Mike Taber’s Blog

Once upon a time, I wrote an article called “How to bootstrap a consulting business”. It was a good article and was well written for what it was designed to convey. The last line of the article sums it up pretty well:

“The hardest part about the process is having the willpower to make the leap into being self employed. After that, it’s really not that hard.”

If you want to get anywhere, you have to start your own business. It doesn’t matter if you do it alone, or if you have one or more partners. The most difficult thing to do is get started. And that gave rise to Mike’s Laws of Business.

Well, at 5:05pm on Friday (go figure on the time problems started), my computer was acting flaky so I decided to do the normal thing and reboot. Unfortunately, my desktop at the office decided to flake out entirely and for some reason decided it no longer wanted to be part of the Moon River domain. To top it off, the local passwords weren’t working either, so I couldn’t log in and do anything about it. I left it for the weekend and decided to deal with it on Monday when I got back.

So now it’s Monday and things have gotten worse. My PC has decided that it doesn’t like the filesystem on my boot drive and disk checks claim it is corrupted. My data drive is still perfectly intact, but the boot drive thinks there are now two partitions instead of just one and that neither of them is bootable. I think I’m going to have to resort to reinstalling the OS, which I always hate to do because of the fact that it’s just such a pain in the neck to reinstall all of my applications.

The only bright spot is that I’m pretty good about keeping non-essential data off my main PC and keeping backups of that data on an external drive and maintain regular backups of that external drive on my NAS server. I’m guessing that the odds of me having any essential data on that drive is pretty low, although I could be mistaken. I do tend to keep text files of notes I’ve taken about different phone calls on my desktop until I get a chance to enter them into our CRM system.

In other news, I’ve started on a new series of articles on how to build a consulting company. I expect to have the first article out the door sometime next week. It would be sooner, but I have a small computer problem to deal with.

For those of you who experience occasional typing problems with your VMWare machines, there’s still hope. Over the past few years, I’ve run into this problem several times, and every time the symptoms are basically the same.

When you’re using a remote console to access a virtual machine, as you start typing the characters will start repeating themselves on the screen. Most of the time, typing and then seeing those characters on the screen is exactly what you expect. Until you hit go to type ‘root’ into a Linux VMWare image and it comes out as ‘rrrooooooooootttt’. Typing very slow sometimes gets around the problem, but not always. Typing a password becomes especially difficult as you have no idea whether extra characters are appearing and depending on how your machine is configured, you might lock out an account. Rebooting the image will sometimes make the issue go away for a little while, but it often returns at the worst possible time.

I used to think this was a low memory related problem, caused by the host using too large a pagefile, thus causing delays and screwing with the low level interrupts. I came to this conclusion mainly as a result of running VMWare Server on a Windows 2003 server with about 4GB of RAM. After overcommitting the memory, this bug tended to surface quite a bit, so I started offloading the virtual images and only running a few when it was absolutely necessary. It turns out this isn’t solely related to memory.

There’s a VMWare KB article that explains how to address this issue and states that it happens due to low bandwidth situations. I beg to differ on the bandwidth situations, as I’m running gigabit on my network and lets face it. My network really isn’t that big. I have at most 2 hops between any given location and it’s generally limited geographically to about 10 feet.

Basically, their fix is as follows: power off the virtual machine and modify the .vmx file for the image you’re having problems with to include the following line:

keyboard.typematicMinDelay = “2000000″

Once you’ve done that, there will be a 2 second delay introduced to prevent single characters from repeating themselves numerous times. Unfortunately, I found this recommended fix didn’t work as well as I would have liked. You see, 2 seconds is a long time for computers. And after you’ve done this, the Backspace key becomes pretty much useless. After some trial and error, I found that cutting this value by 75% seemed to work pretty well.

keyboard.typematicMinDelay = “500000″

Since I added this line to each of my .vmx files, I’ve yet to run into this issue again using any of the remote administration tools provided by VMWare.

No matter what anyone tells you, there’s more to changing blog engines than just clicking a few buttons and importing data. It tends to be a fair amount more complicated than that. In my last post, I highlighted some of the reasons, both rational and not so rational for my decision to change from SubText to Wordpress.

However, with the research links I found on Google, I still ran into a myriad of problems which the resources I found didn’t address. I felt there was more hand waving than hand holding. I like to hold hands, so here’s how I converted from SubText 1.9.3 to Wordpress 2.7.1.

Writing and maintaining a blog is like getting married. Once you choose blogging platform, you’re essentially stuck and changing blogging platforms is about as painless as getting divorced. In the best case, it’s not any fun. In the worst, you lose pretty much everything you ever had.

For more than a year now, I’ve been considering changing blog engines. Interestingly enough, that time frame also coincides quite nicely with my dramatic drop-off in blog posts. Why put more work into a blog if you’re just digging your hole deeper? I knew that every blog post I was going to add was just going to increase the amount of work I’d need to do to perform the conversion and decrease the motivation to actually move to another platform.

However, last week I decided to finally bite the bullet and just get it over with. After all I’d been absent from my blogging duties for nearly a year. With my Masters degree now out of the way, I really didn’t have a good excuse to put it off any longer. So I started at the most obvious place imaginable for how to convert my blog from SubText to something else. Google.

