Issues at work

Stardate 56083.0 (8-30-2003)

Most of this week was spent either at work or on soccer. Work was frustrating. The monthly comparative testing needed to be redone. The powers that be wanted it done by someone else, because despite the fact I have documented the process step by step, no one else can figure out how to do it. So I walked a coworker through it. It crashed, and panic ensued because no one could find out why. I get blasted for not helping. I had sent CrashFinder to the guy, and another coworker sent the Dr. Watson logs to him. The guy is still stuck. Finally, I had him sit behind me and watch as I walked back through the call stack addresses  In about a minute, I found a piece of code that was allocating pointers for 5 array slots, and freeing 6. Next, the code had been there for three months, so I was quizzed on why this never showed up before. There has been a flurry of patches and software installs on the server over the last two weeks. Any one of those could have uncovered the issue.

I've had a lot of calls and messages about someone's daughter signed up for soccer, and has not heard from the coach yet. I took down the numbers, and informed the appropriate age coordinator. April and I are puzzled why these calls are coming to us. April thinks that people at the kids school now refer to her as Mrs. AYSO soccer. I have not heard any complaints from my U6 boys parents, so I am hoping I did ok. I did notice that the rosters that were handed out the the coaches were not the most up to date ones.

Practice for both Rachel's and Patrick's team went pretty well. I was surprised that some of the girls on Rachel's team have not played before. 

Blogging is of course all the rage on the net now. I guess these personal logs fit the category. Some of the Microsoft people are blogging in Got.Net. One thing I did notice was that I blog more frequently than most. There are a couple of MS guys that make two or three entries a day, but most of the ones I read are updated every few days to once a month. Some give interesting insights on the culture and changes at MS. The technical support needed lots of help. The BLASTER worm caused MS to pull quite a few from other teams to help combat it.

One person went the the Linux Expo. He said his badge had MICROSOFT printed in nice, big letters. The most frequent comment he got on this was, "Well, at least you are not SCO". SCO is suing IBM. They say that Linux includes code they have copyrights on. They have replaced MS as the big evil in the open source world. Their web server was down last weekend due to a denial of service attack. They are offering anyone with Linux a $699 license. Considering anyone who has the OS got it for considerably less than that, if not free, I don't think they will get much response.

Microsoft now relies on Linux now to protect them from viruses and worms, as well as DOS attacks. A friend verified that the servers in Salt Lake are not running Windows anymore.

I found a some funny stuff this week.

The Mac Killed My Inner Child (language warning).
Google knows the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. 
I personally liked the C program that demonstrated the flaw in Deep Thought.

With all the other viruses coming up in the news, this one was good for a chuckle:

You have just received the Amish virus. Because we don't have any computers, or programming experience, this virus works on the honor system. Please delete all the files from your hard drive and manually forward this virus to everyone on your mailing list. We Thank Thee.The Amish Computer Engineering Department

The buzz for the past couple of weeks is the Star Wars Kid. Some of the discussion around the net is about what a fat, pathetic loser the kid is. The site gets millions of hits each day, so I would guess the pathetic losers are not a minority. Then there are the people that take the time to make all the variations. It's amazing how one video that was probably done on the spur of the moment generates so much interest.

End of Entry