Older blog entries for klevin (starting at number 136)

chakie I too have a visceral aversion to the KKK. I believe the issue is that once you start silencing "extremist" groups, it becomes difficult to stop and the definition of what is "extremist" keeps geting wider and wider.

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I've figured out what the "person" and "proj" tags do here on advogato, but still not sure on the "wiki" tag, so here's and experiment, wiki'ized "klevin": klevin.

Hmmm. Amusing, but I'm not sure of the utility. Perhaps that's because there's no entry for "klevin". I may have to remedy that.

Not much activity here. Mostly just trying not to stress too much. The job search is produced sparse results, sent my resume in on two jobs (one a telecomuting job, the other, a job located in Seattle). I have comitments through August that are most easily met here in Wichita, so I'm trying to find a job that will allow me to telecomute, or, if located in Wichita, is not a permanent job, as I could not, in good conscience, accept a "permanent" job when I have every intention of moving after August. If I can't find either a temp job in Wichita or a telecomuting job, then I'll have to move, and Seattle was my intended destination anyways, so . . .

When I can consentrate, I've been looking at the code for OpenSSH's sftp program. I don't think it will be much work to extended it, but I'm not too sure of the best method. Either I take the existing code and meld additional functionality on, or I use it as a reference, but write my own client from scratch. The advantage of option one is that it would be less work (in theory), but it means my code would be under the BSD license (as I understand these things). Option two, more work, but I can place the code under the GPL. I don't have anything against the BSD style licenses, per se. However, I'm more familiar with the GPL.

Well, the press releases have been out for a while, so I can say it. Bloody massive layoffs going down today. Management's got their heads in anatomically impossible places. They appear to being taking senior developers. Probably the "higher saleries first" idea. Thing is, once you factor in benefits, the salary delta isn't that big. A good friend and one of two people who've worked here that I consider a mentor just took the long walk to the conference room. I don't know if I'm going to cry, vomit or both. Only thing on my playlist today is Bad Religion. A person w/ way more experience, a wife and kids is getting the axe instead of me, who's young, single, no kids, and quite frankly doesn't know squat. Life bloody well sucks.

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Ok, how about "in addition to" as opposed to "instead of." And a repeat of the last line above.

Time to turn my resume on.

Catching up on email and various stuff that I can't do from home (the fact that LSI uses Cisco's VPN 3000 setup, which doesn't have a linux client, really puts a crimp in what I can do over a VPN connection). All sorts of rumors floating around here at work. Consequently, not much work is getting done. Lots of hallway conversations, though.

Trying to get a driver source package and a hbaapi library binary package put together for several "SAN Management" companies that want to test their apps with our boards under Linux. Pam says she's going to put out another driver package tomorrow for her test people, so I'll wait for that instead of cranking my own out.

Still working from home. At least I can have good coffee w/o coughing up $3+ for a mocha or latte from the caffe in the Barnes and Noble near work. The coffee at work, is, well, bad. The only reason to drink it is if you're in dire need of caffine.

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.