Archive of March 2006

Saturday, March 18, 2006

Project & Work Status Report

Wondering how things are going on your favorite PolarLava project?  Yeah, me too.

MyClient is on hiatus at this time.  I know of no issues with it at this time so I don't have a need to do anything with it at this time.  The next thing on deck for this project will likely be the addition of PostgreSQL support.  That will require me to clone my current MySQL DB class.  At the time I do that I will likely evaluate the situation and extract things out further because there will be some parts that they both share.  Thus at that point there will be a base class and two inherited DB specific classes.  This will need to be done as the first step towards PolarBlog supporting PostgreSQL.  I'd like to think this will create some "buzz" as I don't know of any DB tools that support multiple simultaneous connections to different types of databases.

PolarBlog is in slow mode.  I've written about 95% of the RBL class.  I need to complete the keyword blocking and then integrate it.  That's going to take a reasonable amount of work to complete before the next release is ready.  I've got some odds and ends to clean up also which always take longer than expected.  I've been seeing an increase in spam on this blog and personally I'm really looking forward to getting this working here.

The newest project here, Yapter is in ultra-slow mode.  Again I know of no problems with it at this time.  I have gone through and did some code cleanup, but it has not been commited.  I'd also like to changed the error reporting to something more manageable, but that's not a burning issue.

The major downside to my project work is that in the past several weeks my job has eaten my life.  We continue to go through what we've termed "catastrophic success".  In short things are going so well it's hard to keep up!  This is really good news, but at the moment my department is woefully understaffed.  As such this has led to a lot of long hours of late.  The situation is currently being addressed and my role will be evolving as I will be taking on the management of additional staff.  I absolutely love my job, but I look forward to things settling down a bit.  I have lots of things I want or need to do that are currently on hold until things stabilize.

So as you've probably already figured out, this means I want work on my projects, but at this time I have very, very little time to do so.  I wish I had more time, but having a good stable job is something that I'm very happy to have once again.  Thus at this time I can't put any sort of timelines on when you will see anything new released from any of my projects.  Sorry.
March 18, 2006 @ 08:55 am | Category:
Sunday, March 12, 2006

The Port Deal Gone Wrong

I've been busy and unable to comment on this situation, but my friend Alan has a very good discussion going on regarding this recent issue.  If you read through this you should be able to easily derive my point on the matter.  In short, we're setting an unfair double standard.  You can't have it both ways America.
March 12, 2006 @ 09:29 am | Category:
Thursday, March 09, 2006

WRT54G & Adventures in wireless

A couple of weeks ago I (finally) received my laptop from work (Dell Latitude D610) after waiting nearly six months.  My company pretty much rolls around the clock so often things transpire during off hours.  I generally work fairly normal business hours, but a lot of the people I work with do not.  Having the laptop allows me to check-in from home in the evening with very little effort and thus avoiding getting blindsided in the morning.  It also allows me a lot of flexibility when working from home or wherever.  That is, once I got a wireless connection working for it…

I've had reliable DSL service since that finally was resolved.  But that was one computer connected straight to the DSL modem (Westell 6100).  Thus the first thing was acquiring a wireless router.  In an amazing stroke of luck, one of my employees was looking to unload a LinkSys WRT54G…for $20.  A great deal as most of the used ones I saw were selling for at least $40.

Cool, lets hook it up.  Wham, bam, uh, not quite ma'am.  Got my desktop system connected, and I could get to the configuration interface, but no internet access.  Thus begins a number of rounds of connecting and disconnecting the router so I could access the internets for some help.  After a bit of searching I learned something important about my DSL connection that I didn't know…it's running PPPoE and the modem is also a router.  This means that I needed to run it in bridge mode and let the WRT handle all of the connection details.  Which then meant I had to find out how to do that.  Thus more searching, more forum reading and I finally found a couple of answer that were similar and promising.  Using the tried and true trial and error method I finally got the Westell configured, the WRT connected and internet access working.  Actually I should say I got it mostly working.  Read more…
March 9, 2006 @ 01:18 pm | Category:
Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Fuzzy White Lobster

Via this Boing Boing article…Apparently some scientists have discovered a furry lobster in the South Pacific.  It's so different from other crustaceans that they've given it its own family and genus. It is white and "about the size of a salad plate".

Neat stuff, but they failed to answer the most important question…what does it taste like?  Oh, and how long before we can start over fishing it!  ;)
March 8, 2006 @ 08:53 am | Category: