Older blog entries for Denny (starting at number 15)

Certifications

Checked into a few of the Observer level people I happened to notice in the recent diary entries list and marked them up as Apprentice as they seem to be working away at various open source / free software projects - well done those people.

I almost didn't cert one person as they had already certificated themself as a Master, which seems less than humble to me (I've never been a fan of self-promotion). However, the person in question is running a fairly neat sounding project, albeit 'pre-beta' at present, so after giving it some thought I set them to Apprentice in the end.

Speaking more generally now, I've never understood why anyone certs themself on Advogato - personally I don't think anyone can pass accurate judgement on their own standing within a community? Maybe it's just me... *shrug*

This quote (from the Hacker How-to) might be relevant: "when you play the hacker game, you learn to keep score primarily by what other hackers think of your skill (this is why you aren't really a hacker until other hackers consistently call you one)"

Code

I haven't done anything interesting to YAWNS for ages, I've been too wrapped up in 'real life' which has been frankly unpleasant and extremely energy-consuming. This seems to have drawn to an end now, so maybe I'll get back into hacking soon... I hope so.

Working again, yay!

The interview for the company mentioned below didn't work out. The second interview focused on people skills, which I never claimed to have :)

They said they'd call me back within a week, and they emailed me about a month later to say 'oh by the way, no thanks'. Well thankyou for your prompt rejection...

I can't say that I was that upset actually - they were a shirt-and-tie, nine-to-five kind of company, and I'm not that kind of person - I couldn't see it working out, but I was financially in a position where my options were looking fairly constrained.

Then one of those nifty 'we do all the work for you' job sites actually came up trumps - I got an email saying 'this job matches your criteria', and did it ever!! Ten minutes from home, required skills list a letter for letter match for my key skills list, salary slightly in excess of my last salary, urgent requirement. I rang the agency within minutes, had an interview at 1pm the next day, and had the job confirmed by 3pm. My sincere thanks to the people who run www.it.jobserve.com (and my bank manager's thanks also, I imagine!!)

The place I'm at now is flexitime, casual dress, and gave me a brand new Sony Vaio the day after I started... I like them lots :)

In other news, I have (a) been dumped by my girlfriend, (b) ordered ADSL, and (c) had an incredible amount of trouble with my co-located server, some sort of memory leak thing. A mixed bag of life, to be sure...

It all seems to be settling down now, with my ex-girlfriend now being civil to me again and a possibility of us getting back together, the ADSL going live sometime this week, and the server problem being possibly traced to a bit of bad Exim configuration on the part of the guys who originally set it up... which will teach me to never take over sysadmin on a box someone else built and configured!

On the whole though, all else is overshadowed by the joyous 'not totally broke any more' feeling of getting back into work... although the intervening three months did no favours for my already dubiously large mountain of debt. I refuse to worry about it, or I'd never get to smile :)

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 :)