Personal

I'm getting out software development as a career. I still wanted to stay in Information Services. Fortunately, I found my new home in Business Intelligence. Specifically, I'm working with SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).

Staying competitive in software development has become harder and harder each passing year. By competitive, I mean being able to have a job to practice the craft. My commute (45 minutes each way) and my energy levels have caught up with me, so I can't stay competitive (in the context of this post). The churn is crazy high, and requires even more increasing time outside of work to stay relevant. It used to be that you could concentrate on specific technologies, but that's no longer the case.

I've found that Business Intelligence is a lot more sedate when it comes to technologies, and it's much easier to stay competitive. This means that my focus will be in data warehousing, and Microsoft technologies related to this. So far the main technologies are SSIS, SSRS, and SSAS. I can still use my development experience to deal with custom and edge cases.

I'm much happier with this transition. I can truly feel that my work-life balance is back to where it needs to be.

So effective immediately, I'm cutting back on my development pet projects. I'll update a few tools here as time permits. My main efforts will be directed at getting WheelMUD to version 1.0. Then, I will retire from development in the public eye.

I've spent the last few months fighting hackers, heat, and the recession. I got laid off from my daytime job in March of this year. I was fortunate enough to find a new job in April. I had to take a paycut. I'm thankful that I have a job to pay for bills.

We bought our new house, in September 2009, without central cooling. My layoff put a crimp in our finances, so we were not able to put central cooling until about a week ago (September 2010). My new home office has been extremely hot, and haven't been able to spend much time in it, until the central cooling was installed.

Now comes my fight with hackers. There was a break in at Google. Some Russian hackers got a hold of many Gmail account login details. The hackers got this website's FTP credentails when they broke into my Gmail personal account. This was one massive attack, where they put Javascript malware on a bunch of websites worldwide. I'm surprise that there hasn't been more of an uproar from the media outlets that deal with technical stuff.

It took me close to two and a half months to get this website back up and working correctly. I had restored this website from a backup, and that cleared it from malware the first time.

The second time, they used a FTP account that I had forgotten about. I deleted this account as soon as I found it. Next, I used NetDrive to map the FTP site to a local drive, and used Multi-Edit to do a file search and replace. I got rid of all the bad Javascript, and this site is clean again.

I lost several blog posts, but I have the one about C# COM and Delphi saved up in Surfulater. I want to put this one back up, because there's hardly any information on how to get this done out on the Internet.

It's been a frustrating year so far. I'll just keep plucking along. As life keeps knocking you down, you just need to keep getting up.

I've had several catastrophic hardware failures in a row, which have crippled my ability to work on any of my projects. So here's what happened...

About 3 weeks ago, the in-house email server power supply failed. The ball bearing on the main fan gave out. I replaced the power supply, but then the server did not boot up. I went and replaced the motherboard. No dice again. At this point, I just gave up and moved the different email domains into Google Apps. So the email stuff is working again, except for the SMTP parts. Google Apps SMTP is a giant pain in the ass, and I haven't been able to get that to work at all.

The second failure happened when I was trying to recover the data in the hard drives for the email server. I had SQL Server 2008 running there, so I needed to get the database files off them. I was in the process of plugging the hard drives, one at a time, into my workstation, when I accidently dropped the workstation case. This killed the boot drive and a few of other drives. By kill, I mean that the platters were turned to shards, totally unrecoverable.

My code is safe as I had backups of that, and the repositories are on a Subversion server in my LAN. However my development environment is a total loss. All of my virtual images are gone, and so are my local Subversion working copies. I had the vitrual images in a separate drive, and the working copies in another drive. Both of these drives also failed.

I'm still trying to sort through what drives are working and which ones are not. I bought a new boot drive and installed Windows 7 Ultimate, so that I could at least browse the Internet and email at home.

I decided to just hold off on recreating my development environment, until we move into our new house. The house is supposed to be finished this Friday, September 4th. I will be getting my own office, and hopefully a new workstation. We are getting the tax credit for new home buyers, but most of it is going to be used for new furniture, since all of our stuff is over 15 years old.

It may not be until October 2009, before I can get my development environment up to speed. I will know more, after September 10th, which is the day we are supposed to be getting the keys for the new house.

