Tag: Corporate

  • TaskZilla modifications

    Work on modifying TaskZilla for our company’s needs is going well and I’ve also filed some fixes/addons in the mail Bugzilla. The most part which lies ahead consists of just renaming terms in Bugzilla, such as "Product" to "Team" and so on. Shouldn’t be a hard task.

    ATM there is just one not so easy wish: Cummulate all times (Worked hours, remaining hours, estimated hours, original estimated) of depended bugs/task into the parent. But there are a few things left to discuss about this, so I’ll let this rest for now.

  • TaskZilla success

    Being too excited last Friday, I forgot to post these news:
    In my spare time at work (which is left from the 120% of workload I have) I’ve built an instance of Bugzilla (which I’ve called "TaskZilla" because I already struggled with another Bugzilla-introduction at office).

    This time there was a meeting to choose a proper change-request-management-tool for our whole company (well, only our office here) and my TaskZilla was disqualified in a pre-election just because I weren’t at the meeting because of the no-mail-stuff. This time I didn’t miss the date and re-introduced TaskZilla. The other candidates were homeBrewnSystem1, homeBrewnSystem2 and homeBrewnSystem3. All signs were pointing towards homeBrewnSystem2 😉

    They debatted a bit about the pros and cons of HBS1-3 and then I showed them TaskZilla. I showed them the power of queries. I showed them the power of dependencies. I showed them the power of reports.
    They were stunned.
    Then they decided immediately to use TaskZilla because it had so many pros and only one con (the Look’n’Feel). And this con will be got rid of soon.

    I managed it. I’m the survivor. YEAH!
    I’m surprised how much things I can do in the spare time I’m not even supposed to have 🙂

  • Enlarging the desk

    Yeah, yesterday I finally got my third computer for mail reading. Now my office space is more alike a cockpit than a desk.
    Synergy everywhere and it’s all fine.

  • New job proposal

    Today I got the ultimate job proposal from our "headquarter":

    "…
    Duration: Up to 4 months
    Level: Consultant – Manager
    Location(s): Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra
    Skillset/Responsibilities: Management oversight of detailed currency exchange, develop and implement exchange site distribution load plan, coordinate with headquarters project control team, and coordinate with convoy commander.

    Details!

    • Resources will be traveling to the different locations listed above and will be living in tents on military bases.
    • XXX has hired a security agency that will assist employees and accompany then through their travels
    • All employees are required to attend a 4 day security training session in El Paso, TX. There they will be briefed on current security and receive gas masks, jacket, etc, inoculations, etc.
    • Employees will most likely fly from El Paso to Amman, Jordan and then connect to Baghdad.
    • Danger Pay: 25% of employees salary starting from Day 1 (when they land overseas) to the day the leave back for the US
    • For those employees staying 42 days or longer, they will also receive 25% post differential pay, treated as an extra allowance. Post Diff pay applies and begins on Day 42.

    Feel free to call me with further questions as I have some additional information which may answer some further questions. Thanks!
    …"

    For only 25% more salary I wouldn’t even change office in-country… This mail has caused much laughter here 🙂

  • Order is out for new computer

    Last Thursday they have shut down my corporate IT-Services (Mail, Intranet, etc.) because I have no migrated computer which fits into the corporate LAN. I’ve called the american helpdesk (yeah, 1 1/2 hours in an AT&T line), then installed a corporate software (I call it spyware), and had my services re-enabled. I de-installed this crap again then.
    Next day, my services were off again…

    Now an order for a third computer is on it’s way as well as a statement, why none of my two computers can be converted into a uniform image for the corporate network. I need them for development and in the corporate environment, there is no development environment. And I can’t fool around with network sniffing and so on which I need. Besides this I don’t trust them. My current environment has all security updates, patches, etc., I don’t browse with Microsoft tools and have a rather strict Intrusion Detection Tool (say firewall). Thus my computer should be one of the safest here. I don’t need anybody to tell me how to avoid worms and viruses. They have no chance to infect my system. No Outlook, no mail virus/worm. Firewall, no RPC-Worms and network attacks. Nevertheless an up-to-date virus scanner is active all the time.

