That is perfectly fine. I’m not here to be a politically correct person. This is my space on the Internet—and I’ll say what I like here. You know how I believe in freedom and its natural limitations? No? Well, I’ll say this until the day that I die: one person’s freedom ends where another person’s freedom begins. I’m free to say what I like, and you’re free to read it in any way you like or even not at all. Now, I won’t talk about other people by name on my blog unless I have permission to do so—especially if I’ve nothing positive to say, so don’t say that I’m not being at least a bit nice to you—but if I write a post here and it’s about you and you know that from nothing other than reading that post, maybe that is saying something more than what I have said here. If that has ever been the case in the past, or if it ever becomes the case in the future, then know this: it’s better you read what I have to say about you here, than wish that I were willing to spew my unfettered anger in your direction in person. And shoot, if you’re doing things that are illegal (such as running unlicensed proprietary software) and I haven’t turned your ass into law enforcement, you should be thanking whatever deity you believe in. Honestly.

Anyone who knows me—even if they do not know me well—knows that there is absolutely nothing that will make me angry like willful ignorance.  “Ignorance is bliss,” as the saying goes, but ignorance when combined with the lack of desire to fix it in what you claim to be a domain of specialized knowledge which you possess is just plain inexcusable. If you manage a network, you should know the basics of how it all works. There are people that I know that manage Windows networks and know nothing—not even the high level overview—of how Windows networking actually works beyond the painted pixels on the screen. Guess what? That means that you really do not know what you’re doing.

And lest anyone get offended or butt-hurt over being called ignorant, don’t. Let’s remember what ignorance actually means, and remember that it’s not an insult or a sleight against anyone—everyone is ignorant about many things, even in their own fields of work and expertise. However, willful ignorance in one’s own field—that is, ignorance that you’re not willing to fix all on your own like a big boy or girl—is absolutely something that you should be offended at! It is simply not possible for a single human being to know everything, even in his or her own specialty.  We have reference works, documentation, and vast seas of information in every field that I can think of, more than can fit in a human brain. But what matters is that you know what you know, and know what you don’t, and know how to find it out quickly and efficiently. And that means having a sort of self-initiative. And for that matter, I’ll even point people in the right direction, if they’re willing to do the legwork themselves to decipher the information once I’ve pointed them at it. I certainly don’t spoon-feed though, and if you expect that (in your own field, no less!) then I will stand by my assertion that you should not work in that field at all. And I will stand by that assertion whole-heartedly, no matter how much that gives a person pain.

If you’re ignorant about something that you never do nor have a desire to do—say, you’re an auto mechanic and you don’t care to know how to sew or crochet—then that’s fine; that’s your choice! But if you work in a field, and you learn that there is something that you don’t know, then learn it. Or at least learn where you can learn it when you need to, and get a friggin’ overview in your head. Read any single RFC and you’ll realize that there is no way that any of us can memory every single detail of every single specification for every single type of system that we manage. It’s just not possible without spending so much time studying that as to make it impossible to get anything useful actually accomplished. But if you manage a mail server and you don’t know the first thing about SMTP or POP3 or IMAP or whatever-else protocols your mail clients and servers are using, yes, that’s a problem. You certainly do not need to be able to have a conversation with your SMTP server, but you should know how to look up just how to do to that should you ever have to do any really low-level troubleshooting or log capturing. You shouldn’t need to know how to speak any application layer network protocol directly for that matter (though a lot of the text based ones are simple enough that you can learn them as needed over time). But you absolutely should know how to find the information that tells you how to speak those protocols if ever you have a need. And you should know enough to be able to make intelligent decisions on things like physical network infrastructure, management of your client and server operating systems, and so forth.

As an example: I am nowhere close to an expert on Windows—and I know this. (I will say that I know an awful lot about the way Windows bootstraps itself, as I have had to fix systems with multiple infections by hand because there were no automatic tools available to fix the system… but that does not make me an expert on the whole system, and probably not even the bootstrapping process of the system.) But I will research any issues that I encounter while supporting Windows users and find out—empirically, if I must—how to fix the problem. It’s what I do. And there are many, many places where I can find that sort of information, including booting up a copy of Windows itself and trying to figure it out that way. It does probably take me a lot longer than it would take someone who knows the system in and out, and I’ll grant that. I am absolutely the strongest on POSIX/UNIX-family systems. But that doesn’t stop me from being able to learn it and handle it. Even if it does take longer.

