An orange in an apple orchard
Today, well really yesterday since it is now 0438 local… Was my parents wedding anniversary, number 20 I think. It’s also the day my Father died… guess that would be 1989-01-12 for a date: I was born 1988-06-20.
So needless to say, it is not a very happy day in my family…
Well, after quite some deliberation, I made my decision last night: I will not resign from the [SAS]. Irregardless of what comes next, I can’t walk away from [SAS] so easily; any more then I could walk away from the love of my life (It’s often been my point of view, that if I could put up with this much shit from SAS, if I got married, my wife would never have to worry about me leaving her — hence the reference lol). By all the probabilities that can be weighed, I’m more or less expecting to be let down by my commanders this time around, but hoping GCHQ still proves me right in the long run. That issue resolved, I guess I can [digitally] burn my prelude to resignation letter (unsent) and move onto the other sectors of my life; which do need some dedicated thought. If I can invoke such methodically precise thoughts on tactical matters, and in programming issues, why not put the brain towards improving life?
The family camera is old, well at least 15++ years I would say since we had it when I was little and my memory goes back till when I was about 4 years old! The Camera I got some years in between is essentially a cheaper version of the same; Finally found out that it uses 110 Film. I remember the rolls well, this is actually reminds me of the Beta C-Mags in shape.
As 135 Film became more common we gradually took less pictures as the probability of the films extinction happening before we could afford a new camera. Personally I would like a Digital Camera.. Some thing of fair price to performance but I’m not sure if any of my machines card readers are supported by FreeBSD 0.o
Made a bombing run across the code for wrapping pkg_info, the stuff to right click a program and delete it is still mock-up. But I’ve fixed the display of programs. Before when I had initially written it back in December I used a mish-mash of operations on links and arrays to rip off the version # and description from pkg_info’s output because I didn’t have time to learn Pythons Regular Expressions. Which of course I had to learn the regular expressions module like 2 weeks later but I never had time to revisit that.
I converted it to use regular expressions so it can solve the known issue that some of the entries displayed in the names and versions columns would be ‘cut’ wrongly. An exception handler was there to report any ones that failed the operation (and would display wrong). Because of the change to regular expressions that’s fixed and the exception handlers are mostly there to catch any errors I might make before the file grows more mature.
I’ve also tried to adjusted it so that a non displayed column is used to hold a complete reference to the programs name-version suitable to use plg_delete on. For the sake of those that don’t know what prog-foo installed does I should add a column between it and the versions that will display the short descriptions given by pkg_info; minor change.
I imported about 1/3 to 2/4 of my most stable files into the SVN Repository. And I think I can import most of the others in the testing/alpha2 directory. Before starting t his move to SVN. What I did was create stubs in my ~/code/Python/src/neo directory. And make a testing directory there for scratch tests and things because I still had many modules in Pythons standard library to learn and knew zilch about Qt programming.
The Alpha1 directory was made as a place to start compiling code that could begin to form the basis of an Alpha release. The Alpha2 directory was forked off from the Alpha1 directory to build more quality to it and iron out more ideas. I still personally consider NPM as pre-alpha because it has yet to be made a full program beyond the near complete mockup in the Alpha1 directory.
For the SVN Repository, code is being taken from the Alpha2 directory on the laptop and imported into the trunk. My intention is to make use of the branching/tagging features to prepare an alpha release from the current code when it is ready. So there is no need to use the directory structure I was using before SVN, because this is Subversion versioning system 😉
Ma kindly reminded me that it was after 0500 in tbe morning so I didn’t take time to finish work on the file before commit, it is still improving though. The only thing that pisses me off is I spent about 10 hours yesterday working on NPM after getting home from work. Between the website and the program code the first 5 hours were almost a washout, the 2nd 5 hours were like 20 * more productive then the first — Oh what difference there is between starting at 1500 and starting at 2400 here…
NPM now has a website set up. It is pretty basic and 2 files plus a stylesheet but gets the job done for now.
I want to see what I can do with the server side scripting so I could move the links menu, header, and footer into their own files to be inserted into the target page. I considered setting up a bare-bones install of a content management system since there is a MySQL database and 100mb storage allowed.
