9 posts tagged “work”
Most of you have heard by now, but I thought I'd make an announcement here anyway: I have resigned from CCP Games and am returning to the Bay Area in mid-December. Just about three weeks from now, actually.
I am not entirely certain of the future, but I expect the first few weeks will be involved in me trudging around the country saying hello to various elements of the various families that might have some interest in my presence for that unholy contraption we like to call the "Holidays." After that, however, all bets are off as I try to get back into the groove after being in Iceland for the past year.
It has been a good trip. Being out here for the past nine months has taught me a lot about myself, about my relationship with Janine, and about life in general. I've learned more about what I can and can't handle, what is and is not acceptable in a job, and a bit of Icelandic besides! Ég tala pínulítið íslensku. (Okay; I'm not entirely sure that's right. But it's understandable if you speak the language.)
The reasons for my return are many, but it basically boils down to being homesick and disagreeing with some of the decisions upper management has made regarding employees who actively play EVE Online. C'est la vie, as they say. Life moves on.
I am excited to be returning "home" - as much as the Bay Area is my home anyway - and am looking forward to catching up with everybody I've missed in 2007. See you soon!
PS, those of you curious, Iceland has been quite warm so far. I don't think the temperature has hit freezing except one or two days, and it's still raining out - no snow, no ice! I know most places have succumb to the weather already, but Iceland is still chugging along, nice and warm(ish). Of course, we'll say nothing about the daylight...currently the sun is coming up around 9:30 AM and going away at 4:30 PM.
Also, I saw the aurora the other night! It was faintly visible in the city so I hopped in the car and drove out to my favorite spot by the lighthouse, but by that point the clouds had rolled in. Shame.
It seems that IIS is single threaded. Everything online says that it is not, but I know for a fact that my IIS will only serve one ASP request at a time. Is this due to some configuration error? I don't see anything related to this subject in the configuration screens I can find. Or is there some underlying issue that I'm unaware of?
I found some IIS manager on MSDN, but it doesn't seem to have installed any icons so I don't know where it ended up. I've got some sleuthing to do. It has a readme that talks about what to do once it's open, but I can't seem to find where it went. (Oh, dpkg -L, I miss you...)
Sleep.
So, most of you know I've been working for another company (CCP Games) for the past about a month and half or something. Anyway, they are completely a Microsoft shop. Windows, Exchange, IIS, etc. No Unix or Macs in site, really. Even the artists work in Windows. It's pretty different from what I've learned at Six Apart/Danga. In fact, you could probably call it the opposite.
All of the Microsoft software seems designed to make things easier at the expense of making it harder to actually dig in and find the things you're looking for. Notably, I am sorely missing things that might tell me what is going on. Right now IIS is sitting in the background spinning trying to serve a page. I'm getting no output. I'm very unsure as to how to troubleshoot this.
Sometimes when I hit the page it says remote procedure call failed, and sometimes it spins. Further investigation reveals that it is every other time. Okay, dig out the Event Viewer, which is Microsoft's way to show what's going on. Ah, in the System log, there's an error that happens when the page spins:
The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{0C0A3666-30C9-11D0-8F20-00805F2CD064}
to the user ...snip.... This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Well, if that isn't helpful, I don't know what is. It wasn't doing this before I went on vacation. Well, let's take a short trip down the Google path and see if I can find anything useful. Well, I found some info. Dug through the registry and found that the above is referring to the Machine Debug Manager. I pulled up Component Services and am trying to figure out why it can't launch? It seems like it should work, the various accounts there have access to launch it.
In further exploration, it seems like this is caused by ASPCache expiring. I had downloaded a demo version because I couldn't find the full one on the internal site. So now I need to actually take the time to dig it out of the network somewhere and get the real one installed. Then hopefully things will work again. Hopefully.
Back to work... exciting!
So, I like Mondays.
Yes, I threw that out there. I think Monday may be my favorite day of the week. I know, it's backwards. "Dude, Junior likes Mondays. What the hell is up with that?" I'll tell you.
