Older blog entries for klevin (starting at number 141)

Been trying come up with an elegant, or, at least, not incredibly ugly, solution to the "problem" of how to take xmms playlist info and asynchronously push it out to a different system from within a xmms plugin. The initial solution (some months back) was to use xmms-infopipe and then run a bit of perl code every couple of minutes (via cron) that grabbed the xmms-infopipe output, munged it and then ssh'd it out to the remote location. Besides being ugly, that has the issue of running when there's no need to update, or, if the time interval is large enough, completely missing some sections of the playlist. I'd hoped to be able to find a "new song/track" notification in the xmms api but no such luck. That leaves a plugin that does polling.

Still trying to figure out why I'm getting large amounts of "popping" on cd's that I rip using my new system. If I turn around and rip them on the old system, no pops. It's either the cable running to the cd and dvd drives or the drives themselves. Don't think it's the drives, as I can rip from either drive and get the same result. Guess I'll have to buy a different SCSI-2 cable and see if that makes any difference.

dyork: Give xrefer a whirl. Used to use www.m-w.com, but got annoyed when they started changing their interfaces around. xref is much more than just a dictionary, though it does that pretty well too.

Went to an engagement party for a friend tonight. Not entirely sure as to the wisdom of the the whole deal (think both of them are too young, emotionally), but it's their lives. Thing is, where we all come from, once the vows are taken, you can't just walk away if things don't turn out so well. Forever is a long time when you're not happy.

Haven't done much in the way of coding lately. Life is a really odd thing. I have a personal theory that the universe can be described as a fractal, with various places in the fractal corresponding to specific places and times. Choose a point and start zooming in. No matter how closely you look, there's always something more that can be seen by looking even more closely. Infinite detail in infinite combination. Huh, that last bit sound suspiciously like some philosophy espoused by the Vulcans from Star Trek. Time for the padded cell.

It's all pretty much dead on my end. I think I need to get out of the house, as I'm finding that I've developed a tendancy to sleep till noon and still be exhausted by 8PM. No work yet. I'm thinking about taking some savings and going to Ireland with my brother (if he can scrounge up the money). Sceptre Ireland is running some rather interesting specials for travel through the end of March.

Noticed Alan Cox's comments about the mess that was I2O. I can truly sympathise. I spent far too much time sludging through the 400+ sheets of double-sided 8.5"x11" printout that made up the I2O specification. Fortunately, the company I worked for decided to ditch I2O (too much hassle, and the customers started developing nervous twitches when our sales people said "I2O"). Instead, we rolled our own company-wide wrapper for storage and network controllers. From the comments of several former co-workers who had been on the various I2O committees, I2O started out as something cool and then got bogged down in the committees. Design by committee rarely produces anything good, something that is all too easily forgotten.

dayta: You're not alone in this complaint. One of my former co-workers used to whine at me about this every month or so (I was the defacto "Linux/Free Software/Open Source" person in the office and was thus considered an appropriate target). It seems he had had occasion to take a few swipes at the Linux IPv4 stack and a few bits of network related userland code while working on his Master's project, and had a bad experience with the almost complete lack of documentation and the use of cryptic variable/function names.

Considering that one of the main points of free software is that it is "open to many eyes," it seems to be a little off that so many of the prime examples of free software make little if any effort into making the code more understandable.

I, myself, had more than one occasion to grumble about the crypticness of the network stack while at my previous job.

Went to day one of two days of an "outplacement services workshop" paid for by LSI. Not my usual cup of tea, but necessity makes for strange interests. First day consisted of talking about how everyone was feeling in regards to being RIF'd, doing "accomplishments" and strengths inventories, discussing a systematic method for networking (of the human to human variety, not computer<->computer) and some tips on what not to do w/ your resume. Interesting factoids: only 15% of the workforce gets jobs from responding to help wanted adds. The rest are found by talking to a friend of an associate's friend and so on. According to the fellow running the workshop, those stats change to 9%/91% for jobs in technical fields. This presents a difficulty for many in the workshop: either they haven't been around long enough to build much, if any, of a network (i.e. me and one of the other guys from my group that got axed) or they'd been w/ LSI (actually, NCR->ATT->Symbios->LSI, if you want to follow the trail of buyouts) for so long that most all of their contacts are stale. One of the guys was coming up on his 29th year and another hit 23 years the day he was laid off. Either way, it means a bit of extra work.

