Randy Secrist's Blog

Bruce Eckel (one of my heroes for all he has contributed to the software community) has just posted a article on the challenges of working on large teams.  In my response, I've suggested that engineers need to get out and lead more.

I'm not advocating that all engineers should run out and get a MBA, or major in business.  In this economy however, learning how to run a competitive business as well as deal with people is a key skill which will should not be overlooked.

I'm all about shared vision, and being part of a small community.  Bruce, if you have any open jobs, and need a leader who is very technical - let me know!

I've been considering protocol buffers as a replacement to XStream,which I used heavily over the last few years.  There seem to be some obvious advantages in speed, but also cross language wrappers which deal with object serialization.  When I get some time, I'm going to have to run some numbers on it.  Come to think of it, I haven't looked XStream lately to see if there have been any changes or innovation.

On another note, I am looking for any current articles which deal with when to use REST, and when to use RPC.  (Not a vs comparison).  I would like to come to my own conclusions about when to us what, and just want to see where the industry currently is in this discussion.

Today I had the opportunity to listen to a presentation from a high level GE executive about how to succeed in business.  Being from the technology side, I appreciated his ability to speak to the crowd personally instead of telling us how to design, build, and sell product in order to meet fiscal goals.  Don't get me wrong, those things are all important, just need to be targeted to the right audience.

Generally, his key points which he wanted us to focus on as individuals were:

• Have fun at what you do.
• Develop domain specific skills.
• Communicate effectively with others.

He also had interesting thoughts about health care, the U.S. economy, and where we are likely headed regardless of who wins the upcoming election.  Considering this person is responsible for many thousands of employees, and a major segment of GE, it was a great experience to have him out to talk to the 50 to 100 of us.

I've fired up DNS, and re-opened TCP ports to allow outside traffic back into my local network.  This blog should now be available to the outside world.

I've decided to take a different approach this time with content.  Rather than create a large repo for downloadable files for my webpage, or a library of every picture my family has taken, I've decided to just blog.  Regardless of who reads this, I figure a habit of keeping a journal is a good thing, and it could be fun to open it up to a larger group of people.  In the past, people used this page to find more information about the Secrist family, and a few even attended family reunions we hold here in Utah.  BTW, Utah is a great place for learning more about your family history.

I registered this domain name years ago when I got married and started my own family.  I didn't actually intend for it to be for all Secrist people everywhere.  I don't know Ryan Seacrest, nor am I directly related.  People used to ask me if I knew Ryan before he did American Idol, which leaves me wondering if the person they had in mind is the same man.  It is still fun to say "Secrist Out", and have it actually mean something to people.

I haven't really done the blog thing before.  Something feels strange about just putting random thoughts out on to the web.  Since I code for a living, most of the typing I do ends with semi colons rather than periods.  Also, because I tend to work on small fragments most of the day, my thoughts are often a tangle, and not well organized.  I've learned over the years however, that being good at computer code does not necessarily help with communicating with other engineers (or people!), so perhaps this blog thing will help with that.

As far as my new system goes, most of the software I had been using before to host my site still exists, however much of it has been updated.  I am moving from SuSE 8.1 (2.4 kernel) to Fedora 9 (2.6 kernel).  Many of the packages have also been updated, and I am having to learn new features such as SELinux.  In nearly all cases, I have not been able move the configuration files directly, rather I have had to hand craft them from examples and templates given to me by Fedora.  The basics are still the same however, as this site is still backed by Postgresql.

One other difference, rather than compile everything by hand, this time I am just using YUM.  That sucker sure saves me a lot of time, with the minor caveat of having to know where Fedora puts stuff.  Thank goodness for UPDATEDB.

For any of you wondering, I haven't updated my server content for over 2 years.  On top of that, it has been running on software which is now 8 years old, and it has been showing signs of death.  Java processes would randomly core dump, PHP and Apache would seg fault, complaining about memory access problems.

So I popped in MemTest86, and ran some numbers.  There were thousands of memory errors, thus I figured it was time to retire the hardware.  The site you see now, has a brand new motherboard, Intel Core Duo CPU, and new RAM.  It is sporting a lovely new Linux OS, updated databases, and web servers.  Part of that work is setting up this BLOG - so ... while we are here ... WELCOME.

Looking at the blog software as I edit this, I have no idea what tags and keywords are used for, or how they will help me.  Going to have to do some reading.

I still need to arrange the internal URI structure, as well as get the DNS server up & going.  Eventually this post will find it's way out to the internet.