Older blog entries for technik (starting at number 26)

Decided that this coming Monday, I will go to the gym around the block from work, show my ID badge (for the discount), and sign up. I sit at my desk seven or eight hours a day and a year of this is starting to show. I figure I can exercise for thirty minutes at lunch each day without disrupting my schedule and I might improve my health and probably improve my disposition. At least I'll break from the office for a little while. I'm also sleeping better since changing my schedule, so I guess that worked.

Just for the hell of it, I threw a 3Com 3C509B- only one PCI slot and it has an eepro in it- I had lying around into the slimline P90 running OpenBSD I use as a firewall and segregated the wireless rig. Reconfigured the access point to use the BSD box as the gateway, tweaked TinyDNS and created a new instance of DNScache to serve the new network, and played with the rulesets. My wife didn't notice the difference, which is proof enough. One of these days I'm going to have to replace this AST Bravo, with its Pentium Overdrive, 32MB of EDO, and a 1GB drive scavenged from another machine, with something cheap, faster, and small. I've had this little desktop powered on since at least November 1999 (oldest file in the system). I'm open to suggestions. I might snag a sbus nic and impress my headless SS5 into the role.

Books arrived. Remaining CDROMs didn't. Vacation didn't include planning a lot of time for reading but rather than toast at the beach I read into the Stevens book and experimented. Laptop battery lasts an uninspiring sixty-three minutes before forcing FreeBSD to sleep. I'm must try without running X but I suspect that it won't make much difference as most of my time is spent using Vim, reading manpages, and running gcc. Since it's a borrowed toy, I guess I can't kick.

Meta: Journeyer. Something wonky with the certification.

Work: More reorg but it's all pretty vague, management lingo. That really big consulting company whose name starts with 'A' is on-site for the next couple of years to assist the transition. One thing is that they flattened management roles, so I'm just part of the skill pool officially. The first level of management wasn't something I sought, and I only had the role since May, but I have this sense that I got demoted. Some teams have been entirely restructured and a few mid-level people got badly skewered. See how this all plays out.

Play: Picked up rsync in Java again. Apparently there is a sourceforge effort but it hasn't produced any files (then again, neither have I, but at least my effort isn't as public). Alternately putting on my C and my Java hats is interesting- amazing how much I forgot/vaguely remember/conflated after a full year of working daily in Java following a full year of SA and mostly Perl. Bought more books including another Stevens book (Better than trading cards! Collect the whole set!). Hope they arrive before I leave for a long weekend. Might work on rsync if the beach is too hot, crowded, or rainy. Might just read and not code. I have a copy of Applied Cryptography that I keep meaning to get through. My focus is scattered and on top of that I'm ticked off that Megapop changed the TOS to my ISP limiting my total hours dial-in (yes, unlimited only means as unlimited as we feel like making it and this month it is 300 hours). And Covad doesn't serve my neighborhood, so decent DSL is out of the question. And cable modem with its crappy terms of service, isn't available in my building even if I wanted it.

Meta: Dropped out of Apprentice status after a few weeks idle.

Work: Reorg-a-go-go! It's exhausting that there is so little information and so much rumour. Hustling a dozen pieces of various projects through the chute. I'm not the first to notice (see _Parkinson's Law_ or the _Peter Principle_) that more time and energy is spent navigating the political waters than on "real" work. Along with everything else, I'm defacto contact for everything under the sun related to our software- even had end-users (they really exist!) directed to me instead of the customer helpdesk by mistake. Did get in a few hours of coding, first getting a working J2EE environment with JBoss and then twisting really fugly code to work. Ended up having to write a wrapper around thirty-odd methods- yes, that's one class... I said it was fugly-(that's going to be a nightmare to support if it survives) and wrote a Perl script to extract the methods,parse them and write the skeleton of the wrapper. It's times like this that Perl's ability to munge the namespace at runtime looks really attractive.

Play: Too much to list: a wedding, visiting family, visit from my brother, party at my place, dinner at a friend's, motorcycling around, visit from friends up from Virginia, a weekend in the Catskills. Picked up a SS5/170 base for $50 shipped and my OpenBSD 2.9 order arrived so that should be fun. Waiting for Free and NetBSD orders. Oh, yeah, and sleep. Even before the summer heat, I was sleeping less than 6 hours a night. It caught up with me and I spent a full day sleeping and running a fever. Now I'm trying to break away from stimulating diversions (computer, technical books, novels, TV) at least 30-40 minutes before bed and to climb into bed at the same time every night. I'm also doing a quick fifteen to twenty minutes of exercise (push-ups, sit-ups, and crunches then stretching) before bed. I'll see how it goes.

