Older blog entries for vab (starting at number 98)

New Job

I've taken a new job at MIT. I'll start work there next month. I hope that it will not only enrich me intellectually, but stimulate me to begin making some more significant contributions to the free software community.

I came to my last job mostly for a girl, so I have no strong regret about it - oh, she was soo beautiful! =) But, I have dissappointed myself with my recent lack of productivity. With a slow pace at work, it's very difficult to keep a fast pace at home. I'm hoping that a fast pace at work will translate into, or at least encourage, a fast pace at home. It may have just been the youth, but in my younger days this seemed be the case.

Personal

I'm greatly looking forward to the move to Boston. I've rented a place in Southie, also known as "Little Ireland", which will allow me to take the T to work every day - no more driving for me. That's going to be a very nice change.

Unfortunately, my boss took the week of St. Pat's for vacation so I won't be able to be up there for the parade since I'm covering at work. But, I'm looking forward to the little break inbetween jobs anyway. I'm going to try and make a trip to Ireland and Germany to visit some friends before I start work.

Many years ago I used to hate Bill Gates - passionately. I had a job working for a pediatric cancer research group writing Java Applets to support clinical trials when Microsoft released their own JVM and caused me endless problems and many hours of lost productivity.

Later, I had a job building a single signon infrastructure for a large University with AIX and Linux using MIT Kerberos when Microsoft released their broken version of Kerberos.

I'm starting to really like the guy and respect him allot, though. So, the head aches, lost hours of work, lost nights and weekends spent working around artificial problems - all forgotten. Water under the bridge. Perhaps, a large part of it is that I'm no longer a college kid and my world view has changed a great deal. I understand money much better now.

But the major thing is that I've been hearing a great deal about The Gates Foundation and what Bill Gates has been doing to try and help with the world's most serious problems. I'm especially impressed with, and grateful for, the Foundation's efforts in global health, particularly with vaccines. Gates and his foundation have played a roll in creating a nonprofit pharmaceutical company, and helped with the creation of the DATA organization. From listening to him and reading interviews, it's obvious he actually cares and is very well informed.

I never thought I'd say this, but... I'm going to start developing for the Microsoft platform! (I'll still be continuing to develop software and documentation for the Linux Platform, of course.)

I ordered a copy of Microsoft Studio Beta-2 from Microsoft. The web pages suggested that there would be a small charge for it. But there was none - I'm not sure if it's because I came from a .edu address, a Linux browser, or just that they're not charging. But, it's on its way. So wish me luck in the wild new world of MFC and .NET.

I released, cpcd, a multithreaded daemon written in C. It implements the gWebCache protocol which is used to help p2p programs join the Gnutella Network.

This project is a watershead moment for me. I'm sure that there are bugs, and many things I could have done better. However, this is decent software. It was tested and able to support many millions of connections per day while producing handly any system load at all (0.03 on a PIII 1Ghz).

For perhaps the first time, the limiting factor in what I can contribute to Free Software seems to be the amount of free time I have rater than my programming abilities. I have reactivated my Keyserver project now that I have the skills and understanding to complete it.

(Thanks to eeeeeee@google & pphaneuf here on advogato for the discussions related to a program like cpcd's design.)

14 Apr 2005 (updated 13 Jun 2005 at 13:36 UTC) »

I released, rsachal, a little C program to attempt to solve the RSA Labs RC5 Challenges.

I've become very interested in challenges and puzzle games and such things lately.

I've also stopped registering my projects on freshmeat until they hit v1.0.0 just incase I don't finish them in a timely manner, or at all.

I wrote some C code to solve the google billboard challenge. I didn't send in a resume, though.

I also jumped on the LiveJournal bandwaggon when Advogato went down.

I've released a few new versions of the keyserver and Simon merged his DNS Keyservice code in. We're almost to a beta release (which will mean all that is left to do is bug fixes as they come up).

I also got my Kerberos HOWTO published in the LDP. I need to update it for the new Kerberos functionality in OpenSSH.

I have become addicted to Gentoo. It is like crack. I have installed in on everything from my portable and workstations to a random computer that accidently happened to be wheeled by my cube.

I've quit my job with e-Tech and I'm now working for UF Network Services. I'll also be going to school to study molecular biology. This change should give me allot more time to work on cool stuff in the free software world. Yay! Life is good.

Free Software

I made a release of cpwc, a web cache to help gnutella peers with their initial connection. I also wrote some code for a p2p network I'm planning on calling MetaNET. I got to spend allot of time coding this weekend it was great.

Personal

My resolution for 2004 is to be more focused and productive. I made a clear description of what I wanted to accomplish with my life and made a list of goals to help me get there. It's helping already.

89 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!