Aaaaaargh!

Today began quietly enough: the first noteworthy thing that happened was a visit from the upstairs neighbours, telling us that their grand morning presentation had finished and we were all welcome to come and help them finish off the food. Sane enough.

But then things got steadily more annoying…
We have a customer now who handles “Dangerous Goods”, e.g. chemicals which will spontaneously detonate when stored in the same warehouse. And I mean detonate in the vaporise-a-city-block sense.
Naturally, the solution to these dangerous goods is to wrap them up in earth-girdling quantities of red tape. Hence, in an act of sawnoff-shotgun delegation, I was the proud recipient of a task today which lead to me discovering the joys of the Australian Government Information Management Office. This lovely site gives whole old meaning to the word ‘portal’: it is a gateway into hell. You have been warned.
Following this, among a welter of other smaller crises, I discovered that the electronic locking system I have poured so much blood, sweat and tears into over the past month had been sabotaged! One of crazy old bats from finance had decided that the solution to a door lock she didn’t (refused to) understand was to add another one. This resulted in a door on which neither lock worked, and a slightly disgruntled landlady, who felt that her tennants should know better than to have internal power struggles. It took me two hours to repair the door from where that damn technician had left it.
Now I am sitting here at 5:45 and wondering why I bother. Is it just me, or does this job really suck? Did I make it suck? Can I do better? … I can answer that last question.

My new (old) hope for roaming bloggitry is now the idea of reprocessing email to stuff it into the blog.

I spent most of this last weekend revisiting this idea which I tackled rather crudely the first time around. The BlogBeast is now a project in CVS: I have spent this morning teaching myself CVS and checking in all the little scripty bits. I have cut off the ‘code’ link from my homepage because it was just looking too hard to vet it all for NDA-leakages and properly gplify it all. Maybe later.

The BlogBeast is still not quite finished: the parser is working fine, but I still need it to make thumbnails properly and submit stuff into the tiki.

Fun fun fun.

(delayed post from 8/8/05)

I have temporarily abandoned the ideal of remote/roaming text/photoblogging. Maybe the technology just isnt there yet, or maybe I need to get shot of three first, but it’s definitely just a bit too hard still.
Since I’m not a brilliant journalist or an avidly followed game developer or anything, I tend to think that such immediacy and convenience is just a frippery anyway. For now, writing myself dated notes in my palm will suffice. I can copy them to the blog when I get to work.
…not that I’m going to have time this morning: Giant (the critical systems server) has shat itself again, and some kind of mysterious new worm involving rtvscan.exe is doing the rounds all over the place. Worm? Licensing scam gone mad? Who knows? Unfortunately, I am expected to know. 🙁

At present, I’m attempting to blog from my phone. No joy so far, but this is a post from w.bloggar to debug a few things. Hopefully this will tell me what’s wrong with the tiki’s xmlrpc stuff…

What an excellent title for a bad art-house horror flick!

Actually this is entirely documentary: A couple of weeks ago Erin and I stayed the night at Erin’s Mum’s place in Ballarat. In the morning we discovered the Mutant Lemons!

Aparrently there is a virus or something afoot in Ballarat which makes them grow like this, and it’s happening all over town. We thought about bringing it back home to show people, but eventually decided that the responsible thing to do was probably to leave the offending lemon with its potential virii in Ballarat where we found it.

Feel free to comment if you know anything else about this.

I have been called a ‘hardware slut’ on more than one occasion. I can’t really deny it. Today finds me drooling over a new case which is currently hanging in that murky space between official release and actually hitting the shelves, in which it is mysteriously ‘out of stock’ in all stores. It looks like this:

and it’s called the Asus Vento 3600. I swear the door on the front was designed by someone who has read-access to my dreams…

We wants one, precious.

This seems like a suitable topic to follow yesterdays post:

I just wrote a backup script to periodically tar up the entire linuxish contents of my laptop and put them on the server.

The hard part (in terms of time consumed) was finding a suitable algorithm for scheduling it. I don’t want it to run in the middle of the night, because I’m concerned that it will be frantically pumping large slabs of data into the server at the same time that the server is trying to back itself up, severely impacting backup performance.

I don’t really want it to run during the day (although I am running one right now) because it will slow things down and chew resources which I might otherwise be using for my own ends.

In the end, I decided that the optimal scheduling algorithm was to run it when I feel like it. 🙂 It means that I forfeit reliable regular backups, but all the other schemes I examined would have been so careful about not being inconvenient that they could hardly have been called ‘reliable’ anyway.

Along with its trusty swiss-army-chainsaw PERL!

BWA-ha-ha-haaa!

I’m not sure if these are the chortlings of hysteria or victory: I eventually resorted to a perl script with scrapes the wiki page every fifteen minutes and munges it into my static homepage. The carnage is quite astonishing, but it seems to work!

Work this week is somewhat tense since Andrew and Steve left, but mercifully quiet in other ways. everyone seems to be adapting to the one-big-office environment with a little time. Even Beck!

I should *really* go home now. Even if it’s not my night to cook, I am expected to actually be there to eat at some point.

*marches off chortling inanely*

Today is, on the whole, going better than yesterday. The debris really is finally settling, and I can focus on cleaning up and moving on.
I have felt like maybe I am having a better day than has marked the norm for the past few weeks: this is supported by the fact that I beat Erin’s high-score on Bejeweledthis morning.
The noise in here is much loader than yesterday. So many people have come back from overseas assignments or leave, and arguments are afoot everywhere. I would go mad, but I seem not to be.
Generally, not the most newsworthy of days.

The office-move is now theoretically ‘complete’. It is to laugh…

The phones are at least mostly functiuonal now. I am expecting the PABX-programming person to arrive at about the same time that I want to leave. :-/
Vast masses of furniture which no-one will accept responsibility for lie heaped in the old DCI area which our lease says we vacated on friday and someone else moved into today… D’oh.

…and I still crave sleep. Erin was awake half the night with nightmares. This is not what kept me awake, but sleep largely eluded me nonetheless. Our whole office seems to be at about a million degrees too for some reason… Urgh. Maybe I’m just sick.