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7.27.2011

New Job

Sudden random real life post... I got a job a couple weeks ago as an assistant sysadmin. :) No more retail hell. I still have 1 idi^H^H^Hluser to deal with, but hey. Better than being surrounded by hundreds. Not sure how much hacking I'm going to do, apparently it's even true for me-- once you work on computers for a living, you're not too inclined to mess with them for fun. :\ I'm stuck on whiskey, I have to learn pyqt to make any more headway. Trash80 is trucking along on rewriting coreutils in python, and I'm sitting back giving advice and feedback. And now my fiance is asking me to make a one-off distro for him.

On a job-related note, I'm compiling a list of "Sysadmin Rules to Live By". I have 3 so far.

1. Everyone is an idiot.
Seriously, everyone. I have my stupid moments too, I won't lie.
2. The user didn't do anything.
If I had a dollar for every time I've heard "I didn't do anything, it just broke!" I could buy a curry chicken lunch combo... after just 3.5 weeks on the job.
3. It's impossible, but it has to be done anyway.
Had an example of that this morning: clean out the IT detritus in the back of customer service... even though there's no room in the server room for more crap. And storing it in an empty cubicle is not an option. Oy.

But, owing to my massive masochistic streak, I do enjoy my work now. Maybe after I settle in I'll find my way back to hacking.

1.02.2011

Whiskey is on launchpad!

Whiskey is now on launchpad, in 2 places since I can't figure out how to link habanero (trash80's and my project name) to my personal account. https://code.launchpad.net/~compgrokker/+junk/whiskey and https://code.launchpad.net/~habanero/+junk/whiskey.

Update on the gui: since pyglet will never upgrade to python 3.0, I'm using pyjamas. PIL hasn't upgraded yet either, but it's tempting to grab the bits I need (a small subset of the whole module), fork it, and upgrade it. I haven't decided on that yet, but for right now whiskey still depends on python2.6 (arch's stable python, and the highest version I know of that PIL will work with), although I'm writing my code to be upwards compatible with 3.0.

Although whiskey is up on launchpad, it doesn't have a PPA yet simply because it's not particularly useful yet. Hence why it's still in experimental. Arch has the debian buildtools though, so once whiskey is close to what I'm aiming for (or at least close enough that I feel comfortable opening it up to a wider audience), look for a PPA.