Window Snyder

I think most people have stories about their undergrad days in Computer Science where they were hooked up to an intervenous drip of caffeine and staying up all hours of the night wrangling with assembler on a robot that had lasers for eyes and could do backflips down the hall and land on both feet while juggling C pointers and doing remote garbage collection ... And most of the stories from these days are essentially myths and the characters of those stories are like Greek heroes and heroines.

One of those people from my undergrad days was Window Snyder. She was just the awesome of the awesome. She had a VAX machine for a coffee table. As I recall, she dropped out because she was involved in some clandestine project somewhere that involved all kinds of stuff that so boggled my mind at the time that I don't even remember a hint of it.

Gary told me that she's now the head of security strategy at Mozilla. Sure enough, she even has her own wiki page.

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn thoughts

The hard drive on my laptop was doing some weird things on occasion and I decided to get a new one and an external case to stick the old one in. Figured while I was going to be replacing my hard drive I might as well install Feisty Herd 5 and use that.

Installation had no problems. I was up and running with all the updates in 3 or 4 hours (I have a slow Internet connection and there were a lot of updates). I fiddled with things to get Beryl working mostly because I want an Expose kind of thing, but ... it was really sluggish (I've got a Gateway 450ROG with an ATI Radeon Mobility 7500) so I removed it.

Everything looks good so far. Figured I'd mention it in case anyone else was thinking about Feisty Fawn.

Updates:

3/19/2007: I traded emails with Patrick and he helped me configure aiglx correclty. I've got Beryl 0.2 working very smoothly--some of the features it has are already making a huge difference in usability. w00t! Also, there's an article on Ars Technica that walks through Beryl features called Bring on the bling with Beryl. That helped, too.

Shower's frozen (again)

It was so freaking cold last night that the pipes for our shower froze (again). Unlike the previous two times, this time they're totally frozen as opposed to just mostly frozen where the hot water works but the cold water doesn't.

The pipes go from the water tank all the way across the basement getting smaller and smaller until they go up an outside wall in the corner of the house to our shower. That corner of the house gets no sunlight and it's exposed to the wind. The house has terrible, no-good, very-bad insulation, too.

The last couple of times I was able to unfreeze the pipes by sitting in the basement with a hair dryer in the hole that the bath tub drain pipe comes down from. This time that didn't seem to work.

On top of that, our heating bill for last month was $400. Our landlord says that's normal, but I looked through all the heating bills for all the apartments I've rented over the lat 6 years and I've never used that many therms before. This apartment isn't any bigger than previous apartments--it's actually smaller! I think S and I are going to move when our lease is up.

I think the moral of this story is that having alcohol wipes, an extension cord, and a hair dryer on hand is really handy.

Testing in Python

A few days ago, I saw on Grig's blog that Titus created a mailing list covering Testing in Python. I joined the list and it's been very educational. So far the posts have been of the form:

Hi--my name is _____________ (name) and I use ______________ (framework) and ___________ (framework) and ____________ (explanation for which framework gets used for which specific purposes).

Then this spawns a conversation with thoughts and insights and lots of applause. There have also been questions regarding how to use some of the frameworks and which framework would suit some need the best.

While I'm following the mailing list, I'm taking notes so that I can finish up this round of adding testing to PyBlosxom so that I can do a release this week. We're using nose and I'm using a similar structure that Cheesecake uses since I have some familiarity with their project.

It's a neat list so far. I'm glad Titus put it together--it's definitely solving my immediate needs.

Status 02/18/2007

Life: I had a really rough January, but I'm not going to get into the details. The kitchen sink drain is working again, the pipes are unfrozen, and our cell phones work [1].

School: My compilers class is going really well. My research project needs a lot more attention.

PyBlosxom: I've been doing some PyBlosxom work again as Ryan gets ready to do a contributed plugins pack release that has all the changes to the comments plugin and all its friends. He's done some really great work pulling things together.

I started hanging out on freenode on #pyblosxom after Asheesh mentioned it on the pyblosxom-users mailing list. That's been pretty cool, but the channel has been pretty quiet most of the time.

Wedding planning is ... coming along. I figure a wedding has 10,000 decisions to make of which maybe 5% of them are "big decisions" (venue, church?, food, ...) and the rest don't really affect the big picture, but they need to be made and it's way harder to make them and there are thousands (silverwear, colors, flowers, flower arrangements, music, favors, text for the invitations, the border on the invitations, the pictures on the stamps for the invitation envelopes, color of the envelopes...). It's been interesting. S has taken on most of the planning lately since I've been sick and working on school work.

Things are moving along pretty quickly. In a few months I'll be graduated, married, and (hopefully) employed!

