Andrew Channels Dexter Pinion

Inspired by Simon, I thought I’d follow the crowd;

andy47@Mort:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
  187   cd
   66   whoswho
   46   svn
   30   python
   20   rm
   16   ls
   15   open
   13   vi
   13   grep
   10   ipython

This Thursday, the 6th of March 2008 from 6:30pm there will be a social gathering of Sydney Python Users Group and any individuals interested in discussing Python, Web, Ruby, Perl etc.

Laptops, OLPC’s, code review, show and tell etc allowed and encouraged.

We meet in the ground floor area next to P.J. O’Briens Pub internal entrance in the;

Grace Hotel at the corner of York and King Street in Sydney, New South Wales 2000. See you there

I’m bringing back a long neglected feature, bad customer service. Although a quick search tells me I haven’t mentioned this as much on line as in real life, where friends and casual acquaintances who get me on a bad day are liable to receive a long and bitter tirade.

Back in September when I was last looking for a job in a moment of weakness I applied for a position at a global IT company that is rather fond of the colour blue. After the initial excitement of the application I waited.

And waited.

And forgot that I had applied to be honest, because I heard absolutely nothing. Until today, when reviewing the mails rejected by my spam filter I noticed this;

Dear Andrew

Thank you for your recent application to a large IT company*.

After careful consideration we regret to inform you that your skills and experience do not match
our current position requirements. If your skills match future vacancies we will contact you
again. Please let us know if your circumstances change, or if you do not wish us to continue to
hold your details.

Thank you again for your interest in a large IT company*.

Yours sincerely,
a large IT company* Australia Staffing Team

So by my calculations it has taken them five months to review my application and send a stock response. I was particularly impressed by the last line of the message which states;

This e-mail has been sent by a Service Machine. Please do not reply directly to this e-mail
using a Reply function.

Don’t you love the personal touch?

Update: I couldn’t resist and sent this reply;

Dear a large IT company*,

Thank you very much for taking five months to review my application. I do not wish you to retain
my details as I suspect that by the time you look at them again they will be woefully out of
date.

* Names have been changed to predict the gloriously incompetent.

I started a new job a couple of months ago. Sadly the IT policies are a little restrictive, they won’t even let me use my own mouse with the company supplied computer. So I’ve gone rogue. I bought a new MacBook (black, naturally) in December and thanks to the power of VMWare I’m using it pretty much full time at work.

Which has had an interesting effect on my approach to the software I use. Over the past couple of years I’ve been finding myself using either web based applications or command line scripts I wrote myself. What with having a desktop machine at work, a laptop and a home machine all running different operating systems the web browser and the command line are the easiest ways to synchronise my data via common applications.

As I’m now using the same machine at home and work I’ve started to drift back to o/s specific desktop applications. Instead of Google Reader I’ve switched to NetNewsWire Lite, I’ve replaced the WordPress text area with MarsEdit and I’m trying out OmniFocus instead of some hacked up scripts for my to do list.

I’m not sure what this says about me or my choice of technology, other than that I’ll get a frosty reception from the Google posse at the next Sydney Python meeting. But add this to the fact that I gave back the company supplied Blackberry and I think I must be bucking some sort of trend here. Is it just me or is anyone else fighting back the tide of web apps?

Most of the country may be on holiday but some of us are working hard and we’re thirsty.

This Thursday, the 3rd of January, 2008 from 6:30pm, there will be a social gathering of the Sydney Python Users Group and any individuals interested in discussing Python, Web, Ruby, Perl etc.

Laptops, code review, show and tell etc allowed and encouraged.

We meet in the ground floor area next to P.J. O’Briens Pub internal entrance in the Grace Hotel, Cnr York and King Street, Sydney, New South Wales 2000

See you there.

Yes, I’ve got a new job (details will be forthcoming), but in the mean time I’ve got a shiny new Macbook (black, naturally) running Leopard.

As part of setting it up I wanted to run some of my web pages locally and realised that PHP wasn’t enabled out of the box. Luckily it is really easy to set up. Just sign in to a terminal session as a user with admin privileges and;

$ sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

and then uncomment line 114, which starts out looking like this;

#LoadModule php5_module       libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Then restart Apache by de- and then re-selecting ‘Web Sharing’ under the ‘Sharing’ pane of System Preferences. You don’t need to do anything else because the nice people at Apple thoughtfully provide an appropriate configuration file that is included when you enable the PHP module.

Well that was fun. Now I’m looking for a new job. My resume is, as always, located here.

Anyone need an incredibly talented technologist in the Sydney area? I shall be somewhat picky about location this time, because an hour and a half each way to Pymble every day was no fun at all.

In my new executive position I’m responsible for maintaining adequate staffing levels in the technology department of my company. We are pretty much staffed up at the moment but there are some potential projects on the horizon that will tax the capacity of my team. In a novel fit of forward planning I’m trying to find a consulting partner who will be able to help us in these times of high workload. It is proving quite tricky.

So, dear lazyweb, do you know of any reputable consulting companies who will fit our bill. They must be;

1. On the ground in Australia. A Sydney office is a bonus.
2. Have competencies in one or more of; Python, PostgreSQL and scaling internet applications
3. Have a track record and reputable references. I will be checking.
4. Not cost the earth. Although I’m very aware of how much consultants cost, having been one myself for most of the last fifteen years.

Any and all suggestions are welcomed in the comments or to my email address. As long as they fit our criteria. Outsourcing and offshore development are not an option at this time so please don’t suggest these.

Its the end of the financial year and an email popped into my in box today reminding me to renew my membership of Electronic Frontiers Australia. Which means that in turn I am reminding anyone reading this blog in Australia that you can do your bit for on line civil liberties by joining up as well.

EFA is an advocacy group focussed on protecting your rights to do and say what you like with your computers, telephones and other electronic communication devices. It is small and underfunded and any contribution you can make will help. If you want to know more, take a look at the web site and in particular the objects and purpose in the association’s rules.

So, its official (see the announcement for the 13th of March, 2007). I’ve given up the cosy world of consulting for the hustle and bustle of a real job.

I’m now the software services manager at CommSecure. I should take this opportunity to echo the bloggers motto - the words published here are entirely my own and do not represent the views of my employer.

Its a bit of change for me because I’ll no longer be working with ERP systems but rather looking after the team that write and support the systems that sit at the very core of the company’s operations. Not only that but its a technology shift as well. Away from enterprise technologies like Oracle, Java, .Net, and the like and towards the brave new world of Linux, PostreSQL and Python. The team at CommSecure is one of the biggest concentrations of Python developers in this part of the world and that was, if I’m honest, a significant attraction of this new role.

Sadly I won’t be very hands on, not unless things get really hairy. So whilst I may mention the technologies in use at work here in passing most of my focus is going to be on the transition from managing people for the duration of a project to managing a team of people (and the associated projects) on a more permanent basis.

Its a big challenge for me, and the first few days have illustrated how big, but I’m looking forward to it.