6th August

This last week I have fought CVS to a standstill but finally through dint of much googling I have tamed the beast and now have a useful CVS repository.

It is much in my mind to get the surf club into CVS and to start on the cut of the surf club for this year. I have many things to do, build a mail gateway, carry out some need ed improvements identified from last year and general maintenance of the system

I want to use pGal to maintain the surf club's web site as maintaining it the way it currently is is very tedious.

I played today with my first air port wireless device. It was simple to install and straightforward to use. Plugged it in and away it went, but I found it slow. I think for the moment my large attractive cat 5 cable is the way to go. MMG where I worked today is not far from my house and i tried the wireless from here but evidently there were too many walls or it was too far and i got no signal.
Created: 01/Jan/2007

24th August

A lot has happened.
Work has received a proposal from a Dutch company to integrate several products. I may get to live in Holland for 6-12 months. I think that this would be fantastic but am a little apprehensive about what we have to do. I did all the estimating but wild guessing would be closer to the mark.

I think that the possibilities for photos and to get to see Europe would just be fantastic so I hope that it comes off.

James and I went on another trip to Wilson's Prom. We went to Waterloo bay and camped fro 3 nights and took pictures. Some of these should be on my site soon. Maybe even today. The trip was great as it gave me time to think and to talk through a number of work related things.

This was my first trip with the MindStor. This is in essence a hard disk with a card reader interface. It takes my 192 meg of card storage and turns it into 10 Gb. It worked well and would have been even better had I fully charged the battery. Cause it ran out of battery I in effect ran out of film. I will have to take it for another few days to see if this is really an effective device. The proposal is certainly attractive. A USB/Firewire hard disk that can hold several thousand pictures. With this I can travel for an extended period before I need a laptop

I have hopefully got to the bottom of PostGres performance issues. The bottom line is that under a bit of load the system really slows down. This is a combination of poor SQL and PostGres being a free product which doesn't allow for much load.

One aspect of the Aconex system has been that we have really poor measurement of load and other factors in the system. I am very keen to build a measurement tool. I want to measure load and number of users. Finally a design has emerged that is workable. I am tempted to just build it and see how it looks. So far I have not found a good graphing package for the web that is free. They must exist.
Created: 01/Jan/2007

12th Sept

Well it is the 12th and finally the media is beginning to quite from the froth of frenzy of Sept 11th. The tragedy that changed the world we are told again and again, but maybe it is the tragedy that the US uses as a stalking horse to reduce the rule of law, topple governments of their choice, reduce liberty and generally behave like the biggest baddest boy in the school yard. They are the biggest boy we all know that. As such a great nation it behooves them to behave correctly. But no sooner had Sept 11th happened than the law was being pillaged, the constitution shredded and the world may a less safe place. And all to assuage some furious pride that a little guy had snotted them on the nose.

I know lets topple Sadam, the world will be better for it.

And while we are at it lets not abrogate Australia's responsibilities. Little Johnny has such a tight hold on Uncle Sam's coat tails he is in the position that Mark Latham so loving described. Licking the arse of the US. Where is little Johnies fiber. We could and we should be an independent voice standing fro principal, but now with our craven poll driven prime minister.

The job at MMG has finished, or at least I fired myself. So now i am back to 3 days a week but then the Surf Club beckons. I have started rewriting the web site part of the surf club suing pGal and that is going well.

With the new caching option the site is very quick. As usual the problem is to find sufficient copy for the website and to get people to give this to me in a form that is easy to use. We will see.

I have also made a big effort to get Terra Australis up to date which it is, no to get the last bit of copy done for this web site and all will be well. I found that I could use n off line reading tool to down laod the site and effectively turn it from a pGal site to a plain HTML site. This is a cool trick, but it does result in a rather large html site as many html pages are generated. Still it is another way to use pGal. My other gainful employment is interesting. I have a number of things that I am progressing on but none of them are terribly satisfactory. One of the directors wanted me to work more and then got very vague about when. Given that in the last few days they have managed to employ several new people (well two) I feel that at some point I should have been addressed. 3 days a week and a low rate of pay make for Jack not so much being a dull boy as a poor one. Maybe it is time to look in earnest for an alternate. Something that I have started to do.

The last week has seen me into our hosting center every single night. In fact as i write this I am waiting to get picked up for night 3 or is it 4. We have had some general oddness with one of our boxen .

I also have taken the opportunity to swap sites around so that I can take out the last of the windows box and replace it with nix. So far I have swapped out the web sites and the box. Now to nix it and convert the sites back again. This will be good for me as one of the sites is the surf club. The combination of pGal to manage the site part and better remote access is going to lower the amount of time and effort to get updates onto the site by a huge factor. Prior to this I had to cut each release onto CD and then take this to work where I could use PC Anywhere to a windows box. All ugly and slow. Now I will be able to VPN directly. Should allow for the making of mistakes far faster than the old system.

Apart from all of this I have been slowly working toward getting my Burma pictures into some order so that they might be viewed on the web. There are a power of shots so this is taking a while.
Created: 01/Jan/2007

18th September

I get the word late Friday full of prawns and Duck. The premier will officially open the engagement but earlier than I had hoped for and it is time to get the surf club back on track. I have along laundry list of thing I want to to do and things that I must do.

