Updating machines to F14

I've updated most of the machines in the house to F14. I purchased a 500GB 2.5" hard drive and used that for a new F14 64bit install for my desktop machine. The virtualization stuff seems to be working better. When I get the new work laptop, I'll use F14 on it.

Jira/Confluence vs Trac

I've used Trac in the past for projects. For my current project we have Jira and Confluence. Jira and Confluence are nice. However, trying to manage tasking for sprints is a pain. With Trac it was easy to create tickets representing tasking. Those tickets could be assigned to a milestone. There doesn't seem to be an analog Jira.

Confluence is a wiki, but integration with Jira is limited. Trac tickets can be referenced within it's internal wiki. When a ticket is closed it's displayed with a line through it. There are Jira macros for Confluence but it's not a nice as what trac offers. There's even an eclipse plugin for Trac to make it easier to deal with tasking.

We're going to examine the Greenhopper add on for Jira. Maybe it will make things better.

Put Your Name on a Patent?

Considering all of the bad press that software patents have been getting, would you take pride in having your name on a software patent? They're pretty much a joke. The only reason you'd want one is so you can sue your competitors when they start competing. Look at MS and Apple. Google is starting to eat their lunch in the smart phone market. Their only option is to sue.

Marilla Walking

Marilla is finally taking her first steps. She's taken a few small half steps over the past couple of weeks. Today she actually started walking to people. Our babysitter's daughters had her walking between them today. Tonight she's walked to me and Lee Ann.

Training Your Leaders

I found this article on training managers at tech companies on slashdot. It's interesting in that new companies don't really have a culture of management. The founders may still be running the company. Since they're techies, they are probably young.

This may be a little different from other people starting small business, but I don't know. If you're starting a small business (non-tech related), it seems to me that you may or may not have all of that knowledge either. You'll probably hire an accountant to keep the books and make sure that you get your taxes paid on time. An attorney will probably need to be engaged, especially if the company will be incorporated. There are lots of books and local programs that will help the new small business owner learn things that they probably don't already know. So it seems like this may be a common issue.

The issue with tech companies especially the very large one is that they seem to grow very quickly. Other small business may not have this problem. Tech companies seem to grow into huge behemoths almost over night. If a business has this problem, it's probably prudent to hire someone that can help manage the company while not interfering with founder's vision.

The same author had another article aboutold techies. It paints a pretty discouraging picture for those of us that are aging and doing tech. It's almost an either or proposition. You can do tech related things, not focus on growing tech skills while picking management capability. Or, you must focus solely on tech skills picking up enough to do tech lead/team mgmt perhaps even enough for product management. The skills that you need as a someone that wants to maintain technical path are project level budgeting, hiring, and a focus on improving your capabilities.

You might ask why someone would want to remain on a technical path. My answer is better job security. Highly skilled technical people with update to skills and excellent background may have an easier time finding jobs than middle managers. Middle managers seem to be a dime a dozen. It seems to be the first to go at companies especially large ones.

Another issue is that at places like government contractors, getting into management position is harder due to competition with those that may have MBA and have started at the organization on a management track. This is especially true for those contractors that are Department of Defense (DoD) related.

The problem with DoD companies is that they'll be hiring most of their management from the either recently released/retired officers. Those individuals have plenty of experience managing people. (Probably not so much with EEO types of things though.) Middle mgmt will more than likely be ex military. This is especially true if they're expected to do business development/bring in contracts. They'll know the lingo and have contacts that are needed to form those connections.

Moving above middle mgmt in the above type of organization probably means that you'll need to have been a flag officer. Admirals and Generals are flag officers. It will be tough moving up. Perhaps those Generals/Admirals are worth it. I'm skeptical.

Former members of congress or high ranking government officials also take up those positions. Don't forget that Dick Cheney used to be Chairman and CEO at Halliburton. He certainly brought home the bacon once he became VP. (Yeah it's a snarky low blow.)

All in all, learning the soft skills of management/leadership is important. Even highly skilled individuals maintaining a technical path will need to lead teams of people. (Linus Torvalds is an example.) Just like your tech skills, you can't count on the company providing the training. You'll have to do your own reading or take classes for those things that can be taught. Leading and dealing with people will need to be learned on the job. Try to find a mentor that can help.

Has Oracle Destroyed JAVA?

If you hadn't heard Oracle has sued Google over the Dalvik. Dalvik is a knock off of JAVA. It's a clean room implementation but apparently there are some patents that Oracle is alleging that Google is infringing in addition to some other charges.

Since Bilski didn't clear up the patent mess it looks Google is going to have fight a pitched battle with Oracle. If Google rolls over and just pays off Oracle, it won't bode well for FOSS applications that rely on JAVA.

The irony in this situation is that everyone complained about Mono and the submarine patents that MS could potentially wield against any free implementations. Instead, we've now discovered that our new JAVA overlords aren't as friendly as Sun. It's not really surprising. Gates, Jobs, Ellison have the same basic business personalities. It's now holds barred and anything goes. Oracle is shooting itself in the foot just like MS and Apple has.

I wonder how much Oracle will start charging for either the JAVA runtime, SDK, or both. Oracle will probably squeeze as much money out of JAVA as they can. They bought it after all. It just seems sad that the nice ecosystem that has grown up around JAVA could be in trouble now.

Watch Patent Absurdity if you can.

Groklaw has a nice write up of the situation.

Using RMagick to Resize Pics

I wanted to upload our beach pics to Facebook, but I didn't want the Facebook system to have to resize the pics. From what I could determine, Facebook has a limitation on photo sizes of 720 pixels on the largest side. Also some of the pics needed to be re-oriented.

The tool that I used to do accomplish this task under Linux is called ImageMagick. ImageMagick provides some nice command line tools for working with pics. However, I didn't want to have to write complex bash scripts to accomplish this task so I decided to use Ruby and RMagick. (Ruby, ImageMagick, and RMagick are available for Windows as well.)

Below is the script that I ended up using. It reads the name of the file to be resized from the command line. If the camera adds orientation information to the image, the script will orient it in the proper direction. After orienting the image, it will constrain the image to a maximum of 720 on each side while maintaining the aspect ratio. This means that it will stretch or shrink the side in a manner that distorts the image.

Name: resize.rb

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'RMagick'
include Magick

ARGV.each { |filename|
  origpic = Image::read(filename).first

  newpic = origpic.auto_orient
  origpic.destroy!
  newpic.resize_to_fit!(720)
  newpic.write("lores_"+filename)
  newpic.destroy!
}

Usage:
  reseize.rb image.jpg
or 
  resize.rb *.jpg  

Note that I'm using the destroy! option. This tells the libraries to release the memory that the image was using. Otherwise, running this script on a directory of images will quickly consume all of the memory and make the computer slower and slower. I discovered this the hard way. I had expected it to release the memory after each trip through the loop. It didn't work that way.