The difference between me and the unidentified person in my last post? I’ll spend any resources necessary—time, money, effort—to learn what I need to learn to get the job done. I don’t cut corners. My goal isn’t to get everything done sloppy and fast. Even if it takes me longer, I’d rather know and understand the problem—and its solution!—completely before moving forward with doing anything about it. Especially if I can find a short-term workaround that will enable me to come up with a quality solution. I eschew willful ignorance in my field. Do you?

So, this is a pretty simple-sounding network, yes? It should be—it is just a handful of computer systems. However, there is a problem—a pretty large one, I think. There is very little in the way of either policy or convention on the network. Some users use their documents directory for storing their documents, others store their documents on their desktop, others somewhere differently altogether on the C drive, others on a network share in a public storage space. There are different versions of software on the various machines, more-or-less updated when someone thinks about it, I think.

This is a perfect scenario which shows why a business network should be centrally managed in some form. Note that I am not saying that each machine should be a bit-for-bit mirror image of the one next to it, though that is certainly a possibility. I think that people should be able to use their own choice of things like email client or Web browser software, because everyone is different. But when you have different client applications fulfilling a role on the individual workstations, you have to take a centralized approach to ensuring that things like the email is all backed up.

Furthermore, if you don’t take a centralized approach to backing up such data, it is very difficult to centralize the network storage. Think about adding a domain controller (that is Windows speak for a central server which handles authentication and authorization, as well as file and printer sharing and things like roaming profiles) to such a network. I expect that with multi-gigabyte mail files, things will be very slow at first—and that likely the only fix for them that is going to be viable in the long term is to centralize more infrastructure.

I am too tired to expand more on my thoughts on what I have learned and where it is heading, but the Reader’s Digest version of the point reads something like this: If you are a small to medium sized business, make sure that you have someone who is competent in both system and network administration, and make sure that they are a part of your business from day one. Like writing software, building up a technical infrastructure without careful thought and design is hazardous and comes with many hidden and unpredictable costs. It is best to head those things off right from the start; to delay only amplifies the cost of fixing the underlying problems and puts oneself in the position where fixing one issue can have a domino-like effect and create more new problems.

For my current situation, I think I am going to have to seriously re-think how this whole setup is done. What I do not yet know is how to quickly and efficiently bring things into shape. A bit of training and education may be required, and certainly the removal of a lot of unnecessarily-granted privileges on the workstations. That, too, should be something caught early-on: do not let every person in a business run with administrator privilege, unless they are an administrator (and even they should only run with administrator privilege when they are actually doing something that requires that privilege). If everyone is an administrator, there is little to no control on how things are done in a network, and it can get messy.

I have a lot more reading to do, as well.

Well, anyway, it is way past my bedtime.  Time for sleep.

I turned in my final Final Projects last night. Of course, I have yet to receive the grades from them; that usually takes a little while even for the most responsive of teachers. I think that the computer systems that the grades are input to are probably mainframe computers that require punch-card input, sometimes, as slow a process as that is…

Well, anyway, there is a lot that has happened in the time since I started going there, and now, when I have finished. What have I learned in the little-over 2½ years since I started going to school there? (Please note, that I was going for an Associate’s degree, which should have taken just under two years anyway, but that was not the case.)

Well, I have learned:

1. That the Apollo Group is an institution to be regarded as questionable at best, and at worst, complete fraudsters.
2. That the Apollo Group hires a fair lot of teachers who are neither competent nor qualified to teach even basic fundamental things, let alone anything at a college level.
3. That the teachers they do have that are competent and qualified are probably not getting paid nearly enough, and probably think that the curriculum is a joke. I know that I do.
4. That the reason that recruiters place people with degrees from schools run by the Apollo Group at the bottom of the stack (whether that stack be real or virtual) of résumés, is that these schools are a joke. A total joke.
5. If you want to learn something, it is usually far cheaper to buy resources devoted to the topic you want to learn, and learn it on your own (or with someone else that is also interested in the same thing. College education these days tends to be all about the degree you are awarded at the end of the process, not necessarily the roads you take heading to that degree. At least, for undergraduate programs. (If you’ve got a doctorate, you’ve had a long road, a significant one, more likely than not.)
6. If you are going to go to school, there is really only one reason to do so: Because you enjoy learning. That having been said, pick an institution that has a reputation for being highly respected for their teaching. This probably means that the professors who are there are active in their fields, and constantly doing research. If they’re not, that’s a sign that you shouldn’t be there.
7. If you are going to school to learn, it’s best to stay away from the schools owned by the Apollo Group. They’re often stated to be the drive-thru in terms of college degrees go. Insofar as I’ve been there for the past 2½ years, I would be inclined to agree. The classes that were easy, were trivial; the classes that should have been hard were easy; and the teachers in about 70% of my classes did not have any real knowledge of the core material that they were teaching. One of them—an algebra teacher—taught to the letter of the textbook, even when that textbook’s authors had recognized that the textbook contained an error. Not cool.

