Work:
Frustration. Demotivation. Ennui. I guess it's business as usual. Weeks of HTML, JavaScript, kludgy Java Servlets, and the hangover of years-old decisions. Wondering if I'm cut out to be a programmer.

My build system has been distributed to the development teams and comments are trickling back. I'm averaging two calls a day regarding it. So far, every problem is the result of not following all four (4) steps of the installation instructions, using a buggy JVM (pre-1.1.7B, that was released in 1997/98 !!!), or having a "unique" local directory hierarchy and not adapting the paths held in the external properties file. RTFM.

Advocacy:
Completed teaching a section of Intro. to Unix using Linux as the OS. Despite my enthusiasm and that of much of the class, the answer to the unasked question, "How does one fail a continuing education course?" is, to my disappointment, "Don't show up and don't turn in any work." Ended up failing about two-thirds of the 26 adult students because they neglected to hand in three or more of the five assignments which constituted 50% of the grade. Were they expecting a visit from the homework fairy? Teaching another section and hopefully it will go better.

Play:
Digging into the Camel, a few RFCs, the Stevens book and an example posted to Usenet, I put together a nice ssl-tunnel in Perl which supports Basic and Digest (MD5) authentication to the proxy. Works under Win32 and Unix and under 'use strict'. Played around with Socket programming under Python for comparison and will see how this looks as classes and methods. Python's urllib2 module might make it trivial. Also scribbled an introductory article on bypassing firewalls via a HTTP proxy since it's fresh in my mind.

Organizing my ideas/notes for an article on build automation using Ant, Jython and (ack!) PVCS. While I was at it, I put up my Egoless Admin article on how to handle "difficult" user situations.

For reasons I don't even know, I'm looking at Smalltalk. Downloaded Squeak. Started experimenting and reading.