Manager Skills

 Project Management  1 Response »
May 232011
 

Some­how I missed the news about Google’s Pro­ject Oxy­gen earli­er this year. This was a large pro­ject that meas­ured what skills the most effect­ive man­agers at Google use, and the pit­falls poor man­agers fall into. As one might expect from Google, the res­ults are but­tressed by a ser­i­ous amount of data: over 10,000 answers about 100 vari­ables. If you work for any­one, or man­age any­one, it’s worth read­ing about, even if what you do isn’t in software. 

What I found inter­est­ing was this quote, from https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html:

“In the Google con­text, we’d always believed that to be a man­ager, par­tic­u­larly on the engin­eer­ing side, you need to be as deep or deep­er a tech­nic­al expert than the people who work for you,” Mr. Bock says. “It turns out that that’s abso­lutely the least import­ant thing. It’s import­ant, but pales in com­par­is­on. Much more import­ant is just mak­ing that con­nec­tion and being accessible.” 

It’s been recog­nised for some time in oth­er busi­nesses that the skills required to be a good man­ager are not neces­sar­ily the same as those needed to do good tech­nic­al work. I’m glad to see the data com­ing from Google to sup­port the notion that good soft­ware pro­ject man­agers do not have to be tech­nic­al enough to be lead developers (although they do need to have enough tech­nic­al skills to know what’s going on).

Installing Debian

 Technology  1 Response »
Apr 272011
 

The next stage in the great pro­ject to migrate back from Debi­an from OpenSol­ar­is: installing Debi­an. Wow, it’s so much easi­er these days! Here are my ran­dom notes from the install. I chose the net­work install option and burned the .iso to a CD. Then I booted from the CD on the boot­load­er (on a Sun Ultra 20, you hold down the F8 key while boot­ing to get to the load­er). Then it was just a mat­ter of pick­ing the options.

First option: graph­ic­al install­a­tion. It’s much easi­er to work on oth­er things and occa­sion­ally glance at the installing sys­tem when there’s a graph­ic­al user inter­face. I was­n’t sure what to use for the domain name, since this com­puter will be used inside the home net­work, so I left it blank for now. I can always change it later. I also picked the easy “one par­ti­tion” option as I saw no need for mul­tiple par­ti­tions. Then, I just let ‘er rip.

These days you get a nice list of pre­defined col­lec­tions to install; I chose the graph­ic­al desktop envir­on­ment (yes, it’s a serv­er that I’ll mostly access via ssh, but why not?), web serv­er, SQL data­base, ssh serv­er. Then it was time to wait and do oth­er things, like noti­cing how it’s rain­ing out­side. Again. April in Van­couver, sigh.

Some time later… Debi­an’s installed, and now I’ve decided to try The Debi­an Way to install Word­Press, rather than installing it by hand as I did last time I set up Word­Press on this box. apt-get update, fol­lowed by apt-get upgrade and apt-get install wordpress installs a bunch of stuff into /usr/share/wordpress, includ­ing a file, wp-config.php, which does­n’t appear in the stock Word­Press install­a­tion. Sure enough, it’s a Debi­an-spe­cif­ic file. Guess I’d bet­ter go and read some doc­u­ment­a­tion. I want to set up sep­ar­ate blogs with sep­ar­ate domain names, not just sep­ar­ate sub-domains, and Word­Press MU does­n’t do that by default. It will be inter­est­ing to see if the Debi­an ver­sion of Word­Press tackles that configuration.

Moving Blog Homes

 Technology, WordPress  No Responses »
Apr 212011
 

Giv­en the cur­rent state of OpenSol­ar­is (pre­cari­ous, judging by vari­ous posts I’ve seen over the last few months) I decided to move the base­ment devel­op­ment and blog host­ing machine back to Debi­an. I mostly use it for a couple of small Word­Press blogs, and try­ing out vari­ous things (the odd Django pro­ject, Ruby on Rails, etc), so Debi­an is emin­ently suit­able for that.

