Captain's Log Supplemental

Damn it feels good to get my feet out of shoes… Even if it’s only an hour til I go back to work.

I’ve missed the chance to post 3 or 4 entries I wanted to do.. When I’m busy I usually skip my Live Journal for the day. My E-Mail and server time usually being the next ones on the list to go….

The day started with a 0930 roll out to get ready, home from work, chores done by 1700. That gives me maybe an hour to rest. Then I go back to another hour and a half of hell. Not a bad days labour for some one people bitch at that he doesn’t work, eh?

I’m anxious to see what if any response my post in SNCO’s has gotten. But I don’t have time to deal with the other messages if I do log in. I uploaded an HTML Export of the current draft of the SOP’s. I consider them *almost* ready for release, just a couple more things that I know we need to do. Clean up the section on Communication, I think for the sake of Getting It Done. I’d like to grab a couple of Members and have a group huddle to work on a few things.

What En4cer did for the V-Commands SOP which I adopted into this rewrite as necessary… Is good stuff but we need a RvS and S4 V-Com section that goes hand in hand with each other. And En4cer is sure as hell not current enough on SWAT4 to be able to do it so even if he was active enough…

So, Plan C:

Rip it down to an outline and rewrite the hole thing from scratch. Including writing both sections at the same time(ish) to more better synchronise them.

Also Appendix I needs to be reviewed and I want to change a few more things but I need time to do it.

I’ve taken to keeping an Operations.txt file on my Desktop and having Vim open it to show coloured indentation markers. In such a way I can use it as a Quick & Dirty outline / notes file. While retaining the power of my text editor and skipping learning a plugin to do basically the same thing but more completely =/.

*sigh*, between Family and Work, life is a nightmare…. There’s not a lot good left in my days when I’m not around [SAS]. To be honest, I think I’d do better in the Military… I think even a Private would have more take home pay then both of us combined :S. If it was enough to support my mother… I might even manage to have a chance at going after it. It would also be a chance to do some thing with my life… if my body could stand the Physical Training I might even enjoy it. Ones country can’t shit on you as much as your family for trying to be of help can they? lol.

For my age, I should be strong as an ox…. Rather then having nearly as many rattles as a FORD Tempo.

I always hoped to keep the Army and Navy open as possible options for my future. But I don’t know if the parts would stand up to it any more. I’ve been working in this business since I was 15, without pay or respect. I remember when I was a young teenager people said I had a mind older then my years….. Less then 10 years down the road I feel like I’m developing the body to match =/

…. Fuck.

Re upp’d the library books this morning before work. It’s nice to know I’m not the only one thats half asleep that time of morning hehe.

I’ve been concentrating on Maximum Security: A Hacker’s Guide to Protecting Your Internet Site and Network. A very good book, highly interesting. This is a THICK book, I’ve read only 200 pages or so and keep going. I figure if I keep going at my usual reading rate I can finish it in about a week of reading nights. I’m used to pulling 70-100 Pages a day when reading a novel, more if I just sit on my ass and read the day away.

I really want to dig deeper into the book on PHP/MySQL because I really don’t know shit about Databases, PHP… Is close enough to things I do know that I can generally pick things up fast. SQL, is a different story.

To save my the trouble of screwing with SCP/SMB to continue work tomorrow from another computer…

Heres a scratch file I’ve been toying with tonight. For the heck of it I thought I’d toy around with trying to break a $PATH like string apart into some thing a program or file could be looked up and then try to add a primitive file name completion to after tinkering awhile.

Todo tomorrow:

clean up comments, finish playing with the Abbrev class, toy with trying to match up a regex to an abbrev to a filename, worry about rest afterwards.

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby -w
# Build a hash table from a $PATH like string that we can use for calling
# commands.

require 'abbrev'
require 'pp'

PDEBUG=1  # Programmers DEBUG on

path = '/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin'

# Create a hash for $PATH
#
# Arguments:
#   path => string containing a list of directories delimited by separator
#   separator => Any delimiter suitable for String#each
#
# Return value:
#   A hash where keys are directory names and values are handles to those
#   directories.
def make_pathhash( path, separator=':' )

  hash = Hash.new()

  # Parse path for directories
  path.each( separator ) do |dir|
    dir.gsub!( /:/, '' )
    # Creates a key from path containing a directory name
    hash[dir] = dir #Dir.open( dir ) 
  end

  return( hash )

end

# Create a hash from the current directory to assist filename completion
#
# Arguments:
#   directory => A directory to create the hash from
#
# Return value:
#   An hash of filename => filenames from directory
#
def make_chdirhash( directory )

  hash = Hash.new()

  dirh = Dir.open( directory )
  dirh.each do |file|
    hash[file] = file
  end

  return( hash )

end

if PDEBUG 
  h = make_pathhash( path )
  cd = make_chdirhash( '.' )
  pp Abbrev::abbrev( cd.to_a.flatten ).sort  
end

Not bad for an idiot just screwing around if you ask me.

