Older blog entries for orlando (starting at number 8)

work-don't you just love it when someone in the office has to talk to his or her young child on the phone with everyone else in earshot :) been away from the fun stuff for a week or two, dealing with emails, interviewing, meetings and stuff. hate it. just dying to get back infront of my bsd partition and a pile of xterms. there is so much to be done, a bunch of old apaches need re-building (i want to do this properly with DSO), new version of php needs looking at, new version of the openldap server needs to be tested and installed over the previous version, a proper structured way of building and then managing all the server has to be sorted out soon before it's too late, etc. if someone wants to offer me a position in the UK (london) that means doing this sort of thing for a modest salary then please get in touch, i'm going mad here. peep. toot. gibber. flaaaaaab.
!work-forgot my palm this morning on the way out of the flat. bugger. first time i've done that. got into the office, most of what i need is synced with my pc so no loss there. but i tripped up on the automatic reflex to put a reminder in my palm to remind me to remember my palm tomorrow. doh. looking at hosting companies for my site. bored of waiting for the old machine to be rebuilt, and i would rather have something supported and backed up even if i do have to pay for it. looking at Positive Internet.250 quid pa for 100 megs, plus php and full ftp and telnet is not bad.
rand-53
noise-<rant>various mobile phone ringers</rant>.
work-first week back after 5 days off and i'm just as pissed off with it than ever...
!work-three day weekend, bliss. s and i are hiring a car and then just driving. no idea where we are going, just follow where the road takes us.
rant-why oh why oh why is the MS telnet client such a shite piece of software? why? how can anyone be even the least bit satisfied after having created that? i would be embarrassed to the point of refusing to release it and deleting the source. it's crap. it doesn't do very much, and it doesn't do it well, so why even bother. and the really sad thing is that it's been that bad for the last umpteen releases of windows with no change. priorities, that's the problem. too interested in the things that sell the software to worry about actually making it work. that for me is the main difference between open source and commercial software. as soon as you do anything purely for the money, you can kiss quality good bye. argh! doesn't anyone take any pride in what they do any more?

i'm going home before i break something.

work-bah, back and it's hell already. didn't even have time to eat my pretsel before the phone started and then the emails.. worked some more on the staging server, added mod_layout for automatic headers on all pages. damn fine little tool, must explore more. must also rebuild all the servers as DSO. compiling each time just makes no sense at all and is too risky.
!work-tired, headache, all i need is a quiet night in. looking forward to x-men in a coupla days with nick and erin.
rand-are two biplanes four?
work-none for a week, bliss!
!work-in amsterdam for the weekend, (what a jet setter, france last weekend). saw a bright yellow suitcase at the airport last night with thinkgeek stickers all over it, PHP, MP3 etc. can't get away from the stuff for more than a couple of hours :) lat/long details courtesy of ben's new gps : N 52 22 39.6 , E 004 53 57.2.
work-staging server finished to the point of being usable. now waiting for people to try it before i add anything else. would like to add a spelling checker but haven't found anything suitable yet. user documentation looming up like a big looming thing on national looming day in loomania. trying to avoid it by busying myself with other stuff, but i know it will save me hours of support later on if i do it now...
!work-amsterdam this weekend, but we still haven't got anywhere to stay. place is booked up solid, can't get any joy from the numbers in the lonely planet. printed a huge list of hotels to try this evening. don't want to have to stagger around all night with nowhere to sleep like last time. posting this with M17-win. behaving a bit weirdly doing odd highlighting things in the text box. other than that seems more stable than previous versions. quandries..
rand-are two double basses four?
noise-nothing today. booted my machine into the FBSD partition and i can't get the CDROM or soundcard to work :(
work -it's 9:30am and i'm wondering where nick is, he should have been in a 9. then i get an email from him explaining that he hurt his foot when his bed collapsed. this would have been enough without the attached digitised picture of said bruised foot for proof... received my amazon order of the oreilly DNS/BIND book. don'tcha just love getting new oreilly titles... think i'll swap the mapping for 'o' and 'p' on my kdb to stop typing 'inout' every time i want 'input'... reading cdent's entries (along with everyone else it seems ;) and finding that i'm empathising a lot, managing when i want to code, getting frustrated with narrow-minded phbs... staging server is nearing the point where i can start getting users to try it. all the IPs now attached to the box with appropriate DNS entries, servers are up, cronned linklint (which incidentally was a bugger to get working as perl wouldn't install because it doesn't like Suns cc, pointed to gcc now happy :). still todo: configure dav for each server, add a few form->scripts to automate content migration requests, write some brief user docs to explain how easy it is to use.
pers -off to france for the weekend, always relaxing.
rand -have you noticed the convention in some countries to allow the passenger to do all the driving?
noise -underworld - second toughest in the infants, anything by them is pure gold to the lugholes.
work - reasonable. stuff on the jb site is going well, if slowly. making the php work on the solaris box is easier than i had first thought. getting it all to gell together with the db backend is taking time though. the staging server is still coming along. most of the technical groundwork is now there, the box is up and running, dav is working well, port redirection system in place. really have to get away from the kbd and do some planning before i go any further if this is going to be successful, so difficult though.
!work - gotta find some sort of project to get my teeth into. fbsd 4 now working great on my home box, ppp and all. even got s using it for her web email instead of the 95 partition. might look into resurecting the php,mysql bboard system i was hacking around with a few months back. if i absract the db stuff enough i should be able to get it working with the company intranet and oracle as the backend instead.
pers - found a rubber duck for s, been looking for ages and i'm really chuffed to find this, actually three - one big two smaller in the same package. hope it cheers her up, she's been down for the last few days with migrain :(

soundtrack today was provided by the groove armada remixes. good, but not as good as they could have been..

a lot done. webdav implemented, at least to a 'working' level. shame ie5 is the only workable client i can find. anyway, beats the s**t out of sandboxed ftp accounts and the like, this works a treat :) now all i got to do is think about is implementing it in an organised way. something that won't degenerate into a mess later on down the line.

8pm - i'm doing graphics work cos there ain't nobody else to do it.

Aim - Cold Water Music providing the soundtrack. where the hell is that sample from on Demonique?

orlando....

working at home for the day which, contrary to opinion back at hq means i tend to get more done, if only because i don't get hassled by recuitment agents all the time...

spending the day putting the final touches to the staging server. currently trying to figure out how to get apache to prepend a given piece of html to pages served. i know this is (semi)possible with php, though i don't want to parse all pages through the php engine just to achive this (performance and security problems).

other than that, buena vista social club is keeping me company (aurally)

god i need a holiday...

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