The More Things Change

You’ve probably heard the old adage, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Today’s post is proof positive that’s true. It’s also a little trip down memory lane. Truth to tell, it contains a bit more than the usual amount of tech talk. And maybe it has more acronyms per square inch than most people are accustomed to. If any of that’s not your cup of tea, I invite you to sign off ASAP. As for everyone else? Read on, if you dare.

 

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Back when I was a neophyte programmer, bright-eyed and fresh out of EDS’s Phase II training program, I was assigned to the California Student Aid Commission (CSAC) account in Sacramento. Our mission – should we choose to accept it – was to take a 3rd party financial software package and implement it as a Student Loan system before it was really ready for prime time. The 3rd party made their money marketing relatively cheap off-the-shelf solutions that – they said – easily could be customized to meet any need. EDS made their money sending neophyte (read: cheap) programmers marching through walls to make Mission Impossible happen. Irresistible Force? Meet Immovable Object.

Job One was to whittle down the daily batch process to a manageable size that would fit inside the overnight (13-hour) window, thus allowing users to do their normal daily work while the sun was shining. Good luck with that, because frequent abends (abnormal program terminations) meant that without considerable night time vigilance and intervention by us on-call stiffs, that system was not coming back up by 8AM the next day: No way. No how.

 

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My buddy during those CSAC days was Bill. Like me he was a cheap young programmer.  But unlike me, Bill was a REXX programming genius. In addition to building a REXX-based system to transfer Production data to the Test area on a key-record basis (this saved our DBAs tons of time and and space, and it saved our account manager tons of money) he also came up with a little REXX-routine to help us on-call folk on our frequent overnight shifts. When an alert came in from the batch monitors that told us one of our jobs was down, the routine would activate an alarm that roused us from intermittent moments of much-needed sleep so we could fix and restart the offending job, pronto. When every minute counts, this was a life-saver.

 

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Fast forward 20 years. By this time I was working on a Personnel and Payroll system developed by the U.S. Department of Interior for use by other Federal agencies needing a reliable means to pay their folks and keep track of time off. My job at Interior – should I choose to accept it – was to help convert these other agencies’ data into formats our system could handle. And my first client? SCOTUS. Yeah, that’s right, you heard me: RBG and Clarence Thomas and all the rest.

Many things had changed for me over the course of 2 decades. For one thing, I was now an independent consultant rather than an impressionable newbie. For another, our system was robust and battle-tested rather than limping along held together with chewing gum and baling wire. No more overnight shifts on call.  No more groggy 3AM soirees with batch support trying to get broken jobs back up and running. And yet, still there were challenges… The more things change? You betcha.

 

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If you’ve ever used Teams or Zoom or any kind of group chat, you know there is a little indicator light up in the corner of the screen that goes from green when you are online and active, to yellow when you are “away” or inactive, to something else when you are offline altogether. I’m not saying anyone uses this function as anything other than purely as a means of communication – as, say, a way to monitor who’s working and who’s goofing off? – but, um… yeah.

On our account there was an enterprising young woman named Petra. She introduced me to a product called Caffeine. Basically it’s freeware you load onto your laptop to prevent activation of the screen-saver. At the same time it prevents that chat light going from green to yellow to whatever. With Caffeine, you’re always active. Always wide awake. Never goofing off. Well, at least as far as your chat group knows. So, the more things change? Thanks, Petra!

 

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Nowadays, post-pandemic,  I work from home for an international entertainment conglomerate based in London and LA. Also, there’s a programmer team in India taking care of on-call, so everybody gets a good night’s sleep. I wouldn’t exactly call our system “robust,” but it has served artists and music consumers pretty well for over 35 years. That’s about as long as I’ve been programming. There’s a “new” system with lots of bells and whistles that’s scheduled to come online sometime next year. Until then, I do whatever needs doing on the “old” system. Some days, I’m pretty busy. Other days, less so. And when this gig ends, I’ll probably retire. You been warned.

One thing that has changed since I learned about Caffeine is that corporate security is now a much bigger deal. For good security reasons SCOTUS may have needed their own separate database for just 9 justices, but I’m talking about individual laptop level security.  Any software that gets loaded onto my machine has to be loaded by an authorized person (i.e. not me). As such – well, let’s just say that the only caffeine for me these days comes from my coffee. BUT, where there’s a will there’s a way. Right?

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Caffeine works by sending a PF10 command – basically, this does nothing except it tells the network you’re not asleep – every 30 seconds or so. Other versions of the software do the same thing by simulating a mouse movement on the same schedule. What I’ve found – and it’s taken me 35 years of intensive research to find this, folks – is that if you have a mouse pad on your your laptop keyboard, and if you place it upside down on your belly, there’s enough friction produced by regular rhythmic breathing…

 

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