Step one: move the Word­Press blogs on to an inter­im host­ing solu­tion, namely the same host where I cur­rently host this blog. My pack­age allows infin­ite add-on domains, so that works. To start with, I made sure I had no broken links on the blogs in their old home — I did­n’t want to try to hunt down errors in the new blogs that already exis­ted on the old ones.

The whole pro­cess worked fairly well (install new Word­Press sys­tem on new host, export the old blog, import to the new one) except for a couple of wrinkles, which I’m detail­ing here for next time I need to do this.

  1. when set­ting up the new blog, before you’ve switched the DNS, don’t put the final URL in the set­tings dia­log. This just means you can­’t log in to the tem­por­ary site and you have to go into PHPMy­Ad­min and fix the URL back to the tem­por­ary ver­sion. Get the site set up prop­erly first, then switch the blog URL and the DNS settings.
  2. The image attach­ment prob­ably won’t work. If you import the posts and check the “import file attach­ment” box, some of them will attach prop­erly, but not all, and you’ll have to manu­ally upload a cer­tain pro­por­tion of your images using SFTP or some­thing sim­il­ar. If you don’t check that box, none of the images will be attached to the right posts and you’ll have to manu­ally upload all of them. If you’ve used stand­ard markup to show pho­tos, that works any­way, but if you’ve used the gal­lery short­code, you’ll have to manu­ally attach the images to the post. The best plu­gin I’ve found to help with this is the Add From Serv­er plu­gin, where you can attach the images after you’ve uploaded them all. It’s still a lot of work if you have a lot of images.

Apart from that, step one went well. Now I have to make sure I have all the oth­er use­ful files saved some­where, and get on with the OS install.

Internet Speed

 Technology  6 Responses »
Feb 252011
 

I was reminded again today of the old adage that even when you think you know what the prob­lem prob­ably is, until you meas­ure it, you’re likely to be wrong. This applies par­tic­u­larly to factors that impede your inter­net speed.

The ADSL inter­net band­width pack­age we signed up for, many moons ago, was 3 Mbps. I know, that seems laugh­ably slow to many of you, but I don’t down­load video much and it’s adequate for my needs. On a whim, Tim decided to test the speed and found it to be only 1.14 Mbps (even when tak­ing out everything in the way, such as fire­wall and router). We tested a few times, and got sim­il­ar res­ults. So even­tu­ally we called up the ISP and com­plained, they ran their tests and found noth­ing, and as a last resort from their side, offered to send us a new modem.

Now the mod­el I had was less than a year old, a Thom­son Speedtouch ST516 V6, which I’d bought when I had trouble con­nect­ing last year. So I was doubt­ful that it would turn out to be an issue with the modem, more con­cerned that it might be an issue with the phone wir­ing in this old house. But hey, it does­n’t hurt to try a new modem, so we agreed.

A couple of days later, a new Thom­son Speedtouch ST516 V6 modem shows up in the mail. I plug it in, run speedtest.net again, and all of a sud­den we’re get­ting 2.12 Mbps, a good-sized increase and much closer to what we’re pay­ing for. (The house wir­ing and vari­ous oth­er factors prob­ably make up the rest).

So now I’m puzzled. Two modems, from the out­side exactly the same, with the same mod­el num­ber, bought 11 months apart, with very dif­fer­ent res­ults. It’s not like there are user-con­fig­ur­able jump pins on the back that could be set wrongly. The only thing I can think of is that I got a dud with the first modem. Any­one have oth­er explanations?

Word 2010 and Thunderbird 3

 Technology  1 Response »
Feb 142011
 

My major cli­ent uses mostly Microsoft products: Out­look + Exchange and Office. It turns out that the com­pat­ib­il­ity with Open­Of­fice is lim­ited when it comes to large doc­u­ments and defined styles, so I upgraded my old Office 2003 to Office 2010 on my Win­dows 7 PC desktop. And then ran into anoth­er prob­lem: file cor­rup­tion in email attachments. 

