George Carlin was right, life should go backwards. It should end with 9 months in the womb, and the grand finale being an orgasm. But it isn't.

Live life like it's the only one you have. Never say you are bored, before you do, get up and improve your life. Indifference is what makes being old so sad. When you look back a few years back and realize all the time you wasted, your life flashes before your eyes. That isn't what I want, and I doubt it is what you want. It's like what they say, "Nobody says they want to be a junky when they grow up."

I've wasted enough time in my life, and I hate every minute I did. I'm in a race to finish this software to start a company before I find a job. The only thing I can think of is that I should have done this when I was 21. Or 20.

The reality is that I couldn't do it then, because I had to waste that time to learn the lessons that make this time a possible success.

Mandrake really did a great job making it "User Friendly" -- and I think this is probably the best introduction distro to date. The upsetting part was rebooting and being met with a very fucked up KDE desktop. Somehow, the upgrade decided it wanted to mess my entire desktop up. Woo.

So, I fixed that pretty quickly and am running Mozilla 1.4. The font support in Mozilla 1.4 (I'm assuming is using GTK2) is great, and nice and anti-aliased. It looks very clean, and so far all my other "custom" builds are working flawlessly. I'm running Gimp-unstable, and that was a bit of a pain in the ass running under Mandrake 9.1.

So, if you are a Mandrake user you should definitely go ahead and upgrade.

This shit is fun!

You remember that old adage that gets told, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."? I think we need a bit of a revision for that statement.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, become recruiters.

I just got finished meeting with my agent at my contracting firm. Well, that was what I thought. She went on to Permanent Placement, and I was going to meet with her and her replacement. Except I met with her replacements replacement, and some woman from Cupertino, California.

I have an appointment at 3:30. In my world, an appointment at 3:30 means that I show up at 3:25 and you have me in an office no later than 3:32. Unless you have "M.D." after your name this is what I expect. If I pull in six figures of revenue for your company, I expect there to be coffee and pastries waiting for me. At 3:40, my brain was contemplating what the hell happened to this place.

At 3:43 my tetris game (Thank you modern cellphone) was interrupted by Steve. I would protect the innocent, if there were any. At which point, I get brought into a conference room where they talk about my previous job and where I want to go. My choices are this small ass town in Oregon or Vegas. Vegas, Baby. For less than what I make now. Coding PHP. No offense to the PHP coders around here, but I don't want to make a living pretending I can use references.

I thought their job was to give me jobs. I make them money, and I get some of that. That's the game, and they don't know how to play it. So, at about 3:51 I was on my way to the car shaking my head and chuckling at them. They'll still be in business, because the people they talk to don't have any idea they're stupid.

There are certain questions that can prove one to be completely out of their depth. While asking me about my work, I said I did quite a bit of Perl code for client/server communication and some web applications. He then asked, "Oh, so did you use Tomcat for your perl web applications?"

How the fuck is this monkey going to get me a job? "So, tell me again how it is you fed the bananas monkeys?"
"Sorry, Steve, I feed bananas to monkeys."
"Ooooohhhh."

My project just got killed. It's not a big surprise that it got killed, but the manner of killing was quite a surprise. The CEO is an absolute dick, and an idiot at that. He can't manage his way out of a wet paper bag, much less a company.

The whole run down is that we had a very important deadline to meet. In August. I got my piece done, which was the end user software (and it's nice... I'm really bummed it wont see the light of day.) The people who are actually running the business are also idiots. This entire business is ran by idiots, but it's a child company. I sort of contract for the idiots, they pay my wages and I do work for both the parent and them.

Well, not anymore. The child company CEO has now ceased any further money going into the project which means that all contractors are now going bye bye. So, they don't get the "desperately needed" new software interface because I've been hacking on it while waiting for the data to get mostly correct. I made a huge change and am halfway through fixing it, and they cut it. The irony in that is really amusing.

I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do. I may sell my car and live off the money from that and try to start my company up full time. I may find a management position (almost 7 years in the industry coding now... I think I'm about ripe) or I may just do more code monkeying.

I'm really sad to see this project go, it was a really important project to me and I was really happy to work on it. Above all, a lot of the people I worked with were really great people (not the idiots in the child company, but in the parent company.) I'm going to really miss all of them.