There are many more things that I have learned. If you’re going to go to college for a degree in a technical field, make sure that the college that you go do is respected in that field. This might involve a non-trivial amount of research. It might involve trying to get in touch with people that are in the field and finding out where they respect college degrees coming from. It might involve talking to people who recruit for the field you’d like to get into and see what they determine to be a respectful institution. It might even involve visiting different schools and looking at their programs, seeing what their instructors know, and so forth. “Doing your homework” in this part of finding a college, though, won’t be easy, unless you happen to be able to get into a college which is widely known and internationally respected that everyone knows about anyway.

All that having been said… I am glad that it’s over. I have learned more from having access to the databases at the University Library than I have from the teachers, in most cases, including my teacher in the Java™ course that I took there. She was kinda stupid for someone who claimed to have been programming for as long as she claimed to be programming. While I did learn how to write software in Java™ (and subsequently learned that I really do like C# a lot better…), I also learned that there are plenty of people in the world with Master’s degrees that do not have a single clue when it comes to the field that they were supposedly educated for.

Over the past couple of years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about credentials and their meaning when applied to people. One of the reasons that I am working on starting a business is that I have a very non-traditional belief there: The world should be a meritocracy when it comes to things like what we do and how we evaluate what other people know. Furthermore, there should be more opportunities for people that carry required knowledge, but have not put in the time at any degree-issuing institution to say that they have that knowledge. Companies should also heed the saying, “If you want something done right, you must do it yourself.” When it comes to educating people, if you get them new and talented, you can provide the education while proceeding to pay a wage to the person. You can then come up with a very excellently trained person, who is as capable or more so than the person sitting next to them with a college degree.

This leads to something else—open source software. I’ll draw the connection in a minute.

In many of the fields of science, peer-review is a very important thing. When someone does a study and then performs a write-up of the results, those results are peer-reviewed, and the end result is that before the paper is ever published, it has had many eyes going over it. That doesn’t automatically mean that the paper is worth anything, nor does it automatically mean that it proves anything. But what it does mean is that it has been reviewed, edited, read, thought about, and then sent to publishing. That will prompt more research, which will prompt more writing, which will prompt even more peer-review, and eventually, things happen.

When it comes to people in technical fields like software development, though, many companies require people to sign non-disclosure agreements which cover nearly every aspect of their job, including the source code that the developer writes. Well, this is an excellent tactic to keep a programmer: When I evaluate someone to hire them, I am going to want to see examples of their previous work. I am going to want to look at it, and ask them questions about it, and see what they say. That’s part of evaluating their ability. You would not hire an editor without seeing what they can do, for example. Now, assigning a programmer a quick test to see what code comes flowing out of them in a quick pinch is one way to evaluate a programmer, but it’s not the only way, and it’s far from accurate.

That is the great thing about open source software. You can find programmers who are good, and you can see the code that they’ve written. You can then pull them in for an interview and you can ask them questions about the code that they’ve written, and seeing it, they’ll be able to quickly and easily explain it, and this would give me a lot more confidence in their ability. Why companies haven’t learned from educational institutions in this respect is beyond me. If everyone’s software was open sourced, not only would there be peer review happening on code on a pretty well constant basis, but there would be code out there that people would be able to cite as the code they wrote, which would be helpful for programmers who are looking for jobs, regardless of whether or not they have a degree or some sort of formal education. After all, even college dropouts can become multimillionaires by knowing what they want to do and doing it well. Not that I would advocate that anyone step on as many toes as Gates did in his career.

In any case, I’ve learned a lot. I have read a lot of “classic” papers in the field of computer science, and while some of them have been over my head, I have learned a lot from them. I have also learned a decent amount of what I have yet to learn. Calculus, for starters. (Ouch. I have avoided that one my entire life, I suppose I can’t avoid it for much longer.) But, I can deal with that. After all, I do enjoy learning. And as far as Calculus goes, well, I think I have all the resources I need to be able to learn it, so I should be able to pick it up, with a good deal of effort-investment. Oh, yeah, and I have learned (once again) that “Windows” is not truly required for interoperability with the rest of the world. Where there is a will, there is a way, or so I’ve heard.

Now, on to finishing up with forming the business and getting it going…