18 Dec 2000 gilbertt   » (Master)

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 :-)

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