So a very long break from activity driven almost entirely by a new job which has sucked all my time. And to be fair some depression about how slow my progress was - it's weird realising you have enough books in your study that it will take until you're 30 to read them let alone use the knowledge ;-)
Been playing around with Python quite a bit which is a pretty neat language and definitely fits the 'do someting quickly' criteria. This weekend I decided to learn a bit about sockets using Stevens book and Linux Application Development for my guides: the chapter in LAD was very good and explained the wood from the trees. Anyway, in order to understand this I had to use C and wow did I realise how easy Python makes things - ugh worrying about pointers and nework byte order again! I also loaded the Cygwin libraries onto my work laptop which are Unix development libraries for win95/NT - pretty strange using bash on win98! Couldn't get them to use the sockets API properly - missing inet_pton and inet_aton didn't work, so I'll mess with that more. It would be neat to be able to do stuff on my work laptop while on the train!
With my new work I don't get to do anything useful during the week as I now travel and work quite late. But overall a pretty encouraging weekend.