Flying Blind

Anyone can fly an airplane. I know this because over the past decade I've let my mother, a bar-owning buddy, my whack-job sister and even my seven-year-old nephew take the controls of a plane I was piloting. They were flying the aircraft; I was piloting it. There's a huge difference. Flying is what you do when things are working. Piloting is what you do when shit goes downhill.

Administering a system is akin to piloting. Day to day, a fucking trained chimp can add user accounts in Windows and reboot the system when it crashes yet again. With practice he could probably learn to open a command line window and type dir. That does not make him an administrator.

If you don't know how to use the most basic UNIX commands like cat and grep using Cygwin, you're a trained chimp. The search function in Notepad is not the way you sort through thread IDs in a 500MB log and no, your m4d Excel sk1llZ don't cut it either.

On the other hand, I find it hysterical that one of the most common tools used by people writing UNIX and Linux shell scripts is Windows Notepad. Not emacs, not vi, not even pico (my favourite because I'm just that ghey), but Notepad. Which pretty much always writes a Unicode byte order marker. Which fucks up UNIX and Linux shell scripts.

If your job is Administrator and you're in class to prepare for the Oracle DBA II "Certified Professional" test, you should not have a problem using Oracle 11g running on any platform, not even on RedHat Oracle "Unbreakable <hah!> Linux". Your difficulties in using the better and more-refined-than-DOS bash shell should not prevent me and the others in the class from actually learning shit while you interrupt the teacher for the umpteenth fucking time asking how to change directories to list the files in /usr/bin/temp/ora-inst. You cockmonkey.

I have a little script of my own called "chimp" to run for these fucknuzzles which I usually remember to bring on a USB stick if I go to any tech classroom. It begins

#!/bin/bash
alias c:="C:"
alias dir="ls -lF"
alias del="rm -iv"
alias move="mv -iv"

It ends with echo "Ook."

And then the rest of us get to actually learn something about making the Resource Manager do what we want it to with a few different job classes. Or at least make it do what Oracle wants us to make it do during the damned test.

Petty Office(r)s

I have three days to catch up on all my tickets which no one looked at during my entire week of training. Customers are pissed. I've been officially pulled out of The System. Nevertheless, there's a Ticket Assignment Notification which just showed up in my mailbox. The System knows best.

Not only have I been assigned yet another Solaris problem I have no idea about, Steve has been assigned a problem requiring the ability to see the difference between Japanese characters. We agree to trade, unofficially and doing our best to hide the transactions which management will inspect to make sure we're being good little bitches.

A note last night from a US manager asks me if I can take over Yet Another Citrix Problem which was assigned to Someone Other Than Me, and in taking the reassignment it won't count toward my number of assigned tickets as far as The System is concerned; it only counts toward last Tuesday's assignment quota. I agree anyway.

An hour later comes another mail from some unknown name. Someone in HR. She's seen my profile pic, a particularly funny line drawing animation which has been my profile pic ever since $MegaCorp took over $BigCorp. I've received dozens of mails and IMs in favour of it. I have a link to a site of mine in my profile and dozens of people have clicked on that as well, so I know that they, too, have seen the pic. I know because I have the referrer logs of the site, all coming from xxxxx.$megacorp.com/yyyyy/zzzzz?=$REC_empno. But she's offended. I explained this in an E-Mail littered with management-speak buzzwords and other shitty language abuses that she and her ilk are more comfortable with, stating at the end that should she not change her mind, I would reluctantly -- in accordance with company policy -- remove said offending picture. No word back on that.

What else is in the mail? A note from Giacomo. He'll be back in Munich teaching the DBA1 course in a couple of weeks. Hot diggity! Off to Meathead to get approval for this course as well.

"Hey Meathead. Giacomo's coming back next week to do the DBA1 course. I need approv..."
"Nope."
"WTF?"
"You've already had your five training days this quarter."
"That's the minimum requirement per quarter."
"Right. And you've received it."
"But I didn't get any fucking training last quarter. Nor the quarter before that, nor the quarter before that!"
"But you got it this quarter. You can do the DBA1 next quarter."
"..."