I'm developing against PainlessSVN. There are a lot of things happening, and I had to slow down work on PainlessSVN. So here's a list of things that have been happening:

1) The house that my family and I were renting went on short sale, and we had to move out immediately. This created chaos for a short time, but it caused enough disruption that I had to stop work on everything.

2) The new rental does not have central air cooling. This made the house very uncomfortable. It was so hot inside that we ended up just sitting outside at night, until it was cool enough to go to sleep. We finally got 3 window units, and we can now live in the house during the day.

3) We signed up to have a new house built for us. This house is currently under construction, and it is scheduled to be completed at the end of August of this year. This is going to cause more disruptions very soon, as we will have to move, yet again. Thankfully, this will be the last move for us in the foreseeable future. I will finally have my own office, and will be able to concentrate back on the business of creating and updating great software.

4) While working on the PainlessSVN code, I realized that I could make it more intuitive if I did some structural changes to the UI. These changes, while pushing back the release of 1.1, will make it much easier to add new features to PainlessSVN. I will talk about these changes in a separate blog post.

I've had a nasty cough for almost 3 weeks. I haven't had much energy to work with anything on this site. My cough is starting to subside, so I don't feel like I'm going to pass out anymore.

I'm hoping to re-start work on PainlessSVN 1.1 in the next few days. On more related good news, I was told by my house builder that they got permission from the city to start building our house. They told me that it will take their construction workers about 39 days to finish the house, once they start with the foundation.

The official start building the house day will be between June 12th to June 16th. This depends how fast they can get materials on site.

I've been fighting the flu for almost a week now. Just went to the InstaCare facility this morning. The doctor there confirmed that I have the flu. Thankfully, not the swine flu, but something else that has been doing the rounds in my little town.

I'm going to take some down time to recuperate. Getting older sure makes recuperating from these things a lot lengthier than it used to. My kids have gotten over it in 3-4 days. I'm on my 6th day, and still feeling very tired. I'm going back to my day job tomorrow. At least I have a job where I sit down all day. ;)

The house that we (family and I) were renting was put on short sale. I'm going to be without an internet connection for a while at home. This means that I won't be able to work on anything much, until service is restored at our temporary rental place.  We are building a new house, but it won't be ready until at least July of this year.

Anyways, I wanted to let you know that if there is a reason my my temporary "disappearance." I'm hosting this site with a third party, so it will remain up. I will try to post updates from my day job.

My grandma died at 4:30 AM this morning. It wasn't unexpected, but it is still leaves me feeling sad. I got a call from my father this morning letting me know that it happened. I talked with my mom afterwards, and she seemed quite upbeat.

Grandma Petra had a stroke a while back, and my mom has been taken care of her (Petra is my mom's mother). My mom was really sad that her mom was in such condition. I think we all feel a sense of relief that she's not suffering anymore.

I did get to talk to Abuelita last week on the phone. That was the first time since her stroke that she sounded lucid. I knew that was going to be the last time I would be talking to her.

I did not want to hold this in, and talking about it here gives me a sense of closure. I hope that Abuelita finds Braulio, her husband, soon on the other side.

One good thing that I got as her legacy is a warm feeling towards blonds. She was naturally blond, so that's where I get that. ;) It took me a long time to figure that out. Thanks Abulelita!

My employer's, The Generations Network (TGN), headquarters are in a very nice location. We are surrounded by mountains on 3 sides. I took some pictures with my new T-Mobile Shadow. The camera in this baby is much better than any of the other phones I've ever had. Almost better than the digital camera that we own too!

I put the pictures on their own page, so that they don't bog down the blog. Click on the title, then select the link that says "Next Page."

My workstation is finally back to "normal." I ended up having to get a new motherboard and cpu. This was frustrating because I had to change from AMD to Intel. All of the PC part stores have closed in my area. PC Computer and CompUSA were the biggest ones out here. Makes me wish we had a Fry's over here.

I didn't want to wait a week and a half to have something else mailed to me, so I went to a local reputable computer builder. I went to PC Laptops. They hooked me up with an Asus  P5QL-EM mobo, and an Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 (2.53 GHz) cpu.

Total damage to my wallet was $383.56.

The most aggravating thing was that in the end, it was a flaky DIMM that caused all of the trouble. So now, I have a perfectly good AMD cpu and MSI mobo sitting on my office.

I now have an Acronis True Image with all of my stuff installed. So when this happens again, and you can bet that it will happen again, will get me going in about an hour.