Older blog entries for josh (starting at number 41)

Work
Things have been a bit better lately but today I'm filled with bitterness, not all of it directed at work though. I've been trying to clean some things up in our CVS tree which have been hanging around much to long. Also, re-syncing my SPECS tree with what is in CVS and what we use and release. That hasn't been pretty.

I've been playing a bit more with Alexandria the past few days and working with JXR, their java-based clone of lxr. Working ok so far though I hear that lxr can support more languages now which would be quite nifty.

I don't know whether to put this here or in the Hacking section but I've been trying to come up with more modules/components which Tigris could use. Hopefully I'll have some time to prototype.. Hah!

Hacking
I've been digging into Python a bit more lately and looking for things to spark my interest and I found PyGame which pointed me to civil. I've only started looking through the code, let alone to play it but I think it might be something that would intrigue me since it has nothing to do with my normal coding duties. I'll need to drop either the dev list a note or the hackers to see how I can help...

Work
To butcher a Dickens quote, These are the best of times and the worst of times.
Work
Been working on a simple updater the last day or so. It's in Python and is using the rpm-python bindings. While the bindings are very cool, the documentation is sparse but I think things are going ok with it so far.

The basic idea is for someone to run the script on their box, the script will connect to a central site with a list of needed rpms and then query the local rpm db accordingly. I totally realize that I'm reinventing many wheels but that's ok for now since the script will have the hooks necessary for Tigris integration. If this becomes truly needed, I think I'll use one of the existing tools and add some sort of Tigris support but that's a bit down the road.

It never ceases to amaze me how many good ideas I have during the day which I'd love to implement. Unfortunately, that's about the time, interruptions come.. Oh well, one of these days...

Hacking

Not much to report as I've been pretty focused on work lately. That being said, I have been looking through the gIDE code. I'm hoping to pick a couple of things in the TODO and work on it over the weekend.

Travel

I'm heading up to the office on Monday. It's been over 6 weeks since I flew into SF which is way too long for my sanity.

Meta

My iBook's hard drive died the other day and I'm going to have to reinitiliaze it and rebuild the system. I think I'm going to dual-boot it w/ LinuxPPC since I don't think my wife is ready for the command-line just yet.
Work
Some angst at work but hopefully things will settle down again soon...

Starting hacking on an update-rpm python script which will query a server for the correct list of rpms needed for install and then check what is on the box. I'm fairly confident that it will be useful since it will quiet many complaints...

Meta
I've moved to Evolution as my 'official' mail client.. So far so good.

Hacking
I've been looking through the code of gIDE for the past few nights when I've needed a rest from my duties here. I really would like to help out with it but I definitely need to freshen up my C...
Work
So, I got my 'old' laptop back after a new hard drive was put into it. That's really good because the replacement only had a 5 gig hard drive as opposed to the 15 gig one I'm using now.. That can be frustrating..

Today has been just one of those days where you can't wait to go to sleep in hopes that tomorrow will be better..

Hacking

Rebuilt most of GNOME from cvs tonight using Eazel-hacking which is just really nifty.
Work

So, the other day, the drive on my laptop started clicking whenever I did any type of operation. It would click for a few seconds and then go on about its business. Needless to say, it was quite annoying so today, a new laptop, Thinkpad 600x, arrived at my door.

The rest of the day was filled with moving various things over and generally getting settled into the new laptop. It's running Red Hat 7.1 which is an obvious change from the previous 6.2 install. I'm looking forward to seeing the 'greatness' of the 2.4 kernel.

I figure that I might as well use the laptop as my main development environment so I'll be installing Tigris on it over the next few days. Actually, this might give me the chance to try out some ideas I have about a Tigris-lite install which I think would be very beneficial to outside developers.

Hacking
So, my hacking time has been lacking over the last few days but hopefully that will change soon. I'm currently running the vicious-build-scripts to get various GNOME sources so that my laptop can be both a work dev environment as well as a personal hacking environment. We'll see how it goes.
Work
The JXTA launch went well.. No major crashes or complaints which is obviously always a good thing. I've been hanging out on the discuss mailing list and it has had some great traffic and great posts already.

I firmly believe in the concept of eating your own dog food so I was ecstatic about upgrading the current Tigris.Org to run the latest software. However, the actual process wasn't well thought out and people decided to do the upgrade late at night without really talking to anyone else. Much GAR was felt today.

One cool thing which I did this week was to get our stuff running on a 2.4 kernel, 4 processor machine. We call it the beast and it has been a thorn in many people's sides for the past few months. Everything ran fine after I found out about the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL trick...

Work
Had some appointments this afternoon so I was away from the computer for most of the day. When I got back, it seemed that all hell had broken loose and everyone was scurrying around looking for answers to questions which they didn't know how to ask.

I recognize that we have a huge client launch on Wednesday but it just seems silly to ignore the solid decisions which were made last week and instead move into untested waters.

Much GAR!

Work
More knowledge transfer going on.. Things are going quite well which is awesome.

Wrote a new Ant task which will dynamically create a new build.xml file.

Work
Heading up the office tomorrow... 7 AM flight into SFO.. Ugh! Why am I still awake? Oh yeah, because I have work to do.

stephane started today which is awesome. That's the real reason I'm heading up north so that I can walk her through the madness that is Tigris.. Hopefully, it won't be TOO overwhelming but I'd be lying if I said, I didn't want her to be just a little afraid..

I erased my TODO whiteboard today and amazingly enough, it was tough for me to stay focused.. Hrm.. That's not good...

Hacking

Didn't do much of anything this weekend... My daughter was too interested in looking for the Easter bunny than to watch her daddy sit and type... :)

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