it’s unix, not eunuchs

Two weeks ago Carol Wilson wrote a story for Telephony Online detailing how Embarq has signed an agreement to rebadge one of their NOCs(Network Operations Center) to Nokia.  When I first read the title I wasn’t surprised in the least as this has been happening for about 4 years now with other telephony companies.  I pretty much just assumed that all companies were doing some forms of this, in fact I know that Hallmark.com was rebadged to IBM a few years back as well.

I suppose I should explain the word re-badged.  Rebadging is when a company gives another company one of it’s divisions and signs an agreement to pay the second company to run the division for them.  As a part of these agreements the parent company usually takes some of their employees and force them to accept jobs at the new company or they will be fired without benefits.  There are some other companies that do this a bit more kindly, but it’s usually as I described above.  Employees call it rebadging because one day they have a Hallmark ID badge and then on the next Monday they’ll have an IBM ID badge.

Frankly, I’ve witnessed several of these re-badging efforts and they have all been disasters.  The only good thing that ever comes of it, is that cowardly managers sometimes manage to get rid of lousy employees by suddenly transferring them to a division that is about to be re-badged.  Now, stockholders are always told that the company will save a ton of money by getting rid of the division, however it never really plays out that way.  You get a sub-par performance by the new division, you terrify the remaining employees in the company, and as soon as the contract comes up for renegotiation the recipient of the division will charge so much that the company is forced to give up on all the savings they were promised.

So, back to the main purpose of this post.  I would have mailed Carol Wilson or commented on the her article if Telephony Online allowed such interaction, but it doesn’t.  So I will instead here mention that re-badging is not a new trend in North America.

You can read the article at Telephony Online and I have to give Kudos to AskCALEA for linking to it.

A few months ago Linus Torvalds was interviewed by Lifehacker Australia. Unfortunately the link appears to be messed up at the moment or else I would link to it. Lifehacker really digs into the tools and methodologies people use in order to get things done. An interesting tidbit popped up in their interview with Linus. Apparently after a few years in the limelight, he tired of speaking at public engagements. I don’t know if he was tired of boring questions, the adulation of geeks or was just frustrated that he wasn’t able to get much done when he was talking all the time. But he apparently started cherry picking the events he wanted to speak at.

And recently Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and investor of Digg and Twitter, followed suit declaring that he would stop speaking publicly and blog more. John C Abell, of Wired, writes in his blog that this has to do with Marc being unhappy with the quality of journalism today. Well, if that was the reason for Marc to stop doing interviews I’d have a hard time arguing with him. Media Consolidation has left us with a lot more people re-broadcasting and re-interpreting other people’s stories. Heck, even this post is a bit of a reinterpretation. But I suspect the reality may be that Marc, like Linus, would rather be actually getting some things done than talking about getting things done.

Well, I haven’t texted any of my friends in my sleep yet. But I have woken up and silenced alarms on my phone when I wasn’t on-call. I have to change my ringers when I’m on-call just to make sure those sorts of things don’t happen to me.

But I was surprised today to find out that some people are now texting in their sleep. I remember way back in the day when I’d be in chat rooms and almost falling asleep on the keyboard. Or one time when I helped a friend move their business overnight I stopped being able to speak very intelligbly, so I told her I had to nap and got back at it in a few hours.

And I shouldn’t be surprised that Marketing Campaign Managers are now coming with the capability to send voicemails and text messages. Soundbite just announced their intent to launch their Intelligent Communications Platform in 3Q 2008 and it is supposed to help Fortune 1000 companies market to their customers via email, voicemail and text messages. I am a little interested in how the product is planning on plugging into the SMS channels of various Voice Networks. The only reliable way would be to come in as partner through a firewall and plug directly into the systems. They could attempt to work it via SMTP but the system would rapidly be shut down by anti-spam systems.

And finally, who could be surprised that eventually someone sued Mobile Carriers for not providing an option to opt out of text messaging and then charging customers if they still get texts even if they’re unwanted.

Microsoft is still moving forward with plans to stop selling XP on June 30, but in the meanwhile Dell has found a loophole in the contract that will allow them to sell XP as a downgrade license from Vista. Infoworld wrote about it in their Save Windows XP blog here.

This is a good deal for Dell, but seeing as how Dell’s support structure appears to be going downhill, this isn’t really the answer we need for our solutions. My employers usually give me a laptop to support their operations and for a few years now they’ve been Dell’s. But for my home systems, I just refuse to buy complete systems from integrators like Dell.

This is primarily due to the fact that I refuse to spend time with horrible customer service troubleshooting issues. I’m not commenting on Dell alone at this point, as all desktop support has become a great way to ruin hours and hours of time that you could be earning money, cruising the web or playing computer games. Plus, I require redundancy on all of my filesystems at home which means that as soon as I’m on the phone with tech support I’ve got a problem that they’re incapable of supporting.

Now I’ve already discussed in previous posts that this will be my last install of a Microsoft operating system. Ubuntu has finally produced a decent desktop out of Linux and I plan on building a solid desktop that can do just about everything my current computer can do. But what about games, you say? Well I’ve held out against game consoles for long enough. It’s time for me to bite the bullet and pick up a wii or something else that I will enjoy. And now that vista is so outrageously expensive, the argument is so much easier.

But if you’re in a position where you need to buy desktop computers for a business setting, you probably should consider Dell and their downgrade license.

