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…

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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.

Band-Aids and Broken Arms

“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?

I just had to sit through a 2 hour meeting about upgrading to a new ERP system (I’ll leave specifics out). I, like 90% of my colleagues, will be using this system to enter our time every day – and that’s all. The first hour was about the business processes for our sector as a whole – followed by a short (30 second) break, and then moving into how to use this new system for 30 minutes, then how to enter our timecard data.

I kid you not, we were taught about toolbars, and icons, and things that are “just like Microsoft Word.” At which point those of us sitting in the back lost all respect for the presenters. They were very good at speaking clearly (although they couldn’t figure out that every time they walked in part of the room the mic had terrible interference problems and cut out), and they knew their presentations very well – everything the communications classes in college taught them. But they were explaining to software developers how to use checkboxes and radio buttons.

A total of 10 minutes of relevant information (the actual timecard entry things) in the form of a 2 hour meeting. And then we were informed there would be breakout sessions over the next 2 days to get some training on the time-card entry system before we got the chance to do the hands-on training later in the month. I’m sure this system has worked very well for the non-engineering personnel in the other areas of the sector (these were training people – probably HR – from our sector headquarters), but we are an engineering firm. We wanted to ask SO badly “what happens if I type ‘man [ERP SYSTEM]‘?” but we refrained in the interest of leaving quickly.

And to make matters worse, the air conditioning broke half-way through the meeting….

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…