Author: Paul Tomblin

Today in geekery

One of these days I’m going to figure out why my nightly/hourly[1] rsync backup does something strange when the clocks change. But the problem is that I have to wait 6 months or a year to see if the change I made made any difference, and then I think “nah, I’ll just fix it manually next time it happens just like I did this time”. I think it’s getting confused by the double hour when the clocks go back and thinking it has to do the nightly backup again. Come to think of it, the nightly does happen at 1:15, and when the clocks go back we get two 1:15s, don’t we? I don’t want to make it 2:15, because when the clocks go forward we don’t have one of those. Maybe I’ll make that 4:15 and avoid the whole problem.

[1] Every hour it backs up my home Linux box to an external hard drive. Once a night, it backs up my colo box to my home box, and then backs up that to the external hard drive as well.

Today’s realization

I was trying to explain to somebody how much cooler you are if you just type a big long pipeline with a bunch of unix commands rather than putting the results of one command into a file, then processing that file into another one, and so on. And how for full geek points, that pipeline really needs to include at least one awk command. And then it hit me:

Unix is an Extreme Sport(tm). Just look how much Mountain Dew the average Unix geek drinks.

Today in job requirements FAIL

I got a call from a recruiter asking if I had experience with “ETL”. I’d never heard of it, so I truthfully said no, I had no idea what it was, and she went away.

After the call, I looked it up. Evidently it stands for “Extract, Transfer and Load”. Isn’t that what 90% of computer programs do? Isn’t that what the programs I’ve written and maintained for the last god-knows-how-long to extract aviation data from various sources in various formats, transfer it into my own format (combining data from several different places into one semi-coherent whole, throwing away the data that doesn’t interest me), and load it into my database for future use does? Or when I took data from Island and RediQuote and massaged it so that it looked like what SunGard’s trading system was expecting so that SunGard UMA users could trade stocks on them? Or when I converted data from the SMPTE ShowPlayList schema and stored it into our database so we could schedule movies and disassemble and re-assemble our own concept of what a show schedule was?

So yeah, I think I understand the concepts behind “ETL”. But because I was honest to a recruiter, I’ll probably never get a job doing it when it’s called that. The problem with the whole job market is that it’s full of cases like that, where recruiters and HR departments have a checklist and are just looking for people with the right keywords on their resume. That’s why I hope that careers.stackoverflow.com and jobs.stackoverflow.com catch on with Rochester companies, or companies who understand that off-site doesn’t necessarily mean the sort of idiots you see on Rentacoder who think they can solve the Halting Problem for $500.

More technique video

This time I was the camera man filming Dan and Stephen. I kept the camera at the front of my cockpit, which enabled me to reposition it as needed, but it also meant that my paddle and arm sometimes occlude the image. It’s a trade-off.

There was a fourth person along for the paddle whom you may glimpse once in a while, but he may or may not have been playing hooky from work so we won’t mention him.

[youtube KQMskReo2Yo]

Back in the Thunderbolt

Yesterday I went with Dan and Stephen to Baycreek so that Stephen could try out the new Epic V12 that just came in. It’s one of the specially decorated ones that was provided to the Dutch team in the US versus Holland challenge in last weekend’s Mayors Cup kayak race. Baycreek also got the one that Greg Barton himself paddled for the US team, but that one is already spoken for. I noticed with some amusement that Greg, who is one of the two designers for Epic Kayaks, gave himself a weed guard on his rudder but didn’t give one to the Dutch rival.

Because we were on the bay instead of on a canal or river, I wasn’t so concerned about picking up leaves so I was able to get back into my wonderful Thunderbolt. I also brought the video camera and put it on Dan’s boat. In the following video, I shot a couple of minutes of Dan from the front, and a bunch more where we turned the camera sideways to shoot myself and Stephen. I have to say, I’m really pleased with how good my technique looks. Everybody on the team has been telling me my technique is good, but it’s really cool to see it from another perspective.

[youtube r-R59nOJKSI]