Category: Technology

The Future of IT

I found this Dallas Morning News article about the future of IT especially salient. (If prompted to login, get a username and password from www.bugmenot.com.) In a nutshell, Gartner says IT workers must broadly diversify skills or get steamrolled. Gartner further predicts major IT upheaval by 2010.

I had a similar revelation shortly after getting my BS in Computer Science in 1999. Even back then–the middle of the tech boom–skills taught just ten years ago were already becoming irrelevant or commoditized. In plain terms, that means it can become cheaper for your employer to purchase what you do from another firm than to keep you employed. Before my undergrad days, I lived near the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and I saw how people with dinosaur skill sets were often the first to be laid off. They were also the last to find a comparable replacement job.

These revelations are part of what led me to pursue my MS in Computer Science, and they continue to push me towards my in-progress Engineering Management degree.

These revelations are also a motivation (not the motivation) behind my involvement in community organizations. And by involvement, I am not just talking about essentials like pounding nails and folding newsletters. These are important jobs, and I help with them, but I go beyond that and work within the system to motivate others to pound nails and fold newsletters even better. When I help out in this way with Boy Scouts or with my neighborhood association, I am honing life and career skills. This is part of my education. I think that few people realize the immense value one gets from the lessons learned from going that extra mile in community service. Such involvement benefits you as much as it benefits the community.

These revelations also why I try to diversify my skill set beyond what I can get in a classroom. The above-mentioned community service gives me opportunity to test management skills learned in my degree program. My praxis topic allows me to deeply explore a controversial aspect traffic engineering that also has implications for politics, ethics, and economics.

All IT workers should ask themselves three questions:

  • Are my skills only the basic skills for 2006?
  • Do I have knowledge that somehow goes beyond the bachelors-level? Can I do many things that freshly-minted graduates cannot do?
  • Are my skills a “one hit wonder”? Is my overall skill set highly specialized?

An IT worker who answer yes to any of these questions should be gravely concerned. To survive in this industry, they must fix the problem or quickly plan an exit strategy.

The writing is not only on the wall, it’s etched on the stone outside and tattooed on your forehead. In the IT field, those who get ahead are those who learn and adapt. Many of those who don’t will not have gainful IT employment in as soon a a few years.

Computer still crashes

I am confounded by a problem on my computer.

Since getting my replacement motherboard (first one was DOA), the computer usually runs reliably except for an occasional blue screen of death (BSOD). The BSOD error codes suggest some kind of memory error because the OS detected a data error.

With most hardware problems, you can usually successfully diagnose them by swapping out components or modifying the configuration until the crashes go way. However, before messing with anything, I ran a memory checker all night long three times. This memory checker never found a problem.

I have two 512MB memory sticks. This allows me to use 1GB of RAM in dual channel mode. Thinking that either of the memory chips could be bad, I took out one chip and ran the computer on 512MB RAM for 3 days. No crashes. Then I ran the computer on the other 512MB RAM for 3 days. Surprisingly, no crashes again!

This morning I put both memory sticks back in. When both sticks were installed before this test, they were in slots 1 and 2. When I ran the single memory sticks, I ran them in slot 1. Just to make sure that slot 2 couldn’t be bad, I put both sticks in slots 3 and 4:

About 15 minutes after booting my computer with both sticks installed, I get another BSOD!

Shortly after rebooting from that, I started getting random application errors like this:

I shut the computer down shortly after that error and stuck the sticks into slots 1 and 3. This disabled dual channel mode. Now it is about 3 hours later, and I haven’t had a crash or any other system instability I can attribute to bad RAM.

I don’t get it. Why does my computer run fine only when I am not in dual channel mode? Is my motherboard unable to handle dual channel mode? Are these the wrong chips? I can’t think of anything else. Why do the memory chips work fine individually, but together they cause problems?

Now that you’ve read the symptoms, I have to describe my hardware. My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 Nforce4 board. I am running an AMD Athlon 64 3500+, and–this may be the clincher–I have PNY Optima 1GB PC 3200 memory (2 512MB sticks) that was apparently designed for Apple Macintohses. Yup, I ordered D1GBPC32-G5KIT from NewEgg based on the specs and the generally positive customer comments. (Virtually no piece of hardware has 100% positive customer comments, so the few negatives didn’t overly concern me.)

The publicly available specs suggest that this memory should be identical to the memory PNY recommends for my motherboard, the D512MPC32CUSA. However, since PNY’s Part Number Search does not work for the D1GBPC32-G5KIT, I cannot know for sure.

A little investigation shows I may not be the only one with this kind of problem: http://www.planetamd64.com/index.php?showtopic=10660 and http://www.devhardware.com/forums/memory-35/crashes-at-1-gig-ram-but-not-with-512t-35240.html.

And something that’s interesting is that Gigabyte’s approved memory list for this board only certifies double-sided 512MB memory sticks. Both of mine are single-sided. I am not sure what that means for me, especially given that this list is 10 months old (a long time in the computing world), and the disclaimer that suggests that many memory chips not on the list may be fine.

Just as a side note, I just updated my BIOS from F6 to F9. I have not put the memory back into dual channel mode yet, but that’s the next step. This problem sure is weird!

New computer working, but another wrinkle

I got my computer running a couple of weeks ago. A potential problem with NewEgg is that warranties are generally 30 days long, and customers pay all return shipping costs. However, even after returning my motherboard, I still paid less in shipping than I would have paid in sales tax had I bought locally.

The down side is that if something goes wrong, you will eat up most of that 30 day warranty period waiting for a new product. After that 30 day period, you have to handle all warranties through the manufacturer. Based on this experience, you may want to reconsider NewEgg unless you have known-good parts to swap out in case of a problem.

I selected the case based on my brother‘s recommendation. Fancy cases and huge power supplies aren’t that important to me, and I’ll bet this current case is overkill with its 420W power supply. Regardless, after rebate, it was actually less expensive than many plain jane, inexpensive 350W cases. And it has spiffy LEDs, so I can be all leetzor and stuff!

The side has a fan that lights up and shines on the inside.

With the flash on, you can see that I didn’t bother with fancy colored cables. I don’t care, since I am never going to look in there.

This is the front. Oooh, aaah!

This newer computer is unquestionably faster than that old Dell. It’s nice when two people can be logged in without dragging everything down to a crawl.

Unfortunately, all the kinks haven’t been worked out yet. Three days ago and twice today, the computer has had a BSOD and spontaneous reboot. It appears that this may be due to RAM problems. This is the STOP error:

The important numbers are 0x0000004e and 0x0000008f. These codes suggest either an I/O problem (unlikely) or a memory problem (more likely). I am not sure why I got so many days out of this memory before a problem showed up. Oh, well. another thing to diagnose! Upon reboot, Microsoft suggested I run a memory tester. I will see if that turns up anything. If not, I may run my memory through a memory tester (diagnostic equipment found in repair shops).

Lost all my exercise data

I keep all my exercise data on an Excel spreadsheet on my PDA. I talked about this last summer.

Today, I needed to refer to something in this spreadsheet, and I noticed that it wouldn’t open. I checked the version that is synchronized to my desktop machine with ActiveSync. It was only 14KB, much smaller than its normal 150+ KB.

Argh! It looks like my spreadsheet file got truncated in a file transfer, and I didn’t notice this before the old version got overwritten. (When a file is deleted, the contents are still on the hard drive until other data overwrites it.)

Dang! There goes three whole months of exercise data. I guess I need to script a utility to make regular backups of my PDA data.