Tomorrow: more resume work.

So, for anyone who knows someone who could use a network server developer, Perl/CGI/DB person, Linux driver/network stack munger or just about anything else that involves C/C++, Perl or Korn work on a Unix/Linux OS, I can be reached at klevin@eskimo.com. Heck, I've got nothing against other languages (had briefer flings w/ Common LISP, Java, and CORBA via C bindings).

Anywho, time to hit the proverbial sidwalk and do some "networking."

21 Jan 2002 (updated 21 Jan 2002 at 20:13 UTC) »
chakie I too have a visceral aversion to the KKK. I believe the issue is that once you start silencing "extremist" groups, it becomes difficult to stop and the definition of what is "extremist" keeps geting wider and wider.

--

I've figured out what the "person" and "proj" tags do here on advogato, but still not sure on the "wiki" tag, so here's and experiment, wiki'ized "klevin": klevin.

Hmmm. Amusing, but I'm not sure of the utility. Perhaps that's because there's no entry for "klevin". I may have to remedy that.

Not much activity here. Mostly just trying not to stress too much. The job search is produced sparse results, sent my resume in on two jobs (one a telecomuting job, the other, a job located in Seattle). I have comitments through August that are most easily met here in Wichita, so I'm trying to find a job that will allow me to telecomute, or, if located in Wichita, is not a permanent job, as I could not, in good conscience, accept a "permanent" job when I have every intention of moving after August. If I can't find either a temp job in Wichita or a telecomuting job, then I'll have to move, and Seattle was my intended destination anyways, so . . .

When I can consentrate, I've been looking at the code for OpenSSH's sftp program. I don't think it will be much work to extended it, but I'm not too sure of the best method. Either I take the existing code and meld additional functionality on, or I use it as a reference, but write my own client from scratch. The advantage of option one is that it would be less work (in theory), but it means my code would be under the BSD license (as I understand these things). Option two, more work, but I can place the code under the GPL. I don't have anything against the BSD style licenses, per se. However, I'm more familiar with the GPL.

16 Jan 2002 (updated 17 Jan 2002 at 00:09 UTC) »

Well, the press releases have been out for a while, so I can say it. Bloody massive layoffs going down today. Management's got their heads in anatomically impossible places. They appear to being taking senior developers. Probably the "higher saleries first" idea. Thing is, once you factor in benefits, the salary delta isn't that big. A good friend and one of two people who've worked here that I consider a mentor just took the long walk to the conference room. I don't know if I'm going to cry, vomit or both. Only thing on my playlist today is Bad Religion. A person w/ way more experience, a wife and kids is getting the axe instead of me, who's young, single, no kids, and quite frankly doesn't know squat. Life bloody well sucks.

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Ok, how about "in addition to" as opposed to "instead of." And a repeat of the last line above.

Time to turn my resume on.

Catching up on email and various stuff that I can't do from home (the fact that LSI uses Cisco's VPN 3000 setup, which doesn't have a linux client, really puts a crimp in what I can do over a VPN connection). All sorts of rumors floating around here at work. Consequently, not much work is getting done. Lots of hallway conversations, though.

Trying to get a driver source package and a hbaapi library binary package put together for several "SAN Management" companies that want to test their apps with our boards under Linux. Pam says she's going to put out another driver package tomorrow for her test people, so I'll wait for that instead of cranking my own out.

Still working from home. At least I can have good coffee w/o coughing up $3+ for a mocha or latte from the caffe in the Barnes and Noble near work. The coffee at work, is, well, bad. The only reason to drink it is if you're in dire need of caffine.

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