Seems that I should be spelling France with the big F from now on.

Well, I have been busy. Busy looking for a new job.

Have been on overhead for most of 4 months now. Part of that was training for "the Orient", until the prime contractor did a phone interview with me and decided they did not want to use me.

That was a huge surprise to everybody from the engineers who build and maintain the surveillance system to the upper management. They are all pissed at Raytheon. Mostly because Raytheon had my resume for two months and everything was fine enough for me to make preparations to go (moved the 'hybrid' Charger to Tennessee, dental work, notes from doctor and dentist, lined up someone to use my condo while I am away, etc.). Another reason my management is pissed is that the interview had almost no questions about the required skills, everything was about higher level "desired" skills.

They are doing their best to take care of me and I have never seen a response like this from any other employer I have worked for. My resume is being passed all over the company and people are giving me contacts with other firms, like SAIC, Northrop, SRA and KBR. Still nothing solid yet.

The two most promising things to date came up this week. It looks like we either won or are trying to win the project I used to work on, for 7 years, at a previous firm. Two of the job descriptions were my job description from back then. The manager gets back in town Friday.

Another possibility was just brought to me, working in "the Orient" doing really kewell stuff with radios on vehicles. Sounds like custom fabrication work on top of the usual "fancy stereo install" stuff. Configuration management too. No body work that I know of, but I am sure there will be the possibility :) Idunno, that one is sounding too cool to believe. Database geeking, wrench turning, wire splicing, metal bending and everything. Won't get word until mid-next week :(

Tried to post this at Multiply in the Circular Refuge Group, but that verification thingie is not working today.

It's not every day that you get someone from Google showing up to check on the spreadsheet you shared out using the Google Documents site. But that's exactly what happened after I posted such a spreadsheet in a Slashdot comment and accidentally created an impromptu chat room.

Someone over on Google must have been curious about all those server spikes, because a viewer with the address of google@google.com showed up shortly after the user traffic peaked. In fact, I had never expected that the discussion feature of the spreadsheet would attract so much attention. I figured that people would simply look at the sheet and discuss it on Slashdot. Perhaps even make a copy, modify it, and share it out.

So what could I do when the Google lurker was noticed? Quickly yank the spreadsheet from the public eye? Close my account and hope Google never traces it back to me? No, I went for hollering out an apology for the Slashdotting over the aforementioned discussion feature. This must have satisfied the lurker, because he then exited the sheet without saying so much as a word.

Then again last night, the sheet received a chat from a person with the gmail name of "google". The message was simply, "A chat room through the spreadsheet discussion? Who would have thought?"

While there's no concrete proof that these users were indeed from Google, it does seems likely given how Google tends to control its name inside its own system. Thus I have to wonder, will there be any repercussions from this? Will Slashdoters regularly create impromptu chat rooms with spreadsheets? Will Google use this as an example of how well their collaboration features work? Or will the whole thing simply blow over?

Who knows? But I can say that this little spreadsheet gone haywire was a fun experiment. And if we want to keep Google on its toes, we can always do it again!

I have to admit, I think I owe Miguel de Icaza an apology. When we last butt heads, I believe I accused him of choosing .NET over the existing Java projects out of a case of "Not Invented Here" syndrome. And after the Silverlight announcement (which he wants to name fad-da daw'), I was even starting to buy into the idea that he might be a blind Microsoft follower.

But after spending a few days with Mono, I have changed my mind. It is quite obvious to anyone using the platform that the Mono team is not in bed with Microsoft. In fact, it would seem that the Mono team is explicitly trying to warn you away from .NET technology. Otherwise, why would they make it SO GODDAMN HARD TO DEVELOP FOR?

Excuse my outburst, but I'm just about at my wits end. Allow me to explain.

The whole thing started when I was working on a side project that required ASP.NET. As much as I might want to get around this requirement, it was non-negotiable. So, I looked into Mono and found that they had a special development server capable of running ASP.NET pages. I thought, "Great! Now I can develop on my Mac on the go!"

So I downloaded the Mono for OS X package and installed it. It compiled the requisite "Hello World" program with no issues. (Though it spat out Hello.exe for a binary. WTF?) The XSP server also ran a simple ASP.NET page without any problems. Great! Now all I needed was some documentation.

