the boredom of ramfree17

Copyright still retained by Scott Adams and original image can be found here

One more inevitable thing that cannot be helped. My joining the brood doesnt help elevate my previous position.

It was the first time to generate and send the report. It deals with downloading a lot of access logs, combining them based on certain scenarios, filtering out the cruft, slicing and dicing per service accessed and then tallying the responses to see if they meet the SLA.

The first manual extraction took around 4 hours to create the report for the most critical service. After that, I sat down and created the bash+awk script to do the slicing, dicing and tallying part. It took me 3 hours to create and test the script but after that I can generate the reports for 6 services in 30 minutes, where the bulk of the time was spent in downloading the latest logs (~10minutes) and pasting the data in Excel to create the “bayoootiful” graphs.

I figured if I can automate the rest then the reports can be generated under 15minutes, and I can hook it up on a continuous service so it will send it automatically every night. After that I can work on getting rid of the need to go through Excel if I can find some API to generate it and publish them as PDFs. JFree perhaps but my Java skills are already rusty. I also need something native if possible as I cannot install stuff on the office machines. The zLinux servers are pretty much off limits though I think there is a python interpreter installed.

One thing I can say is that automation and f/loss rocks. The script is too specific and covered by IPR so I cannot post it here but it is something that most scripters should be able to do.

ciao!

During this lifetime I have heard people say a few times that their work is too stressful that they want to vomit. I didn’t realize that this morning it would be a literal thing for me.

I went to sleep at around midnight after a healthy dose of boring reading material (aka project work package aka contract) for some big shot discussions this week. At around 2AM I suddenly awoke with a jerk with the words UAT[1] in my mouth and the feeling of having a lot of bile in my throat. Thankfully the trash bin was on my side of the bed so I swiped the cover open and started dry-heaving on it. The icky and rough feeling on my throat was not going away so I ended up drinking a lot of water and munching on fried and salted corn kernels to get the taste of bile away.

Now I can, with credibility, say that I can related next time I hear somebody say they are sick and tired of their work that they want to vomit.

[1] User Acceptance Test

ciao!

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And it is not meant to be funny.

Installing RTC 2.0 client on the Win2003 machine provided by our customer is proving to be a challenge of patience and futility. I spent the better half of the day trying everything I can think of but:

– Using the bundled launchpad doesnt do anything: everything just quits without any warning or error.
– Invoking the launchpad using the parameters in the autorun.inf file () doesnt work.
– Invoking launchpad\launchpad.bat terminates with a wrong variable expansion.
– Invoking the various installer executable inside the win32 sub-directory produces a “Missing file install.xml” error and then will show the Installation Manager window. Unfortunately it cannot install anything even if the preference shows the repository to the RTC 2.0 extracted files are detected as “connected”.

I know the installer works because we have installed it fine on our WinXP workstations. The md5sum of the file in the Win2003 machine matches the one in our XP workstations.

Ready to give up and log a RTC bug, I did some more fiddling to gather more information and tried to download the web install even if it is going to be painful installing RTC on a slow and erratic connection. I got the same results.

Then I noticed that there were lots of files named install-[something].xml in the win32 directory but no install.xml file. An idea hit me and created a copy of the “install-client.xml” and renamed it to “install.xml”. I then executed the win32\install.exe and everything installed as expected.

And that concludes a whole-day wrangling on getting RTC 2.0 installed in the Win2003 server. Sometimes the best solutions are really those that hide under our noses.

ciao!