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30 miles so far this month. The running thing has ramped up considerably. My standard runs are now 3.2 and 4.0 miles.

I am still quite slow, but can comfortably jog several 9 minute miles as often as I wish. This won’t sound like much to real runners, but it is an order of magnitude better than I could do even back in January. It’s the improvement that’s bringing the motivation these days.

I’ve been really enjoying the NewBalance love/hate commercials lately; they really seem to nail the running mentality. Here’s a link to one.

Let’s see if I can hit 40 miles this month and add some speed in June…

Because Peter and Charlie were right, not just specifically about REST, (as in representational state transfer) but about the fact that it takes people a while to really understand REST and why it’s not just beneficial, but downright important. I think I finally had some of the ephiphany of REST, but oddly it was because I was thinking about an entirely different problem than web traffic protocols. I was thinking about the different ways people move large amounts of geospatial image, elevation, and vector data around their systems. These days, interoperability is the new way, partly due to advances in technology that allows digital collaboration, partly for the more mundane reason that there are a hell of a lot of formats, web services, and spatial databases out there that people want to use. So, in effect, geospatial data and associated information is coming from all over the place all the time, in all kinds of oddball formats, map projections and states of metadata completeness. Yet we fearlessly use it all together all the time now and it pretty much works well. How do folks do this? Basically, we use a very awkward collection of file format codecs, open standards specifications, web services, and RDMBS systems. This stuff is extremely heavyweight. Again, as it was with web application programming, our first instinct was to create a big fat abstraction layer of stuff to shield us from this big scary world. We created heavy ungainly things that allow us to communicate spatial data and we were happy. But we did it at too high a level again, just like we did with web apps. It turns out that HTTP does provide you with most of what you need for web app communication and much of the app server is stuff we decided we needed to have wher we really didn’t. Well, maybe there’s a way to use a similar type of protocol to make communicating spatial data throughout data systems and get to a place where the communication of data isn’t surrounded with huge, heavy applications to manage all the translations and states and other stuff that we decided we had to have when we really didn’t. Just like web apps. So, I’m not saying use GET,PUT,POST ans DELETE. Maybe something similar in spirit, though. I’m not even suggesting anything specific. This is just the kernel of an idea. But I think there may be something to it. I’ll have to think about it. I know that the OGC specifications have gone a long way towards providing a key data abstraction in the networked world, but I feel like it’s still too high level. I don’t want to have to churn through chatty XML conversations, I want those sweet, sweet bits with a minimum of fuss and I want to edit ‘em, send ‘em back or have ‘em disappear or whatever I want. Web app, workstation app, handheld app, whatever…

I’m going to have to ask Peter and Charlie about this one.

I just wrapped up my first week at the new job. I now work at ITT Visual Information Solutions, or ITT-VIS for short. ITT-VIS used to be commonly known as RSI, or Research Systems. My official title is “Software Engineer II”. Unofficially, it’s “ENVI developer”. ENVI is one of the base products of ITT-VIS. It’s kind of hard to describe, but it’s basically visualization and analysis software for remote sensing and GIS data. I work on a small team that develops the ENVI product and generally helps engineer things around the shop.

A long time ago I posted an article complaining about having my IDL programming skills erode away. Well, that certainly won’t be the case here anymore. ITT-VIS main product is the proprietary IDL language, which most of ENVI is written in. So basically, I’m helping to write our products in the house language, which I managed to learn while at Digitalglobe. IDL is an interesting environment and it is extrememly powerful. I can’t wait until I really get up to speed there and get some these ideas I’ve had for IDL projects going.

Right now, it’s pretty intense with so much to learn to get up to speed. I really like it there and I hope I won’t have to switch jobs anymore for a very long time.

When I was finishing up college in southwest Virginia in the late 1990’s, I worked for a couple of years at a Virginia Tech sports bar called Champs Sports Bar and Cafe. When I was hired on, the General Manager of Champs was a fellow by the name of Kevin Halpin. Kevin was universally referred to as Halp. Halp was a former marine, a veteran of Desert Storm, the first Gulf War.

