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HTC Evo & Apple iPhone

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I’ve had an iPhone 3g for just over 1.5 years now, and I LOVE IT!   I’ve also had the Samsung Instinct as a work phone for the past 2 years, and it’s been pretty meh.   Today, our new work phones arrived, the new HTC Evo, the worlds first 4G smartphone blah blah marketingspeak.

All I can say is this thing is HUGE!  And when I turned it on, it’s got a nice, crisp, hi-res display and it looks fantastic.  I can’t wait to get it activated and start playing with it.  I primarily use my iPhone for personal, but I use the email / web features of it for work because it was so much better than the instinct.  I might actually start using my work phone for work (email/web) as well as personal.

Here is a picture of the phones side by side while I wait for the new phone to activate…

Tools a Project Manager can’t live without

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As a project manager for a software development team, there are several tools that I can’t live without.   Whether your development team contains 2 people or 200, these are tools that should be in every development toolbox.

Code Versioning

Is versioning even a word?  In any case, any development team, whether working on a grand scale project for NASA, or a simple website for your mothe’s friends neices husbands business, keeping track of changes within the code is a MUST.  There are several different methods for version tracking within your codebase.  One is to always save your file with a different name.  But most people nowdays make use of Subversion.

We use subversion for our code repository, and it has made things so much better in terms of day-to-day workflow.  When we started our project, it was just one developer working, soon we added another developer, and things got sticky.  Our code management system was FTP, and our developers both connected to the production server to make changes directly to files.  Sometimes both developers would have the same file open, and one would overwrite the others changes.

Needless to say, we had problems, and it was frustrating, and a very bad way of managing a project. Even though I enjoy learning new technologies, and configuring servers, I needed a pain-free way to quickly and rapidly get a versioning system online and in use.  That is where Jumpbox’s Trac system came to save the day.  A quick download, simple configuration, and we were up and running with subversion and trac that afternoon.

Issue Management & Bugtracking

So now we have a code repository, but we don’t have a way to track issues, bugs and tasks.  (Well, trac has a built in system, but it’s pretty clunky and didn’t meet our needs).

Everything in our project to-do list was up in my head, and our roadmap existed in various versions on the whiteboard in my office.  Bugs were sometimes fixed as they were found (if found by a developer), or were lived with until they were fixed.  Email and instant messenger were the means to communicate tasks and feature requests for the application.

Things were pretty disorganized and I became frustrated as I was repeating myself and doing things multiple times between my whiteboard, emails, IMs, and various conversations with my development team.  We needed a management system desperately, and that is where Redmine came to save the day.  Redmine is a simple project/task management system.  We were able to input bugs into the system, create new tasks, assign issues to upcoming versions, and finally have a comprehensive roadmap for where we were heading.

Since Redmine is a Ruby on Rails app, and we are a PHP development shop, I didn’t want to have to mess around with a RoR platform.  Thankfully, there was the Redmine Bitnami Stack. This allowed me to quick set up a Virtual Machine and install the bitnami redmine, and that same afternoon we had an issue management app up and running.

Now whenever my developers and I have a brainstorming session for features, each idea gets added as a feature request, and assigned to a “very far in the future” version.  We then reveiew feature requests and re-assign them to upcoming releases.  We also set up an email box that redmine monitors for new bug requests.  So our users can simply shoot an email (or the system can send an email if it detects an error anywhere) and we now have an active growing to-do list.

And Finally…

With a good code versioning system, and an issue/task management system, the only other thing a good project manager can’t live without… is good developers!

Back on the Fire

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Well, I arrived back on the scene of the Cavity Lake forest fire today. After driving all day yesterday to get back from AdTech in Chicago, it feels good to no longer be in a car, even though it’s 85 degrees out. While I was gone, Jay added the directional antennas to the towers, so we’re getting 87% signal strength at the basecamp now, so the directionals are helping quite a bit.

While I was in Chicago, there was a changeout of some of the crews that were reaching the end of their 14 day rotation. Now there are crews from NY, CA, and other far reaching places, so it’s neet meeting and talking to these people, many of which this is their first time in northern Minnesota.

Well, even though I’m at the fire, it doesn’t mean that there is a shortage of work for me to do. Especially after everything that went on at AdTech, I now have enough work to keep me busy for a couple months, so my time is spent keeping the Mesh Network working, and getting things in line for Wi-Fi Guys, and our new project.

From AdTech:

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So Tom, Chris, Eric and I have spent the past 2 days running around Chicago to their hotels, converting them to the new Radius platform, as well as getting the ads set up on the redirect pages. In the middle of all this, we have spent a majority of time at AdTech. So far, the show has been very good, very insightful, and now we have a good contact list of people / businesses to partner with for this upcoming ad project.

Going to Chicago

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It’s been a week since I arrived at the Cavity Lake forest fire incident, but today I needed to leave to go to Chicago for an Ad-Tech conference. I’m going down there with Wi-Fi Guys, another one of my clients, because it ties in well with a project that we are working on that deals with advertising/marketing.

