Older blog entries for robhudson (starting at number 19)

Trance Enhanced

Been feeling a little sluggish when it comes to coding lately. Yesterday I put on my headphones and tuned into XTC Radio. I think I got the most coding done since a long time. I got a lot accomplished. It's a nice feeling.

Telecommuting

The building that our offices are in are scheduled to be torn down to make room for a parking lot. A few months ago, I moved my workstation home and built an office for myself. It's been a great couple months of telecommuting. Waking up, grabbing coffee on the way to the desk and waking up mid-code is great. Sometimes you shower early, sometimes you stay in your pijamas until, well, until the next day. This has the strange side effect of causing you to doubt yourself when you go outdoors. Today, on the way to the mailbox I had to look down at myself to make sure I was clothed appropriately.

I've secured a desk at the offices of a local fiber wholesaler and will be moving there in a few weeks. Working at home was really nice, but it will also be nice to be around lots of tech and people to talk geek to. It will also be nice to know that when I'm at home, I'm on my own time. The line between working and having a personal life seems to get blurred when the 'office' is only a few steps away.

7,874,560 pixels

I took a series of screenshots today. I run enlightenment here with dual head display. I have 3 virtual desktops, 2 displays wide. I took a shot of all 3 virtuals, joined them together to make one huge screenshot that is a pretty good view of how my desktop looks in full swing (trance enhanced). The final result is a 2560x3076 jpeg, which can be seen here: Screenshot

Just a little side note... I can't multiply numbers like that in my head. And since I'm typing this in Vim and will transfer it in a bit, I typed this at the Vim command prompt:

    :r! perl -e 'print 2560*3076;'

I don't know. It's the little things. :)

IAC

fxn: MyAdvogato is way cool. I installed it. Very nice. I think advogato should adopt that view. It packs a lot of info in a small space.

Perlscript?

Wasn't there once mention of a perlscript? Some sort of browser embedded script based on Perl that runs client side, installable as a browser plugin?

I think that would rock to be able to write perlscript instead of javascript. And if there was a popup window like "Your browser doesn't have Perlscript installed. Click here to install it", it would spread fast enough.

24 Aug 2001 (updated 27 Aug 2001 at 17:58 UTC) »
Web

Waldo: I gave PHP-Nuke 5.1 a test drive not too long ago. I do a lot of PHP/MySQL development so I thought it would be easy. It was pretty easy, but when I started digging in the code, it was really ugly & non-consistent. I was doing the same thing -- cleaning up lots of code and fixing things. I ran the english defines thru a spell checker b/c the text strings were full of bad english and mistakes. I deleted it all last night. It might have given me a headstart on a website I'm working on, but I chose to just go my own route. I haven't looked at Postnuke, but the ideas there already seem more worthy.

Perl

Been playing with Perl more lately. I re-read Learning Perl the other night (mostly skimming for refresher) in preparation to re-read Programming Perl. I think I made it about half way thru last time. This time around, I'd like to learn OO Perl and learn how to make perl modules.

Inter-web Communication?

I found a Perl-GTK sample that displays a calendar. I started to get curious as to what would be required to create a local Perl-GTK app that I can select a date, type in a subject and body for an email, and have it send the data to my Email Reminder program to insert into the MySQL database. This kind of led me to imagine that there are many other inter-web communication protocols/servers/etc that act on XML/etc data. Something like this seems feasable using HTTP post queries, but I'm sure there's simpler ways.

I remember someone here had written a diary/blog data entry program that could take entries from the app, and shove them into various blogs. I should check out his code. I'm going to be playing with Perl-GTK more too.