Minima = maxima only when it's shit I want; I do far fucking more than the minimum number of tickets and still get pushed to "do more".

Fuming, I return to my desk. There's a mail from Mini-Me with an attachment. A screenshot of $OurBigInternalApp with a ticket, and in the owner field, Mini-Me's name. There was a second screenshot of another ticket, also assigned to him. In his note to our manager he wrote, "I'm kinda busy right now but I'll try to look at them later today."

Mini-Me left the company ten weeks ago but The System knows best.

Training III: An Open Letter to Oracle

Dear Oracle,

Classroom training's cool. The free lunch isn't too bad either (for fans of MSG anyway). A week away from my normal hell is also pretty fucking sweet. So please don't take this the wrong way...

When I (or more precicely, the $MegaCorp division I work in) is shelling out for my DBA training which is supposed to include all that horrible PL/SQL shit and RAC and SQL tuning, and I've worked with databases for the past eight fucking years (yours, DB2 and FoxBasePro SQL Server {$year}), I should get a pass on the intro shit. I should not have to sit through hours of fucking explanations to n00bz about tables, foreign keys and the fucking SELECT statement. I may not be a Mastah DBA but I know how to grab the shit I want out of your tables. I can even do it in your shitty, still-not-Unicode-compliant command line SQL*Plus program which will never, EVAR be as good as Toad. EVAR.

That Enterprise Manager copy of Microsoft's point-and-shoot GUI ain't the best in the world either. Would you guys even consider writing something in a language more efficient than Java? PASCAL perhaps? SNOBOL? Fuck, even a DSKY machine might be faster.

No, your browser-based "iSQL" client just doesn't impress me. It's just another "Do X... on the Web". Meh. Accidentally backspace and all your work and history are gone. Would it be that difficult to have the browser write the history commands to a local text file? Yes, I know it's possible to write my SQL in a local editor and then paste it into the browser but then what's the fucking point of having the browser-based client to begin with?

Also -- and this is pretty important -- please refrain from putting really attractive wimmens in my classroom as they tend to distract. I'm not against wimmens in the field; IT tends to attract the lunatics of both sexes so things are never boring. I just think that segregated classrooms might be something you guys could maybe try out. I'm pretty sure that's a wedding ring on her finger and although 30-45% of German women admit to affairs depending on which survey you read, I'm in a classroom and I'm supposed to be able to focus my attention on what the instructor is saying.

That's all I can think of for now. Thanks for the cookies and air conditioning but that horrible excuse for coffay you've got would embarrass Americans and even Turkish resorts. Powdered premix? Have you no shame??

Love,
REC

Training II: LOL Nazis

So I'm sitting through another day of Stuff I Already Know and the teacher, a nice enough Genoan guy who mangles both German and English without prejudice is going over the new syntax and abilities in 11g. We're dropping tables but wait! There's a foreign key! What to do?

My response didn't go over so well.

The blonde is killing me, constantly looking over at me and smiling, looking longer than is normal. She's not drop-dead gorgeous but there's something about her I can't get over. I'm sitting uncomfortably through classes with a constant reduced cranial bloodflow that I haven't experienced since puberty. Chances to talk, however, aren't taken and she quickly kills my attempts at conversation. I even ate with her in the shit canteen (and paid the price for it later) in order to give it a go. No dice.

Anyway, when discussing databases in German you don't talk about "parent" and "child" but rather "mother" and "daughter" tables. It's less awkward than trying to translate the English constructs directly since "parent" is rarely used here in the singular and no matter how you combine "child" and "table", the result sounds bad. So Muttertabelle and Tochtertabelle it is.

And Giacomo went on talking about altering tables as I tried to stay awake. Then he got to the "ON DELETE CASCADE" construct which when invoked, he explained, will not only remove¹ the 'mother' table but take all the 'daughters' with it as well.

I didn't actually think about it, it just came out: "Ah, the Magda Goebbels method."

The temperature in the room dropped quickly. She's definitely not sleeping with me now.

