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Sunday, April 23, 2006

Where have I been

I don’t think I let the masses know where I went after Uni. So here is the speel.
Towards the end of IBL last year, I got an email from Ashley at HotMagna. He said that had heard I lot about me, and was wondering if I would be would be interested in a position there. They handed over the web address and said have a poke around.
At the time, I had just been given the kick in the pants from IBM, and was interested in wasting my time on Web Development on my own under the name of Infinite Precision.

But I said what the hell, it’ll be interesting for the interviewing practice.

They gave me the 30min phone interview. Basically just asking how I tackle development in general, and a few “text book” style Java questions.
I was slightly dissapointed in some of my responses. My simple answer was that I had been doing Delphi for 4 months and C# before that so the specifics of Java had left me.

A couple of weeks later a receive an email. They want to put me through their test. Most of it was a rehash of the questions they asked over the phone, and two coding tasks.
I hadn’t done database interaction in a long time, so I wasn’t able to do that.
The other task I did. I wasn’t proud of it’s design, but it was only a small task.

They were quite intrigued at how I interpreted their instructions. We had a chat about how a design can sometimes be inhibiting if you are venturing into new territory and a couple of other things.
Get a phone call a while later that they want my skills. I wasn’t over the moon about it because I really wanted to follow my own web dev thing.

But I started.

I was placed on the Toll acount. They have a system that manages all of the scanned documents from parcels that pass through the various scanning stations. The IT isn’t that difficult to grasp, but it does take time to get a complete understanding. The hardest part is the politics. The kind of thing that can really kill a love of developing.
Funny thing. Toll stocks have almost doubled since I’ve started working there. I’d love to think that I was the cause of it

So, to prevent the brain from going insane, Dave and I are trying to get some movement in the Web Dev world. He is suffering a little in his job. Has no tangible result from the work he does. We have a few clients that we will meet. A meeting with Telstra has to be re-arranged. We want to find the cost of hosting our own server. We feel it could be a selling point to small businesses if they only have one point of contact for all their online accounts.

Last weekend I went away. Probably for longer than I should have since I have been trying to get over a cold of some sort. I don’t mind the 9-5 job, but when you leave home at about 7, get home at about 7, it leaves little room for anything but sleep.

-= Comments
1. Xavier | April 24th, 2006 at 1:07 pm

Rather than hosting your own server (or getting a dedicated one), you may be better off reselling (or having a “preferred”) hosting. Then you don’t need to manage the specifics of maintaining it and can focus on actually making web sites. You can still be the single point of contact - just refer through to the hosting company.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Ooooh, Perty new machine

Dell 9400.
Dual core 2ghz
Dual Channel 2 GB 667mhz Ram
80gb @7200 rpm HDD
17″ @ 1920×1200


-= Comments
1. Andrew B Coathup | April 12th, 2006 at 12:59 am

*jealous*

2. Clinton | April 12th, 2006 at 2:12 am

what - only 80Gb? Seems so under-spec… (also slightly green)
:)

3. Xavier | April 12th, 2006 at 12:27 pm

> 17" @ 1920x1200
That’s … sharp.

4. Matthew Delves | April 16th, 2006 at 9:22 am

Buy a mac next time. Apart from that, looks like a nice boxen.

Sunday, April 9, 2006

Linux woes

I was talking to a friend at 2600 and found out that he worked for Dell.
I thought that I might as well ask if he could get my laptop that I purchased some 5+ years ago put it my name. At the moment, Dell think the machine is stolen and won’t give me a replacement power adapter from the crap batch that release long ago.

I had a look at his site and seen that it was pretty crappy, and asked him what was going on with it. He said he put it together it 2 minutes and wasn’t very proud of it. So I started throwing something together in PHP. His current site was in asp. My plan was to write in PHP, change stuff over to ASP and hand it to him and hope there would only be minor changes required.
My next thought was blow it. Mono does asp (I refuse to use IIS any more), I’ll get that going.
Downloaded, installed. Works ok standalone. Now I had to get it working with Apache. Got that compiled and installed but it doesn’t really work yet (haven’t looked into why).
My next thought was the instructions seem more plentiful for linux. I want to run linux, best I make a move.

Went out and bought a 200gb PATA disk. Formatted into enough fragments. Backed up some stuff from my main disk and started with the linux process.

