Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted anything here. Since my last entry: I've changed jobs a couple of times; moved cross country; finished my book; taken on an official role with a free software project; watched my kids grow stronger, faster, and smarter; spent time with my wife; and generally tried to be a good person. Hopefully I've succeeded.

I guess I'll start trying to keep this diary up. We'll see how it goes.

I finally got up the inertia to put together a game I've been thinking about for a while (I made a couple of stabs at it earlier, but didn't get too far with it). I'd be interested in getting some feedback on it if anyone is willing to help an apprentice out ;)

word-dig is available from sourceforge. Don't expect too much tho' , it's little more than a commandline word game/puzzle.

Okay, so I've put together a ciphersaber based system for having an encrypted password in gotmail. Alas, gotmail is developed in .au and i'm in .us ... does anyone have any clue as to how exportable a ciphersaber is?
other stuff

it looks like i'm going to be teaching a intro/intermediate perl course here at work (14 people, 2 classes). scary. I'm just glad netizen put skud's nice perl classes up under the OPL ...

lilo, the thinkpad 240 is a pretty nice box if you're looking to run linux on it. RedHat and Debian both installed flawlessly on it, and X is crisp and clear (albeit a bit small). It's hard to beat the price too. The only knock I've heard is that they're approaching End of Life.

• A contract is signed with New Riders, including publishing a portion of the book (networking and Linux) under the OPL.
• No progess has been made on freeing HAstat, and the opposite is true. It seems that the 2nd level manager who was starting to make positive noises has now resigned from the company to take a position elsewhere.
• I wrote a ciphersaber. Given the amount of help that is available, it was pretty easy.
• I found a new hotmail mail sucking script. Since I'm stuck using hotmail from my current workplace, this is good. I've start bundling up patches to make the script better.

in other news, my 10 year old daughter has decided that Disney is evil. She's been reading my copy of 'Bullfinch's Mythology'. When she compared that to 'Hercules', she started wondering how badly Disney did at telling other stories ...

mdorman I've taken to calling my useless factoids esoterica ... I don't know if anyone else would ever deign to use the term, but I like it.