¹ It helps to know that the German word for "remove/delete" wrt to DB tables is extremely close to the one which means "extinguishing life"

I CAN HAZ TRANEING

"Dog, your training has been approved."
"Citrix? Finally??"
"No, Oracle. DBA path.
"Umm... "

We have a dozen DBAs in the office. While acquiring this skill wouldn't hurt my chances for advancement (because they're already hovering slightly below zero) and would even give me m4d sk1llz to go elsewhere, I'd really prefer the Citrix training because no one else fucking does it here! I'm already stuck with every Citrix problem there is and it would be nice to have a fucking clue about what it is I'm doing.

More importantly an increasing number of our customers want to use Citrix. We have an ever-growing number of contracts which are dependent on getting $OurBigApp to work on Citrix. Fucking hell, Citrix is now doing Xen which, like, you know, we're doing too!

"Why can't I have the Citrix training?"
"Because it's unsupported," Meathead replied.
"It's unsupported because no one knows how to do it or has any contacts there."
"I understand."
"And if you send me to that training, we'll will have someone -- me -- who can work with it and help out Eng and PM so that we can support it."
"But it's not supported now and so we can't send you."
"The fucking Oracle training is twice the fucking price of Citrix'! We have dozens of Oracle DBAs worldwide!"
"We also have a deal with Oracle training so it's not the list price."
"But we don't need more DBAs."
"So you don't want the training?"

I may be dumb, but I'm not stupid.

"Of course I want the fucking training! Beggars can't be choosers. So is it PL/SQL or DB tuning?"
"Professional Introduction to the Oracle 10g Database"
"NO WAI!"
"Yep."
"Why? I've been working with databases for the past 8 years! I know how to fucking SELECT a goddamned row!"
"Oracle's path requires the course. You can't take the next ones without the certificate from this one."
"Son of a bitch."

Considering the rate that training is approved around here, I'll get certified to "Oracle Master" some time before the turn of the century. They really better hurry up with this anti-aging shit.

SELECT standard_complaint FROM blog WHERE (INSTR('17') > 0);

Text Adventure Games

Remember in the olden days how the only graphics you got with a game were the box design? Infocom made some killer games, my favourite being Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. What I wasn't so thrilled about were some of the steps you had to take in an exact order. Do any one thing wrong and you'd only find out far too late in the game, forcing you to start over and once again order the beers and peanuts and sandwich. If you didn't take the junk mail with you, you were fucked up in the Vogon ship and couldn't get the Babel fish.

Corporate games are no different, except that the plot's not nearly as amusing.

"Single sign-on" means you only sign on one time for everything. It was never meant to be an abbreviation for "sign into each fucking application and each goddamned screen every single time". It would also be helpful if, when I have to access something within this "SSO" environment, that the fucking user ID you want remains the same. By definition a "global" user ID number is my world-wide ID and not just one of a collection.

I tried to log into my MegaInfo account. Error in name or password. Fine, try the old passwords. None worked. No problem, just check the "lost password" button which takes me to a screen that requires me to again enter my E-Mail address.

We're sorry but the e-mail address really.evil.canine@megacorp.com was not found in our user database.

WTF? Great, another automagically lost account. Off to the account activation applications.

You are not authorized to access this screen. Please log in with correct credentials.

You gotta be shittin' me. Off to IT I went, where it was then explained I have to use this link to get to that page; coming in from the link I was using passed the wrong credentials. Huh? Our user names are always fname.mi.lname@megacorp. Not at account activation, where I'm just really.evil.canine.

Back upstairs to try again. Success! I could now enter the account activation area! Click on new account, fill in information, and... I need a corporate ID code. Back to IT.

"You need to use the Employee Account screen."
ORLY? Where the fuck is that?
Johnny tried to show me but couldn't find it himself. He clicked around a while, did a few searches, and was finally able to bring up the correct account activation screen. The correct one isn't on acct.megacorp.com, it's on acct.emea.megacorp.com. Johnny mailed me the direct link.

Back upstairs to try again. Open Johnny's mail, copy the link, paste it into Fireferret and...

You are not authorized to access this screen. Please log in with correct credentials.

Once more into the breach. Johnny was able to paste it directly and access the section. I told him to try logging out from all open screens completely and then he figured out the problem. You have to log into the $MegaCorp Apps section, then also log into the account activation section. If you hadn't been routed via a link to the acct.emea.megacorp.com in your current session, you can only access that server via a link three screens into the accounts section.

