Am now working on implenting a IMA algorithim for Nethawk, www.nethawk.fi, taking over the pile of crud left behind by our supposed expert in embedded programming. Before getting anywhere in the code you first have to decode the mess that is the C++ code nestled within those .c files, yeap, C++ code, complete with this pointer (pTHIS) dereferencing before any function is called. Every structure declaration, which are supposed to be objects, even comes with its own constructors and destructors which are set up when you explicitly call the "objects" initialize function. Gah! So tracing execution is a job of tracking down every "virtual" method invokation and trying to remember just what exactly pTHIS is actually pointing to. It all would have made sense if we had been writing C++ for a C++ compiler, but alas, our code base is still entirely in C. As a hardware company, initially most of the code was written by firmware engineers who didn't give the software more then a cursory attempt, so we're backlogged with a bunch of dead wood.

Am burying myself in my work to put the pain of my ~L leaving for home. I find it helps me keep my mind off her, which helps, because otherwise it just makes me real sad. I have so much of my life intertwined with her, it's like loosing a part of me. :( sigh...hope she is well.

EDIT : I have COMPLETELY finished the MSc, all corrections accounted for and approved by the supervisor :) So very happy, at least in that regard. I just have to send it off to printery and send it off to the university. I have so much of that to thank for ~L's persistance in rewriting my pseudo-english.

Laterz, back to work, J.

Well, it's official, ~L and I have parted ways. What? I hear you say, the last I heard she was arriving in a few days. Well yes, she arrived, and it was great! I loved spending time with her, however things started to go south as she grew to understand our different views on the immediate future.

EDIT: Sorry babe, I love u sweety and I miss u so very much. :(

I'll post more about how it all came to be, but for the moment, I'm back at Massey doing a few things. Laura is in Seattle looking for another job and passing the time away working as a paralegal at BLG. BLG is on, I think, the 45th floor of the Bank of America Tower. Trust me, there are some pretty awesome views from that height.

Better get back to it, I have singing, for the first time in ages, with Catherine at the 6pm mass. According to Hoos I have to much face, sigh, to much good food. Will be looking to loose 5-10lbs before Xmas.

Bye, J.

This has got to be the worst day of my short life in Hamilton. Working on thesis corrections! sigh. I think I pretty much ran out every excuse I could think of not to go back to this bound slice of hell, but today I bit the bullet, got my thesis out and started working through the corrections. Most of em are stupid little errors, I'll be expanding a bit on some stuff that came clear to me after I had submitted the thing, when I was cleaning up the implentation. I gota say this is about the worst possible way to conduct research, submit the thesis before finishing the implementation. If I get round to doing a PhD, a lot of things need to get better. Sloppy thought processes have no place for one! And grammar needs to be corrected throughout the process of compiling a large document.

I did myself a diservice, cause it's actually a rather large body of work that really didn't get the treatment it diserved, mostly from my super, who shall remain nameless. Needless to say I think I would have got a much better product out the door if we had organized things. I'm also to blame in this, I prooved stubborn about researching and learning about seemingly *everything* before sitting down and writing anything, which proved ultimately to be the wrong way to approach things. I became bogged down in things that had no direct bearing on my work and included snips and bits and pieces of information that had no real relation to what I was working on, purely because after spending so much time on it I wanted to include it, no matter what!

Anywayz, I think I'll do a much better job cleaning this up and including some information which didn't make the first cut.

Hopefully when ~L arrives she can keep me motivated somewhat, though I don't want to keep her first weeks in NZ, in the office with me!

Had a nice lunch with my french flatmate and some her french/chinese/american friends from the lab she works at. We went to a Chinese restuarant for yum cha! which worked out rather well, cost me about $12 bucks for a really filling lunch. Tip for potential yum cha'ers, go with as many people as you can, cause costs usually just go down. Especially if you take a couple of petite french girls with you who can only eat 1 steamed pork bun for every 6!. Met an american professor who is working up at Waikato, doing microbial research of some sort on Mt. Erebus. He's of to Antarctica next year in Janurary, lucky bastard. I kept pitching the idea of taking a programmer with him, I'm sure there's a sonar bouy or weather baloon that needs some last minute modifications.

Well I better get back to it.

laterz, J~

Okay so I decided to try cutting wood to work up a sweat then going to the gym, which worked rather well except for the blisters. Wade, my flatmate, decided to kill a number of trees today. Not content with leaving them quietly converting carbon dioxide to oxygen, he hacked away at the trees to make a pretty fence. Replacing them with other smaller trees with lesser carbon dioxide removal ability. Don't ask me what sort of tree it was, thats not whats important here. What is, is that 2 big trees died to make a pretty fence. I wasn't home for most of it, but when I came back the front yard was full of evidence. I guess the only upside was that I got to get a bit of a sweat up without having to go to the gym. That saved me about a dollars worth of petrol, so yeah.

Anyhoo, spent most of the day getting rid of my anally retentive installation of SUSE 9.1 Enterprise, which royally sucks the big pie hole if ur trying to do anything else off it besides serve web pages. Two installations later, and some great help from a work collegue ( Mike ) we managed to end up with a very pruuuty installation of SUSE 9.3, non-enterprise, which is probably called something official, but I forget right now. So now that my eyes aren't offended whenever I go to work, I figure I'll be able to get more done.

Finnaaaaly got around to starting on my MSc corrections. Yee gods, was that an aweful way to start my weekened. But I guess it had to be done, I spent most of today deleting the near infinite supply of copies I'd made of outdated versions of it. So I think I've finally got a final edition sitting there, with a final version of the source, just waiting for me. So that will be tomorrows expedition of joy and sunshine.

