Before Night Falls

Wild Geese

In Chinese, geese are categorized as "yan" (who migrate) and "err" (who don't migrate, usually the livestock kind). I think the geese at Point Lobos have transformed themselves from "yan" to "err". They are here all year round and always keep on eating.

Untitled

One reason I pick up a camera and take photos is to record things I find fascinating but so often ignored by people. Dorothea Lange once said, "a camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera". It's the best advice I ever get on photography.

Mitty Claimed New Territory

One thing is for sure. Anything new in the house, your cat will notice. I left the shopping bag Chinchih gave me on the chair and Mitty immediately claimed her authority over it. Notice how the chair had been used by Mitty as her scratch post.

A Panorama View

Lovely Clouds

Who Spilled the Paint?

On A Cloudy Day

A cloudy day, the rocks of Point Lobos showed the incredible skin-like texture. Not that many people here today, so I ventureed out the beaten trail and took a closer look. The rose like green plants (don't know their name) had such beautiful red tips and looked like modern art installed purposely on the stone. I had to be careful not to step on any "baby" plants. They were so delicate!

Still Looking

Today is probably the first Friday that I could leave work early. I decided to make best use of the time to take some photos. It was too late to drive to Point Lobos or Half Moon Bay, but I still got ample time to photograph near the Bay. Remembering my own notes on using macro lens, I took out my rarely used 105mm Nikkor and headed toward the Bayfront park.

To my surprise, I found I had gotten used to the manual focus of Zeiss and didn't like the auto-focus Nikkor that much any more. I also noticed the legendary 105mm (I got the older version) did show its age. Its color was not as saturated as I remembered and the image seemed to be "flat" compared to the Zeiss. (Most likely the result of using a telephoto lens, or maybe I am just spoiled by the Zeiss.) Fortunately I didn't do much macro photography so I had no plan to upgrade my 105mm, but I could hardly wait to use my Zeiss lens again.

A Stroll Around the Bay

Still recovering from the hectic week, I spent the weekend watching Steven Soderbergh's "Che". I couldn't say I felt relaxed, because the last two hours of the film was a real struggle (both for the protagonist and for the viewer). Well, guess not everyone is cut to be a revolutionary.

Instead of going to Point Lobos, I took a stroll in the Bayfront Park. I noticed a lot of white shells scattered on the ground. They had very interesting patterns and I made a mental note to bring my macro lens next time. (The 50mm Zeiss Makro/Planar seemed to be a perfect fit for it.)

Playing Sherlock Holmes at Work

I have been an avid detective novel reader since childhood. The way a puzzling mystery can be solved easily by the detective through the power of deduction just fascinates me*. I never realized that can actually be an important trait for being a software engineer.

Couple of days ago, our VP of engineering asked our QA lead why the databases he provisioned all shutdown overnight. Was it because of some undiscovered bug? Was it a longevity issue? Did they test things overnight? Since I was responsible for that feature, our QA lead solicited my help to investigate.

Knowing that things wouldn't "just happen" (against the law of Physics), I decided that the shutdown could only happen if 1) it was issued from outside (by user or through a crown job), 2) it was triggered by some internal policy. I also remembered all the outside traffic was logged into our audit log files (since I wrote that module), so, if we couldn't find any logs about shutdown issued from outside, it would be an internal job (and I could transfer this issue to another engineer to investigate).

Sure enough, we found a few commands issued from outside to shutdown those databases in the log. Where were they from? Fortunately (actually it's by design), the source ip of the mysterious outside entity was logged, so we could tell the culprit's ip address. Our QA engineer, who was helping me investigating this issue, looked at it and immediately said: "It's from VPN".

We dug through our VPN log, trying to see who was the real originator of ip address. Unfortunately, our VPN log was not kept that long so we couldn't find it. Suddenly, I remembered our VPN software always assigned the same ip address to us when we used it. So we could actually just ask people to login to find that out. (We are a small company so it's not an issue to try this route.) By that time our QAs and I had started to suspect our VP of engineer was actually the culprit. Sure enough, his VPN ip indicated the commands were issued from his laptop and he "sheepishly" admitted he forgot he issued those commands before he went to sleep. Mystery solved.

So next time when you are interviewing candidates, ask them what they do for pastime. Their reading detective novels may tell you more about their debugging skill and ways of thinking than your standard interview questions.

P.S. I think every software developer should remember the Holmes rule while debugging: "once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, not matter how improbable, must be the truth".

*Naturally, you can tell I am a fan of the classical (so called "golden age") detective novels, which focused mostly on the puzzle solving. The newer, "modern" detective (or crime) novels, though claimed to have better writings, don't interest me that much.

Crazy Week

I hardly had enough time with my new Zeiss lens, and my plan of going out shooting last week was destroyed by the GA release of our product. I was fire fighting all over the weekend. To my surprise, I found I could actually do instant messaging with four people at the same time. Wow, I never knew I was this good at multitasking!

With things seem to slow down a bit, I hope I can have a break this weekend. After all, all work and no play make me a very cranky person.

P.S. my company had a group photo taken when I was on vacation a few weeks ago. Today they hung the enlarged photo on the wall and I noticed I was IN the photo. Guess what, our graphical designer photoshopped me in! I really don't know what to say.