Older blog entries for avi (starting at number 10)

misc.:
why do slashdot feel they must post articles that are no-where near accurate? it's almost like they go out of their way to NOT check things before they post them.

getting excited about my new project now (a web-based knowledge management application), we are starting officially on the 18th of this month. it's going to be really cool working with other people. it's been a year of working by myself, so i hope we don't argue too much.

i have been speaking to steve danic of memes.net fame regarding an XML DTD for import/export of the data between knowledge management apps. i've set up a mailing list at e-groups if anyone here is interested in joining.

jcheek:
VC's rarely "get it". they are looking for something that will make your product "unique" (they love that word) for as long as possible. what most of them don't realise is there's no such thing anymore. one VC ceo i met with a while ago told me the idea i was pitching was no good. i asked him what prior investments he had made that he considered to be "good and unique". his answer? encryption software. (he called it "enscryption"). being less than stupid about IT security, i laughed in his face. the fact of the matter is - if they don't get it, they're not the partners you're looking for. that's probably not what you wanted to hear, but it is my experience.

raph:
kudos on your election to the gnome foundation. i feel confident that gnome will remain unspoiled by commercial interests (cough*sun*cough) with people like you to help steer the project in the right direction. 8^)

misc.:
i was watching A Current Affair last night and was disgusted by what i saw. the host was interviewing an american personality (i think his name was something ritter) regarding the elections. one of the questions the host asked was something like "and what about nader?" and the response was (i quote) "he's just an angry man who has cost gore the election".

now, for starters, people have every right to vote for who they like - regardless of whether there are two candidates who the race will likely be between. second of all, it was obvious the race would be close. imho, it is Gore who might lose Gore the election. people who voted for ralph obviously feel that he has something important to contribute to the country - and al doesn't. maybe if the vp had realised this and addressed some of the issues the nader did, he wouldn't be scrounging for votes in florida, regardless of the usability of the electoral cards. (which was pretty pathetic).

misc.
haven't written because i have been insanely busy, and bad shit has been happening in my personal life. i am pretty excited about the PHP compiler.. i can't wait to try it out! i wonder if there will be any speed increases. also, mozilla seems to be coming along really nicely - it's certainly changed a bit since M3 8^) i'm looking forward to being able to finally develop for a single browser. HTML4 + CSS1 may not be perfect, but it's a start. btw, if you have not yet experienced the wonders of XML + XSLT, you don't know what you're missing out on. it makes life with PHP so much easier!

i got an e-mail back from Michael Hirsh (exec producer of The Dish) thanking me on behalf of Working Dog for my kind words of support. of course, it's going straight to the pool room. 8^)

if you actually bothered to read this, why not drop me an e-mail to say "hi"? i'm always interested to chat to other advogatans.

oh, and one last thing. there is nothing more aggravating than ordering the 5 disc set of redhat (2 x binary, 1 x powertools, 1 x docs) and being shipped a dud disc. now, taking good old murphy into account, which disc would be the broken one? of course, it was the first binary disc - the one you actually need to do anything remotely useful - like, say, installing the damn thing!. cough. i feel better now.

misc.:
caught "the dish" last night at indooroopilly megaplex (in brisbane). brilliant movie, i've already sent rob, tom, santo and jane a congratulatory e-mail.

picked up a dexxa optical mouse for $50 ($25USD) and it was an absolute steal. what a beautiful peripheral. i walked back into the office, ctl+alt+f5'ed out of X, unplugged my old Logitech, plugged in the Dexxa, ctl+alt+f7 and i was in business. All 3 buttons functioning, works amazingly with Windowmaker. update: if you have a mouse pad that happens to have a holographic sith lord on it, don't use it. the hologram screws with the mouse's imaging.

work is hectic, hectic, hectic. sign off on my current project is underway, making good project on preliminary work for my next one.

staroffice is finally (l?)gpl'ed. the logical solution would be to use mozilla as the platform instead of gnome-ifying it, but i doubt that'll ever happen with Sun at the helm. They seem intent on making all the mistakes themselves.

lkcl:
dunno what it is, (the midas touch maybe?) but the stuff you have been doing lately is super cool.

misc.:
been working hard. happy happy, my column is now being hosted by zend - who are uber professional and i'm glad to be associated with them.

