JakeScaltreto.com

August 20th, 2007 by Jake Scaltreto

Again, it's been quite a while since I've posted anything here. Just to get the personal bit out of the way, I'm still at Red Hat and enjoying it very much. As I stay here longer, I'm gaining a greater appreciation for the amazing amount of hard work and dedication that goes into producing OSS. It's not just a mom's basement operation my any means - as some have suggested upon telling them I work for an OSS company. The people who make the software are experienced knowledgeable professionals. And one thing that serves to potentially set these folks off from the closed source pack: they believe in their product. Sounds corny, I know. However, I think that a lot of developers in the closed source world are vested in their projects more as a means to a paycheck than something they truly are attached to. I realize that's a sweeping generalization, and I'm certain that there are plenty of closed source developers who do it for the love of it. The difference is the guys at RH would be working on these projects anyways even if they weren't here getting paid to do it.

What I actually wanted to talk about here is my new hosting situation. Since this website started back in 2002 it had been running on desktop hardware stored in my closet. First, an old Compaq Pentium 2 266MHz that I picked up on a junk table at a computer show for $50, then a more robust P4 2.6GHz that also doubled as my MythTV backend. The Compaq sits in my closet still being resurrected every year to take part in the SkillsUSA state competition where it has gained notoriety as being unpredictable (Yes, I've had competitors - who probably were too young to have even worked on a computer this old - remark that every year they dread whatever curve ball I'll throw at them with this computer). A MythTV box really is no place for a functioning web server. MythTV is inherently unstable and needs occasional rebooting when it's feeling ill (In all fairness to MythTV - which is a great project - most of the problems I find are with the ITV drivers). Additionally, since day one I've had to do some funky DNS/forwarding fu to even allow people to get to the web site. This is because back in 02 my ISP decided they were going to block port 80 going into people's houses. The excuse at the time was to stop the spread of worms such as Code Red, but it was pretty clear from the start that this was a permanent policy designed specifically to stop people from hosting web servers. I, of course, feel this is crap when you consider the price paid for supposedly unlimited Internet. My ISP will, for an extra $20 a month, pop open port 80 - as if changing a firewall rule is a recurring charge.

Well, recently I've begun hosting more sites and availability is becoming a bigger concern. In addition the the MythTV problem, It seems that some people have great trouble getting to my sites. I think it has something to do with being on the same subnet as me and having trouble getting DNS to work properly in that setting - again, my ISP being stupid. In any case, I decided the best route to go would be virtualized hosting. This is a great thing. For a mere $20/month (same as it costs to open port 80 with my current ISP and a third the cost of my gym membership collecting dust.) I get an off-site hosted virtual server from which to host my stuff. Brilliant. I went through rosehosting.com on the recommendation of my friend and fellow sys admin Greg. My only complaint has been the fact that I requested an Ubuntu LTS box, but they installed CentOS. No biggie as I am well versed in both - and seeing as I work for Red Hat, it can't hurt that I'm using a de facto RH product. So that's the new set up. still some tweaking to be done for sure, but it seems to be pretty functional.

Beyond my computer related things going on, I also wanted to put a plug in for a play that I'm involved in this coming weekend. The show is "All in the Timing" by David Ives. It's very funny collection of short plays. I'm acting in one of the shorts and directing two others. It's this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown (http://arsenalarts.net) at 8 PM each night. Find out more over at http://flatearththeatre.com (site designed and hosted by yours truly, I might add)

Be seeing you.

April 7th, 2007 by Jake Scaltreto

Well, I'm about a week in at Red Hat, so I figured I might as well check in. After the orientation was over on Tuesday, I spent the rest of my week hanging out with the Helpdesk (or, Help Desk, rather. long story) here in Raleigh. My first impressions of the Red Hat way of life (that weren't part of an expectedly sugar-coated orientation class) remain positive. I haven't met anyone who doesn't like their job and who isn't enthusiastic about working for Red Hat. I am especially impressed with the way the Help Desk operates compared to the helpdesk at my last place (with due respect, the helpdesk there started out good, but management chose to change it for the worse). The typical helpdesk is designed to operate much like a sweatshop, only instead of substandard goods, helpdesk's are expected to produce copious amounts of tickets as efficiently as possible. This means that in a typical helpdesk setting, customer service takes a back seat to producing numbers.