The first of these is to follow up the splitting off of the website and build a race site. I do that and it is easy but I decided that I must upgrade everything and I do

Resin is to the latest rev, Java moves from 1.3 to 1.4 and Log4J goes to its latest rev. This means i need a new Java IDE as Jbuilder 4 doesn't deal with Java 1.4. I get the site up and start working with it. After a while I get some very weird errors. It seems that Java 1.4 has a threading problem with a core part of the code. This shows up in a most peculiar way. Indicating that errors have been thrown where they are not possible to be thrown. After much investigation I find that the problem relates to the way that I am extending an interface.

There is no time so I regress to 1.3.

Day one sees the new site built. The graphics for the race entry pages made and revised into the site and the first page fitted to the look that I want. When I built th site last year I had learned quite a bit on the way through and so each page looked different from its neighbor. This time I unified their look

I had been intending to refactor some of the race validation code. It is used in 4 separate palaces and I had just cut and pasted code around the shop. It was also in a monolithic block and i wanted each field factored into its own method.

This all got done and suddenly the code became clearer and easier to understand. I also factored out the annoying startup routine which coupled together the two races. Now it is possible to have one races entries open and the other closed.

Day two saw most of the refactoring completed and the startup code rewritten. I also created a CVS module and got the system under source code control finally. I had regressed a couple of screens in the administrative interface, most annoying and I had to fix these. Hopefully now that CVS is there we wont have that problem anymore.

Finally I started on the code that would identify who had created each entry and when. This code will allow for the production of reports on when entries are made which will allow back end people to cross check the entries that they have made against the database.

Suddenly after three days I can see that we can have a site ready to go on launch day. I still have a list of things to do that is quite long but i now see that we can be ready to go when required. Will I get all of the other features in. Time will tell, and time is the one thing that is in short supply.
Created: 01/Jan/2007

17th Oct

My back hurts in a way that only happens after prolonged periods of doing nothing. Not that I have been doing nothing but i have been inactive. 6am Saturday and I was recovering from a sleepless night and fighting with CVS. It was insisting that I had made no changes to the source and I knew I had. CVS and I have had a love hate relationship I hated it with a passion bordering on mania and it loved to fuck up in numerous unpredictable ways. This time it had found another failure mode.

Finally after frustrating hours I checked out the entire repository and then carefully copied over all the changed files and finally CVS recognised that yes I had changed my code. What a total piece of shit this program is. A repository that doesn't recognise new work.

During the day I checked in and out the software many times trying to get a clean compile and build onto linux. I found new ways that CVS can screw up. Text files are, well text files, but binaries like graphics are not. Check a graphic into the repository and it comes out just different. Thats right this utter piece of dog excrement takes valid files checked into the repository and alters them so that they are corrupt.

Why geeks like this is beyond me.

Saturday slowly passed with me compiling the environment onto linux the first time this had happened. I found lots of small ways that I had not done good change control but slowly I got these under control and produced a working bit of software. I guess that what I do on my own is a lot less good than CVS.

I might have worked under pressure for a few weeks but finally I was getting the software to work and what just a few days before had seemed impossible was going to become a reality. The surf clubs software was going to be ready. OK it was a few days late. But that deadline was thrust upon me. Now I was going to be ready just a few days after I and thought and it was looking good.

I did a training session with Ron. The administrator of the system. A guy who at first had been deeply suspicious of me and who had slowly warmed to the new software I had written. At first I had thought that he was simply an old man who was reluctant to change but gradually I have realized that here is someone who has devoted the last 22 years to getting the surf clubs event to run well and his conservatism was firmly rooted in having a successful event. With such a huge amount of effort in producing a world class event there was no wonder that he was wary of change. Since then I have grown and grown in respect for a tireless worker and wonderfully decent person.

The training over and after a pleasant lunch I carried on. At some point a Rubicon was crossed and the software changed into really terribly possible.

Sunday passed in me trying and fixing things discovering things that required fixing and generally chasing down bugs.

The most auspicious note happened late in the day. The software allows for entry and then the forwarding to a secure gateway via HTTPS this happens under the covers by SSH. A bit of software that I had written with little knowledge and had only tested under various versions of windows. Naturally I was worried how it would work under Linux. I finally got things so I could test the Linux implementation and it just worked, I was terrified of it not working though I needn't have.

By Sunday night the software was installed and ready and all that was required was that the payment gateway be turned over to production and then we could start for real.

I had changed logos, rewritten JSP's, reconfigured the software, refactored lots of the old software, woken early gone to sleep late, sketched in odd hours on napkins, menus, and the large creamy folders I favour. Here it was, pure good software finally ready to see the light and only 2 days late.

Monday the gateway went live, and irony the payment avenue to the bank was down. Day one and there have been 19 successful transactions and a variety of failures. It has worked and it has worked perfectly.

Writing software is when it goes well is a pure joy a hard confection of absolutism and art. Today was the pay off of that work. Art seeing pleasure through the veil of engineering leavened by language.
Created: 01/Jan/2007