Older blog entries for darkewolf (starting at number 22)

Gods, how long since I last posted here? Of course, I could blame LJ on that. Given that I use LJ for most 'online journal' type activities (and my IAM.BME page).

What has been happening? Dropped Debian developer status for a bit. Needed a break from overly technical stuff. Got a job at a fairly good company. Positive share growth, positive cash flow. Heck, they have employed me since feb. so it can't be all bad. Except for morale :(

Got tonnes of tattoos recently *smirks* and piercings and stuff. Been buying a tonne of books. Plenty of little userlevel hacks on my machine at home, primarily a book / resource management system and an image catalog database..

Na Diathan leibh.

Bored, not working. No job, and nothing in the market it seems.

Bored enough to totally rewrite the website and database for http://cyberpunks.org. Runs faster now, looks nicer, has user accounts. Drinking much mead, but thats okay. Fixed bugs in mathwar, and working on packaging the new xconq for the testing/unstable/foo release. Maybe i should start playing xconq again, as my machine seems to be degrading and cant play many other games. However, I do have the definitive triad of horror movies now on DVD, The Exorcist (extended version), The Omen and Rosemary's Baby. That coupled with my growing collection of definitive sword movies (Braveheart, 13th Warrior, soon Beowulf...) I should be in good stead. Beannachdan oirbh.

In the idle time between mid-December, and early January, whilst waiting for the hiring to be done again, I got bored. Perfected my image catalog (well, my script to add images is buggy, it freaks on spaces in filenames, but since most of my image store got renamed a year ago, its not too much of a problem).

And then I got really bored, and started working on a book catalog system. Fully searchable, catagorized book collection, about 200 books in and still typing (books can also be defined as wishlist and on order.). The final addition for it will be cross-linking book extracts to the entered titles (take notes from a book, and have it automatically linked when you search for the title), and ability to cross reference scans (images) to each book title.

Not much else to do, except wonder what happened to my Gimp install. One day it decided it was not going to display anything that involved a font (only showed dotted boxes instead of characters), upgraded it, same thing. Removed dot-directories and files, still happening. Was not happening to any other gtk based application. Bitched at the machine for a day (i have had huge and random font problems recently), tried to rerun the Gimp, and it all worked fine.

Oh well, got made reduntant 4th of October, and due to the loving tech industry at the moment, there aint any jobs out there.

Got to the stage of using up all my payout to live, and now on government payments (*sucks*) and blanket mailing companies in order to find a position anywhere.

Bah. The boss and CEO are in a meeting with the financial directors of the parent company. Will we exist after lunch time? My bet is nope! :)

Payout might be good, will let me pay off some debts and look for a nice job :)

Its been a long time since I have even considered entering data into this system. Used to be working at mBox.com Ltd, but got fired (Decision of the Directors) so they could post a saving on their end of finacial year report (pffft). My boss quit the next week in disgust.

Searched around for ages (well 6 weeks, which is ages when you have no income) for a new job. Finally found one closer to home, same pay (sucks), and less work load. Basically paided to admin the unix side of the network and write code on Solaris machines that process datafeeds from stock exchanges. Exciting stuff.

My Family life is different now. No longer living with a housefull of children, doing the fight in the family courts thing with the mother of my son.

Doing much less coding at home recently, spending more time researching stuff.. But started recently back at programming a gaelic-english lexicon/dictionary (I am learning gaelic and its much quicker to do searchs on the computer then thumb through a book). Plus I got bored and decided to catalog all my images (800megs of stock images / nice photos). Nothing good on freshmeat to do what I wanted, so I am 90% of the way through writing it myself.

Slan leibh mi chairaidean

woohoo, my managing director handed me a piece of paper signed, as a waiver, protecting all my out of hours hacking and contracting from IP claims from the company.

And I have managed to explain to the powers that be that using some source code i found online would be a useful component to modify and use. I was adding some functionality to a commercial MTA, with a big and clunky interface that involved huge amount of testing etc.. etc.. But I decided to grab a simple smtp proxy, hack around with it, and added the same functionality as a small component.

Blerk!

About to go on a 7 day vacation/holiday. Not a great time for it at work. Two of our major clients are about to go live with our system and I wont be there to babysit them.

I think you can tell when you have become a corporate slave(I am just a humble corporate slave, working myself into a corporate grave), it's when you feel guilty taking time away from the office.

Mind you - I do enjoy where I work, and leaving for any time tends to mean i miss stuff when i need to see whats going on.

I had to cert whatever as a journeyer after reading their mature attitude toward free software as well as posts in general.

Kudos!

Finishing Cryptonomicon (by Neal Stephenson) a few days ago has finally cleared my synapses. All (well most) of the fuzz from my brain is gone. How do i know? I have decided to pick up and start reading a book on Chaos theory (which I have intended to read for a long time), instead of vegeing or TVing.

Once all the legal shit with the parents-in-law is out of the way my brain will really clear... (Anyone want to help fund our legal case? We are currently $5000 in the hole :/ With 6 kids to feed).

Although, I have much to thank Neal Stephenson for.

13 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!