The reson for this is quite simple: managers (who generally aren't technical - at least not the ones who make decisions) love things that they can look at to justify where the company money is going. And, in the end, it all comes down to cost. The more tickets a helpdesk analyst can churn out in an hour, the lower that analyst's cost per ticket. And cost per ticket (we'll call it CPT) is one way managers have come up with to determine how much value they're getting off of their helpdesk. CPT can easily be charted - and you walk into your average classic helpdesk and you're likely to see a CPT graph hanging on the wall somewhere - hung there, no doubt, as the proverbial "big brother" poster reminding lowly analysts that they're always only a few cents per ticket away from the chopping block. Arguably, in some cases, more money is wasted tracking numbers than stands to be gained by doing so.

CPT is only one of a hundred ways that managers have come up with to quantify something that by its very nature can't be quantified: service. And this is where all the fancy bar charts and Visio diagrams really miss the mark. While everyone's busy trying to raise the numbers, one essential element of a helpdesk is lost: the help. Take, for example, two fictitious individuals, we'll call them Steve and Greg. Steve consistently has the highest operating numbers on the desk; lowest CPT, highest call answer performance, etc. All day, Steve takes call after call with the sole intention of hanging up the phone and getting to the next call. He doesn't take any time to troubleshoot issues, only writing a ticket to send off to someone else to solve. Greg on the other hand listens to the problem and takes time to troubleshoot it. Only once he has exhausted his arsenal of IT magic will he resort to escalating the ticket up to the next level. Because of the way Greg handles calls, his way is inherently slower than Steve's.

At the end of the day, Steve has taken, say, 50 calls, escalated 30 tickets and solved 20. Greg has taken only 30 calls, escalated 10 and solved 20. Based on these fictitious numbers, Steve is answering a lot more calls than Greg, thus his relative cost is going to be lower. They're both solving the same number of tickets - so on paper Steve is looking pretty good. But consider this, of the calls he took, Greg solved two thirds of them right at the desk, while Steve is only pulling 40%. Right away Greg is looking pretty good from a customer service standpoint; most of the people he talked to had their problems solved before they even got off the phone, and presumably, Greg was able to do enough investigation and troubleshooting on the phone to make for a very short desk side visit. Now Steve has far fewer smiling customers (percentage wise), but what's worse, all those people who didn't get their problems solved will now have to wait for a desk side visit to get their problems addressed. Plus, because Steve was so concerned with getting to the next call in the queue, and didn't do a lot of troubleshooting over the phone, the desk side technician will have to spend additional time trying steps which probably could (and should) have been done at the helpdesk. Already, it's getting pretty clear who's really of more value to the company.

Now, consider the fact that the typical helpdesk analyst (Tier I) makes significantly less than a typical desk side tech (I don't make the rules). The company now has to staff additional desk side techs to cover all the tickets coming from the helpdesk. Clearly, if the helpdesk was more focused on quality than on quantity, then fewer tickets would end up in the desk side team's lap and suddenly you start to see savings on staffing right there.

Alas, it will be some time before this thinking will have its chance in the greater world of IT management. Until then, most helpdesks will continue to be call routing centers, and chart wielding managers will continue their method of thinking. Things are also complicated by the myriad of companies out there that support this line of thinking. Namely efficiency gurus and those in the IT outsourcing world. One of the ways that outsourcing companies charge is by staff headcount, so the more bloated you make the staff, the more money the outsourcing firm stands to rake in.

When companies take the "classic" approach to helpdesks, customer service is reduced - and isn't customer service the end goal of any IT organization?

Sorry for going off on such a tangent there. Back to Red Hat. You see, Red Hat's helpdesk isn't based on the classic paradigm. At least from my initial impression, the helpdesk is deliberately staffed with knowledgeble individuals who's goal isn't to get to the next ticket, but rather to stick with the current ticket until it's done right. This, I feel, is a positive approach to customer service. With benefits which can be noticed not only from a service perspective, but may also be seen from a cost perspective when held up against the paradigm helpdesk.