Before I get to that part, however, let me take a moment and address Microsoft documentation. I've heard plenty of programmers beam about how wonderful Microsoft documentation is, and how they absolutely love Microsoft documentation. If they had it their way, every program would have Microsoft documentation. Personally, I've always wondered what these people are smoking.

My experience has been that Microsoft documentation is poorly organized, lacking in detail, designed to run you around in circles, and packaged in a proprietary format that makes it non-portable and generally quite useless. The only positives to Microsoft documentation is that their docs are very pretty to look at and there is a LOT of it. (Which is what happens when you try to document every possible use rather than how to use the technology.)

Back to my story. Here I am thinking that I will simply download an HTML class reference and be about my business. After all, I'm an experienced programmer. Just tell me the library calls and I'll be good to go.

A quick check of the official Mono site produced the necessary HTML documentation. But only online. Nowhere could I find a download that I could take with me. The more I looked, the more I realized that the Mono folks want you to use a GTK# MonoDoc Browser. Oooook....

MonoDoc browser is (unsurprisingly) not shipped with the Mac OS X Mono package. So I went and downloaded the only package available: The sources. Of course, the MonoDoc browser requires GTK#, so I download those sources as well. It's all cross-platform code, so it should be easy to compile, right? *sigh*

When I untarred the source archives, what do I find? Something incredibly simple and reliable like ANT? Nope. The same old configure/make scripts that have been giving me nightmares for the last decade or so. No problem. I can do this. It's CLR code, so it MUST be a simple compile, right?

First thing that happens is that the configure script can't find Mono. Wait, what? How can it not find mono? It's in the path! After some checking around, I find that the build script is using pkg-config and pkg-config doesn't know about mono. Ok, so I create a mono.pc file in the /usr/lib/pkgconfig directory. Still can't find it. I move the mono.pc to /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig. Still can't find it. I set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH to the folder containing mono.pc. STILL CAN'T FIND IT!

As you can imagine, my blood pressure is getting dangerously high at this point.

I go back to the configure scripts to see if I can simply route around the check. No, it's pretty integral. But I do manage to find that the pkg-config it's pulling is an older version in /sw/bin. Mono apparently installed its own copy in /usr/bin. Ok, I can see that. So I switch the path around (making certain it's exported to the environment) so that /usr/bin will get checked first. It still finds the older copy. I struggle with it a bit more. It still finds the old copy. Finally, I rename the older pkg-config to pkg-config.old.

Eureka! It finds mono! Just to fail on GTK+!

Wait... what?

According to the configure script I don't have GTK+ or Pango. Yet I know they're both installed because of a few other OSS apps I compiled a while back. Finally, I give up. This is a dead end that's already sapped too many hours of my time. The craptacular Linux build process bests me again.

Let's try another tack, shall we? The mono package contained a pre-compiled (thank God) tool called monodocs2html.exe. All I need to do is feed the documentation sources into the tool, and voila! Instant HTML docs! Or so I hoped.

Unfortunately, I couldn't make heads or tails of the process. The documentation on generating documentation seems nice and all, but is a bit difficult to understand without some experience with the platform. And since I can't get any documentation on how to use the platform, I'm kind of stuck with a catch-22 there.

In theory, I just point the tool at the "assembled" documentation and it works. In practice, it keeps telling me that I need index.xml. Yet there's no index.xml anywhere in the lib/monodoc/sources directory. Not even inside the Mono.zip file. Rats, foiled again!

At this point I've resigned myself to wearing the ball and chain of an ethernet cable. After all, why would anyone possibly want to take HTML documentation on the go? Not that I've been too impressed in the online docs themselves. In Java, you tend to document API methods as you go. But with Mono, they separate out the docs from the sources, ensuring that no one ever documents anything! Documentation is handled entirely by online volunteers in a Wiki-like fashion, leading to a great deal of the library being documented with "Documentation for this section has not yet been entered."

So here I am now. My laptop useless in the face of such incredible resistance to using Mono. My blood pressure at all time highs. My patience long ago exhausted. For an instant, Google gives me hope that someone else has shared their generated docs! Yet it's nothing more than an apparition of a carrot dangling in the air as if to mock me.

I really do owe Miguel an apology. His team has been making wonderful strides in ensuring that the platform is completely inaccessible to new users. Thanks, man! We always knew you were secretly anti-Microsoft.

