A Few Thoughts…

I’ve ranted on this before, and I probably will again in the future. Word is a fine tool for writing short papers – but in the technical writing world, it’s only barely adequate. It can get the job done – not easily or conveniently though. Several of my co-workers would be in favor of doing documentation in Latex, but many (including those in charge) are not.

The documentation process would be much easier (SCM tools can easily handle text files – go figure) and it would be much easier to maintain formatting across multiple writers/editors. In general I think those writing the docs would be more productive because they can sped time writing the content instead of worrying about the formatting. Just because the ‘World runs on Windows’ and by extension ‘Writes with Word’ doesn’t mean it’s the best answer for a task – merely the most convenient. People spend a lot of time learning new languages and new techniques to be able to solve problems better, and then fall back to what is most convenient method of documentation. Scratch that – Word isn’t even the most convenient, it’s just the most pervasive in the office environment.*

If you have a little while, do yourself a favor – learn Latex! There is a little bit of a learning curve, but you can very quickly become proficient at writing documents which are easy to maintain, and look more professional than 99%** of the documents written in Word.

* Excel is still awesome, and the best tool for the job in many cases*
** 78% of statistics are made up – though this does not indicate that my estimate is wrong!
*** Footnotes are also a LOT easier in Latex…

I think working at Xetron has spoiled me some. Sure, if you talk to me I’ll complain from time-to-time about the political issues in the company, but that’s probably present in all companies. What I mean, is that the pace of the work, and the expectation for picking up new material quickly has really pushed me to the point where classes like the one I’m at are really only useful for the materials which are given to us.

Since I’ve done some device driver work (very little, but some) before, I knew a little bit about the topic which I was coming into. Apparently, the little work I had done was at a large enough scale to cover a lot of the topics I didn’t already know from my architecture, compiler, and OS classes from grad school. So today I find myself sitting in the class thinking mostly about the work that is piling up back at work.

Timing of this trip has turned out to be less than optimal as I now have a rapidly approaching deadline to hit back home – woohoo for overtime I guess. I have one more trip out this direction (though for a much shorter period of time), and school starting before the deadline, not to mention 2/3 (of my 3 person team) will be gone for one of the weeks as well. So, we’ll see how quickly we can get things done I suppose

In other news, the presentation of the material in this class is somewhat less than what I expected. The book we were given is nice, though I would like an index for quicker searching. The materials the presenter is using doesn’t match our book however (he’s the author of the book, and so teaches from his “beta” copy), and is in exactly the same docbook-eque format. Now, I’m all for using some format like docbook for books (go figure), but for a presentation? He’s constantly scrolling around the screen, which after 4 days is kinda making me sick – and I can’t directly follow along with the book because, as I mentioned, it’s not exactly the same – though a lot of it is.

At least do what a lot of my professors have done – make landscape pdf pages of what you want to show, then go full screen and use the page up/down do move through the content! It’s much more presentable and can still be generated automatically from the source (not sure about docbook, but certainly from LaTeX). The other things that’s bugged me is the out-of-order presentation of the material. We’ve been jumping around to different chapters, making it hard to get an idea of what builds on what (if at all), and where we’re at in the progress of the course. Not a huge deal, just something my engineering brain doesn’t like to deal with. Anyway, if this is par for a RedHat course, I won’t be finding myself at another one anytime soon.

As an entrepreneur – I’ll admit, I’m tempted to take a job for less than I think I should be compensated for the work in the interest of “getting off the ground.” This blog post does a good job explaining why the lowest-bidder usually ends up with the worst reputation. Try to remember this as you look at possible offers – it’s a little lengthy, but a good read!

Band-Aids and Broken Arms

From a company email about our recent phone system upgrades – parts which contain any real information omitted.

“Also, if you are having issues with your new system please call x[9999] and a [Phone Company] technician will assist you.”

This sounds a lot like the computer message everyone laughs at: “Keyboard error, press any key to continue.” Obviously, if my keyboard was working, I wouldn’t be getting the error. Likewise, if my phone system isn’t working, how am I supposed to call for help?

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE! I cannot stress enough just how quickly you will lose your audience if you do not send a message that they can understand. This goes for anyone, but I will elaborate on one particular message: business people talking to engineers…

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Gone are the days of being able to download something faster at work for most people. Thanks to changes in our proxy here, and all traffic essentially being routed through our parent office now, I can download things faster on my machine at home than I can at work – by a factor of almost 4x sometimes! Isn’t progress great? I should probably create a rant category for things like this…

After feeling like I’ve had a few slow weeks when it comes to work projects, I was talking to a guy today who put it into perspective for me. He’s been out on vacation for the last week and asked me how my projects were going. Once I started recounting them, I realized that I really had gotten a lot done. I managed to get a spider’s web design polished into a linear, albeit bi-directional, flow – well, I condensed it a while ago, this was the documentation and polishing part. I did enough research to determine that Ruby on Rails + AJAX is going to be the way to go for a UI that I have to design – which involved actually explaining a lot more than I thought I knew about rails. Anyway, +2 for self-generated work morale.

In other news, at our all hands meeting today they announced that we were switching to the way our parent office schedules vacations. Normally not a big deal, except that our week off between Christmas and New Years that everyone just got now requires us to use some of our vacation time! And we don’t really seem to get a choice – apparently we’re supposed to get approval to come in to work on those days. So, we get to use our vacation, or just go unpaid because we can’t even go to work. It’s kinda crazy, and caused all of the engineers to say “This makes no sense” – which seems pretty typical when business people try to manage engineers. Oh well, at least we’re not moving to Baltimore!

btw – don’t expect many posts from this category…