Well it looks like I've gone and used up all of my blogging mana for one night, but I'll be back with more to keep you posted on my continuing adventures.

April 3rd, 2007 by Jake Scaltreto

Today was my second official day at Red Hat. I flew down to Raleigh on Sunday and will be down here for the next three weeks or so. Today and yesterday I spent in the new hire orientation class. I know NHOs aren't known for their flair and ability to keep one's interest, but I have to say it wasn't that bad. Meeting people from all different departments at the company has really given me a good taste of what Red Hat is all about. In short, it's a company with a focus and a goal. And everyone that works there is really passionate about the company. Furthermore, Red Hat seems to realize that it is nothing without it's employees and the open source community and does its best to stay in the good graces of both. It's a refreshing alternative to the typical corporate atmosphere which tends approach the company as an all-powerful supreme being and employees as tiny peons ripe for the crushing.

Tomorrow will commence my first day of actual "work" work. Even though I'll be a sys admin, initially all the admins have to spend a couple of weeks working on the Help Desk to learn the ropes. I think this is really brilliant - and is a concept worthy of adoption at other places. So, that's what I'll be doing until next Friday. After that, I'll spend an additional week down here during which there will be a departmental kickoff meeting with people from all over coming in, and I'll also start to learn my duties as a sysadmin.

After that I'll be flying back home where I'll begin my actual duties at the Westford office.

So, the next month looks like it's going to be both challenging and rewarding as I adjust to my new job.

On a non-work related note, last week I pulled and disassembled the engine in my '77 MGB. Right now it's off at the machine shop getting bored and cleaned up so hopefully by the time I'm back I'll be able to put it all back together to have it ready for the warm weather. I'm damn siked and can't wait to get back to working on it.

March 12th, 2007 by Jake Scaltreto

Well I haven't updated in quite a while, so I'll put down some of the things I have been up to lately.

I continue to be out here in the SF Bay Area. What was originally a project intended to last a few weeks is now well into its fifth month. As discussed in a previous entry, I have been getting rather fed up with the situation. So it was by sheer good fortune that about five weeks ago I received a call from someone in the HR department of RedHat, Inc. Yes, that RedHat.

The young lady on the other end of the line informed me that RedHat was doing some hiring and they were interested in doing a phone interview with me. We scheduled the interview for that Friday (They called on a Tuesday). Needless to say I was a bit, er, fuckin' siked to have gotten this opportunity.

I scheduled the interview for Friday with the intention of being in Boston for it. You see, I was going to be flying back on Thursday. Now I must warn you, we're about to enter a bit of a tangent here, so please bear with me and we'll get back to the RedHat story in a bit. So Thursday I arrived at Oakland Airport bright and early with the intention of boarding an 8:45 AM flight which would stop in Dulles and then switch to another flight home to Boston. Well, you may have recalled in the news the recent mix-ups involving a certain blue-logoed airline. Well, it turns out I was traveling on said airline on the same day as the aforementioned mix-ups.

As I arrived in the airport, I was astonished at the massive amounts of people for such an early flight. That is, until I realized that half the people who were there (At 7:30, mind you) were waiting to board their 6:15 flight. Well, the earlier flight finally got canned and the people dejectedly made their way from the airport. Eventually, 8:45 rolls around and there's no word from the counter-folk. Then 9:15, then 9:45. Finally, someone changes the little "On Time" placard to read "Delayed". That having been resolved, I decided to approach the counter and inquire as to the situation of the flight. The guy at the counter informed me that the crew who was supposed to be flying was not there and they were trying to locate another crew. When asked what the odds of cancellation were, the young man shrugged and told me he was unsure. Great, I thought, no word on when I'll be leaving, not to mention the connecting flight I'll be sure to miss.

