Can we survive another round of layoffs at Linuxcare?
Tue Oct 16 01:57:51 PDT 2001
Round #5 looms. Mark the date.
Enormous World Trade Center image montage
WTC Image Montage
- I was given an image to add to my collection (now approaching 1,200 images) from a person who shall remain anonymous of an aerial view over the decemated WTC location.
What’s unique about this image is that it is a 9372×9372 jpeg image at 1016dpi at 1:12 ratio. I can literally zoom in and see the color of the pants that the construction workers are wearing, clearly. The file itself is 16 megs. It’s painful to zoom with gimp on this PIII/850 w/256 megs of ram (the gimp swapfile is over 1GB on disk).
I should stop panning around and zooming in, I might see something I don’t want to see. Even the 300×300
thumbnail I created of it is 87k. The original file is 31 times larger than this thumbnail.
Wow, can these headaches get any worse?!
More crippling head pain. Can barely stand up without getting hit in the head with this invisible shovel being swung at me. It’s been one full week, 24 hours a day, of this pain.
I’ve dumped about 11 ice trays of cubes into a garbage bag, and I’m using that as a pillow right now. I can’t relieve this pain. It’s a good thing I’ve got some high tolerance.
What would Nostradamus do?
nymia: As you know, there’s a lot of FUD out there about the interpretations of Nostradamus’ quatrains (not including the faux ones popping up recently), but here’s a page that seems to take a fair “academic” approach to dissecting the particular verses dedicated to naming the antichrists.
[addendum: It’s important to note that I have absolutely no belief in a “God” or “higher power” at all. My beliefs lie more along the lines of Zen or Buddhism or Wicca than “Christianity” or “Catholicism”]
In other news…
A lot is going on in a lot of areas, but I’m just focusing on training, learning, and lots and lots of reading. I’m trying to sharpen my “hard skills” a bit more.
There’s a lot of code to be written, and much of it is outside my abilities at the moment, but not for long. I have a lot of open projects sitting on my plate that need some attention. I just need to get back to coding, and worry about the other stuff going on at $JOB later.
The headaches continue to get worse. The dizzy spells come almost daily now. Erika thinks it could be my sugars, but I’m not so sure. As I type this, I’m having another one.
The Parallels between Dark City vs. The Matrix
…finished off Dark City a few minutes ago on the
portable. There’s some very interesting parallels between this movie, and The Matrix. See them both in series, it’s quite obvious. Even the taglines are somewhat similar:
Dark City
“They built the city to see what makes us tick. Last night one of us went off.”
The Matrix
“A computer hacker learns from mysterious rebels about the true nature of his reality and his role in the war against the controllers of it.”
So much to do these days. So much to do.
Relocating for a new job to California, Kodak PalmPix and more!
She’s here! Everyone wish her well on her interview. This is an important step for her, for us.
Kodak PalmPix Decoder [site]
- And now it’s Kodak who may enter the ranks of those that I may have to educate about Open Source… There was an interesting discussion I had with them at last year’s Palmsource seminar about their “proprietary” image storage format. They had some very “not nice” things to say to me when I offered them several profitable opportunities for collaboration on a desktop conduit for Linux.
Palmsource was postponed this year, and will be adjourning again in February. You can bet if I’m still in the area, I’ll be in strict attendance.
Good work on the decoder Angus and everyone else! Version control and robust updates are next…
Driving Sans Musicas
I’ve been thinking about getting a new radio for my truck since my boom box was stolen from the front seat. The stock radio in the dash is really old, and drops out from time to time going over heavy bumps. It only gets a few stations… and I think its time to get a proper deck installed. I know there are a lot of places that carry my favorite brand, but who knows if they’ll fit in a truck that is 14 years old. I should ask my girlfriend what she thinks I should do…
Long, long projects
- Another huge deliverable has been completed, after some slight “dragging on” of the expectations. Huge weight lifted.
Seafood Proxies
- I’ve been playing with a reverse-squid proxy underneath Apache, and have had nothing but trouble. As rasmus puts it so well today,
“…computers don’t like you…”
Touche.
A parting thought I had, given we’re all going through similar times these days in our industry:
“…do you choose to just bite the bullet and make the decision yourself and
suffer the unknown, or have the decision made for you…”
A new Plucker Release
Plucker 1.1.13 release
- Not much to report, but we’ve released Plucker 1.1.13 today. Animated tutorials, Daily Dose, and some other things are coming.
Translators needed
So far, we have Czech,
Danish,
Deutsch,
English,
Faeroese,
Français,
Italiano,
Japanese,
Polska,
and Simplified
Chinese versions. We could use an Español version, and others as well.
jacobo, did you want to do a Galacian
translation for us?
Hardware Death
- Laptop drive died, only 6 months old. Replaced with 48gb laptop drive (which, oddly enough, doesn’t do DMA, blecch) for only a mere $616.00 USD. This is my 4th drive in less than 2 years on these Thinkpads, and my third physical Thinkpad. I think
something’s wrong in their controller.
Linuxcare Bootable Toolbox
- Found, documented, and closed some more bugs in our LBT
today. A new release should arrive soon.
Work
- Work is… “confusing” of late.
Miscellaneous
- Being taken advantage of, and being taken for granted, sucks, and no amount of money or “dinners” can compensate for the damage that has already been done.
More on this as news develops… the East Coast is calling me, and I’m torn between two coasts.
Somthing Fishy This Way Comes
Mon Sep 24 21:14:35 PDT 2001
There’s something. My gut is never wrong. Mark this date. Something tomorrow.