Now, the first hurdle is the first two disks are SATA, sda and sdb and raided together at the hardware level as a raid 0.
Third disk is sdc.
When I started the install, suse10 warned me that these two disk are in a raid set, and the installer doesn’t know how to deal with them in the 2.6 kernel. I was ok with this. I wanted it all installed on sdc anyway.
Got to the partitioning stage and set up all the partitions on sdc to how I wanted them mounted. But I couldn’t see a way of telling the process to completely ignore sda and sdb. So I chickened out.

Removed disk sda and sdb.
Re-installed.
Got the dual head working. Got networking working. Looks sweet.
Put sda and sdb back. Windows still boots.

Then started work on how to get NTLDR to look for linux.
Found pages on it:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Dual_Boot_from_Windows_Bootloader_(NTLDR)_and_why
http://www.highlandsun.com/hyc/linuxboot.html

The first thing I had to do was get linux to work out it is actually on sdc instead of sda when it installed. I think I’ve fixed that up in grub and fstab.
I then re-installed grub on sdc just to make sure that it knew it was there.

dd sdc and sdc1 to two separate files, because I’m not sure which one I should really be using. Set it up in boot.ini for Windows, rebooted and tried both. After futsing around a bit, they now both say:
“Windows was unable to find \system32\hal.dll, please re-install it”

I’m a little confused at this point since linux is meant to be booting once I select it from the list, not windows. I haven’t got around to searching this on google yet, I think it’ll be my next step.
I didn’t want to put this on the net yet because I would really like to figure it out for myself. I am open to short one liners like “Check file xyz for something or other” but I don’t want full instructions at this point.
Also need to give this blog some content, rather than just commenting others

There is the little linux man whispering in my ear, “format all disks and just go with linux”, but I’m not prepared to give up Windows just yet.

-= Comments
1. Zooba | April 8th, 2006 at 9:26 pm

Format all disks and just go with Windows

2. Lucien | April 9th, 2006 at 3:16 pm

I currently have the Ubuntu linkux distro running on my second HD. Windows is still my primary OS, and the one grub boots to by default.
they both live happily together on my system, but then I don’t have a raid

The Ubuntu installer is VERY nice. Nicest linux install I’ve ever done.

The draw back with Ubuntu is that it’s aimed at end users, not developers, so it doesn’t come with a lot of dev stuff I assumed would be there. But the package manager is so nice to use that installing anything else is simple. Ever for a linux retard like me

3. admin | April 9th, 2006 at 5:59 pm

Zooba is that little voice inside my head.
Lucien, I tried installing Ubuntu, but I had trouble setting up the network. I propably could have for it to work, but suse10 picked it up quicker.

4. Xavier | April 10th, 2006 at 1:22 pm

Are you sure you’re selecting the right hd in grub? I know it does it kind of a strange way. Sounds weird that one of your entries is trying to get into windows.

Tuesday, April 4, 2006

l33t

How cool, my blog entry has an actual pi symbol. I feel so special.

I was working on Zork so very long ago and I actually came up with some question that I would like to ask peoples.

If I make this a service, that people connect to. Does that mean all the detail about rooms, and objects be stored in a database instead objects. Do I only interact with the database, or do I keep details about room ‘in memory’ until a person leaves a room.

I’ve probably skipped over a great lot of detail (Do people still remember Zork?). But I want to enjoy some popcorn.

-= Comments
1. Zooba | April 3rd, 2006 at 11:29 pm

Yes, I remember Zork

Keep in mind that even if you store the details in objects, the objects will still have to be stored in a database. Possibly this is a level of abstraction which is easy to achieve and convenient for this purpose, perhaps not.

Since multiple people will conceivably be using the room (similar to a MUD - maybe look for some code for these) you need to be careful about who keeps what information. In my experience, usually the server maintains everything and input/output is echoed to the client.

As usual, it is possible to produce this without using OO techniques at all, though it may require a greater stretch of the mind, since this is a problem that lends itself to OO. However, a RDBMS could also easily be used. It basically comes down to what you are used to and how much abstraction/performance loss you’re prepared to live with.

2. Andrew B Coathup | April 4th, 2006 at 7:09 pm

What is the most efficient, what is the most scalable?

What works for ten rooms? for 100 rooms? for 1000 rooms?

What works for ten users, a 1000, 100,000 users?

Use the database with sensible caching. That is my two cents.