It was at about this time that my cell phone rang. I answered the call and it was two very nice gentlemen from RedHat. I kindly informed them that I thought the interview was scheduled for Friday, but that I'd be happy to talk to them anyway. I also let them know that I was stuck in the airport at the moment. They fired of a plethora of technical questions - everything from the basic to the very advanced. Some questions I knew, and some I didn't. At the end of the call, I'll be honest, I was feeling a bit down about it. I was worried that the combination of being in the noisy airport as well as the stress I was under with the flights had in some way affected my performance and caused me to hose the interview. But, I moved past it for the moment, and concerned myself with the more pressing task of getting myself home.

As time rolled forward I decided that I was going to have to take matters into my own hands. I again approached the counter and asked the young man what options there were for flying out with a different airline. He kindly informed me that this particular airline had no partnerships with other airlines and thus would not be able to put me on a different flight. Furthermore, there were no flights from Dulles to Boston after my (now missed) connection. Bummer. So I got on the phone with my company's travel agent and asked what my options were. They were able to track down one flight for me on a different, triangular, airline leaving at 1:03.

So I grabbed the ticket from the other airline, boarded the plane at twenty of one, and sat patiently. 1:03 rolled around, the door was shut, but the plane wasn't moving. 1:20, still nothing. Finally, at about 1:40 the captain came on the intercom and asked the flight attendants to open the main door. Needless to say there were sighs abound, which quickly turned to gasps of concerned confusion once a gun-toting Oakland PD officer strolled on board.

The officer silently walked up the main aisle carefully eye balling each row of passengers before turning around and repeating the same routine on the way back down the aisle. He spoke to the captain, then walked off. Five minutes later, another officer and a TSA (that's Transportation (In)Security Administration) official repeated the process. Now that the passengers were in a sufficiently agitated state, the captain again came onto the intercom to explain what had transpired. Apparently, The TSA official who had walked through the cabin was operating the security checkpoint and somehow someone got past it without having been properly screened. So, they had to temporarily ground all the flights while they checked each plane for the individual. I later found out, that many people actually had to go back through security and be rechecked.

The plane finally left Oakland at 2:20 PM. Mid-flight, a flight attendant came onto the intercom to inform us that our estimated arrival time in Atlanta would be 9:30 PM Eastern. My connecting flight to Boston was to be at 9:40 PM. Needless to say, when I arrived in at Atlanta it was 9:39. I furiously rushed through the airport from the end of one terminal to the end of the next. A good quarter mile walk with a tram ride in the middle. As I approached my connecting gate, it was clear to see that the plane had taken off. The guy running the counter was wrapping up.

I explained my predicament and he informed me that it had been the last flight to Boston for the evening and I would have to rebook for the following day. He told me I had to go to such and such a location to do that. Not knowing where that was, I flagged down a passing airline employee to help me. He asked where I was going and when I said Boston he told me that there was another flight boarding way back at the other terminal where I has started from. I rushed to the new gate to find the Jetway door closed, and the ticket lady with her coat on, ready to leave. Out of breath, I again explained my situation. She took my ticket - for another flight, mind you - tore it in two and told me to go find any available seat on the flight. I ran down the Jetway to find the door to the aircraft shut. I feverishly knocked on the window and they opened the door and let me on. Within a minute of sitting down the plane was emerging from the gate.

The real kicker to this story is when I spoke to the passenger beside me about how lucky it was that I caught the flight, he looked at me and said, "Yeah? Well this plane was delayed. It was supposed to take off two hours ago!" Funny how things work out sometimes.

Now I'll get back to our RedHat story. Having felt as though I had bombed the first interview, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a call the following Tuesday asking me to come in for a face-to-face interview. I was naturally excited, but explained that it would be difficult for me to get to the Westford, MA office seeing as I had now returned to California. The lady I spoke to said that wouldn't be a problem because they would be flying me to Raleigh, NC for the in-person. So, the following Thursday I headed off to Raleigh.

The interview was great. Essentially, I sat in a room while several people from the IT group came in and talked to me. They were all very good at making me feel comfortable, which is a welcome change from some of the more "hard-sell" interviews I've been involved in. I really got the sense that they were looking more for a personality match than anything else. My initial impression upon leaving the interview was very positive.

