Get Ethereal

At work we were having some interop problems between our server and some DSL devices. I wanted to get some packet traces to see what was going across the wire in both directions.

Needing some software for this, I Googled around a bit. There were some commercial products. Most of the commercial products were big elaborate network management suites. I just wanted to sniff some traffic between my PC and a device. Looking around a bit, I found Ethereal.

Ethereal is free to download. It did what I wanted, allowing me to analyze the traffic and get a nice detailed view of what was going on. I recommend Ethereal for packet sniffing analysis. Pretty good for free. The commercial products were starting around $995.

Ethereal is just one of many free and open source products I use all the time. Here are some others I use now or have used heavily in the past.

• Eclipse, plus a number of quality free plugins
  
• Python
• JBoss
• Emacs
• SgMibSpy
• PHP
• Tomcat
• Apache Web server
• All kinds of Apache Jakarta Commons Java libraries
• MySQL
• Ant
• Java JDK
• Linux
• Firefox
  

That's just off the top of my head.

What does it mean? Well in those areas above, it would be tough to sell me something when there is a quality alternative that I can download and use for free. Why pay $995 to sniff traffic when Ethereal is free? Why pay for a Java IDE when Eclipse is outstanding and free.

That's kind of the thing about open source. The stuff is great for a programmer as it makes your life so much easier and more productive. However, developing commercial software, you can see a potential threat to your company's area if a strong open source alternative was available. Where I'm at in consultingware, we tend to be industry specific, with services work with each sale. Since were not mass use general purpose we're probably not too threatened by open source at this time.

New CEO

We've hired a new CEO at work. Since I joined Core Networks in the summer of 2001, this is the fifth CEO I've had. We also preannounced this quarter. This is the third time in the last seven quarters we've preannounced. I don't think many people are expecting the new leader to just maintain the status quo.

In the nine years I've been in software, there's been some interesting times. I've been acquired three times. I've survived eight downsizings. I left a job on my own. I've been fortunate to not yet been downsized. I've also not yet been in an office or company that was shut down. So far so good.

As always I'm grateful to on the inside working in high tech. The pay and benefits are good. The coffee is free. The work can be challenging and interesting at times. The cubicles are comfortable. The office is climate controlled. The PC is fast and the monitor big.

The change is a fact of life in high tech. I sometimes miss the stability and continuity of PRIOR Data Sciences back on Spring Garden Road. It was civilized, things were done a certain way. Spring Garden Road was happening and downtown. Alas, PRIOR is no more.

I'm LinkedIn

I heard from a former coworker last week. She invited me to join her network on LinkedIn. It looked interesting and I respect her, so I joined. So now I'm LinkedIn, yay for me.

My network only contains the one person, so I should try to increase it I guess. I'm not sure who I should ask to join. It would be a good time to try to find some of my old TUNS (now DalTech) fellow students and find out how they are doing. Back then around 1/2 the TUNS CS Class of 1997 joined Nortel, who I'm sure would have hired the other half too if we'd wanted to join. I wonder what became of them. At least of some of them are likely still there, but certainly not all of them.


My friend's network was interesting. She has around 12 people. Some of the names I recognized as people I'd worked with before. One guy I knew from St. Mary's and TUNS. Some of the others were well known players in the local startup scene. It was pretty good company to be in, so it's nice to be remembered positively after we'd worked together in the past.

One time there was this insane Core Networks project where she was team lead and everyone was working really hard on it. There was a key integration testing weekend before the first baseline went to the test team, and she said that everyone was on call and had to come in if problems were found in their area. I had a quiet weekend. On the Monday after she told me she'd phoned everyone else in the department over the weekend except me with code issues. No problems were found in my code. That's kind of a party trick I have of writing all kinds of features and lines of code with very low defect rate, something I take pride in. I take bugs in my code personally, but in my career I've noticed that few others do. Most people I've ever worked with are indifferent to bugs in their code.

It has made me realize I've been part of the Halifax software startup scene for nearly five years now. In my own modest way I've contributed to building a new company, and to building the Halifax software industry. I think it will be interesting to see what directions my career takes in the next five years.