From: Jonathan Katz Date: 22:09 on 20 Jan 2008 Subject: More jobseeker rants... I ranted earlier about hate for job sites that aren't properly configured.... here is some more hate. I know the prose isn't as sexy as other rants here, but I'm more frustrated. 1) dice.com. Thank you for providing captchas to keep out bots. However, once I've authenticated to the site I shouldn't have to answer a captcha for each time I update my resume or my account information. 2) etrade.com. Thank you for allowing me to upload a resume. It makes life easier. Your resume parser sucks, though, confusing what I think is a fairly easy-to-read resume, with different experiences and different companies put into various paragraphs. So even though I uploaded a resume I had to spend 15 minutes cutting and pasting to make my resume fit your forms. Additionally, I shouldn't have to switch browsers to submit a resume. I won't hate on you for not working with Camino, since it is in its own category. However, if you work with Safari I can't understand why you won't work with Camino. 3) disney.com. My hate for your website parallels that with etrade.com. You choose not to parse the resume, just accept the attachment, which is fantastic. Resumes are for people to read. However, after working with Camino and Firefox I finally had to try a third browser, Safari to submit to the job posting.
From: Jonathan Katz Date: 15:51 on 10 Dec 2007 Subject: HR/Employment Software HATE I'm currently looking for work :( I've submitted my resume to many places. Many of them use brassring.com or taleo.com which have their own ideas on how to handle your resumes. Other places, like EDS have their own software for parsing resumes. Even the State of Indiana uses some bastardized module in Peoplesoft that they have yet to properly configure, as I'm able to request my salary in any of the 199 available currency denominations. First, some of the sites have a 100k limit on the resume you can upload. I'm a relatively senior guy with a loaded 2-page resume which comes out to 120+k in Word or OpenOffice. I got around this by converting it to PDF and having a 98k resume. Then there is the parsing. I keep my resume simple. No real boxes or funky formatting. Just dates, companies, and descriptions. No funky "skills listing" or multiple-paragraph objective shit. Their auto- parsers will skip entire sections, replace dates as the names of former companies and other such nonsense. If I wasn't seriously needing a paycheck I'd leave the resumes that butchered as an example of how horrid their systems are. Instead I wind up having to delete anything that they auto-parsed and commit several cut-n-paste exercises to convey the important parts of my resume to these employers. Likely I won't wind up with any callbacks because some HR dweeb with an IQ of 2 won't realize that a CISSP isn't a job function but a separate certification that is listed under the certification section of the resume. -Jon
From: Jonathan Katz Date: 14:51 on 27 Sep 2007 Subject: Fuck you Siebel (2) ------=_Part_1720_17384626.1190901071810 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Dear Siebel, When I run the installer on my Solaris box as "./setupsol -console" I expect that the installer remains in a CLI-mode. This does not mean execute the first half of the install process from the command line and then launch a portion of the X-windows installer. I just happened to have Exceed running on my laptop and X11 tunneling turned on to catch this, otherwise I didn't know why the installer kept crapping out half-way through. Requiring a GUI to do things on a Unix system is a special kind of hate. Also, the installer should not require us to populate values in the configuration files, essentially slowing-down the install process and eliminating any form of automation (as it's the X11 component of the install that requires us to fill in values.) I should be able to independently generate configuration files and copy them in place after the install. After all, the install process is not dependent upon those values.
From: Jonathan Katz Date: 20:16 on 26 Sep 2007 Subject: Fuck you, Siebel! ------=_Part_8679_11407277.1190834203714 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Yes, I know you have an ego, especially after being bought by Oracle. However, there are other web servers on the system than the one we're installing Siebel extensions to and really, it's A-OK if those servers are running while we work on the server I'm building with the Siebel hooks. You don't need to abort out of the install when the other servers are running. And the fact you create a windows-like registry in /var/adm/siebel without asking us and making the permissions mode 777 is really lame, too. ------=_Part_8679_11407277.1190834203714 Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Yes, I know you have an ego, especially after being bought by Oracle. However, there are other web servers on the system than the one we're installing Siebel extensions to and really, it's A-OK if those servers are running while we work on the server I'm building with the Siebel hooks. You don't need to abort out of the install when the other servers are running. And the fact you create a windows-like registry in /var/adm/siebel without asking us and making the permissions mode 777 is really lame, too. <br> ------=_Part_8679_11407277.1190834203714--
From: Jonathan Katz Date: 16:05 on 17 Jul 2007 Subject: Reverse Proxy.. ------=_Part_72267_15176432.1184684713946 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Not quite a software hate, but a hate nonetheless. My employer is in the market for a reverse ssl proxy. Essentially we need to connect to a single endpoint on our network that will then traverse a private frame relay network and connect to a SSL-enabled tn3270 server. The proxy will handle the SSL work so we can connect to it unencrypted. Any ideas on how to skin this cat? I'm thinking something with netcant and openssl... -Jon ------=_Part_72267_15176432.1184684713946 Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Not quite a software hate, but a hate nonetheless.<br><br>My employer is in the market for a reverse ssl proxy.<br><br>Essentially we need to connect to a single endpoint on our network that will then traverse a private frame relay network and connect to a SSL-enabled tn3270 server. The proxy will handle the SSL work so we can connect to it unencrypted. <br><br>Any ideas on how to skin this cat?<br><br>I'm thinking something with netcant and openssl...<br><br>-Jon<br clear="all"><br><br> ------=_Part_72267_15176432.1184684713946--