Halp was a perfect bartender, knew everyone in town, and was generally a personality in Blacksburg. He also happened to be the ex-boyfriend of the girl I was dating at the time. So, it was slightly intimidating when Halp approached me out one day to recruit me for a bartending opening. I thought he was coming to give me trouble about dating his ex-girl. I couldn’t have been more suprised when he offered me a bartending gig at Champs on the spot. He’d been poking around and decided I’d fit in there. Halp turned out to be a great guy and we were good friends during the remainder of my time in SW VA. I promptly quit my job at the Macado’s sandwich shop waiting tables and reported to work for Champs. This would’ve been 1996.

One of the first things you find out as a rookie bartender is how much freakin’ work bartending is, and how much of that work can be distasteful. Champs didn’t have a cleaning crew, so the bartenders did the worst of the cleaning, since they made the most money. This was typical of how Halp ran things. The best part was cleaning the toilets. Imagine these toilets for a second. Picture 1000 drunk college kids tearing it up on friday night before a Hokies game. And let me tell you, the ladies room was no better than the men’s. Cleaning these toilets was horrible, but I never minded doing that much, because of the way Halp trained me.

I can still picture it right now, Halpin standing there in his khakis, motorcycle steel shank boots and white polo, hair cut high-and-tight, over a toilet that it’s best not to describe. He kneeled right down by that toilet, grabbed his rag and proceeded to clean the bejeezus out of it with this rag, bucket and bare hands. This was a thorough job, incuding a small demonstration of how the flush handle worked, how to care for it and prevent it from leaking, and advice on how to deal with cleaning up vomit (”Just don’t think about what you’re doing”). I can clearly remember him scrubbing that sucker down “This is how you do it, okay.. You got it?”, tying a knot in the rag (our universal sign of evil - do not pick up a rag with a knot ), tossing it in the rag bin and scrubbing up. Let’s just say I was impressed. Halp could’ve stood at the bar, counting the money and told me, or anyone, really, to go do the toilets. He certainly didn’t have to get down on his knees and scrub vomit and other horribleness off of it. After that, I didn’t grouse about cleaning the toilets. If Halp could cheerfully scrub that sucker, when he certainly didn’t have to, well I couldn’t complain. It was a good lesson on how to lead folks, and I still remember it sometimes when I clean my toilet.

I haven’t written about the latest interesting development in the Operating Systems realm yet, but I think I should explain this a bit, mostly for the benefit of my non-technical audience. The following opinons will almost certainly bother some folks, which is alright, I’m just saying up front that I hear ya.

Microsoft recently entered into an agreement with Novell (vendor of SuSE Linux), whereby Novell and Microsoft will create a Linux compatibility laboratory for Windows. This was annouced with much of the usual MSFT fanfare and bluster. The Open Source community instantly smelled a rat and waited to see how Microsoft was to turn this into the next attack on Free Software and Linux in general.

Let’s go back in time a bit to Microsoft’s last big try at taking down Linux. The short version of the story is Microsoft funded a small company called SCO, which bought up some remnants of old UNIX intellectual property and then proceeded to sue the pants off of IBM, Auto Zone, and whomever it thought it accuse of putting their newly acquired UNIX code into the Linux kernel. Over five years later, the IBM case still drags on and SCO hasn’t shown any offending code. There never was any. Along the way, SCO tried to cash in by selling licenses to use Linux “the clean official version” as it were, that had been approved by SCO. No one bought. SCO is in ruins and everyone now knows the ploy failed, embarrasingly badly at that. SCO is now an industry joke. Microsoft funded the whole stinkin thing, denied it, then was outed and forced to admit it, embarrasingly, at that.

Now, let’s return to modern day. Now, Microsoft and Novell are going to sell you a ‘legit’ Linux operability kit. Microsoft is trying to control the linux market now, by choosing a favored vendor/partner and forcing everyone to play by their rules. Because, now, Microsoft says it has patents to the stuff inside Linux, and well, you’re going to have to get indemnity by using the Microsoft/Novell linux stuff or they’ll sue the pants off of you. Same game, different name. The problem is, the general public doesn’t know about the GPL license that the Linux work is released under. The upshot is that Microsoft can’t make that stuff their property and sell it to you like Windows, it’s illegal. Now there is likely to be another dragged out court challenge to all this. Microsoft says they found a legal loophole in GPL. We’ll see.

