Older blog entries for darkewolf (starting at number 11)

Work

The first test of the cohosting/virtual domained webmail went without a hitch. The remote management scripts work fine, even via SSL.

Still need to finish the major contract i have going in my spare time. Once I have that finished, i can collect the money and relax.

Home

Only 250 pages to go until I finish Cryptonomicon. Its shaping up to be even more brilliant then I thought.

Need to get the house cleaned for a rent inspection. If I was not so exhausted I'd be able to do more cleaning :/

Also need to help untangle Tonia's threads (wonderful kids had a go at them), so she can sent 10meter skeins out to her 'thread swap partners'.

Beg

Anyone with a spare laptop. Even a cheap and rusty 486 or a lowend pentium, I'd appreciate to 'borrow' it. I need a way to keep emails and documents with me most of the time. Plus play around with writing 'OrdoEmacs' as in Cryptonomicon. *thanks*

Finally, premium services are a long distant memory. Now we have the task of working on a paying customer. And writing services for them. Cohosted and branded webmail, with our standard IVR backend.

Not to mention lots of funky hacks with DNS and remote adding of users from another website. Yes, its all shoelaces and sticky tape here.

Oh my ghods!

Solaris did not handle me missing a exit(1) very well. It ended up being a fork bomb. Normally, i'd expect a modern Operating system to restict the number of processes per uid to something reasonable. And this being a non-root user it should not have hurt. But it brought a dual cpu e250 to its knees, using 1gig of RAM and 1 gig of swap in under 2 minutes.

Oh well, that'll teach me.

Am currently 377 page into Neal Stephenson's brilliant new book Cryptonomicon. A lot of it makes me kinda wish i was single and childless again, so I could devote 100% of my energy to technology and invest time into outlandish startups.

However, it has encouraged me to take a stand. I wont be accepting email that is not digitally signed or at least encrypted from now on. With the exception of mailing lists of course. This way I can halt spam mail and essentially reduce my time needed to read email daily.

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Version: GnuPG v1.0.1 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

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trying desperately to catch up on the contract work i do on the side. Once its done I can pay of my slowly growing debts and get back to being a father to my kids :/

Now, if I can get this last bits done, I can totally sign it off and wipe my hands of it. Its hardly an elegant website. And its too bloated, having to design a database front end to match the original in functionality but make it lighter blech!. Moving from perl/flattext to php/sql was a good move....

Finally.....

The Premium Services have been rolled out. Built on a bed of ultra fast Sun's and tied together with quite a lot of open source tools, it works wonders.

Now, if i could be allowed to install Debian GNU/Linux on some of the E250s i'd be happy. *grins*

That asside, I am learning a lot more about project management and the huge benefits of documenting everything (not that i didn't already ;), and generally running a test system, with

• Identify bug/feature
• Make changes
• Test on test system
• If it works sign off
• Install a group of working changes per releases

And heh, the boss has moved to a X Window System solution in the office for the non-technical staff and to using CVS on my recommendation... :)

Bwhahahahaha! I downloaded and installed festival (text to speech system). And it kicked bum on the commercial package we are trialing at work. Plus the API is 1000 times simplier to use.

The trick will be pointing this out to the boss. But I guess with a few sound samples and hints at the cost, he should be fairly happy about this.

The last week of the school holidays and I get some time off (thanks to the Xtian easter tradition). Five days of no work, so I can spend some time with my family, run around with the kids and catching up on all the stuff I have promised to do around the house but have no found the energy to do recently.

of course

It does not stop there, I have to catch up on some prototyping for work. We are meant to roll out the TTS system by the end of next week, but with SIMS dying in the arse for the last 2 weeks I have had no time what so ever to work on it.

To save time I'll just rip the arse out of my boss's old code, and plug mine into that *grins* Not quite open source, but at least it means less thinking about the code.

Oh to get more system design stuff happening, low level code is getting up my nose recently (But it is unfortunately necessary sometimes).

The system at work is still fscked. However its no longer my problem, Sun Microsystem's people are out and fixing it. Its their software, and its closed source. Not my problem.

But in the mean time I get to hack on some neat TTS stuff some more and in my slowly diminishing spare time, I am getting back into POVray. Using ac3d as a basic modeller and then hand coding the really good stuff into it. Of course, A3cd does meshes rather than real povray objects. So its somewhat of a pain in the arse.