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Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.. |
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April 15, 2001 - Updates at 0810,
Noon-ish
Good morning... It was a busy weekend, and now Marcia's come down with the creeping crud, most probably a relative of the bug that bit me last weekend. Long incubation time! She's off at work, still, but plans on coming home early.
A busy weekend had I. If you came here over the weekend, you saw on Saturday that I had remodelled my office space the day before. On Saturday itself I did some yardwork, then Greg and I struggled through putting in an IMAP server. Yesterday was errand running, dog bathing, bathroom cleaning, and writing an article for the new site that Greg and I are launching soon. Stay tuned, that event is creeping up on us quickly.
Also, we ate well. Late Saturday evening, I took several cloves of garlic, some fresh rosemary from the garden, some flaked red pepper, salt, cracked black pepper, lemon juice and a dash of Chardonnay. Minced and mixed, it became the perfect marinade paste for a butterflied Leg of Lamb that I've had sitting around waiting for a nice day. 24 hours in the refrigerator, then onto the barbeque until pinkly done (and a touch crusty outside, perfect). Absotively yummerlicious.
Now to jump into the Job Hunting mode, with some resume tuning courtesy of the excellent advice from several of you. Then a stroll through the want-ads, both online and newsprint. I have some "professional" job hunting materials to review, from a friend who recently concluded her successful job search, and a bit of networking to do. That should keep me off the streets, busy and out of trouble, don't you think?
Take care, see you soon.
Almost noon... - Well, I've been busy working with several people, generous to a fault with their time, on punching up my resume. While I won't "puff" it (that is, I won't lie), I was leaving far too much to the imagination. There are lots of skills implied when I say Linux server admin. Now they're spelled out. I've added <shudder> MSWord format to the list of ways that you can retrieve the document, at Clark Myer's request. Thanks a bunch to all of you. The button at left? Well, that's also a Clark suggestion, and my implementation. Geek for hire will be visible daily here until the right gig is found.
Now, with all the tuning done for the time being, it's time for a spot of lunch, then I'll get the updated resume posted to those job board accounts that I am maintaining. Following that, it's time to dig into the adverts. See y'all later.
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April 16, 2002 - Updates at 0730
Good morning. I've written Tuesday AM at the top of the page, and I shan't burden the words with a probably, although right now my connectivity is flat gone. It must have just died as I rolled out of bed and Marcia headed out the door, since she didn't have any trouble checking her email a bit earlier. Ah, well.... Hey, a two minute rest, and it's back. Woo Hoo.
For those of you that missed yesterday's second post, welcome to my minor self promotion blitz. You'll be seeing this button until I've got a new gig. I'd compare it to the fundraiser that a local accordian group runs each year to get to the national championships. They hold a Lady of Spain-a-thon. That is, they pick some public place and start playing that atrocious song, over and over and over again. Their stated goal is to stop, the moment they've got enough money to make the trip. As a matter of fact, should someone run down to Justin Herman Plaza and drop $5K in the hat, hell, we'll stop right now!
Oh, sorry, I do like telling that story -- it's so San Francisco, isn't it? But back to me. The button links to the new, lowfat, high-protein resume that is good due to my interpretation of the extensive feedback I've gotten from Clark Myers, Greg Lincoln and Bob Thompson. Thanks, guys!!! I've updated the information at the various job boards, and just to let you know, we're going country-wide. If there's an opening with a good firm and good people (and definitely with a lower housing cost than this freakin' market), we'd strongly consider making the move.
Therefore, your job is to evaluate the companies in your area, determine if they're a good fit for me, and I for them, then get my resume into the hands of a hiring manager (not an HR flack). I'd sure appreciate it. Of course, you can do nothing at all. You might like the look of a miniature Brian face next to glowing letters. Heh, suuuuuure!
Linux bits. Yesterday, in the background, I was rebuilding KDE3 to work with the new libpng library. This is on Garcia, my main workstation. As it got to and through the KDE Multimedia source base, at the end there was an error in bold red letters: ACCESS VIOLATION. After googling the problems a couple of different ways, I learned enough to determine that it was a sandbox problem. Now, apparently that means that... well, that I don't know enough. I guess that's what I'll choose to call a learning opportunity. But I popped onto irc.openprojects.net#gentoo, and asked the question. A kind soul told me to edit my /etc/make.globals file and comment out the FEATURES="sandbox" line, just for this build. That done, I typed the following line:
ebuild /usr/portage/kde-base/kdemultimedia/kdemultimedia-3.0.ebuild merge
Using the ebuild command picks up where the previously failed emerge command left off. Had I just restarted the emerge process, it would have wiped the source tree and started from scratch. That wouldn't have been fun. Once completed, I uncommented the sandbox line, and ran the rest of the KDE tree, entirely without hassles while I slept. This morning I have a bright shiny new KDE, just like the old KDE3, but with an improved underlying libpng library.
