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Employment

I found your resume on Dice and believe based on your background you would be a good fit for the Jr. Technical Project Manager/XML Position on a government project with one of our Fortune 100 partners in Crystal City, VA. This position is critical and we are seeking to fill thisimmediately.

Heh, I’m pretty sure this is my job, or at least the part of it that I have been hoping to pawn off on some Jr. Technical PM/XML type.

My lackadaisical job hunt continues, with the following results so far:

  • Motorola was promising, but ultimately it was too tech supporty and not programmy enough
  • No reply from the tech shop on the same street as my apartment
  • There are a boatload of J2EE/SQL jobs. Too bad that is boring as hell.
  • Too many defense/gov’t jobs. Ick. No, I do not want to be sponsored to work for NSA.
  • There aren’t that many “work from home hacking on the kernel” jobs.
  • Stop calling me, recruiters. Please let me ignore you via email.


I’m still being super-picky, obviously. Unless you have a “work from home hacking on the kernel” opening…

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Book

Having seen it mentioned on Dave Jones’ blog (), I picked up The Soul of a New Machine and read it in 3 days. I think it pairs nicely with The Mythical Man Month as a cautionary tale for would-be computer nerds. Other than the amusing and all-too-true metaphor of ‘mushroom management,’ the interesting parts for me were the computer architecture digressions, with mostly reasonable layman’s explanations of i-cache, addresses, and the like. And the extensive discussion of Adventure — I had to break out TADS and try Colossal Cave myself. Doom was still better.

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Merged


$ git-log --author="Bob Copeland" v2.6.26..master  | git-shortlog

Bob Copeland (10):
ath5k: Fix loop variable initializations
ath5k: convert LED code to use mac80211 triggers
omfs: add filesystem documentation
omfs: define filesystem structures
omfs: add inode routines
omfs: add directory routines
omfs: add file routines
omfs: add bitmap routines
omfs: update kbuild to include OMFS
omfs: add MAINTAINERS entry

Woot! I had an 11th patch, for ath5k, but the maintainer fixed it independently. Very nice to finally get omfs in and not have to maintain that sucker out of tree.

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Pegged

I moved my main server from the old house to the apartment this weekend, which immediately presented the problem of too many wires and not enough legroom under the desk. Taking a cue from lifehacker.com, I’m jumping on the pegboard organizer bandwagon. The picture to the right is the underside of the desk, with a section of pegboard attached via hanger bolts and wing nuts. Right now, only a couple of power strips and a router are zip-tied to it, but I plan to add the Vonage router, the wireless router, various power bricks, and a few loops for cable runs. Pro tip: affix the pegboard with temporary screws while you add the hanger bolts, or else the bolts might be just crooked enough to drive you nuts, so to speak.

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Train haxored

I was wondering why the $7 trade-in limit for SmartTrip farecards went into effect, along with numerous signs imploring us to only buy cards from the vending machines. I thought maybe it was a MetroChek scam, but no, it was the result of scissors-and-tape hackers.

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Residences updated

My wife is officially a permanent US resident, yay!! Also, I am officially a Marylander. As I was sitting in the DMV the other day getting plates, they had this moronic LED ticker thing going. With earth-shattering up-to-the-minute news such as: “Did you know? The moon is the Earth’s only natural satellite. There is no life on the moon. The moon is the brightest object in the night sky — however it does not give off its own light. The moon reflects the sun’s light.”

Meanwhile, I’d like to take a second to thank the internets for finally updating neomail, and for fixing ‘In-Reply-To’, adding S/MIME, and being able to handle user-defined folders. Now I can realize my dream of replying to mailing list stuff (filtered by procmail into separate mboxes) from work without breaking the threading like a noob.

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New Banshee Plugin

Thanks to a few hours of hacking during the holiday weekend, I have a new version of the Karma plugin for Banshee (and a newer version of omfs too). I’m too lazy to write my own release notes so read someone else’s! Thanks, Ben.

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swing rant

Never ever write a Java gui application with the requirement that you check fields before letting the user tab off of them. What a nightmare! Your only two tools, without rewriting large parts of Swing yourself, are FocusListener and InputVerifier. FocusListener is great for the case when you have two such fields. Set up bad data in each field, then watch the focus traversal war as a focusLost() method reclaims the focus for one component, causing focusLost() in the other component to fire. Fun. Then you have InputVerifier, ostensibly designed for this very purpose. Ignoring the fact that buttons still fire without the verifier getting called, now you have the awesomeness of not knowing what the target component would be. Want to build a view with multiple fields that get validated as one? Good luck with that.

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Recommend fail

Amazon:

We recommend: Pony 8510BP Cabinet Claw (2-Pack)

by Pony
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0000224BN/ref=pe_ar_x1

List Price: $73.77
Price: $54.39
You Save: $19.38 (26%)

Recommended because you purchased or rated:
* Align-Rite DG-101 Drill Guide with 3/16-Inch Holes for 12-Inch Drawers and Doors


New business idea: a collaborative filtering engine that lets you, the user, customize the idiocy away. Actually, eTantrum’s music recommendation app (Linux version only) had sliders to control the weights of various things. Still an awesome idea.

Update: yeah, amazon lets you customize it too. I still want sliders though!