jmoiron.net

he phrase come sweet death was never such a misnomer. For some reason, I can't find my MSI and Rage Against the Machine cd's, so at work I've been listening to Evangelion OST's that I leave there just in case. Angel's Attack! is great bugfix music.

The past few days have been a roller coaster ride of confusion and jubilance, capped off with good food and unfortunate mishaps keeping me from the gym for the past 4 days. Today, nothing can stop me. Except perhaps the TCP/IP project who's due date looms on the horizon of midnight.

Speaking of ye olde DNS server, I finished the smart caching yesterday, which means If I so pleased, I could start on other extra credit stuff today. I was contemplating suffix things, but that kind of interferes with my plans for world domination as well as the central structure of the server. I'd have to go back and re-modularize the code, and quite frankly the number of routines in it are already dizzying.

Yesterday (well, now two days ago I suppose) I spent a good deal of compilers reading "Code Complete", a book on good coding technique and software architecture ironically written by a Microsoft employee. It's actually a pretty good and well written technical reference, although it was written in 1992 and shows its age by not falling to its knees from the weight of .NET promotional baggage. A few snippets from the book make me feel like a better coder, and I'll probably continue reading it tomorow in databases and compilers because I finaly got to the part that talks about coding.

The room has been quite busy lately; since New Jersey felt it was OK to not plunge us all into sub-0 temperatures, it's actually been unsettlingly warm. To escape the heat, I've set up a small space heater near my feet and turned it on full blast. It doesn't make much sense, but when I escape that heat, it feels much cooler.

The snow that we had yesterday was that tiny type of snow that almost looks like sprinkling rain from a bottle of fantastic, falling from god knows how high up and then magically appearing when it gets to within 5 meters of you, like some strange real life draw distance. I like this kind of snow.

I should probably start showing up to databases class, but staying home and doing anything in the list {nothing, something} just seems like a more enjoyable option. I have to buy a laptop soon so that I can do useful things during the classes that don't appear to be able to offer me knowledge that I already have.

The DNS server project for TCP/IP has finaly been completed and handed in. Look for it to appear along with a reconfigured "code" section sometime this week. Tonight I unfortunately have to code the first very trivial cs456 project, but it shouldn't be all that bad. Tomorow I have to show up to a lot of work because as I look at this week's timesheet I see a lack of hours that is rather unnerving.

The state of the union address happened, and apparently I was one of the people that watched it. Would you miss comic gold like that? One of the things that causes me the most disdain about the state of the union address is that it, without fail, starts out with a sentence that ends with "our union is strong". I believe Jon Stewart brought this up in the Daily Show coverage of the address last night, but I can't help but agree that our union is in distress, under the heavy economic weight of recession, a price that takes its toll on our nation as much as the price in blood we'll pay when we attack Iraq and Korea (or Iraquorea as the case may be). Why do we (as americans, not I really) sit back and believe that our nation is strong just because a president that nobody trusts tells us that? Why do we think that there will actually be a push for non-oil based automobiles and cleen air and forests? I don't know the answer, I guess its all about Noam Chomsky's "herd" theory. I'd link it up, but if you read this site, you should have found it based on curiosity alone by now.

JWZ came up at work today, probably because he had a recent article about the state of video playback in Linux posted on slashdot. I don't know what to think about JWZ. For those not in the know, He worked for Netscape and coded a lot of Netscape 3.0, then did mail stuff for 4.x, finaly "leaving" Netscape to start the Mozilla project division. Needless to say, he's proven is ability in the field. Unfortunately, JWZ also happens to be a whiny bitch, which ruins a lot of the good things he's done (and of course then theres Xemacs...). Anyway, some of the points he made were of course correct (I really can't argue with the correctness of most of the things he brings up; he has quite a brain in that middle lump on his shoulders), but it bothered me that he called the writers of mplayer (mplayerhq.com) "fucktards". Something about that just isn't right; someone who, it would appear, likes open source a lot, should not be calling developers of software fucktards. Especially not developers of the most fully featured movie player out there. Yeah, binaries aren't really available, but thats because debian has screwed them by not letting them pack mplayer with libasound. There was recently a large post about that too, in which debian-law or whatever their pompous group of crackhead GPL experts is called disputed the validity of mplayer's claim that it is compliant to the GPL, since mplayer requires that you cannot distribute binary packages of their software, a limitation that is illegal under GPL. (of course, if they did allow it, it'd be illegal, because they aren't allowed to distribute binaries with the proper lib's included). Its a big mess, but JWZ doesn't help things by calling them names, especially when they create such a great program (sorenson, wmp9, broken .avi and mpeg1 and 2 in an app that can do fullscreen DVD playback in the console!). Even though he's a whiny bitch, I still highly recommend you read his article about the shortcomings of java. I didn't agree about his "spaces vs tabs" post, since I religiously use tab's to put more power into the users hands and for its "compression" use. (8 spaces = 8 bytes, 1 tab = 1 byte)

Work, though not happening as much as I'd like it to recently, has been really good the past week. Even though I haven't shown up a lot, I've been running around getting all kinds of stuff done while I am actually here. This makes me feel kinda good, becaus although I havent been able to show up as much as I wanted too, I still feel kinda useful around here. Its important towards dismissing my opinion that any day now I'll be fired and consequently screwed out of the best job I could possibly have at the moment.

I need to finish my 'to do' system and content update system (similar to omlette's "news" section) soon so that I can start working on the site and update it without ranting about crap. Til tomorow! (where tomorow = today + 3 days).