Whoof. I just lost track of time. Gotta get on with the day. See y'all later.
And whoops! I almost forgot to mention. Greg is finally back to posting again - you should pay attention, since he has had a lot to teach me, it should help you, too. Also, some of our new writing is going into the new project, now just a few days away from launch.
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April 17, 2002 - Updates at 0715
Good morning. I spent a less than stunning day going through the depressingly thin want-ads section yesterday, but that hasn't got my spirits down. The right gig will come along. My issue today is (as I wrote to Moshe yesterday) something ... else.
I went for a run yesterday. I am inspired by a couple of things. First, my doctor had recommended that I become less ... sedentary, as that would be good for my slight overabundance of cholesterol. Second, I saw a neat quote in an email or online someplace recently. Here I paraphrase, and without attribution, since Google failed me... Just running is bad enough. Running slowly would bore me to death. That gave me the giggles enough the other day to remind me that I've been meaning to pick up the running shoes again, as the weather improved. Well.
Indeed. So it was more of a bit of a jog, interspersed with some fast walking, over a piddley little four miles. Very little running at all was involved, so I don't get to invoke the bored to death symptom. I had fun watching small animals, snakes and slugs zoom past me - a few of them were angry about me blocking the sidewalk at my pace, and who can blame them. Heh, I'm so far out of shape that I've forgotten every bit of geometry I've ever learned.
Like everything else worthwhile, though, I'll keep at it. I'll be turning 41 this month, and ... I don't like birthdays. And I don't want to let the progression of years wear me down too much, too quickly. So I'll work at taking care of the temple a bit more, although I'm not the steadiest of characters on that front. We'll see how it goes.
Project X (Jonathan Hassell, Tue Apr 16 15:30:41 2002)
OK - I confess I'm intrigued. What's this new project?
Are you willing to share some pre-release comments?
Woo Hooo. We've generated ... BUZZZZZ
Patience, friends. Greg and I are slaving over hot PHP and cool ideas in our less than copious spare time, and when the thing is ready, then it'll be ready, and not a moment before.
Now to get on with my day. Y'all have a good'un, and I'll catch you back here later.
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April 18, 2002 - Updates at 0745
Lots to do, lots to do, and very little time... Good morning. Well, I exercised again yesterday, and while the time to complete was slightly less pathetic, the pain is with me today. I'll need to stretch through it, and work anyway.
I found a couple of potential gigs at one of the local community colleges, so I'll be working up the application for those today, as well as continuing the online search. I have some more resources to explore. Big multipage application, including a sensitivity awareness essay. Mmmmm. Heh, OK, I'm game. That and a cover letter should do the trick.
Last night, I spent a few hours working on CSS again, and finally gave up in disgust. This morning, of course, I saw the light, and I think I've got the stuff working right. All I need to see it properly is a browser that's working right. None of mine are now - Konqueror 3 doesn't like what I've written, and Mozilla (consequently Galeon, too) are both bitten by a library change in my upgraded Gentoo installation, so I've got that rebuilding now. We'll see later today on that.
I wore out my chair. 3 years, many posts, and one book killed the old one dead. Not broken, except for the foam where I perch, which had achieved the support characteristics of cotton candy, that is, none. Well, it was less than $100 then, so not a bad deal, I guess. The new chair is leather clad urethane foam, a nice supportive backrest with locking adjustments. I drooled over an Aeron for a while, then got this one.... Should be good.
Heading out into the day. See you later!
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April 19, 2002 - Updates at 0750
Good morning. I've been busy at it, having applied for two jobs already this morning, while the recruiters haven't even had their first cup of latté yet! However, this "feedback" came in from a headhunter, through a friend who showed him my resume...