I ruled it out throuhg because the majority of it would just sit unused and that is at least 50MB of files for most CMS’s I’ve bumped into. While I do have experience with the software we use on [SAS] that does not mena I like it, I don’t think there is a CMS that I would want to use unless there was going to be enough volume of work to warrent it. I tried several demos of various PHP based CMS systems online, Drupal, Typo, Joomla, Xaraya, eZ Publish, e.t.c. I didn’t partictually like any of them but Xarya and Ez Publish looked quite nice but still overkill for this.
I also began checking in some of the more complete modules from NPM into the code repository on source forge.
As far as the web site goes, the only major additions I have planned for the near future is a planned features page, contact form, adding a link to my blog from page 2, and a note on fetching the sources from the svn. I also would like to get a mailing list setup.
My only complanit so far, it took me 6 hours to create the website — most of it done when my family was finally ‘out of the house’ for awhile, and all in all the job should have taken less then 45 minutes for me… That is how much damage constant interuptions, dogs barking, birds screaming like hell, fetch this and thats, phones ringing, peoples TV’s blasting my ear drums away, and the other general commotion going on in this rat-hole causes… Trying to work here is like pulling a fat man through the eye of a needle unless everyone here but me is sound asleep…
*sighs* is it any wonder I’m awake until I pass out from lack of sleep when I’ve got ‘work’ todo?
http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/
This is awesome !!! I can’t wait to give it a go without LiveCD 🙂
The new Okular document viewer and Phonon multimedia framework are big interests for me. Oh baby is it gonna be a sweet road to KDE5 😉
Todays live op went s’ok, a bit sticky at first getting every thing organized. Every thing went quite well other then Chester getting killed on the first floor…. We cleared room by room and it was ok until Duke and Lake went down on the fourth floor.. I was the last smoe still in one piece and that only lasted until about 2 stair wells down.
I saw the tango make as if to flee, so instead of using my last stinger I leaned out to fire… BUt instead of kicking out the door and running away as Tangos usually do in S4 when they flee. He shot me through the metal railing with an MP5, you could hear the bullets blink off it haha. Second time I’ve gotten ‘stung’ for being so stupid lately… Next time I just call up the tac aids.
I think this is about the dozen’th live op I’ve set up, I know there are 2 Live Ops on the site I’ve yet to do. Went through and compiled a summery of my own live op history. Kind of nice to be able to review my record… Usually if I look into live op history it’s because of compiling peoples service records.
live op name (position if noted/remembered). All the ones I created include (TOC) in the position notes. The rest I only participated in. The creators of the various live ops vary between James, Myself, En4cer, Wiz, Noer, Rasa, Sniper, Lake, and Yuke I think.
My live op history:
747 Hostage Rescue (Sniper+Blue 2)
CP Peaks
Operation Black Gold (EL)
Codename Deep Water (Red 2)
Arctic Recon (TOC)
Fallen Angel (EL)
Mogadishu Mile (EL)
Hostage Rescue (Red 2)
Save the Prince (Independant Tech+TOC)
IRA Sting (TOC+Sniper)
Codename: Legal Eagle (Red 1)
Operation Drug Lab (Red 1)
Operation Nightlance (EL)
Dockside Dragons (TOC)
Bavarian Bandits (TOC+Spotter)
Operation Amazon Assault (Sniper)
Operation Blizzard Assault
Street Sweep (Red 2)
Highland Prison (EL+TOC)
Hunting Klaus: Island Fury (Red 2+TOC)
Hunting Klaus: Safe House (Sniper+TOC)
Hunting Klaus: Trial by Fire (TOC)
Operation: Avenue Sweep
Creeping Death Part I (Blue 2)
Hacks and Daggers (TOC+Blue 2)
Operation Worst X-Mas (EL)
London Library Under Seige (Blue 1+TOC)
I think Iw as downed in about 12 of them 🙁 As I usally remember after a successful live op, “At least this time I didn’t get shot in the tookus” lool. The 747 op was actually my very first. Cobra was EL and James was conducting, we had two assault teams. One would be blasting in from the main hatch; the other from the lower access way. Cobra and I with PSG-1 rifle and P228 pistol in hand paved the way to the jet and secured the cargo hold before taking up the 3rd aslt position from the lower-access ladders.
Recon was the only one to survive the assault, while most of us lived a fair way through it. The graphics card intense siege and tangos sliding between chairs eventually caused a lot of causties. He managed to get the pilot out and hunt down the Co-Pilot in the next building saving the day.
