Long long time

Wow, my last blog entry was on June 22. I guess Andrew is right in saying that I need to blog. So much happens in 3 weeks (I think it’s been 3 weeks).

Coaster

Really, not much has happened with Coaster on my end. Harshy has some debs in his repo for libburn and libbakery2.4 if you want to check those out. Also, he merged his gtk code into libcoaster, so now coaster-gui is using libcoaster for its preferences dialog (on my local copy). I’ll check that in sometime this weekend. I hope to get burning data discs working before my wedding so we can push a release out.

Wedding

Dude, it’s only two weeks and six days until I get married. I’m really excited. The plans are going well (we almost have everything lined up) and we’re trying to stay as stress-less as possible.

September and I just bought her a car last week and she loves it. It’s a 1997 Ford Taurus with only 74000 miles on it and in great condition. We also got her a cell phone on my account so she doesn’t get stranded somewhere when she’s out exploring Cedar Rapids. And she expects me to get her a wedding present on top of this…

iBook

Well, I got tired of building everything from source so I broke down and installed Debian on my iBook G4 12". I don’t know why I didn’t do this earlier. I am quite pleased with it. I know, I know, the Gentoo-ites will tell me that I don’t have a streamlined, fully customized box, but I’m OK with that. I don’t have to worry about building Mozilla, Firefox, OpenOffice.org (I never built it, but I got packages from people that said it took 12-14 hours), or anything else. The surprise to me was that my Debian install actually boots faster and generally is faster than my Gentoo install (waits for USE flag comments).

On that note, I built debs for libbakery2.4 and libburn for Harshy and emailed them to him today. Those should be up within a day for all you Debian PPC users (the repo is http://debian.dersoldat.org.

Work

Work has been going very well. It felt really good to get my first check last week. About a week and a half ago, my friend and I tried to propose we use python for our paging scripts instead of using VBScript. That proposal got shot down, but my proposal to move the paging system (to page the person on-call when an error occurs in one of the Beyond FTP scripts) to a database went through. That is a complete relief. Now I just have to wait for VS.NET to come in so I can start working on some command line programs that will page the correct person (instead of everyone) with a template filled in with the correct information (instead of 154 different messages for each possible error that can occur).

I also found something out last week: I can plug an ethernet cord into the back of my VoIP phone and connect my laptop to the network here. That was nice when I went to do my Debian install. All of GNOME downloaded in about 10 minutes, and OpenOffice.org downloaded in about 8 minutes. It’s nice to have a fairly fast connection ;).