Recent blog entries for TSBandit

I'm pretty excited today about going to Denver to meet the Jabber/Webb team (or parts thereof) Hopefully, this trip will also result in me getting a position in the Jabber, Inc company, so I can work on Jabber related stuff full time, which is what I've wanted to do since I started the working on jabber's opensource project. This is a pretty exciting time, and I can't wait for my flight! (although my Girlfriend is upset/worried that I am leaving.. =[ but at least she understands that this is a great opportuinity foro me, and she can live without me for a couple of days =]

This (and next) week promises to be an exciting week for Jabber. the 1.0 server promises to be released very soon. I have Yahoo-Transport and IRC-Transport working, but not perfect, AIM, ICQ, and MSN transports are also getting ready to go. This will be a pretty big launch, and I'm looking forward to it.

Also, on the 24th, I will be going to Denver to Interview for a position with Jabber, Inc., the Commercial side of jabber. This is way cool, and I'm Can't wait to meet some of the Jabber/Webb team In person. :)

It's been a while since I wrote a diary entry.. Let me bring you up to date... I've been working alot on jabba lately, and started a new family of *mini* clients, called wijits. they are basically little, single purpose jabber clients. the main wijit, is a simple messaging only client that sits in the icon tray. the gcWijit , or group chat wijit's only purpose is to connect to group chat rooms, in fact, it will refuse to connect to any server that doesn't support group chat.

On the side, I've been trying to get up to speed on the jabber server. I want to become a server hacker, and I've been looking at writing a transport for jabber.... at this point, it would be either MSN transport, or Yahoo. Getting deep into server code will definitly improve my odds of being hired to work for jabber, and that is definitly the path I want to travel down.

I've also been looking into Perl, at the recomendation of Jer. From reading the intro of a few books, and a getting started chapter, it looks like a way cool scripting language, and I look forward to getting into that as well.

Today was an intersting day. I got my Jabber server running very nicely. All the components automatically restart themselves, and send me email when they go down, as well as post their logs onto a webpage.

I went to go look at an appartment for Dolly to live in. There is a nice one, just down the road from here, and it isn't that expensive. The nice thing is, I could move her in Immediatly, since the appartment is open now. I am going to take her to see it later today, it will be just us two, so we can really tear it apart, and make sure it's a nice place.. ;)

Other than that, I came *close* to porting the Jabber server over to windows again. pth seems to be running properly now, it runs all the test applications, however, the etherx server and jabber-transport still fail to read from their sockets. Ah well.. all the more reason to write a Native win32 server. ;)

Last nights meeting rocked. I feel like we got a lot accomplished, and I also briefly spoke with Jer about implementing a native win32 micro server. possibly, a messaging only server, or even a full native win32 server, (but only if porting pth turns out to be an impossibility).

I Love working on Jabber, I Hope that this will turn out to be a full time job for me. I find out more on Monday, (6 Mar 2000) when I talk with Andre ( a Webb employee who is working on the Jabber, Inc. project). I'm looking forward to the next couple of days, for that reason, and also, becuase Dolly's Dad is willing to put a downpayment on a house for us! That's awesome! I need to stay in the buffalo area for another year and a half, since Dolly has to finish school... I don't know how that will affect my availablilty for the Jabber, Inc. project... Hopefully, this is somthing that i will be able to work on from home, and do a lot of traveling if I need to...

Well, I have a lot of errands to run today, and we will be looking at some houses and apartments today.

we had a meeting with the jabber developers that went rather well, Trying to work out a lot of issues for the 1.0 release. The rest of my day went well also, despite my little brother eating the leftovers from my dinner last night, which a) I was looking forward to eating, and b) I spent $70 on that meal.... ah well, such is life.

Our jabber meeting will continue in about a half hour, and I'm looking forward to it. I am really excited about this project, and i forsee alot of great things happening in the near future. I am also going to talk with jer about creating a native win32 C++ jabber server. I have some ideas for it that will work out rather well, such as COM automation, and MMC snap-in support, for Win2k, and NT.

Jabber has been my biggest accomplishment so far (as far as programming goes). Jabber will be the thing that will "get my foot in the door" to becoming a professional programmer, which has always been a dream of mine.. Jabba started off as a pet project, to see if I could get AIM and ICQ talking to each other, and it turned out to be something so much greater... I wish I could see into the mind of Jer, becuase his vision of jabber is incredible.. ;)

well, time to get on with the jabber meeting, part #2. i hope to bring back some cool news to my diary..

As my first diary entry, I feel it only proper to start with a rant... ;) I have never had such a problem with a Dell computer before today...

This problem actually started about a month ago, when Jake Schoellkopf (local Billionaire) and friend of the CEO of My Employer was given a job. Me, being in the MIS department, I was given the opportunity to supply this fellow with a new (old hand-me-down) computer. This fellow, then gives me a zip disk with "stuff to load on his computer, like Outlook contacts and emails, etc.." It turns out, that in addition to this, he also filled the rest of the zip disk with pornographic pictures, movies, and spam mail. For *some* reason, this guy is held in great regards, and even feared by the other employees here. (I'm guessing becuase he's a billionaire).. so I took the disk, and my complaint down to the HR office.

Well, the HR director says, "well, we can't do anything about him, cuz he's Bob's friend (the CEO), so just don't put it on there, and don't say anything to him. (obviously, she is scared of the guy too). To make a long story shorter.. this guy has *NO* computer skills, he's annoying, rude, and doesn't work well with others. the model employee at Sovran .

Due to the fact that, he "Wants sound on his computer", becuase "no reason, I just want it. Isn't that reason enough?", I had to setup a laptop for the guy. we bought a new laptop for another more productive employee, and gave Jake the old laptop hand-me-down. in setting up this laptop, i didn't have a problem, until I gave it to him, which caused the laptop to no longer find the NIC card on bootup. After spending 20 minutes of, "I can't get my email!" "that's because you aren't on the network.", "I can't get to my files etiher." "that's because you aren't on the network." "this wierd message pops up telling me I'm not logged into the fax server, I've never seen that before" "that's because you aren't on the network." "I can't connect to the internet either I noticed.." "that's because you aren't on the network.".. (you get the picture) I decided that i must fix this problem pronto, or go crazy.

I decided to take the docking station that went with the old laptop, (and getting alot of protests from the current owner of the new laptop + old docking station), and hook up the old laptop the way it was.. unfortunatly, it didn't detect the docking station, and KILLED the video drivers for the machine as well... to end this rant, I finnaly was able to reinstall the drivers for the video card, and network card, and had to fiddle with the bios to get the docking station to work.. all told, I spent 4 hours on that laptop today.