8 Aug 2000

Tue, 8 Aug 2000 15:32:36 GMT

4pm, taking a work break as I've finally passed a personal milestone on the long road to getting my first real (non-vanity) site live. friseurguide now works mostly correctly - all the right data appears on all the right pages. All the remaining issues are basically formatting and display tweakage (eg the nav menu has to hide sections with no data, er oh yes and everything's still appearing in English which means lot of tedious Text::text calls and cursing the translation lookup file which things don't appear properly....)

Happened to DL the latest mozilla nightlies both here (on Linux) and home (NT) just before M17 released. It's really coming together nicely, and I'm also really relating to the status pages... much more so since I began working alongside other developers. In my last job I was the only one who had the faintest idea what I was doing.)

Altogether feeling much better about things than at the time of the last entry. I'm over (I think!) the steepest part of the Linux learning curve - I can do most of the day-to-day stuff with emacs, cvs, shell etc that are required to do actual work. Plus I've written some actual original code, a morale boost to find that I can still do it and that it doesn't stand out too badly compared with other peoples'. (We have a cvs notification mailing list which automatically sends everyone the diffs when you commit.)

Big news on the personal front is that I was sacked by the grilf on Saturday. Rather relieved to find how well I've taken it. It was never going to work long term, but I've supplied support & encouragement to her to help her kick drugs (big bad nasty IV opiate drugs, that is), helped out with money and access to email whilst she tries to get back into proper full-time work. Now she seems to be making things deliberately hard for herself - eg won't sign on for unemployment benefit (welfare), has allowed herself to get discouraged after not getting the first few places she interviewed for, etc. But those things are her problem, and I was running low on patience with that stuff anyway. (mail me if anyone's looking for an office admin /PA wiht reasonable IT (M$) skills, quad-lingual... Serbo-Croat, Russian, Arabic and English, based in London... :) )

Right, time to make a start on the buglist I think.

28 Jul 2000

Fri, 28 Jul 2000 11:50:36 GMT

Whoo-har, My First Diary entry.

I'm working on getting a new guideguide 'guide' (collection of microsites) up and running. Realised yesterday that a chunk of Perl which I was trying to reuse from another guide was too specific to be used - lots of inappropriate assumptions about the datastructure hardwired into the code. Came up with what seemed to me a reasonable solution (just rewrite it with a slightly different datastructure) but the owner of the original code got a bit irritated when I asked hm for comments. :?

Still, I've been here nearly five months and I've yet to write a reasonable amount of original code yet - silly considering I'm supposedly a "perl programmer" - so now's my chance to really, uh, fuckup in public.

Sad thing happened yesterday - we're banned from playing music on the stereo, it's headphones only from now on. Originally they were all techno-heads here - however a few of us now have more diverse taste- someone played a couple of cheesy cock-rock tracks ("living on a prayer"?!) more or less as a joke; I followed up with a bit of flamenco (I LOVE flamenco, reminds me I must add it to my homepage here), then the only non-techie in the office appeared on IRC saying "please, turn it off! We only play electronic music in this office!" which lead to all public music being banned. This is a real shame - I enjoy having my horizons broadened by stuff I haven't heard before, but it seems other people are less broad-minded. <sigh>

Right, that's it, back to the xml / mysql / emacs compile/test cycle thing...

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8 Aug 2000

28 Jul 2000