Interesting resume...does he also use English on occasion? If he finds a market willing to use his talents I'd like to know what it is, just out of curiosity. I'd say he's an interesting case demonstrating that uniqueness seldom pays in today's world. or perhaps he has just missed the point that subtle unique-ness is MUCH different than oddity, especially if one is interested in working and eating. Such is the narrow view...Robin
I don't know whether to be offended or dismayed. My initial reaction was the former, I'm now leaning towards the latter. Sigh. What to do, what to do? Keep busy, that's what. I've got to stay on top of this, and waxing maudlin about one opinion (or several, but please do tell me if you think the resume sucks - I need to know!) isn't going to buy any bags of pretzels for me.
See you around.
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April 20, 2002 - Updates at 0745
Good morning. I received a great many emails in feedback from yesterday's post about the Headhunter in need of a wider view, and his/her take on my resume. Now admittedly, most of you are not in HR. However, the overwhelming sentiment is that my resume expresses myself and my skillset strongly. I also received some more good tips on tuning, and I may take advantage of those, especially making a *slightly* toned down objective statement for the initial submission to frontline HR oxymorons. Fear not if I did not reply to your email, there was really quite a lot of it, and all valued. Thank you very much.
Now, I can see that Greg (who's been posting regularly again) has been up and about for a while, no doubt redeveloping our whole project since I decided to sleep until the sun was high. I'd best go do my job, to be a thorn in his side while he does good work. See you later.
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April 21, 2002 - Updates at 0800
Good morning. Yesterday was devoted, nearly exclusively, to exhaustive testing of the WineX codebase from Transgaming. But before I talk ever so briefly about the testing, let's talk about the business model. Note that I am a subscriber of Transgaming.
Transgaming is a company which has built a subscription model around two distinct decisions regarding their code. Since Wine was previously licensed under an X11 type model, Transgaming has ship their binary versions with binary-only modules that contain proprietary information. This permits them to incorporate licensed technology from Installshield and SafeDisc. Additionally (though not without some heated conflict), it has allowed them to trickle their changes in the public Wine codebase down to WineHQ at a pace that allows Transgaming to get income from their subscriber base by being at the leading edge.
Transgaming subscribers help determine the direction of the company through periodic surveys regarding which technologies should get developer effort, and which games should have more attention given to them in order to get better support. This has brought DirectX 8 APIs to the Transgaming codebase, and extensive tweaks to make many games work, or work better.
However, all is not sweetness and light in the land of Wine. There's been a change of license to the primary Wine codebase, effective with the March 10, 2002 snapshot. Wine is now licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, as a result of a vote among the Wine developer/contributor community. See more about this here: http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-license/. Here's a choice quote, though (from Steve Langasek):
I'm afraid Transgaming gets no sympathy from me if a future Wine license prevents them from working on copy protection functionality. The DMCA is fundamentally broken; technological mechanisms to prevent copying are fundamentally broken because there can be no protection for fair use rights; and any company that uses such copy protection mechanisms should be thoroughly boycotted. While I don't condemn TransGaming for trying to support copy-protection mechanisms in Wine -- corporations are by definition amoral -- I also won't shed any tears if this particular business model falls by the wayside.
Mmmmm. OK. Licensing is a tarpit that will sink more than one developer, project and/or company into the morass, over time. In a world without want (say, the world of Star Trek, where money isn't needed anymore), then licensing becomes moot. Here, today, well, people want to build a business or two around opportunities and perceived opportunities... Ooooooh. I've got a rant that's ill-formulated coming on, and I don't want to inflict that on you, especially since it's likely to be very incoherent and confused. I'll put it in shape one day. Anyway, here is Gavriel State (Transgaming CEO and CTO) on the topic: http://www.transgaming.com/gavstates.php (a link that may go away or become non-pertinent someday).
Anyway, the software itself is nice. It lets me play test with Diablo II: Lord of Destruction for hours and hours and hours. The mailing lists note that for some reason the Alsa sound isn't as good as commercial OSS drivers. While I don't run commercial OSS, I can certainly vouch for the sentiment: My only grip from yesterday's play experiments is that the sound drops and cuts and blips quite a bit, and at one point went away entirely. I had to restart the game to bring it back. Other than that, the game software is great, with solid rendering, fast gameplay and a good time was had by all.
Now, what am I going to do today? Mmmmm... See ya later!
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
All Content Copyright © 1999-2002 Brian P. Bilbrey.