So, the parody song Barack the Magic Negro is called "much more offensive to Al Sharpton than to Obama" by The New Republic. How something full of Sharpton quotes, which are in perfect context, can be called "offensive" to the person who said them is ridiculous. Perhaps embarrassing, but not offensive.

The song is a collection of quotes from Leftist 'journalists', including the title that came from this David Ehrenstein piece: Obama the 'Magic Negro' The Illinois senator lends himself to white America's idealized, less-than-real black man.

Somehow, not one word about how the song is a collection of quotes by Leftist writers and activists made it into The Plank post, even though a Leftist 'blogger's assessment leads Eve Fairbanks' hit piece and he fairbanksed all over it.

None of the commentors seem to be aware of the fact that the song is a collection of Leftist quotes too, but moste of them have the typical Leftoid knee-jerk reaction.

Okay, I am now on Multiply as GMontag. Stop by and say hi so I can find yous guyz ovah der.

All of my Republican debate comments are over here, complete with horrid typing and spelling.

Check out David Weigel's reporting at the top and in the previous story too.

Not sure to me that this really counts as "censorship" at least to the extent of the examples given by Wired .

One soldier took down pictures of how well armor stood up to improvised bombs; a military spouse erased personal information from her site -- including "dates of deployment, photos of the family, the date their next child is expected, the date of the baby shower and where the family lives," said Army spokesman Gordon Van Fleet.

Let's see here . . . This guy actually thought that armor capabilities were just fine to broadcast to anybody? They weren't when I was a 'kid'. Same with effectiveness of our munitions.

They really thought that deployment dates were fine for any Joe-blow to publish rather than only being announced through official channels? When did that ignorance creep in as being okay?

As for all of that other info, it is usually bad to toss that all over the place and if the reasons are not obvious then I am not bright enough to begin explaining it here.

Perhaps if the military adopted the B. Hussein Obama method of information control the folks aw Wired would be a little happier?

Hat tip to reason online.

More proof that they are a bunch of wackjobs.

One of the stupidest freaking things I have seen in my neighborhood to date.

Parked near Caribu Coffee was a silly little Prius with the Maryland tag of "MRLOGIC".

Well, maybe not that personal, but kinda.

I have been sitting on overhead for several weeks now. Was approached about a new job in "the Orient" (yes GekoFood, same effort you passed on) and was sent for initial training on the surveillance system, software installation, etc. Waiting to go get similar training from the prime contractor.

Moved the 'hybrid' Charger to mom's garage in TN. Cleaned up condo a bit (needs a lot more) so that my neighbor's home health care helper can live here while I am in "the Orient".

Was supposed to leave before now, for training in Georgia, then off to "the Orient".

So, why am I still sitting around Crystal City re-studying the same manuals and surfing the world-wide-interweb?

THE STUPID CONGRESS WILL NOT PASS A PROPER SUPLIMENTAL FOR THE PRESIDENT TO SIGN! Apparently this work cannot start under a continuing resolution, so the Congress is holding me up from the most "exciting" job I have been offered in ages, and the pay ain't bad neither. They can't even give me an offer letter until there is a new supplemental.

UGH!

HO HO HO, MERRY IMUS! by Ann Coulter April 11, 2007

It's not the words, it's the context.

Note: I still reserve my right to speak of all of france and ireland in any nasty way I wish.

I am all for the "put your money where your mouth is" aproach to dealing with people who want the rest of us to spend by their rules, but if this suggestion comes true I don't know how I could survive.

While Pudge and I disagree on what sort of show Don Imus pretended to have, a frequent guest of the Imus in the Morning Show, N.J. Gov. Jon Corzine, is recovering from injuries he sustained during an vehicle accident en route to a meeting with Imus and the Rutgers basketball team.

Corzine was riding in the front passenger seat in his two-car motorcade's sports utility vehicle around 6 p.m. EDT when a white pickup truck swerved to avoid a red pickup truck on the Garden State Parkway, authorities said. The red pickup had corrected itself after driving onto the right shoulder, said State Police Superintendent Rick Fuentes.

Later reports confirmed that the Governor was not wearing his seat belt.

Right now they are starting an episode of "Pimp My Ride" with a 1965 Thunderbird. I am way not a ford guy (I really think they are from france) but it is a cool body and in well enough shape for a restore.

5 min. into the show (first I have seen) it is way better than that "Unique Whips" crap show.