Pretty Pictures

apparently the bruce museum in greenwich is having an m. c. escher exhibit, running until february second. i'm a huge escher fan, so i'll definately have to check that out, maybe this coming weekend if i've got time...

Ouch

it would be nice if this headache would go away...

Xmas Power Outage Sing Along

so on christmas night we were hanging around my parent's house in the dark (since the power had gone out), and my father and cousin and one of my cousin's friend's father's (yeah, we get a strange crowd at my house around the holiday's) were playing old songs on their guitars and everyone was singing along...

i was particularly amused when we got to a traditional irish song called "A Man You Don't Meet Every Day" (probably best known these days because The Pogues sing a version of it), which has a line in it that always seemed kind of off to me...

"I took out my dog, and him I did shoot, All down in the County Kildare."

my cousin mentioned that he had heard it sung differently, as:

"I took out my dog and my gun for to shoot, All down in the County Kildare."

so i looked around on the web, and all the web sites i found with lyrics seemed split 50/50. half of them have the guy taking his dog out and shooting him, and half of them have him taking his dog out and going hunting.

i just found it amusing how the wording of a traditional song can be altered over time. which way was the original? who decided to sing it slightly differently?

in any case, it was a fun night. we went through all the old songs we sing at family gatherings, and amber's father introduced us to a bunch of songs i hadn't heard before. apparently he worked his way through college playing the guitar in bars.

Back From The Dead!

it's been like 3 or 4 years since i last saw toad the wet sprocket in concert. i only saw them once, because a little while after that concert they broke up, which really sucked because they absolutely rocked live.

anyway, if you follow that link to their web site, you'll see that they're touring again, and i recommend going and seeing every show you can possibly get to, it's well worth it.

(i'm hoping to hit the Boston, NYC, and New Jersey shows, assuming we can get tickets)

Fun With Java

or... "hey, in the past few years they actually made some of this stuff not suck!"

so i've been playing around with server side java web application stuff lately, servlets and jsp's and all that jaz. it's pretty neat. so far i've run across the following cool things that i would have loved to have had when i was actually doing this stuff for real:

• ant. ok, technically they did have this when i was doing java, but i never really used it, and i really should have cause it rocks.
• junit. we all know how much i love unit testing with cppunit, and junit is even cooler than cppunit since they've got a lot of custom extensions to it to simplify testing specific kinds of applications (like server side code that's notoriously hard to test).
• struts. james farley mentioned this stuff to me a while back, and i finally got around to taking a look over the weekend. great stuff.

so now i'm toying with a little java webapp that's backed by a postgres database (oh, another cool thing: the postgres JDBC connector, a full reimplementation of the postgres network protocol in java, so you get all the stuff you need to connect to the database just by dropping in a jar file).

maybe it'll get far enough along that i'll throw the svn repos up where people can get at it, who knows...

at the very least it'll let me polish up my java skills, which are very rusty at this point.

oh, and i almost forgot! the absolute coolest thing about all this java stuff is that it all just worked on the first try on my powerbook! maybe there is something to this 'cross platform' stuff after all...

Bad News On The Eldred Front

it's good to see that Lawrence Lessig has a sense of humor about this sort of thing...

[Lessig Blog]

Game Prices

i love the way video game prices drop through the floor after the game's been out.

i just picked up a copy of 'Alice' for 15 bucks! it's such a cool game, and since it's a little old, it runs fantastically on my new powerbook.

ok, back to wonderland i go...

Testing, One, Two, Three...

here's a test post from NetNewsWire Pro's weblog editor...

let's see if this shows up...

[ later... ]

ok, it works. i like it ;-)

i am so buying this when it hits 1.0.

Bad Day

today was a bad day at work.

i had a long discourse mostly written about exactly why it was a bad day, but i think i'm just going to leave it at "today was a bad day at work" and move on with life.

OMG This Rules

i am so amused.

oh, and completely unrelated, but the two towers rocked.

From The Mouth Of Ben Stein

read it

courtesy of rob

Math Is Power

i just saw the most amusing 'math is power' commercial...

that entire advertising campaign cracks me up. every time i see it i can't help but think of my friend adam, who has to be the best math teacher i've ever met. of course, he'll likely end up flipping burgers or something after college, but that just underlies the irony inherant in the commercial ;-)

i don't really have anything more useful to say, but it cracked me up and i felt the need to post an entry about it.

Weird Movie Interactions

so i'm watching a movie that my replay happened to start recording (two ninas if you must know, and yes, it's a sappy romantic comedy, what of it?), and one of the main characters just quoted from one of my favorite movies of all time (kicking and screaming, which is STILL not available on DVD!).

it's not like he just said a line that happened to be in the other movie, he literally refered to seeing a movie sometime where someone said "if you want to make god laugh, make a plan".

that's so random.

What? You Were Expecting More From A Star Trek Movie?

went to see star trek: nemesis this morning.

it was as expected. not great, but not horrific. i never go into star trek movies expecting much, so i'm never all that dissapointed.

oh well, back to doxygenating subversion's header files.

My New Favorite Application

LaunchBar has the be the most brilliant application i've ever seen.

i now have keyboard shortcuts for like everything i ever use! i'm on the verge of registering for the full version, and i haven't even been playing with it for 10 minutes yet! this is so cool!

This Is So Not My Week

lets just say that i hate being on call at work.

so far this week i've dealt with hardware problems, software problems, magic "we didn't change anything but it seems to have fixed itself" problems, and most likely a dozen or so other problems i can't recall at the moment, and it's only wednesday.

the really annoying part is that i've actually got some cool stuff i'm trying to work on, but i'm not getting any time to work on it because i'm dealing with stupid shit all the time!

Apple Switch Parody Number 4753

watch it.

then go see this movie.

(hey, they're vaguely related... ok, i was just too lazy to post two entries.)

Adventures in Retro-Computing

jwz seems to be having an interesting time with some old macs.

the whole concept of retro-computing is interesting.

i mean we've already got companies who specialize in recovering old data from older machines, since really, do you have the hardware and the software to read that obscure archive format you used to back stuff up on to now-ancient floppies back in the 80's? what if you need something on those disks?

this kind of thing can only become more important as time goes on, with people storing so much of their data in the random proprietary format their favorite app happens to use.

in any case, yes, i'm jealous, i wish i had a dedicated daliclock machine.

I Am So Weak...

i was wandering around the palisades mall today, and i had a moment of weakness...

so now i'm typing this on a brand new 1 GHz Titanium PowerBook.

it is so nice.

i got the 'double your RAM for 40 bucks' option, but they were out of 512 Meg chips, so i'll have to go back next week to get that put in. even without the RAM maxed out, it's screamingly fast. i love it.

now i'm going to get back to not thinking about my credit card bill...

Who Knew Math Could Be This Fun?

i've got this feeling that someone has pointed this out to me before, but i can't recall when or who.

it's still damn funny though, either way.

Tetris!

brent simmons (of NetNewsWire fame) had a link to this tetris clone on his blog today.

so of course now i've become addicted...

it's really amazing how such a simple little game can be so much fun...

