Running is therapy

I am taking off this week between jobs. I have some plans to get some things done around here that I otherwise have put off due to time constraints (both real and imagined).

I will be going to work for a smallish company in the Lancaster area. It should be a lot of fun. It seems like they have myriad things that need to be done and I should get a chance to get my hands dirty with all of them. Some coding, some Sys Admin stuffs, and some IT related things.

It sounds like big fun :)

There are already a bunch of projects lined up and I have been putting in a little time thinking about them and trying out various softwares that might meet our needs. I love stuff like that. Mostly because I like to complain to other geeks on IRC about how much I hate certain software and this gives me plenty of ammo :)

Not only that, but installing and trying to use software and crafting elegant solutions to problems trips my trigger. This job should be the best of both worlds really. I can still code, which I love and also get to be a Sys Admin, which I also love.

Can’t wait (almost makes me wish I was starting tomorrow…almost :)

I have a little webserver here at home for development purposes, and some proxying for other services I like to offer to myself (heh). However since it’s devel I don’t usually pay it much mind. However I was curious about an error I was getting and happened to check to the error_log. Crap, looks like that xml-rpc worm had been by…so I went over the logs, crafted a little shell to add new offenders to the list of blocked IP’s. Then I thought. Fooey on that.

I just set it up to Deny from ALL. Then I can IP’s as I see fit.

How much further along would comp-sci be if we didn’t have to waste resources on security because of idiots.

I have accepted an offer from another company, and I put my two weeks notice in (this will get it’s own post here shortly).

For the last two weeks I have been doing nothing at work. It has killed my concentration. I have no focus. In addition, I think I may have read everything there is to read online.

A while back I had blogged about the Yahoo RSS reader. Well they screwed it up with new “features”. And really the features add nothing of value, they just screw up the interface. They added the favicon from each page to the title bar, and a mouse over hovering box with a snippet of the story in the links.

*sigh* All that serves to do is, A.) Make the title bars look cluttered, and B.) Obscure the other links with the text box.

So they ruined it. Time to find another reader.

A few months ago I was considering for a short time purchasing monkeyonmonkey.org and making it a C# weblog. The joke being that monkeyonmonkey sounds somewhat uncouth, but that Mono means monkey in Spanish, and I of course would be covering that topic…so that would make me the monkey…get it. A Monkey talking about Monkey…ah forget it.

Just so you don’t think I have been neglecting the project I posted about a few weeks ago…I assure you I have not. I am still plugging away. A really enthusiastic time line puts me about two weeks from finishing Beta 1. This will include the all the code I think this software should have to be considered a feature complete 1.0 release. Now having said that, I would assume that it will also be very buggy. I am but one man. Hopefully at that time I can attract beta testers. I will post again in the coming weeks to see if any readers here would be interested in helping me test this thing. Since I haven’t told you what it does yet [0], I can assume that you would rather wait to see what it is before offering to test.

[0]This is called generating “buzz” :)

At the behest of mark, I was Listening to the recent perlcast – “Interview with Tom Limoncelli”, author of Time Management for System Administrators, there were some good tips…and some funny lines.

To get his time estimations for how long a project will take, he says

“I take how long I think something is going to take, and I multiply it by PI.”

I think it was tounge in cheek, but it was amusing nonetheless.

Another tip I found particularly good was this advice:

One of the best time management tips I can give is to just use perl.
…
Perl lets you automate system tasks like no other language before

Heh. Nice.

There was even a tip for Eric in the intereview…something about keeping your inbox clean :)

One thing I do know. Listening to too many 45 minute podcasts will probably not help you get things done.

I am a Netflix user. However over the last few days I have been seeing more and more stories about “throttling”. While I am bad with my returns, and often keep movies longer than is beneficial to me, a person who does not, should not be penalized.

The article talked about the official Netflix policy. So I looked it up. From the Terms of Use

In determining priority for shipping and inventory allocation, we give priority to those members who receive the fewest DVDs through our service.

That seems like throttling to me. Perhaps it is time to rethink the subscription there.

I hope he was as uncomfortable at that funeral as I am in his country.

This was more than I hoped for. Congrats Pittsburgh Steelers 2005. We are world champs!

When the season started I hoped for a good year but not this. This is wonderful.