vampire's blog

All the good stuff gets posted to rubyred.com/kb which is currently not enabled for anonymous access (I'm working on it... just haven't been feeling well enough to do anything after work). As I was just told yesterday, "patience is the only currency we need right now".

When you're in the zone, everything just flows. At that point, it doesn't seem that you'd ever forget all the little things about whatever you're doing. Fast-forward six months, or in this case 2 years(!) and that isn't the case any longer. I just got stung at work and had to spend 30 minutes deciphering what happened with an issue 2 years ago. At the time I wasn't immersed in the GTD system, and so even though I saved all the related emails and all the code was in CVS, determining the 1-paragraph summary now of what happened back then took a while.

These days I spend more time writing down notes about things; much better to be saying "yeah I know that already" instead of "now wtf was going on here?" or something similar. For example, we are dealing with a PDF issue right now with one of our larger clients (under NDA; can't be specific with details but you'll get the idea). The PDFs generated by one product are fine. One they are OCR'd through a second product, then they are only viewable by Acrobat and a handful of other PDF readers that support JBIG2/JPEG2000 images in PDFs. Of course, the intended target viewer is using an older 3rd-party component that doesn't support that format. The newer version does, but the intended target viewer won't be upgrading any time soon. So, the task now is to figure out how to convert formats without wasting 25MB of disk space per PDF. This may not sound like much, but we're talking 100,000+ NEW documents a day, so it does add up rather quickly.

OK, I'm rambling due to caffeine. The point is, for this project I started a plain text file called "notes" that simply states the above (with exact names instead of being vague). I included sample files of "good" and "bad" PDFs. Once I get it resolved (my money is on GhostScript...) I will include the resolution. That "notes" file will stay in the source code in CVS so in 2 years I or someone else will be able to quickly discover 1) what was the issue and 2) what was the resolution.

Cake was awesome last night at the Crystal. Although I will remember next time not to wear my duster, as it's very heavy by the end of the show standing holding it.

The music was great (Cake anyway, the opener not so much), but why is it that bands can't just say "we're going to play x long", do an encore piece if really really necessary, and then be done? This bit of "we're outta here", "no wait, we'll play one more", "well, if you insist, we'll play another", "ok, we have to play this last one before we go" gets annoying. We came to listen to music, not get jerked around. And even if we came for that too, chances are it wasn't that we wanted the band doing it! Rant over.

I am very glad I went. They even ended with my 3 favorite songs, Opera Singer, Short Skirt/Long Jacket, and The Distance. That made it more than worth the price of the ticket! Now to figure out who to see next...

Now that I've had a chance to administer it for another site with way more activity than this, I give it my seal of approval. And like all things Open Source, if I don't like it then I can change it. So I will be integrating the whole site into a Drupal site over the next month or so. My goal is to launch the new site by the calendar year start. So my blog will eventually have categories, be integrated into my kb (KISS - one place to enter things!), have my wishlist attached, and have links to my online galleries. I've recently discovered that Google's Picasa has a Linux client so I can stop hosting my own photos.
Things are getting better all the time!

http://developer.apple.com/internet/opensource/cvsoverview.html

Yesterday was K-Lyn's birthday party with a Beatles theme - come as a Beatles song. For those of us who aren't that familiar with the Beatles there was a big round of "no, I don't get that costume either". It was fun even though I only know a small number of Beatles songs. And the cake was awesome! Miss Lissa did a wonderful job (as usual) and it took quite a while before K-Lyn was willing to cut into the yellow submarine. But the Jell-O shot waves under the sub were gone in about the first 15 minutes. :-)

Everyone should have the chance to experience what we did this past weekend. 8 people, no toilets, all because the water went out. The ground was too hard to dig our own (+ we had no shovels) so we had to drive into town or to the gas station to use the bathroom. What fun!

I've been working very long days lately and contracting on the side. It's helping pay the bills for sure, but barely leaves me with any time. Very happy with Drupal though; I'm able to add stuff into my KB straight away instead of bookmarking it "to be added later when I have time". This is akin to the GTD filing rule - you should be able to create a new folder and file a piece of paper in 60 seconds or less, or you won't do it.

I think I've finally found the perfect compromise between ease of posting/configuring and power/customization level. It's a content management system called Drupal, available for free from http://drupal.org/. It has the power to do most of what I've written by hand in the past, and has the speed of 'somebody else wrote it so I don't have to'. :-)

So, maybe now I'll get around to using my blog again instead of just setting it up.