Unit Tests == Goodness

so i imported cppunit into our source tree at work and started writing unit tests for some of our code. it's something i've been thinking about for a while, and i finally broke down and just did it (like my recent reworking of our build system to support partial tree builds).

it's taken me a few days to get this stuff working well, but overall i think it'll be worth it in the long run, since checking out the entire tree to build was getting cumbersome, converting all our old crufty makefiles to use my newer system will only help us maintain them, and unit testing just makes everything easier in the long run.

of course i'll really have to start making progress on my other projects soon, but i think i've figured out one of our major problems, and once that's out of the way the rest will begin to fall in to place...

I *HEART* Newbury Comics

so i was in the belingham newbury comics this week, and i was looking for the second season of the simpson's on DVD, but i couldn't find it, which was annoying, since they're always cheaper than anyplace i can find around stamford, and i don't get too many chances to shop there anymore, since they don't seem to have them in CT.

anyway, i gave up and bought something else.

then, today i was heading back to CT and i decided to stop again just for the hell of it, and i found a copy of it in their used section!

bonus!

I like MT, but...

i really wish it would actually rebuild pages when i explicitly tell it to do so.

i just messed with the sort ordering on my archive pages to get them back the way i like it (i must have screwed that up in one of my upgrades), and i had to go through and edit an entry on each damn month's page to get it to actually update the page because just rebuilding didn't actually change anything.

if i was a better person, i might try updating to a newer MT (if there is one, i'm not sure), or poking through the code, but i've spent too much time looking at source code today and i'm tired of it.

Recommended Reading

so i just finished reading Software Configuration Management Patterns. it's definately recommended reading for anyone working on any real world programming projects.

like most other 'patterns' books, it tends to cover a lot of things that are basically common sense, but also touches on a lot of stuff that isn't immediately obvious. plus, even 'common sense' ideas have sides to them that you don't notice until they're laid on on paper in front of you.

i've been thinking a lot about how we do things in my group at work, and how we could make them better, and this book has really crystalized a lot of those ideas.

Streams

it would be nice if subversion had code to let you wrap one svn_stream_t in another svn_stream_t that would do keyword and eol translation on it, so you'd end up with a stream that translates everything you write to it.

as it is, i'm stuck writing the stream out to a temp file, then reopening it and creating a new stream, which i pass to the function we have that does the translation on it.

i think this is acceptable, since 'svn cat' isn't exactly a core bit of our functionality, but it's still irritating.

me: 1, make: 0

it's an ugly, evil hack, but it seems to work.

and can i just say that it's damn annoying that solaris make doesn't do macro substitution inside a command substitution, so to get data from the makefile to the shell command you're using to generate another macro, you have to do evil evil things.

if someone knows of a way to export an environment variable inside a makefile, that would also solve my problem, but i can't seem to find a way to do that either. i'm sure my o'reilly's book on make would have some kind of answer for me, but i left it in CT... so i'm stuck with the evil solution...

oh well, at least it seems to work...

Turning 30

i hope that when i turn 30, it's at least as interesting as this.

Damn...

it costs entirely too much to frame prints...

on the bright side though, i will soon have "The Face of Aphrodite" and "Reptiles" hanging in my apartment.

of course, this requires a fairly liberal interpretation of the word "soon", since there is a 3 week wait at the local framing shop...

consol^H^H^Hsomething else

just picked up mac os x for unix geeks, which seemed appropriate, since i use mac os x, and i am a unix geek.

so far, it looks pretty cool.

(ok, so i was originally going to write about something else, and i forgot to change the title to match this post. it's fixed now.)

Peter Jackson is God

the new extended edition of the fellowship of the ring movie is too cool for words.

they added everything i had hoped for, plus a few other things i hadn't even remembered from the book.

the only question i've got is "how am i going to find time to watch all the special features if i've still got all these babylon 5 DVD's to watch!"

Progress...

so i've been making progress on the subversion ruby bindings... the client bindings build and even seem to work, and the working copy stuff is coming along (although there have been annoying changes to the svn libs since these were last touched that make some of the behaviour difficult to recreate).

i'm questioning whether i should even be working on this, since it might be more practical to contribute to the SWIG bindings, but we've already got these native bindings here, and i like working with native ruby bindings a hell of a lot more than i like working with SWIG (it gives me a headache to read it), so i think i'll work on these for now.

Let's Take a Trip...

back in time...

it looks like the internet archive wayback machine has some of my old pages archived.

wow, that's a blast from the past...

Weird

so MT doesn't seem to be updating the comment counts on my index page...

i wonder if posting a new article will trigger it, since rebuilding the index didn't...

Argh!

so i was in borders today, looking for some book, and i got a call on my cell phone from a friend, and i proceeded to become one of those people i hate, the ones talking too loudly and for too long on a cell phone in a public place.

so thank you cara, for helping to complete my transition into that which i loathe...

Must Resist Urge To...

watch 22 consecutive hours of Babylon 5!

i got the last copy of season one from tower records, and it even turned out to be on sale!

Time and Motivation

or really, the lack of both....

i've got a ton of stuff i really should be working on, for a variety of different projects, but i never seem to have any free time, and when i do have time i don't seem to have motivation. i end up sitting around watching bad tv and surfing the web.

does anyone have any time/motivation they could lend me? it would really help...

The Ring

that had to be the scariest movie i've seen in a long time.

Welcome To 2.51

just upgraded to MT 2.51... i wonder if it worked...

Midnight Madness

i don't think i've ever been as tired, wet, and cold as i was at the end of midnight madness this weekend.

a day of running around boston in the pouring rain will do that.

but i also don't remember the last time i had so much fun ;-)

even though we lost...

The Hissing!

so i have 3 radiators in my apartment, and since they turned the heat on, all of them have been hissing, to one extent or another.

the one in my bedroom was the worst, and the superintendent fixed that (granted, it was after i started to actually see steam, but whatever).

the other two were annoying, but not overwhelmingly so. the guy had told me to call and have someone look at the others later, since he hadn't brought the correct parts to do it then (and it was late).

today, someone was supposed to come by to handle the other two. they appear to have fixed the one in the kitchen (which i couldn't care less about, i spend like 0 time in the kitchen), but the one in the living room is actually worse.

and the person i talked to today says he'll have someone come by tomorrow to fix the other one.

sure he will.

right.

Vanity

the new version of NetNewsWire has my blog listed in it's sites list.

cool.

it also has some neat bandwidth usage reduction changes, so anyone who uses it should upgrade.

again, i'd just like to point out that this program is so damn cool that i'm actually looking forward to the pro version coming out so i can pay for it. i don't really need any of the features he's talking about adding (although a few of them are neat), but i feel like even the lite version is worth paying for.

Replay

so i got a replaytv.

so far, i like it.

there's still a very intermitent problem with it not being able to change the channel on my cable box 100% of the time. i managed to tweak the settings so it doesn't happen much (i couldn't make it happen when i tried), but it still managed to fuck up recording "that 70's show" today. perhaps i'll call tech support tomorrow and see if they can help.

Now With Valid RSS!

so i validated my rss feeds, and fixed the problems that were there...

someday i need to go through and fix the accessability problems my blog has, but so far i've been too lazy to fix up the old MT templates i've been using. oh well, a problem for another day.

Finally!

chris finally released an alpha version of waterlily.

it's pretty neat... not quite ready for me to use it full time, but it shows a ton of promise. once he gets some syntax coloring of the incoming messages going and a way of notifying you when a message comes in for a given tab, it'll be great!

i'm also glad to have a cocoa app writen by someone who knows what they're doing to look at. the code is rough in some places, but a lot of it is damn cool.

