Advogato blog for pgmillard

6 Apr 2000

Thu, 6 Apr 2000 23:04:04 GMT

Settling into the new office space just fine. Got a KVM switch today so I can hook up my Linux box and my NTWS to a single monitor,keyboard,mouse, but my CDW rep sent me the wrong cables. DOH! I'll have to wait until tomm.

Jabber Stuff
Been tweaking Winjab, finding lots of bugs and e-t found another doosey (siq) today with regard to my auto-docking chat windows. Apparently the tabs names have a mind of their own and apparently pull names from previous windows.

JabberIM is really shaping up and is moving to private Beta hopefully Monday. Things look pretty solid so far, just tweaking minor bugs and verbage, etc. Stuff seems to work quite well. Paired with the 0.9 release version of JServer, the architecture is really starting to rock. The ICQ and AIM transports still appear to be a little buggy, but overall are definitely working.

4 Apr 2000

Tue, 4 Apr 2000 21:54:32 GMT

WOOP - I'm now typing from my new area in our office. Totally revamped the entire layout.. I now have more privacy and A LOT more working space. My NTWS came back to life fine, as did my Linux server - ROCK!

2 Apr 2000

Sun, 2 Apr 2000 17:28:47 GMT

Bouldering news
I am so psyched.. I finally got out Bouldering yesterday. Saw lots of cool folks down there - a group came all the way from Ithaca (3 hours) to boulder, and there was another big pose' from the Toronto area, then later we saw a group of friends from the "crew" here in Buffalo. Good climbing, my back feels pretty good (still not close to 100% though :(), and I'm stoked for the season to really get going. Pants and short-sleeves for most of the day.. it doesn't get any better.

Jabber Stuff
I've been doing battle with the RAS/DUN stuff in JabberIM so that it can automatically detect when someone's dialup connects to the net, so it can auto-connect to the Jabber server. Cool concept, but an implementation nightmare. It now seems to sense connections fine, but I'm getting Access Violations when the RAS connection is dropped. Some OLE Exception. It makes it doubly hard to debug since I don't have a modem in my development box :(

WinJab is getting more stable the more I tweak. Still lots of "eye-candy" stuff to work on. Temas had a great idea for drag-n-drop group management using Windows Explorer like key-bindings (ctrl = copy, shift = move, etc..). The jabber.org open jabber server seems to be running pretty good and kudos to erbo and temas for doing lots of debugging on the ICQ and AIM transports. I'm now officially in IM nirvana... Jabber, ICQ, and AIM in a single client interface. Life is good :)

Vantek/Work stuff
Curt and I have discussed plans to revamp our small office layout which would give me more work-space to work on other devices, and give us both more privacy for phone conversations and my MP3 tunes :) I'm kind of psyched to do this, but of course it'll blow my servers 70 day uptime :( Oh well, It's a small price to pay.

Linux stuff
Got a copy of Redhat 6.1 from TSBandit this past week and installed it at home to run in dual-boot mode with my existing Win95 partition. I was blown away by the ease & simplicity of the graphical install. Linux has come a LONG way since old text-only, gross installs of the pre-slakware days. Getting ready to upgrade my RH 5.2 box here at the office sometime this week. I installed Interbase 6.0 on it earlier, but apparently this needs the 2.2 kernel and glibc 2.1 on it. Keeping my fingers crossed that it won't hose any of the custom stuff I've done to this box over the last 2 years. I'll keep you posted :)

22 Mar 2000

Wed, 22 Mar 2000 05:13:41 GMT

I seem to be stuck in a 1 week per diary entry. Well, I was supposed to be in LA from last Saturday to today, but the trip got canned. I was very happy to get to stay home.

JabberIM and WinJab are still progressing at "internet" speeds, much to the dismay of my normal sleep habits. Thanks goes out to 'eff' who helped me get file transfers working really slick in WinJab using the direct client- client method. We are still working on Firewall stuff. After much deliberation over the past week, we've finally hammered out a "temporary" vCard XML spec to use with Jabber. Phew, it was a major production to get everyone on the same page, and "sort-of" agree with the IETF Draft.

