Author: cdwan

Installed a new mailbox / post in place of the hack job I did last month. This involved driving a rather large stake into the ground as an anchor, and mounting the post on top of said stake. I quickly discovered, with about 2.5 feet of stake remaining, that my trusty rubber mallet was just not going to cut it in terms of driving the stake. I needed more weight. More power.

I now own a 10lb sledgehammer. I decided to splurge and go for the 10lb rather than the 8lb, but I’ll admit to being intimidated by the 16lb. That thing looked like something you hand to a mountain troll and say “go kill the white wizard.”

It worked. Wham wham wham, stake went into the ground. Mailbox was mounted shortly thereafter. Irks me that it still wobbles, but it’s a lot better.

The christmas tree is denuded of ornaments, but we still wait for the ceremonial inspection in which both of us stare at it really hard and agree that we’ve removed all the ornaments. Really, either pair of eyes would be good enough, but neither of us is willing to take responsibility for throwing out the precious and treasured decorations with the dead tree.

Budget cleaner for your screen

Awe inspiring houses of cards. Where’s the one entitled “US Domestic and Foreign policy?”

Idiots, or geniuses? They filtered cheap vodka using a Brita water filter, and it got better.

Odd and anthropomorphic food

A truly odd piece of art. I like it.

perl -e 'sub b{my($w,$x,$v)=@_;while(($y=$w*$w)+($z=$x*$x)<4&&(++$v<9)){$x=2*$w*$x+$_[1];$w=$y-$z+$_[0];}return$v+0;}foreach(0..3119){print"\033[4".b(($_%78-40)/20,(int($_/78)-19)/10)."m ".(($_%78^77)?"":" \033[0m\n");}'

Once you see what it does, it's totally obvious how it works. Until then, it's more than a little obscure.

Sorry folks, unless "command line", and "Perl" are in your vocabulary, it'll take more than a little explaining before this will make any sense at all.

Okay, now we’ve got snow.

We had to postpone an install of my software this week because (thank God) I took the time to chat with the system admin for a while and learned that it was *far* from a vanilla cluster. Three kinds of hardware, two mechanisms for imaging nodes, three operating systems (Fedora, SuSe, and Solaris 8 for x86), nasty network, heavy, grouchy user load, no scheduled downtime to do the upgrade, etc. So, I balked and pushed back a couple of weeks to test various stuff. I hate wasting customer time and my reputation showing up and trying to fix code onsite.

So this week we’ve been busting ass, building clusters over and over on a variety of platforms in an attempt to build up to a simulated install on this nasty legacy nightmare. We’ve almost got it too. I do really like my company. I can’t imagine being able to pull off some of the crap we do with any other team.

There was an announcement that a company called “Six Apart” is buying the company that runs LiveJournal. The claim is that they’re totally friendly, they want to keep LJ the way it is, whatever. I still recommend grabbing an archive of your journal and a copy of the code. If it goes to hell, I’ll host an LJ-alike out of my basement for a while.

An interesting column at Joel on Software giving advice to the college-bound geek. It’s quite realistic in addressing a couple of things. Namely:

• The concept that your job needs to be personally fulfilling is a fairly new one, and it’s still limited to a select and lucky few. If you have a skill that you enjoy using, and you can make a good living doing that thing, count your blessings.
• Learn to communicate. In English, both written and oral. In any job, the people who can communicate end up in charge of things by dint of the fact that they define them to everyone else.
• Learn microeconomics. Sure, it’s not programming, but programmers who understand the business model are more valuable programmers.
• Learn C. Not C++. C. And I quote: I don’t care how much you know about continuations and closures and exception handling: if you can’t explain why while (*s++ = *t++); copies a string, or if that isn’t the most natural thing in the world to you, well, you’re programming based on superstition, as far as I’m concerned: a medical doctor who doesn’t know basic anatomy, passing out prescriptions based on what the pharma sales babe said would work.

So I’m building Linuxes (again), and our corporate connection to the internet is driving me NUTS. It’s the rate-limiting factor in these builds.

Yes, that’s correct: The machines I’m dealing with can build their OS in less time than it takes to download the source code for said OS.

This is sick and wrong. Plus, it’s not right.

Hate. Glare and slowly moving progress bar. Hate hate hate.

In better news, at least that conservative freak Gonzales took some heat from the Senate department of “biting the pillow and waiting for it to be over” before they caved and said “yes Bush, anything you want” along party lines. Bunglers all. Let me in there.

We went into town (Providence) and checked in to the Westin downtown for New Years. It was like a mini-vacation. Very cool to not have to drive home, and to be able to get up and be fed breakfast and not worry about making the bed.

Providence has a New Years Eve festival they call Bright Night. For $10 you get an arm band which provides admission to a couple of dozen art performances all over town. They also held a partial burn of WaterFire which wound up with fireworks at midnight. I remain convinced that Providence (like Saint Paul) is the correct size city. Small enough that the downtown really has one central area, and that people retain some sort of personal investment and ownership of the place.

The headline act for bright night was Toxic Audio. They rocked. They started out as a DisneyLand act, doing many sets per day, many days per week, and then they spent some time as an off-broadway act. They basically ooze energy and stage presence, and they put on a kick ass show. It’s not often that I experience a group who immediately get put into the same pantheon as Rockapella or The House Jacks. Toxic Audio did so. They kick ass. They covered Evanescence, and their psycho percussionist was pretty damn fast. Oh yeah, and then there was the backflip.

We also took in a mandolin ensemble and a clown show, before chowing down at Fire and Ice, which is a chain that does the mongolian style “make your own stir fry and we’ll grill it for you” thing. It was a great time. I even played a “game of skill” at one of the little carnival booths that were set up downtown, and won a large stuffed alligator for Jen. His name is “Lucky.”

This morning, post breakfast, we took advantage of the unseasonably warm weather by going to the zoo to visit the animals.

Me, this morning: “So this is 2005, huh?”
Jen: “At least it’s sunny.”

Dave Barry’s take on 2004

Looking back on 2004, we have to conclude that it could have been worse.

''HOW??'' you ask, spitting out your coffee...

http://jen.dwan.org/2004Christmas/

In which is shown, among other things, my new panda footrest:

Wow, this is approximately 500 times easier than it was the last time I tried it. Got a web server online too.