I just wrote a shell script that looks up a webpage, text-only formats it, and mails it to a specified e-mail address.
Why? SSH isn’t proxied or filtered (how would you filter near-“random line noise” on a specified port?). So, if the net is down here it’s likely the proxy server. And SSH therefore is likely okay, as is e-mail.
Meaning I can SSH into the home server and issue a command to fetch and send a webpage, which I receive via Outlook at work in a few seconds. Work can continue.
This is what they mean when they talk about burnout!
I would say that the last few months of my job, from a developmental perspective, have almost entirely been about time management. Which is weird, since I’ve never thought myself at all challenged in that area. But, the professional world is very different.
Especially in a job like mine, you pretty much have people heaving things at you from many different directions. And, if you apply your own value system to some of the tasks, they would never get done. That’s the sticking point: when do you put down what you know is more important because you have become delinquent or slow on something less important? How to manage that?
It’s especially challenging when you receive a request you simply don’t know how to handle immediately and know you’re going to have to tap other resources. My biggest challenge has been to find a way to track and manage tasks that go from “Pending” to “In Action”, then immediately begin cycling around “Waiting for Third-Party”, “Pending”, and “In Action”.
Anyway, the experiences have been of great help. I’m very much a fan of the Inbox Zero concept, and I’ve basically structured my entire workflow around keeping things out of my Inbox. Although I’m not so against having a constant poll on your mailbox (not like our system lets you avoid that anyway).
No antesonic.org browser incompatibilities with IE 6! Helps that you could probably hand-write my CSS file on a grain of rice.
I am somewhat uneasy after receiving various tidbits of lukewarm feedback regarding the new site design. I’m ever looking for possible future design ideas…
Type a password into a password box (any web login will do) within your browser of choice. Include spaces in the password.
With the cursor at the end of the starred password string, press Ctrl+Backspace. Does the password only delete up to the space you typed? If so, is that not an undesireable security feature?
The Sigma class system being well underway (although not present in trunk/ at this point), I somehow can’t help but self-destructively imagine a different project.
Imagine a Microsoft Access replacement written in Python, using pysqlite and wxPython…
wxPython has an XML file format for UI design, meaning the program could basically embed a wxPython XML designer that would then auto-load the interface from the database itself whenever necessary. The whole file format for the database could actually be a sqlite database with a few special tables!
Instead of banging on the class/race system immediately, I took some time to check out wxPython and get some mockups going for the Designer.
Seems to be working great. The left pane will be a tree for an area’s XML parse tree. The rich text editor currently visible will be read-only and will generate only the XML for the currently-selected tree node.
Between Python and wxWidgets, this will be a very easy program to create.
