chrishowie.com

It’s been just about a year since I started working at Ontario Systems. I’d always been lacking evidence that it’s a pretty fun place to work. Well now I have a few pictures of some of the more subtle goings-on.

Here are the present contents of the album, sure to grow as our shenanigans continue:

We use an XML editor named Epic (well, I don’t but other people do). I saw a few books on the bookshelf and couldn’t resist.

There’s been this hole by the baseboard of a wall here. Jason finally did something creative with it. (And I captioned it.)

My DSL and phone service is due to be activated today. When I got up I had dialtone, which is a good sign. But a few days ago I had an interesting encounter that was just too humorous not to share.

On Thursday the DSL modem showed up but since I was spending the night at my parents’ house I didn’t tinker with it too much. Friday night I unpacked it and hooked it up. To my surprise it actually found DSL signal, but obviously failed on PPPoE authentication since I did not have my account information. I went out and got a cordless phone to see if I had dialtone, hoping to call AT&T customer service and get my DSL account name and password early. Of course I forgot that I needed to let the handset charge for a day. So I copied my order number and other info down and headed into the back room where I get good enough wireless signal from my neighbors to make Skype calls on my Pocket PC and called them up.

After giving her all the relevant numbers I explained the situation — that I had DSL signal and would like to try to connect. Hilarity ensued. This is a rough paraphrase of the conversation:

Me: My modem says I have DSL signal. Can I get my account info early?
AT&T: Hmm, I see here your line will be set up Monday, correct?
Me: Yes, that is the scheduled date.
AT&T: Do you have a dialtone yet?
Me: I have no way to check that yet. I don’t have a working phone.
AT&T: Well, if you don’t have dialtone then you cannot have a DSL signal.
Me: My modem says I have DSL signal. The DSL light is green and the modem diagnostics report that I have signal.
AT&T: What happened when you plugged the modem in?
Me: The DSL light flashed red for a few seconds, then it flashed green, and now it is solid green.
AT&T: Ok. It was flashing red — that means you don’t have signal.
Me: Well, it changed. It is not flashing red now, it is solid green.
AT&T: Yes, but it was flashing red when you plugged it in, and you don’t have dialtone, so you don’t have signal.
Me: I never said I don’t have dialtone… the modem is telling me that I have signal.
AT&T: That’s not possible, your line is not connected. You don’t have signal. That’s why the modem light was flashing red.

Around this point I gave up. Not so much out of frustration but I just could not believe what I was hearing. I could have understood refusal based on policy or simply that the person responsible for creating accounts had not yet created mine. But blatant denial of information presented to me by my equipment is ridiculous.

At least it makes for a good story…

A few fun things have been happening, but I’ve been too busy to write about them. Now that I have time, I’ve just finished moving into my new house for the summer and won’t have Internet access until this Monday (or later if past experience on this topic is any indication).

Anyway, here is a rough list of developments since my last post.

• I moved to a summer house nearer to my office (cutting my commute from one hour to about five minutes). But I already said that.
• My computer is now sporting a new power supply, motherboard, GPU, and hard drive. I also upgraded my RAM from 1GB to 4GB. Compiz Fusion looks sweet on an 8800GT.
• I’ve been in communication with two Mono people about the future of OpenVP. I don’t want to give too much away right now, but I can assure you that in the next couple of months OpenVP will be transforming into the visualization framework with the highest degree of ass-kickery around.

• Taking liberal arts classes because in someone’s opinion that’s somehow supposed to make me more of a person.
• Hearing from every one of my professors that their class is not only directly relevant to my life, but extremely important and that I’ll never forget it.
• Caring about school.
• Not caring about school.
• People thinking I should care about school.
• Homework.
• Beating myself up because I don’t care about homework.
• Feeling like I don’t need school.
• Feeling like a whiny, egotistical jerk because I feel like I don’t need school.
• The inescapable feeling that if I didn’t get out of bed for a week, less than five people would notice and fewer would care.

This morning I got up and was going to take a hot shower. I started to take off my shirt and in so doing I must’ve bent my neck funny because I felt a sudden shooting pain near my left shoulder. After I recoiled, the initial sharp pain died down and it was replaced by a very, very intense throbbing pain. I sat down as fast as I could and tried not to yell (it was that bad).

For the first ten minutes I could concentrate on nothing else; I was paralyzed from the pain. An hour later I took an ibuprofen when it wasn’t getting better. Finally I made an appointment with my university health services. After explaining the issue to the nurse, she recommended that I take two ibuprofen every four hours and…

Take a hot shower.

During the prayer at the end of chapel today the pastor’s voice broke from emotion and she stopped abruptly mid-word. My immediate reaction was “argh, packet loss again!?”

Yeah. It’s that bad.

All in all this was a pretty good week. My new job has been a lot of fun and it feels good to finally have a job where my skills are being used. The team has been very welcoming and are fun to work with.

My computer is back alive too… actually it was sometime before Monday but I don’t recall exactly when. Anyway, it’s quite zippy now. I also got a new 300GB drive at Fry’s, so I now have over a half terabyte of storage.

And on that note, I’ve been thinking today about filesystems. We have some good Linux-native filesystems like ext3 and reiserfs, and Windows has NTFS, but there is only one filesystem that both Windows and Linux can reliably read and write: FAT. But FAT has some irritating limitations, such as a maximum file size of 4GB. This is not optimal for use on a dual-boot system, but it’s the best option right now.

Has anyone looked at the possibility of designing and implementing a filesystem specifically designed to be portable between operating systems? Sure we have ext3 drivers for Windows and NTFS drivers for Linux, but neither of those options are really attractive. I’d like to see someone design a filesystem that works first to the lowest common denominator: store files. After that is finished more features could be added in a multiplatform-sensitive manner. For example, allow file metadata to be stored in some sort of tree dictionary, so each operating system could have its “own” set of metadata. Linux and Windows could store permissions there without clobbering the other’s data.

Even taking an existing filesystem like ext3 and modifying it for this purpose would be really handy, especially if the existing ext3 driver could handle it without destroying the metadata for other operating systems.

Just a thought. Comments welcome as usual.

My computer should be working by the end of the week. Turns out the motherboard is dead, so I’m getting a new system: AMD 64 X2 2.8GHz. $347.24 later and let’s hope nothing else fried.

My right wrist is also not working so well. I’m taking an anti-inflammatory and have it in a brace. It feels better today than yesterday but it still hurts to move.

And finally some good news: I have a job! A real, actual, paying job. I’ll be working with Ontario Systems starting on the 13th.

Today was a really good day, at least for summer break. I got to see my girlfriend again (second time in the last week… woot), got a long-standing WikiBench todo done, and found some pretty nasty bugs in Mono’s implementation of the 2.0 framework TryParse methods for integer types.

Somewhere in there I sent a form letter to the three Indiana congressmen urging them not to support the IPPA of 2007. I’d encourage you to do the same.

WikiBench now has proper support for blacklisting anonymous users, as well as blocks of IP addresses. You can ask it to blacklist, say “192.168.0.0/8″ and every edit coming from an anonymous user in that range will be reported. Combined with state persistence, as I just blogged about, this is really useful. I also toyed with the idea of allowing a user to maintain multiple user-defined blacklists, but am not certain when or if this will happen.

Coming soon to WikiBench: watchlist and citation builder pads.

(I should really release a beta soon…)

I got a car! They just had some work done on it so it should be working for a while yet. Not bad for $500.