Older blog entries for nooks (starting at number 13)

I've started reworking the Killer Idea on a smaller scale to help think about design of the eventual OO implementation.

ajv, what've you got against bleep? Seriously, if NDAs suck, there's an easy solution: don't sign! I can count the number of NDAs I've signed on one hand.

chromatic:

Thanks, I have a Perlmonks account (I'm sure you can take a stab at the username) and have found it incredibly useful from time to time. The author of HTML::TreeBuilder responded to me on a mailing list just today; I'll take his advice and see where it gets me (mind, if it doesn't get me far I know whose fault it will be, and it's not his!).

I thought your name looked familiar.

Fun, but not interesting

I just finished installing Bugzilla internally. It's a nice enough system, but geez, some of the decisions strike me as a little odd. mysql? Nasty Perl CGI, hardcoded script and cookie locations? No OO design?

Ick. Don't like.

HTML::TreeBuilder

I'd like to keep using HTML::TreeBuilder on my project, but the lack of support for subclassing is stopping me. I don't really feel like modifying the class to support creating a tree of subclassed HTML::Element objects (which are themselves not trivially subclassable, IIRC), but breaking encapsulation on the HTML::Element class to add the attribute I need doesn't seem a good solution either.

It's a shame I can't find good help for this because it's stopping a simply killer idea. Have any advogato persons messed with these classes much?

BJF:

If I walk away from my DSTC job with one thing, it'll be the knowlege that I'm capable of building real software after all.

Learning to build software is a humbling experience: after a year away from uni, I think I'm finally starting to prove that to myself, as well as deciding that programming for a living may well not be my cup of tea.

What helps me is knowing that I still have something like thirty or forty years in which to be professional and become a respected hacker in my own right.

De-funked

I've just spent the last 24 hours in what's probably the most productive state I've been in for a few years (certainly the last six months!). My pet project (perl scripting to extract the important stuff from web pages) just came together, and the idea may well be simple enough to keep working despite my best efforts to ruin it.

I think most of this motivation (I've finally started working on Debian again) comes from taking just a few weeks off work. Emotionally, the whole time was a bit of a rollercoaster (I'm not going into that here; email me if you're interested and I'll decide whether to tell you or not) but it appears to have recharged my enthusiasm for work and play.

Take me drunk, I'm home again!

I'm moving house in, uh, three or four days (it's midnight as I write this). I haven't packed a damn thing. I haven't cancelled my telephone, gas, or eletricity accounts. I haven't even arranged mail forwarding. Ah well. Surely this is all normal?

nooks is a helper on project Debian

Spent the last few days working on my two Debian packages (which I haven't done an upload of in nearly a year) and picking up a third, the Perl Crypt::SSLeay module, which I've just uploaded.

It's a nice feeling to know I'm at least trying to contribute to Debian again, considering I've been a developer for some time but have been (ahem) less than active.

Of course, this is all due to my sudden burst of energy when it comes to broken (or in-development) software, which I attribute to changing back to being a sysadmin.

The day the west stands still

Christmas day was a bore---no-one to talk to, nothing not christmas-related happening, can't order pizza for dinner... The list goes on! I'm planning on deciding once and for all next year whether I want to do the christmas thing at all, ever.

Sideways Promotion

I finally bit the bullet and talked to my boss a few days ago: the Java Developer (nay, `Software Engineer', if you look at my business card) thing just wasn't working out, and I could see too many things that were broken on the network. Dave kindly agreed and decided to put me back on in a sysadmin support/scripting role. (I suppose you can all tell I need to think of a better title for myself).

I was kind of surprised at how easy it was to stop being someone who billed time and start being someone who at best saves money for the company. It makes me want to be sure my salary and associated costs are well-spent. I think I can see room for some serious scripting and infrastructure work, espescially with the large number of new hires we have right now (the company has increased size by 50% over about three weeks).

All this is a little moot immediately, though, since I'm on holiday until the 15th of January. Whee.

Present them

How the advogato folks who give presentations and lectures cope with rowdy `listeners'? I gave my slide presentations today to a bunch of people who heckled, asked questions about stuff I was just explaining, talked, chattered, walked away and generally did everything they could to be distracting.

I know there are techniques to deal with this (if there's only one thing I learned at Uni, it's that): what do folks find the most effective?

Sliding around on LaTeX

Today is a training day at Plugged In; I'm required to give three presentations: GNUPG, Debian Packaging, and CVS. LaTeX slides for the last two are (more or less) complete, I'm just going to have to wing the GNUPG one. Ah well.

Oops!

I encountered what I think is a nasty X 4 bug at work: when starting quake-x11 on one of our workstations, the machine hung---totally. The owner is going to be pissed. I suspect it's something to do with MIT shared memory, since it, uh, worked over an SSH X-forwarded connection (slow, yes, yes, I know---I simply wasn't thinking).

Four down; two to go

I've finished Thomas Covenant book 2.1 (``The wounded land''). Not as good as the previous books, I think, but still not bad.

The continuing chronicles

I've finished the First Chronicles and have started on the second; I still think Donaldson's doing a good job---why do people dislike these books so intently?

LWP::Hotmail

A small tool I'm writing to download email from Hotmail is turning into a general purpose framework for testing web applications (this would be a killer timesaver where I work) if only I can get the time to talk to another developer about how to design it. I hate design work, but realise it's necessity. I suppose I've just never had the knack for it.

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