Sinzui

I haven't put code to disk in a month. My job and hardware troubles have consumed all my spare time.

Working for Direct Holdings Worldwide (the company that purchased Time Life) sucks. The company is really behind Internet marketing and e-commerce, but I've spent a year disabling our systems per the last round of company directives. Now I'm swamped with prioritized requests to restore or create new features for the site.

I bought my daughter, Indy, an iBook for her birthday. I'm sure I was very irresponsible giving a five-year-old a notebook computer, but she really enjoys it. Every morning a 8 AM I wake up to a twisted combination of Queen, Wiggles, Travis, and Sesame Street bellowing from her iTunes collection. I put an Aircard in, but I doesn't talk TCP to the Linksys or DLink WAPs I have. I've spent days working on the problem; the iBook sees the network and had a good signal, but I cannot make a route. I've given up. She's using a wireless bridge to get to the Internet.

I added a second drive to my wife's win98 computer a few years ago. I set the machine up so all her data was on that drive, thinking I was protecting all that was important. I even managed to move her Outlook mail to data drive. That drive failed. The drive cannot read–a hardware failure, possibly because a virus arrived in her inbox and it fried the disc thinking it was the usual C: drive. She' missing about 12 months of photos. I don't see how I can get them back without replacing the hardware in the drive.

Coincidentally, or maybe not, I did some stupid things to my own disk. The /etc dir lots big chunks, and other dirs too. There were too many pieces in /lost+found to restore. So I decided to rebuild the whole disk and finally upgrade to Fedora. This is the third major rebuild in 3 years. the first two times were from bad drives in my Dell Latitude. My Toshiba drive was good so I decided I should take the crisis as a clue-by-four and partition my hard drive right. I've never understood why Redhat/Fedora defaults to a single partition. I

I've rebuilt GNOME with jhbuild with no trouble. Hurray! All GNOME was a pain to rebuild in January. I'm pleased to see the Medusa truly works on a virgin system. It indexed my 3G of data in a scant 15 minutes. All is where it was 30 days ago. I never like February anyway. I just pretend it didn't happen and carry on with a metadata daemon to replace Medusa's database.

The topics doesn't come up much, but it has so I must make a few comments. Now strictly, speaking my idea of a sandwich is turkey, lettuce, onions, on a real baguette. Most of my variations involve cheese, peppers, and another meat. Occasionally I make an exception for an Italian style sandwich on focaccia or ciabatta, a gyro, a muffuletta, and once a while a cheeseburgers.

1. chipotle mayonnaise
2. horseradish sauce
3. tzatziki sauce
4. hummus
5. tapenade
6. remoulade Sauce
7. romesco Sauce
8. Italian vinaigrette

I've been very busy at work these past few weeks and I could not make the time to write any code. The closest thing to hacking I've done is cooking–chop chop.

1. A dynamite lemon grass chicken and summer rolls
2. an acceptable chicken korma, spinach paneer, and chholar dal.
3. A damn fine chili that my wife insisted on ruining by adding extra tomatoes.
4. Good spicy tuna rolls, mmm wasabi
5. OK Chicken fajitas. They really need a grill
6. a Fab red curry chicken.
7. A zippy Sichuan style chicken.

I cannot get enough spicy food this month. The hectic pace at work looks to be near its end. Soon I'll be putting code to disk instead of food to plates.

By prized burr coffee grind broke this morning. No coffee, no wakey. Søren Sandmann fixed GtkToolbar yesterday so I may toss the GNOME 2.4 build I've been keeping to run a few apps that don't like unstable.

I just removed my permalink to test if that is what Planet GNOME is choking on.

Five Star Stories 15 and 16 just came in the mail. This is the greatest comic/manga ever.

I knew Mark Finlay through his emails. He was smart, insightful, and helpful. Most of all, he understood how people use computers, and he conveyed that knowledge to the GNOME community to make a great desktop. In every conversation that had an interface or usability issue, I waited to read Mark's opinions. I was surprised to learned he started at Trinity this fall, and was 'studying' computer science and learning Java. In GNOME's meritocracy, he had quickly risen to the top because he had talent way beyond his youth.

