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Taking the day off…. Camped out in front of the with my laptop atm, watching the end of the The Illusionist.

I’ve downloaded all 3 ISO Images for PC-BSD 7Release. I intend to test it in VirtualBox and natively on my test machine. But, because my test machine is also my games box… I’m backing the sucker up first ;-). I’ve booted the test machine into it’s maintenance partition (FreeBSD 7, my failsafe if WinXP goes belly up hehe). ssh’d in and am backing up each drive letter to Vectra (the file server). I’ll setup VirtualBox later and see how it works out, I don’t really care much for such things though, but VB may be handier then QEMU. After that, I’ll try installing it native, and see if the release likes my DVD Burner better then the Alpha/Beta versions did, lol.

I figure, for good measure I can take care of updating my laptop while I’m at it, probably lay down for a bit…. Assuming there is anything on this afternoon lol. It would be nice to gt *some* rest, but knwoing my family, it’s far from likely :

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Time for bed, I’ll finish cleaning up after others later… And since I think I’ve figured out who did the nbsp look up and why, I might just have a few words with a certain someone or someones after work as the case may be…

Tomorrows job doesn’t bring any favorable thoughts to mind, especially when I need to get back to work on my on projects, but work pays the bills :. I hav a few things to do after work, including finishing tonights work lol. But it’ll hold a day or two if necessary. The reworking I’ve been doing tonight, is mostly because I need a test case for one of our new sub systems. And also, because the module of code the last sample came from, irks me in just about every way possible. And extremely wasteful operations and problem-side-steppings aside, it’s a pile of shit to start with. So refactoring it to use something more, ehh ‘sane’, can’t be to bad a thing….

Now if I could just convince the dog to give me a place to lay down >_>

Haha, a quick sneeze and Willow took off at light speed, looks like I get to stretch my feet haha!

This one is just to much

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Ok, now this one has me putting my hands up an shoutin’ “this one’s to much!”

I’m working on rewriting an old pile of sludge that hurts my eyes, properly porting it to the new interface that works better… So far, so good, except for the fact that the actual bi-language mingle used for both logic and display, is about as undocumented and about as helpful, as a bullet in the toe.

All was going well in trying to understand it, until I saw this kind of thing:

/* NB: I probably added most of this indentation myself */
    $query4 = *_query("look up a user", $dbh); 
    $name=*_fetch_array($query4, $dbh);
    echo "<font color='#6699ff'><b".$name['the users name']."</b></font><BR><BR>";
    echo "<table border='1' cellspacing='0' cellpadding='3'><tr  border='0'><td align='left' border='0'><font color='#6699ff'><b>some header</b></font>";

    $query = *_query("look up first section from database", $dbh);
    if ($query) {
        $nr = *_num_rows($query, $dbh);
        for ($k=0;$k<$nr;$k++) {
            $topic = *_fetch_array($query, $dbh);
            echo "&nbsp;".$topic['the topics name']."&nbsp;";
            // ... do other crap

Where ‘the topics name’ is looking up a row in the database, which contains a non breaing space: &nbsp; ALL THAT FOR WRITING A FREAKING BLANK SPACE !? I have no idea if that was a quick and dirty way of cutting an item out of the list or what (before I took over), but for crying out loud… If I ever did something so moronic, I would shoot myself before leaving it for someone to find.

THANK GOD THAT I DID NOT CREATE THIS MODULE …. Even if I’m the sap whose got to keep it running like a swiss clock :

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Well, this was some bad news.

My mother told me to get off the computer, so I did (for once). Turns out that the other end of her phone call wasn’t who I thought it was, my Aount called and told her that Grandpa Ken passed away on Monday.

I’ve never met him, so I guess that’s what bothers me. Most of my life, Grandpa Ken has sent me a check every birthday and Christmas, but never a card…. The one thing I actually wanted from him, was the card! (or even a note) But as Ma always said, it wasn’t his way of doing things.

It reminds me, a couple of weeks ago; I had a very strange dream. I dreamt that for some reason we were all in Texas, and everyone was going off somewhere. But I was staying wih my grandfather and having lunch with him (Chili). In all my years of memories, never once can I recall dreaming of him :. And I remember a few months ago as well, one of my pictures fell un-provoked on two occasions. In my room, on top of the TV is perched the DVD player, and an array of pictures standing guard. My mother and Father, and then one of each set of grandparents. The thing that had alarmed me, was that it was my parents picture to fall over… That really got me praying for my familes safety.

My mother usually reports that certain things will happen when certain other things happen, e.g. stuff falling for no reason == death. I don’t really believe in such things, but she’s generally as accurate as a sniper in the long run…

Ma is a little annoyed, because it’s likey that my Aunt will get everything and I won’t get crap. I don’t want anything, I’ve never cared about money, people are what’s important. I would very much have liked to see him, or at least to pay my respects at the funeral… Probably just as well, no way to have made the trip to and back anyway +S. To be honest, if I did inherit anything, I’d rather it be film of him and the rest of our family, or something like that rather then anything else.

