Tsky Blog
"Delivering thoughts on living with electro-connection-disorder since 1980."
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Birthday girl, Hacking Hardware, Regional Pride
2012-05-14 (08:43:14)
Where has the year gone? My little girl turned one this weekend and I honestly don't know where the time has gone. So we fired up the twin BBQ, invited friends and family and celebrated the day.
Noticed an epic bug in my blog site (my bad - if I hadn't turned the error reporting off I would have caught it ;) ). Many thanks to Steven for pointing this error out.
Spent some time playing with the Dreambox this weekend and finding out how some of the system operates underneath the hood. Crazy to think it's decoding satellite streams; rendering images; managing FTP and Telnet; uploading files to a remote server; providing a user interface all on 265Mhz and a few Megs of RAM. Now that's Linux in action right there.
Which reminds me - I still want to get m hands on a couple Raspberry Pi units. Matthew has one and is playing around with it (lucky bugger!) so I'm waiting to hear about some benchmarks on the little baby.
Working in the new building makes me realise how under-promoted Teesside is in regards it's achievements. So many products, services and inventions come from here and we're not proud enough of this fact.
Fighting off whatever bug wiped out my kids the other week, Strepsils eyeing me up from my desk and ibuprofen like candy at the moment.
The new MacBookPro is the dogs danglies - I'm throwing all the applications I use at it and it's not spluttered once (even with them all open). A bit more memory in it and I don't think it ever will. Marked difference to the old black Macbook I have at home (which i still use, just carefully selecting what applications I want to run - damn you Netbeans and Safari for hogging all my 2Gb RAM!)
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Hardware, Software, Wetware
2012-05-06 (23:15:17)
I've been looking at a lot of hardware stuff recently - looking at ways of putting Steampunk stuff together as well as knocking together systems I need to work with. I've been really amazed at the little Dreambox device I got from a good friend of mine who's doing a nice little trade with the ex-pat community in France. The hardware is really neat, considering it's age / internal components. Really makes me frustrated and angry that the big boys in TV boxes and networks can't get their uber systems to work nicely. Another win for OSS.
The kids have been pretty ill lately and it's meaning I've been running on something like four hours sleep a night due to the fact my brain is telling me to listen to their sleep pattern. It kind of leads me to thinking about software and hardware while I'm laying semi-awake on my pillow.
Awaiting hardware at work (hopefully will turn up early this week) so I can get my teeth stuck into development work along with the hardware systems work I've been going through.
One week to the second child's first birthday - where has the year gone? A lot of water under the bridge and a lot of miles covered in a better direction.
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New Code, Legacy Code
2012-04-25 (08:07:42)
So I'm in my new job, getting to know everyone and all the systems. Trying to get my head around FreeBSD again (I'd forgotten what it was like to have to compile and do make install processes - thank you apt-get!).
Anyhow, I get a ping about an old system I maintain legacy code for over on Sourceforge to find an XSS bug in Kongreg8. You need to be authenticated for it to kick in from what I can gather from the report and have elevated privileges in the system but it was annoying (yet not that out of the realms of possibility given when half the code was written five years ago) to find it was caused by a line having been moved in a launch file for some unknown reason. It was doing all the cleansing after launching primary files (DOH!). Modified the whole system to pull the cleanse routine when firing modules instead of on the main launch sequence to add an extra layer of protection to each of the module files. I'm amazed, given how they've seemingly tested the whole application framework) that there was only a couple of medium level issues. Ah well.. legacy code eh? Such is life!
Anyhow, coffee and new code time...
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New job, new opportunities
2012-04-20 (13:21:59)
So my last day working full time at bsearcher - it's been an awesome ten months here and we've achieved so much. It'll be sad not to be here with the team on a daily basis but seeing as I'm only really moving down the road there'll be plenty of opportunity to catch up.
So as of Monday, I'm working at thap ltd in Middlesbrough as a PHP developer. New team, new opportunities to push my abilities, new desk!
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Serendipity
2012-04-18 (20:33:18)
So, randomly, I managed to get in touch with an old friend from university today. Really good to get back in contact and talk about the past few years.
One of those happy accident situations that's mutually beneficial at the right time.
So, yeah, was great to have Olly and Ria round for the evening last night (was totally in shock and delight at being asked to be part of his best man team - I've known him for like 21 years and I don't think I've seen him happier than he is now).
It's Wednesday night already. Where has the week gone?
There aren't enough hours in the day at the moment either.
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