Thursday:
Worked from home. Been hanging around my dad and it turns out he's gotten some secondary eye infection from his cold and the doctor wants all of us to stay away from other people for a day or two.
Mostly just did some "configuration management" type work, aka software builds. I proceded to goof up the version strings and they had to be re-done. Happy day.
I was out sick on Monday, still sick today, but I figured I'd come in for a few hours just to keep stuff from slipping too far.
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Still getting stuff to compile after the re-arrangement. A couple of header files went away, making life vastly more amusing (from the comedy of errors perspective).
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On the non-work side of things, I've started considering a couple of different projects: extending the sftp client (from OpenSSH) to provide more functionality along the lines of ncftp, and a distributed chat client/server w/ built in encryption and authentication. I'd like to use sftp more for files transfers, but it's functionality is so limited (kind of like using the Windows command line ftp client) that I find myself just using ssh and scp. Distributed chat isn't a new idea, but I haven't seen anything out there that really takes security into consideration from the ground up (as opposed to just bolting it onto the side). Most likely, I'd use the OpenSSL and OpenSSH libraries, with (and this just came to me) the ability to go out to the key servers to grab public keys. The basic idea is to have a single program that's both client and server. Start it up, decide which, if any, channels to accept incoming connections for and then tell it what other servers to connect to. Kind of similar to the star topology of IRC, but where anybody can be a server. When people connect, they either provide a public key to authenticate against (which will be cached for some period of time beyond the end of their connection) or a key server address to get it from. There's several inefficiencies there, but hey, this is still in the "restaurant napkin" stage.
Reworking makefiles. Oh, happy day. Rajesh moved the code files into separate direcories, so the makefile broke. My fix resulted in a rather ugly makefile, but it appears to work for now. Time to start reading up on makefiles.
My trip to Washington just re-emphasized how much I dislike living in Kansas. I've made up my mind to move back this fall. I have obligations here in Kansas through the summer, but after that . . .
Ideally, I want a job that allows me to telecomute, as that would allow the most flexiblity in where I live, but I suppose I'l take just about anything in Seattle.
I'd really like to find work w/ a company that has a more favorable attitude to free and open source software. The only reason we were allowed to release the Fusion MPT driver for linux under the GPL is because SteveR and I presented management w/ the ugliness of maintaining binary only drivers for linux. Presented the lack of goodwill from the linux community if we dumped binary only drivers, etc. My direct manager seems favorable to open source, but his bosses are another story altogether.
Got back from Washington/Seattle last night some time (our connecting flight out of Denver was several hours late). Awesome trip involving: my brother (along w/ my folks and sister, who went with me), friends, snoeshowing, lots of wandering around Seattle, the abscense of one particular friend who couldn't make it down from Bellingham due to a sudden need to find new housing, Lord of the Rings, more wandering around Seattle, and more snowshoeing. Interspersed with all of this was excellent Thai, Indian and Americanized Italian (aka pizza) food along w/ several varieties of quite good cheesecake. It's a good thing that there was a fair amount of physical activity, or I'd be quite balloon shaped.
Bit of customer support work this morning. Talked with Carl, one of our security people, a bit. He's a big fan of the west-coast as well. Ex. Army Intel., so he's used to traveling around quite a bit (sounds like my maternal grandfather, whom I never got to meet) and isn't a big fan of the Kansas area, despite having grown up here.
Got a package almost ready for the linux version of our SNIA hbaapi library (so we could send it to one of the SAN software compies for testing), and found out that the SCSI command code is broken. Now I'm back to waiting in the hbaapi arena.
Did I mention that I'm heading of to Seattle (well, various points in western Washington, Seattle being one) for a couple of weeks on Thursday? Less than two days and I will be well on my way. Too bad it's only for a couple of weeks and not permanent.
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Rajesh restructured the hbaapi project to split stuff up into logic directories, as oppose to just dumping it all in one directory. Now I get to update the Makefile so I can do compiles under Linux and Stephen can do Solaris compiles.
Cranked out a build for the latest fw point release. Hopefully I didn't mess anything up; SteveR usually handles the official builds, but he's on vacation (so it falls to me since I'm his CM lackey).
See the 14 Dec entry.
Tracking down issues with the linux code in the hbaapi library that were introduced by the rather major re-write that moved all of the data out of globals and into per adapter structures. Next on the list would be to add some locking, but that can probably wait a day or so.
Today seems to be CM Gopher day for me. Fixed a problem w/ some code from one project getting committed to another project (the developer had copied a directory over from an older project to use as a template and got all the CVS files as well). The last time Rajesh committed code to the hbaapi project he managed to wipe out every change I had previously committed. I'm really not fond of working w/ engineer types when they're using something "new" that they refuse to take the time to understand.
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Fixed a bug in the new code that handles the "fixed in" field. Ahem. It helps if you actually submit the changes to the database. While running that down, I discovered that the "change multiple bugs at once" functionality of buglist.cgi causes process_bug.cgi to only log the changes to the first bug and not the rest. Loverly. Trying to find an elegant way of fixing it.
Absolutely glorious day so far: cloudy, cool and a light mist. This is my idea of good weather. I've liked cool, damp and foggy days for as long as I can remember. We used to get some awesome fogs off the ocean when I was a kid in California (Santa Maria) and when my family moved to Washington, I just mossed over and became a confirmed cloudy weather person. Living in Kansas has been a real struggle, as I get grumpy when it's sunny for more than a couple of days in a row. My ideal home would be on a rocky cliff jutting out into the ocean somewhere on the northern coast of Washington. Man, I'm really home-sick today. Ah well, I get to go visit for a couple of weeks, starting the 20th.
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Cleanup time for the changes to Bugzilla. Turns out it's only necessary to splice "fix_ver" into the collist array if the user has a non-default collist cookie set (such as me). Otherwise you end up w/ two fix_ver columns in the bug listing. Cleaned up a few other bugs and added more versions to the fix_vers table for the Fc929 FW project.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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