random neuron misfires

Christmas Season

Well, it’s that time of year again. Food, family, snow, and reminiscing about the year gone by. Time to put some smiles on faces. Time to make amends, and commit to some changes for the upcoming year. This year, like the last, has been a very interesting roller-coaster ride.

ObAmazon

For those wondering what to get that unemployed hacker on your Christmas list for Christmas (me!), I have assembled my “Amazon.com Wish List” for exactly that purpose. Let’s see what Santa puts under the tree this year.

What exactly is this? Advogato spam? Should that really be allowed to stay there, and the associated account nospamplease?

Elliot

I just found out yesterday that a former coworker at Linuxcare had a death in the family… his wife.

Amethyst Mariani, Director, performer, friend, daughter, wife and mother passed away Sept 22, 2003.

Some other Linuxcare alumnus have set up a PayPal fund to help him and his daughter out. Our heartfelt apologies go out to you and your loss, Elliot. More details here if you’d like to help out (thanks Bill and Gaylen).

Paul

pjf, I am so sorry for your recent loss; very unfortunate. I hope her passing was at least peaceful.

Work

Still haven’t earned any substantial money this year, so I’ll once-again fall under the cutoff for qualifying to pay taxes. It’s going to be a lean, svelte Christmas… again.

Interesting things coming on the horizon though, if all goes well at the end of this year. Only time will tell. Life has changed in remarkable ways over the last 2 years.

For those that celebrate it… HAPPY TURKEY DAY!

I just realized that last Friday (11/21) was the two-year anniversary of my resignation from Linuxcare, soon after they decide to turn away from their Open Source roots, and go down the proprietary path. 5 rounds of layoffs and 4 CEOs later, I called it quits.

“I have dreamed a dream…
..but now that dream has gone from me.”

One word: Ugh!

  my %foo = ($bar =~ /^s+(w+)s+=s+(.*)$/mg);

There is a mountain of evidence proving their idiocy and refuting each and every one of their claims…. and yet their stock today has never been higher.

I don’t understand.

• The MPAA is claiming that “texting” people in theatres to let them know that the movie sucks is hurting them. Here’s an idea… MAKE BETTER MOVIES!
• SCO is slinging baseless manure left and right, despite the thousands of people who have clearly exposed their lies and deceit, and they continue to sell their stock like gangbusters, making millions on these lies.
• Execs are doing insider trades left and right, and nobody seems to give damn.
• Microsoft “renamed” the “MS-Blaster” worm to the “Blaster” worm in a futile attempt to try to lead people to believe they had nothing to do with it.

I am so confused. Nobody is taking blame, nobody is being held accountable, and everything is just spiraling down. It’s like.. everything that is reality, is reversed. I’m in the anti-verse.

“..there are some 2.5 million servers running Linux and that SCO has ‘identified by name’ those companies running many of them.”

“We are in the process of contacting them about coming into compliance and taking a UnixWare license from us. If they refuse to do so, we will sue them directly and see them in court,” he said.

“In a nutshell, this litigation is essentially about the GNU General Public License and all it stands for. That license has not yet been challenged or tested in court, but it is now going to be. We are also firmly and aggressively challenging the notion that Linux is a free operating system,” McBride said.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1224000,00.asp

Does anybody else think that this charade has gone on long enough?

Where is the proof that any of this IP is actually in the code they claim that these 2.5 million servers are running? Are there really 2.5 million Linux servers running SMP/NUMA/RCU/JFS in the public internet? I’d be very surprised if that figure was true.

Has anyone (or their company) actually received a letter from SCO requesting (demanding?) a license to UnixWare, or face litigation from them? Wouldn’t this constitute mail fraud? If a company sends you a bill, through the United States Postal Service, and that bill cannot be proven to be valid, isn’t that considered fraud? Time to talk to the postmaster and see.

This game has gone on long enough. First it was a contract dispute case against IBM. Then it was an IP case against Linux (the kernel). Then it was an IP case against ANYONE using Linux (the operating system as a whole). Now it’s all about the GPL? There is only one company that spins FUD like this.. and it seems as though they are doing the actual speech-writing for SCO these days.

linux != Linux, and I think SCO and the media need to get straight on those facts.

Prove that my linux kernel is running your intellectual property, and I will remove the infringing code myself, and run it sans your IP. Period. This is how it works. If you can’t prove it, legally or morally, then I’m sorry, I (and everybody else) don’t owe you a damn thing.

