Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Plugin' along

Turns up the meeting with Cathryn (the VP or Corporate Dev / HR) was just a typical "what do I do here" meeting. So I gave her the schpeel. She had a bunch of questions about management style and what people in the group are thinking. In particular, there were a bunch of questions on my take on what people thought of Shamoun's management style. Also, she indicated that they are in the process of looking for a Director of Engineering. I mentioned that Dan is already the DOE (at least in title), and she said that he doesn't really want to play the management role (he's always been more if an 'in the trenches' kind of guy). She had said that she kept hearing all these good things about me and therefore wanted to find out more about what I did in Technology. All in all, a good lunch.

Found a fun bug tonight. Apparently when the agent spawns processes, it doesn't close any of the file handles after the fork. I found this out when I couldn't restart the agent because the Oracle Cluster Manager was controlling the listening socket for Dagent. I told Matt, and he said "That's such a rookie mistake!". I couldn't agree more. It's funny though because I found the same bug in Netilla's software several years ago. I feel like the old man who's seen it all before.

Patching is coming along. I found out that Naoum's perl-DBD-Oracle module didn't work because he didn't do the dynamic linking properly. He fixed it today, but it's a bit of a hack. It's good enough for now but I should take a look at some point. Also found out that when he imported Xerces last week that he didn't static link it. Unfortunately I discovered this when I installed the latest version of the software on my box and the agent crashed because it couldn't find the library. Converted the node monitoring tools over to the new transport, so we don't rely on SSH anymore for it. Also Naoum started learning gSoap so I can hopefully get him to convert the NodeConnect message to SOAP.

New episode of House tonight. Very exciting.

I was thinking about my car earlier. I wish I had taken a picture before they took it away. It was such a beautiful day on Sunday too, so it would have glistened in the sun.