Before the end of the day, I had already received an email asking for a list of references. After sending them the info, it was only a few days before I was awakened (I was on PST) by a call from RedHat HR informing me that they wanted to make me an offer. This was last Friday.

My title at RedHat will be Systems Administrator and I will be working out of the Westford office. I will need to spend some time (a couple of weeks) down at the Raleigh office learning the ropes and meeting people. I'm really excited about this opportunity. I am going to miss a lot of the people I've come to be friends with at Novartis, but being in Westford it won't be hard to get out for an occasional pint or two. My official start date with RedHat is April 2nd. I can't wait.

Oh, and there has been some discussion as to the merits of RedHat's package management system. And for the record, I don't think there's much of a difference between rpm and deb. People who say that one is better than the other need to offer up something other than opinion. If anything, it's the front end that makes the difference, whether it be apt or yum. The package managers themselves would seem to be on par with each other in my experience. Then again, everyone is entitled to a preference. Be seeing you.

December 14th, 2006 by Jake Scaltreto

When I first started this site, it was suggested that I add stories posted here to the 3n22.com RSS feed. I put it off and put it off until I got bored last night and decided to finally do something about it. The RSS feed for 3n22.com is generated from the MySQL database that's backing up phpBB. This site - which is using the WordPress CMS - also uses MySQL as the database server, but the two databases are completely separate.It was my original thought that I could query both databases separately, store the data in a class, reorder it reverse chronologically and then output it in XML. Well, the more I thought about it, the less appealing this idea sounded. It would mean a complete rewrite of the RSS script, plus it would mean a lot more overhead having to query twice and then do some type of sort function after the fact. I resolved to come up with a way to do everything in one SQL statement.

I'm a novice at PHP; perl is my language of choice. However, since the RSS script was written in PHP, I had little choice but to work with it. It was no problem, though, the little PHP I do know was enough to get me through the project.

The big challenge was going to be forming the SQL statement. Yes, I've done some SQL before - jBlogg uses SQL (obviously) not to mention all the stuff I had to do when converting over the old flat-file database jBlogg to the new one - but, for me, this would be the mother of all SQL statements. What I needed to do was query two separate databases containing different field names and return a single set of regular data.

Some browsing through the MySQL manual revealed exactly the function I would need: UNION. UNION allows you to combine two SELECT statements into a single output - provided the two have the same number of columns returned. I built a SQL statement that would make your mother proud.

Now that I had a way to actually grab the data, I needed to solve the problem of arranging the rows reverse chronologically. Ordinarily you could just do something along the lines of ORDER BY date DESC, but it soon became clear that that would not work. It turns out that phpBB stores its dates as integer POSIX time and WordPress stores it as a DATE data type. I can only assume that the phpBB folks went this way for compatibility with older databases that don't support the DATE data type. Who knows. In any case, some more searching through the MySQL manual revealed a nifty little function called FROM_UNIXTIME(). This function converts POSIX time into a format compatible with the DATE data type. This was the last key I needed and my ultimate SQL statement was born. Behold it, in all its glory:


SELECT
f.forum_name, t.topic_title, u.user_id,
u.username, u.user_sig, u.user_sig_bbcode_uid,
p.post_id, pt.post_text, pt.post_subject,
pt.bbcode_uid, FROM_UNIXTIME(p.post_time) AS post_time,
t.topic_replies, t.topic_first_post_id
FROM
phpbb_forums AS f,
phpbb_topics AS t,
phpbb_users AS u,
phpbb_posts AS p,
phpbb_posts_text AS pt
WHERE
t.forum_id = f.forum_id
AND p.poster_id = u.user_id
AND pt.post_id = p.post_id
AND p.topic_id = t.topic_id
UNION
SELECT
'jscom', wp.post_title, wp.post_author,
wu.user_login, '', 0, wp.ID, NULL ,
wp.post_title, 0, wp.post_date AS post_time, 0, 0
FROM
wordpress.wp_posts AS wp,
wordpress.wp_users AS wu
WHERE
wp.post_status = 'publish'
AND wp.post_author = wu.ID
ORDER BY post_time DESC LIMIT 15;

I tried to tab it, but its not working so hot, so you'll just have to use your imagination.

