Older blog entries for Wheat (starting at number 88)

I released a Zope product: SQL Poll.

I've got a couple preferences working on bud.ca, you can turn on the four side boxes on and off.

It's tedious doing Zope developement over a cable modem with a 5 year old Mac (lots of upgraded stuff but still), so I've been working this week on scrounging up a system. I also greatly miss using the Linux computer operating system (I used to have that on my Mac but dual booting is no fun). I was going to buy some old hardware from John. An AMD-K6-2 at 450 MHz with mainboard and 128 MB PC-100 RAM, and a tofu-coloured tower. But we spent all today working on the frickin' thing and it jes' kept crashing - something wrong with the hardware we reckon. I'm greatly considering buying a new board and CPU - you can get a lot for $350 or so.

For video, I yanked my second video card from the Mac, a Voodoo3 2000 - it took me forever to find PC-SAVE.ROM so I could flash back to a PC BIOS. I'd trashed my original PC BIOS file shortly after I got the card for some reason. I think I'd like to try Tribsoft's Jagged Alliance 2 port for Linux. There's a few games available for Linux that aren't on Mac. John suggested a dual boot with Windows for gaming, but two OSes is plenty for me, and I really don't think I'd derive pleasure from running Windows, even if just for gaming.

In the process of removing my V3, I somehow broke my Mac's G3 upgrade card. I was just trying to remove some of the dust around it, but now it don't work at all. It's a PowerForce and it looks like they have a 3 year warranty and a good return policy. One more try of fiddling with dip switches and CUDA buttons and I'm going to RMA the thing.

When I get the Mac fixed, and the new Zope-dev box built, I'll have two decent system. After I return to the workforce, perhaps I'll also pick up a laptop, then I'll have a great base of systems for UT lanpartys. Whee!

Hmm, so, hmm. I've been unemployed. I've been hanging out, mostly at home, "surfing the web". Doing a little work, a little hacking, watching the days go by. Listening to lots of electronica streams: trance, goa, jungle, and house.

Zope 2.3a2 seems to have broken my ZMailIn. Must fix.

Skipped out on my contract work to go hiking in North Vancouver today. It feels good on the legs and the lungs. We (CP, LF and SB) had fish and chips in Horshoe Bay. Then we returned to Stormix for an all-hands meeting. Which was weirdish because I don't work there anymore, but there has been lots of activity there as of late.

Tried to install Zope- Perl on the bag last night, but had trouble with MULTI_PERL. I think that the Debian Perl doesn't have the proper thread support option, but I'm not really sure yet - need to read the docs n' such a little better.

thump, thub, thub, thump.

Listening to streaming squidradio drum n' bass for hours on end, while playing with the server and sending emails and fixing web pages. hypnotic.

click, click, clack, clack.

put a pretty face on the Poll Product on bud.

I've got my email client to make this gentle "bah-bing" sound when there is new email. And since it checks for email every 15 minutes and I'm on a few high traffic mailing lists, it "bah-bings" all night and then gently wakes me up in the mornings.

Hiding out in my log cabin.

Watched A&E's remake of The Great Gatsby . Martin Donavan played a really good Tom. The music was terrible.

Tomorrow I go to stormix and clean out the rest of my desk and pick up my record of employment. Perhaps my last trip to the ol' office.

The bag is down. *Sigh*. Our new home was block our POP3 port or sumpin' so I called Matt, who tried to fix it but he upset the firewall and now we are locked out for the night. So instead I am cleaning up some ancient Perl code. And trying to figure out how to get the old code to use the MySQL server by looking at some Java code. Wow, Java servlets are verbose.

My jaw hurts from the novacaine that the dentist pumped in me yesterday. The novacaine or something made me right naseous last night.

It seems my answer machine message caused a bit of a stir today. Everyone was calling to listen to it and I get home and there is blank message after blank message, and then Roy saying it's so funny he's in tears.

Ah, waking up late, sitting in front of the computer while having coffee and breakfast half-dressed. This is the life!

Soon we will be moving the bag to it's new, more-or-less permanent T10 home. Good stuff.

The view permissions are off by default for ZMail. Fixed that today, so now mere mortals can see the site. Duh.

Came home late last night. Our crowd went to the Lotus. Lindsay, Murray, Fehr. We left talking about sness, and how cool he is :) He's rearranged his site some. I remember how he always had a page like this in his browser when he worked at Stormix, with little icons to his favorite pages.

Tomorrow, I'm leaving my job. Listening to The Wedding Present's Go, Man, Go seems appropriate. It's going to be really hard to say goodbye, but I just can't work there anymore. I'm not totally sure what I'll do next. Some time off will be nice - it's been 18 months of start-up fever, although the second nine months weren't as wonderfully intense as the first nine.

The bud hacking has been going smoothly. Except last night when I kept the dummy copy of a python file and wondering why none of the changes were taking effect. I've just gone live with the email publishing system, so head over to bud.ca and send us an email to bitz@bud.ca.

The system is fairly bare right now. Lots of features can be added!

• #1 is a basic keyword search function.
• advanced search (by date, or author, etd.)
• browsable by date
• Send to a friend. Forward an email on bud.ca that you like to a friend.

A lil hackin' on the email to web publishing system for bud.ca. Here is my intended process:

1. Email is submitted to bitz@bud.ca
2. Email is marked as 'unpulished'
3. Editor is notified (via email :))
4. Editor visits Inbox web page, listing unpublished email
5. Editor edits some email(s), and then marks them as 'published'. This also causes the email to be indexed in a ZCatalog of published material (for easy and fast searching of content). The ZCatalog is the primary method of publishing, but the email still need to be marked as published in case the catalog needs to be reindexed.
6. New emails are then displayed on the home page. Old emails can be searched through (thanks to ZCatalog :).

Notes on the holidays

Well, I did end up getting right sick, even though I kept hoping I wouldn't :). Finally basically better now. New Years I laid on the couch under the covers. I played through Star Trek Voyager Elite Force during my convalesence. My folks went out to Pender Island near the end of their vacation and they saw this house they really liked, but the thing was this other guy talking about coming buy and buying the place in a couple days and the old lady who was selling the place was anxious to sell, so my folks came back the next day and bought the house! I guess this means that they'll sell the house in Fruitvale, the one that I grew up in, which is kind of sad, but their new house sounds really cool. It's reachable from my place via public transportation (45 minutes bus, 2 hour ferry ride). They got a beach on the ocean (whee!), and there is a small lake near their house and a bigger one for swimming somewhere on the island. And they'll have the sailboat at the nearby marina, so my Dad won't have the 10 hour car trip to get to the boat, just a 5 minute one.