Availability Suite on OpenSolaris

A few weeks ago it was pointed out to me that Sun open sourced Availability Suite. AVS (under all it’s many names) is something I had a love/hate relationship with at Sun. I worked on QA for it off an on for most of my time with the company. At one point I was put on a small team tasked with creating automated test suites for it, something most of the QA team and some of the developers felt was an impossible goal.

The small team got smaller, but in the end we exceeded all goals that were set before us. After the first six months I was told by my then boss that I had wasted everyones time and cost the company a disgusting amount of money in doing so. The team was disbanded an work on the tests stopped, although the existing tests were still used for at least the next five years. There were some people with a vested interest in the effort failing, and they did their best to make the tests appear worthless. My last few years at the company this attitude started to change (in no small part to my good friend Paul’s insistence on using facts rather than opinion to decide value). As a result I was pulled back a number of times to add new tests and make changes as the product interfaces changed (some beyond recognition). When I left the tests were running nightly on numerous platforms across multiple versions of the product. Not everything I wanted to do with the tests was done, but I had to go.

Anyway, it felt good to be thanked by Jim Dunham in a recent blog post. I know Jim appreciated the work I did, and I always appreciated him being one of the very few people to take the time to push past the rumors and innuendo and actually look at what was there.

Enough about the past. I’m excited to see the path AVS is on now, and wish everyone involved the best of luck.

I Can’t Hear You

Sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been swamped with work, and I also have a double ear infection that has been blocking up my ability to hear. As far as I know it’s the first ear infection I’ve ever had in my life, and I’m not a fan. I got up early to get a good start on the day… and it didn’t quite work out. Since my entire office looks worse than my desk did last June I think I’m going to try cleaning. I’ve been stepping over piles of stuff to get to my desk for so long I can’t remember when I last saw the floor.

Whoops

So I ended up not working out a writing plan yesterday. I tried doing it this morning, but stopped when I had twenty minutes left and just started a short story based on a Freemind file I did last July. I wrote for fifteen minutes, which is better than nothing. So the current plan is to finish this story, then write another. We’ll see where that takes me.

Back to Writing (Now Where’s my Pencil?)

Things have (mostly) settled down around here. I’m ready to jump back into writing (hopefully) starting tomorrow, but I’m a bit stuck for what to do now. The original plan called for doing some work on another project before diving into revisions on Miracles. I had a list of things to do before the revisions, but it sort of called for me to be done with them by now. None of that happened so I can either start that list now, or skip it and start revisions. I need to make some sort of plan or I’ll use my writing time failing to decide where to start.

Life on Hold

I mentioned before that we were all not feeling very well. I’m mostly better, and so are the kids (Rachel a little more so, Vanessa a little less). Denise, on the other hand, is about the same, and it looks like she’ll stay that way for a while yet. So everything (including the writing) is on hold until things settle down. After having a crazy, exhausting week last week, this one is a lot closer to normal, but not quite there yet. I’m itching to get started on a number of things, but family comes first.