With that SQL query and a few other tweaks for formatting, the RSS was fully integrated. Now I need to find another project to mess around with. Be seeing you.

December 14th, 2006 by Jake Scaltreto

Wow, it's been over two months since I've posted anything here. My apologies, I've been remiss in my duties to the masses. First, a small update on what I've been up to lately. For the past month - well more than that now - I've been in Emeryville, California (Across the bay from San Francisco). The company I work for acquired a company out here last year and I've been sent out here to help ease the integration of the computing environment. Unfortunately for me, a the majority of the work out here has been Windows related - and not all that interesting at that. Mostly I'm doing things like installing software, configuring accounts for users, and coming up with novel solutions to problems as they arise. I could also be out here until March of next year, which I'm not particularly siked about.

Despite the majority of the work out here being Windows related, I've been sneaking bits of Linux in there when I can. My laptop at my hotel is running Ubuntu, so I get to play around in the evenings.

In addition to being a god of all things Linux, I'm also an amateur photographer (see link on right). As a photographer, I'm always looking for ways to improve my photographs to make them appear cleaner, richer, and more pleasing to the eye. The number one tool in a digital photographers arsenal is Adobe Photoshop. Famous for having the ability to create "hilarious" image manipulations for the likes of Fark.com, few realize that the original purpose of Photoshop is - in fact - to do photo touch up.

As previously stated, Photoshop is a very important tool for the digital photographer. In my eyes, there are two major drawbacks to Photoshop. For one, it's incredibly expensive. And rightly so, considering everything you can do with it. It's priced to appeal to professionals, but the amateur photographer doesn't always have the resources to shell out that kind of cash and often ends up with the watered down version, Photoshop Elements.

The second drawback to Photoshop is really important to me: it's Windows only. Yes, I've heard of folks successfully running it in Wine, but that's not ideal. So, begin the quest for a replacement. Well, you don't have to look to far before you come across the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). The GIMP is a fully featured photo editing program - that's free. Although not a clone of Photoshop by any means, the GIMP does share a lot of functionality with it's closed source cousin.

The first time I ever tried to use the GIMP I was a bit intimidated. Being a veteran Photoshop user, the new interface seemed confusing and unintuitive - but so do many things the first time you use them. My first few creations with the GIMP were admittedly sub-par, but as I got a hang of using the interface and hot keys I became better and better at using the program.

The other night, I came across a tutorial on creating "Airbrushed" style portraits. I thought it was pretty neat, and could come in handy (especially if I ever get a job in the art department at Maxim ). However, the tutorial was written for Photoshop. Despite what many have said, I firmly believe that the GIMP if capable of doing anything Photoshop can. As such, I began the process of translating the tutorial to GIMP. Later on I plan to make a complete tutorial including screenshots, but for now I'll just show you the results.

First, the original image as it appeared in the tutorial. I chose to do the same image, so that a proper comparison can be made between the GIMP results and the Photoshop results.

She's a very pretty girl as-is, and doesn't really need any airbrushing in my opinion. But let's pretend this is for a spread in FHM. The author of the original tutorial ended up with the following image:

Not a bad result. And, so, I set out to achieve a similar result using tools available in the GIMP. Here is the result of my quest:

As you'll notice, my image and the tutorial image do differ, but the effect is the same. The difference is more the result of fine tuning and adjustment on my part. I actually prefer my version to the one in the tutorial - the skin toes are richer - but stuff like that can be adjusted to preference.

Just for kicks, I applied the same procedure I used with the photo above to a picture I had taken of my friend Mairead some time ago. I feel the results improved the photo greatly, but judge for yourself:

And the touched up version:

I feel the changes give the photo a lot more depth and bring out her features more.

So there you have it, the "proof of concept", if you will. Again, in the near future I'll work on a tutorial outlining the process I followed to create the pictures. Until next time, be seeing you.

October 3rd, 2006 by Jake Scaltreto

As mentioned in an earlier post, I have been planning to get my RedHat Certified Engineer (RHCE) Certification. Well, I took the test last Friday, and I'm happy to say that I passed along with a fellow Linux god from my company.

