Just in time for this comment I made yesterday, I received an email a few hours ago from one of the tech leads at the company I work with as a consultant. Of the entire application portfolio for the VP whose groups I work with, they will be releasing 57 people (or offshore resources as they call them) at two locations in India.

This adjustment in staffing (more management speak) directly affects six to eight different projects/applications across four groups in the division. And this is just one division under one VP. I am involved with two of those. Technically I am an onshore resource as well, at least from their staffing perspective, although I'm not in India, I don't work through Tata, Infosys or IBM, and I don't cost $20/hr.

These are mostly developers, with a small number of QA/testing positions and a few analysts. It also includes about two thirds of the tier-1 production support staff for the entire division. Yay.

Of course what I have not seen is an adjustment on the project schedules that were agreed upon last month, with the assumption that all these resources would be available. Or the SLAs for that matter, which assume there are people 24/7 available to respond to problems. Dollars to doughnuts they will probably change very little, or not at all. The business stakeholders (the people who actually pay for, use and own these applications) will be told that everything's A-OK, as usual.

Over the course of these project(s) you inevitably tend to get to know these people. They get married, have children, get sick, their parents or grandparents die, etc. You talk to them on the phone every day. You exchange emails. I know some of them personally, as they've been flown out for meetings and knowledge transfer sessions and whatnot. Some are good developers, some are not. But they're all human beings, and now they're out of work, just like so many people in the US, Europe and elsewhere.

I thought I'd share this. People here on Slashdot tend to be generally hostile towards the whole notion of outsourcing, and I don't necessarily blame them. It's a very visceral issue. But we do often forget that these people we have a vague dislike of are ultimately just like us. It's not their fault that the companies that employ us want to make three cents a share more per year to keep investors happy and they do that by eliminating a thousand US jobs.

Announcement here.

I had the pleasure of going back and forth with a few of the members of the team on a few issues I found during testing, which were promptly fixed. Their bug triage work on CodePlex is also extremely good. This is a well-organized team, a far cry from the original 2-man operation.

So this brings the number of stable, production-able implementations of everybody's favorite programming language to 3 (CPython, Jython and IronPython).

The only problem I have with IronPython is that it's still painfully slow compared to mainstream CPython on Windows, but I hear baseline perf is going to be the main focus of the next point release. Let's hope so. While they support compiling multiple files into a single assembly now, that's not a good solution, because it would obviate the need for using IronPython over C# or VB.NET (well, unless all you know is Python).

Oh, and IronPython now works with ctypes... wow!

I just had to share this.

Having had the experience of setting up and operating a MediaWiki site, I am very impressed with ScrewTurn. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but it works extremely well. It's open source and s extremely well-designed (which is always reassuring). I've been testing it internally at one of our client sites and so far it's been nothing but goodness.

All of the other attempts at wiki software I've seen for ASP.NET have been a huge disappointment, but ScrewTurn simply rocks.

There's nothing wrong with MediaWiki of course, and if you already have the Linux infrastructure to host it then it probably makes more sense to use it instead. But if you have mostly Windows Server boxes and you need a good wiki, then I definitely recommend this one. Very nice.

Since election night I've noticed that many stories about Barack Obama tend to characterize his victory as a "landslide". I saw one just now on ABC News.

I'm truly happy Obama won. I'm truly happy McCain lost. While I consider myself a moderate conservative, the US needed change badly at this point in history, and I believe the election provided that.

But calling it a landslide is disingenuous to say the least. According to WP, Obama nailed 52.9% of the popular vote, while McCain got 45.7%. That's not a landslide by any measure, in any election.

Now if people are referring to the electoral vote (365 vs 173), sure, that's sort of a landslide, but it's still disingenuous, because essentially the same group of people that are calling it a landslide were the ones bemoaning how broken the electoral system is in 2000 and 2004 when Bush won by way of Florida and Ohio.

