03/04/98

Sometimes I wonder about things…

Last night I went to a stand up comedian playing at a local nightclub. Very
funny. Unfortunately it was quite late, so after work I got home, programmed
java, went out to the comedy thing, got back at 1am or so, then programmed java
till 3am, went to bed for 3 wonderful hours of sleep, and got up at 6. And
tonight I have my class till 10, and tomorrow I get to come towork early
to reboot the machines. Weeeee….

Had a meeting about the
FVREB intranet project
(http://www.realtorlink.org).
I got very frustrated, and here is why:

The system is basically an online document management system… and it blows.
Its ugly, doesn’t work and looks like shit. And why
are we buying into this if it sucks so bad? Funny you should ask that… it
looks like it is because our EO didn’t want to consult with people who are
familar with this stuff, and qualified to make judgements and suggestions
about it. He got shown something, took the 3 color glossies and said "Ohhh!
Looks good, here’s a check". Now we are stuck in the
hole for the money,stuck dealing with this stupid shitty system, and stuck with
having the controlout of our hands.

Even worse, the other people in the meeting were complaining about things like
the appearence of the headers, without noticing that the system was a hunk of
junk. sigh it’s days like this that it makes me want to quit and
get a job in a company when they respect their IT people, and are willing to
listen to new ideas. I understand that standards make things run smoother,but
at what point do you draw the line? When people are doing 10x the work
they should because of some (for example) stupid programs? I think so.
If so,I draw the line right now!

On the other hand, it has inspired me to write my own software, just for fun.
And if it’s done well, it might even be profitable 🙂 I’m imagining
a few things, none of which I’ll put here until I get things straight in my head,
but it’ll involve java and C++
and apache
and Linux 🙂 Anyone want to help
me? Well if so tell me.

Speaking of stupidness, I sent off an email with the following in it yesturday,
simply out of frustration:

Why are people so stupid?
This isn’t a news articale or anything, just a rant out of the frustration
of being the only enlinuxtened one at my work. Just take some of the
business cards I sent you for xmas and burn one for me…

Anyway, we have a situation where linux would be perfect… We have many
images coming in from about 3 different sources, being manipulated into
different sizes and formats, and then send out to different places (in this
case, the internet, a catalog of real estate listings and our own system).

My manager’s solution? Put them all on the PII that we bought that isn’t
doing anything then use VB.. hell, not even VB, but a ripoff called
reflections basic, combined with batch files and other bullshit to do all
the manipulation and logging, etc etc.

At one point in our brainstorming session I mentioned that I had an idea
that linux might be the right way to go and he simply said ‘nope, there’s no
linux here’.

Now imagine this: A lowend pentium, running linux (duh), with samba so the
images can be accessed just like any other file from our NT server, there is
a version of alchemy (image converter) that we can use, or use any of the
other image tools that are for linux. FTPing, tape creation and all the
other stuff can be done with bash/perl scripting (a lot is already scripted
on our hpux box)… WHY WHY WHY????

I’d use our hpux box, but after a few thousand images the tools (like ls and
du) break with ‘too many files’. I wonder if linux could handle doing an ls
on a dir with 25K files?

Why are people so stupid, close-minded and anal? I plan to ask (again) to
just let me bring in my linux486 and just do stuff (and then of course shove
it in his face.. ‘oh, look at that, you can do X with linux.. fancy that’
🙂

Question of the day: Where are there no computers?