Price of Commercials

28 Oct 2009 — eric

The price of commercials is especially high for engineers. And by commercials, I don’t mean an intermission between pieces of a sitcom or drama, I mean the brief 15 seconds of an interruption when someone asks an engineer in the zone a question that takes 3 seconds to answer. For the sake of argument, let’s say an engineer gets interrupted a mere 5 times per day including lunch and a daily meeting (let’s call it a scrum for fun).

If it takes that engineer, admin, developer or whatever 10 minutes to get focused after each interruption and the initial getting into the office and getting into the swing of things; that means that out of an 8 hour day, 1 hour is wasted just refocusing. Refocusing just puts you back on the issue, it doesn’t put you back in the zone. Some engineers only get in the zone once per day. At that rate, you can massively waste someone’s productivity with a 10 second interruption.

What’s my point? Good question. That commercial/question/interruption that someone is pushing onto that engineer could be the straw that broke the camel’s back on a deadline. So be aware of the situation that your people are in, who is talking to them, who has access to them, and who takes advantage of that access. Those precious periods of concentration can afford you a huge win or bring about a big loss.

Posted in Misc. Tags: . 1 Comment »

Printing New Lines in Bash

22 Oct 2009 — eric

Ran across this the other day and decided it required sharing. If you want to print a new line ‘\n‘ in an echo statement in bash, one would think its just as simple as:

beacon:~ elubow$ echo "This is a test\n"
This is a test\n

The problem is that this doesn’t interpolate the newline character. (For more information on interpolation, see Wikipedia here.) In order to have the newline interpolated, you need to add the command line switch ‘-e‘.

beacon:~ elubow$ echo -e "This is a test\n"
This is a test

This will force Bash to interpolate any non-literal characters in the quotes. Note: Unlike Perl, single or double quotes don’t matter here when Bash is deciding whether or not to interpolate the new line characters.

Posted in Misc. Tags: . No Comments »

Causing More Problems Than You Solve

7 Oct 2009 — eric

To start off, if you know me personally, then you know I recently (July 30, 2009) broke my leg skydiving. If you’re interested, you can see this video on Youtube here. To make a long story short, I had surgery that night, they put a titanium rod in my thigh and I have been on crutches since. I have only recently started learning to walk again (which I have no yet reached that point). This week my insurance decided that it was no longer necessary to send me to Physical Therapy (thanks Oxford).

Like any corporation, Oxford is in the business of making money and in this case, they are doing so by deciding not to pay for my PT. In the long run, the lack of rehabilitation will likely leave me in a weakened state and generally more prone to injury once I go back to my skydiving, motorcycle riding, MMA, and BASE jumping ways. If Oxford had said, let’s make sure he can walk and then we’ll cut him off, at least he’ll have a foundation and be less prone to injury; then they might be saving a bit of money on me in the long run.

So what does this sob story have to do with IT? A decision made now in order to save money can end up costing you more of time and money in the long run. And since time is money, sometimes a little bit of planning can go a long way. Should you add the feature now because your biggest client wants it by Friday. Well if you do that, then you might lose a few smaller clients along the way and the word of mouth may be more damaging than temporarily upsetting that large client.

Perhaps you set up Nagios and immediately turned on alerting without learning the thresholds that your machines typically sit at. Then you get a whole set of alerts and you spend more time trying to sort through the real problem ones versus the ones that just have a slightly abnormal operating level then you would if you just looked at your machines thresholds to begin with.

There are a million examples that could be listed here. The point is, before jumping into a decision, try to make sure that you’re not going to be paying for it in the long run. A little planning can go a long way.

Posted in Misc. Tags: . 1 Comment »

SysAdmin Of The Year Contest

5 Oct 2009 — eric

It’s that time of year again where you too can nominate someone for the SysAdmin of the year. The contest ends on October 24 and has a progressive jackpot of up to $5,000 (and seriously, what SysAdmin do you know couldn’t use an extra $5k ish)?

So if you know any rock star sysadmins, sysadmins who save the day, sysadmins who have done stuff previously that have saved many days or any combination thereof, enter them: http://www.bigfix.com/rockstar/enter.php.

Posted in Misc. Tags: . 1 Comment »
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