I suppose I should back up a little bit and explain my reasons for abandoning SubText. After all, I do a fair amount of .NET development and SubText is written in .NET with a SQL Server back end. Let me put it bluntly.

I had higher expectations for SubText as a platform.

I was going to write another post about my day yesterday when I got back from the office, but my day simply got worse when I booted up my laptop.

It turns out that there is a strike going on here in Athens. A lot of the city services are shutting down, garbage is piling up on the street corners, etc. It’s really not pretty. I’m certain that it’s not any different than in the US when public services go on strike.

Yesterday morning, I had to wait for more than half an hour to get a taxi to get to the office. I left the office around 5:30pm and it took me 3 hours to get home. I waited outside the office for more than 45 minutes trying to get a taxi before I decided to start walking. And of course I got lost because I couldn’t read any of the signs.

Yes, that photo is technically from the airport. Not a good photo, but the best my camera phone could do. The streets of Athens are worse because most of the side streets have signs and the ones that do are well… in Greek.

So after my 3 hour, unanticipated walking tour of downtown Athens, I made it back to my hotel and attempted to do some work for the client. When I boot up my laptop, my profile was somehow corrupted. I think it was some leftover problems due to an older profile I was using on my computer, but I’m not quite certain. So after my 9 hour work day, and my 3 hour commute home, I spent another 3 hours fixing my laptop, and another 3 hours on top of that doing work trying to keep up with things going on with Moon River back in the US.

It’s been a rough trip so far, but I really can’t complain. It’s better to have too much business than not enough and travel is part of being a consultant in my line of work. Things are on the verge of changing though. I have several more weeks of travel lined up and after that, we’ll have to see what happens. I’ll certainly keep you posted.

I’ve been here for literally 10 minutes and I already hate the place. It’s cramped, it smells funny, there’s nothing to do here, the food sucks, and I had to pay $125 to get an adapter so I could plug my laptop into the power outlet. Only 9 more hours before I get out of this damned airplane.

********************

Well, that flight sucked. Now that I’m finally in Greece, it’s not too bad here. Of course, there’s an impending strike taking place on Wednesday that will likely impede my ability to take a taxi back and forth to my client, but it really only took most of Sunday for me to adjust. I didn’t sleep real well last night, but I would attribute that to the first night in a new hotel and being paranoid about whether the wake-up call is really going to work in the morning.

I haven’t had any time to get out yet, but hopefully that will change over the next few days. I’ll see if I can get some good photos of the acropolis while I’m here. I have a decent view of it from the hotel, but I don’t think my camera is going to cut it at this distance.

And a traveling tip to the wise… don’t try to cross the street between lights here in Athens unless the pedestrian light is on. Look both ways, even on the one way streets. I saw a woman try that today and she got halfway across one of the four lanes of traffic when she realized she wasn’t going to make it. All of the cabbies gunned their motors like they were at the starting line of a go-kart race. Fortunately, the cabbie coming down the road in her lane hit the brakes just in time to avoid giving her a ride on his hood. I wonder if he would have charged her for that ride.

So, I’m back. Technically I never went anywhere. Unless you count Indianapolis, Puerto Rico, Raleigh, Durham, Pinehurst, and Indianapolis again. I also have an upcoming trip to Athens. Yep. As in Athens, Greece. I leave on Saturday. Two weeks after I get back, I leave for Las Vegas where we’re sponsoring a conference. Yes, life is rough. Let me tell you, that trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico back in February was just awful. Coming from New England, I just can’t understand how they deal with that weather all the time. I mean, it was warm, sunny and people were walking around in shorts. Shorts! In January! The insanity of it all.

Of course, doing all that traveling for clients is pretty nice sometimes too. After all, I didn’t have to pay for any of those trips and only one of them was terribly painful. If you’re guessing, it wasn’t the trip to Puerto Rico.

A lot has happened since I last posted to this blog. We filled the position we had open with a new technical member of the staff. Finally. It took forever and we had a ton of people in for interviews, but the process is finally over. He’s smart, funny, and brings a unique perspective to the office. Unfortunately, now that he’s in the door, we’re already considering starting the hiring process again. It just never seems to end.

We also moved into a new office space at the end of the year. That’s been something of an ongoing nightmare due to the heating issues, but the move has been good overall. We went from a 450 sq. ft office to a 2,200 sq. ft office. Believe me when I say that we needed the space. We had the space built out for us back in December and moved in just before New Years. I’ll tell you the war stories in a follow up article, but everyone has their own office, and none of the servers are in anyone’s office.

Let’s see, what else. I was reminded today that my stolen GPS with all of the European maps would have come in extremely handy while I’m in Athens this coming week. Alas, it was not to be. I could buy another set of maps, but when am I going to go to Europe again? Oh yea. Most likely in the next 3 months, as we’re courting a few potential customers in Europe right now. Seems Moon River Consulting has gone international pretty quickly.

