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Having some spare time, I set to updating my code books while I wait on the Google Wave video to reload; I had to pop off at ~55min for a Live Operation ;). Ahh, crud! Now it looks like I’m going to be interrupted by dinner 8=).

Around late April, I devised a new schema for how I handle my password management—yes I am insane. I actually do have an encoding system for increasing password strength, that is tied to how my brain functions. It’s built from a system of standard passwords that are pseudo-salted with mnemonics that are tied to both the schema and how my brain internally organizes data. The end result, a systematic password that is more difficult to brute force, and hard to guess unless you are me ;).

I’ve just converted about 50% of my core services to the new password system, and I’ll do the rest tonight.

At the moment, my bookmarking has been focused around delicious. The pattern I have chosen for tagging is roughly the same as what I’ve been using in Gnolia; Category/Sub-Category/… and in place of larger meta tags (e.g. Programming/Perl) I’ve bundled the tags. It’s an informal hierarchy but rather nifty. Gnolia lacks bundles which I dislike about it, but honestly the only thing Delicious’s method offers in improvement, is you can’t forget to add the meta tag along side the regular one (e.g. Programming/Perl/Frameworks).

The tags I’ve arranged are strongly organised, I like keeping things tidy. There is a simple “Personal” tag for things connected with me, Services/ for various services: Services/Webmail for example contains marks for Google and Live mail. Programming/Language/{Distributions,Documentation,Modules,Frameworks, …} is also in use

For some reason, I love organizing crap…. lol.

Being too brainfriedto write code…. utterly SUCKS!!!

• General SAS related work
• Making my game prototype load key=command mappings out of an rc file
• Finish Cara’s skins
• Get to work on pipin-ims backend daemon
• *Several* personal but business related web-projects
• Continue compiling my letter about PC-BSD shortcommings
• Setup/test CppUnit, Boost, and POCO
• Customize Irssi and evaluate its possiblities for replacing Weechat
• Figure out how much crap didn’t make it onto my todo list before it fell off
• Work on the SAS Tactical Command Interface
• Work on several other small SAS-related projects

and all I can think about right now is a quick snack…. lol

I’ve been thinking about how to organize tags on gnolia.com, mostly I want something more hierarchical in nature then just top-level tagging. It doesn’t really need to be built into gnolia, just something convenient.

There are two schema that I am thinking about, utilizing a file path style: e.g. programming/c++/qt or the namespace syntax my wiki software uses at home: e.g. programming:c++:qt. Then again, there’s always programming.c++.qt and all sorts of other combinations. Really, I think I like the Java/Python style dotted namespacing or simple folder paths. The issues of dealing with separators that may be utilized within a tag name is always a factor to consider though#—but shouldn’t be a problemo for me. Why do I feel like reading a book on database normalisation? One nice perk, i could always design a little bookmark mangaging gizmo as an external application or an AJAX page. Gnolia seems to have moved developer documentation into the wiki, so it shouldn’t be to hard. I could cook up something client side fairly trivially, but doing it as a web app might be more ‘fun’ in the short term, mmm!!! Short of writing my own program, there’s really no way for the UI to bundle tags within tags, that I’m aware of. (e.g. tag “Google” points to tags “Google/Services”, “Google/Software”, bookmarks for account “Preferences”, blah blah). A simple tags cloud sorted A-Z however, makes it fairly easy to see that kind of relationship though.

I may also play both decks at once, and try managing my data with delicious at the same time; with a review to be made after a month or two. And of course, I can always whip up my own booksmark gizmo and place the server on Vectra for safe keeping.

Today I introduced a friend to the tagging concept behind services like del.icio.us and ma.gnolia, and used the wikipedia articles^[1][2] to give her a quick tour of things. In thinking about it for a whilef, I’ve realised that I ought to look into this again myself.

