random neuron misfires

Time

It’s time to get out of the cube and into the Big Blue Room and go biking, camping, snowboarding, running, whatever. Next weekend will definitely be fun.

There are rougly three aspects to my life:

• Work
• Play
• Family (except that I’m not married and have no children, and “girlfriend” might be somewhere between “Play” and “Family”

Her birthday is coming up. We’ve missed too many holidays apart, so I’ll try to do what I can to make this one special, given unbelievably constrained funds at the present time. At least my round-trip tickets from one coast to the other on 10 days notice (3,051 miles) were $200.00, saving $1206.25 on the full fare. Thanks to Priceline, of course.

Project Roundup

Well, it looks like the new Plucker website is a success so far. Still some small minor tweaks to do, but overall, it’s been doing well. 11,997 hits on it’s first night, nearly 13,000 the next day, and pretty stable on the third day.

Don’t forget to help out with the Plucker Artwork Contest. We need some T-Shirt ideas. Templates are available on the site, and I’ll be putting up everyone’s ideas there for everyone to see.

Oh, and go play in the Plucker Samples Section. I need some more ideas, content, stories, HOWTOs, etc. Just send them to me directly.

I also managed to squeak out a few more patches into pilot-link, and get a release of pre5 on the website. Download it if you’re using 0.9.3 and use this for now until the final version is released. Just a few more additions to the code, and I’m going to cut it, if there’s no major breakage. It fixes a lot of problems people have had, and it’s going to be a mandatory upgrade when it’s released.

The CVS Seminar I am going to be giving at the offices seems to have grown in interest, and now it may be turned into a University Course to deliver to partners. Doesn’t matter either way to me, since I’ll be retaining the rights to the material, so it comes with me. This also means I can turn it into a book. There’s really no good in-depth books out there on CVS, including this one and this
one. Depressing. I’m going to try to fix that.

Looks like there are some other new projects coming my way. I just hope I’m given the time and flexibility to dig into them. Lots of new chewy ideas, just need to start coding away and implementing them.

“How do you eat an elephant?”

More Public Speaking

Looks like I’m going to be flying around again speaking at CLIQ, the Colorado Linux Info Quest. I’ve never been on a panel before, so this should be interesting. I’ll be on the panel with Havoc Pennington, Andy Hertzfeld of Eazel, and others.

Sounds like fun.

Of course I’m terrified.

I’ve never done slides or a presentation on pilot-link before. Time to get cracking!

At least I can use my iPAQ now to remotely control my MagicPoint presentation on my laptop over 802.11 wireless. Whee! The joys of geek toys!

Why do people even use Microsoft products anymore, really. I mean with all the instability, patches, and blatently open security holes in it. Even PowerPoint has security holes now… How did that even get past QA?

We need a “VBA Viruses For Dummies” or “Writing Successful Microsoft Viruses in 24 Hours” book on the open market. Any takers?

I have to laugh though, I was in my local CompUSA recently, and someone was commenting on my iPAQ running linux, and my ThinkGeek ultra-spiffy perl t-shirt, and this guy says:

(him) “Why don’t you run Windows, it’s so much better than that Linux stuff”

(me) “Why do I need Windows, I already have a Playstation…”

(him) <blank stare>

(me) “In a few years, when their OS gets to the point where it actually becomes useful, though highly unlikely, I might consider it, but that’s probably 5-10 years off, and I have work to do now. I can do exponentially more things with Linux as it existed a year ago than I can with Windows today.”

(me) <walks away>

Picture seeing this tall, ominous-looking person covered in tattoos saying this to “Joe User(tm)” in a CompUSA. It’s always funny when it happens.

Ok, that’s enough for now.

2:11AM PST

Time to get some food, and get some more code cranked out before I have to roll back into the cube at 7:00AM PST.

I hate driving.

I hate my truck.

I held my first-ever BOF on Group/Shared Calendaring under linux and the State of Affairs. Looks like there’s a lot of really neat stuff to work on here. We’re in the beginning stages of stitching it all together (as is everyone else). My not-even-complete slides are here (there are only 4 of them for now). I’ll be updating them as the weeks roll by. The next BOF we have will be externally open to the public and we’ll provide a Sprint dial-in line for those who want to join in.

I have several more talks to give, both internal and externally. I’m still working out the hundreds of slides for my CVS talk at the main Linuxcare offices. It was going to be a full 8-hour session, but now I think I’m going to split it into two days of four hours each, perhaps with some ‘homework’ on the first day for those in attendance.

