Older blog entries for Denny (starting at number 13)

Work:
Still no job. Had an interview last week and been invited back for a second (salary haggling, I suspect) next week. Also been a few potential contracts flying around, which tempts me to try and pursue freelance work instead of going back into the wage-slave system.

Hacking:
YAWNS is coming along nicely, with all this 'spare' time on my hands... I've written most of the admin features (had a load of code contributed for user admin stuff which was nice) and it's almost at the stage where I'm going to fork off a stable branch with just bugfixes.

Life:
You know that chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times" ? Life's been like that recently...

Hrm... redundant. Didn't see that coming. Nice of the boss to come round my house and deliver the news personally though, as I was too ill to come to the office to find out.

Usual story; economic downturn, no clients hiring my (ex) company, hence no money, hence no job for me anymore.

Anyone near Milton Keynes (UK) looking for a Perl-CGI/Linux person, throw an email my way huh? I'd like to be able to eat next month, all things considered...

Hacking:
YAWNS is coming along really well... after posting my first update to freshmeat, I got a few emails from interested people. The first was to let me know my tarball wouldn't unpack, oops! Fortunately he got to me pretty quick, so I managed to fix it before the whole world got the broken one...

The second email was the next day, from a guy who really likes the code and he wants to help! Hey, this open source stuff works!! :) He's already posted me a nice list of bugs with suggested fixes (some of which I went with his fix, some I saw a more elegant way to do it), and he's going to add some admin functionality that I would like to have which isn't as high on my TODO list as more user functionality is right now... so that's pretty cool, I'm really happy :)

In fact, I'm so happy, I think I'll go write some more code now :) Have a good New Year party everyone!!

Other people:
kgb: Lucky you... my car was supposed to be fixed on Sunday, but the car spares place supplied the wrong parts, as per usual, so my friendly mechanic couldn't do half the things that needed doing, so it's all on hold until next weekend now... another week where I'll run up ~£75 taxi bill :(

Hacking:
I have a project on freshmeat. Woot. Actually I'm quite happy about that. It's taken me about twenty years of being interested in coding before I finally managed to stay with one idea/project long enough to call it a release version... yay!

YAWNS on advogato.
YAWNS on freshmeat.

Work:
Yesterday one of my more senior co-workers pointed out to the management team that if they'd stop coming by my desk for progress reports every ten minutes, I might actually make more progress. I wanted to hug him :)

Hacking: Yay, I did something :)

I finally got my slash-clone to a point where it is useable. Check out www.BTsuck.org to see it. The site validates as 100% compliant XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS2, so I'm pretty happy about that.

Of course, this means it looks terrible in Netscape 4.x, but I'm done coding to something that old and broken. It's embarassing when Microsoft can release a more standards compliant web browser than Netscape - I only hope the Mozilla project helps pull Netscape back to where they used to be. Personally I use Galeon these days, I like the bookmarks functionality better than Mozilla...

I still need to add some more features to my code (heh, there's always room for more features!) but right now I'm spending some time with my girlfriend, who was starting to forget what I looked like after the last few months of over-enthusiastic coding!

I'll put a tarball up on the site soon, at the minute there is a broken download link on the about page which I really must fix...

ObAdvogato: I just found out about the recent comments page! I always wondered how people managed to comment on other people's diary comments so frequently :)

olandgren: Look into the HTML::Template module - it complements CGI.pm really nicely, allowing you to keep your interface code separated from your functional code.

Holy shit.

My deepest and most sincere sympathies to anyone touched by the tragic events of this week.

On Sunday afternoon, I crashed my motorbike - I started this week in pain. On Tuesday afternoon (I'm in the UK) my pain suddenly seemed very trivial.

I can't think of anything useful to say, I'm going to go and read other people's diaries instead.

My usual apathy fueled gap between updates... I do actually get out of bed sometimes, not that I could find anyone to testify to that. Anyway, I got my craptop to do the thin client thing to my workstation downstairs day before yesterday, so now I can run decent X 'net apps from the comfort of my duvet :)

Speaking of decent X 'net apps, I still haven't found a nice GUI email client. I poke Balsa around occasionally, as it will coexist peacefully with PINE which I still use mainly. Evolution was a total bitch, I kept up with the CVS for about three months (about six months ago admittedly) before rm -rf'ing the nasty thing. Both it and balsa lack what I would consider the most fundemental advantage of a GUI mail client - drag message from inbox to store in folder. They don't do it. Weird.

I've got a new job (started last month) doing website devel (in perl, so I'm happy again). To learn the HTML::Template lib that they use here, I'm implementing a slash clone that is XHTML 1.0 strict and CSS2 compliant... nothing the world needs, but I like it (and I intend to use it for a hobby site I have been running on someone else's slash clone up to now).

Web browsers seem to be doing better than email clients... I like galeon, it's nice. Oh, found a good text editor the other day too, SciTE (uses scintilla text widget instead of the nasty slow gtk+ one!). Very configurable, which is what we want :)

Enough ramblings for now, time to do some work I guess (well, it is 3pm here!).

More in another year or two ;)

I just added some relationships between me and projects, I'm not positive they're correct... it would be helpful if people who set up projects here would include some rough definitions of what critieria they feel put people into the various categories...

I've also set up a project for anyone who is affiliated with Linux User Groups - I think they are an important part of the Linux community and don't get enough publicity - of course I would say that as I run one :)

Someone (hi Fare) asked for certificates on #linpeople, so I wandered over to see if my login woes had been fixed... astoundingly, I got in, so I thought I'd better update my diary while I was here...

Of course, I still haven't done anything useful with my life, so there's not much to say!!

Work stopped me coding under perl-gtk, an excellent toolkit/language combination, and moved me to wxPython, which is nasty nasty nasty... still, I'm still working under Linux, so I guess I'll survive.

Meanwhile, my personal life is a raging disaster :( Here's the deal - if you don't ask me, I won't tell you (in excrutiating detail) :)

My home PC is long overdue an upgrade, mainly in need of RAM I think, but a new CPU beckons (unfortunately this requires a new m/board and case, so finances decree that I ignore the beckoning for now). I am putting the upgrade off atm due to the almost constant lowering of prices...

Nothing else of interest to say right now... worship perl, die foul wxPython, etc etc blah blah...

I've been trying to get on here to post a new diary entry for so long, I've forgotten most of what I was going to say... kept getting some server error about Auth fields...

Let's see, what have I done recently... I went to the Linux Developer's Conference run by the UKUUG here in the UK, got to meet Telsa and Miguel (energetic guy - now I understand how GNOME as a whole manages to move so fast - he's behind, pushing it!), as well as saying a brief 'hi' to Alan... I also met a lot of other people whose names I never remembered (a weakness of mine, sorry) but who were almost all very interesting to chat with, especially the guys in the bar afterwards who were discussing various networking things... thanks for letting me invade your conversation and learn some stuff from you!

Highlight of the conference for me was Miguel's speech - apparently "Unix sucks" :) which went down well at the UK Unix Users Group conference, obviously... *grin*

I also went to the OSE seminar recently, that was very interesting on a personal level, although not hugely relevant to my work, so it was nice of them to pay my petrol to get there... shortly before I went to that, I had helped one of my LUG members install Linux on a few machines at the school he teaches at, so it was interesting to hear a lot of different people discussing exactly this sort of thing, on scales ranging from one machine in a corner somewhere, to county-wide networks...

Today I had a kind of performance review at work, I didn't get fired, but I don't think anyone was that impressed either... I think I need to prioritise my work over my hobbies a bit more often! (I'm sure plenty of people here know that old song). On the bright side, my work is coding under Linux, so it's not a terrible fate...