December 7, 2004 – 1:10 pm
My first day at the new job went pretty much as I expected. Filled with introductions, paperwork, mile-high system overviews, and the tedious configuration of a new workstation. The drive to/from the office was a little stressful, since it was raining. It took about an hour for the ~25 mile commute. I’m going to try to start leaving earlier and see if I can beat the rush.
I’ve got a desktop PC running Debian Linux, which I’m configuring to run as a test server. It will be handling a bunch of Apache/Perl stuff. I’m currently bringing in my laptop from home to act as a client, though I’m not really using it much yet. [...]
November 29, 2004 – 1:23 pm
Received in my email this morning:
Dougal,
Please find attached the formal offer. Sign a copy and bring it with you
on Dec 6th, but for now just indicate your acceptance via email and I’ll
start the paperwork rolling. Let me know if you have any questions.
I’ll be a Senior Software Engineer for a small-but-growing tech company that survived the dot-com bust. From what I know so far, my primary responsibility will be to refactor a largish web application written in perl. And, of course, “any other duties as deemed appropriate and necessary by management.”
Like most of my other employment in the past, the job lead came to me via my personal network. [...]
November 25, 2004 – 6:10 pm
I managed to get a little computer time today after all (everybody else is watching movies and/or in Turkey Coma).
I could write paragraphs and paragraphs about all the little things I’m thankful for. But really, there are only a few things that really matter. In particular there are two rather big things worth mentioning here now.
The first one is a new job. I’ve really enjoyed the contract work that I’ve been doing since moving to the Atlanta area. It’s been a good mix of system administration and web application development, which are two of my favorite things. [...]
Over on Simon’s site, I ran across a link to a 2001 article where Joel Spolsky takes us Back to Basics in an essay about how high-level programming languages can lead us down the path to poor performance.
Today I want to think about CPUs. A little bit of silicon moving bytes around. Pretend you are a beginning programmer. Tear away all that knowledge you’ve built up about programming, software, management, and get back to the lowest level Von Neumann fundamental stuff. [...]
December 4, 2003 – 12:45 pm
I have (and still do) worked on several projects hosted on Sourceforge. For code that I deal with a lot, or for projects where I’m a developer, I often check out the CVS version of a project, to stay up-to-date with the latest changes. And I often find that I’d like to get a concise list of changes that other developers have checked in recently. One should be able to use the cvs log command for this, like so:
cvs log -NS -d >20031201
This would show the revisions that have occurred since December 1, 2003, but would only show the information about files which have actually been modified in that time. [...]
December 3, 2003 – 9:14 am
If you use Perl for programming web services, you might be interested to know that the website for SOAP::Lite has been updated. Looks like it’s now a MovableType blog, which should hopefully mean that the developers intend to make more frequent updates.
October 4, 2003 – 10:41 am
UPDATE 2008-09-22: This code was superceded by my Text Filter Suite plugin. You can download the current version of the plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory.
Updated Oct 4. Fixed code to not convert sequences inside the regex example into smilies. Updated funfilters.zip file with a properly formatted README.
I finally got around to improving and cleaning up my blog filters. [...]
I’ve been working on a project at work dealing with PGP. Basically, we receive some sensitive information from a business partner, and it needs to be secure. They were considering setting up a rather expensive solution involving leased communication lines and virtual private networking. But I happened to mention that we could automate some of it with PGP, and in an unusual fit of common sense, they decided to let me have a go at it.
So, I got our Network Administrator to set up a new mailbox for the PGP ID, got our PGP keypair generated, got our business partner to give us a test file encrypted to our public key, and I was ready to begin the coding phase. [...]
The latest meme making the rounds is World of Ends, an essay written by Doc Searls and David Weinberger.
“All we need to do is pay attention to what the Internet really is. It’s not hard. The Net isn’t rocket science. It isn’t even 6th grade science fair, when you get right down to it. We can end the tragedy of Repetitive Mistake Syndrome in our lifetimes — and save a few trillion dollars’ worth of dumb decisions — if we can just remember one simple fact: the Net is a world of ends. [...]
By Dougal
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