Kitchen sink is blocked

A few days ago, we discovered that the kitchen sink drain is blocked. Not only that, but it's blocked below the point where the drain for the upstairs neighbors' kitchen sink meets ours. So when they use their sink (for example, when they clean pots from the spaghetti with clam sauce), it backflows into our sink and then our sink overflows. Ewwww!

An "excavation" guy showed up at 7:45 in the morning to unblock the sink. While he was working, I learned that garbage disposals, while convenient, are the devil's tool and were probably invented by an evil plumber looking for a steady flow of business. I had no idea.

Anyhow, he couldn't excavate it enough and it looks like we're going to have to have the section of pipe replaced. That's nuts!

No more Dark Rifts for me

I had a craptastic conversation with one of the admin on Dark Rifts a couple of days ago the end result being that I decided to cut my losses and leave. They're not going in directions I'm interested in and I don't really have time for it anyhow.

Between all the mud projects I've worked on, I've probably written a couple hundred thousand lines of code in Java, Python, C and ending with LPC over the course of the last 7 or 8 years.

I'm still kind of bummed about it and I think that's the end of mud projects for me unless I get involved in Twisted Reality or Phantasmal/DGD. Twisted Reality is really interesting, though it's really different from other mud systems I've worked on.

Bumped off Unofficial Planet Python

I used to be subscribed to Unnoficial Planet Python (http://www.planetpython.org/) but for some reason, I was unsubscribed. I didn't get any email about it, so I'm not sure what the problem was. I emailed Ryan (his email address is on the site) twice and haven't heard anything.

I am still subscribed to Planet Python (http://planet.python.org/), so I'm puzzled.

This is a minor issue because I'm not subscribed many places (subscribed is probably not the right word to use), so it reduces my audience significantly and prevents me from participating as much as I could be [1].

Anyhow, if anyone knows of a better way to get me re-subscribed to the Unofficial Planet Python, that'd be super.

Updates:

01/11/2007 Ryan got in touch with me and I'm back on again. w00t!

Mudos under Ubuntu

I installed Mudos on my laptop which is running Ubuntu Edgy. I had two problems compiling the source for v22.2b14.

The first issue is this error when running make:

make: *** No rule to make target `obj/malloc.o', needed by `driver'.  Stop.

The solution, bizarrely, is to just run make again. I don't know what the issue is, but discovered this in the depths of the mailing list archives.

The second issue I get when compiling is this error:

socket_efuns.c: In function 'get_socket_addres':
socket_efuns.c:1198: error: invalid lvalue in unary '&'
make: *** [obj/socket_efuns.o] Error 1

Doing this change fixes the issue:

$ diff socket_efuns.c.orig socket_efuns.c
1198c1198,1199
<     addr_in = &amp;(local ? lpc_socks[fd].l_addr : lpc_socks[fd].r_addr);
---
>     // addr_in = &amp;(local ? lpc_socks[fd].l_addr : lpc_socks[fd].r_addr);
>     addr_in = local ? &amp;lpc_socks[fd].l_addr : &amp;lpc_socks[fd].r_addr;

After that, everything works wonderfully.

New year 2007!

Today is the start of the new year. I went through my web-site and updated a bunch of stuff to reflect changes in status, direction, and what's coming up. I also spent some time updating my resume.

Writing resumes is a pain in the ass. I've done a lot of stuff and it's hard to prove that I did it and that I did it well since most of it is locked behind NDAs and Confidentiality agreements and all that. Even if it wasn't, it's a lot of stuff and I only remember bits and pieces of it and I don't remember all the gory details. The whole thing feels like marketing: "Hire me because it'll be AWESOME!"

I threw in a section of technology smorgasbord--acronyms, "technologies", applications, ... blah blah blah. Most people have all that stuff on their resume regardless of whether they have much experience with it. It's hard to know how to get across my experience/knowledge level in those things--am I an expert or just an advanced user? If I under-rate myself to err on the side of accuracy, will a company skip over me because their HR department is looking for people with 25 years of Java experience?

It's hard to get across in a resume that I work pretty hard, I work pretty smart, and I get along with other people pretty well. It's hard to get across that I'm somewhat quiet but I work hard at communicating comprehensively and accurately without overloading someone with lots of stuff. It's hard to get across that the people I've worked with over the years really liked working with me and that together we've done a lot of really great stuff, but for some reason it doesn't seem as great when I look at the things other people my age have accomplished. It's hard to get across that over the last 10 years, I've grown a lot and so far I keep growing--I am not a stick in the mud. It's easy to get across that I really love this stuff and that I practically dream about it because I can say that in a single sentence.

The only evidence I have that's publicly available is the work I've done on Lyntin and PyBlosxom. I cut a lot of teeth on Lyntin, but I'm really happy with where I left it. I'm not as happy with PyBlosxom, but I think that's mostly just a function of how much work I wanted to do versus how much time I actually spent on it.

My resume is here. I'm Will Guaraldi and I'm looking for a job in May 2007.