Dan Makovec’s blog

Selling Cars

Recently we launched our online Cars portal, and so far it’s been reasonably successful at attracting private sellers due to its relatively cheap pricing, array of payment options and seller features when compared with its competitors.  As with any new commercial site, we’ve faced a chicken and egg situation.  You need visitors to make a site attractive enough for sellers to advertise, but you need enough stock from sellers in order to attract visitors.

The powers that be, until recently, have been advocating an “organic” approach to developing the site’s business.  Indeed, “if you build it, they will come” has been a bit of a mantra around here since long before I joined.  Fortunately though, that has changed somewhat in recent months.  In one month, we’ve doubled the amount of stock advertised on the site, and we’ve started promoting the site via both traditional media and Google AdWords.

I wouldn’t say that traffic has shot up, but it’s increased steadily.Our analytics system tells us that users are spending more time on the site compared to before, and our sign-up rates have increased dramatically as I’ve made little tweaks to the system’s software to iron out kinks and bottlenecks.

As of today, we launched the first round of our dealers listings section - something which dramatically increases the attractiveness of the site to potential shoppers.  We’ve also outsourced the site’s look and feel re-design to some experts in the field (the current design has proven that I’m no HTML artist) to give it a more polished look and improve its SEO.   The redesign is coming along and we’re hoping to have it up in the next couple of weeks.

Also coming along is the part of the system that most excites me.  With the majority of the classifieds functionality live, we’re expanding Cars.com.au out to become Australia’s premier motoring portal.  We’ve got some partnerships with content providers signed up, and we’re working on the content management system at the moment.  I can’t say too much at the moment, but when that part of the site goes live, we’ll have a really useful motoring site ready for the Australian mass market unlike anything that’s out there at the moment.

Fun times ahead! 

Back in Sydney

Well, I’m stuck here for a week, and once again, Sydney has turned on the charm.

We have the wet weather, the grumpy check-in bitch clerk, and the Pakistani taxi driver who told me that all gays will burn in hell and he’d like to personally cut all their throats as soon as I mentioned that I used to live in Newtown.

I’m theoretically here until Friday, working night shift down in the datacentre for the next couple of days. With any luck though, I’ll get my stuff done sooner and get back on a plane a day or so early. Fingers crossed!

Just moved to DreamHost

TCH’s comparatively miniscule storage quota was getting on my nerves, particularly with my IMAP addiction.  So I’ve moved to DreamHost, where the hosting’s cheap and the storage and bandwidth abound.Actually, I moved my mail across to DH a couple of months ago.  I just moved my web across this evening so that I can finally give TCH the flick (as soon as the DNS updates, which I’m hosting at E-Info, propagate).It also gave me a chance to install Joomla and a couple of other pieces of software I’m investigating for work.  An interesting afternoon’s research. 

My next phone

Well, the old ten quid SE T630’s starting to get a bit long in the tooth. It’s all scratched up, and while the battery life is still reasonable, it ain’t what it used to be. The buttons usually work, but not always. The camera is completely useless (and always has been). It’s time to upgrade.

But what to get? With my current position at E-Info requiring that I be connected, or at least connectable, at all times, it’s time to think about getting more out of a phone than plain old GSM voice. I want a data connection and VPN capabilities which let me remotely access my network in an emergency while on the road. I want the ability to make cheap calls with VoIP, or have my VoIP number directed to my mobile at no additional cost. Hell, I even want to be able to check my email and web sites from a Hotspot-enabled cafe without having to lug my Powerbook around.

While this may sound like a bit of a wank, the number of times where I’ve been caught out through not having a computer handy in previous jobs, combined with the increased risks of being disconnected in my role now mean that I have to think about getting a decent, easy to carry around computer solution.

Enter the Sony Ericsson P990i. This baby was announced a year ago, and it’s finally coming out next month. It’s been a long time coming, but this promises to be the ultimate communications device (at least until the next one comes along anyway) for a tosser IT professional like me. It has VPN, wifi, bluetooth, touch screen, a full qwerty keyboard and a serious suite of applications that should keep me happy for quite a while.

I reckon it’s going to cost about $1500 by the time it makes it down here - demand alone will keep the price up. Looking at the current smart phone market, carriers in Australia don’t seem to want to subsidize these babies as much as they will, say a N80 or RAZR, so I’m probably going to get stuck paying close to full price for it. But if it gives me the ability to bugger off to the beach knowing that I can handle a network fault on location should I receive that dreaded call from home base, I reckon it’ll be worth it.

In Adelaide

I’m down in Adelaide for my grandmother’s 80th, and apart from the party and a couple of outings, it’s pretty much been business a usual - have laptop, will work.

