Is cron really meeting your scheduling needs?

The folks over at Airbnb were frustrated with how good old cron was not really managing their scheduled jobs.  To limit the frustration they built Chronos.  This week they decided to open source it.  It's built on a Java project from the Apache Project Incubator called Mesos and Maven as the backend.

For those who haven't used it cron is about the simplest scheduling you can do.  Cron works great for kicking off things like backups and basic reporting.  Where cron starts to fail is when you want to do complex jobs that know to start things on a previous jobs success or manage the number of jobs that are running.  The logging and reporting of cron failures is generally pretty rough.  So facing these issues the team decided to write their own replacement.  They additionally needed it to be able to run on multiple machines. 

They started building the system, simple and with functional GUI to make management and reporting easier.  To be redundant a server is chosen to be the "Leader" which keeps track and hands out work to through their API.  If you do connect to a machine that isn't the "Leader" your request is redirected to the "Leader".  If the "Leader" goes down a new "Leader" is elected.  The jobs can have defences and can be run in parallel.  The jobs themselves are written in interrupted BASH Shell commands.  It tries it's best to be flexible and not overly complicated.

If you are looking for a package to manage distributed schedules this one is defiantly worth a look.  Here you can find a good demo talk about how they got to where they are. There are closed source options but they tend to be very complex.  So this is a really nice addition to the open source world.

How to get a Linux Job in 30 days or less!!!

First of all let me state that I am not a recruiter, job search expert or in any way in the field of Human Relations.  What follows is information I use and if you try these I can make no guarantee about your chances of success.  All I now is that they work for me.  They should work for you but everyone will need to figure out how to tweak them for their own career path.

Photo Taken by Nanagyei

Over the last thirty days I have received no less than two phone calls every business day and over 120 E-mails about jobs.  Are they all great quality contacts?  Nope, about 60% of them I deleted right away.  They were either situations or positions I was not qualified for,  things that don’t use my talents, or things I was not interested in doing.  The next 20% required me to relocate to where the job was, which is something I cannot presently do.  So that leaves me with 20% of the people contacting me with viable jobs within North-East Ohio.  I then add to that the companies I actively want to work for or jobs I thought would be great that I applied for directly without someone contacting me.

I have done basically the same things I list here for most of my career.  Even when I was a consultant, I applied the same rules and techniques with similar results.  When I was consulting I generally had 30 day notice clauses for ending my employment.  The contracts I did running less than 3 months generally wouldn’t accept that clause but some of them did.  The only exception was an 18 month period right after the .com bubble burst.  I picked up random odd jobs that kept my head above water but at times I had to wait more than 30 days for things to work out.  What I have below is an example of what I have done for the last 6 weeks.

On December 15, 2012 at 10:30 in the morning, I was summoned to the Presidents office for a meeting with him and my boss.  The company I worked for was small so I wouldn’t normally have thought twice about it if my boss hadn’t been acting strange when he asked me to come with him.  Within a few moments it was over.  Much like ripping off a band aide, I was unemployed.  Well, I would be as of December 28, 2012.  I can’t say I was surprised, but the details of why are a tail for another time.

So at this point what did I do?   I started making phone calls and sending text messages to everyone I had ever worked with.  Then I touched up my resume and updated it on Dice and Monster.  I did not post or make it searchable but more on that later.  I also logged into Linked-in and made sure my job history was updated.  Being two weeks before the end of year holidays and when most enterprise shops are down to skeleton crews, I knew there wasn’t much else to do.  So I put the problem as far out of my mind as my mind would allow and did my best to enjoy the holidays with my family.

First Tip:
I don’t ignore anyone who calls or writes me.  I respond to everyone with something.  When it’s something I am not qualified for I simply tell them so.  My most common request was for Java Developer positions.  While I can write Java code, it’s not something I excel at or something I am eager to get better at.  I like tuning Java systems, building out automated operational system deploys and developing overall infrastructure architectures.  It’s what I have worked hard to learn and hone as a skill.  It’s also something I know I need to keep up with or I will start to lose it.  So I politely tell them it’s not for me and that I will forward it on to my network of friends who might be interested, which I do.  This tip is important because the people that don’t send me automated messages will appreciate it and try to send me things more suited to my talents, which they normally do within the next couple of weeks.

January 1, 2013
This is when the real work began.  Until this point the only return calls or interest I received was from the hand full of friends whose companies had openings when I called them.  There was a lot of talk about giving me a job but at this time no contracts were signed or job offers on the table.  So, I acted like I had nothing and didn’t let myself think that they might work out.  This is something I have learned to do until I have a signed contract.  I do not stop looking for work.  

In December when I lost my job I updated my resume but didn’t make searchable.  This was done for a reason.  Now that everyone is back at work or will be in the morning, I want my resumes to be on the top of their list.  So I make them searchable.  Since it’s been activated within the last 24 hours it looks fresh and when they are sorting newest to oldest I will be on top.  The people combing Dice and Monster don’t want to look at two week old resume’s.  They want the hot fresh new ones.

Second Tip:
Update something about your resume every two weeks.  Seriously changing a single word is all it takes.  This is something simple that works because computers are basically dumb and only see a change as a change.  On Dice I actually have two almost identical resume’s stored and flip between them every two weeks.  This keeps my resume in peoples search streams which hopefully will improve my chances.  When I do this trick I see at least a 1 week spike in inquiries from it every update.

Ok, my resume is now out there, why are people going to see it?  I have been tweaking the look and feel of my resume for years.  I have been doing search engine optimizations on it during the whole time.  I try to keep up by adding new buzz words and limiting old ones.  For instance, on the latest ones I changed my comments about my VMWare experience to reference that I had cloud experience.  It adds a few words I need to get a few more hits.  The HR departments and headhunters looking for resume’s aren’t generally technical.  They have a list of requirements given to them and they start looking for people who meet those requirements.  