I don't know why, I just hate people who do that sort of thing. The same people who claimed that the 2004 election was "stolen" by the Republican party were strangely silent when the democrats kicked ass in the 2006 mid-terms. Apparently the GOP forgot to steal that one? And the same people who claimed Bush was going to do something evil to re-elect himself (remember the stories about troops being brought in to the US, the pending attack on Iran, the martial law, etc) were also strangely silent on 5 November.

I guess I just hate conspiracy theorists and agitator nuts. If you have to say something, make sure it has some backing in reality. Otherwise, please shut the fuck up.

I'm sure some Slashdot users are fans of Joe Satriani (at least maybe those that are closer to my age). I'm sure a few more are also Coldplay fans. Well, it turns out Joe has filed a lawsuit claiming Chris Martin & Co. lifted the riff from Satriani's If I Could Fly piece from 2004 and made it into their Vival La Vida hit.

There's a comparison up on YouTube and indeed, the opening riff from Satriani does match the Coldplay song. But I don't think Coldplay was ripping anything or anyone off.

Many musicians (especially mainstream ones) inevitably tend to do things like these. They have influences, they listened to the same artists when they were coming up the ladder, etc. Sure, Kraftwerk didn't sound like anyone else, and neither did Nine Inch Nails or any of those edgy groundbreaking acts. But Coldplay is the result of pop/rock evolution. It's inevitable that they will sound like someone else at some point.

Joe Satriani's music is part of the soundtrack to some of the best moments in my life. I hate it when my heroes do things like these. Is he not selling enough records now or what? I buy them all. C'mon Joe, that just sucks.

A message in the python-committers marks the beginning of the new Python era: The 3.0 branch has been tagged in SVN and ready for a tarball drop. Installers and packages should be ready soon as well.

Yay!

From the oh-trollboy-you're-so-busted dept.

You know how it goes: it doesn't matter that people have sockpuppets, leave the poor sockpuppets alone, they're not hurting anyone, sometimes they say interesting things (not), etc.

Did everyone notice that their user page changed a few days ago? I don't really like it, but whatever. And as usual no word from the powers that be. But someone did notice something very interesting with the new "activity" view and they were kind enough to share. Even more interesting in light of hypocritical idiocies like these.

Wah, Slashdot is gamed, wah, people are ruining Slashdot, wah.

[Edit][12/03/08.15:20] I've been advised that this will be incorporated into the SockDisclosure journal, along with the existing trollpuppet evidence. Let's just see how long that takes... *squints*

Recently in a thread started by everybody's favorite troll where I also posted to let someone know that he was being stacked after the sockpuppets where whipped out of their dark hiding places, someone posted this reply to me. And while the person I originally replied to was not aware of what was happening (thus validating my comment, in my mind at least), my responder does have a point. A very valid point. The recommended solution to this nagging problem is for everyone to use the Slashdot IFF system and adjust their viewing preferences so that they won't have to read any of it, ever. That's what it was designed for! twitter's nemesis used to be very nice whenever he got this kind of reply. He would apologize (!) and ask that people mark him as a foe so they wouldn't have to suffer through the indignity of reading his comments about the Shill In Chief's idiocies. Me, I'm a little more organic and I was about to post something harsh (because seriously, compared to these shitstorms, a "look out for the troll" post once in a while is really peanuts, I think) but again, I realized this person had a valid point, and after thinking about it a little bit more (and being in an uncharacteristic good mood) I decided to turn that negative energy into something useful. So I sez to myself, I sez: What if we had a centralized place where people can easily foe all these accounts? That would be great!

So this morning instead of canvassing Reddit and Digg for yesterday's memes and LOLcats while I drink my coffee, I dug up an email from willyhill that had all the known socks and their account IDs in HTML format, fired up PyShell and one gnarly regex + twenty minutes later - voila. The handy Foe The Sockpuppet mashup. Bliss is only a few clicks away at this point! So without further delay:

Click here to foe twitter
click here to foe Erris
click here to foe gnutoo
click here to foe Mactrope
click here to foe inTheLoo
click here to foe willeyhill
click here to foe westbake
click here to foe Odder
click here to foe ibane
click here to foe freenix
click here to foe deadzero
click here to foe GNUChop
click here to foe myCopyWrong
click here to foe right handed
and click here to foe trimmer.