Well, except that problem number one is no broadband. Not such an issue for my folks because they’ve never had it and in their words haven’t used the computer that much. I can see however that their usage has been growing and that they’re being seriously held back because of the unusable speed of a dialup link (imagine having to wait 4 hours for OpenOffice to download as we did the other night, or having basic services like yellow pages, maps and even email simply not work or at best allow time for a coffee between mouse clicks).

I’m doing my best to convince them of the benefits of going broadband - last time I was down I even did a spreadsheet for them for calculating how much they’d actually *save* by going to broadband by virtue of rerouting all of their timed voice calls through VOIP (at worst case with all things included it would have worked out the same cost as their current setup, at best they could have saved $50 a quarter). But I’ve since given up, knowing from my grandparents that stubborness and reluctance to accept change is a part of my family’s genetic makeup that I’m sure to inherit over the next few years.

For me, no broadband is making work extremely difficult - ssh tunnels to our servers are extremely slow, accessing reference material impossible, and retrieval of my 200+ daily emails tedious.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that as you get older either your tolerance to cold increases immeasurably, or your power of denial over the fact that you’re freezing takes hold of your other senses. As you can see from the current temperature, I won’t be going swimming any time soon. Still, the folks decide to leave the doors and windows open to “freshen up” the house.

Now, 14 degrees c may be a lovely temperature while renovating, welding, landscaping moving furniture, but it is NOT a great temperature to sit in front of a computer for 4 hours straight attempting to type. Fully dressed with thick socks, shoes and a jacket, I lost sensation in my fingers and toes after the first hour. Now that everybody’s gone out, the doors and windows are shut and the heater is on just to make typing bearable.

Maybe I’m just a wuss, but I’m sure there’s a reason that most offices are heated to at least 21 degrees. I thought Sydney was getting chilly until I made it down here.

Itty bitty days

It’s one of those days today. Lots of little tiny jobs that keep popping up and getting in the way of my main goals. Plus a tonne of admin work. I hate these sort of days - they’re so unsatisfying!

Tomorrow I’m off early, hopping on a plane to Adelaide at 6.45pm for 4 days alone with family and old friends. It’ll be great to have a break. I can’t wait!

Feeling like a manager

It’s just about to turn 7am, and we’re finishing up maintenance work that began at 04:00. I hate these early mornings, but at the same time I’m the one who’s scheduling them. The idea is that we bring in a bunch of guys from the ops department and teach them how to perform the procedures, both by demonstration and written instructions. We repeat each procedure at least once, updating the docs each time to get them as accurate as possible.

By the time everybody’s happy with the docs, we give custody of them to the ops guys and from then on the procedure is their responsibility and not ours as developers. The aim is to free up developer time to actually do development rather than maintenance. This is a new concept for the company - we’ve only started doing this in the past month. Consequently I’ve already had quite a few early starts and a couple more to go.

The hard part for me is stepping back and taking a managerial rather than technical role. As problems occur, I need to let the guys sort them out and just ensure that solutions are found rather than solving them myself. Looking back at some of my managers in previous jobs, I recall gloating quietly to myself about my superior technical knowledge compared with theirs. Indeed, managers subconsciously became somewhat of a target of ridicule, because they were just so damn *thick*. I mean, how could anybody not understand the concept of a buffer overrun in C code, or a faulty ARP table entry? Sheesh!

Now I’m starting to see myself in the same light. The guys I’m working with are good, and their problem solving skills impressive. They leave me beginning to feel a little bit like the dumb bunny that I always saw my managers as. Not that I mind any more - I’m spending less and less time pouring over code now and more time thinking about architectural and design issues, as well as actually *how* to get the work done. It’s a quantum leap in my way of thinking. I just wonder if the guys working under me are starting to see me in the same way I used to see my bosses - just another PHB who doesn’t get it
Now I’m sitting up on the 21st floor watching a spectacular sunrise over Sydney’s CBD. Such amazing colors of orange, red and green. Maybe the early mornings aren’t all bad.

Stressed

I’m feeling like crap tonight. Work’s definitely getting me down. I’ve got one group who scapegoat my team for everything that goes wrong - even when it’s their own fault. I’ve got another group who are either incompetent, bone idle lazy or both. Responsibilities coming out of my arse and no resources to deal with them. I have work going back to last September and stretching forward to next July to try to squeeze in. And to top it all off I’m having to get up extra early - 5am last Friday and tomorrow, 4am Thursday and next Tuesday - to finish off a job that my predecessor started 7 months ago and never finished.