It Can't Be This Easy...

spent some time this weekend playing with the GUI development tools for OS X. i have to say that they have got to be the best rapid application development tools i've ever seen. it's just too damn easy to put together a professional looking app. with a bit of poking around and a good book i've been able to get everything i've tried working in a matter of minutes.

it's remarkable that NeXT was able to take such incredible technology and still not make it a comercial success. i swear, it's things like that which make it depressing to be in the computer industry. often, the better technology just doesn't succeed.

oh well, at least apple has managed to give it new life.

now i just have to come up with a good application to write...

Birds of Prey

ok, maybe it's just because i'll always have a little of the adolescent geek who spent far too much reading comic books and playing role playing games in me, but i thought birds of prey was damn cool.

and it's not because it has beautiful women dressing in tight clothing and running around gotham city beating people up.

well, it's not just because of that...

We've Moved!

i just moved this blog from my account at pair.net (which hosts http://electricjellyfish.net/, and will likely continue to do so, if only because i prefer to pay someone else to handle my email, to avoid the chaos that would inevitably occur if i did it myself) to my server (which hosts http://quicksort.net/).

i didn't have any real problem with pair, but i like having more control over my environment, so here we are. plus, i've been having some problems with my MT install at the pair account, and it's hard to debug without access to the error logs.

anyway, redirect any bookmarks or whatever that you might have had pointed to the previous site, and let me know if anything's wrong with the site.

Tabbed Browsing

does anyone else wish that when you close a tab in a browser (either mozilla or phoenix or chimera or whatever other tabbed browser you use), it would dump you back into the tab you were last browsing in before the one you closed? all the ones i've tried have always left me viewing either the furthest left or furthest right tab.

am i the only one who's annoyed by this? or am i just nuts?

Welcome to MySQL

so i don't like MySQL, but it's better than flat DB Files, at least that's what i'm telling myself...

if this post shows up, then i guess that means this upgrade really did work ;-)

What a Cute Blowfish

someone pointed me to a ssh-agent front end for os x, so i can finally stop typing my password all the time on my laptop.

it has a couple of ugly hacks with symlinks and environment variables to make it work, but i don't care, it does the job, and the blowfish icon in my dock is great!

Yes!

i just got offered commit access to DarwinPorts!

3,2,1 Contact!

so if anyone out there (there are one or two of you) actually remembers my apartment's phone number enough to use it, you'll have to start using the cell as of tomorrow. i finally got around to calling and canceling the service, since i almost never use it.

Syndicate Me!

by popular demand, i now have a link to this site's xml feed on the front page of this blog.

of course, if more people used rss syndicators that supported auto-discovery (like say NetNewsWire), then this would be less of a problem ;-)

New Toys

so i started playing around with darwinports. it's pretty neat so far. a little raw, still lacking a fair amount of functionality and a lot of documentation, but it works well enough that random programmer types (like me for instance) can play with it.

i put together ports for expat and neon, which haven't gone in yet, and chef, which has (since jkh has a sense of humor). hopefully i'll get subversion going soon, although it'll have to be a network only build for now, since dp has version 4.1 of berkeley db, and we don't support that yet...

unfotunately, the opendarwin.org site seems to have fallen off the net for some reason, so my progress has stalled a bit...

Third Party Software

why is it that like 80% of my problems at work can be traced to third party code i have no control over and no access to?

damn that's annoying.

doesn't anyone make software that JUST FUCKING WORKS?

sorry for shouting.

thanks.

Catch Up

i haven't written anything here in a while...

but looking back on the last few weeks, i can't think of anything especially interesting that's happened, so i guess this will be an exceptionally dull entry.

yep. pretty dull.

i'm going to get back to waiting for buffy to come on and hacking on my toy project. i'm writing a chat client/server system with apr, since there are a lot of parts of it that i don't get to use in my subversion coding. overall, i'm reasonably impressesd. there could stand to be more documentation, and the header files are a bit oddly named sometimes, but other than that, it rocks.

Free The Mouse!

a good article at wired about Laurence Lessig's career. very interesting, especially since the supreme court will be hearing his arguments in eldred v. ashcroft on oct 9.

I Am The Keymaster

it is just the coolest thing that all XUL files have the namespace http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul.

i am definately going to have to pick up the O'Reilly's Book on building applications with mozilla just based on this fact. these people have enough of a sense of humor that i feel compelled to support them by purchasing the book ;-)

Curses, Foiled Again!

so jerenkrantz tried to release apr-util-0.9.1 today, but the build is busted in at least two places.

first, it depends on the install.sh script from the apr tarball, but the release version of the apr tarball is in a different location than the cvs version would be, and the path is hardcoded.

if you rename directories to get past this hurdle, the configure script errors out. i can rebuild the script myself, and then it works, but out of the box it's fucked. i wonder what version of autoconf he used to roll the release...

anyway, at least people are making some progress on it, as it will be nice to have release versions of both apr and apr-util out there.

Will Sell Soul For Debugging Tools

i am in love with purify.

rational is general an evil company, and all their other tools i've encountered suck horribly, but this one just kicks so much ass.

i'm going to see if it's possible for us to trade ben to them for a single user license. i like ben and all, but i think purify is worth losing him. it's too bad, since we'll have to find another windows weenie to replace him, but these are the prices we have to pay...

#include <witty title here>

isn't it just a little depressing that my blog only has three categories?

work, general, and coding. is that all my life is made up of?

of course, general could be broken up into other categories...

friends. love (a rather dull category these days, unless you count ex-girlfriends who occasionally get themselves stuck in my head for no adequately explained reason (i wonder if any of them read this... maybe. probably not though...)). family. rants. i'm sure there are others.

but when i started this thing, i lumped it all into 'general'.

even more proof that i need to get a life.

i'm still not overly happy with life in stamford.

i don't have any really good reason for this, i mean i've got a good job, working with (mostly) cool people. i have some reasonably good friends (hell, they'd likely be great friends if i didn't spend most of my time succumbing to my techno-geek reclusive tendencies), there's a million things to do if i just went out to find it, but still...

i keep dwelling on the negative things about living here.

everything is really fucking expensive. i pay way too much for rent. i could solve this problem by moving somewhere cheaper, but then i'd be living in the middle of nowhere and spending my life commuting, which i would hate.

the only place you can really find something interesting to do is in the city, which means an hour there and an hour back on the train. when you move here, they tell you 'and NYC is just a short train ride away', but for me, it's a long enough ride that it makes it annoying enough that i hardly ever do it.

worst of all, most of my really close friends are elsewhere. there's godfrc, but she's got jettea, and i /hate/ doing the third wheel thing. other than her though, everyone's either back in troy, or out in/near boston, or scattered across the country here and there. i really miss them all. this becomes more and more clear every time i see them. it seems like every other weekend i end up hanging out with the old crew for one reason or another, and having a great time, and then i come back here and get annoyed that i can't do that all the time.

ok, i'll stop now, because i'm just bitching at this point, and it isn't going to solve anything.

but thanks (whoever you are) for letting me vent for a bit.

i needed that.