Why should you care? Because if Microsoft gains this kind of legal control over Linux, then all of our computing environments will be toast. Microsoft’s products are already of dangerously poor quality and security. They’d get worse and worse without the stiff competiton of the Open Source world. Your choice of computing environments would be gone, and you’d be stuck with whatever crap MSFT rolled out. This could be compared to everyone being forced to drive a Buick because Buick somehow claimed to have the patent to internal combustion. The only cars would be Buicks, which would suck really bad, except, well, most folks would really just be happy with _any_ car, as long as it worked most of the time. That’s more or less what we’re facing here. Look, if Microsoft executives had their way, every UNIX and Linux server in the world would be replaced with a Windows OS. That would be utterly horrible and lame for reasons I don’t have space to indulge here. Why would you ever trust something as essential as the world’s computing platform to a private company that has demonstrably practiced every evil business practice in the books and invented a whole new class of evil business practices to meet the changing technological landscape? Uh, I don’t think so.

The good news: It won’t work. Firstly, the GPL is pretty explicit. Whether MSFT claims to have found a legal loophole (as they claim) or not, it has stood the test in the courts every time, and let’s remember it can also be modified very quickly. The F/OSS community is not about to let Microsoft steal or kill the fruits of their decades of labor, all of which was perfomed under unceasing assault by Microsoft itself. Ridiculous. The only way this even begins to work is if the public is too lethargic or stupid to care. If the public buys into the Microsoft fear campaign, then it could be more difficult for the truth to come out in the end. But, really, even the biggest luddite knows that Microsoft and Linux aren’t the same thing, and I just don’t think that this latest Microsoft play to kill off Linux will work. Linux is just too resilient and now it’s too well established. It won’t be taken out by some mere trick of corporate law or ‘gamesmanship’. Perhaps the best testimony to the success of the GNU/Linux Operating System is how hard Microsoft is still trying to find a way to kill it off. Don’t think that others haven’t noticed. Sun Solaris used to be an extremely expensive UNIX Operating System. Now, it’s totally free and open source. Sun knew that it needed to be released ‘into the wild’ to survive, and smartly decided to let it go. Linux proved that Open Source community property works and even Microsoft , with all of its resources and evil tactics can’t stop it. But I wish they’d stop making it so difficult.

I’m going there tomorrow. The purpose of the trip is to meet and greet my new co-workers. I have a new full-time job as a GIS Engineer with a company called SabiOso. Although they are parented here in Denver, the office is in Clearfield, Utah, just north of Salt Lake City. I work from my home office, as I have since January.

So far, I have been enjoying the work. It is very much in my pocket of expertise. I basically am creating a very, very large database of pre-cached map tiles for a web mapping application. I make image mosaics and do cartography. I manage the spatial database. I help design the information systems to serve this huge amount of data up. And, that’s basically it. Which is nice. It’s a full-time job, but it’s not two or three of them. I am trying not to work more than 50 hours a week, which is new. So far, I’ve been pretty good about not working 24/7, and I hope that starting out that way and having some discipline, I won’t let this job fall into the 24/7 thing that’s even easier to do when you’re office is always 10 steps away. I’m sure the boss wouldn’t mind me working 24/7, but this time, I’ll know better where to draw the line.

So, off to Utah to meet the boss and the new co-workers. Should be a fun couple of days.

Having an extremely wide range of skills and experience should be an advantage and a differentiator in the employment marketplace. But, much to the contrary, it’s making it much more difficult to find good fits in the employment arena.

It seems like I would be having much more success if I had only focused on one technology stack during my career. All of the recruiters and job descriptions have become keyword driven. So, basically having experience in many different languages, operating systems, programming environments and problem domains _hurts_ your chances of getting the interview. Because they’ll go for the guy that can say he spent the last five years only doing J2EE every single time.

I would assert that being so poorly rounded would be a disadvantage in the marketplace, as almost no job is really that focused. Developers need to be adaptable and quick to learn new technologies, be able to recognize he value in them, and adapt to new problem spaces and toolkits. If you’ve spent the last five years ignoring everything but J2EE or C#.NET, you probably aren’t the adaptable type. You probably cling to your one skillset with an iron grip. That’s not they type of developer I’d want to add to my team.

