Older blog entries for hexmode (starting at number 8)

<a href="http://www.hackgnu.org">hack GNU</a>

<a href="http://www.hackgnu.org">hack GNU</a>

test < This is a less than <b>en</b> &lt;em&gt; It is hard to judge <a href="http://www.hackgnu.org">hack GNU</a>

test < This is a less than <b>en</b> &lt;em&gt;

test

Since I was on-site today, I decided to grace my cow orkers with my presence during lunch. When we left to go, my manager said "Mark, why don't you ride with me?" Great.

Turns out he just wanted to let me know that unless I wanted to come onsite every day, they weren't gonna continue my contract after the middle of September. (I tried to point out that the work I did didn't demand my physical presence, but he said they needed bodies to show for "marketing" purposes.)

This despite the fact that they are desperately in need of sysadmin help (but they just pay me to program). Someone cracked our RHat box and they didn't want to spend any time cleaning up. Oh, and they are losing their other competant Unix guy this week, but they don't know that yet.

Also, the FBI came by today with a Navy security guy. The infosec people in the FBI are (Carnivore not withstanding) pretty cool. My cow orker and I had a great time knocking management with them. We probably shouldn't have talked quite loud enough for managment to hear, though.

Tried to work on AddressBook.pm, but didn't get much done. Flourescent lighting just doesn't do it for me. That, and working at home has kinda grown on me -- even with Ginger and Basil running around and banging on my office door.

I've been looking over the information on Microsoft's website about LDAP schema that they use for Outlook lookups. However, I found that the information on OpenLDAP's site was more concise and to-the-point.

This thing may work, after all!

I wanted to comment on an article, but I didn't realize that I needed certification. That's reasonable.

My current project is to build an online contacts database for one of our clients. I need to get the whole thing accessible via LDAP and allow them the ability to edit it on the web. Initially, I foolishly thought Surely Outlook Express allows you to edit LDAP data and I can eliminate the web portion for now, right? -- Wrong!

So now I have people all over me because I gave them a ridiculously short time estimate based on almost zero information about the project. I guess that'll teach me.

I've been looking at these various projects that are already out there and most don't fit for one reason or another. Either they

• are in a language I don't know or have time to learn (PHP, python), or
• have no access control, or
• use a database for a backend instead of LDAP, or
• any mixture of the above.

Ugh. So I'm probably gonna take ldap-abook and see if I can tweak that the way I want it. This may even be a good chance to bring in the Wizard module.

Later

Well, I've been hacking on Abook.pm for a bit now. I sent out a post to the almost totally inactive ldap-abook-tech mailing list. I think it would be great if we could create some sort of abstract AddressBook class. From there you could create AddressBook::LDAP, AddressBook::Palm, AdressBook::BBDB, etc. Awesome! I'd love to have a way to easily share my bbdb addys between machines and with other people. This would be ideal.

Now to get the CPAN people to give us a good namespace.