Older blog entries for taral (starting at number 8)

More work today -- some of that code is rather hairy to go through... *sigh* Why can't people do more design before plunging into coding frenzies?

Bills, bills, bills...

So it looks like I'm going to summer camp later this month. Woo! Work has finally started, _and_ I got my first paycheck today. Fun fun fun :) I can pay rent now.

Bah! I had to reinstall my workstation today -- what a pain. So I didn't get much work done. I did go to the little mini-class on "code dropping". It surprised me a bit -- apparently IBM is still using quite old technology. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." They are, however, finally re-evaluating their software design strategy. I've arrived at a good time, apparently. I talked with the main guy for design process, and he was quite receptive to my ideas. :) :)

Meanwhile, life goes on. I might actually be going to a summer camp in August. I need to remember to ask my boss about it though. I forgot to ask him today. I'm sure it won't be a problem, but you can't be too careful.

I also found out that I don't get my first paycheck until 3/14. *sigh* Money is evil, I swear it.

Oh, wow... that was an absolute blast! I have a list of more than 10 new friends I met at the convention... not to mention the parties, events, panels, _games_ (oh, there were lots of games played). Apparently attendance was almost 1,500 people, making this the largest convention of its type in the nation (if not the world). The staff was stretched to its limit -- so I've volunteered to help next year. We'll see what happens :)

In other news, my mobile phone got lost :( I have to get a new one now. So if you're trying to reach me, leave a message on the phone's voicemail and I'll get back to you ASAP!

Tomorrow I leave for a furry convention in Philadelphia (AnthroCon). I'm quite excited. Last time I went was in '99, and I had an absolute blast. Thankfully this class I'm taking at work means that I don't actually have to take 3 days off (Thu, Fri, Mon), only one. Yay! Now I have to do my laundry...

About once a month -- I suppose I post a diary entry as often as I look in here. Maybe I should add this diary page to my daily set of links.

I've started at IBM... quite nice, really. I had 2 days of orientation, 1 day of setting up (not finished yet), and now I have class all week. And the class was designed for support people, so it's an absolute breeze for us. I just hate having to get up for 9am.

Here's hoping that the squeeze in the industry doesn't put me out of a job anytime soon.

Gabber 0.8.4 is quite nice (especially with the PGP fixes in place). I especially like the little status thingy that appears in the window. (I use windowmaker, so I don't get a docklet. I just make the status thing a floater. Gotta love gtk.)

Had a hard drive crash just over a week ago. Data recovery told me it was unrecoverable. That sucks. I shipped it to IBM, and UPS says it's delivered, but their web site says it's not received. I hate this stuff. Last time I sent a drive back for warranty replacement, I never heard from the company again.

My, nothing since May. Well, since then I've become a Debian Developer, taking over maintenance of acl2 (not yet released as a package), GNU Common Lisp, jaxml and scanerrlog, and jbofihe and lojban-common (for the logical language "lojban").

Mostly I've been busy trying to reconstruct something of a social life and getting through this one last history course to get my degree. There's only a few days left! Yay!

Once done with the degree, I will be working (unless something goes terribly wrong) for IBM, in their AIX group. Should be interesting, since I've always like operating systems work. Sufficiently complex without being inane. (Of course, that's a terrible way to put it.)

Otherwise, I've been looking at Freenet and Mojo Nation again. I've written a mostly-working freenet client-only node for the 0.3 stuff, although it's woefully short of a full node. Needs a bit of redesign. As soon as the Mojo Nation people stop the daily protocol changes, I'll make a version of that too. We've had some interesting conversations about the protocol.

tmlm, of course, has gone nowhere. I'm still not sure if I'll actually do anything with it, or if I'll just contribute the major modules (MTP.py and Mail.py) to the python project itself and let the rest go. If anyone wants to help out with tmlm, please tell me!

Other projects I have sitting around include:

  • Some rudimentary DHCP code for python (works!)
  • An RPG die-throw probability calculator (also works)
  • An Earley parser (works, but I'm not sure what to do with it)
  • Some rough pdf processing code (works as far as it's gone... still need to do re-filtering)
  • A bit of stuff on Personal Entropy (I'll dig up a link if anyone wants)... this kind of works, although it's not fully implemented
  • The code I used to generate the Strongly Connected Component stuff for Debian (include PGP keyring processing code for OCaml)
  • Rather evil-looking shell code to find garbage left behind by poorly-written debian packages
  • And finally, an unlambda interpreter -- written in unlambda! How USELESS! But it was lots of fun. :)

I also updated some of my project involvment stuff here on advogato.

Well, CVS has been up for a while. Looking at the log stats, it seems many people are interested, but nobody actually emails me! I wish someone would... The snapshot is available, not that I change much nowadays.

Well, I finally got back to working on tmlm. It's located at SourceForge if you want to take a look. Feel free to join up! As soon as they get the cvs, etc. up you'll be able to download the code too. *grin*

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