last time I bought a CD was 6 months ago, the time before that was a year and a half. One CD a year is not going to sustain your industry.
I had an interesting exchange with my manager yesterday. We had our very first team meeting under the guise of the new “Great Place to Work” initiative. We were informed that there is no budget for conferences this year so SOL on the professional development plans. There was also an open question about if we understood our performance goals. The exchange went something like this:
Management: Does everyone understand their performance goals?
Me: I’m a little confused. I’m told I need to make 4 contributions that fix an issue in production. What if there are not four issues in production in my product? (I’m thinking do I really need to break something in order to have done a good job this review cycle.)
About a week after release I ran the 10.6.1 update only to find that it had failed to install. I’m not sure exactly what happened since my typical method of carrying out updates is to click whatever needs clicked then move back to working on whatever other system is available. I do know that I was left with a dialog proclaiming that the update had failed and I should restart. Fine. I restart. Upon restarting the machine – my MacBook Pro circa 2007 – sat at the boot screen (grey screen with the little spinner) for at least 30 minutes. Not good. I restarted again but this time with the verbose boot sequence – Command-V at startup. Turns out the machine could not find a needed kernel extension for SCSI. Not sure why it needs SCSI but apparently the file was lost in the attempted update. It was clear that whatever happened the system was not going to fix itself, and Google wasn’t sure what was happening either as most the posts I could find related to the specific error talked of hardware failures.
I managed to resolve my television issue. After a little search last Sunday my wife and I both preferred the look of plasma. I was a little concerned about burn-in but apparently technology has progressed to the point of this being a non-issue, or at least it’s about the same as old style televisions (see here and here). We decided on the Samsung PN50B550 50-Inch 1080p Plasma HDTV
I’ve adopted a solution to my storage problems. Basically, I’ve decided on the Drobo solution. If you recall from last time, I was leaning heavily toward an OpenSolaris solution using ZFS. I still think ZFS is ultimately the way to go because it’s cool software design, but I’m not convinced of running an entire system for that purpose. I really wish Apple would get their act together and implement ZFS to go along with the rest of their even cooler software design. I’m also not quite sure why there are no cheap external eSATA enclosures. I’m thinking $150 for a chunk of metal with a fan, a power supply, and enough circuitry to support 8 drives as JBOD. Is that unreasonable? Maybe not enough market.
I’m a cheap bastard. I’ve been a cheap bastard for a long time. I just want to feel as though I get something for my money that is worth while. Maybe cheap bastard is the wrong term. I’ll spend more to feel like I got the best value. I could after all buy a cheap notebook instead of a MacBook Pro, but the pounding in the ass I’d take in usability every time I want to do something offsets the monetary expense of the transaction. So, maybe I’m a “best bang for the buck” bastard. No matter this post is about how I finally fell for the allure of the promise of salt and vinegar chips.
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