Hardware

I'm going to be building a new system soon. From reading hardware reviews and checking out prices, I'm heading for a DDR AMD system. I can't decided if I want to go for a dual-head solution in the form of a dual-head card (Matrox, ATI, nVidia), or just get a really good AGP card and a fairly decent PCI card for the 2nd head. Why don't they make dual AGP motherboards? Looks like my US Tax rebate is going to new hardware. =P

16 Aug 2001 (updated 17 Aug 2001 at 18:38 UTC) »
Work

Recently upgraded a firewall/gateway machine for a friend from RedHat 5.2 to RedHat 7.1. They wanted Redhat, and it has been awhile since I've installed it. Got it all running just fine.

The funny scenario occurred when I decided to remove some packages to trim down the install. I noticed that the 22 MB package known as emacs was installed, so I removed emacs and emacs-nox. I also figured I'd just use vi to edit the network scripts and remove vim-6alpha. Note that this was before the network was running. Turns out that Redhat 7.1 doesn't have the old true vi, but they call vim vi and I just deleted it. D'oh! So I was stuck using 'ed' to edit network scripts. It was ugly. ed isn't a very user friendly text editor, to say the least. I was lucky I'm a vim user and knew a few commands. I'm also lucky the configs weren't too long or detailed or I never would have got the network up and vim re-installed.

« Roots »

Found www.bioperl.org. Cool stuff there. Since I come from a Biochemistry background, I'd be interested in getting back there. Programming for biochem or bioinformatics would be pretty cool. Hmmm.....

« Bi-lingual »

Anyone know of an online Spanish-English translator? Or maybe even a Perl module? I'd really like to have something similar to the webster dictionary script I use often. It'd be nice to enter a word to translate on the command line and have it return a dictionary like entry.

« Network »

Got to test out my network tonight. I burned a CD on my windows box with an 8x burner. The file was an ISO image of FreeBSD that was sitting on my Linux workstation in a Samba share. 8x is only about 1.2 MBytes/sec, and my network can now do about 6MBytes/sec via Samba. Before on a 10-base-T I had to copy the files then burn. Of course, I could have just spent about $20 more and got another 8x burner, but hey. :-)

« Work »

I burned the FreeBSD CD b/c work wants me to install a mirror of our webserver on their laptop so they can demo a web site we are developing. Tonight I got FreeBSD installed. Next is getting the PCMCIA card working, then Apache/MySQL/PHP and X. I've never dealt with FreeBSD in the desktop environment, so it will be interesting to me to see the differences in setting it up.

« Open Source »

Submitted my first bug report to Mozilla. I think it is bug 95000. I try to keep up with some of the latest Mozilla builds, and I noticed this bug. I searched bugzilla and found it, but it was marked as NEW and only a few people posted about it, so I thought I'd add my blurb.

12 Aug 2001 (updated 13 Aug 2001 at 04:45 UTC) »
« Motivation »

I was pondering the other day as to what my main motivation is for wanting to code open source software, and what motivates me to learn new languages/tools/etc that are outside the scope of my current position. Do I spend my freetime for hopes of a better job in the future? Or do I do it because I love Open Source and want to give back to the community? Do I learn just to be master of my own box, satisfied that I can do anything with this hardware?

It is hard for me to really determine if I'm learning for a job or money or not. But I think I finally came to the conclusion that I do it just because it's damn fun :-)

« Miscellany »

Got a 100 base network card in the mail today. Now my home LAN is 100% 100baseT. Real good for those Samba transfers. I'm trying to make a new kernel now with the latest drivers from scyld.

Made a release to my Email Reminders the other day. It was fun hacking the calendar code.

Made a screenshot. It's a 2560x1024 image. Dual head is nice. :)

It's so hot here today. My gkrellweather told me it got up to 96 F. So I'm heading to the pool in just a few moments.

Work related, I've been working heavily on an e-commerce website that sells books only about fishing. It's probably the largest project I've had and it's been great fun. The database is huge and we've had to build import and export utilities, big search routines, using both Perl for some stuff and PHP for most of the embedded HTML stuff. It's been fun.

« Vim »

'=' now ranks just under '*' as the coolest single character Vim operators. The Vim book is teaching me much needed Vim stuff.

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