Planning out your next job

I don’t listen to a lot of podcast but I did listen to Andy Lester’s[1] recent appeared on the Pragmatic Programmers. Andy’s book “Land the Tech Job You Love“   is in beta now and will be released Soon.   If the book is as good as the podcast was, it will be a must-have for a lot of techies.

One thing that struck me from the podcast was Andy saying “If you can’t put two new things on your resume every year, you aren’t doing enough to keep up with this industry” (or something to that effect). Lately, my self-learning has taken a back seat to simply trying to keep my neck above water on my projects — not learning anything new, just puttying out fires.  And sometimes that okay, but I  actually like learning something new — which is what I enjoy about this industry in the first place.

Another thing Andy said is that the right job for you changes over time.   For example, what you want to do when you are 25 will probably be different than when you are 35.  Very true for me — when I was 25, I was flying all over the country and world.  Now, at 35, I’m married with three kids.  My desires now are very different.

Andy also suggested being honest with questions like “Where do you see yourself in five years?”  If you may want to stay technical but they may want someone to move into management.  So, that’s not a good fit for you and you will soon be frustrated. Be honest and know the answer to questions such as that.

These things aren’t just for finding your next employer, but also for your next promotion.   Want to go up to a team lead role?  How can you prove that you are ready for that?  What can you do now to take that step?  Those are the questions that I am asking myself, and other techies should be, too.

[1] Andy is also the author of ack, which is one of my newest tools in my toolbox.  And, yes, it is better than grep!

The Button That Wouldn’t Push

Gina (my wife) had a concerned look on her face when she told me.  “The Mac was acting funny so I took the power plug out and removed the battery like usual, but it won’t turn on!  The button won’t push in.”  I thought that was pretty weird so I went and tried it myself.  Sure enough — the power button on my MacBook Pro wouldn’t budge.  Ugh.

I figured it just needed a little enouragement and decided to take the MBP apart.  The warrenty is waaay over and done with, and it doesn’t work anyhow, so what else could go wrong?  Getting it apart was interesting — there are four different screws and two types of heads.  It’s easy to get them confused, especially the ones that hold the over the RAM.  Underneath that cover, you still have three torus screws to deal with. None of my torus screwdrivers were that small, but my smallest Allen wrench worked like a charm.

Once the screws are out, you have to turn it over, open the screen, and pry keyboard part off.  Kinda weird, and it definitely resists.  But you hear a “pop” and then it’s off.  I think told Gina, “Do you want to see the inside of a MacBook Pro?”

Gina: “You’re braver than I would ever be.”

Me: “Well, what’s going to happen? It won’t work?”

I took the keyboard off and mucked with the button for a little bit.  I’m not sure what I did, but the button started going up and down again. I also took this time to blow some air on the insides, especially in the part where the screen latches to the keyboard when you close the laptop.  It was filled with gunk! I think that will help prevent the problem Gina had that made sure force everything down.

Getting it back together was also interesting.  There is think wire that starts on the back of the keyboard that has it’s end taped (!!!) to the motherboard, so I made sure to re-tape that. I think is also helps to put in the torus screws first, and the side screws last.  When I turned the MBP back on, it beeped at me several times and I got nervious.  But it soon showed the Mac OS screen and then the login screen.

So now it’s working fine.  Yay!

The Apple Tax angers me

I do love my MacBook Pro. It’s three  years old and has taken a beating, but it still works extremely well. I’m still on Tiger, not seeing any huge reason to go to Leopard.  I’ve had a few problems (like with the wireless in my house, which is still janky).

I have noticed that the adaptor wasn’t working as well as it should be. Sometimes the charge light would go off all a sudden, and when it did stay on, it seemed to take forever to charge the battery.  Finally, on Monday, Gina emails me and says that it just shut off while plugged in. So it had finally died.

I made it to the local Apple Store to get a new one. I was expecting something around $30, maybe $50 at the most.  The final price?  $80!  What?  $80!  Why?  Why?

A quick google shows that a Dell adaptor is around $30. So I expected a premium, but not twice as much!  I love the OS, and the community, but their lock on the hardware may just drive me to get a Linux-power notebook next time.

How SSH knows how to get your keys

Most people who work with SSH know that your user’s keys and config is at $HOME/.ssh.  Or is it?  A problem I had revealed that it isn’t so cut-and-dried.

I use Cygwin at work, because, well, I need to get work done.  I was smart enough a long while back to make my users HOME directory my shared H-drive, as opposed to somewhere on the C-drive.  That way if I got a new machine, etc my  configs would be safe.

Well, the moment arrived to see if that worked.  I got a new hard drive at work a month or so ago and one of the first things I did was install Cygwin. Everything worked great — except my SSH keys.  For some reason, Cygwin’s SSH refused to find my private keys, even though I have never moved them.  This week I finally dug in to figure out what happened.

I did a ssh -v host and saw this:

debug1: Trying private key: /cygdrive/c/.ssh/identity

Huh?  My HOME directory is set to H (/cygdrive/h/, in Cygwin-speech).  I mucked around again and it will was in the wrong spot.  A few google searches later revealed that OpenSSH doesn’t look at the $HOME environment variable at all!  Instead it goes by the directory for the user in /etc/passwd. I opened that up and, sure enough, it was set to “/cygdrive/c/“.  I changed it, saved the file and then it worked.

In an normal Unix instance, this works because, chances are, they will be the same.  But I guess when I installed Cygwin I didn’t have a HOME variable set, so it defaulted it to the C-Drive.  Then when I set it to the H-drive, it just happily used that and let things break.

Hey JUDE

In our current quest for modeling our objects before actually creating them, we needed to find a good tool to use.  And, no, Visio is not a good tool!  After some looking and experimenting, we found JUDE Community Edition. While the Full version can add value, the free Community version fits our needs well, namely:

• Create Object graphs, Deployment Diagrams, and simple Flow Diagrams.
• Import Objects from Java and then back to Java.
• A GUI that’s intuitive!
• Export diagrams to PNG.
• You don’t need administrative rights to install it.

If you want to start modelling, I’d recommend JUDE Community edition.