Forums
Oct 06The Wi-Fi Initiative at WTF University
by in Feature Articles on 2006-11-30Niklas B considered himself lucky. His dormitory at West Thomson-Friedman* University (also known as WTFU) was the first selected to participate in the campus-wide Wi-Fi Initiative. This meant that he'd be able to take his laptop and work in the more-comfortable areas of the building instead of staying cramped up in his room. Of course, like everything else at WTFU, the Wi-Fi Initiative didn't quite work like one might expect. Connecting to the wireless network required tilting one's laptop to a randomly-changing angle, waiting until the solar azimuth and winds were just right, and not only crossing one's fingers on both hands, but crossing the arms over each other as well. It was a bit inconvenient to say the least.
Achieving such low wireless performance is not an easy task, especially when using the commercial-grade wireless equipment that WTFU purchased. Finding a proprietary wireless authentication application that manages to freeze any computer unlucky enough to drop the wireless signal is an even bigger challenge. Thankfully, the cleverness of WTFU's IT department knows no bounds. They found the perfect location for the dormitory's high-powered wireless router: the basement kitchen.
Christian P felt kind of bad. His company had just been awarded a contract to take over in-house software development at a fairly large underwriting agency. Not only would six developers be laid off immediately, but the remaining three would be responsible for transitioning their replacements before getting laid off. On Christian's first day, he was prepared to be met with anger, sadness, resentment, hopelessness, and even hatred. But there was none of that; instead, it seemed as if the outgoing developers had a feeling of relief.
We're in a bit of a jam, an email to the support desk read, we accidentally ran an entire day's worth of transactions for 11 Oct 2009 instead of 11 Oct 2006. Can you fix this?
Back in the early 90's, Steve worked at a certain blue company known for its putty colored machines that cost a lot of green. This company was trying to make a big splash for itself in the UNIX market and wanted to convince technical folks that they "got it." And Steve had just the idea to help them out.
Everyone tolerated Steve. Some even got a kick out of his antics: whenever a successful project was nearing launch, Steve would rush in to "rescue" it. He'd send off warning emails to everyone, saying the testing was not conclusive, the deployment plan was incomplete, and the code was riddled with bugs. Then he'd call for a "weekend crunch" to make things right and slave away as the project's sole martyr when no one else would come in. Granted, he would never actually check-in code or make any other changes, but he'd always take credit for the project. No one bought it, and that's why it was so funny. Well, funny until he was promoted to management. 
One of the more popular ideas from the dot-com days was creating a payment service provider company. It's hard to say why; perhaps their founders believed that we really needed yet another "layer of abstraction" in commerce? Perhaps they thought that merchants would sign up in droves when they heard about the opportunity to give away yet another percentage of each sale to a middleman? Whatever the reason, no one signed up and most providers collapsed as soon as their funding dried up. Well, I shouldn't say "no one;" there were a few businesses that took the bait. <b>Diez B. Roggisch's</b> company was one of them.
It was a very exciting email: "Dave, Binnentech is definitely interested in a trial run! Can you go to Amsterdam for two weeks to do the setup and presentation?" While frequent business travelers might dread such a request, Dave had only been on a single business trip in his career, and even then, it was just an overnighter to Ottawa which was just a few hundred kilometers across the province. He couldn't pass it up an overseas journey like this. 
Ryan H was pretty excited to start his new job as a developer. But his excitement quickly faded after he started. It didn't fade into apprehension, disappointment, or regret -- just into nothing; he simply stopped feeling anything at all. This type of apathy is to be expected when one is given the type of assignment that Ryan was given: absolutely nothing. Ryan's day to day job was to sit and patiently wait for the company to start up a project. 
A financial services provider, Daren's company did a lot of data processing and aggregation from a lot of different sources. The Director acknowledged that their processes were "a little rough around the edges" but insisted that they ran "smooth, like a factory." An accurate analogy I'd say, especially considering what the typical industrial factory is like: poisonous steam pipes spewing death gas every three seconds; razor-sharp pinwheel governors spinning at different yet predictable intervals; and giant, spiked stampers slamming down on conveyer belts running different speeds in varying direction, all placed inconveniently at the entrance and exit so that they must be meticulously navigated to avoid a significant loss of Life Points. At least, that's what every factory I've been in was like.
James works at one of the few companies where maintaining a high-reliability environment is important. Actually, it's more than important, it's required by law. The company is a natural gas supplier and needs to ensure that their Problem Alert & Monitoring (PAM) system is always running. And for good reason: PAM is responsible for coordinating, dispatching, and directing emergency crew to problems like gas leaks and pipeline explosions.
Several years back, Jack Herrington worked at a Web 1.0 company. Of course, no one called it "Web 1.0" back then; it was simply the "Dot-com Era" or the "Internet Age." Personally, I think the version numbers are okay, but I'd prefer if we all used nonsensical acronyms: "Web QM3200" or "Web ZXT." Come on, you know you want to surf the Web ZXT. 
A little more than a decade ago, John Rudd was a Computer Science student at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He worked closely with the university's IT department and played a vital role in the creation of a new state-of-the-art data center: he unplugged and labeled cables before the movers relocated the servers and plugged them back in at their new location. There was one thing that struck John as being a bit different: the data center wasn't fully built yet. 
One thing I miss about working at a large corporation is being a part of a team that maintains a large business application. Well, that, and reading Slashdot all day. But let me clarify what I mean by the "team" thing. You see, working on the application itself isn't very fun. Actually, it pretty much sucks: large system, horrific codebase, ridiculous management, the whole nine yards. But watching other people work on it, especially the newbies -- now that's great! 
Today is a very special day for quite a few of you out there; you know who you are. For those of you not fortunate enough to work for a certain leader in the travel industry with a certain brand that is a household name, allow me to explain what Merge Day is all about. Jim M got to live through it for nearly two years.