Older blog entries for deirdre (starting at number 1)

Whee, fun with sendmail today -- someone thought it would be *amusing* to run a production server without reverse DNS. <grr> Sendmail antispam rules don't like that.

Naturally, we hadn't tested that contingency, so rollout (which would otherwise have finished around 2 am) didn't occur until just now.

Phew. It's good to have a project finished and launched and live. Ok, not live. Wait, it's live again. Can I scream now? At least it's not my code that's buggy. :P

Tonight we're headed to the city for Duncan's[1] birthday, so I'll get to see some people I haven't seen for a while.

[1] Works in the Linuxcare labs [2]

[2] When I arrived, I realized it was Duncan's son Duncan who was having the birthday, not the Duncan who works at Linuxcare. Rick had never specified. I had been last year but had remembered it being later in the year.

This shop isn't moving from Linux to NT yet, but there's a lot of pre-deployment cross-platform voodoo going on and I'm winding up being the sysadmin again. Can't anyone else secure a Linux box around here? Ah well, at least I'll do it right, not like the dweeb who left NFS, IMAP, etc. open on a production server. ::cough::

I also didn't have a weekend. To those of you who did: :P We're stuck in pre-launch hell, where we've been for a solid week, if not longer. I can't remember. It's been since around the time Guido came to talk to BayPIGgies, but I have no idea how long ago that was. The 15th?

And no one tested my big contribution of code because someone else screwed up and deployed the NT version of the database library bindings on the Linux box. Way to go! ::cough::

I need to get out of this microcosmic level I've been working in lately. Not the sysadmin stuff (that's detail work I enjoy), but the rest of it.

Thus, Gtk+ MacOS has gotten *zero* work done lately. It's something of a strange project as I'm not really sure how to go about testing it. The standard library interface it expects doesn't really work the same. I think, for the moment, I'm going to assume static libraries just to make the damn thing easier. I still have to port a LOT of stuff though. I'm still not convinced it's even a possible project -- all the other Gtk+ ports have been to platforms where there was at least a command line and a tool chain.

One piece of code I was severely impressed with was SmartMoney's market map, which they now have a windows version of (not just the web stuff, but a product that does even more and looks cool). Per them, they are indeed planning on a Linux version. While I don't predict it'll be open source, the concept of getting finance apps for Linux is very cool. I also really like the idea of taking this information, making a 3d representation of it and putting it into two dimensions.

My dad and I have been working on ideas for portfolio management software. If you have anything other than the simplest thing, pretty much everything out there sucks. Even Schwab's online calculations are just wrong. None of them handle the peculiar nature of options well either.

And I have a test tonight in corporate finance and I haven't cracked the book in a week. I've been doing really well so far and don't want to blow it, but because of the release frenzy, I didn't make it last week.

I also missed the deadlines, being too busy, to submit exam forms for my MBA (Organisational Behaviour and Finance), so will have to wait a few extra months, which isn't a problem really. It's just annoying.

_Deirdre