The video playback couldn't be better. The screen is large, so watching a movie or tv show on it is quite enjoyable, and with a battery life of over 4 hours for video playback, I can use it through almost an entire Boston->San Francisco flight. The sound quality is superior to 3G ipod - it delivers a much richer audio experience. Additionally it comes with features such as voice recording and FM radio built in - which, while I haven't used it much, is certainly nice to have. The W does have some minor drawbacks or areas where I would like to see improvement.

Linux compatibility - Like many mass market devices, the W is designed to work on Windows. As a Linux user, I have gotten accustomed to throwing out driver/software CDs that come with hardware, and the W is no different. There is a ray of light, however. The W uses Microsoft's Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) to transfer data over USB. Thankfully, there are a few Linux applications that support this. The first is the feature-rich (read bloated) music player, Amarok, which can be used to transfer music, album art, etc. to and from the W with ease. Additionally, the minimalist Gnomad2 does a fine job of transferring music, video, and other data to and from the W. I've also heard that later versions of Rhythmbox support MTP, but I've yet to play with it myself. I would really like to see the player work like a portable hard drive with specific directories to copy music, video, pictures, etc. to. Needing a proprietary transfer protocol to use my expensive player is very off-putting - and the fact that it's a Microsoft protocol makes it feel even more dirty .

Audio Codecs - One thing that immediately drew me to the W was support for the Xvid video codec. Xvid is a free (as in speech) MPEG-4 video codec (compare to the proprietary Divx codec). I am a strong proponent of xvid and typically encode all of my video content with it. It just feels nice to you a free codec as opposed to something that's closed - really, it does, try it! Unfortunately, the audio codecs available on the W are not as open. You essentially have two choices: MP3 or WMA (oh, and WAV... but c'mon...). WMA is a Windows-only codec (which, in my personal opinion, sounds fairly poor) and MP3 is a proprietary format which may or may not be illegal in the US (because of it's proprietary nature, several organizations have claimed royalty rights. While LAME may not be strictly an encoder, any binary implantation of the mp3 format without a license would be against the law). Ideally, I would prefer to use an open codec for my audio such as Vorbis or FLAC, but alas, it seems the world is not ready to handle it. Vorbis and FLAC tend to get very little respect outside of the FOSS community. It's a shame, too, I would love to keep my entire media library free of proprietary formats, but neither my iPod nor the W will have it.

Those are the two big gripes I have so far with the W. I must say that it is a great little gadget and for the past few weeks I have owned it, I've made extensive use of it. But please, Creative, show some love for FOSS.

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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.

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.

]]> http://jakescaltreto.com/2007/04/07/on-helpdesks/feed/ http://jakescaltreto.com/2007/04/03/33/ http://jakescaltreto.com/2007/04/03/33/#comments Tue, 03 Apr 2007 23:37:59 +0000 Jake Scaltreto Linux http://www2.jakescaltreto.com:81/2007/04/03/33/ 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 [...]

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.

I won't be there, but according to the library's website, there is a reception tomorrow Saturday the 13th from 2-4 PM. So, even if you're not interested in the art, show up and get some free snacks.

 As for me, I'm still out in California at least for the timebeing. To be honest, I'm not really happy with the situation as it stands. Way back in October when I agreed to come out here, it was initially planned to be like a one month thing, with the worst case scenario being the end of December. Also, there were plans to hire someone locally who I would train to work with me and eventually replace me when I came back. Well, long story short, no one has been hired yet and I'm still here.It wouldn't be so bad if it were work that I was interesting to me. Although there's a lot of it, not much of the work really utilizes my skill sets. This is frustrating to me because I've worked for the past couple of years to expand my skills in the areas of Linux and Unix and now I'm not even getting to use those skills. Se la vie.

As for when I can go back to working in Cambridge, that has been and continues to be somewhat open ended. I'm now told the worst-case scenario is the end of March, but this week I was able to corner my boss and finagle somewhat of a reprieve. I will be coming back for one week at the end of this month during which I will return to my old job. The plan, as it stands now, is for me to come back here (to Cali) after that week and have two people (either hired out here or transfered from Cambridge) out here as well. Then I would take on the task of showing them the ropes and transitioning out before my ultimate term sometime in the first weeks of February.

That plan works for me, but my boss declined to fully commit to that withdrawal plan, and maintains that the "worst-case scenario" is late March. I'm very anxious to get back to Boston and with any luck, that should be happening soon. (fingers crossed)

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.

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.

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.