Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Settling in

Dec072004

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. I was encouraged when I booted up the laptop and my manager jokingly said “Windows? Did I pick the wrong guy for this job?” Today, I brought in a Knoppix 3.7 boot CD, but I couldn’t get my wireless card to connect to the local network. I’ll try messing with that again later, or just fall back to a wired connection.

Recycling

Nov302004

Does anyone know if WMI in the Metro Atlanta area (specifically: Woodstock, Cherokee county) actually recycles anything? Anything at all? Because the last few times the recycling truck has come by our house, the guy has dumped the contents of our recycling bin into our trash can. And we get charged a $3/month fee for that privilege.

Needless to say, we are not happy. We make an effort to segregate our recyclables, only putting in the paper, cardboard, metal, and number 1 & 2 plastics that they supposedly accept, and now I find out that our efforts are a waste (no pun intended). Today, with all of the trash we generated from Thanksgiving, we had enough recyclables to fill up an entire trashcan. And instead of getting recycled like we think it should, it’s going to go into a landfill. I guess I’m going to have to call them tomorrow and cancel our recycling pickup service.

New Job

Nov292004

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. In this case, Eric Dodd, who I don’t really know very well, actually. We’re pretty sure that we probably met each other at some LUNA meetings several years ago. We think. But we do know that we both know Rod Montgomery. And Eric uses WordPress, and he’s a geek, so he’s my kind of people. And that whole job lead thing is a-okay in my book, so hurrah for Eric!

Netcraft: SCO “own all your code”

Nov292004

Netcraft: SCO “own all your code”

SCO’s web site now proudly proclaims “We own all your code” and “pay us all your money”.

On the one hand, I definitely don’t endorse attacks like this. They only serve to hurt the image of ethical programmers who support open source projects.

But on the other hand, that is funny as hell.

If you don’t know what all the hubub is about, you can find lots of links about the SCO/Linux debacle in Slashdot’s SCO topic.

Thanksgiving Tally

Nov292004
  • 4 days
  • 13 mouths to feed (9 adults, 4 kids)
  • 3 blocks of cheese
  • 2 boxes of crackers
  • 1 very large summer sausage
  • 1 bag of baby carrots
  • 1 bag of broccoli florets
  • 1 bag of cauliflower
  • 1 pint of ranch dip
  • 1 pint of shrimp dip
  • 1 pint of spinach dip
  • 4 turkeys cooked (2 baked, 2 smoked)
  • 2 potato & sausage dressing casseroles
  • 2 cans of cranberry sauce
  • 2 batches of gravy
  • 1 corn casserole
  • 1 broccoli casserole
  • 2 pans of dinner rolls
  • 1 pumpkin pie
  • 1 pecan pie
  • 1 Italian cream cake
  • 2 congealed salads (1 lime, 1 orange)
  • 2 gallons of milk
  • 2 post-Thanksgiving shopping trips
  • 8 cans of soda
  • 0 work done
  • 1 happy family

blo.gs: hook up a cloud

Nov282004

Extreme technical blogging geekout zone ahead!
blo.gs: hook up a cloud

the old cloud service that operated via rebroadcasting pings over HTTP is being phased out. it is no longer documented here, and will be shut down at the end of 2004. (also, the changes.xml files will also no longer be available after 2004.)

I’ve been using the blo.gs changes.xml file for a while to track recently updated sites in my blogroll. So now I have four choices: 1) implement this new cloud interface. 2) switch back to the old weblogs.com changes.xml file. 3) start generating my own changes.xml file on Ping-O-Matic. 4) learn to stop worrying and love the bomb.

Option four is easiest. But option three might be more fun. And the weblogs.com site generally seems overburdened anyhow. I can’t really see implementing this new cloud interface just for my blogroll, though. But it could be useful to hook Ping-O-Matic into the cloud. That might require some more thought, but there could be some good synergy.

Thankful

Nov252004

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. And the flexibility of working from home has been a great boon (until you find yourself working through the weekend to make up the hours you spent running errands). But I’ve continued to search for a full-time job with the usual benefits, lower health insurance costs, lower tax burden, paid holidays, etc. You start to miss those things when you don’t have them for a while. Anyhow, I interviewed for a position as a perl developer a couple of weeks ago, and I just got a message yesterday with an offer for the job. I’ll probably post more details after it’s properly official.

The other big thing I’m thankful for is… Well, it’s still in the works, so to speak.

Or maybe I should say it’s a little thing. Well, it’s little now. But growing.

Susan and I are having a baby 🙂

Okay, that’s enough computer time for today. I think I’ll go join my family again. They’re watching a Jimmy Neutron movie, and I’m missing all the burping. But more importantly, the pecan and pumpkin pies should almost be cool enough to eat now 😉

Gobble, gobble, gobble

Nov242004

I don’t know if I’ll get to fire up the computer tomorrow (or the next day, or the next day…), so I’ll take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving! We’re going to be baking one turkey and smoking another. Plus we’ll have some sausage/potato stuffing, corn casserole, brocolli casserole, green bean casserole, spinach dip, shrimp dip, pumpkin pie, and assorted other goodies, stretched out over three days (we’ve got relatives coming in on Friday, and another batch coming in on Saturday).

When I get a chance, I’ll make the obligatory “what I’m thankful for” posting. I’ve got a lot of good ones this year. 🙂

Another Ping-O-Matic Update

Nov222004

I’m back. Did you miss me?

I didn’t think so.

Anyhow, ever since Feedster announced their new ping interface earlier this month, we’ve been getting requests to add them to Ping-O-Matic. Matt contacted them to make sure that they wanted us to start bombarding them with our pings, and they said ‘okay’. So a short while ago, I flipped the switch.

We also got the word that A2B was ready for us to step them up, so they also now receive pings from the Ping-O-Matic RPC interface, as well as from the manual ping form.