Leading Teams

Well I just had a tired half hour discussion about teams and what constitutes a good team and the various roles that are needed to allow a good team to function.
Of course what was missing was any mention of the general problems that tend to occur when the members are not in the same place, or even in the same timezone. I’ve been a member of a team that has always been a minimum of 8 hours from me. I recently got a change of manager, who is only 7 hours away. Normally it’s a struggle to talk to my manager before 5.30pm local time, which is a bit on the annoying side as my energy levels are really low, now I get to call him at any time after lunch. He’s in the office at a decent hour. I’m scared that I might have things to talk to him about other than the fact that I’m shattered from yet another long day of fixing problem.
One of today’s beautiful problems was the removal of a CD from the drive. It’s UNIX and you don’t want to do something stupid like reboot the computer. It’s teaching time. To find out what processes are using a file system issue a fuser command. You get a groovy output containing the PIDs that are using the mount point. You could check them using p(s)tree; just in case it’s something important (like vold :-). Then you kill them. But what’s best is that fuser allows you to do that by passing in -k, so if you didn’t care…
Tirivia about the fuser command. When you get the list of processes that are using the file system, it will indicate whether they are tied to consoles by having a c after the ID. Great, ahother thing that needs filtering, but no! all the non-pid information is output to stderr, while the pids are output to stdout so a simple 2>/dev/null filters out all but the process ids.
I’ve Ed Pil to thank for that piece of trivia which he informed me of while working on the layered driver effort for Solaris.

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One Reply to “Leading Teams”

  1. Hey Pete!
    Love the new website. Thought someone had taken ur domain. Nice blossoms. Arent we getting all hippy? talk2ya!
    B!

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