Weekends

it's been a reasonably slow weekend.

i didn't get the work done that i intended to, since for some reason i couldn't VPN in this afternoon. i don't know what was up with it, since i was able to connect in the morning just fine. the only thing i can think of is that i upgraded the firmware on the wireless router (which has apparently stopped it from locking up), and perhaps that is interacting oddly with the VPN stuff. i will have to investigate further, since i kind of need to be able to VPN in from home...

instead i ended up playing with subversion's build system, with the end result being that you can now turn off the building of the swig bindings. as a bonus, you can also specify an alternative swig, which i don't particularly need, but other people asked for.

i also picked up 'super mario sunshine', which has a stupid title, but is a reasonably fun game. i'm pretty bad at it, but i think i'm improving, slowly...

then i hung out at JATKINS' place tonight, and played trivial pursuit. i lost, but it was a good time. he's been having these sunday night 'games night' things for a while, and this is the first time i've been able to go. i think i'll definately be going again in the future, assuming i'm in town on sunday night.

Apache 2.0 Rocks!

and if you need further proof of this, check out this article on how to write an extension to it.

neat stuff.

Damn

i'd just like to point out that it /really/ feels like friday, but it isn't.

that really really sucks.

oh well.

Still Alive...

so it's been a while.

lets see, what's happened lately...

went to joe's wedding. that was cool. had to wear a tux. that wasn't.

started using chimera again. i like it a lot. i'm starting to see why people like tabbed browsing.

i really should get something done tonight, but i think i'll just sit here and watch tv.

Retro!

so in an effort to see what a /normal/ OpenVMS system is like (as opposed to the hacked to hell, covered with home grown stuff we have at $COMPANY), i signed up for an account on the DeathRow OpenVMS Cluster.

it's pretty weird. even on VMS at work, i was used to having all sorts of unix compatability commands lying around. on DeathRow, they don't have any of them. i'll have to train myself to use DIR instead of ls ;-)

Geek Lit

damn, i really must be a geek, cause this story is just about the most amusing thing i've read in a while. gotta love it when a writer actually knows what he's talking about.

Grr, Argh

been meaning to post something here for a few days, but haven't quite gotten around to figuring out what to say.

i still haven't, so i don't know why i'm even writing this, other than to say "hello world, i'm still here".

Once More With Feeling

it looks like they're going to be releasing the soundtrack to 'Once More With Feeling' in september... very cool stuff, as it's damn good music, and the mp3's i've got of it kind of suck, having been transfered from the original TV broadcast and all.

Kitty Cat

went to the palisades mall last night to worship^H^H^Hsee the release of Jaguar and pick up a copy. mac people sure are fanatical... it was cool though, and i got a free t-shirt out of the deal. overall, i'm impressed with Jaguar. it seems nicer in general, and Subversion compiled right out of the box, which was very nice to see.

anyway, i'm off to take a shower and drive to MA for joe's bachelor party...

libpdel

saw a neat new port that was added to the freebsd ports tree today. it's a library of code for creating embedded applications on freebsd (and linux i believe). it looks to be frighteningly full featured, with a memory allocation system, a threaded http server that does ssl, and a bunch of other stuff i haven't begun to digest yet.

not that i really have a use for this, but it seems like something that would be good to remember, so i'm posting this here so i can find it later ;-)

Toy!

NetNewsWire is very cool, for those of you who are looking for an RSS aggregator for Mac OS X, it looks quite promising. It doesn't seem to work with the RSS that livejournal outputs, which is unfortunate, and it would be nice if it was open source so i could fix that problem, but other than that i think i'm in love...

Have We Made A Difference?

doc searls has some interesting things to say about lawrence lessig's recent speech at oscon.

At Work?

it's at times like this, at 10:50 on a saturday morning, when any sane individual should by all rights be at home either asleep or having a quiet morning around the house, that i wonder at what point in my life did i go wrong?

because i must have done something horrible to have ended up at work, waiting for idiots at first call to fix their network problems so that this feed will turn back on and i can stop worrying about it.

oh well, at least nobody is here, so i don't have to worry about how loud the music is.

btw, the new they might be giants album kicks ass.

It's Alive!

i finally found a second to burn a new iso for testing, and it seems tht the latest FreeBSD/ppc snapshot boots on my ibook. unfortunately, it doesn't seem to recognize my cdrom, so i can't mount the filesystem and play around, but still, this is big progress when you consider that the previous version simply died on boot.

here is some proof, courtesy of my digital camera.

I *heart* CafePress

you gotta love a website that makes jokes like this not only possible, but easy.

(you probably have to have been reading the subversion dev list lately to get the joke.)

Oh My God!

everyone must go read tales of the plush cthulhu right now.

free culture

i heard lawrence lessig speak at usenix this year, and it was really really cool.

unfortunately, he didn't have any copies of his talk available, so i couldn't show it to people who weren't there.

it seems that he's made this one available on the web, so you should check it out (and so should i when i get the chance).

Random Update

it's been a few days...

let's see, what's been happening.

work is hectic. training is almost over, but that means that they are just now hitting our part of the project, which means they've got all sorts of questions for me. on one hand, this is good because it means i get a good chance to see what these new people are like. on the other hand, it can be /so tiresome/ answering the same question over and over and over...

anyway, it's almost over, and i will be glad when it is.

yesterday we found out that out of the new class we got JATKINS, which is cool cause he's smart and he'll be working with me on some stuff. kan got DRUBIN, which is also cool because it means he'll be working with us as well.

tomorrow is the 6 flags trip, and i am so ready to just ride roller coasters all day, but first, more training...

Getting Out and Doing Stuff

went to see 24 hour party people with tray yesterday.

it was amusing. i'm not a huge music person, but i definately enjoyed its little tour of the manchester music scene from 1970 to 1990. neat stuff.

spent the rest of the day wandering around the museum of natural history, which had it's good points and it's bad points. a lot of it was neat, but a lot also looked like they hadn't done anything new with it for like a decade, which is disappointing.

i think museums would be a lot more fun if they had designated times when children were not allowed in them. the whole thing would be more enjoyable if there wasn't this constant background noise of whining kids.

Fun With Ruby

so seeing louis's aggregator made me want to play with it, but my scheme is pretty weak, so i started hacking on my own in ruby.

it's coming along. it grabs rss files, parses them and extracts the useful information, then outputs them as html. i need to make the formatting better and provide a way to cache downloaded output so that it doesn't try to download a new version each time it's called, but it's making progress, and it gives me an excuse to play with ruby, which is always fun.

CamelBones

i really wish i had time to play with some of this stuff.

as much as perl has annoyed me in the past, it seems that there are still cool things being done with it, and i should take the time to become more fluent with it.

of course that will come after i port Config::Auto to ruby ;-)

Maybe Perl Isn't So Bad After All...

this rocks.

i just sent in a patch implementing the ini parsing part, since version 0.2 from CPAN doesn't seem to have it (although it tries to call it if given an ini file... perhaps he meant to write it and forgot).

well, maybe 'patch' is a generous term, since it was literally a single line of code... but i even wrote tests for it! ;-)

it almost makes me wish i worked with perl more, so i would have an excuse to use it.

