http://www.bbassett.net/blog/ Yeah, I know everyone has one. So sue me. en-us bbassett@bbassett.net 2005-03-19T11:51:33-08:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://www.bbassett.net/blog/archives/000022.html OK...the beta test for The Matrix Online is finished...but I won't be shelling out for this game. It all comes down to control. I had the damnedest time controlling my character. The controls were the standard WASD for movement (which gives my hands cramps after five minutes) and the mouse-look was frequently overridden by the matrixy camera moves. While matrixy camera moves in a Matrix game are entirely appropriate, it makes moving around in the world a real female dog. Example: when going down a staircase, the camera would be following my character in a spiral down the stairs. All... 22@http://www.bbassett.net/blog/ Miscellany 2005-03-19T11:51:33-08:00 http://www.bbassett.net/blog/archives/000021.html http://www.savetoby.com/ Need I say more?... 21@http://www.bbassett.net/blog/ Miscellany 2005-02-18T16:35:41-08:00 http://www.bbassett.net/blog/archives/000020.html Silly me for thinking that I could avoid my annual case of Seasonal Affective Disorder (well, at least it's always a mild case)... What is it with programming houses and small windowless offices? I mean, it's not like we're vampires or various sundry creatures of the night that will evaporate at the merest hint of the Day Star; but every place I've worked in the past four years has been in a small windowless rooms. Come to think of it, I seem to going downhill...at my last job, it was a large windowless room filled with other geeks; this one,... 20@http://www.bbassett.net/blog/ Life 2005-02-17T22:55:37-08:00 http://www.bbassett.net/blog/archives/000019.html I think I've figured out why it seems like it can't possibly be eight days until Christmas. Snow. Or more precisely, the lack thereof. Back in eastern Washington (where I've spent the better part of the past nine winters) there would have been snow on the ground for six to eight weeks by now. Contrast this to the greater Seattle area, where the recent low temperatures (averaging around 40-some degrees) have consistently been higher than the high temperatures I've become accustomed to back east (typically in the high 30s). Not to mention Seattle's reputation as drizzle capital of North America.... 19@http://www.bbassett.net/blog/ Rants 2004-12-17T10:42:08-08:00 http://www.bbassett.net/blog/archives/000016.html Back at Cylant, I did practically all my build infrastructure, packaging, and installer work in a weird amalgam of Bourne shell, Perl, and Makefile. Naturally, I was the subject of many a comment about sadism (Heck, I was even known to debase myself for that combination...) But working in a Windows environment, I find myself debasing myself to new and never before plumbed depths. CMD.EXE, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways:No control structures other than if, goto and for.Variable access semantics are different depending on how and where the access occurs. %VARIABLE%Standard access to variable contents.%VARIABLE... 16@http://www.bbassett.net/blog/ Rants 2004-11-11T12:22:23-08:00 http://www.bbassett.net/blog/archives/000017.html Just posted a message to the NJS development list talking about the current status of the project: OK, I've been very delinquent in composing this email. For that I sincerely apologize. First, I should mention about my situation... persistant rumors on the mailing list about my demise are vastly exaggerated. I have had problems with a pair of epilepsy induced car crashes (ironically, the only two times I've had a seizure), but things are well under the control of medication on that front. I did loose my job back in January, and had either been so depressed I was sleeping... 17@http://www.bbassett.net/blog/ NJS 2004-10-28T19:27:45-08:00 http://www.bbassett.net/blog/archives/000018.html 18@http://www.bbassett.net/blog/ Life 2004-10-28T08:05:22-08:00 http://www.bbassett.net/blog/archives/000015.html Well, today is the beginning of my third week of my new job (which is fast loosing the veneer of new). But I've now switched over to riding the bus. On the plus side, it seems that there is sufficient cell service along the entire route that I can do anything I want, whether that be general web browsing or blogging in particular, form the comfort of my Sidekick. The only downside I see is the route(s) I have to take. One of the perks my employers offers is a free (to me) bus pass. However, it's only good on... 15@http://www.bbassett.net/blog/ Life 2004-10-25T08:08:10-08:00 http://www.bbassett.net/blog/archives/000012.html Well, I finally found myself a job. (Even if I am making this entry after having been working for three days now.) I'm doing build engineering for a major software company with an instantly recognizable two-letter abbreviation. (Say any more, and I invite the wrath of Free Software advocates the world over.) Having fun reorienting (or should that be disorienting) myself to a Windows environment. Missed vi enough that I installed Vim on my workstation. Although on the up side, I do seem to be the group's Perl expert. Oh, well, we'll see how this goes...I always have contract renewal... 12@http://www.bbassett.net/blog/ Work 2004-10-13T21:50:09-08:00 http://www.bbassett.net/blog/archives/000013.html The GSLUG folks were a great audience today. I talked to them about version control systems. Lots of great questions and bits of hints and tips were passed from one to another. Gotta do it again. It also turns out that the other speaker was the same person who wrote the HOWTO I used to set up teevee, my MythTV TiVo-alike. It impressed him that I, a died in the wool Debianista, abandoned his Debian-based mythbox in favor of his directions.... 13@http://www.bbassett.net/blog/ Linux 2004-09-11T16:03:12-08:00 http://www.bbassett.net/blog/archives/000011.html 11@http://www.bbassett.net/blog/ Work 2004-05-20T17:22:24-08:00 http://www.bbassett.net/blog/archives/000010.html Turns out that stealing test cases straight from Perl may have been more problematic that earlier envisioned. It seems that a number of semantic differences in Perl's regular expressions and Javascript's rendered a few tests incorrect. So today was spent writing a small converter that takes my testcase files and converts them into Javascript for comparison with the Mozilla Spidermonkey engine. (It turns out that the Rhino engine can't seem to create enough locals to satisfy my generated testcode... :) It turns out that Perl and Javascript handle "backreferences" where no capturing parens exist (i.e. \3 given (a)|(b)) differently (Perl... 10@http://www.bbassett.net/blog/ NJS 2004-05-13T23:21:45-08:00 http://www.bbassett.net/blog/archives/000009.html Decided to take a break from job hunting, and got down to the serious insanity of working on NJS's regular expression engine. Fixed a few problems with the way I was handling (and creating) CHARSET matchers; now both case-insensitive regexes and negated character classes work as expected. Not to mention that of the 525 tests stolen from the perl distribution, we now only fail 137 of them, down from 235.... 9@http://www.bbassett.net/blog/ NJS 2004-05-12T23:23:18-08:00 http://www.bbassett.net/blog/archives/000008.html 8@http://www.bbassett.net/blog/ Work 2004-05-04T14:56:14-08:00 http://www.bbassett.net/blog/archives/000007.html Went to LinuxFest Northwest 2004 today. Had a blast, just like last year. A quick summary of the talks I saw:The author of OpenVPN talked about the cryptographic and networking challenges in building virtual private networking systems. He also talked about the advantages in a user space VPN over an IPSec-style solution. Things seem decent enough for me to resurrect my VPN on dedicated firewall project (in my Copious Free Time, of course).Got a bit of background about using VoIP and Asterisk. Having adminned a telephone switch in a past life, and seeing the simplicity at dealing with the VoIP... 7@http://www.bbassett.net/blog/ Linux 2004-04-17T18:49:44-08:00