Integration testing work

My current work involves integration testing of financial market data that is processed by both UNIX and Linux servers.

Now working in financial investments

Well, it took six years to get back there, but I am back working at a large financial investments company that utilizes a lot of leading edge software. They use Linux, UNIX, Windows, and all kinds of networking tools. I get to be in near the ground floor effort to revamp their infrastructure to provide very high speed, low latency access to up to the instant access to financial market data.
I like the company and the work very much!

Downloaded DSL 1.5

This evening I downloaded DSL 1.5, which is 48 MB in size. I will give it a test run shortly.

Starting new job on Tuesday

I was hired for the job I interviewed with back on September 2. I will be starting my first day on that job this coming Tuesday.

Interviewing for longer term positions

I had an interview this past Friday with a financial investments company to do some testing of market data feed systems that provide market data for the entire company. The work may involve either UNIX or Linux systems, and it will most certainly involve writing test plans concurrent with development activities. This is right up my alley. I did some work writing test plans for super computer extensions to large scale UNIX systems several years ago, and I wrote many shell scripts to test both individual test cases and a test harness to put all the tests together into a much larger comprehensive test suite.

Working in IT again!

At last I have some employment in my profession - information technology. This past week, I worked four days at Southern New Hampshire Medical Center (SNHMC) as a Windows 2000 security consultant, installing the latest Windows 2000 Professional service pack, the latest Internet Explorer service pack, running the latest hot fixes, then installing the latest version of Symantic Anti Virus software. I personally worked on between sixty and seventy systems during the week.

Yesterday and today, and for the next few days, I will be working in the IT group at Keane State College (KSC) in Keane, NH to provide both field and help desk support for students returning to school. KSC implemented a Cisco Clean Access (CCA), "a software solution that can automatically detect, isolate, and clean infected or vulnerable devices that attempt to access your network". (ref. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/products_security_advisory09186a00804f3127.shtml)

Returning students are likely to have difficulty and get initially annoyed with the solution, so KSC hired ten temporary consultants to assist in getting everyone up and on the air. I worked with Freshmen students today, and I will be working with the remaining student population for the next couple of days to get securely connected to this year's network. This hardware and software solution was implemented to help reduce the instances of worm and virus attacks and isolate their accessibility to the campus network.

Both jobs have been interesting, and I am looking to leverage these experiences toward work that I plan to do in the near future.

FreeSBIE 1.1 back on my AMD 400 desktop

I have experimented with FreeSBIE before. It has a nice looking interface, and it simplifies the use and optional installation of FreeBSD software onto a desktop system. FreeSBIE 1.1 is based on FreeBSD 5.3. While strictly speaking, it is not FreeBSD, like some of the Linux distributions that begin with code from a certain base, FreeSBIE is to FreeBSD as CentOS is to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I may revisit PC-BSD to see if they have any new version. PC-BSD was advancing like mad for a while; haven't heard much about it recently, so I want to see if any more progress has been made. If so, I may put PC-BSD on the AMD, otherwise I will leave FreeSBIE on there a while longer.