Having heard how tough the test was, I took extra time to study the materials and I feel that it really paid off. Some of the stuff that I spent extra time studying (BIND, SELinux) didn't even make an appearance on my exam. Overall, I'm very happy that I was able to pass the test and get the cert. Now to conquer my next cert: Solaris.

September 19th, 2006 by Jake Scaltreto

When I first came on board with the company I'm with now, my duties were... shall we say, limited. One of my duties was to name and enable all the Ethernet ports in a new building and check them for connectivity. As the facility was large, this meant literally thousands of ports. Furthermore, each time I did a port I also had to create a problem ticket to track the work I did. I got very good at entering tickets as you can imagine. Still, even at my best, I was only able to do do about one ticket a minute. So I did a bit of out of the box thinking and wrote a script that given a list of ports would automatically write my tickets at a rate of about one every twelve seconds. Mind you, it was a crude VBScript that interacted with the ticket software by simulating keystrokes, it was still a leap forward in ticket writing for its time. I couldn't have anticipated the ramifications of writing that script at the time. For one, the spike in tickets set off a management storm like you wouldn't imagine - I was praised as the ticket-writing boy wonder and to this day I still hold the record for most tickets created in a one month period. Secondly, and more importantly, it established me as the resident "script guy".

For the next two years I spent a good deal of my time writing scripts - mostly as side projects on top of my regular duties. Everything from VBScript to Perl to Bash to Batch - I was your guy if you needed something scripted. I would have to say that working on these little programming projects has been the main highlight of my employment as it appeals to my problem solving nature.

Recently, as in last week, I was tasked with coming up with a script that would scan a number of folders on a drive and determine which of them were unused. Sounds simple enough, right? I'm sure there are Windows utilities designed for just that. However, they wanted a completely hands-off utility that would generate a list on command. It didn't help that the drive in question has some folders with data in the terabytes. Yesterday I set out to tackle the problem.

I immediately decided to use Bash as my script language for this project. Now the drive needing to be scanned was a network drive on a Windows machine. Not wanting to fiddle with samba, etc. I fired up cygwin as my operating environment. The task was to find out what the most unused directories are. Initial instincts would drive me towards using a simple "du -s */" command to scan all the directories. However, this proved to be grossly inefficient when scanning those large directory trees - which we weren't concerned with in the first place.

I was taken back to a lesson I learned years ago when writing the AI for Othello2001 (A VisualBasic reversi game I wrote years back). The problem I had then was that if I scanned every possible move on the board to determine if it was a good move or not it would end up taking an incredibly long time - especially when I had it checking 2, 3 or 4 turns in. To solve this, I made it so that the computer would do an initial scan of all the moves discarding those that were considered bad moves - no sense wasting time with moves that would ensure certain destruction. It would then scan each of the remaining moves one turn in - discarding the bad ones yet again. I could recursively scan and discard moves many turns in to come up with a move that was (hopefully) very good. This is oversimplified, but the point is there. In the end, I was able to scan 4 or 5 turns deep and come up with the best move within an acceptable margin of error - and in a tiny fraction of the time it would have taken to scan all of the possible moves to to five turns.

So I applied a similar technique to my folder scanning project. First, I had to discard the folders that were obviously being used. The quickest way to do this was to count up the number of subfolders it had - a folder containing 10 subfolders or more is clearly being used by someone for something - so discard this. This increased the speed of scanning by quite a bit - but it still would have taken several days continuously running to scan all the folders because of instances where a folder did not contain many subfolders, but still contained a lot of data in the few subfolders it had.

To tackle this issue, I came up with the idea to insert a timeout into the "du" scan. Essentially, if a folder took longer than two seconds to scan, it obviously wasn't empty. These two methods eliminated the scanning of large folders. I was then left to only scan the "good candidates" for unused folders.

Using this method, the full scan now takes around an hour to complete and does a very good job of identifying unused folders. I'm confident that the script would have been much more difficult or even impossible to write in Batch or VBScript. It's interesting to see how Linux tools can be employed to solve such a vast array of problems.