Meta, and My Open Source Convictions

gary comments on the fact that the MT people spoke at OSCON last week.

i'll concede that since the convention is supposed to be concerned with open source software, and as such, MT probably should not have been represented, since it is most certainly not open source.

his comments about people using MT instead of some open source blogging tool made me think though. i'm certainly one of the people he's talking about, as i use MT to maintain this site, and if i was using some other blogging tool i might be inclined to contribute code to it.

on one hand, maybe this does 'make the world a worse place', or at least 'not a better place', in some abstract sense, but on the other, i'm not sure that i care.

it's like something louis told me once... he said that he felt he had 'done his part for king and country', and as such didn't feel guilty going out and using some closed source product if it made his life easier.

while i don't pretend to be as accomplished an open source hacker as he is, i still feel that i have made (and continue to make) my own contributions, and quite honestly, when you get right down to it, i'm not all that interested in hacking on a blogging tool. for the moment, MT does all that i desire of it, and perhaps someday, if something else better comes along, i might switch to it. that something might be open source, might be 'source available' like MT, or it might even (doubtful as it seems) be closed source.

when it comes to computers, i use what gets the job done, and while i'd prefer (for mostly technical reasons) that it be something i can hack on freely, that just isn't the sole motivating factor, and i'm ok with that.

Random

this is just completely random. i actually know the girl they're talking about in this article (well, vaguelly, we both interviewed at trilogy at the same time during my senior year of college). well, i assume it's the same girl, since there can't be a whole lot of people named 'camberley crick' out there.

it's interesting to consider how the implications of having a lot of information about yourself on the web have changed over the past few years, now that so many people can so easily access it via something like google. i'm not saying that this is a bad thing, but it's certainly something to be aware of.

damn, i hadn't thought about that name in a long time. it's not often you run into a girl who will keep score in hexadecimal while playing darts ;-)

Finally!

so it looks like justin is working on a replacement for libtool, since he found using the original to be /way/ too slow on his mac. the new version is written in c, blindingly fast, and with any luck will really take off, as this whole 'run a shell script a bazillion times for each build' thing really has to stop.

Suck

so one of my higher ups at $COMPANY ran across one of my archive'd weblog entries where i had mentioned the company name. apparently it came up in a google search or something. on the same page i had also bitched about some stuff at work, and he was of the opinion that it could be taken the wrong way by some random customer of ours who ran across it, and so he asked me to go remove the mention of $COMPANY's name. so now i'm about to go remove it.

this really sucks, since i don't like the idea of censoring myself on my own personal web page, but i can sort of see his point, and it's always a good idea to stay on good terms with the higher ups, so i suppose i'll just play along and be a nice little worker bee.

i'm kind of curious what kind of google search he was doing though, because when i do a search on the company name, my page doesn't seem to be anywhere near the top... i can do a much more specific search (say $COMPANY and rooneg) and get it, but that's about it....

anyway...

Drool

michelle would love this.

Programming Advice

this is great.

Drool

i almost forgot about this...

saw the cover art for the new babylon 5 season one DVD box set here...

i am so looking forward to getting that... babylon 5 on DVD is way overdue...

Fun With C#

well, mono released a new version recently, and this time it compiles on FreeBSD. well, sort of anyway.

first off, the configure script sucks, and can't figure out that you need -pthread to link against the pthreads stuff. now i concede that this is a bitch to figure out, and i guess i'm spoiled by the fact that the apr people have such nice autoconf-fu for figureing this out, but it stull bugged me. then, you can't actually use the garbage collector, because both the boehm gc and mono have headers named 'gc.h', which screws all sorts of stuff up. on linux this isn't an issue, because they install the gc headers in /usr/local/lib/gc, but on BSD they're in /usr/local/include, so we get fucked. of course, if you hand hack the includes to find the right header, it crashes trying to use the resulting binary to run mcs.exe, so for now we're stuck without gc. then, once you actually get this all built and running, you have to set MONO_DISABLE_SHM in your environment, because it can't seem to connect to the shared memory segment correctly and will give all sorts of errors whenever you run mono if you let it try. oh, and there are occasional errors when it's starting up the io daemon, which leave annoyingly named files all over the place, and i haven't figured out what causes that yet. it seems intermitent, and i can't reproduce it right now.

all of this asside though, i was able to bootstrap the class libraries (it took an ungodly amount of memory, but it worked), and now i'm playing with C# on my FreeBSD box, which was the whole point of this exercise, and it is damn cool ;-)

Toy!

subversion grew a new command today...

[rooneg@quicksilver:~ ] svn ls http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn
http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn:
_    2738 bmatzell        0 Jul 26 13:07 clients/
_    2744   rooneg        0 Jul 26 18:07 trunk/
_    2703    brane        0 Jul 24 22:07 branches/
_    2734   kfogel     2331 Jul 26 10:07 COMMITTERS
_    2698   rooneg        0 Jul 24 18:07 tags/
[rooneg@quicksilver:~ ]

i didn't write the actuall command, but i did do the formatting, which is why it looks so much like 'ls -l' on a FreeBSD box ;-)

In other subversion news, we have our first gui client in the tree. RapidSVN is a wxWindows based, cross platform subversion client. it's still a little young, but it shows some promise.

And The Crowd Goes Wild

so subversion hit Alpha yesterday, and this morning we were on slashdot.

freshman or sophomore year of college, that would have made my entire week, having something i'm involved in mentioned there, and i'd like to say i wasn't phased at all by it now, but i have to admit, it was a pretty damn cool feeling.

now to finish up the new version of the freebsd port, and perhaps do a little more work on the new docs ben put together.

Oh My God...

this is just wrong.

i wonder how long i'll be able to keep myself from ordering it...

No More Sleeping In The Living Room!

I finally broke down and bought a bed today. It's supposed to be delivered on wednesday sometime. I am SO glad I won't have to decide between sleeping in the living room and dragging my futon mattress into the bedroom anymore.

Plus, adding another large piece of furniture brings me a /little/ bit closer to actually filling this apartment to the point where it looks like someone lives here, which is nice. All I've got to do after this is find something to put on the walls, since they look a bit empty now.

*laugh*

I find it amusing that louis is now almost done implementing something i suggested to him as a joke.

Not that it will stop me from using it once it's stable of course ;-)

Random

chimera is cool. i'm posting this with a nightly build, and it seems quite a bit nicer than the last time i tried it. all the little annoyances that pissed me off seem to be gone.

MT 2.21 seems to be a worthwhile improvement on the previous version. a few new tweaks, and i haven't seen any of those annoying 404 errors when rebuilding sites, which is quite nice. this is one of those applications that i'm perfectly willing to shell out a few bucks for, simply because there's no way in hell i'll ever be motivated enough to work on it myself. web apps just aren't any fun.

and now i'm off to troy for the alumni meeting. i don't believe i'm driving this far for a boring, micromanaged meeting where nothing will get done. i must be an idiot. at least there's a party after, although the party is in boylston MA, so i'm in for just a little too much driving today, but i'll survive.

MySQL Can Bite Me

So I spent most of today fighting with MySQL.

I finally got it to do most of what I wanted, meaning I was able to work around a bunch of it's brain damaged behavior, but I never did get it's pathetic excuse for C++ bindings to compile with Sun's C++ compiler.

Overall, the whole program feels like it was a poor excuse for a database that has enough stuff bolted onto it that you can almost use it as a real RDBMS, but in order to do so you have to jump through so many hoops that you might as well just go use a real database.

