Older blog entries for rjp (starting at number 53)

Hmmph - one of the code reviewers (supervisory) said not to work too hard this weekend ;) I just can't win - I want to be mad, but how can I be now? Well shit, it's a beautiful day: marine layer burned off early, it's noon and already sunny and warming up. Ocean's blue, palm trees green, yadda yadda.

Shit, kaffe doesn't like my Qube.

So I've been waiting for more than a week for some code review from two people . . . code goes to QA Monday . . . Friday the reviews come in. Thanks for waiting a whole week to respond and thereby totally fucking my weekend! Yay! Too bad much of it was "well I suggested you do this but now I don't like it." Great, now I get to undo, refactor, and re-test all weekend long.

So I finally set up the Cobalt Qube 2 at home - the web and email servers are now running there instead of on my workstation. Crap, sendmail is a pain in the ass. The Qube 2 actually has packages for MySQL, PHP, (old) Java, etc., which is super cool. I'm slowly updating it though - I guess the original distro was based around an old Red Hat version on a 2.0 kernel . . . thank god for GNU.

Enigmail, a nice PGP plugin for mozilla, works nicely if not perfectly. The problem (as ever) is key management. Grrr.

Palladium: sheeyit, what nonsense.

Long time no entries. I think I'll set up a log/diary on my own server, I might have more motivation to keep things up to date there . . . or not. Whatever.

So we've been in Santa Barbara since early April. It feels good to be here - things are just generally nice. The beach is great ;) and the water's getting warmer.

TOOLS conference here this month. Bummer, it's all about .NET and Eiffel - two worthless (in my opinion) technologies. Worthless because . . . well, Eiffel's a polished turd, and .NET's just evil. Miguel de Icaza evidently will be giving one of the keynotes. His inexplicable fixation on .NET is just sad. So, here's a conference in my own backyard on a topic I'd ordinarily like (the object orientation and all that), and the focus of the conference sucks.

I just started using my new Kinesis ergo keyboard . . . my typing speed has returned to the realm of mere mortals . . . it will be days before I am used to this well enough to code acceptably. but it does feel nice . . . good thing I got one for work *and* one for home. I already remapped alt and ctrl - the good folks at kinesis, I think, are not X Windows users, or vi users ;) But geez, having enter and space right next to each other, both using my big fat right thumb - that's really getting me. Numbers are going to be a problem.

code.

soon i'll be getting an ergo keyboard, probably a kinesis "concave" thing. actually 2, one for home and one for work - and if i'm lucky they'll spring for it at work. i typically find myself in ergonomically evil situations - feet up on the desk, keyboard in lap, hands crunched in together and wrists at an awkward angle . . . i'm starting to feel some pain in my left wrist after typing for 3+ hours. this is a bad thing.

finally, i've got my car back. dad and i drove up to monterey friday, spent the night there, drove over to soquel saturday morning to serious auto to pick up my car - they put a hard dog rollbar and 15" rota subzero wheels on it. we chatted with them about car geek and technology geek stuff until about noon, and then drove down hwy 1 back to santa barbara.

anyone that lives in or visits california should drive hwy 1 between monterey and san luis obispo. depending on the number of stops you make and the traffic, it'll take 4 or 5 hours. it's the most breathtakingly beautiful part of coastal california, period. plus there's some ass-kicking fun curves.

back at work, zooming along, less time for diaries and other web diversions . . . ;) it's good to be back at it.

wow. we did it. we arrived in santa barbara last tuesday, and the movers brought our stuff last saturday. this is my 3rd day at the new job, and things are good ;) if only my dsl provider could get their shit together.

the three most stressful things that can happen in someone's life: moving, new job, death. we've weathered all three, and it's my hope that now we're coming out on the other side of a hellish year, and things will be looking up.

woo hoo! linux at work. they don't care - they brought me another machine to do windows on for ms word and outlook calendaring. the only thing i could ask beyond that is that they simply drop exchange, and windows on the desktops . . . yeah right!