[geeks] Liber-fascism

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sat, 25 Oct 2008, Nick B. wrote:

> I'm curious, do you have any experience whatsoever inside the government?

Mmm, the stories I could tell.  Working for the state for nearly three
years is what solidified all this for me.

Given what I've said in this thread, this is going to sound very strange,
but I -very- highly recommend that everyone do a six-month stint at a
government agency.  It'll give you a view into how things work that will
make you forever suspicious when some government agency tells you they
need X dollars to solve some non-problem.

Here's a very short example:  While working for an agency at the State of
Texas, my primary project was to migrate a core piece of business software
from an S/390 mainframe onto a bunch of RS/6000 servers.  So that the
agency wouldn't suffer from vendor lock-in (despite standardizing on IBM
top-to-bottom), one of the core requirements of the project was that the
selection of components involved would not impose the requirement on
maintainers to know any programming language.

That is, an entire state agency was going to migrate its entire business
onto an app that was mandated to be built from a point-and-click code
generator.  That application went online in September of 2003, and it was
a big deal since $agency issued a regulation requiring every doctor in the
state who was licensed to perform procedures resulting from a Worker's
Compensation claim to register through this web application.

The stack consisted of a pair of IBM p660 (quad RS64-IV, 8GB memory)
servers running Oracle with failover, a pair of IBM p630 (dual POWER4, 4GB
memory) servers running WebSphere AS, and a pair of IBM p610 (dual POWER3,
4GB memory) servers running IBM HTTP Server (Apache) with cryptographic
accelerator cards to offload SSL.  In front of all that was a ciscoSystem
LocalDirector cluster for load-balancing.

In September of 2003, when the application launched, it could support four
(4) concurrent user sessions before it fell over and ran out of memory.

The project was declared a resounding success.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
Elgin, TX         |                                   --Mahatma Gandhi
USA               |