Urgent telegram.                 <stop>
Regarding Linksys BEFW11S4 v4.   <stop>
Do not purchase this device.     <stop>
Major firmware and chipset bugs. <stop>
Return to vendor immediately.    <stop>

I bought this Linksys BEFW11S4 v4 router/WAP to hopefully replace some of my aging Luent wireless and network gear here on the network, and what a wonderful experience this has been. I also picked up the WSB24 signal booster for the 802.11 bits, because I wanted to go through some of these thicker walls. I’m also working out a plan for a Monster Cantenna that I’m building (Yes, that’s my arm).

Apparently there isn’t a single person who owns a v4 of this device who can keep a stable connection longer than 30 minutes. v1-v3 work fine, but v4 is a horrible mess of broken chipsets and firmware. Read here and here for the hundreds of users who have reported this issue. Linksys is curiously silent, and their technical support continues to blame MTU settings, Windows (even though I’m on Linux and FreeBSD), the cable modem, DSL providers, and the direction of the wind blowing.

I’m pretty close to giving up on the device, and shipping it back to the vendor I purchased it from online. I’ll barcode it off and RMA it, and let them deal with it. The Netgear MR814 is looking like a nice replacement for it.

Other News

No job yet.
Looking for a house.
Lots of new woodworking projects.

Just perl, nothing but perl, only perl.

I’ve been spending an enormous amount of time writing perl lately, learning a lot more than I thought I would on these projects, but it is definately fun.

Elegantly stripping Javascript and Style tags and blocks from a stream of HTML content in a scalar:

$html =~ s!<(s(?:cript|tyle))[^>]*>.*?</1>!!gis;

There’s so much I haven’t ever done with perl, using it only as a “sysadmin” tool in the past, but now I’m neck-deep in screen-scraping and all kinds of other uses for perl that I’ve never delved in before. Neat stuff.

Job Trends

No job yet, still looking for contract work to fill in the blanks.

The trend seems to be towards posting jobs with incredibly unrealistic job requirements for a pittance of a salary.

“Must have 10 years experience in HTML, XML, CSS, DOM, ASP, PeopleSoft, AutoCAD, Macromedia Flash, .NET, C, C++, Java, and be able to speak Spanish, Japanese, and write Sanskrit.”

“Oh, and by the way, we don’t offer any benefits.”

“Do you mind being our Senior Developer, leading up a team of 16 other developers, for $45k/USD a year?”

Yes, yes I do mind. That’s insulting.

It would seem that even if you send in a peper resume, make the calls, follow up, and get a real human on the telephone, one who is impressed with your skills and previous work experience, that it is all moot anyway. It’s like yelling at a tree in the forest.

The other thing I’ve heard (after sending in roughly 400 resumes and making about 70 phone calls myself), is that it doesn’t matter if you’re a perfect match for the job, with everything they require. If you’re not in the “first batch” of resumes they receive, you’ll never get a look.

A job posts an open position, and they get say.. 500 resumes in the first 2 days (a very low estimate, most are in the thousands by week’s end). The hiring manager will take the top 50 from the pile, and toss the rest into the trash (or “scan them in for later”, yeah, right). If your resume isn’t in the first 50 in that pile, you’re never going to get your resume seen or receive a call back.

I’ve sent out probably 400+ resumes in the last year (many of them were email-only contacts, no follow-up mailing address to send a paper copy of my cv to, or a business name to call around to speak to someone in charge of hiring), and made about 70 phone calls to places that were offering work. To date, I have only received one call from a recruiter, and it was from a word-of-mouth discussion at my local LUG meeting. The job was for something completely out of my skillset (Python and the “R” Statistical language). That’s a .002% return on my effort. My friends send me job postings all the time, which I follow-up on, only to find myself talking to a tree in the forest again.

Housing

We’re trying to find a house here in the area, so we can settle down a bit and stop paying rent. There’s so many nice houses, and a whole lot more houses that are complete trash, going for substantially more than their market value. Typically, the assesed value for taxes represents 75-80% of the actual market value of the house. We’re seeing houses listed for 90-100% over that value. A house assessed at $89k for example, will be listed for $225k on the market, in a not-so-nice area of the community. I just don’t get it. the interest rates are at 5.1%, and everyone jacks up the price of their house to compensate. It just ends up being a feeding frenzy.

We’ve got an agent now to try to help us find the “right” place for us. We go through about 2-dozen listings, drive by the places (without going inside), then take 4-5 out of those 2-dozen, and hand them to our agent to set up appointments to see the insides of. It saves everyone time and money to do it that way, so we’re not driving halfway across the state for a house we wouldn’t live in, just because the back yard borders an auto-graveyard for example (but of course, you don’t see that in the pictures of the houses online, noooOOOoo..). Tough work.

I’m ok with doing some renovations, but not moving plumbing and walls from one side of a house to the other. That’s a bit out of my league.

.oO(Now where did I put Norm’s phone number from “This Old House”)