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Finished up yesterday and flew back to New York. I still have a head cold. That made for a painful descent and I probably annoyed the other passengers as I coughed and snorted. Despite that, the last few days of the training seems to have gone well. I’ll see how the formal feedback turns out. I am a little irritated that the IT Training people were unaware I was giving the course until I asked about feedback forms. Someone dropped the ball. I have some material to add and lab questions to revise, but I don’t foresee big changes in it when I run the course again later this summer for another team.

I’m leading an off-site training these past two days and part of next week. My teammates and I wrote the material and proofed it but you don’t know how it’s going to go until you actually get up there in front of a real class. I’ve done a handful of trainings for my employer and I’ve taught high school and college courses. So far, it’s going well. I’m working out the pacing a little, the topics are not of equal length, and I’m one of the last of several providing technical instruction on our respective topics so I am finding out what others did or did not cover in their classes.

After the second day, one of the students walked out of the building with me and while we chatted on the way to our cars, remarked that this class was good, that I was training them instead of just teaching the material. That is the sort of off-hand comment that makes me feel like I’m doing a good job.

What’s been going on…

• We had "Comp" day last week and received our bonus numbers. Firm had a good year and so did we. I compare it to finding a $50 bill on the ground… I don’t plan my life around it but it’s nice when it happens. Helps to validate the effort all year.
• Much in the way of holday parties, drinks and dining with my coworkers. I skipped the firm office party- I know why they schedule them on mid-week nights and that I should go, but getting some sleep seemed like a better idea. Maybe next year. I enjoy more the little gatherings.
• Got reamed for supposedly screwing up an internal-but-widely seen web-based project. Turns out it’s the corporate filtering proxy and some very subtle timing/rendering issues with Javascript on some browsers. The acknowlegement that my code was correct when not filtered was not nearly as loud as the earlier chastising. Suckage.
• Digesting an internal course on our global namespace and change management from its implementer. Excellent.
• Production change blackout starts this week. Good time to clean up and study some new APIs we’re releasing. I will eventually be teaching the use of these so it’s doubly important.

Last week the company offered a four-day course on information security from @stake condensed into two days. The material was good and the pace, given the usual for courses, great. The majority of the attendees were current security people, so the subject was old hat for most of them (or should be!) and would be for anyone else who follows bugtraq, but for the target audience of application programmers it should be great or at least very enlightening. Now, the amusing thing. While experimenting with one of the commercial @stake tools we found a bug to which the instructor remarked that you sometimes find these in early releases. He noted that the guys who develop the tools are expert in multiple areas and very good a breaking things but not so hot at QA testing. Funny, isn’t that the problem?

Add to the list of wsadmin annoyances that invoking some of the really useful methods on MBeans results not in a string or usable Java object but a unique string naming the instance of the class. Having this object identifier might be useful if there were some means of then manipulating it, except there isn’t. Thanks for the useless string com.ibm.ws.foo.bar08FA7100A0. This quirk makes it furiously hard to do anything with, for instance, clusters, like determining their members without enumerating every server in the cell and figuring out from each one if it is a member. I suspect that I’m going to have to write Jython or Java programs that directly use the Java classes rather than work around the limitations of wsadmin.