Deep thoughts from a software engineer

Come on, you don't really think engineers have any deep thoughts do you? Granted software engineers are a little better than most, of course I am biased!

Umm yeah, I really wish today was nicer, along the lines of last weekend... I am soo sick and tired of the dreary weather...

Finally Friday!

Oh gosh I am sooooo glad it is finally Friday!!! Today was another slow day. I spent the first part of the day preparing a demo script for my meeting Monday, and the rest of the day was spent playing with SOA suite again! Ugh.

Slow days suck!

I absolutely hate slow days! I sat at my computer today trying to get Oracle SOA Suite setup on my computer and not having a very good time of it. So of course I sat there checking google most of the day!

Who knew the unknown was so easy!

Well after all my work documenting yesterday how to tackle this one task, my project manager said to go for it. What do you know, it took less than two hours to implement! Makes a person feel great to knock another item off the todo list! Now to keep my team mates motivated and moving forward on their items! Only two left in this phase of development, and we hope to have one done by the end of the day Friday, and the other done by the end of the following Friday!

Now to tackle the unknown.....

On our project work list we have this one task, that is about as clear as mud. So I decided I will at least look into it. It looks like the web service I was working on a few days ago has a few parts to it that all run as seperate threads. For anyone that doesn't know and wants to, a thread is kind of like multi tasking. For those that use windows, you can think of this like the running processes in task manager. While a process and a thread are not the same, they are close enough for this discussion. Ok, so this task involves on thread that looks at the database every 15 minutes and decides if it needs to send out some emails. The problem is that under heavy load this thread can generate an error. When this happens it sits in this error state for the next 15 minutes. The IT department uses a program called Nagios to check that everything is ok. Right now if this thread does die it reports an error in Nagios and the IT department is notified, even though it was just an issue with increased load. My plan on to setup a loop. We would try to run the thread, if it failed we will wait 30 seconds, then try again. We would repeat this until either 3 minutes has passed, or the thread runs with no errors. If 3 minutes passes and the thread still doesn't run successfully then we go into an error state and let Nagios report the error to IT. I am not sure if my project manager wants me to work on it or not, but I emailed him what I have found out and what I planned and I will let him decide!

Ummmmmmmmmmm

Yeah that is how I feel. I got like four hours of sleep Saturday night, two one hour naps Sunday afternoon, and like 8 hours of sleep last night. Why do I feel like my brain is on vacation?

What on earth did I do wrong???

So I went to bed around 10pm or so, and I have been up for an hour now!?! What did I do to deserve this?

Happy Birthday Sis!

Yeah, so unfortunately my older sister and I are not all that close. I don't know what it is about her, but we just don't, and never did, click. She was nice enough to get a hold of me on my birthday, ok so she had to call several times the day before, of, and after to get me to answer, but I did and she wished me a happy birthday. Because of this I thought it only nice to do the same. Since today is her birthday I gave her a call. At least I planned to. I woke up and my phone was dead, dammit! I plug it in and we go shopping. Come late afternoon my mom starts sending me messages via instant messenger asking why I hadn't called her. Dammit again, I forgot. So I grabbed my phone and called her. Her first question, did mom get a hold of you to remind you? Umm, no why was she going to? Yeah I tend to tell little white lies some times. After a great deal of time on the phone I wish her a happy birthday and hang up, have I mentioned I hate talking on the phone? There, conscience cleared, I am a good brother again, for now!

Finally Friday!

I think I need to make "Finally Friday!" a weekly thing what about you? Nah, probably not. If I did I would end up forgetting to post anything through the week, so I would have a blog full of Finally Friday posts! Yes dear, I know I already forget to post! So sue me! No, not really....

Oh, and I finally got that damn web service to debug and what do you know my modifications work just like they are supposed to!

Debugging web services sucks!

I know I have expressed that I really don't like JAVA, well this is a little of the same, and a little different. Right now I am trying to modify a JAVA web service. The modification is easy, it is just the fact that it doesn't want to pay any attention to my break points. GRRR!!!

I greatly dislike no-shows.