It's been a shitty Friday morning, but I saw it coming for a long time now (Since July) so it's not a big surprise. This is the first time I've gotten my contract cut, so it's an interesting feeling. I was at a company until the last of it's employees walked out the door, and I have a feeling this company will be doing the same. It's a shame, because with the right leadership they could have done some great things.

The dot com bubble isn't completely dead.

The long awaited (not really, nobody was using 0.9) MagicBox release is ready to roll. I just need to package it and start writing the documentation.

If you like or are forced to write web-applications, this software is for you.

If you hate maintaining templates, and versioning, this software is for you.

If you hate managing database connections, and stored procedures, this software is for you!

Download in the next 10 minutes and we'll throw in a free sample configuration file! A 1 kilobyte value!

I'm a bit overjoyed about seeing this go. It's been a pretty long journey to get here, with everything working smoothly and efficiently. Fighting with template engines and looking at other template engines to see how they work, and then crafting our own extensible template engine. It's been a fun project, and I'm glad to have something really usable come out of it. Even though I'm labeling this as an RC1 I still have to go through and work the logging out. So, that will change for RC2 but I want to get some people testing the core functions.

When I get home tonight I will write up a tutorial, installation guide, development guide, template usage guide.. and ... well, shit, that's a lot of guides. I'll probably type out a page or two to get people started and show some examples.

Hopefully I can get a few people testing it and using it, because it really does work well. If anybody here is interested, I will provide some free AIM consulting to get you going with it.

Software Rundown
MagicBox is a mod_perl framework that transparently handles object caching, database caching, session management, and template management. It provides a flexible and extensible template interface, as well as a "Data Broker" interface for working with the database. You can even modify the database usage to work with multiple databases with different query sets very easily just by storing SQL files in a directory.

It traverses URLs like Object pathways, instead of actual files. If you have a module called, "Foo" that is your default you can access it by $ROOT/Foo or $ROOT/, as well as $ROOT/Anything/You/Want. Unless you have a module Anything.pm in your module path. Or if you have a function called Anything in your Foo.pm module. Get it? Hopefully, because these docs suck.

I'll package it up over tonight as much as I can, hopefully I'll get it all done.

Cheers!

I wrote a response to this jackass, Ed Stroligo, who wrote a nice little article.
You can read it here.

It is my first response, I hope you would enjoy it!

Updated - Someone with the name of "Stroligo" has responded. Whether it's him or not remains to be proven, but the counter points he has presented aren't exactly bullet-proof to say the least. I'll be curious to see how it goes.

Here's a link to his response.

Luckily the failure has to do with hardware, and not my idiocy. After the SSL shit I've been back to working on mod_perl and MagicBox. The new version of MagicBox impelements a new template engine, a data broker engine, as well as a revamped object system. The only thing that is the same is the session management. I'm also writing more documentation so people can actually use it. Woo.

Girlfriends laptop fizzled out during an upgrade to Mdk9.1. I think the hard drive was bad, and we just hadn't rebooted nor really used it in a long time. So, I gave her my laptop (which sucks, and I feel bad) to use. Gnome was running about 3 times faster than KDE so it's using Gnome right now. As long as she can type in Japanese and use Mozilla she's happy, so it all works out. I've gotten the approval to get a PowerBook to replace it after we get back from Japan. My printer finally printed something in the way it was supposed to. It's working great off of my machine, but this isn't exactly the best solution as I reboot into Windows (BF1942, and VPN access) so it'll be unavailable during those times. Oh well, maybe I'll mess with it under Gentoo a bit more.

The nerdfarm.org server died during a "routine upgrade." Colo people are (hopefully) diligently working on resolving the issues. Not sure when it will be back up again, but hopefully soon. Very soon. Without me losing any data.

I played Clue in Japanese on Saturday night. It's an interesting game in Japanese, and I won. It was Miss Scarlet, in the Billiard Room, with the Revolver. I drank a lot of Sake, but didn't get drunk. That is an irritating event. It was a good weekend, though, even admist all the hardware failures. Had a decent time with some friends on Saturday (See, I'm not antisocial) and got some good code done. Now I just need nerdfarm.org to go back up so I can start writing the nerdfarm code.

Player Vs. Player and Penny Arcade are having a good ol' fashioned zing-fest. It's worthy to check out, and it's pretty entertaining. I hope it continues for a few days. I would like to take this moment to say how grateful I am this isn't with Megatokyo or anything because Fred would just piss in his blog and not post a comic, or post a filler about a depressed robotic girl who is in love with a pedophile.