My sleeping patterns are completely fucked up. I’m having to use ear plugs to sleep because the slightest noise from the road, a dripping tap or Brian rolling over wakes me up. During the day I feel completely lethargic. If I have coffee I’m edgy and scatter-brained. If I don’t I’m sleepy and have a tendency to sit staring into space.

90% of my time is spent thinking about problems at work and how to solve them - whether I’m staring blankly at the TV, pumping iron, eating, showering or shitting. The other 10% of my time is spent wondering why my quality of life is the worst I can remember despite having more money than I’ve ever had before.

Every time I see a beggar in the street, I just want to kick the shit out of them. I’m more cynical than ever about people and the world, and my thoughts are getting darker each day.

I came home early from the gym tonight simply because I couldn’t get into it. Not because I was tired or puffing, but because I couldn’t concentrate on what I was doing, so just gave up.

This can’t be right. I need a vacation or something. I’m not expecting any sympathy from work. The main jack-of-all-trades has just left for a 4 week European vacation, and my boss is off to the snow for a fortnight starting next week.

Brian and I went to Canberra on the weekend. We were sitting in a cafe on King Street on Saturday afternoon, waiting 45 minutes for our breakfast (some scrambled eggs and toast), wondering why life felt like shit. I pulled out my phone, ordered a rental car and a hotel room, and an hour later we took off on a 285km trip south to our nation’s capital. For the first time in months I felt alive - doing something spontaneous, not linked to work or the regular routine that has become our life. We stayed overnight, ate out and hit a club, then toured Parliament House, the city and Telstra Tower the next day before getting back in the car and returning to Sydney that night. That was a great break. I only wish we’d done it on Friday night and had a whole two days away. Maybe I’d be feeling better now.

I’m off to Adelaide for a long weekend on the 21st. Don’t know what I’m going to do until then.

Time to play with LDAP

One of my big upcoming projects involves LDAP. Specifically, I’ll be investigating the possible use of a aystem for user authentication for Apache, account creation for Unix and Windows servers, Exchange mailboxes and corporate addressbooks, sudo user/role management, crontabs across multiple machines, VoIP PBX config and electronic badge setup, with a web interface for configuring the whole lot.

I’ve been up thinking about the best way to tie this together. Documentation on how to drive Active Directory/Exchange from LDAP is fairly thin on the ground, so I’m wondering if it’s done very much, and what features we’re cut off from by not using MS’s proprietary AD interface. Just about all of the other systems I’m looking at tying in have pretty decent docs on how to integrate with LDAP.

It’s just an evaluation at the moment. Whether it will be rolled out for real is up to the powers that be. But I’m quietly excited as I’ve been looking for an excuse to mess with LDAP for years now, and it looks like I’m finally getting my chance.

Shit. 2am. Must sleep!

So this is drowning

A bad day today. It started with the train running late and getting me into work at 9:20. By 9:35 we saw the first signs of a catestrophic server failure which, over the next few hours, resulted in enormous (by our standards) service disruptions which lasted for the next three hours. All our alerting and failover systems worked exactly as expected - the problem was that the issue that we experienced was never predicted, so by the time the systems kicked in the proverbial bodily waste was already impacting with the air projection unit.

The problem was made worse by the fact that the departments are organised in an intellectually top-heavy arrangement. That is, the front-line personnel responsible for day to day running of the systems concerned lack the problem solving skills to deal with what really amounts to a front-line problem. So instead the development team is called in to take care of what really should be a basic failover operation, without any of the staff who should have been there being present.

The problem goes back to the company’s origins in dot com mode. Procedures and lines of responsibility are still poorly defined, and consequently work is performed in and ad-hoc fashion by whomever is the fastest at solving the problem, regardless of whether the work is their responsibility or not. Consequently, knowledge doesn’t get disseminated, and we depend on the same people forever, despite the fact that they’ve moved on to other work within the company. The only time anybody learns the information (if we’re lucky) is during a handover when the old person responsible leaves the company.

One of the things I’m trying to achieve in my new role is formalisation of our procedures - including ones that should have been in place to handle today’s problem. The frustrating part is that we’re in a catch-22 of attempting to do this while continuously being interrupted by the sort of front-line problems that we’re trying to get a handle on.

Another of my frustrations is the fact that a colleague is drawing a lot of time away from essential work because they’re not coming up to speed with their own work, continually requiring more assistance than most people in their position for the amount of time that they have been there should require. I believe they’re transferring to another department this week so that at least should cease to be a problem soon.

We managed to get through our problems by the end of the day well enough, but I went home feeling wholly dissatisfied with my day.

I guess you can’t expect miracles overnight. This is going to take a while.