So last night, after finishing up at the basecamp around 2200, I packed up and drove back to Duluth, arriving at 0130. I woke up this morning around 0730, went to walmart to pick up some stuff for the Chicago trip, and am now at my office getting things in order here. I’m going to meet Chris and Tom at my place around 1030. We’ll drive down today, and drive back on Wednesday. Then Thursday morning I get to drive back up the Gunflint Trail to the incident again, and stay for the remainder of the fire, which will probably burn until the end of August, lest mother nature put it out with a good rain.

I don’t think that I’ve eaten healthier, or felt better in the past few years, than I have this past week. Living and working on a forest fire crew has been a great experience. I havent had pop in over a week, drinking TONS of water, and eating large, hearty, well balanced meals. Sure, I’m tired and exhausted, but I’d rather fall asleep tired, than lay in bed wide awake, just because it’s time to go to sleep, when I’m not tired.

I’m thinking long and hard about taking the 4-day class to get my base certification for forest fire fighting. Then I’ll be a little more qualified to walk around camp, as well as know what to do and what not to do should the fire suddenly spread and overtake the camp. If I were to stop doing my business, I would most probably go and train to be a fire fighter (structure fire) and then do wildland/forest fires in the summertime. Although, I foresee continuing to do the Tactical Satellite stuff for a long while yet.

5 Cups of coffee

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5 cups of coffee is what it took to get me going this morning. Last night we were back in a cabin, but I was so tired last night, that I passed out, and woke up in the same position I fell asleep in (I normally roll around a bit). So today I woke up with a stiff neck because I wasn’t in the best position when I fell asleep.

Today, the basecamp is transitioning from a Type 2 command team to a Type 1 team. This is due to the complexity of the fire, *not* due to any deficiency in the existing team. The current team has been doing a fantastic job, but with the size of the fire, the number of people involved, and the fact that the fire is pushing the Canadian border, a Type 1 team is recommended.

Along with the transition, the basecamp is moving down the road to a patch of land the county cleared off. So that means that Jay and I get to go place Mesh repeaters to feed the new camp with internet and phones. Perhaps today we’ll get to trek out on some ridges to deploy the masts.

Yesterday, the National Guard showed up with a blackhawk, and I got some pictures of it, along with a video clip of it taking off. Here they are:

Blackhawk takeoff
Blackhawk approach

The power of Raid

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So the other week I was in the datacenter doing a routine check on one of our servers, and I noticed that Chimera (our MySQL server) had a blinking orange light on it, and it was making this *beep beep beep* noise.  Great!   The Raid array has failed, or possibly the hard drive.

Well it doesn’t really matter now, because I’m at the datacenter again preparing to fix this problem.

Thankfully, we use RAID.  RAID stands for a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (some claim the I stands for independent).  In particular, this server runs RAID 1, or mirroring.  That means that it has 2 hard drives, and one mirrors the other in real time, so both drives contain the exact same data.

This is a good thing, because in the case that the hard drive is actually bad, I just call up Dell, they send me a new hard drive, and I re-image the array off the good disk.  But hopefully the case is that the array just broke it’s sync, and I just need to rebuild it.  In any case, it means I have to take our database server offline to do this process, which means thousands of databases for our shared hosting customers are going to be offline for a wee bit.

I feel really bad about this, because it means that they will have an interruption of service, but then again, they are only paying $10/mo to share a server cluster with hundreds of other customers.  This kind of stuff comes with the territory.  Unlike our major dedicated server customers who have their own database servers and redunant load balancers etc.  Then again, they are paying hundreds of dollars per month for the assurance that they will not have an outage.

This is a little off topic, but as I’m sitting in the datacenter here backing up the server before this process (in case we need to do a bare-bones re-install), a centipede like bug just ran across the floor from under the rack.  I think I need to tell the DC techs that there are bugs in the datacenter.

Anyways, the main point of this little tirade is that any reputable web host will have redundancy built into their system for cases like this.  Modern hardware and computer equipment is not infallible, rather it is quite fallible and will break or fail at some point.  The key is to know what you are going to do when it happens, and what you are going to do to minimize the situation with pre-planning.

Possibly deployment any time now

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I just got a call from Jay, one of my clients, that we built a rapid deployable emercency communications system for.  It looks like there is a 90% probability of being called out to deployment within the next few days.  If we are deployed, it means I get to pack my bags and head to Wyoming.  So right now I’m scrambling to make sure everything is all set with the system so we can get out there and it works.

I’m excited about this, I had a blast last summer when we deployed the system at the Alpine Lake fire, so I’m looking forward to this now.  The only downfall is that my friend Will is getting married the 24th of June, and I wanted to go to his wedding.  It also means that I’ll be away from Melanie and my son for a while.

On my to-do list.

  • Complete the startup page for the system’s intranet
  • Make sure all components in the system are functional
  • Do laundry, pack a suitcase
  • Reconcile my bank statements and get as caught up in my billing as possible
  • Quick test my remote access capabilities to the office, so I can still get work done on the road.  (Remote desktop is going to be a pain through the satellite)
  • Pick up another TV series on DVD to watch

Well, back to work!