September 14th, 2006 by Jake Scaltreto

For years, industry certification has been one way to beef up our resume and give you a bargaining chip when negotiating with potential employers. Especially for someone like myself who does not have a college degree, certification can mean big differences in starting salaries. Also, any glance at Monster.com reveals that many positions require potential candidates to have certain industry certifications. In the Windows world, this usually meant some type of MC* cert (MCP, MCSE, etc.), in networking we would see the CCN* certs or even the all powerful CCIE, and of course, most hardware positions generally like to see the modest A+ cert.

For a long time, Linux was missing a respectable cert of its own. Once Linux became a respectable force in the IT industry, suddenly dozens of certification companies were clamoring to get their foot in the door as the Linux certificate to have. Over the next couple of years, many of these faded into obscurity. However, even at this point in time, I'm not sure if there is one Linux cert that serves as the standard.

I was recently reading an article in this month's issue of Redmond magazine which discussed recent salary trends. One table of particular interest to me was the average salary with respect to industry certifications. Although the table listed certifications in many areas of IT, one which seems to command a high base salary the RHCE (RedHat Certified Engineer) which clocks in at just below $87,000 base salary. (source: Redmond Magazine)

Other Linux certifications were not well represented in the table. A google search for the term "Linux Certification" returns quite a few results. But it's very clear that as of this time, the industry has yet to decide on a standard to follow.

One thing that is attractive about the RedHat certs is the fact that the exams are fully lab based. Meaning that if you don't know the material, you won't pass. Unlike some of the exams *cough*comptia*cough* out there which can easily be passed after a couple of nights of cramming, the RHCE requires that you actually know and understand how Linux (well, specifically RedHat Linux) works as well as how to fix it. I think this approach greatly cuts down on the dreaded MCSE effect (I've known a great number of MCSE who couldn't tell the mmc from msconfig). This is perhaps why the RHCE commands a higher base salary: not because of the cert itself, but because the people who have it genuinely know what they're doing.
I started the path towards RHCE certification some time ago as part of my work training plan. I currently have the RHCT (RHCE's baby brother) and hope to get to coveted RHCE by the end of this year. Right now, it would seem to be one of the better choices in the Linux certification arena. I don't plan to stop there, though. The more certs you carry these days, the better it is - although they can't compensate for good old fashioned knowledge and experience, they can certainly be an influential factor in the hiring process.

The area of Linux Certifications continues to grow and change. I will be most interested to see what emerges as the market leader in the next couple of years.

September 12th, 2006 by Jake Scaltreto

Well, my first impressions of MythTV 0.20 are in and the verdict is favorable. On the outside, not much has changed. The addition of the MythArchive plugin (Create DVDs) is a welcome change, but I haven't had the time to extensively test it yet as the DVD burner in my server is DVD+R and I only had DVD-R discs handy. Of the other improvements, I can only say that things seem a bit faster and the whole package just seems tighter. I can't wait for the 1.0 release, which - at this rate - we should get sometime around 2010 or so...

Which brings me to something else I've noticed. Especially when dealing with OSS, we are seeing a greater acceptance of pre 1.0 software. It used to be that anything before 1.0 was Beta: Riddled with bugs and not ready for prime time. However, in today's world of demand for bleeding edge features, we are seeing a much wider acceptance of Beta software. To the point where some projects (i.e. MythTV) are fully functional and widely used having not even come close to a 1.0 release. How long did Firefox take to reach 1.0? I know I was using it well before that time.

I know it's not really important and it's really no more than a nomenclature change, I just find it interesting. I look at it as a small step in computer evolution. Control of software releases is leaving the hands of the big corporations who wouldn't dare release a pre-1.0 version of software unto the unsuspecting masses and entering the hands of community based projects. In some cases, even the big software companies have jumped on board. In the past five or so years (Since Windows XP), Microsoft has really lightened up when it comes to releasing public betas. They stop just shy of attaching the name "Release", instead using the newspeak buzzword, "Release Candidate".

Just something I find interesting.