Long entry warning. It's been a while.
So. I've been busy. The new job is working well, the 16
hour days are cutting into my hacking time, but it pays the
rent :-)
Also the work is switching over the corporate website
from a proprietary platform to linux, a nice challenge and
an honourable one IMO.
So the website redesign is going right on track. The VA
linux servers arrived and are all installed (by yours
truly). We have apache, we have tomcat, we have mod_jk, all
working together nicely and serving jsps and static content.
(That was me too ;-)) The SSL area is nice and tight (me),
and running in the background is an application server. (Oh
yeah, I did that). Oh yes, and I've been writing stuff in
java, even some enterprise beans ;-) Who would have thought
it?
Thoughts on java? Well, apart from the not-really-free
beef I have, it's a fantastic language to code in. I really
love it. Pretty much makes sense in a lot of ways. This is
good. The implementation aspect still sucks a little, a
small daemon I wrote to keep an SQL server database (ick)
synched up to an openLDAP one works great, and was nice to
write, but just sitting there doing very little it uses
~12Mb resident and that's a lot more than it's perl script
equivalent ;-)
Still, the fact that I can just take this code and plug
it
into the app server and let client-side jsps interface with
it pretty well rocks IMO. (Let's not mention the appserver
DEMANDS a box with half a gig of RAM to run on ;-))
So, anyway, I think we'll hit the deadline, and along the
way lots of other little things spin off to please the
Management. Better site traffic monitoring and analysis,
better uptime, off-site maintanence and updates, heavy
automation compared to the current setup and I persuaded
them to switch to mailman for client bulletins.
That's all fun, and in the little free time I have I am
redesigning geist, and
re-coding it in C++. The codebase was growing large, and
rapidly becoming hard to manage with my object-model-in-C
strategy. C++ is making things a lot more doable.
So far I just have some base classes, but it's going to
be easy to grow up from once those are nailed down. The
strategy is that everything is a composite object. So a
window has a ->render() which calls render() on the document
in it, which calls ->render() on it's children, which all
render their children until the leaves actually draw
themselves :-) There is a lot more to it than that, but
getting this bit right is utmost if the rest is going to
follow through nicely.
I've also written a website for smoothwall, a firewall
mini-distro I am about to help write a better UI for.
Still hacking on camE, gom, feh, scrot as time permits of
course...
Other than that I'm looking forward to xmas and wishing
there were several more hours in the average day :-)