Also to do tomorrow, finish that thing I was doing before dinner.

mm, one of my favorite things to do.. Organize crap ! lol.

On the agenda for the day:

• Update, organise, resync, and probably rewrite my vimrc
• Find note taking software, write it, or kiss VIM into doing it for me.
• Solve the multi-machine but single user problem…. My data getting spread between several PC but still used by just little ol’me.
• fix my laptops SSH configuration
• *Some day* finish working on my browser reintegration… Craps spread between Konqueror, Firefox, Opera, and Netscape..
• Try new file management idea
• Figure out how to use Vim for mail composing and temp files for message backup

currently my file system looks like

tmp -> usually crap I don’t want cluttering space in ${HOME} or Desktop but won’t delete yet

Work -> Files I’m currently working on not related to [SAS], usually need to be moved to ${HOME}/Programming/Language/, documents, and images.

sasclan.org -> a directory structure of all things related to [SAS].

I’ll probably have a follow up post when I have more time to think on the file system issue.

Considering that I haven’t really paid much attention to the study of math in many years I was some what surprised to be asked to cube a number.

To me, a cube means a lot but it doesn’t mean a number :/

When I think of a cube, I think of the operations one can carry out on it.

Find the external dimensions of it’s walls to find how much space it occupies to store. Find the internal dimensions of it’s walls if any to find out how much it holds. The knowing how many cubic centimetres the object may hold, try to find the probable capacity in US Gal. That it may hold and of how much kg it said liquid will occupy. Of course the problem there is that we need to know what kind of liquid lol.

Damn, I used to do that kind of shit when I was a youngster. When I was like 12-13 I was always trying to cook up a custom mech design of some kind of Mobile Suit, down to the most minute details… Even to the thickness of armour locations and the metrics of the thruster systems. I basically had given up on the study of math years prior but I needed math to persue my interests. So I worked on it, I wouldn’t know how to describe in proper terms most of the stuff I did, so much as the results. Many a time in those years ago, back when the word “mall” had some meaning. I would often ask my mom for a calculator, pencil, and paper so I could work out some problem or figure while I walked.

For the most part, I know squat about mathematics because I’ve done my best to ignore paying attention to it in school. But, given a proper reason to find some thing and the time & motivation to do it. I can usually find my way though things after some time.

I’d love to learn more about some the more complex aspects of math but school has never served such a goal very well. And what little time I do get to my self to study on any thing is limited… It was a wonder I ever learned the basics of working in binary :/

Most of the times when I sit down to work on some thing and then end up in the game servers a short while later, is because my family is driving me so nuts that I can’t get any thing done… or I’m to tired to do any thing else. Really to get any thing done around here I’ve got to wait till they go to bed… the STHU up and let me work thing doesn’t work…

A man can do many things but without finding a good purpose for doing them he is trapped in hell. That’s how I think school can be best described… Why waste time with a text book, when what little time I have… Could be spent wrapping my head around some thing interest? Like the Unix V6 kernel with a handy book to fill in the gaps for example.

Sheese, I think the book started out as part of the authors computer science courses at the University of New South Wales in the 1970’s, and to be honest I’d much rather have a chance to learn about how old Unix worked on the in side then putt around with the sludge school books demand :S. At least this has a point to it, learning some thing !!!!!

My time is limited enough as it is, I preferr to spend it ether with friends or learning…. not wasting it more then necessary.

Is there any polite way to say….

I need more damn time to work on things ???

else free room & board out of this place for a few months…

Figure out why the hell when ever we get a phone call it seems I have a 75% chance of losing internet connection on my desktop for just long enough for X-Fire to time out.

No other system seems to suffer from it, yet non are more active during the time of day when the phones get spamrung. At least at night when I’m on the laptop and the phone is silent, all is good… Never have gotten any reports off the other systems of any downtime during the day ether.

*arrrggghhhhhh*

Note to self, look into the andrew file system. I remember seeing source code for an AFS implementation on my FreeBSD system but don’t know much about it.

Probably worth reading the (huge) fine manual since it works under *nix/Win/Mac as far as I can tell. Hey, it can be any worse for my needs then SMB… lol.