Back upstairs. Log out of everything. Reboot for good measure. Log into apps. Log into accounts. Click on link 1, search for second link. Click on link 2, search for third link. Click on link 3 and... IN! Huzzah! All those years playing Scott Adams games and MuDs was paying off.

Go to Employee Accounts, check. Fill in name, country, employee number and global UID. And... nada. WTF? My global UID isn't correct.

Click here to open the $MegaPeople site to find your GUID.

Fine. Not surprisingly another full log-in is required. Search for me, click on me, click on details, see two different UIDs and grab the one I didn't use, and back to the accounts screen, out of which I've been auto-logged out. "No problem," I thought as I pasted in the direct address. I've already been credentialised.

You are not authorized to access this screen. Please log in with correct credentials.

Log out of everything, reboot, restart the whole above process, get back to the accounts. Remove Gown. Hang Gown on hook. Wait for Ford to sleep. Get towel and satchel. Put towel over drain. Put satchel in front of robot panel. Put junk mail on top of the satchel. Push dispenser button. Press the switch on the case.

I finally had the Babel... the MegaInfo account and could access it, allowing me to understand the Vogon poetry, from which I'd need exactly one word. Except it wasn't Vogon poetry, it was a group of "trainings" I was required to complete, every single one of them Death-by-PowerPoint with "presenters" of increasingly poor oratorial abilities reading out slides and documents we already have access to word for word.

Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits,
On a lurgid bee.

Region Locking

That Citrix training I was promised? Yeah, it's right there with that advancement I was also promised. And the raise. There's Citrix training to be had, but not here, nosiree. It's too expensive here in Germany. Citrix offers training all over the world, even in Bulgrohungria. Do you see where this is going? I did as soon as my manager Vera mentioned it.

Citrix does offer training in Bulgrohungria but not in English. It's only available in the local Eastern European language which I, oddly enough, don't speak. Vera's great plan: send Mini-Me for the training. And she has another bright idea.

Vera has decided that it would be good to bring Mini-Me over here for "training", such training to be provided by this dog. Now I like the guy enough but there's one small problem which, despite me telling her repeatedly, Vera continues to ignore: I don't have anything to fucking train Mini-Me on! Nothing. Nada. Zip. Nimic. Diddly-squat.

I'm supposed to teach him Unicode? I haven't finished writing the training, a massive brain dump of everything I've learned over the past 30-some years about it and all related subjects. I'm supposed to teach him everything about I18N? Where the fuck would I start? I've never taught anyone I18N because as it applies to us, it's not something you can teach. You either know it or you don't. Citrix? How the fuck am I supposed to teach him anything about it when I haven't had any training myself?

Citrix training is shit to begin with. The company's software is built around licensing. The first classes are only concerned with licensing and license management. Fair enough, I guess, since you can't make Citrix work after installation without running all the goddamned licensing components. After that, who the fuck knows? I haven't had any fucking training and I can't get any time away from tickets to even try to figure out how this shit works.

If you want to do anything with Citrix, you have to become a member of the Citrix License Police Force. Cocksuckers.

My protests and explanations are being ignored. Vera's creaming to get Mini-Me over here. Call me a cynic (or maybe I recognise my own), but I can only surmise that Vera's doing this to try and shitcan both of us, me for failing to teach Mini-Me anything after we spent a couple thousand to get his ass over here, and him for not having learned anything after we spent a couple thousand to get his ass over here.

I don't begrudge him the trip. Hell, I'd like to meet him. It's also nice to travel on the company's dime and more power to him if he can swing it. But in this case there's precious little to be gained and much to be lost. I've got to write a formal E-Mail to Vera to recap the pointlessness of his trip in order to cover my ass and save his as well.

The real bitch of it all? The money Vera's willing to spend to bring Mini-Me over here is more than enough to cover my tuition for both the basic and advanced Citrix classes here, classes I could take and afterwards write and give presentations to spread the working knowledge throughout our division worldwide. Fuckwits. Sheer, utter, vindictive, scheming, dastardly fuckwits.