I use Thun­der­bird 3 to fetch mail via IMAP from the Exchange serv­er, but every time someone sent me a Word doc­u­ment, I’d get this error mes­sage about not being able to open it in Word 2010 because it was cor­rup­ted. If I used the Out­look Web Access cli­ent it worked fine, so it was­n’t a cor­rup­tion at the serv­er. And Word 2003 used to open the same types of doc­u­ments sent to me by the same per­son, so at first I wondered if it was some­thing to do with Word’s upgrade.

Hunt­ing around Moz­il­la’s getsatisfaction.com web site gave me a point­er to Spe­cial Thun­der­bird IMAP Set­tings at the Michigan State Uni­versity’s Phys­ics-Astro­nomy Com­put­ing Sup­port Site (they have inter­est­ing art­icles on lots of related issues). Basic­ally, the issue is due to Thun­der­bird chunking the file as it pulls it down from the serv­er, which intro­duces some cor­rup­tion. The same appar­ently also applies to using the Gmail IMAP serv­er, although I haven’t noticed any issues with that. 

To fix it, go into Tools…Options. Select the Advanced tab, click on “Con­fig Edit­or”. Search for chunks. Click on the res­ult­ing set­tings to make sure they’re all set to “user set” “false” (they will be in bold once this is done). Close the win­dow and press OK to save. I then restar­ted Thun­der­bird to be on the safe side (not all con­fig set­tings take effect without a restart and I did­n’t feel like test­ing it). Then (and the web page I linked to did­n’t include this step), right-click on the account name in the list of accounts/folders on the left (in the stand­ard win­dow con­fig­ur­a­tion), and choose “Prop­er­ties”. You should see a “Repair Folder” but­ton. Click on this to make Thun­der­bird fetch everything again, with the new settings.

Prob­lem solved! I still don’t know why Word 2010 had prob­lems with doc­u­ments that Word 2003 could read, but I don’t care enough to try to find out.

Blank Pages After WP Upgrades

 Technology, WordPress  No Responses »
Nov 272010
 

I was upgrad­ing the Word­Press site for someone and had a few moments of pan­ic when, after upgrad­ing, all I could see were blank pages. Vis­ions of hav­ing to go through the pain of rein­stalling the data­base from the backup, and upload­ing all the files from the backup, were dan­cing through my head, which would turn a quick upgrade into a long mara­thon. The upgrade here was from 2.6.something to 3.0.1, and I had­n’t bothered doing all the inter­me­di­ate upgrades, so that made the pro­spect even worse.

Pok­ing around the vari­ous sup­port pages encour­aged me to try a couple of dif­fer­ent things first. The fact that all the pages were blank, both the admin site and the pub­licly-vis­ible site, made the prob­lem seem worse than it ended up being. And the solu­tions turned out to be rel­at­ively simple.

Step 1: get the admin site going. I’d made all the plu­gins inact­ive, but fol­low­ing the advice on the WP FAQ troubleshoot­ing page, I renamed the plu­gins dir­ect­ory to plugins.hold, and cre­ated a new empty plu­gins dir­ect­ory. This worked, and I could see the admin site. It turns out that one par­tic­u­lar plu­gin cre­ated hav­oc even when it was­n’t activ­ated. I could then rein­stall all the needed plu­gins cleanly from the auto­mat­ic install one at a time, test­ing to make sure each one worked.

Step 2: go to the Appear­ance page and turn on the default theme (one thing I’d for­got­ten to do before upgrad­ing). It turns out that the old theme was­n’t com­pat­ible with 3.0.1, and showed only blank pages. 

Now the site works again, albeit not look­ing quite the same as it did due to the theme, but that prob­lem is tract­able and does­n’t cre­ate any­where near the same “oh, no” prob­lem that the oth­ers did.

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