Last week was intended to be my return from hiatus, however I read in the paper the morning I was going to add a new entry that Gary Gygax had passed away. I don’t think he was still involved with Dungeons & Dragons or Wizards of the Coast anymore, but still. Once a geek, always a geek I suppose. I felt like I had somehow lost something, but wasn’t quite sure what. Maybe I need one of those Remembralls.

I think the only major thing left to mention is that my Masters thesis is finally underway again. Previously, I had spent a huge amount of time procrastinating. To the tune of nearly 5 years. Now, with the deadline fast approaching, I’m spending my spare time on the road working on my thesis rather than touring the sights. It’s not terribly unusual for me to sit in my hotel room on my laptop, but it’s a little disconcerting that my trip to Greece will likely be spent the same way. After all, how many times do I get to go to Greece?

Stay tuned for some follow ups.

We have a full time position open here at Moon River Consulting. What’s that you say? What’s Moon River Consulting? Well, it’s the consulting counterpart of Moon River Software. The listing is on Monster.com and you can find out more information about it here.

If you’re pretty good with Windows, Unix, and have a halfway decent security background, please take a look. We’re trying to fill this position by the end of October if at all possible. Below is the listing from Monster.com.

Full-time Software Consultant

Moon River Consulting is an entirely self funded software development and consulting services company based near Worcester, MA. We’re looking for a jack-of-all-trades, Senior Consultant to add to our consulting team to help service enterprise level clients. This person must be technical, outgoing and self-motivated.

Job Responsibilities:

• Communicate effectively to project managers, clients, and others involved in a project at all levels of management
• Write project plans, work proposals, and identify additional business opportunities with existing clients
• Implement project plans and security software across enterprise level corporations using SecurityExpressions and other security products
• (training will be made available for SecurityExpressions)
  Develop security policy files for various operating systems (Windows, Linux, HPUX, Solaris, AIX, etc)
• Actively participate in development of internal and packaged software solutions
• Perform software demonstrations and proof of concepts, both on-site and via the web
• Perform other consulting services as needed

Required Qualifications:

• Strong Windows and Unix systems configuration skills
• Scripting experience such as Unix/Linux shell scripting, Perl, Javascript, VBScript, etc.
• Experience with C#, C, or C++
• Must write easily maintainable and easily understood code
• Excellent command of written and spoken English
• BS or MS in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent
• Ability to learn new concepts and technologies quickly
• Experience writing design documents and gathering implementation requirements
• n-tier design experience

Preferred qualifications:

• Consulting experience, CISSP, MCSE, MCSD, or MCDBA
• Experience or certifications with Altiris products
• Security software background
• Relational database programming and design (SQL Server, Oracle, mySQL, etc)
• Web development technologies. ASP.NET Web Services and Web Applications a plus
• XML and related technologies

Please only apply if you have the experience/qualifications necessary. Send résumé and cover letter to pcloadltr@moonriverconsulting.com , or fax to 617-314-9890.

Additional info:

Some travel will be required for this position, but the amount of travel varies by client requests. This position is open to a wide range of talents. When you’re not working on consulting engagements, you will be working on in-house product development efforts. If you’re smart, motivated, hate bureaucracy, and want a company that is willing to give you the tools you need to get the job done, we encourage you to apply.

Our office is currently located in downtown Worcester, but we will be moving to larger offices in the Westborough area before year end.

We offer medical and dental benefits, paid vacation and holidays, and a pleasant, supportive work place. U.S. citizenship required.

A few days ago, I was riding up the elevator to my office and as usual, was annoyed when it stopped at the second floor. My office building has a parking garage right behind it and there’s a connection to the second level of the building. I have a parking pass in another garage because there’s a two year waiting list for this one, but I digress.

What has often bothered me is the fact that I need to get to the eight floor and more often than not, on my way up in the morning I’m stopped by people who take the elevator from the second floor to the third floor. To get to the elevator on the second floor, you have to walk past the stairs to the third floor. But these people will wait for an elevator so they don’t have to climb 13 steps. It’s a little ridiculous.

Today, was even more so. The man who got on the elevator had two bags over his shoulders. One was a gym bag that had an old pair of sneakers sticking out of it and some gym clothes next to it. The other bag had some office documents I presume and a Lean Cuisine meal sticking out the top.

This is a classic case of treating the symptoms and not the problem. “I’m overweight so I’m going to go to the gym and get on a diet to lose weight.” Nevermind changing the basic habits that made me that way to begin with to solve the problem long term.

I’ve seen this is software too and it’s just as annoying. The following is a recreation of some code I worked on a long time ago.

// Fixed: autocorrect if this variable wasn’t set to keep the progg from crashing
if ( selectedOption == null )
{
    selectedOption = 1; // default to the first option
}

Hmmmm. Here’s a thought. Instead of just avoiding the problem, why don’t you find out what’s causing it and fix it!

If the user didn’t select something, chances are they didn’t mean to select option 1. You can’t make the assumption that the user even knew what Option 1 was, let alone that they wanted to select it. Very poor bug fix if you ask me.

When you’re debugging a problem, make sure you understand the root cause of it and treat that. Don’t assume that by fixing the symptoms, you’ve fixed the problems. That’s like getting treated for lung cancer while you continue to smoke like a chimney.