Archives, eh
-
# Links for 2006-08-31
- Extensions for Web Developers – Spellbook – IT mage’s best friend ✴
-
# Some more whining
At the risk of again being told I am whining too much, I found out today that the lead developer here at Giga has resigned.
The main thrust of the interview process was me telling them that they are in a precarious position, if the lead developer should die suddenly that they are screwed.
Him leaving is only marginally better – from Giga’s perspective, I imagine it is infinitly better from his – than dying. So as you might expect, I am less than thrilled. At least I left GR in good shape.
-
# Links for 2006-08-29
- Shades of Gray – category higher-order-ruby ✴
-
# The Sydney Simpsons Recreation Society
Once, a long time ago, I thought I could quote The Simpsons effectively. For any given situation I could summon a relevant quote, even going so far as a whole scene if necessary, to illustrate whatever point I was trying to make or – if I was losing the argument – to render the point meaningless by reducing the argument to farce. On extreme ocassions I could even do an extremely poor impression of an itinerant Alberian peddler attempting the voice acting.
No more. I have been put in my place, which is increasingly looking like that of the other Gil. The designboy and the main developer here are Comic Book Guy in their level of fanboydom.
I heard one of them preemptively out-quote the other earlier today. Design Boy said “hehe, I knew what she was talking about” before Lead Developer could say “What you talkin’ ‘bout?” This of course led to the “Galaxy of Prawns” bit.
I have much to learn.
-
# Links for 2006-08-28
-
# Work, Relatives and Wi-Fi
On Tuesday I was feeling lost. On Wednesday I was thinking I had made a mistake. On Thursday I knew I had made a mistake. On Friday I was feeling better and had decided to just roll with it.
The real problem is that I no longer have control. At the last place I had complete autonomy over everything to do with my projects. I was a team of one and accountable only to the client.
Here I have no client. At this point I don’t really even have customers. The sitch, Kim, is that there are a half dozen sites running various vintages of the version 3 codebase. There is then the version 4 codebase which has been in development for something along the lines of a year – maybe eighteen months – but is being kind of forced upon the company by their sole developer. Owner of the company doesn’t see the need for it. I can credibly argue the point from both directions.
To mitigate the coffee situation, I may have Counterstrike installed, but it crashes my system after five minutes. I may have water views and all that, but Darling Harbour is essentially one huge multi-acre rippling mirror reflecting and focusing the light of the afternoon sun straight into my optical nerve. I may have administrator rights on this website but it is a triple-edged sword. Sure, if I like I can browse through people’s private galleries. However people whose private galleries you might want to browse through have no need for a site like adultmatchmaker.com.au. The googles, they do nothing!
My sister made it to the UK fine. She has had trouble settling down as well – she has better reason though, being thousands of kilometres away in the
armpit of the universeMother Country where she knows no-one. Global Roaming didn’t work as expected for her, so she was making stressed out reverse charge calls to Dad. Those crazy poms thought she was South African, although I suppose we can blame Hollywood for that since American actors can only do one accent, Incompetely Trained American Actor, and “Australians” always sound South African or Kiwi.On the other hand, I called her last night. My heart sank when I heard her voice turn all Essex-ey on a couple of words. She’s already turned to the Bland Side.
Meanwhile, the wireless network is networking. The two desktops connect fine, the internet connection is fine, bittorrent torrents, World of Warcraft connects – even if I am planning to close my account in the next couple of days – and so on and so forth. All is wirelessly good. Except for one small thing. The whole fucking point of getting the network was so I could connect to the network on my notebook without having to have cat 5 running across the room. The notebook – or rather Ubuntu – is not playing nice with the PCMCIA card, a D-Link DWL-G630. The windows drivers are installed using ndiswrapper and the ndiswrapper admin tool claims that the correct device for that driver is present. The only problem is that the system hangs up immediately after the login screen. It’s like it is 1998 again and linux’s relationship with hardware is shitting me to tears. Or perhaps it is just my relationship with hardware.
-
# Links for 2006-08-27
- Coding Horror: The Programmer’s Bill of Rights ✴
-
# Links for 2006-08-25
- Baby Rock Records – Transform your favorite rock music into baby music.
What I find most fascinating is how the baby music versions of Coldplay seem edgier than the originals ✴
- Baby Rock Records – Transform your favorite rock music into baby music.
-
# A solution to my DI-524 and DSL-302g issues
So that google might pick this up and offer aid to future generations: Optusnet, DI-524 wireless router, DSL-302g modem, internet access.
As I mentioned earlier, I had the wi-fi network working, but no net access. The router didn’t not appear to be talking to the modem correctly. I didn’t bother calling Optusnet tech support because they weren’t going to help anyway, seeing as how what I was doing was unsupported by them. I was routing around all their attempts to make me their bitch in perpetuity.
So I called D Link tech support and had a solution in a few minutes. My first mistake was trying to use PPPoE(Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet) for the WAN connection. I should have been using Dynamic IP and allowing the modem to handle the PPPoE connection. I then had to change the MTU setting from 1500 to 1400, apply the settngs and reboot the router. Connection was then achieved and I proceeded to start opening ports for Bittorrent &c.
I wonder how the fuck it was that I could have worked out this voodoo without being told. The Dynamic IP thing I could have had working, since the router may actually have auto-detected it anyway; it didn’t give any indication it had auto-detected and I changed it to PPPoE because the description said that is what most DSL connections require. But the MTU bit…wah?
-
# 0xINSTANTBAD
The old company didn’t make it 24 hours without me. I have already been over there this morning to fix a problem that could have been solved simply by actually using their eyes.
The new place has no espresso machine. Only coffee-flavoured dirt. This is…bad. I tried to drink the dirt yesterday and it was marginally less awful than drinking raw sewerage after the raw sewerage has been treated with some more raw sewerage. However, I realised I had used sugar, so I tried again this morning with twice as much dirt and no sugar and I managed to drink a cup without gagging.
Cino protect me from heretical notions such as taking up the drinking of tea.