I just thought I'd get in on the action.

Seriously, not one of you motherfuckers can implement it to standard and correctly. I have not encountered any of the same results amongst 3 different browsers, and get different outputs on 2 different linux distros and Solaris. What the fuck happened to this?

Is TLS going to be this way, too? Where it takes a fucking mind-reader to understand how to use the libraries that suck anyway. Their error reporting is next to non-existent, and it isn't even threadsafe? Seriously, what the fuck were you guys doing? They woke up out of their cataonia and decided they were going to write a fucked up OpenSSL library that only works if you are apparently one of their fucking developers. I bought the O'Reilly OpenSSL book, and it got me jack and shit. Jack still is in town and he's kicking me in the nuts.

It's a fucking communication protocol, why is that so fucking hard? It even has an RFC! Gee, Bob, I don't think we should follow the RFC because it will make our fucking webbrowser more cool! The sheer amount of bullshit that goes into coding an SSL application is astounding. Isn't this two-thousand-fucking-three? We've been dealing with this whole "internet" thing for a long enough time we shouldn't be dealing with monkey fucking like this. Has it really taken so damned long to get a fucking standard into usable code? SSL v3 was standardized in 1996! You've had almost 10 years to make it not suck! What the fuck is wrong with all of you people?

I'd like to say sometimes... I'm having some serious issues trying to create a nice clean circle. If only I could design all my UIs using squares.

I am a fucking retard magnet. I see too many stupid ass people doing the dumbest things you can ever imagine a person doing for it to be a coincidence. Oh wait, that's what a coincidence is! Fuck you, too.

Luckily this time when I left the confines of my office or house it was purely humorous and not dangerous stupidity. And people wonder why I don't like going out...

This is frustrating me to no end. CUPS is crashing, and Michael Sweet insists that the fact it isn't printing has nothing to do with CUPS and won't actually read the bug report. So, fuck him.

I'm sorry, but when software responds with, "server-error-internal-error" while using their GUI, it's a fucking bug in your software. Not Epsons. Not foomatic. Not gimp-print. And you charge money for this shit. I used to have a high opinion of Michael Sweet, years ago in the FLTK days. Now I think he should just be a Slashdot editor.

Anyway, I got this printer. Epson StylusPhoto 925. My mom traded me for my HP inkjet, because she hates it. I can't imagine why... oh yeah, I can. The thing is fucking impossible to work with. Apparently even under Windows, which is why she traded me. Ironically, she gave me my previous printer for helping her out with her computers. I'm not the type of guy who has printers, but the GF is the type of girl who needs printers. I suppose she is worth it.

I plug it into my Vaio that runs Mandrake, and bam, out of the box it works and prints a test page. The Gentoo box (bench-built) recognizes it, configures it, and when I try to print somewhere between CUPS and the printer, the process dies. This is annoying me to no end. Especially when I post a bug report about CUPS not working (with either printer driver.. that sounds a touch suspicious to me) and get a rude response back. Well, fuck Mr. Sweet and his Easy Software. Sluts, the both of them.

Any print gurus, I will gladly send you pictures of my girlfriend naked* if you can get this shit working. Right now I'm installing KDE on the gentoo server just so I can use their print configuration tool because it fucking works. Unlike your shit, Mr. Sweet. And they don't charge for it. (And yes, if CUPS could actually be configured, I would take issue with foomatic/gimp-print/Epson drivers, but as I can't get to the printer configuration I blame CUPS first.)

* Not actually my girlfriend, but they all look the same anyway.

I was just thinking about something, and decided to step on Em's toes.

I am a:

1. Programmer, Professional.
2. Programmer, Student/Intern
3. System Admin
4. Network Admin
5. Tech. Writer
6. QA
7. Tech Support
8. Customer Service
9. Other.

This is for you sebi, and anybody else.

http://www.xboxgw.com/

I don't think it has any game finder services, but I haven't actually downloaded it and checked it out. It is being ported on Mac OSX, so hopefully that'll be done soon. Since they don't have source, they're fucking dorks, but maybe if everybody sends them an email telling them to GPL it, they will.

What's the point in releasing free software without GPL'ing it? That's like downloading porn movie and not masturbating.