I just hope that it comes out way ahead in speed tests, because if it doesn't then it's pretty sad that they sacrificed so much and didn't gain anything for it.

Just A Bit Too Apropos

i spotted this at jwz's livejournal.

i don't think there's anything useful i can add, so i'll just leave it at that.

Ugh

I hate powerpoint.

I've been writing boring as hell training documentation for the past two days, and if I look at another powerpoint slide I think I'm going to strangle someone.

But I finished them up today, so now I can go back to evaluating SQL databases for my project. I'm willing to bet we'll go with PostgreSQL, but you never know, MySQL could come from behind and win. We'll see.

Now, back to fighting with rhythmbox. I will make it compile on FreeBSD damn it!

Oops

So obviously, when I said "restoring my FreeBSD partition to bootable status" what I meant was "accidently render Windows XP unbootable and while attempting to fix that accidentally install Windows over my FreeBSD partition, losing years of accumulated stuff that was sitting, not backed up, in my home directory."

Oops.

Anyway, now I've got a freshly installed FreeBSD partition and a freshly installed Windows XP partition, and everything is playing nice with everything else, which is nice. I decided to play with subversion today, rather than going right back to NWN, and fixed a little bug, so at least the day wasn't a total waste.

Fun!

Well, I've finally gotten some free time and started taking a closer look at Neverwinter Nights. After a fun filled fight with my video drivers, which were locking up the machine whenever I tried to start the game after creating a character (but not if I used a premade character) I made my first character (an elvish fighter/mage) and I'm now working my way through the city's jail. I still think the game is a lot of fun, and I can't wait to start playing multiplayer once Kirsten and Larry get off their asses and start a game up.

Now I think I'm going to see what I can do about restoring my FreeBSD partition to bootable status, since WindowsXP was nice enough to blow away my boot loader when I installed it.

Gotta love windows...

Stranger In A Strange Land

So Kirsten managed to convince me to put a windows partition on my machine (well, actually a separate drive, but whatever), so I could play Neverwinter Nights.

So I went out and bought a copy of Windows XP Pro (contrary to what the box tells you, you can upgrade from Windows 95 (the only Windows CD I had left) to Windows XP), and now I've got it up and running.

First impressions: XP doesn't seem to suck as much as previous versions of Windows. The default Look and Feel is pretty much a bad imitation of Mac OS, but once you change it back to old style windows (which is ugly, but not hideous), it's usable. I had it crash once, when starting Neverwinter Nights the first time, but I upgraded my graphics drivers and now it works fine.

Neverwinter Nights itself is damn cool. Even with my year old graphics card it looks nice, and it seems to pretty accurately recreate D&D. I'll have to see what it's like when I'm playing multiplayer, but that will have to wait a little while.

While I'm living in windows land, I decided to give the Windows build of Subversion a try. It seems to work quite nicely. The installer depends on cygwin binaries for diff.exe and diff3.exe, which is a bit irritating, since I prefer not to install such things on my Windows machine (when in rome, etc), but that will likely be solved in the near future. Other than that, it seems to work just fine.

Back To Work, Take 2

Well, I spent the last few days out on Cape Cod with my family. It was our semi-regular family reunion, where we rent a bunch of cottages, drink a lot, play loud irish music late into the night, and generally have a good time. I enjoyed it, but I wasn't able to stay for the whole week, as I've already missed way too much work lately.

Now I'm just trying to get back in the swing of things. The stuff we worked on last week STILL isn't in production yet. Well, my stuff is, but Oren's side of it is still waiting for some changes. He needs to work out some of the issues with 'old client' -> 'new server' combinations first. It's annoying being all the way out here so I can't really help very much. I'm still trying to chase down the random segfaults we're seeing. I'm almost certain it's a memory corruption issue, but I have no idea where it could be. Hopefully my boss will come through and get us a license for purify and that will shed some light on the issue.

Kirsten's coming to visit this weekend, which should be cool. It's been a while since we've had a chance to really hang out.

Back to Work

Well, after a week and a half away, I'm now officially back to work at good old first stamford place. It looks like my boss is very happy with the performance gains Oren and I were able to come up with on monday and tuesday, so modulo a few small issues, which we're working on now, we'll be able to roll out the new stuff really soon.

Unfortunately, since I was out the beginning of this week, and I have so much stuff that should really get done, I'm skipping the Solaris training we have scheduled for today and tomorrow, which sucks, but I'll deal. On the bright side, odds are I probably did much of what they're doing last week in the Solaris Internals lecture I went to at USENIX, so it's no huge loss.

Anyway, back to work...

Macs!

So I finished up USENIX and headed up to Cupertino with Louis yesterday. He took me on a tour of Apple, which was really cool. Lots of macs, as expected, plus some really cool people. It was fun.

Today, we hung out with Chris a bit and I got to meet some random people who work at Apple who I had previously only known as email addresses on Darwin mailing lists. That was really cool.

Then, I spent an annoying amount of time trying to rent a car, and ended up having to call the American Express travel people and have them work it all out, because I, being underaged, was not able to rent a car from the few places I called. Fortunately, it turns out that National lets you rent cars for like 10 bucks extra if you're under 25, which still sucks, but I was able to bill it to work, which is better than nothing.

Now to help set up Subversion for Louis.

More USENIX Fun

Well, USENIX continues on, and just gets more fun every day.

Yesterday was the BSD BOF session, with talks from representative of all 5 BSD operating systems (NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, BSD/OS, and Darwin), and that was really really cool. I got to see Theo de Raadt (from OpenBSD) arguing with Kirk McKusick (of CSRG fame), who happened to be sitting right next to me. Kirk is a really nice guy, and Theo really does seem to be just as abrasive as everyone says he is, but then again, there's something to be said for someone who's willing to tell absolutely anyone that they are full of shit, and I'm glad he's around.

After that, Jordan Hubbard installed Castle Wolfenstein on the imacs in the terminal room, and people played it until like 4AM (although I crashed around 2).

This morning was a talk on Scheduler Activations in NetBSD, which was really neat. It was kind of amusing when Julian Elischer, the guy who's doing the FreeBSD KSE project (which is pretty much the same thing as Scheduler Activations), started asking questions after the talk, and had to stop half way through because he had too many questions and they ran out of time... I forgot to ask my question though, which was how he felt about the fact that FreeBSD and OpenBSD are spending a lot of time working on multi-level threading libraries, while Solaris, which has had a multi-level threading library for years, has just switched to a 1-1 model because they've concluded that the complexity isn't worth it on modern hardware. Oh well. Maybe I'll get a chance to ask him later on.

It's really cool to be able to place some faces with the email addresses I've been seeing on the lists for so long. Check out this and this for some pictures (not mine, since my camera's battery died, and I left the charger at home...).

USENIX and Slow Compiles

So I'm sitting here in the USENIX terminal room, waiting for my laptop to finish compiling and testing a patch to subversion, and it occurs to me that despite the fact that I really like the ibook, I'm not sure I'll be able to justify one next time around, just because of the speed issues.

I guess if I can get an acceptable speed mac in the same form factor when I get motivated to upgrade, I'll do it, but if not, I'll go for a similar size PC laptop running FreeBSD. I don't particularly like the idea of going back to a PC laptop, but these compiles are killing me.

In other news, USENIX is a lot of fun. I spent today in Kirk McKusick's FreeBSD Kernel Internals tutorial, which was really cool. He's an interesting speaker, and I'm really annoyed that I have to go to the Solaris Internals lecture tomorrow instead of the second half of his.

The only thing that sort of annoyed me was that his tutorial was a bit dated, as it covered the 4.X series of FreeBSD, but since the 5.X series is still in very rapid development, I don't think I can really fault him for that, and he did make a point to mention when things were different between the new and old versions.

Money + Family = BAD

So I talked to my sister a few days ago, and she asked me if I could co-sign the lease on her new apartment, since she doesn't have a job yet, so she can't pass the credit check at the moment.

Well, actually she asked me if mom and dad had told me I was co-signing the lease. Apparently it was just assumed that I would agree to this little plan.

Now I didn't have any problem with doing this, so I said yes, and she faxed me the forms.

Today, I get the forms and look at them, and they seem awfully odd. They aren't designed for a person who's co-signing a lease, they're designed for someone who's leasing an apartment, so they ask for a lot of information that they don't need for a credit check. The forms also don't have a lot of information that one would expect them to have, like how much the rent is for example.

Since I'm a little leery of filling out a form that looks a bit wrong, and I'm a lot leery of filling out a form that says I'm financially liable for some amount of money when I don't even know how much money it is, so I call my sister to ask about these things.

Then she gets all pissy because I'm asking these questions, like I'm supposed to just smile and nod and sign the papers.

Money and Family just don't mix. That's all I'm going to say.

Procrastination

So I should have moved the rest of my stuff out of my old apartment tonight.

But instead I went to dinner at sundown with Ben and then came back here and played with scsh, which is turning out to be pretty cool. I should learn more scheme, it's a neat language, and I can barely read it, let alone actually write anything useful in it.

Work was odd today. My boss asked me to make up a list of all the things I work on at work. I guess someone higher up asked him for some kind of 'justify the existence of your group' sort of thing.

I'm going to try not to let that bother me, since if something bad is about to happen, I can't do anything about it anyway.

Anyway, time to get some sleep...

Connected

So the cable guy actually came when they said he would, so now I have bad TV and an internet connection, which basically means I'm moved in to the new apartment.

I still have to get the last remnants of my crap from the old apartment, and I really need to go buy a bed so I can stop sleeping in the living room, but other than that, I'm all set.

Gotta get used to the new channels on cable though. Different cable company here, and I actually need to remember the channels since I don't have a TiVo.

Moving

So I'm -><- this close to getting all my stuff over to the new apartment.

My parents and I moved all the larger bits of furniture today, and now I've just got a crapload of smaller stuff I need to move.

The place is actually looking pretty nice, now that it actually has some furniture in it. The cable guy will be coming tomorrow afternoon and hooking up cable and the cable modem, and after that all I've got left to do is get a bed (since the futon is moving into service as a couch).

But I must say, I'm damn tired, and I will be very glad when this is over and done with.

Fun with Mac OS X

My friend Louis wrote a paper on advanced kernel synchronization for SMP and Real-Time.

He's pretty smart, so you should go read what he has to say.

I mean you've gotta like a guy who once told me: "It's not brain surgery, it's just kernel code."

Now That Just Sucks

So I'm at my parent's place (I guess I have hit the point where it's no longer really home), and their default web browser is netscape 4.7. It's really really amazing how much the css implementation on this browser sucks. I mean if it doesn't work, why bother even including it? I had to turn it off completely in order to even read this site.

Just another reason that I am grateful that my job doesn't involve doing portable web development. Or web development at all for that matter.

I can't wait until mozilla hits 1.0 so I can justify installing it here.

Strange Friends

Apparently Louis is getting a new chair.

Now is it just me, or is that the weirdest chair you've ever seen?

Ah well, no time to write more, I'm off to move more stuff into the new apartment. Damn moving sucks.

Stuff To Read

Paul Graham seems to have a lot to say.

Go read it.

I'm not much of a lisp/scheme person, but everything he says seems to hit home, and as a result of reading his essays, I'm really looking forward to checking out Arc when it's ready for public consumption.

It's interesting to look at the differences between what He's doing with Arc, and what the Perl people are doing with Perl6. One is very much the cathedral style of design and implementation, while the other has everything, from the design of the language to the implementation of it's low level VM out in the open. I wonder which will take off?

Personally, I'm hoping for both, since there's more than enough room in the world for many languages, and both seem to have a lot of good ideas that are worth exploring.

What the Hell Were They Thinking?

So since I'm a super geek who has loved fantasy and sci fi for years, I went and shelled out my twenty bucks for a copy of the Harry Potter DVD, which just came out today.

It's decent enough. The movie itself is just as cool as it was when I saw it in the theater. The problem is when you try to watch the extras, all the deleted scenes that one is supposed to get as the benefit of shelling out the money for a DVD.

They're hidden behind a maze of little games you play to find clues, and once you get enough clues, you can watch the scenes. Fortunately, you can just go here to get the inside scoop on how to find them, but really, come on! Why should I have to click through one puzzle after another just to watch the deleted scenes that I payed for? And it's not like I only have to do this once, a DVD player can't save these sort of things, so I have to do it each and every time I want to watch them.

Damn that sucks.

Long Weekend

Let me explain.

No, is too much, let me sum up.

Went to Maine for my sister's graduation. The 5 hour drive turned into 8 hours, since they closed 95 north due to an overturned tractor trailer truck filled with batteries. Apparently the highway was covered in battery acid.

Did the whole graduation thing and then helped my sister move out of her apartment.

Then, I drove back to MA, picked up some stuff from my parent's house, and started moving stuff into my new apartment.

Since I'm going from living with a roomate to living alone, I've had to go out and buy all the things that my roomate brought to our apartment. Today, I got the microwave, the toaster oven, and the TV. Unfortunately, I can't do much with the new big screen TV, since cable doesn't get hooked up until next monday. Tried it out with the game cube though, and it's really nice.

Not Cool

My 4:00 meeting today went longer than it should have, so even though I really didn't have to be there, and we didn't actually accomplish much, I still missed the train into NYC that would have got me there in time for the showing of Episode 2 I had a ticket for.

Oh well, I'll just have to catch it on a digital screen some other time.

Cool!

I just got my license key from the MT people, so I feel compelled to write a new entry and see if it shows up on their page.

The bug I've been fighting with lately seems to have been corrected. I hate saying that, because I know I'm just tempting fate, but it looks good...

Going to see Episode 2 again tonight with people from work, this time in a nice digital theater. It should be cool.

Can't Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me

I really hate not being able to fall asleep.

What can I write about to waste time?

Good Buffy season finale tonight. I was reasonably impressed. Evil Willow is cool.

Submitted a few Gnome related FreeBSD ports. Gnome 2 is looking quite nice. Perhaps I'll even keep using it longer than a week or so like usually happens with me and desktop environments.

Great, now I can't sleep and I can't come up with anything interesting to write about. This sucks.

One Of Those Days

So friday afternoon, Derek came by my cube and asked me how the problems with news searching were going. I replied: "what problems with news searching?"

Of course, despite the fact that the product goes live in TWO WEEKS, nobody had bothered to mention any problems with news searching to me, even though I WROTE the news server...