Work is absolutely insane. Besides my normal stuff (Vantek Software, and 3D-Workshop), I just found out we got 2 more measurement / automation contracts. One is small and easy, the other is not. I can see my summer free time being sucked away like a super-nova into a black-hole. <sigh> I finally decided to scrap Quicktime off of my computer today hoping I could get rid of the idiotic Quick-Time plugin that was being used to display PNG files in IE5. Well, its gone, and PNG's render fine inside of html pages, but by themselves, the situation is about as automatic as my 5- Speed transmission. Soon I think I might just nuke my HD and install W2K.. or maybe I'll just tough it out until SP1 :)

I work a Koinonia weekend this weekend with a good friend of mine. It should be really fun. Play lots of music, do some chapels, etc.. It'll be a nice get-away from the computer world for a few days.

My sister, who works at New Horizons, called today and told me one the horses she co-owns as sort of investment broke it's NECK yesterday. It's still alive, but they aren't sure whats going to happen. She is really bummin', as this was a money making deal for her. It's really shocking news, we both have been around the horse industry for a long time, and this is the first time I've heard of one breaking its neck. Bizzare.

My back still hurts, but seems to be getting better.. Hopefully it's recovery, and warmer temperatures will coincide so I can start climbing outdoors soon!

15 Mar 2000

Wed, 15 Mar 2000 04:44:03 GMT

It's been almost a week since my last entry? Where do I start?? Jabber development continues.. I finally posted an update to JabberCOM yesterday which has tons of improvements, bug fixes, and new stuff. I finally got UTF-8 encoding working (thanks Kutulu for those algos), so WinJab should not cooperate nicely with other languages and funky character sets.

Talked at lenght with jer about issues related to vCards, sending around roster items, and other cool stuff, and finally got around to hacking together file transfer stuff into WinJab... they work, and are really cool. We just need server proxy so I can finally send stuff from behind my NAT and firewall. I'm so close to IM nirvana - as soon as the AIM transport and ICQ transport get installed on Jabber.org, I'll be happier than a pig in.... a mud puddle.

Last Saturday, I FINALLY got around to completely re- stringing my Epiphone (guitar) with a new set of Elixor strings.. it sounds sooo nice. I still need to talk to my buddy Darrell about getting a pickup put it in it.. hmm.. there goes my new video card for the home PC. Oh well. Had a team meeting on Sunday for this retreat I'm working in a couple of weeks, and jammed with Chris M. afterwards at the apartment for a while - great fun - until he realized he left his lights on in the parking lot again. DOH!

I'm supposed to be going to LA for a trade-show demo thing this Saturday, but those plans may be changing (I'd rather not go anyways). We'll see what happens.

The climbing scene continues to depress me. Last Wed. we set a new record high temperature (69 F) and by Sunday morning, we had a foot (12") of snow on the ground. ARGH. I just want to get outside and climb. The Glen is still soaked, but hopefully, it'll get dry, warm, and windy.

8 Mar 2000

Wed, 8 Mar 2000 19:49:43 GMT

Well, Chris Moyer and I stayed up WAYYYY to late last nite getting the new and Vastly improved Foosteps Website rolled out. It appears to be working and is pretty slick. We are stoked to have it finally go live.

JabberIM is progressing at a maddening pace, as is Jabber develeopment in general. Be prepared for world domination everyone :) It seems every day someone new pops into #jabber asking about server setup issues :) This means 2 things:

We need to work on packages and install procedures more
TONS of people are interested in this project.

During lulls in the website stuff last evening I had some time to play with my video measuring app, and was able to make it do really wierd things trying to improve my motor control classes and methods. WOAH, Where's the STOP Button!

It's 65 degrees outside.. considering going to the Glen to boulder. hmmm..

