May 2008 Archives

This is crazy. Someone must have made a mistake. I just got my work monitor shipped to me today and was plugging it in and testing it. After I did so I could not get wifi to work. Wifi has worked flawlessly from my office using a similar Macbook Pro in the past. The wifi was working for my wife’s Mac Mini downstairs. Why did the wifi suddenly stop? The answer: the monitor is killing my wifi connection.

I still see “4 bars” of wifi on the little gauge at the top, but nothing is going across that excellent connection. I can repeat this experiment over and over and the pings tell all:

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=100 ttl=64 time=1.563 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=101 ttl=64 time=1.555 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=102 ttl=64 time=1.333 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=103 ttl=64 time=1.507 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=104 ttl=64 time=1.585 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=105 ttl=64 time=1.558 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=106 ttl=64 time=1.553 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=107 ttl=64 time=2.514 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=108 ttl=64 time=1.571 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=109 ttl=64 time=1.333 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=110 ttl=64 time=1075.141 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=111 ttl=64 time=78.932 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=112 ttl=64 time=5909.617 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=113 ttl=64 time=4909.318 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=115 ttl=64 time=15571.986 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=116 ttl=64 time=14588.171 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=117 ttl=64 time=13587.816 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=118 ttl=64 time=12587.626 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=119 ttl=64 time=11590.435 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=120 ttl=64 time=10591.978 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=121 ttl=64 time=9592.633 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=122 ttl=64 time=8593.659 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=123 ttl=64 time=7594.748 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=124 ttl=64 time=6595.005 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=125 ttl=64 time=5601.815 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=126 ttl=64 time=4603.203 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=127 ttl=64 time=3603.183 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=128 ttl=64 time=2603.059 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=129 ttl=64 time=1612.565 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=130 ttl=64 time=612.293 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=131 ttl=64 time=1.103 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=132 ttl=64 time=1.346 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=133 ttl=64 time=1.428 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=134 ttl=64 time=1.459 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=135 ttl=64 time=1.516 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=136 ttl=64 time=1.444 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=137 ttl=64 time=1.599 ms

You can see my normal pings to my router are around 1.5 milliseconds. The hop up to 1 second happens at icmp_seq 110 when I plugged the monitor in. You’ll note from there that nothing got out until I unplugged it after about 15 seconds. You can tell by looking at 115 to 130. The first, 115, is one second higher than 114. This pattern continues down until 130. They’re one second apart because that’s how fast ping was firing them. Nothing got out while the monitor was plugged in, but they immediately got out and were all responded back to at the same time as soon as I unplugged the monitor.

This is a very interesting phenomenon and one I’ve never encountered before.

Weird.

Update June 8, 2008: Wireless-N to the rescue. I bought a LinkSys WRT160N to replace the wireless of my LinkSys WRT54G and my problems are solved. My wifi access is considerably faster to boot. Cheers.

I am now almost finished with my first week of orientation at my new job with Pittsburgh-based Grant Street Group. I’m going to be doing some software development on one of their product lines and have spent much of the week in training to use the product. I’ve also spent a lot of time reading policy, learning development practices, and digging through the code. I’m hoping that I can start digging in and actually working in the near future. I’ve gotten to meet several members of the staff as well and am very excited to be working here.

Now that I’m no longer looking for work, however, I’m hoping that I can start catching up on my back log of hobby projects that need to get done. This includes some items on the honey-do list (like cleaning the garage which never seems to happen), but I’d really like to get the second half of my latest O’Reilly article published sometime this century. I’ve had at least one person ask where the other half of it is and I really need to get the rest of the text fleshed out and off to the editor (all done, but finishing up the research).

I’m also trying to figure out what other hobby projects are going to be kept and which ones need to be canned now that I’ve switched jobs. I have some loose ends to tie up. One that is likely to be canned is my relationship with Drupal. I think I’m going to have to pass the modules off to other developers (possibly to my former employer) or drop maintenance altogether. I don’t have any need for Drupal at this time with my blog now on Movable Type, no longer working with a company using it, and I’m no longer maintaining the site for New Hope.

I’m still evaluating my relationship with the Jifty project. I really like it, but I’m not sure where it fits in my current work-life balance. I have a couple home toys I’ve written to use it, but nothing serious. I really did like the prospect of helping on the documentation side of things there more, but I’m having trouble really finding time for that. Having a son really sucks time away from being able to do much in the evenings just for kicks and giggles. (That’s not a complaint. I could very easily choose the projects over Gabriel, but who’d want to do that? Gabe is way too much fun to avoid spending time with!)

I guess I’ll see how things shake out over the next few months.

Cheers.

Phew! This has been a whirlwind week and I can now break the silence and talk about it openly. Today, I gave Boomer Consulting two weeks notice and signed my shiny new contract to start work with Grant Street Group. This has been simmering for a bit, so I’ll tell the story of how we got here.

A little more than two years ago I left Kansas State University to give up systems administration to seek a job in software development. I had some pretty strict limits on what I was looking for location-wise (Manhattan, Kansas only) and a friend of mine let me know that his company, Boomer Consulting, was looking for a software developer. The job was to be primarily customizing a Java-based CMS called Magnolia. I interviewed, was offered a position, and took the job. From there we added PHP-based Drupal and some other Perl-based apps to the list of things to do, which was quite a lot for a lone dev. Things at Boomer have been rocky from time to time, but overall it’s been a good experience. In the end, I’m leaving because Boomer is refocusing how it improves it’s software and I no longer feel like I’m a good fit for this direction.

When I determined that things at Boomer were drawing to a close, I began searching for positions. This time around I was a little freer to decide on location, but I still had a very strong desire to stay in Kansas or at least a neighboring state. My two main goals in this job search were to find a job primarily working in Perl, since I’m having fun with it and it’s a focus for me right now, and either a job in Kansas or nearby or would allow me to work from home. I even considered a couple positions out of the area to make sure I wasn’t missing out on anything important, but only if it looked like a really good opportunity.

I talked with a recruiter for a hospital informatics company in Nashville. I also talked with a certain movie database company in Seattle. However, neither opportunity was exciting enough to justify uprooting our family. As much as I love the Seattle area and as much as the housing market in Nashville is appealing, extended family and our friends in town are too important to leave for a so-so job opportunity.

Other than those and the company I’m moving toward, I also spoke with the folks at a certain wiki company in California and a company that develops software for building surveys for Fortune 500 companies. All of these were telecommute positions that would allow me to work almost entirely from home with the possibility of travel to home offices a few times every year.

This past week I actually interviewed in both Seattle and in Pittsburgh (that’s PA not KS, which is Pittsburg without the “H”). This was a lot of flying and odd sleep patterns, which unfortunately ended in a migraine on Saturday. In Pittsburgh, I had a chance to meet with the folks at Grant Street Group and I got a really good feeling from everyone I spoke with. The offer they gave me is exciting and, frankly, better than I really expected. Therefore, I will be learning the ropes for Grant Street Group in the next few weeks.

Anyway, I wanted to let all my friends and fans (all 4 of them, cough) as soon as possible because I’m kind of tired of being discrete about the fact that I was searching for a job.

Cheers.