    The solution will be that my third computer will stay connected to the corporate servers all the time to prevent further shutdown of the IT services and sit still somewhere under my desk. Mail and other services will (hopefully) be available on my current computers then again and work can continue without disruption.

    (Yeah, another computer for THIS!)

  • Shrinking company

    Damn, I still haven’t found time to transfer my article from paper to blog, don’t know why. I apologize.

    Back at work my windows-computer didn’t boot from hibernate, a normal boot resulted in BSOD. "inaccessible boot device"… Luckily a chkdsk run in repair console fixed the problem.

    Then while diggin’ through the mountain of mails I found out that three employees were fired, other three have left us on their own will and one was saved by works committee. What the heck is going on here? We hardly have enough resources to keep up with the incoming work not to speak from improving our products. Don’t they realize, that they remove the hard gathered knowledge base from the company?
    I’m way off of getting fired (I’m the last remaining core developer in my area) but it’s a strange feeling that many other co-workers could be gone tomorrow. I’m still remembering the statement from shortly before my vacation: "… retirements were necessary, but are over now…". Crap. Hot air. "Marketing nonsense".
    Side note: We are going through a economizing and reduction wave now for almost a year and the effect on our company’s statistics: zero, nada, nothing. They even have degraded slightly. Doesn’t surprise me, the remaining people are, if ever, hardly able to compensate the reductions.

    On the other side, my girlfriend has carried her computer over to my place and we are playing a bit over network when I come home from work. Worms, Starcraft, Tetrinet and so on. Much fun for me, but she constantly gets better in all the games 😉
    At least at home there is some relaxing.

  • Salary stagnation

    > Great news from our company-group-leader: “Overall salary increases going into {4. quarter of 2003} will be very modest to no increases…”

    He claims that this is caused by general industry weakness and the effort to expand our markets to EMEA and ASPAC blah blah…

    Take gods message to mankind, bastard. :/

  • Mail computers cancelled

    Yesterday we got mail concerning our "mail"-computers which are still absent: They won’t arrive. Instead it has been decided that the access to the VPN will be established with VPN-clients on our regular machines. Hasn’t it been said that such connections from non-migrated computers are not allowed? Anyway, clever developers have found out the possibility of connecting via VPN-client quite a while ago

    Legally at last 🙂

  • Cisco incompetence

    Last week some of my co-workers were sent to Romania to do some tests with Ciscos telephony solution and our product. Cisco got everything they needed in advance, papers, required configurations etc. but when the developer-teams met, Ciscos people had not the slightest clue, what to do and how. Seems the world-connecting company has large problems with its internal communications and knowledge-exchange. I don’t want to blame the people they sent there, but there was something terribly wrong in the whole process. This is stuff which must not happen in such a company…

  • Performance evaluation and SMP optimizing

    Well, last week didn’t bring many news: Tuesday I had a talk with my "performance manager" (why do all American companies have such silly titles?) about the goals I’ve reached in the last year personally and in my job and made up new goals for the future. For the past I think I’ve met the expectations but my PM thinks I’ve exceeded them. 🙂 (Not too hard, if I’m the last remaining real developer in my team) For the future I’ve told him that I’d like it if I could get in touch with developers from our partner-companies and work on cross-company-projects.

    Anyone out there who likes to work on a carrier-grade telephone-solution with me?

    Anyway, the rest of the week was not that interesting, I’ve been still trying to optimize our system for SMP environment (AIX, Solaris) in a cross-platform manner. Still too much slowdown on massive parallel access if same heap is used for all threads (possibly false sharing?). Also began organizing the next iteration meeting which was initially set on Thursday but moved to next Monday…