Settling into the new office space just fine. Got a KVM switch today so I can hook up my Linux box and my NTWS to a single monitor,keyboard,mouse, but my CDW rep sent me the wrong cables. DOH! I'll have to wait until tomm.

Jabber Stuff
Been tweaking Winjab, finding lots of bugs and e-t found another doosey (siq) today with regard to my auto-docking chat windows. Apparently the tabs names have a mind of their own and apparently pull names from previous windows.

JabberIM is really shaping up and is moving to private Beta hopefully Monday. Things look pretty solid so far, just tweaking minor bugs and verbage, etc. Stuff seems to work quite well. Paired with the 0.9 release version of JServer, the architecture is really starting to rock. The ICQ and AIM transports still appear to be a little buggy, but overall are definitely working.

WOOP - I'm now typing from my new area in our office. Totally revamped the entire layout.. I now have more privacy and A LOT more working space. My NTWS came back to life fine, as did my Linux server - ROCK!

Bouldering news
I am so psyched.. I finally got out Bouldering yesterday. Saw lots of cool folks down there - a group came all the way from Ithaca (3 hours) to boulder, and there was another big pose' from the Toronto area, then later we saw a group of friends from the "crew" here in Buffalo. Good climbing, my back feels pretty good (still not close to 100% though :(), and I'm stoked for the season to really get going. Pants and short-sleeves for most of the day.. it doesn't get any better.

Jabber Stuff
I've been doing battle with the RAS/DUN stuff in JabberIM so that it can automatically detect when someone's dialup connects to the net, so it can auto-connect to the Jabber server. Cool concept, but an implementation nightmare. It now seems to sense connections fine, but I'm getting Access Violations when the RAS connection is dropped. Some OLE Exception. It makes it doubly hard to debug since I don't have a modem in my development box :(

WinJab is getting more stable the more I tweak. Still lots of "eye-candy" stuff to work on. Temas had a great idea for drag-n-drop group management using Windows Explorer like key-bindings (ctrl = copy, shift = move, etc..). The jabber.org open jabber server seems to be running pretty good and kudos to erbo and temas for doing lots of debugging on the ICQ and AIM transports. I'm now officially in IM nirvana... Jabber, ICQ, and AIM in a single client interface. Life is good :)

Vantek/Work stuff
Curt and I have discussed plans to revamp our small office layout which would give me more work-space to work on other devices, and give us both more privacy for phone conversations and my MP3 tunes :) I'm kind of psyched to do this, but of course it'll blow my servers 70 day uptime :( Oh well, It's a small price to pay.

Linux stuff
Got a copy of Redhat 6.1 from TSBandit this past week and installed it at home to run in dual-boot mode with my existing Win95 partition. I was blown away by the ease & simplicity of the graphical install. Linux has come a LONG way since old text-only, gross installs of the pre-slakware days. Getting ready to upgrade my RH 5.2 box here at the office sometime this week. I installed Interbase 6.0 on it earlier, but apparently this needs the 2.2 kernel and glibc 2.1 on it. Keeping my fingers crossed that it won't hose any of the custom stuff I've done to this box over the last 2 years. I'll keep you posted :)

I seem to be stuck in a 1 week per diary entry. Well, I was supposed to be in LA from last Saturday to today, but the trip got canned. I was very happy to get to stay home.

JabberIM and WinJab are still progressing at "internet" speeds, much to the dismay of my normal sleep habits. Thanks goes out to 'eff' who helped me get file transfers working really slick in WinJab using the direct client- client method. We are still working on Firewall stuff. After much deliberation over the past week, we've finally hammered out a "temporary" vCard XML spec to use with Jabber. Phew, it was a major production to get everyone on the same page, and "sort-of" agree with the IETF Draft.

Work is absolutely insane. Besides my normal stuff (Vantek Software, and 3D-Workshop), I just found out we got 2 more measurement / automation contracts. One is small and easy, the other is not. I can see my summer free time being sucked away like a super-nova into a black-hole. <sigh> I finally decided to scrap Quicktime off of my computer today hoping I could get rid of the idiotic Quick-Time plugin that was being used to display PNG files in IE5. Well, its gone, and PNG's render fine inside of html pages, but by themselves, the situation is about as automatic as my 5- Speed transmission. Soon I think I might just nuke my HD and install W2K.. or maybe I'll just tough it out until SP1 :)

I work a Koinonia weekend this weekend with a good friend of mine. It should be really fun. Play lots of music, do some chapels, etc.. It'll be a nice get-away from the computer world for a few days.

My sister, who works at New Horizons, called today and told me one the horses she co-owns as sort of investment broke it's NECK yesterday. It's still alive, but they aren't sure whats going to happen. She is really bummin', as this was a money making deal for her. It's really shocking news, we both have been around the horse industry for a long time, and this is the first time I've heard of one breaking its neck. Bizzare.

My back still hurts, but seems to be getting better.. Hopefully it's recovery, and warmer temperatures will coincide so I can start climbing outdoors soon!

It's been almost a week since my last entry? Where do I start?? Jabber development continues.. I finally posted an update to JabberCOM yesterday which has tons of improvements, bug fixes, and new stuff. I finally got UTF-8 encoding working (thanks Kutulu for those algos), so WinJab should not cooperate nicely with other languages and funky character sets.

Talked at lenght with jer about issues related to vCards, sending around roster items, and other cool stuff, and finally got around to hacking together file transfer stuff into WinJab... they work, and are really cool. We just need server proxy so I can finally send stuff from behind my NAT and firewall. I'm so close to IM nirvana - as soon as the AIM transport and ICQ transport get installed on Jabber.org, I'll be happier than a pig in.... a mud puddle.

Last Saturday, I FINALLY got around to completely re- stringing my Epiphone (guitar) with a new set of Elixor strings.. it sounds sooo nice. I still need to talk to my buddy Darrell about getting a pickup put it in it.. hmm.. there goes my new video card for the home PC. Oh well. Had a team meeting on Sunday for this retreat I'm working in a couple of weeks, and jammed with Chris M. afterwards at the apartment for a while - great fun - until he realized he left his lights on in the parking lot again. DOH!

I'm supposed to be going to LA for a trade-show demo thing this Saturday, but those plans may be changing (I'd rather not go anyways). We'll see what happens.

The climbing scene continues to depress me. Last Wed. we set a new record high temperature (69 F) and by Sunday morning, we had a foot (12") of snow on the ground. ARGH. I just want to get outside and climb. The Glen is still soaked, but hopefully, it'll get dry, warm, and windy.