Monday is the beginning of hope. You've spent the weekend relaxing, refreshing, getting your mind off of work, thinking about other things. (In general. On those weekends when Mogile gets nailed or someone exploits a security hole or something... not so relaxing. But those aside!)
For me, after that relaxation and whatever, I'm ready to get back to work. I'm ready to throw my mind back into whatever my task is. Solve those problems that were vexing me on Friday, and make some forward progress on things. I'm ready and raring to go!
This generally lasts until I get slammed with meetings. (It seems to be a management favorite that Monday = meetings!) However! Since I'm in a weird position right now with work, I have no scheduled meetings, and only meet when I need to exchange information to do my task. Hell yeah!
I've got the perfect thing going on now. Seriously. I like this sort of being. Not having to check in with somebody every second of the day, just working on what needs to be done. It frees me up to plan my day around my productivity levels, and not around arbitrary blocks of time for the exchange of information. (I should write a book about meetings, and become rich.)
So I'm going to get back to work now. Huzzah.
I am babysitting now and she is sleepy.
Current mood: happy
Current drink: Coca-Cola
Current music: Overture by Andrew Lloyd Webber (The Phantom of the Opera Soundtrack)
Current project: MogileFS improvements/refactoring
Current lighting: perfect! somehow the lights are on today.
I absolutely love distributed systems. I love the fact that I just switched the active database from one machine to another, and you didn't see a thing. It's just cool. It's certainly not unique to Six Apart, but it's just something I think is neat.
Not much else to report now. Spent the day engineering backup stuff, or rather, reworking it so that it can be ported to work on Vox from LJ. Had to change and tweak a bunch of things, and then test it out the wazoo. Still lots to do though.
Got some tasty sushi on the way though. That will definitely make this evening episode that much brighter. Heeeeeck yeah!
But in reality, it's a good night. I vastly prefer working at night than I do in the day. Less interruptions, less noise, and my brain doesn't really seem to get going until I've been awake for some number of hours anyway.
Enough rambling, time to work!
The subject says it all. The Shuttle I'm using here is relatively old, it was bought about three years ago before I got to Danga. I've been using it ever since. Originally it had only the built in integrated video, 512MB RAM, 40GB hard drive, and a Celeron 2.5GHz processor.
Over the years, I've slowly upgraded her. First I stuck in a second video card (1996 Matrox Millenium... whoo-boy, it's slow, but at least it does 1280x1024) and then later I bought an extra 512MB RAM to boost it to a gig. Finally, today, I broke down and upgraded the video card again. GeForce 6200 with 128MB of video ram.
The display is now much faster and the CPU isn't as loaded when the system is redrawing on the screen. It's kinda nice to be able to scroll without seeing 100% CPU. Granted, it still seems to have problems moving the Flash around when it's paging... hm. Questions for another day, I guess.
Next upgrade: bigger hard drive, and need to try to get a better processor. Celerons are horrid. And perhaps get more RAM, but eh, 1GB is probably fine... it makes Xen a bit tight, but I'm not running Xen right now. Probably not going to either, as VMware is more flexible for what I want to do. Just need to fix that disk space problem above, see...
Really, the point of this post is just to post. Because I need to update this thing, yeah, that's it. Next stop: real work. Ahhh yeahz.
Why is gnome-terminal so awfully slow? This piece of software has been around for so incredibly long, you'd think they would have improved the speed somewhat.
All I want is a terminal application that provides me with tabs, without all the fancy functionality. I don't care about transparency, Unicode, or ... whatever else gnome-terminal does. I just want to have one window with named tabs. Is that so hard to get?
Further, X has crashed twice today. Just out of the blue -- pop! -- restart, hello login screen. This is rather frustrating. I think this machine is about to bite the big one. (That might explain why one monitor has gone fuzzy, too.)
I think it's time to look into the corporate equipment replacement plan.
Well, back to work.