From: Jonathan Katz Date: 16:39 on 04 Apr 2007 Subject: I hate Siebel... ------=_Part_54598_7402457.1175701198832 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline I forgot this mailing list existed until I received the recent messages. It's good timing too, because I feel a need to rant. I hate Siebel. Plain and simple. For those who forget, Siebel is an application development framework used in creating CRM applications. In other words the software that large call centers and client-facing businesses use. McAfee uses it for their support website, etc. Siebel is an octopus of sorts; it has hooks at the Web layer, the application layer and the database layer. It's designed around a true 3-tier architecture. I work for a government contractor and we recently endeavored a major release and some OS upgrades, including some patches to iPlanet, etc. With increased load after the upgrades we ran into limitations of the Siebel software. Siebel never told us that their internal load balancing between the web servers and application servers cannot scale beyond 10 different application servers. They left us thinking that it could scale to 36 application servers and the software and default configuration files are designed around this 36 server limit. After opening a severity one support ticket and waiting FOUR WEEKS we finally received a response that our architecture was invalid; an architecture that they validated two years prior. Meanwhile, during this four week period we rolled back OS patches, changed configurations, and yelled and debated. As a larger IT shop we have procedures for vetting patches and system changes and frankly, if any of those changes caused this error all of our processes and procedures would be for nil. Extraordinarily frustrating. ------=_Part_54598_7402457.1175701198832 Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline I forgot this mailing list existed until I received the recent messages. It's good timing too, because I feel a need to rant.<br><br>I hate Siebel. Plain and simple.<br><br>For those who forget, Siebel is an application development framework used in creating CRM applications. In other words the software that large call centers and client-facing businesses use. McAfee uses it for their support website, etc. <br><br>Siebel is an octopus of sorts; it has hooks at the Web layer, the application layer and the database layer. It's designed around a true 3-tier architecture. <br><br>I work for a government contractor and we recently endeavored a major release and some OS upgrades, including some patches to iPlanet, etc. <br><br>With increased load after the upgrades we ran into limitations of the Siebel software. Siebel never told us that their internal load balancing between the web servers and application servers cannot scale beyond 10 different application servers. They left us thinking that it could scale to 36 application servers and the software and default configuration files are designed around this 36 server limit. After opening a severity one support ticket and waiting FOUR WEEKS we finally received a response that our architecture was invalid; an architecture that they validated two years prior. Meanwhile, during this four week period we rolled back OS patches, changed configurations, and yelled and debated. As a larger IT shop we have procedures for vetting patches and system changes and frankly, if any of those changes caused this error all of our processes and procedures would be for nil. <br><br><br>Extraordinarily frustrating. ------=_Part_54598_7402457.1175701198832--
From: Jonathan Katz Date: 21:20 on 02 Feb 2004 Subject: Actuate Report Server... Actuate Report Server is a 3rd Party App which tags onto Siebel. It requires a Windows 2000 server but can actually produce decent reports so you can collect stats on a call ceneter. From what I've seen of it, the language is a bit better than oh, Crystal Reports. The downside is it requires your Siebel App server be a Windows box; it won't pull data from a Unix-based Siebel app server. Actuate has its own console client app which runs on your workstation. You can tell it which report server to connect to. We have multiple report servers, as we have one for production, development and test. You get the idea. The console app looks like an explorer window. You can scroll through different directories (as administrator) and see reports, see what reports are running, and view results. As a regular joe user you have limited access (you can only see your output directory and the reports you're running.) As an administrator you import new reports through the menues or through dragging-and-dropping. It's faster to import multiple reports by highlighting on many of them and dragging them into the app. As a security precaution, when reports are added to Actuate they have NO permissions, so no-one can run them, read them, write to them or delete them. As an administrator one of the first tasks you have to do is set the permissions on the reports. The permissions can be set for all or for specific users and groups. It has a nice amount of granularity and is "secure by default" -- You don't want joe random report user running reports on groups or people he doesn't manage because you imported a report and he got access to it before you could lock it down. The one MAJOR shortcoming is in the UI. You can only set permissions on one report at a time. When you import, oh, 37 reports at once, you have to manually set the permissions on each of the 37 reports. This is tedious, slow, and annoying. You can't simply highlight multiple reports, right-click and go to properties and change the permissions for multiple files at once. It just won't work. -Jon -- Jonathan Katz, J. Random Guy.
From: Jonathan Katz Date: 01:13 on 31 Jan 2004 Subject: Lotus Goats After three and a half years of using whatever mail client I wanted that accepted IMAP v4 I'm now at a new gig where the corporate mail standard is Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes Blows Goats, get it? First and foremost, in the day and age of GUI mail clients one would expect that when you drag-and-drop a file into a message-compose window it would attach that file. No, not in Lotus Notes. It EMBEDS the file if it is a Word or HTML file or some such, making a message nearly unreadable or un-editable if you're sending a large document. Then, if you drag-and-drop a document into Notes, it embeds and becomes slow. Windows XP surprisingly and correctly reports "Not Responding." Although Window's Task Manager does not have the beauty of 'kill(1)' I can easily close out Notes. That's fine, except there is a ntlhplr.exe (or similar) program running in the background which does directory lookups for Notes. That's all fine and dandy, but upon restarting Notes it will fail to start, claiming that there is a lock-file in use and that the only way to fire-up Notes is to log-out or reboot. Using my magic powers gleaned by Google I found the advice I needed to find the ntlhlpr.exe process (or whatever it's called) and was able to kill that and successfully restart Notes without having to logout, quit what I was working on, or lose my ssh sessions to many hosts actually doing stuff. Wait until I start commenting about Siebel.
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