rastplats

The latest results just came back from the lab and it seems that the doctors finally found a working cure for my recently found disease. It does involve me having to eat three pills of two different medications each day for the rest of my life, which sucks undescribably hard. The good news is that I dont have to take the injections every three months which I’ve been doing for some time now. Clearly better than the uncertainty of not knowing how to handle things but it will take some time to accept the fact of being chronically ill. Life sucks and then..

I spent today at work setting up provisioning of the Ericsson HM340d CPE which we have quite a few of deployed in our network. The configuration is pushed to the CPEs using vendor encapsulated options in the DHCP protocol which worked very well indeed, since the CPE performs the DHCP request on a management PVC the solution is safe as well. The format of the options is of course a network byte order encoded string which was documented in a protocol specification I received.. or so I thought. The documentation contained every octet except the checksums, how stupid is that? Luckily the missing octets were fairly simple to reverseengineer given that I had an example configuration but it was still more painful than needed. Perhaps hacking up a Perl module for the configuration creation would be in order?

Yesterday saw the yearly examination event at Malmö Högskola for all students graduating during 2005, which includes me. The arrangement was extremely nice and somewhat un-academic which made it a lot more interesting. It did however look a bit stupid when my class was announced and called to the stage to recieve our diplomas since we were only two out of 25 who actually graduated. All in all, a nice evening though. This marks the finale of my engagement at Mah, next stop La Trobe University.

Sorry for the silence lately, I’ve spent the week with having surgery and succeeding that, having a lot of pain. The total stitch count is now at about 60, if I continue in this pace I should break 100 within the next 4 years or so. As usual when recovering from injuries, the second favourite thing to do (next to doing as little as possible) is devising new ways of showering.. The traditional shower is such a flawed design when it comes to cleaning a body that contain parts which create immense pain when adding water.

But.. as we say in sweden, “That which does not kill you strengthens you.”

I comitted a patch to the TenDRA buildprocess tonight which adds some keep-it-simple checking for needed binaries prior to configuration. The resulting hack got a bit messy due to limitations in bmake(1) however, the below code fails due to .for loops being evaluated prior to the variableexpansion in the BUILD_BINARIES list.

BUILD_BINARIES=  ${BIN_FOO} ${BIN_BAR}

.for BIN in ${BUILD_BINARIES}    test -x ${BIN}.endfor

Each test had to be hardcoded instead which seems like a suboptimal solution, it does however work which was the intended effect. Now for some preproducer hacking.

My current employment was only meant to be a low-key consultant-like substitute for a position that never really existed in the first place. Needless to say I had a hard time finding my place at first. Things gradually progressed and when most of the department headed for vacation it more or less exploded on me. Now I am at the opposite side of the fence, I carry too many hats and have become rooted as en employee, which feels odd since I will be leaving in about three months. My official title is project manager for service delivery and installation, but I am currently equally involved in strategic projects regarding information infrastructure and just yesterday I was out on an acute mission to locate a fault in the core SDH backbone and tomorrow I’ll be investigating automated remote configuration of ADSL2+ adapters. Not that I mind getting involved, quite the contrary actually, I am however still a bit confused since I really didnt expect to make a 6 months substite gig into a careermove..

I spent today in a meeting with a configuration systems vendor who seemed to have incorporated quite a few of the basic principles behind description-driven modelling. Getting a peek inside their software would be fun, damn all proprietary closed source licenses..

I had a pre-sales consultant at my office today to demo one of the major OLAP players on the market. The graphic capabilities were of course impressive and the functionality to read standardized datasources worked well enough. Looking at the easy stuff is however boring and that the software could do OLAP 101 wasn’t really impressive, I always fail to find questions to which the answers should be given interesting. To see it perform in edgecases I asked him to parse data from my Visio documents, something that I actually need and know is non-trivial. This is where the Microsoft Way started to show its face. Only when saved as XML and with the files renamed to the file suffix .xml did we get somewhere (when will be see Windows software that actually know how to validate fileformats?) but without luck, the correct strings we’re nowhere to be found. How interesting that I did the exact same thing, but made it work, in about 20 lines of Perl the other day..

Next up was digging deeper into the stringhandling of the embedded scripting language. The reason for wanting an OLAP package in the first place is to create logical relations between data of different types in an abstractionlayer where datatype and source is uninteresting, naturally I assumed there would be loads of nice tools to munge data.. and yet again I was utterly dissappointed. The only stringmatching functions available were the usual Visual Basic suspects such as Left(), Right(), SubStr() and friends. When I asked about regular expressions the facial expression was enough as an answer, sigh. When is the Windows community going to realize that regular expressions is The Right Way and their utterly inadecvate crap is Clearly Wrong? Not only is it not portable, it produce hundreds and hundreds of lines of code in order to cover all edge-cases which is a nightmare to write and review.

..but the GUI was pretty and could display all the data I already knew about.. in many pretty colors. wow.

I officially joined the TenDRA project today as committer which I’m very excited about. TenDRA is a BSD licensed compiler based on the ANDF technology currently featuring producers for C and C++. I’ll be blogging about my forays into compilerland using this category.