Spoke to Toshio a couple of days ago after his return to his office. His wife passed away. He was very much in shock. He is only 30.

sign off on my current project begins next week. looking forward to having it out of the way. my next one is going to be tough - it'll be self financed software development (to be GPL'ed of course). it will, however, be very exciting - i know there will be lots of people who will find it really useful.

raph:
congrats on gs. it really sounds like it'll be your cup of tea (coffee?).

claudio:
congrats on your freshmeat article. i have been thinking for a long time that if redhat were to rename rpm to lpm (read: linux package manager, or something similar anyway) and hosted the project and its roadmap / working group on something like sourceforge, it would increase the chances of all distributions adopting it. i think this might be the case because it addresses 2 key issues.

1. perceived ownership, ie. community standard - not redhat standard.
2. perceived control, ie. bazaar - not cathedral.

skud:
real sorry to hear about netizen. if i hear of anything i'll let you know..

misc.:
it's been about a week since my last post, and i was promising myself i'd try to write one nearly every day. oops. read seth godin's excellent sequel to permission marketing titled ideavirus. anyone who is even slightly interested in hacking memes should check it out here (it is available for free download).

went up the coast for half a day, relaxed a little. bought the ideavirus issue of fastcompany over the lastest business2.0 because b2 was the british edition. very impressed with the zeroknowledge ad. campaign.

the new foundry sections on sourceforge are really cool.

misc.:
been working my butt off, no time for anything else. it is 11:16pm, still in the office. just heard someone go into an office down the hall - it was Toshio. I heard people talking about him today, and assumed he might be leaving. It seems i was wrong though. People were talking because his wife is in a critical state in hospital. he looked very badly shaken. I tried to comfort him, but i doubt it helped. he seemed resigned to the fact there was nothing that could be done. i hope she comes through this ok. it's amazing how unimportant the things i was working on 5 minutes ago now seem.

andrei::
there is a pretty cool page here comparing a whole bunch of the most popular registrars.

claudio:
wow! i remember 9 fingers and tech.death. it's been so long since i even thought about those, i'd completely forgotten them. makes me want to watch them on my amiga 1200, which i stupidly loaned a friend in exchange for his NEC multisync monitor. he moved away, and i never saw my amiga again.. 8^(

misc.:
sad but true, http://www.rhymeswithorange.com/arch/960320.html.

speaking of things amiga, i freaked out a little yesterday when i was trying to check out studio3's website. the hostname wouldn't resolve and i was really worried that they'd gone broke and last ninja 4 would never see the light of day. it seems they were moving ISP's though. phew!

xach:
> so I was in my khakis
> Who am I kidding?
remember what tyler says, you are not your fucking khakis. 8^)

claudio:
condom corruption is one of my favourite mods ever. it's so cool that someone else knows what it's called even 8^)

misc.:
surprised that i'm not tired this morning - it's my second 80 hour week in a row.

does anyone out there know how to pipe the contents of every single incoming and outgoing qmail message to a script? i know you can patch the source and recompile, but it only saves the messages in a file - not exactly what i was after.

there are some really exciting things happening on the PHP front, especially the new network stuff (SSL! yeah, baby, yeah!) and the XSLT extension. what i'm really hoping for is a PHP template extension sometime soon though. i wish i was smart enough to write it (or even design it, dammit) but alas, that's not the case.

"marge, these people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which i joined."

logged on and started reading through the news, pleasantly surprised to find i have been certified as an "advogato apprentice". (thanks andrei!)

i've spent the last 24 hours wondering why the PHP interbase extension doesn't have a ibase_num_rows function, and am slowly realising that it probably won't make that much difference to any work i do with it.

interbase is truly awesome, and i am giving MySQL the flick for good. it is easy to install, has great features, and it has all the ACID loveliness you could ever wish for. yumm. i'm so glad borland made it free software and it didn't just become abandonware.