Advogato blog for KevinL

4 Apr 2001

Wed, 4 Apr 2001 04:50:01 GMT

Argh. So much for keeping up a good, up-to-date diary.

Squidfs

Scary stuff. I'm slowly wading through the current squid filesystem layout, trying to build something better(tm). Exactly what that is is up for debate, but it involves more abstraction... Seriously, it's interesting stuff, trying to make ufs and aufs share more code while at the same time present a more useful interface for plugging different things (like sfs and coss) into. Will get there, slowly.

Moebius

Way too slow - need to find time and space to put some serious hours into this again, it's languishing for lack of world-level coding.

EverQuest

Still addictive.

Consulting

Still happening, main client was purchased by some telco or other, so they're madly trying to justify the product's existence I suspect - hope they do, because it is a good product, and I do actually enjoy working on it, mostly ;)

Other clients are slowly appearing - atm, I'm doing html/zope work that I really don't want to be doing because we seem to have a surfeit of low-level techies and a shortage of html-types. Ah well. Have also picked up some unix consulting work for a gov dept, which looks like it'll be ongoing - on the strength of making sure the work done is done well. Note to people doing consulting/contracting: When you're asked to setup tripwire, and you just install it without actually removing all the bodgy stuff/configuring it, that's a good path to not being asked back for more work. So we've been spending time setting up the installation of tripwire the previous guy threw on there. Hehe.

Ferrets

Well, dogs, but he looks like a ferret... pjf got a rabbit, Jimmy (half-blue heeler, half-jack russel, all ferret) is currently running up and down the fence-line whinging because he can't go, um, introduce himself to said rabbit... Oh boy.

That's all.

21 Feb 2001

Wed, 21 Feb 2001 01:23:04 GMT

Ok, well, I kinda dropped off the face of the earth for a while. I'm back. *shrug*

The company stuff is coming along nicely - Obsidian Consulting Group is the name we finally settled on, and that's all well on it's way to being functional. I've been looking at accounting packages and, while I'd dearly love to be using something we can hack ourselves, atm I need the crutch of something that's properly tuned for our countries tax system (and that our accountant doesn't go "ummm.... what?" when I mention ;), so I've stuck with Quicken. *sigh*.

Don't buy EverQuest - it's addictive.

Moebius is languishing atm - some amount of work, not much. I really need to attract some new developers to that...

Squid FS work is happening again, which is great :) Lots of fun threaded code with callbacks and interesting things - helps keep the brain alive.

Paid work - more organisational than coding atm, which is kinda scary from a consulting pov, but you get that. Hoping it'll all calm down again soonish, as I'm finally making the concerted effort to put everything in order.

That's it. Now, the great decision: Sleep, or Coffee....

15 Dec 2000

Fri, 15 Dec 2000 06:26:09 GMT

It's happening, Reg!

Scary, scary. NovaNet is getting some interest from various people... This is something I've wanted to do for a couple of years now - it's why I left my last workplace, and it looks like it's finally going to come together ;)

(join.php on that link above is a better description - basically, Nova's supposed to be a gathering site for a bunch of good techies, to provide a way to ensure a bit more cash without doing the 9-to-5 drudge, and maybe provide for space for Open Source stuff further down the track... Oh yeah, and a way to do consulting without having to think _too_ much about horrible things like accounting ;)

In other news, I got feedback from the jellybean guy (chromatic, which I've put to one side until I can read, absorb, and understand ;) But it looks like a neat project, with a few parallels to Moebius.

So much to do, so little time... party-thing tonight, should be a good relax from current client's work (which is killing me, but only because I'm trying to clear lots of todo items before going on holidays).

Does anyone actually read this stuff? :)

3 Dec 2000

Sun, 3 Dec 2000 21:57:33 GMT

So I'm finding that I'm going day to day thinking "I should put something in my diary, but I lead a boring life" ;)

Have spent far too much time working lately (paid, real work - as opposed to the fun free Moebius-stuff). Although, have also been spending lots more time outside - our apricot trees are coming into fruit, so between watching the birds eat half of them and trying to grab some ourselves, it's kinda fun.

Realising slowly that all the people I see in day-to-day life probably read advogato - *waves*. Sad indictment of a life, or well-chosen group of friends? Not sure...

People are talking about using Moebius for "real" things - one for a mud, another for a fully-fledged community-type project - which is cool, but scary. Lots of work needed to bring it up to speed - smooth off the rough performance corners I left to get things conceptually right. Should be a good excuse to spend more time on it, anyway.

And the usual feature-creep on main paid project - I've been trying to read XP pages, to see if there's any tips in there for managing this sort of work. Client has so far set a Version 1.0 list of features three times in the past 6 months, we've met it twice. This time around, there's not even the pretense of sticking to the list - new features daily. *sigh* Still can't decide whether it's a good thing or not. Explains why my views on project management are so twisted tho - ISP-related work doesn't give itself time for structured management, which is probably bad - I've never worked to a spec that didn't change, or worked with enough resource to-hand to meet deadlines etc. Ah well.

Oh, got the compost bin working too - thanks pjf/jacinta ;) Renewed my interest in actually doing stuff(tm) to the garden - rip up all the daisies the owner loves so much, replace them with something more productive, would be a good start. Being outside definately makes me more productive when I come back in.

30 Nov 2000

Thu, 30 Nov 2000 03:32:27 GMT

Ok, so I've finally created an advogato account. Let's see if I can manage to upkeep a diary on here ;)

Um - good starter: We finally met our new neighbours - what's the chances of enviro-geeks moving in next door to enviro-geeks? I woulda thought pretty slim, but, um, pjf ;) Most cool.