For a while I was thinking about building up my bookmarks again, more formally then my cobweb riddled brain pain that is. Today I figured that would mean using del.icio.us, if I was ever to go with a replacement for my old ma.gnolia account. When ma.gnolia went down, it basically took all of my bookmarks with it (unrecoverably). After that, I basically stopped using bookmarks lol; in fact the only one I’m actively using is a quick link to my usual radio stream, which I load every time I login. Everything else is something I know the URL of, or can Google for the exact address (I love a good search engine more then an old phone book lol). The only thing that I actually miss, is some of the programming articles I had tagged, but bookmarks are a fairly painless thing to loose; well, for a geek like me anyway there’s much worse.

In looking at ma.gnolia’s website, it seems that the wikipedia article is outdated. After a renaming to gnolia, it would appear that the service is alive again. While I expected to end up on delicious (sad to see the domain hack go :’), the revived gnolia is a bit of good news IMHO. I don’t know if I’ll ever establish as large a bookmark collection as I used to have on ma.gnolia but this time as an extra safe guard, I intend to make regular exports every couple months. Perhaps I’ll even check in the file into a git repo, dunno.

The really big question, is how to organize my tags…. hehe. Ok, sure my desk, room, $HOME, and everything else looks like a bomb hit it! But it’s tightly organised, so I can actually find crap when I go looking for it ^_^.

“Doctor Doctor, I feel like an alpha particle”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m positive!”

Setup Boost, Doxygen, and CppUnit on SAL1600.
Experiment with POCO when time permits: http://pocoproject.org/

The A/C unit desired to act up last night, so the work schedule had to be adjusted accordingly—not to mention being driven bonkers half the night. Luckly this morning only cost a perfectly nice dream… and 3 hours sleep lol. So far I’ve had two pour naps tonight, but no real sleep since :-/. Been running on an average of ~3 hours for work days, and around 5-6 split into segments on days off. If there’s such a thing as a sane sleep pattern, I doubt that I’ll ever see it again.

I’ve spent most of the day alternating between SWAT 4, Raven Shield, and transferring notes into my internal wiki; at least I’ll be able to decrease the size of my home directory, once I have vectra configured to automatically back up the wiki files as well! I’ve maintained notes and copies of documents for years, and on/off have been trying to down size it over the past several months. Such things change much less often then the rest of my home dir, so it is worth the transition; it’ll keep the dumps smaller. Right now, my main concern is actually the life spans of hard disks: less data to dump, less disk activity per backup cycle. Around december or janurary, it’ll be time to start work on the now bi-yearly CD-ROMs.

Most people I know, are nuts about overwriting their files, me, I’m paranoid, so all I worry about is massive data loss, that I didn’t cause my self #&62_>. The lack of a recycle bin on UNIX systems actually fits my brain well, if your going to want it back, why on earth delete it in the first place? Somehow I think the world would be a better place, if more people learned how to place important documents under version control and just be done with it!

Tomorrow, eh, now today… is going to be a long day, the only upside is work doesn’t start until the afternoon, so no need to get up early – I hope. I really don’t feel like sleeping right now, but it’s that or be running another 26-28 hours on no food nor sleep +S. *Sigh* I could get so much more done, if days were 36 hours instead of 24, or if life here was quite different…

After much internal debate, I’ve made a string of decisions that may effect the rest of my life. Something private now lays at the foot of the cross, let it be done as HE has had it written. When the time comes, I will leave this world as I came into it, free.

I’m beginning work on the next phase of cracking the problems that stand in my way, as one legendary hacker once put it, “When in doubt, use brute force”. There are only two problems integral to moving forward, and I must advance or be this place will destroy me. I have no hate or love to drive me anymore, only an iron will. If I have to hack code until my brains fall out, I am moving ahead with this: it really is as simple as that. Life has left me no stranger to running at a 150% of normal, I’ve already spent, what? The last 5 or 6 years of my existence like this? Last night proved a point, this morning charted a path.

Today is the first day, in the next chapter of my life.

Making like a crazy person, has got my desktop up and running again in 2 days and a night; and I’ve managed to get some game time today. Tonight, I’ve basically spent time with my routine updating procedure on FreeBSD. I update the ports tree, use the portversion script to grep what needs updating, then feed it into a little shell script to take care of business lol.

Ah, the simple beauty of automating UNIX—such a treasure to return to, after so much time with Windows NT.