Maybe Mark excelled because he knew he had little time to leave his mark on this world. He has achieve some immortality, because his emails are archived, and his ideas are in GNOME. We had such great expectations from him.

I'll miss you Mark.

This week sucked, rotted, bl owed. What this town needs is a Chinese or Indian restaurant that I could eat my sorrows away in.
Monday Time Life, my employer, was purchased. In 60 days I'll know if I have a job. In the mean time I plan to switch to Lillian Vernon's Web architecture since there is clearly better.
Tuesday My good friend Chris, and former boss, was laid off. Anyone who knows of a company that needs a great CTO/Director of Operations/VP of E-commerce, please contact me.
Wednesday I man-handled the Web catalog data into shape when we discovered that the TV unit entered invalid data minutes before going live. Rolled out the new site in the absence of a sysadmin, only to discover the perms were bad in production.
Thursday I came in to discover the US and international sites had bad certs, The international machine was dead, the build and dev database machine was also dead.
Friday TL Staff start staking claims on my cube, my daughter stole my wallet.

I'm all for winter solstice celebrations and joy to the world. After a few days of the sappy music I, was terribly depressed. I put on some Interpol, Placebo, and Bork to pull me back to the center. It felt good, and it broke Scotland's stranglehold on my mp3 player.

My home and work environments are a mess with GNOME 2.5 unstable. I need to use Eclipse for my work life, but it bombs when it tries to use the GTK 2.3 ToolBar. At home I used jhbuild to build G 2.4. The firewalls are closed at work, so I used gargnome to build G 2.4. So I've got a full G 2.4 installation on both machines to run one app. That's bogus. I like Eclipse's editing, versioning, compiling, debugging, and unit testing features for Java, but found its C features are inadequate.

I decided to make an effort to use Eclipse's CDT to develop GNOME software to justify a G 2.4 installation. For starters, CDT doesn't play with autotools; that is the single greatest flaw the IDE has. The CDT project is looking to add better Makefile handling in the future, but are not willing to commit to autotools. I'm surprised Redhat is promoting a tool that cannot manage the make tools used my most of the OSS software the Redhat uses. I added a couple sh scripts and hooked them up as external tools to configure the Makefiles. CDT Make itself is pretty dumb, so I needed a small sh script to compile the file I'm editing. Code assist (code completion) is limited to the symbols in the current project. I created a script that mines the common GNOME headers and updates Eclipse's code template feature to provide some code completion for types and functions that I commonly use hacking Medusa. The large number of templates really slow the editor down so ill need to refine that.

I've been hacking on Medusa for a week and without any problems. I really like using Eclipse's outline, version control, and debugging features. I guess the next thing I need to do is hook up gnome-doc to make API docs.

Anne and I took a four day weekend to the Blue Ridge mountains to celebrate our 10 year anniversary. We stayed at my parent's summer house which they vacated a few weeks ago. The house was recently fixed up, and it is a great escape from the troubles of the world. We needed a break from our kids and work.

Time Life, my clumsy employer, single handedly ruin this get-away. One of the backend systems failed, and because Time Life laid-off most the e-commerce team and all of my backup. No one at all Time Life had the skills (Enterprise Java + Unix) or wits to fix it. I spent three days working on it. Anne was not pleased. I was very stressed out. Time Life was an idiot last year for expecting every employee to double their efficiency. They are idiots this year for lowering goals, but halving the staff to accomplish them. Last year and this year have the same set of liabilities, the company is too dependent upon specific people. The company cannot succeed because no one person is permitted to fail in the plan.

I had decided some months ago that I would leave the company when it moves from Alexandria VA to Tyson's Corner VA. Now, with family gatherings fast approaching, I've decide to resign in the next few weeks. I have a few job opportunities already lined up, just for such an crisis. None would be ready for me in the next two weeks. I have a few weeks vacation saved up, so I may just resign, take some time to spend with my family, select the job I want.