Wednesday, August 16, 2006

The REST of the Story...

Brought forward from the Comments to “Rain!”...

(Steve from) Fix4RSO said...

Kermie in the windscreen!!!

Gotta geek out on ya for a sec. All our systems in our SQA Lab (software quality assurance lab) are named after things. A meme I am sure you are familiar with, Buck? So, here's the breakdown:

RedHat Linux == muppets
Win2k/2k3/XP == computers
Sun Solaris == Buckaroo Bonzai "john"
IBM/AIX == more Bonzai "johns"

It really cracks me up when "corporate types" have to get a briefing and my VP says something like, "So, kermit is hooked up to piggy, with gonzo and zoot providing the middleware ..."

So, when they need info on the Solaris platform mixed with some PCs running Win, "For the hub bigboote is supported by smallberries and the GUI is found on VGER."

Seeing kermie, I just laughed ... ;)

And I replied:

Steve sez: Gotta geek out on ya for a sec. All our systems in our SQA Lab (software quality assurance lab) are named after things.

And I'll geek right back!! My database servers in Rochester were named "Fatman" and "Little Boy." I know all about geeky!

And... Kermit was a corporate hand-out from EDS. We had four "frameworks" on the Xerox account: compute (mainframe/legacy stuff), telecomm, applications, and "infrastructure," which was the desktop environment, its associated processes (change management, problem management, etc.) and the supporting architecture, primarily e-mail, network naming and addressing, etc. The "environment" was global, broken down into regions: i.e., North America, Asia, Europe, and South America. I worked in infrastructure.

So anyhoo...each framework was evaluated by the client (Xerox) on a "Red-Yellow-Green" basis, monthly. Infrastructure was either Red or Yellow, but never Green, for the first TWO YEARS of the contract. The situation sucked, to say the least -- I'll not go into details, but it wasn't all EDS' fault. Two-plus years into the contract, infrastructure finally went "green" and stayed there for three months, which was a contractual hurdle we had to overcome. After we made it we threw a BIG-ASS party in Rochester, and all the infrastructure folks were gifted with those little Kermie dolls, with a card that said "It's good to be Green!" And that's how Kermie came to live with me...I put him on the 'Vette rear-view that very day.

Paul Harvey Voice
And now you know the rest of the story!
/Paul Harvey Voice

4 comments:

  1. Great stories, but serious nerd talk!

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  2. Geeky but funny.

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  3. fatman and little boy!?

    DUDE - at least I chose MUPPETS!!!

    ;)

    You got that geek thang down pat, man! It's a good thing most people using your systems had NO IDEA what those names are all about. :)

    Plus, I thought you were gonna swerve off into a "kermit" discussion regarding remotely logging in to another system (there's some unix-ee stuff for y'all!). To think kermit and elm/pine/mail were my life-blood!

    So, you wander into SLOs and uptime? Yikes, that's definitely no fun ... we used to call all that SLO/SLA stuff the LifeSavers short pack! :)

    Hey, so, how much fun was it trying to explain X Windows idioms to your friends, neighbors, and BOSSES?!?!?! "So, no, the (x)server is not in charge, the (x)client is doing the work for you - delivery it to the server. Get it ... ???"

    Those were the days ...

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  4. Steve sez: It's a good thing most people using your systems had NO IDEA what those names are all about. :)

    Oh, but they DID (know)! Thse servers were for "internal use only," i.e., never used at all by the client, only by my group. But, as you know, the aliases did appear on the network. I got a few comments about that, and there was some discussion between senior management and myself as to whther the boxes should be renamed (or not). I prevailed...

    And...SLAs were my LIFE, professionally speaking, of course!

    :-)

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