So once again I get to the work site and our contact person is not there. No big deal really, but I would not have driven down there had I known he wasn't going to be there. I see no point in making an hour drive to work along side someone just to find out they won't be there! Monday at least he sent the message out in plenty of time, so had I checked my email before I left at 7:15am I would have known he wouldn't be there and I could have gone to the office. Tuesday I though hey maybe I will check email before I leave, so I checked it around 7:10am, no email. Great! I load up and drive down there. I get my computer fired up a little after 8 and of course there is the message from him at like 7:45am. This morning I also thought maybe I would check email before I left. Again there was nothing, but I wasn't sure if that meant anything. I drive on down there, get my computer up and running, check my email...... Nothing! Great! About 15 minutes later there it is, out again. I can't really complain much, after all his daughter does have the flu, but I wish I knew ahead of time he wasn't going to be there so I could avoid burning a tank of gas in the truck! Here is to hoping tomorrow is better!

Update from yesterday.

Well, the engineer with the other project did not talk to the project manager, and did not let me know what was going on. I knew I would not see this person today, so I emailed the project manager and asked him if he was contacted, and if I should work on this persons task to help speed it along. He let me know that no he was not contacted, and that he really wanted this other person to work on the task. I really would like to work on this task. I looked it over, made a lot of notes, and I think I have it basically figured out and outlined for this person. It just needs done! Let me do the damn thing and get it over with..

Take one for the team...

The project I am on for work has three engineers working on it, myself and two others. We have a project manager, but he is busy with other projects, and wouldn't have much to add to the development on this one anyway. He has very little experience with Java web applications, which is what this one is. Anyway, I was pulled off of one Java web application, to work on this one, so when it came down to getting up to speed I have had it easy. Because of this I have been the technical lead on the project, taking over management of the development team, and pushing to get tasks completed, while the project manager can deal with schedule issues, and interfacing with our customers. One of our engineers is trying to finish up another project though, and is running into problems switching between projects. I suggested consulting with the project manager and letting him know that I could handle one of the remaining issues. We have five weeks left, and only two items to complete, so it shouldn't be a problem. I guess only time will tell!!

Glorious Sunshine!!!!!

Wow, it actually 50F today!!! I was outside trying to chip away at the 8inches or so of ice still at the end of our drive way, wearing a t-shirt and all sweaty!! I am sooooo ready for spring! I can't wait for those warm spring days when we can cruise around in the bronco with the top down!! Sigh, much colder temps and even more snow on the way.....

What a day!

Well I will tell anyone reading that I had a great birthday! My wife took me to Lone Star Steak House for dinner, ok so I took her ;-), I had steak and lobster, she had chicken as usual. My food was great, but my loving wife mentioned to the waitress that it was my birthday... Yeah, I bet you can guess what happened right after dinner... Yeah, she asked me what I wanted for dessert. I selected the apple cobbler, and here she came, with about 8 other servers.. Yeah to sing to me...

It's my party...

Final BPEL training day!

Wow, so the training was as close to a waste of time as I really think you can get! I should say the training itself wasn't THAT bad, but the format was not the best. It was of course online training, so I sat there listening to a teleconference while watching the instructor flip through a power point presentation... Anyway, around noon I kept dozing off!!! Anyway, I got the basics of BPEL, and I think I would modify an existing process without any issue, so I guess thats what counts!

BPEL Training day 3

Well today was the final day of the fundamentals portion of my training. It was basically just covering the basic operation of a bpel process. The training itself wasn't too bad, but I think I got just as much out of the tutorial built into the free software we were using! I hope tomorrow proves to be a little bit more fruitful!!

BPEL training day two

Well as I expected day two went a lot better. First though I finished up another task on our project! We now have only two left, one fairly easy one, and one fairly complex one. Now, back to BPEL. I actually learned a lot today. About setting up a sequence in BPEL, directing the flow of execution. I went through the labs and then started on the tutorial again. I decided to try the tutorial without help and had no problems.

Oh, on a side note, I have a meeting tomorrow to talk to my engineering manager about trying to start some project management. Oh yeah, and I really need to get to work on my microsoft certification.

BPEL training day one

So this week I am in BPEL training. Business Process Execution Language. Anyway, the entire first day of the class, which is web based instructor led training, was spent learning their own tool for BPEL. I did go through the labs for the training and then went through the tutorial for the tool. All in all it is going well, I hope tomorrow is better!