Next talk is on the migration of Windows Applications and Data Interchange to Linux. It should get some people stuck in the mud at work to think about running a proper OS. Windows users are propagating, and it has to stop.

My LWE proposal is in for August’s Linuxworld Expo at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It’ll be a shortened version of my Secure CVS for Distributed Development Projects talk that I’m giving at work

Struggles

My life is rife with uncertainty…
…and I do not like it.

I’d like to know what’s going on with [CENSORED]

I will not lose her, and everything else in my life, most of all my sanity, for this.

BBC

schoen, not to worry. The BBC will survive, and we will manage through these resource-constrained times. We just need some more time to focus. I seem to be so distracted with a million things, I’m whittling them down one by one.

“Nibbled to death by ducks…”

I need a sense of accomplishment.

Depression crawls closer.

I must be strong.

robk, you may want to take a look at OpenFlock and gctp. We’ve been working on it as much as we can “Find Time(tm)”, and I’m going to be responsible for the Palm-resident port of the OpenFlock code. You can see a screenshot here and my attempt at a group meeting icon here.

rasmus, I’ve tamed the J-Pilot exploit. Pretty easy fix. We’re talking about applying an interesting model to network and group sync’s now in the linux space. Much more to come. You know how I feel about security anyway…

johnm put on a good talk about GCC on the final day of PalmSource 2000. My only wish was that tools like par and the interoperability between the m68k gdb and gcc were touched on. Good stuff though.

On the last day of PalmSource 2000, I was able to meet some more interesting people. I met Dan Royea who is helping bring out the third edition of PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide from O’Reilly. I met Keith Rollin, author and present maintainer of POSE at his incredibly informative talk on the Emulator. I managed to meet Steve S., who makes Datastick.

I passed him some of my references at Perkin Elmer to help him productize this device. I may want to talk to him about some residuals on it for those valuable references. He’s had some trouble with getting to the right person, and thanks to my previous employer, I’ve actually sat down with the “Top 5” at that company for dinner. If it works out for Steve, I might want some “credit”. Looks like a great use of the Palm© device in any case. I was able to rant some more about AvantGo and some issues. Apparently he’s worked for them over the summer. Great. Maybe they’ll get
the word.

The weirdest thing is that we’d be talking in a circle in the hall or something, and people would walk by and see your name badge, then walk over and say “Hey, it’s glad to finally meet you!”, and I have no idea who these people introducing themselves to me were. Oddly surreal. I guess when you bury yourself into so many mailing lists over the years, people learn to remember your name.

What is with these women. It started Friday AM at PalmSource 2000 with one of the “door checkers” talking tattoos and piercings with me, then about college, then… Friday PM it’s the Pizzaria Uno waitress. AAHHH! I hope this isn’t going to be a point of conflict in the near future.

So now I’m working on cleaning up the Plucker homepage. I tried to get a shorter url going, since

plucker.com and friends was already registered. I may end up doing it in static html to prepare for a heavy test of the Slashdot Effect as we announce it on Freshmeat and PalmGear. I’ve been toying around the idea of a banner too, and doing some t-shirt sales from the website, so we can finally get some compensation to these developers who’ve worked so hard on this over the years. Once that onslaught is over, and we get some more bandwidth, the page will be converted over to phpNUKE. I like the ability to theme and layout the content separate from presentation. Nice.

More to do…

Plucker

• Plucker Web Engine
• Plucker Desktop Buddy
• The email gateway is 90% complete. That’s going to be the coolest thing.
• The perl spider has to be finished. I really wish others could jump on and help me with this. My perl is quite limited where it concerns parsing web content and dealing with pack() with binary data formats.
• Once these things are done, I can get back to actually putting code back into the application space itself. Too long away from it.

pilot-link

• 0.9.5 release
• Redocumentation, man pages, autoconfiscate it
• Work on the 1.0 roadmap
• Merge that ugly code base, and decrease the number of required binaries.
• Lay out a conduit SDK for pilot-link development
• Anyone that can help me bite into the TODO list, please do.

Home Life

• Move her over here. No more wondering.
• Relocate closer to the city. This apartment is killing me.
• Legal matters resolved re: relocation from CT to CA.

Work

• Enthusiasm. Have to… stay… focused… I can’t keep taking it personally when people quit and leave. This is not my fault, and I will not pick up their lingering work. I can’t kill myself for this.

Enough for now. I have to get back to hackery.