Saturday, February 7, 2009
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
New Job, New House.
I have changed jobs, and moved to a new apartment since my last post. The new apartment is great. It doesn't get too cold at night and it's nice and quiet. The job is nice too. I am a Software Engineer at Cheetahmail.
I was a Sys Admin before at another company. It was a startup, which had its benefits, however there were significant drawbacks. Let's just keep the negative to a minimum by just saying that they ended up wasting a significant amount of my time by misrepresenting the position.
On the other hand, Cheetahmail is quite a different story. It is a pretty mature company. There is a very specific job description. The goals of my employer are in line with my own. My team is very supportive and friendly. The business people that I work with are approachable and friendly. The office atmosphere is jovial at times but things are always serious when the job needs to get done.
This is a great step for me. I have programmed at work before but now I am getting paid to program.
I was a Sys Admin before at another company. It was a startup, which had its benefits, however there were significant drawbacks. Let's just keep the negative to a minimum by just saying that they ended up wasting a significant amount of my time by misrepresenting the position.
On the other hand, Cheetahmail is quite a different story. It is a pretty mature company. There is a very specific job description. The goals of my employer are in line with my own. My team is very supportive and friendly. The business people that I work with are approachable and friendly. The office atmosphere is jovial at times but things are always serious when the job needs to get done.
This is a great step for me. I have programmed at work before but now I am getting paid to program.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Why I don't switch to Ubuntu
I was about to switch to Ubuntu from Fedora. I really was on my wife's machine I remembered one of the reasons that I stopped liking Ubuntu. Fedora has chkconfig. I can and have installed init scripts on Ubuntu before and it just isn't intuitive. With chkconfig I can turn services on and off.
Ubuntu is great for when you want to use the GUI for everything. In my experience, problems crop up when I start trying to tweak things. For example, if I want to install MySQL with Ubuntu's package manager, it also installs a mysql user that the operating system uses to make sure the database is up and running. I didn't know this until after I had removed the user from a test server at my work and we started getting a cryptic message in the log. I couldn't turn them off I had to remove the script entirely.
I didn't ask for the OS to monitor my databases. The scripts were just there and there was no easily available documentation telling me how to use these monitoring scripts. I understand that Ubuntu is trying to provide a better desktop experience for linux users that don't necessarily want to use the command line. However, as far as I am concerned, If my computer is doing something I didn't ask it to, then it is doing too much.
Ubuntu is great for when you want to use the GUI for everything. In my experience, problems crop up when I start trying to tweak things. For example, if I want to install MySQL with Ubuntu's package manager, it also installs a mysql user that the operating system uses to make sure the database is up and running. I didn't know this until after I had removed the user from a test server at my work and we started getting a cryptic message in the log. I couldn't turn them off I had to remove the script entirely.
I didn't ask for the OS to monitor my databases. The scripts were just there and there was no easily available documentation telling me how to use these monitoring scripts. I understand that Ubuntu is trying to provide a better desktop experience for linux users that don't necessarily want to use the command line. However, as far as I am concerned, If my computer is doing something I didn't ask it to, then it is doing too much.
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