You know, it’s taken Sprint 2 years to put qchat into production and in that time the cost of talk minutes have dropped enormously and text messaging uptake has grown significantly. Frankly, I haven’t heard the annoying chirp of the PTT feature in over 18 months except for the two dweebs I used to live next to. They were city workers who drive big trucks, go poaching, and basically were kids playing CB with one another. That’s not really something to dump a large amount of capital into, IMHO.

Tag onto that the fact that the construction industry is absolutely annihilated by the sub-prime market and what you have here is a product looking for a market, 2 years too late. Anyhow, Sprint recently announced the phones that will support this service and phonescoop covered it here.

Unbeknown to me, some people have been asserting that Perl’s heyday has come and gone.  Sterling Hanenkamp and Kevin Marshall have posted a fair rebuttal over at perlbuzz.com.  I thought I’d tag on a bit to what Kevin and Sterling brought up.

Truly great languages do receive updates less frequently as they age.  That’s because such a large base of programmers have learned the earlier libraries and being the bright chaps they are, they requested more and more features.  Until at a certain point the product becomes so eminently usable that very little else needs to be added for most users.

Now there are going to be specific requirements for each project and that’s where the development comes in.  But god bless these bright chaps, because not only do many Perl programmers write this custom code, but they frequently check it back into CPAN as modules.

So other people who program similar projects with these precise requirements don’t have to reinvent the 7-spoke, 16″, lithium-greased, carbon steel wheel.  You see, Perl provided the wheel to everyone who worked with the base language.  But not everyone needs a 7-spoke, 16″, lithium-greased, carbon steel wheel.  Especially when they’re writing really secure code that has to be analyzed line by line for security risks.  Or if they want to write really small code that will work on a mobile phone or embedded code.

Why is this good for business?

Do you really want your programmers to have to re-learn their code-base every 5 years?  I knew lots of people who used to know how to do some Visual C++ and Visual Basic development back in the .com days.  Then along came Java.  In the midst of this came a lot of middleware that provided common libraries for programmers.  And then came .net.  Now, most Java developers don’t do Microsoft stuff, but these days some .net guys do perl and some java guys do some .net.

But trying to find and hire people that will mesh with whatever mix of code your shop is currently running is difficult for technical managers.  It’s completely impossible for HR and non-technical managers.

Now I’m not saying that hiring Perl developers is necessarily any easier.  And I’m not trying to be a Luddite either.  All I’m saying is that new revisions of products come out when current needs aren’t being met.  So we haven’t needed another Perl for a while now.

And Sterling hits on a brilliant point about how poorly the TIOBE index measures current market needs or the current state of code development.  Go figure that a free language doesn’t have a bunch of PR geeks hiring Search Engine Optimization guys to drive up the results of people’s searches.  Microsoft and Sun are literally spending millions of dollars to try in tilt these sort of comparison’s in their favor because it helps them make money.  Then we have to spend our money to learn the new skills, license the new libraries, call for support on their poorly written new projects, etc. etc.

In summary, Perl still kicks much ass and it’s not going anywhere any time soon because the price is right, it does the heavy lifting, has a good community full of nice people like the Perl Monks and Larry Wall is god.

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I’m tired enough of redhat that it’s time to explore other options. I’ve been having yum issues for years now(yum is the program you use to patch RedHat) and it’s finally time to just look to another OS. Asking for $180 a year for updates to an operating system is just unrealistic. All of this for a silly little box that is running a Pentium 2 processor. The box is literally worth $5. But I’m going to pay $180 a year to run software on it? I generally don’t like variable pricing, that is to say like what Oracle does but in this case it would make more sense.  If you’re running a single processor ancient box, $25 for updates.  If you’re running a 16 processor box that can compute a googl, that will be $1000 for updates. What’s a little silly is that this is an increase from the old prices. They used to beg for $100 a year but give you the updates for free if you wouldn’t donate. I hate to go back to Windows, but at least Microshaft understands that I don’t want to license my OS. Actually, I’ve read that Microsoft explored the idea and realized it wasn’t feasible, probably due to the strong competition by Google.

OK, so if you’re a non-geek and still here I’ll attempt an allegory. Imagine that instead of buying the transmission to your car you instead decided to lease it. You own the car and you get to design the cockpit…but you have to pay an annual fee(FOREVER) just in order to get the thing to move. It’s just an absurd idea initially. Then when you price it improperly there’s no reason to bother with it all. Imagine if they asked you to give them $3000 a year for your transmission, in addition to your usual car loan payment.

So anyhow, this begins my foray into freeBSD. Never had a reason to not like it…it’s just that fedora and redhat were always so cheap and accessible. Time for a change.

anyhow, it’s quarterly review time. I used to hate them because we were told that they were unimportant. Then last year they fessed up to the fact it’s the second most important thing for your annual raise. The first of course is your boss’ opinion of you.

So anyhow, I was putting stuff together when I realized that one of my solutions produced 5.5 million in revenue this year and will produce 73 million next year. So I’m sort of stoked at the moment. I’d let you stroke my ego, but I’m too busy doing it myself at the moment.

A Picture Share!
Originally uploaded by russkiypenguin.

Tools of the trade for the on-call

http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

A few excerpts:

Many people in this country think of taste as something elusive, or even frivolous. It is neither. To drive design, a manager must be the most demanding user of a company’s products. And if you have really good taste, you can, as Steve Jobs does, make satisfying you the kind of problem that good people like to work on.

So it’s not just fastidiousness that makes good hackers avoid nasty little problems. It’s more a question of self-preservation. Working on nasty little problems makes you stupid. Good hackers avoid it for the same reason models avoid cheeseburgers.

I’ve found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.

If you’re worried that your current job is rotting your brain, it probably is.