.... wait, you think you're done yet? No, not a chance. You still have to go through his 26 trollpuppet accounts, just in case he decides to start using them again:

Click here to foe twittter
click here to foe twiiiter
click here to foe willlyhill
click here to foe wi11yhill
click here to foe willyhilll
click here to foe willyhlll
click here to foe wlllyhill
click here to foe wlllyhlll
click here to foe dedaz0
click here to foe willlyhilll
click here to foe inTheLooo
click here to foe twiiter
click here to foe vvillyhill
click here to foe wlilyhill
click here to foe wi1lyhill
click here to foe wlliyhill
click here to foe westfake
click here to foe vviIIyhiII
click here to foe wwillyhill
click here to foe Oddder
click here to foe freeenix
click here to foe inTheL00
click here to foe wiIIyhilI
click here to foe vvlllyhhlll
click here to foe freenlx
and finally, click here to foe wiIIyhiII.

There! You're all done. That wasn't so hard, was it? Only 41x3 clicks!

Oh, one last thing: Foe me as well. That's only three clicks, but who's counting, right?

Convenient? You bet!

The next time you see someone whining about "wah, poor twitter, wah, leave him alone, wah, you're a bigger pain than he is, bwah", just point them to this page. After they recover from the RSI flare up they're going to get from all that clicking, maybe they'll bitch a little bit less. They won't see my posts, they won't see any of the trolltard's posts, and everyone will be happy. That's what I call bliss, right there. And all for the price of a little Ben-Gay.

Peace out.

It was only a matter of time. Very cool.

I didn't even think this was possible with a satellite. Those are stunning images, especially the one just before the wavefront hits and the sea recedes. Amazing. And the angle and span of the first two pictures at least seem to be identical. The third one is zoomed in.

Very good indeed.

Really, no words are necessary here.

Yep. Without IP restrictions, even.

This is a little obscure for most people, but being something of an expert in both the MSMQ and AMQP platforms, this is great news. A native supported implementation of AMQP (or an MSMQ interop layer for it) would be a welcome addition to most architects' toolbox.

It's been three days since I got the last spam message on my personal email address.

From ~60 a day to zero, in 24 hours flat.

I spent three hours two nights ago trying to figure out what was wrong with my mail server. Nothing, everything's working perfectly, I'm getting all my normal email just fine. There's nothing upstream that could be filtering or blocking or anything like that.

What the hell?

I've finally had it with RH-based distros. I used to swear by them but it seems they've gone down the crapper lately. I've been getting core dumps and mysterious errors on CentOS the past few weeks, and I'm done with all that.

So a few days ago I reformatted my Slicehost instances with Debian etch. Don't get me wrong, I've never liked Debian for what I use Linux for, because they're always two versions behind on everything and I just do not want to deal with "non-free" and "unstable" repo stupidities. But in this case, I needed Python 2.5.x and all the latest and greatest, so I had no choice (Slicehost offers Ubuntu as a server... right).

So after about a day or so, I have lighttpd, Postgres, Postfix, OpenAMQ and just about everything else working on my Slices.

I have to say something about RedHat though - you do get used to their admin tools. I found myself trying to figure out whether I hated RH more for making all those tools or Debian for not making them. Case in point? chkconfig and /sbin/service. Don't get me started on iptables, which are a proper service under RH but an afterthought on Debian - to the point that I had to go in and edit the /etc/network/interfaces to make sure my rules would survive a reboot. What the frak.

Anyway... everything seems to be working fine. I realize it's just that I'm used to a different environment, but it's still a pain.

As for the desktop, looks like I'm stuck with Fedora because I have no intention of going through another wipe-and-reload distro-of-the-day cycle, I just don't have time. Holy jesus, just installing the TTF fonts I need on Linux is an unbearable experience I don't want to repeat more than once every couple of years. For the time being though I'm warming up to Putty on Windows, which is not as flexible as a straight GNOME console with SSH, but acceptable for most quicky deals so I don't have to actually log in to Linux. It even comes with a half-acceptable SCP client.

Rant over.