Aug. 28, 2006, 10:49 p.m.

Day One

I started a new job today. This will be fun. I'm the guy in the group who doesn't have a Windows machine. Actually, it turns out my manager has a Macbook Pro. That was a relief since I'd never heard of him before today.

It's definitely a Windows shop, though. This is not surprising since the flagship product is a fault-tolerant managed exchange server. Some of it is just silly, though. There's this anachronistic thick-client based bug tracking system that does have a web interface, but they put a lot of work into making it hard to use, apparently. I'd link to it, but not even google has heard of it, so believe me, it's obscure and unpleasant so far.

There's also MS Sharepoint Portal Server. Picture a wiki with a tables and such replaced by a proper database schema (i.e. more rigid), and every link that may contain useful information is a file download that requires you to open another application to read the content. And of course, if you don't understand something from the document you're reading, you go back to the web site and search for something that you can download that might describe this other concept. It's basically a file server that I can't connect to in Finder. I hear there's a way to be notified when things change, but I couldn't find it.

My group is the UNIX group, though. The management software apparently runs on UNIX as far as I can tell. I don't have any idea what it does or how it works yet, but I've seen some of the source to it. It's written in perl, python, and java. Not sure what part is what. The build system also adds make, ant, and bash. I get the feeling consolidation would help some. I've got to learn a lot more about it before making any recommendations. I've already had to fix some perl bugs, and modify a makefile and bourne shell script to get the thing to build for me. I don't know what to do with it once it's built, though.

At least I filled out a lot of paperwork and got all my important accounts created. I didn't commit my changes today because I wanted a little bit of review and stuff. Apparently it's advisable to branch before randomly changing things in the main trees.

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