Most of the other Live Ops I was in gave me a good chance to enjoy live ops, although I don’t consider most of my participations successful because in most, win or fail, survival or KiA, I usually got shot up one way or the other… I remember Noer’s Mogadishu Mile live op, I was EL and we lost 2 people very quickly. It ended with Me and Lazko as the last men standing, bleeding to death if you noted our health bars, and a handful of bullets left between us! Think he had an M4 and I had a Sniper Rifle + Glock about to go dry. A lot of guys have made live ops over 30 since I joined [SAS], more then I’ve been able to participate in lol.
Arctic Recon, Save the Prince, IRA Sting, Dockside Dragons, Bavarian Bandits, Highland Prison, and the three Hunting Klaus live ops: Island Fury, Safe House, Trial by Fire were all apart of my live campaign and have inter connected stories. I conducted them and tried to avoid being in the Element. That reminds me Operation Vengeance, the 3-part finally still needs to be launched !! The only thing holding it up is finding a sound-clip to mix in for an Air Strike.
Hacks and Daggers and London Library Under Siege were two live ops I just had an itch to do one and went out and made them. The others were mostly planned… I always try to be helpful to my fellow members when they are doing a LO because I’ve done enough on both ends of the pond to know a fair bit lol.
Live Ops are one of the things I love about [SAS], you get a map, a mission, and one chance to save the day — which will it be?
Most of the live ops I created were successful and when they were not, usually a grade A disaster!
I think some thing most of my peers don’t know is that in real life, big special forces operations can and probably often fail just as often as they succeed. I never have really paid attention to our track-record as a team because the records only go back so far into our history, [SAS] was founded in ~2001 after all. I do have fairly detailed records for the live ops I’ve done for the live campaign though.
Registored for an account on Source Forge today and set up a project there for NPM.
My primary goal at the moment is the website because managing the source code on my laptop is no real problem, you could say I’m my own revision control system.
I’m planning on putting Source Forges project SVN Repository to work soon though. I am some what familiar with CVS, I’ve used it in the past but I’m not fond of it. Like emacs my relationship with CVS is a case of being able to live with it but not partial to it.
So in accordance with how much I have had to learn in getting this project a moving, I’ve elected to study a bit about using SVN. Heck, I havn’t used C++ in ages, I even hated the Python tutorials and never found the time to learn GUI toolkits besides (old version of) Java’s AWT. I also had to do a fair bit of hide and seek throughout the ports system internals. So I may as well learn a new versioning control system while I’m at it.
Hmm, busy busy busy time ! I’d love to get a micro-website and an alpha release sorted out this month.
NOTE TO SELF: Upload map for tomorrows live op tonight!
Ahh finally a little bit of rest. Been watching Jurassic Park one of my favorite movies you could say. Man it’s been a long time since I have gotten to see it. I still remember when it came out like it was yesterday, my GOD Mother said I shouldn’t see it because of the violence and gore or some thing (I didn’t notice any). I couldn’t have been older then 5 or 6 at the time. I don’t really consider JP violent or any thing but then again movies like Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, and Aliens were all movies I grew up with. Yeah so what if I was a weird kid 😛
I’ve always loved Dinosaurs so I guess it’s no wonder I love the Jurassic Park films, especially part one. It’s a shame really, they took every possible precaution and I’m sure their must have been multiply redundant power supplies… But they only thing they failed to consider was betrayal from the inside.. Fat stooge couldn’t even drive would a darn and brought down the parks systems with a command hidden within a system of over 2 million lines of code (that’s big).
What shocked me, is I wondered when watching it tonight what kind of computers they were using, couldn’t tell from the camera shots of the monitors. But towards the end when the girl Lex is trying to enable the door-locks while Grant and Ellie hold off the Raptor. When she sits at the computer:
“It’s a UNIX system, I know this..”
So I guess it is probable that Jurassic Park was supposed to have been powered by Unix workstations, interestingly for some thing that started life in the 1970’s Unix lives on in a number of incarnations today, including FreeBSD 🙂
I remember thinking too, that the graphical file browser Lex uses in the movie is actually similar to a program I’ve seen before in the real world. The difference is, the real one looks a lot better graphically then the one in Jurassic Park but I doubt it has as many features as the movies FX hehe. But hey, the movie was made in the early 90’s for a largely Computer unaware audience :
Ahh, now to slither up some code for the night.