That’s another face, that I’ll have to look for in heaven someday. My father, now both sets of grandparents, only one of which I ever met… A good friend, and two older brothers. And my God mother, but that’s a day hopefully in the far future.

R.I.P. Grandpa Ken

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Since there is nothing on TV, I am utterly bored, yet to tired to do much with code for the night… I’m working on an idea I’ve been thinking over on/off recently.

Awhile ago, I decided to read a few style guides for English. Not that I’m likely to ever follow one >_>. I’ve elected for at least one American and one British based. Because, A.) I am an American :-P, and B.) if you have a problem with color and colour in the same paragraph, blame it on to many people in [SAS] living outside of the USA hahaha.

I would very much like to improve the quality of my written English. But there is not really likely to be much change, as I still have to be an abusively quick typeset. I type with ten fingers available to me, and usually have to type about as fast as I can think the words in my head. The mos tcommmon problem sbeing thsi kind! But I can’t really help the fact, that I have got to type and get my thoughts written down, before I end up getting interrupted and forced AFK (Away From Keyboard); which usually leads to interrupt upon interrupt, until I wish my head context switches better then my PC.

Who knows, maybe I’ll someday prove my friends theory, that I’ve never heard of a semi colon, to be wrong ^_^. In fact, I have heard of it, but I spend most of my time writing it like this:

expression;

😛

Days recap

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Quite a full day, if not very productive :

I was up to around 0500 last night, I dunno why but I never seem to get much sleep lately lol. The other day, I thought I was getting to bed early, and it was 0430’ish, well.. an hour early then the two days before I guess hahaha. Tried to sleep in today, since work didn’t start until the afternoon — not much luck. At least though, Tuesdays job is more time consuming then strenuous, tomorrows job on the other hand… Is more so a pain in the ass, then it is time consuming.

One thing odd, I heard Amanda kicked Adam out and that he’s staying with his parents again. Not a good sign in my opinion. Especially since, as memory serves, in 2007 I’ve seen and heard of a lot more people getting divorced or dying. 2008, I had somewhat hopped would put that incremental stream of numbers to an end lol.

One of these days, I really ant to take some time to write up a review of Google Chrome — I love that freaking thing!!! And whether the V8 JavaScript engine is really THAT fast or Google is taking advantage, gmail is so snappy on loading + the seperate process per tab thing, means no more browser-locks when launching gmail. Google Chrome is enough of an improvement over Firefox 2.x, that I might actually be able to re-take control of my inbox, if I ever get a linux binary package to use on my FreeBSD box… or better still, a native binary ;-). Perhaps it would be more fair to compare it to Firefox 3, but I use Flock 1.x most of the time, which is based on Firefox 2.x. And in all honesty, I hate Firefox 2 when compared to Firefox 1.0,x-1.5.x, it’s just lost that feeling I guess… I just don’t like the changes, and Firefox 3’s alpha builds didn’t look like an improvement. Although, I do have FF3 installed on SAL1600 just in case, but more so because it’s a newer version.

Google Chrome, I think is perhaps the best thing since Lynx and HTTPS but who knows >_>

As far as my efforts to standardize myself around 1/2 languages + what we use on [SAS], has fallen back into deadlock. Every way I slice the pie, Python seems to be the best choice for all of my needs, hell… The only time I’ve had an interpreted language come out as to slow for jobs I’ve tried to use them on, is an oddity. A script had to invoke perl so many times to process text, that it was faster to invoke sed/awk instead, which could actually be considered interpreted languages I guess lol. Some of the things I’ve heard about Python 3000 alarm me in that regard, but I’m not very concerned. The real problem is, I prefer C, but I don’t have *time* for C. When it comes to using C++ for tasks, I look at it as a two edge sword. More time savers then C but they all go out the window, in situations where they are not helpful.

That and working with gtkmm on Windows will probably be a pain in the royal hind quarters when it comes time to link against stuff. Although, I rather think a combination of Boost, Qt, and libs used in gnome is a good idea. The odd thing? C++ is not actually a language that I like a lot, but hey… beats Java I guess :

Java would actually be a perfect tool for my needs, except I don’t want to have to write in Java that much loooool.

Pride

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After a thread that came up about uniforms / arm patches, I interjected a comment on the way we used to handle it. I still have the arm patches issued to me as a recruit and trooper, plus the one I made for myself as a trooper. Pictured above is a GIF copy of the one [SAS] Shield issued me shortly after my tryout.

S’all the all rank I ever needed: [SAS] Trooper

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I have to go to work tomorrow 🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁

Oh well, at least [SAS] Killhouse Redux is making headway.

Windows XP — hates to run your programs

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This one was just pricless, when I got back to my PC, I had to unlock it via pw.

When I went to click on my user icon, it gave a balloon message, essentially saying:


Terry has 3 programs running

Running to many programs reduces your computers performance. If you computer is running slowly, try closing a few programs

Now that, is just fucking funny lool.