Work: Meetings and project plans. According to my VP, I'm de facto leading the charge for Java2 and WebLogic. Using Enhydra Enterprise wasn't even in the discussion, the decision was made already and licenses and training dollars spent. Its architecture seems to be at least as compelling as Bea's. Whatever. Had to extricate myself from cross-departmental squabbles as everyone and their dog laid claim to some part of this. Figured I would keep the scope limited, do the project plan, compose the Gantt chart and send it out and see who screams.

Play: Guerrilla.net, Seattle Wireless and the local effort caught my attention. Particularly interesting are the home-brew antenna documents like this yagi which describe the potential to extend the range of 802.11 networks. Apparently, it has caught the attention of some of the people at O'Reilly too

Play: Yes! Only two and a half hours of tinkering last night and I have my Linksys wireless access point/router configured with a couple of Orinoco Silver pccards. Slightly complicated, mostly because I took an hour to realize that I needed to upgrade the ROM and some of the terminology of their web-based user-friendly configurator isn't clear. I'm using its WAN port as an uplink to my existing network and keeping my OpenBSD box managing the dial-up (one day, I hope soon, I'll get broadband but the OBSD box stays). Demonstrated to Maria that we can access the internet from the living room couch. Much joy. I was surprised that two plaster interior walls (there is duct work and pipes and maybe some metal lathe from repairs in there) heavily degrades the signal creating little radio shadows in the apartment despite distances of 20-30 feet. I'll probably relocate the unit or maybe try a better pair of antennas (antennae? is it still Latin?) ... if I can find someplace that sells RP adapters to the public or a cheap deal on the antennas.

lkcl I've just got to wonder... people who bought your book at BN.com also bought The Old Farmer's Almanac 2001 and the U.S. Army Survival Manual. Hmmmm.

jschauma The numbers make sense if you consider the list of names rolling in the credits of a typical feature film. Hundreds of people. So each of them only wasted a few months of their lives.

Work: until I collect my thoughts I'll rant- I really want to know why programmers ranging from our summer intern to consultants don't grok regular expressions? Isn't it easier to describe text as a ordered collection of patterns than as line numbers and columns? Aren't we supposed to think about the data? *sigh*

Play: Las Vegas for a friend's bachelor party. Weird experience walking through these enormous theme parks for adults when I expected a more carnival of vice atmosphere. Pretty tame time and chipped in to buy him an afternoon of Formula-1 race school.
Linksys wireless base/router/switch while I was out of town- very cool. Wireless cards did not- cancelled them and ordered others from another vendor. Hopefully, this order will arrive soon. I'm looking forward to working from the couch.

Meta: Logged in today to find Green. I'm an apprentice now, thanks to hacker.

Play: On the advice of a fellow Perl Monger I ordered copies of Parkinson's Law and The Mythical Man Month. Turns out I am familiar with Parkinson's observation that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" (and how), now I'll read the book. I'll also finally read Brooks' work in its entirety. And someone in the office was throwing out McConnell's Rapid Development so I snagged that, too. I have at least a good month of reading aside from the 17 or so- yes, I've lost count and yes, a dozen are computer-related- periodicals I already receive.

Work: Almost got to work on a cool code project- a full text search engine for arbitrary files in a Unix directory tree- but idea was shot down during the biweekly meeting. We can buy it if and only if the people clamoring for it can establish a need. Still working with that big certificate authority, nice to see that they don't have their house in order. Feeling kind of numb with this post-merger organization and at loose ends with managing others.

Play: My motorcycle is repaired, registered, insured and ready for the road. I should pick it up this weekend. Back on the road for the first time in six years, so I'm looking into a Motorcycle Safety Foundation course to refresh my skills.

Returned Sunday from YAPC in Montreal. Driving takes ~7.5 hours including stops and thirty minutes of traffic at the GWB. Heard great presentations and put faces to names and names to nicks. Revitalized my desire to hack code in Perl and thinking about how I can sneak a little more of it into work... I wonder on the status of perljvm. Finally caught up with my email, nearly caught up with the missed work week, not anywhere near caught up on sleep. Surprised to find we have two consultants from a well-known certificate authority on-site to assist in integrating their product. Unsurprised that not much was done in preparation for their arrival.