This is why I receive several emails almost daily telling me that someone thinks I should develop Java applications.  My resume is full of Java related technology like WebSphere, Tomcat, and various other applications.  It’s true I do have a lot of experience with Java.  The problem for them is that my experience is with pointing to the problems with the Java code and not actually fixing it.  I have more than once been forced to go find and point out where the problem with the code is.  But I am a dev/ops person, not a straight up developer.

I have been on both sides of the interview process.  Listening to how my team perceived candidates based solely on their resumes taught me to keep it all real but meaty.  If you did a deployment/roll-out for a technology say that.  But unless you then worked on it for years afterwards you will not be an expert, so don’t stretch the truth too far.  Remember that your resume is not the sales pitch to get you hired.  It has to get you past the HR person and whoever is filtering the resumes before the interview even begins.  

Third Tip:
Just like making your website searchable, having the proper keywords in your resume is extremely important to the quantity and quality of inquires you will receive.  If you want to move towards a specific area, focus on increasing the buzz words in that area of your resume.  Figure out which jobs you enjoyed most and if it was working with a specific technology.  Focus on adding as many of those keywords as you can.  Also, make sure that the sentences all read properly.  Your goal is not to scam the people reading the resume and if you try that,  it will fail when they do the first interview.  In some companies, you will even get put on a do not call list of sorts for doing things like trying to mislead or scam them.  

So what’s next?  Normally, I start getting calls the first week.  Currently it takes about one to two  weeks to get an interview.  When I get turned down before the first interview, I try to write back and ask why I was not qualified for the position. I then either fix my resume to fill the missing area they were looking for if i have the experience.  If I don’t have the experience I try to focus on jobs that will let me get it.   If I feel I did have the specific kind of experience mentioned in the response I look at my resume and try to figure out why that didn’t come across properly.  I very often ask friends to look at those sections and tell me what they think it says about me.  Some of the best people for looking at these things are managers I  have worked for in the past.  As long as you aren’t annoying about it, I have generally found that people are willing to spend a half hour looking at your resume.  Normally they read a lot of resumes and can point out things that make them drop people.  These are all things that you can use as feedback and help you keep updating every two weeks.

Next time, I will write up how to handle doing technical and interpersonal interviews.  If you have any additional resume job seeking tips please share them here or on the forum.  I will do my best to help anyone who asks.  If I can’t answer it, I will find you someone who can. :)

One prediction from year end podcast coming true!

I'm sure many people will say this might have been an easy one to call.  Now I cannot say that my prediction is 100% yet as we don't know what distro they will be using, but I think I am going to be pretty close with what I said from reading this story:

Linux in your living room

From reading the article, I may have only been touching the surface on what Steam has planned for your living room.  So while this may not be the year Linux takes over the desktop, I think we may be able to say it is invading your living room.

How to check for a mouse and disable the trackpad

So I love my new massive desktop replacement of a laptop.  It’s fast, has plenty of RAM (for now at least), and plenty of Cores.  But it suffers from some of the same old issues every other laptop with a touchpad causes me.  When typing, it occasionally causes my cursor to end up in really strange places on my screen which results in messed up words or variable names.  On my MacBook Pro and in Windows I could disable the touchpad as soon as a mouse was connected.  I spent days trying to find the same settings on Linux and then ran across a few articles written by people who just wanted to turn off the trackpad for good.  That sounds good until you forget your mouse at home.  So I decided I needed to write my own script.  In a mere 38 lines(without comments) I came up with a script that looked to see if my mouse was connected and if so disable the trackpad.  If the mouse disappears or is removed the trackpad is re-enabled within 30 second.  If you want to use this script you will want to do a few things first:

1. remove your mouse
2. run “xinput list” determine what the system thinks your trackpad is called 
3. plug-in the external mouse/pointer
4. run “xinput list” again and determine what the system thinks it’s name is

My trackpad comes up as a ALPS GlidePoint.  If yours is different, which it likely will be, then you need to replace ‘ALPS GlidePoint’ in line 5 with the name of your trackpad.  If it is the same name then you don’t have to do anything with line 5.

My mouse comes up as ‘Logitech USB Receiver’ cause that sounds like a mouse right?  Well it is really the name of the wireless receiver for my mouse.  I shorted the name to just ‘USB Receiver’ in the hopes that any future wireless mice I may buy will use that part of the same name.  (Yeah I know there is about a 0% chance of that happening but I can dream can’t I?)  If yours is different, which like above it likely probably be, replace ‘USB Receiver’ in line 6 below.  If it’s the same then you don’t have to do anything with line 6.

The complete script can be found at this link.

One thing I did above that you may want to try in your scripts was to use the logger command instead of echo.  Logger uses the syslog subsystem and lets you write whatever you want to the default log for syslog.  Where to write is of course configurable if you need it to go somewhere else.  A word of warning though, logger will not move on if there is nothing to log.  It freezes and waits for you.  So like I did above, check to see if there is something in the variable before using it with logger.  Logger is available on most *nix versions.  If it’s missing you can normally find it as part of a syslog related package.

Episode 79 - Predictions for the new year...

1) Introduction

This is our annual predictions episode.  We will start new shows in two weeks.

2) News

Not the year of the Linux Desktop - Brian
Linux will make it’s way into your living room - Joe
We will either Fix X11 or replace it this year - Corey
Joe installs windows 8 and doesn’t like it!
Review of last years predictions We didn’t even do that bad.

3) Conclusion

Recommendations for People to interview
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