Older blog entries for darkewolf (starting at number 5)

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.

After a grueling 10 days of stress testing and upgrading the most major part of the system at work (well the most visual part of the system), its up and working and stable.

Next task of the week is finishing writing the Text to Speech distributed server (grab emails on one server, process them on another, and then play them back via a phone on yet another server), and configure the Sun NetManager POS to dial the pager on certain system traps.

And finish building the music collection on the samba share *grins*

The worse thing about the next too weeks, is that my kids are on school holidays, and i have to keep working.

After starting a new job a few weeks ago (my dream job none-the-less), I get an editorial into the hallowed halls of freshmeat.net. The emails i have been getting about the editorial (Developing with Opensource) have been wonderful and say a lot about the community we are part of.