16 Jul 2001 gilbertt   » (Master)

Muahahaha. I'm back!

Hrm, only 7 months to catch up on, diary-wise...

New job since the last entry. I'm working as an IT consultant now, specialising in OSS. Most of my work is web- related now, with stuff like apache, J2EE, appservers, etc.

Currently I'm consulting to Deutsche Bank, and boy I'm having fun! Their entire Global Intranet is running on OSS. That's right, over 1000 internal business sites and another 1000 personal employee sites are being run on a combination of apache, tomcat, php, perl, and more. All wrapped up in a chroot environment with automatic management and configuration. This has been one of the most fun projects I've undertaken, and I've been able to make a large contribution to the design, infrastructure and implementation of it. Very satisfying stuff.

Outside of work, I'm currently hacking on a bunch of things - one is a C project I refuse to talk about until it does more ;), another is an IRC bot in Ruby - mainly because I'm really enjoying working with Ruby, I don't really need an IRC bot :) Still - it was fun implementing the IRC RFCs in Ruby, and I managed to find and report a couple of Ruby bugs on the way.

I'm still working on camE, my v4l webcam snapper/uploader etc. I just made a large update to the palette code - it previously only supported RGB24, so I added support for a couple of YUV derivatives and am working on more. Unfortunately I seem to have broken support for ov511-based webcams, as davej will testify ;)

I don't think I'm doing anything wrong v4l-wise, but some of these drivers are still immature and I think I'm just tickling ov511 up the wrong way. Something in the palette detection code causes it distress. What I really wish is that v4l had a general "what palettes DO you support then??" call =P

Apart from that, life is good - I finally got ADSL installed last month - 2Mb into my flat. Now for the UK, that's a nice pipe, but it cost ;-) The upstream is, obviously, pathetic - but this is the UK and I have no chance of doing better right now.

In other news, I'm off on a carribean cruise in september, some good friends of mine are getting married, and I'll be out there with them. It gives me 2 weeks to spend time with my girlfriend, who I don't see much - I live in London, UK, she lives in Cleveland, USA - and that justifies the cost alone. After the cruise, there is a good chance she's gonna come over and live with me in London, and then next year I plan to head out to the states to live and work - visa permitting.

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