And today, once I finally got people to give me the information I needed to debug the problems, I've hit a brick wall, because as far as I can tell, there is no difference between the code I wrote, which doesn't work, and the code we're using in production now, which does not.

Of course, spending an hour and a half on a conference call with the San Mateo guys explaining what the problem was, and hearing them try to offload their problems onto me just added to the fun. Really.

[later] Ok, it has been pointed out to me that the last sentence of that second to last paragraph doesn't make much sense. A more gramatically correct way of saying what I meant would be: "and the code we're using in production now, which does". I swear, that made more sense when I wrote it the first time.

Weblogs

So I was just thinking how odd it is that weblogs in general have taken off.

I remember back in my freshman year at school when I first ran across James Peret's online diary. He just put random thoughts about absolutely everything in his life up on a web page served off his PC in his dorm room. Reading it was a great way to figure out what was going on in his life, although honestly, we probably would have been better off just talking ;-).

Later, when I had my own problems (or so I thought) to vent about, I put them up on my own diary. I guess I didn't really think anyone would read what I wrote there. Honestly, I'm not sure if anyone did, other than Rochelle, who sent me this long email about how I should have been doing something about my problems instead of just writing about them where random strangers could read it. She was right of course, not that it changed anything.

I suppose r0b also read them, although I can't think of any concrete proof of that. For a while there, we had a tendency to find out random things about our lives by reading them on each other's web pages. I suppose that was probably a bad thing, but hey, that's us.

And now, you can go to any number of different web sites and download tools for doing just what we used to do with just a text editor and some flat html pages. What was once the province of the geeks of the world has begun the process of moving into the realm of normal people.

It's kind of odd, and there's a temptation to be a little annoyed by it, just like it's easy to be annoyed by the way the web has moved into mainstream popular culture, but really, it's not good, or bad, it just is.

Motivation, Or Lack Thereof

AKA: How to get absolutely nothing done over an entire weekend.

I've been in one of those funks lately, where I seem to have a lot to do, and yet I still seem to get very little done.

At work I spend a lot of time running around to various meetings or fighting fires because something that was working all of a sudden stopped working, and even when I do find time to work on something, I still don't actually seem to make any progress. A quick look at my TODO list seems to show about the same number of things as it had in the beginning of the week. Sure, I've got some things done, but new problems seem to be piling up just as fast as the old ones are resolved, if not faster.

At home, I just seem to end up sitting around watching TV and surfing the web, when I could be spending that time doing something productive. It's not like I don't have other things to do, since I've got a pile of books I want to get to reading, and about a million things to do to get ready for moving, and probably a ton of other stuff I could be doing that I'm forgetting...

It's ironic, I've been talking to one of my ex-girlfriends lately, and we've been trying to get together to do things, and she always seems to be busy. This is the person who I broke up with (among other reasons) because too much of her life was centered around 'us', and not enough around 'her', to the point where I would feel guilty if I went out and did anything without her. Now, she's the one who's got a million things going on, and I'm sitting at home bored.

I'm thinking of taking up aikido, since I really need to get into the habit of exercising more, and a bunch of people I know from school do it and seem to enjoy it a lot. Perhaps I'll get motivated and sign up for lessons once I finish the whole apartment-change thing.

I'm sure I'll snap out of this funk soon, since I've been in them before and they never last too long, but damn they're irritating when you're in them.

Yoda Rocks!

So I was too tired to write this last night (well, early this morning technically) when I got back from seeing Attack of the Clones, but damn, that movie kicked ass.

Especially Yoda. He's just too damn cool. Most of the rest of it was also great, but the scenes with Yoda at the end were the best.

Imported the boost.org regular expression libs for C++ into perforce at work today. They just got them on the VMS side, so I figured the Unix people should have equal opportunity to play. My first impression is that it's fantastic. It is so nice to be able to use regexps in C++ without having to fall back to using the old, C style regex.h interfaces.

I need to go see Star Wars again. It was so damn cool. I wonder what time it's playing tonight...

Goodbye Helen

It's been announced now, so I can talk about it.

Helen, the woman who ran the software engineering recruiting and training program at $COMPANY, is resigning, effective July 5th. Incidently, she's the person who hired me, and what she said in my interview was a motivating factor for my joining the company.

Ironically, what she told me was that she missed coding (she had been an engineer for 7 years before she started working on training and recruiting). I had asked her what she didn't like about her job, which is one of the things I always ask in an interview. And now, she's leaving, and that's part of the reason.

It sucks, because I both understand why she's leaving, and I REALLY don't want her to leave, because work just isn't going to be the same without her. I got involved in recruiting and training at work because I thought the way she ran them was a great thing, and now she's leaving, and I'm left wondering how much things will change as a result.

Will we be just another company, with HR people doing most of the recruiting? Will our trainging program, another of the things that made me work here, change for the worse?

Too many questions. Not enough answers.

Deny By Default

AKA: How To Make Me Not Want To Help With Your Project.

So a while back, I helped out a bit with the mono project. I was bored when I first started my job, and I figured I'd make good use of the windows machine work had given me by learning some C# and help a deserving open source project at the same time. I wrote a few low level classes, got cvs commit access, and maintained them for a while until I got busy and then, when I had more free time, I found other, more interesting projects to spend it on.

Tonight, I got motivated for some reason, and decided to download mono again and try compiling it on FreeBSD, just for the hell of it. I mean since most of the people who work on it are "all the world's a linux box" weenies, I figured it wouldn't work, but hey, what the hell.

First, my old cvs account appears to no longer function. OK, no biggie, I did tell Miguel I wasn't going to have time to work on it, so shutting off access was probably a prudent idea. you never know when someone's ssh key will get compromised or something.

Then, after I get it downloaded from anonymous cvs (hey, look at that, they finally got their acts together and set up anonymous cvs servers, will wonder's never cease), and hacked on it a bit until it compiled, I put together a patch for one problem I'd found, and explained another, and sent them off in an email to the dev list.

And low and behold, it turns out they're blocking mail from non subscribers by default, so I get to wait until someone gets around to reviewing the message before anyone can see it. Damn that's irritating. I'm all for preventing spam, but there are better ways to handle it then just blocking by default. If you're trying to get people to help you out on a project (and if you are an open source project, i sure as hell hope that's what you're doing), then putting any barrier at all between the motivated developer and you is just the WRONG thing to do.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Well, today I managed to (after some debugging) get one of the things I wanted to do this week done, which was a nice change, since I've been accomplishing less and less lately, for a variety of reasons.

Unfortunately, one of the things this required to be useful did not work, and I still have no idea why.

And worse yet, I got some bad news, which I can't even tell people about because it's not public info yet, and it's killing me.

At least voicestream managed to fix their DNS.

It took them two days to fix it though, so they're still Losers.

Voicestream Sucks!

Stuff broke at work today, and I should have got paged for it, but I didn't.

When I finally found out, and fixed it, I started investigating why I didn't get the page, and it turns out that voicestream.net had completely fallen off the net.

It just wasn't in DNS anymore.

How FUCKING hard is it to just keep the domain name that ALL your email based paging goes through on the net?

Losers.

Is This Thing On?

So I've tried to start a weblog once or twice, and I always end up getting bored with writing my own (I've never been much of an HTML weenie), or irritated with whatever blogging software I was trying.

Movable Type seems pretty cool though, so hopefully I'll actually keep using this one.

We'll see.