7 Mar 2000

Tue, 7 Mar 2000 14:14:33 GMT

Wow.. I hate working late, and last night was no exception. I finally stumbled out of the office at 11:30 PM. I arrived at 8:30 AM. Ugh. HOWEVER, I finally got my Matrox Corona Frame Grabber card and my Matrox G200 AGP card to work in Dual Monitor mode, AND I was able to capture live video into my development environment. Wicked cool. I LOVE having cool toys to play with :)

Before that stuff, I had a pretty mundane day. Finally patched up the last of 3 customer databases I had to fix. (Why do BLOB files have such a propensity for getting currupted???) Worked some more on JabberIM. The client is really starting to come together. I still need to tweak the graphics I got from Tom @ Webb to deal with transparency issues, but otherwise, the thing is Really starting to look slick. AIM and MSN beware. I got a MUCH improved message history working in Winjab, and it's ready to be merged into the JabberIM codebase as well. I talked with temas about other ideas for displaying message history, and he had some good thoughts, but I need more time to implement them yet. Maybe post 1.0 stuff.

I feel pretty good about both the JabberIM and WinJab clients... they are both coming along nicely. The Flush meetings on Friday went well, and we hashed out tons of remaining issues. I'm still waiting for some JUD portions to get coded out on the server side, and am eagerly awaiting the file transfer (oob) stuff.

Today I'm hoping to plow through the rest of Andre's comments about JabberIM and deal some more with my Frame Grabber and CNC machine...maybe the phone will be relatively silent and actually let me work today... I can hope.

Last weekend was busy but fun. I had a Koinonia team meeting on sunday where I'm playing my guitar for a retreat on Mar 24-26. Afterwards I showed off WinJab to a good friend and blew him away with ideas Jabber World Domination Theory :) Finally cleaned the apartment on Saturday afternoon, my bathroom and kitchen were beyond disgusting, and actually got to the gym Sat nite to climb. Full day. Sunday we had an amazing Footsteps Reunion after church (30+ kids showed up) and had a good meeting afterwards.

3 Mar 2000

Fri, 3 Mar 2000 15:25:28 GMT

Woah, it's been over a week since I updated my diary. <hang head in shame>. Although, that fact alone should be some indication of my busy-ness quotient. Jabber is moving at insane paces some days, and a crawl on others it seems. I've been helping erbo debug the ICQ-Transport, and working on another client. Waiting for JUD to come along to really start seeming some super-cool stuff.

Apparently I'm now working on like 5 projects at once:

My Vantek Software, bug fixes etc.. (Real Work)
Maintain the older 3D-Workshop measurement app. (Real Work)
Work on the ultra-new uber cool measurement app. (Real Work)
Work on the JabberIM client for Webb/Jabber Inc. (Real Work)
Tweak JabberCOM (Open-source)
Work on WinJab (Open-source).

Oh.. I guess that's six, and I think I've worked on them all in the last 3 days for at least 8 hours a piece. Do the math, I know you want to.

Last weekend I worked a Footsteps weekend. So that was mad amounts of guitar playing (3 of us managed to break 14 strings), but tons of fun. It's so nice to do something that completely takes my mind away from work.

Must climb more.. *sigh*

23 Feb 2000

Wed, 23 Feb 2000 18:57:33 GMT

Trying to get the WinJab GUI cleaned up. Battling with design issues, 3D looks, etc. I need some an artist gf who can make cool icons for me :)

Other mundane tasks today like dealing with some guy who's BDE installation is totally fubar'd. No clue what the deal what the deal with that is.

JabberCOM seems really stable. *Knock on Wood*.

22 Feb 2000

Tue, 22 Feb 2000 21:24:39 GMT

Finally doing something here and trying to checkout/use the system. Apparently, I'm still clasified as a schmoe, and can't add myself to any projects :(.

Exchanged my 21" monitor today for one that actually WORKS *WHOOP* The old one was totally blurry, giving me mass headaches. Of course, this probably means I'm going to work even more.

Doing actual work on WinJab and another Jabber client. JabberCOM seems pretty functional, and somewhat bullet- proof so far. Time will tell.