During the last five years, I’ve delivered code in a dozen languages, on Windows, Linux, UNIX, and Macintosh platforms. I’ve built and maintained computer hardware and done systems administration. I’ve designed, built and administrated SQL databases in several RDBMS systems, commercial and otherwise. I’ve built custom continuous integration and deployment systems. I’ve built a software test lab from scratch. I’ve integrated tools in various languages that most wouldn’t have thought would work together. I’ve solved tricky problems that most single-stack developers couldn’t fix. I’ve delivered solutions in a wide variety of problem domains from simple Employee Time Tracking ware to detailed Remote Sensing software, to RF Engineering visualizations. It’s frustrating when a potential employer calls up and simply asks “How many years of J2EE have you done?” So, I honestly answer, “Well, one, but…..”, and they instantly pass on you. This just keeps on happenning, and honestly, I don’t understand how some of these people so easily write you off.

I’m glad I’ve taken the path that I have. I know now that I can tackle almost any technical domain and acheive success. But, how on earth do you convince a potential employer that it’s true? It’s becoming fairly frustrating to see how my breadth of experience seems to be a hinderance in the job market, when really, it’s my chief strength. It’s something employers should value, but they just don’t seem to.

So, we’ve all heard about the recent phenomenon of ‘digital dirt’. That is, some folks found it expedient at some point over the last few years or so to post unflattering content about themselves on the internet. Potential employers Google your name (every single one of them does this as far as I can tell), and pop! there you are, shirtless, drunk as piss and vomiting underneath the “Psi Alpha Psi” fraternity sign at Kent State or some other foolish thing. As your resume hits the trash can, the hiring manager thinks “What a jackass!” Usually, this takes one of two forms: 1- the compromising photo/youtube clip/myspace profile and 2- the unsavory rant.

Now, I can guarantee you there are no incredibly compromising photos of myself on the internet, and I made sure to register an empty profile under my name on myspace (so no other donald marino puts embarrasing crap there - I want a monopoly on ruining that name), but I have ranted a bit here and there. Now, my stuff’s really very mild, I usually am whining about how mainstream technologies suck or some other annoyance of a developer’s life. Real ‘digital dirt’ would be someone’s racist tirade or childish insult stream or just plain dumb-as-hell statements. You won’t ever find me being racist, but I do say dumb things from time-to-time. Not as dumb as Virginia Sen. George Allen (at least learn how to pronounce ‘macaque’ before using it as a racial slur, you f*%&$g boob), but that’s setting the bar pretty high.

I do have to say I’ve found it amusing on a few occasions to have a hiring manager blurt out “I read your blog!” with a flourish and a twinkle, as if they were the only one who ever googled my name and put 1 and 1 together to make two. (Hello, potential future employers! I know you all are reading this. I’m really a nice guy and a hard worker :-))

So, the question is: do you speak your mind online ever, or do you milquetoast it? Do you just give up and say nothing? Anyone that knows me personally knows I have strong opinions and that I like to speak my mind. Most see this as a positive, some cannot stand it. I appreceiate a direct style and a well-defended position, many feel threatened by that. A blog is somewhat different, though. First of all it never goes away (thanks to the internet wayback machine), second - it’s quite voluntary. No one makes you blog. No one asked your opinion, you just decided to post it up for the world’s edu-tainment. I hope that people read this blog and at least think that I have some critical thinking skills and can express myself reasonably well. Some people will not, though, I am sure. I personally think it’s a mistake to read too much into someone’s blog posts, but people will hold you to every word you say in your blog as if it were a court deposition. Which, really, is a shame. Because it’s fun to rant in your blog. It’s fun to say something incindiary once in a while. It’s fun to say what you think and see people react, especially if you have a strong or unusual opinion. But now that we will seemingly be harshly judged for anything edgy we say, perhaps this medium is dying faster than we think. Or maybe, you can feel free to say what you want still, as long as you don’t need to find a job soon.

I’m not sure. But I did delete every one of my technology posts. I won’t write about work here again. I need to maintain a professionally neutral web presence until I have a secure job again (pause as we note the new more conservative stylesheet). I love working and I love to argue the merits of different technologies, designs, and approaches. I’ll have to resign myself to doing this in person from now on, since it’s so much harder to be misunderstood in person. This blog is now merely here to illustrate that I love motorcycles, the NY Jets, baseball and my girlfriend, and that I make fairly bad sounding amateur music from time-to-time. Nice and low-calorie, a light snack of a blog as it were. Use the wayback machine if you really need to see me at my internet worst. Or just come ask me my opinion about the state of “Enterprise Development”