And finally 7 days till my baby is back. So looking forward to that, I'm planning on taking up a couple of bottles of Leffe, Blonde, and maybe a Monteiths original to celebrate the occassion at 5:45am in the morning when she walks out of the arrival gate. Sounds like as good a time as any to break out the piss. Then we do a few things in Auckers, like get coffee, and drive back down to Hamilton to get her moved in, relax and kinda work out what the hell to do with each other, now that we know that neither of us is going to up and leaving for a different country in a few days. Kinda wierd!

Ok, off to bed, man at work on Sat night at 12:48 am, sad. I can hear everyone partying at the bars about 100m away. Reminds me of college,speaking oh which, that damn MSc just won't die!.

Laterz, ~J

p.s. lost about 5lbs over the past couple of days, am trying to loose 10lbs before laura comes. I want to get back to my post Fiji, pre Poxy days. One can dream can't they.

Well plans have been moved along rather brusquely! ~L and I have decided that the distance between us is proving rather more then just inflated ph bills and increased microwave exposure. We think it would be better if she was here, living (down the street) and working in the general area to help with the relationship. Figured it was a little to much to expect a hitch free marriage after only 2 1/2 months in the same area together.

So with much planning, and other stuff that ~L took care of :) she will be here come 5:45AM yes u read that right, Sat. morning at Auckland International airport. Right where I picked her up last time, though not quite so early. Having learned the lessons of international arrivals, I will be turning up fashionably late.

I'm sorting out a flat at the moment, still on the first one to. Last night I go to find this place to check it out and get nowhere. I drive to the address 73 Dey St. and I swear its not there! There's a place for 71 and 75, but no hole for 73. Convinced of this, I chat to the residents of 71 about the apparent lack of a 73 and recommend including a house inbetween there place and the next place for a 73 at some pt. in the future. Then I leave and go home and watched an interesting debate between the leaders of the 8 major parties vieing for power, run by TV3. That was fun, especially the part where United Future and the Progressives sued to get included. Yeah losers.

Also busted my gut at the gym that night, 2nd time after a 2 month hiatus. Man is it HARD to get back and motivated. Still jiggling when I run on the treadmill, but I figure my liquid diet will kick in soon.

Ok, well I better get back to work, am working on AAL5 packet generation to help Cass test her reassembly software. Till next time, J~.

Well I'm busting my ass at work on a Saturday working on a library for Endace. Haven't updated the journal in a while but it looks likely that as I write this Laura is reading my other entries :p

Yup HEAPS has happened since my last entry! I'll save the complete update for later, suffice to say, I did get to Seattle and meet ~L! And in about 2 1/2 months she'll be moving down here to stay for a while! I'll leave the obvious logical deductions for later.

have to finish this dagpartum library....

I have 2 weeks to go before I hand in this MSc of hell and dispair.

My 2nd draft was a complete mess! Idea's everywhere, no cohesive thought process, etc.. Have managed to rewrite\reorder almost the entire thing in 8 days, so looking forward to a week of just solid dotting t's and i's.

Had a bunch of support from my mates in ChCh, Josh and Behshid, u guys are da bomb, Nads ur included in that group to :). ~L's been a god send helping me out with grammar and where and where not to put comma's! I'm forever gratefull. Look forward to seeing you next year in cologne.

Ok, back to the grind, might go for a quick run and unwind with my sis.

laterz,
J.

It is official; Netcraft confirms: MP3 is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered MP3 community when IDC confirmed that MP3 market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all music files. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that MP3 has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. MP3 is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive audio test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict MP3's future. The hand writing is on the wall: MP3 faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for MP3 because MP3 is dying. Things are looking very bad for MP3. As many of us are already aware, MP3 continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Open source MP3 is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time MP3 developers Frauhofer and Philips only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: MP3 is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Due to the troubles of Frauhofer and Philips, abysmal sales and so on, Philips went out of business and was taken over by Magnavox who sell another troubled audio system. Now MP3 is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that MP3 has steadily declined in market share. MP3 is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If MP3 is to survive at all it will be among audio dilettante dabblers. MP3 continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, MP3 is dead.

Fact: MP3 is dying
Free speech thrives at

Yup, one more day working in my Dad's office.

I'm so damn tired I think I'm going to pass out on my keyboard soon. The ol thought processes have slowed to that of an old man wondering the streets under a cruel July moon. Don't bite me for the analogy, the very fact it hurts is indicative of where I am right now.

Anywayz, I suppose I really have to get this piece of chapter worked out. I've rewritten the damn thing about 4 times and I'm still having to go back and change it.

I wonder how Laura's doing. I haven't talked to her in so long. Here's the worst case scenario that continuely flashes along while I tap out my MSc. A sleek silver BMW M5 pulls up outside a house somewhere in Issaquah and a sprightly blond bounds out of the house into the arms of her waiting Microsoft millionaire...I usually shake my head about here and growl.

Ah well, such is life. And who knows maybe it's meant to be. Fatalism is such a safe avenue when failure seems preordained and change futile.

I'm finding this rather theraputic. I think I'll start doing this more often.

Well untill tmrw, happy /.'ing.

Jason.

Neo: Do you always look at it in binary?

Cypher: Well you have to. The compilers work for the construct program. But there's way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it. I...I don't even see the code. All I see is an array, function pointer, integer. Hey, you uh... want a drink?

Neo: Sure.

Cypher: You know, I know what you're thinking, because right now I'm thinking the same thing. Actually, I've been thinking it ever since I got here. Why, oh why didn't I sell my VA Linux stock?... Good shit, huh? Cowboy Neal makes it. It's good for two things, degreasing Perl code and killing brain cells.