EleventyTen

Just a quick apology to anyone who has my blog in their RSS reader. I’ve just switched from Mephisto back to WordPress and in the process of converting all my posts and comments (there is no automated conversion routine, I’ve had to do this by hand; with a little help from Ruby) I’ve made a few mistakes, messed up a few articles, and as a result I’ve been making quite a few edits. So apologies for the noise, please remain seated while we ride out this turbulence.

Why the switch? Well actually a few reasons, but primarily because Mephisto seems to be at a standstill, and besides being a sucker for new features and plugins; I don’t believe that Mephisto can be 100% complete and secure after such a relatively short development period. I haven’t seen a single public update since I installed it (of course I could use -trunk.. at risk of watching my blog fall over every time a breaking change is committed..). That’s maybe 8+ months without a public release. So whether you agree with my reasons or not (I got flamed on #rubyonrails a couple of times for mentioning I may switch..), there it is. I’ve switched. So stick that in your console and compile it :-P

I finally have my Mac! Through a series of unfortunate events, my PC finally gave up the ghost, and with a little help from my Mum (thanks Mum!) I have a shiny new MacBook Pro. And it’s awesome. Ruby development is super fast, and actually so is everything else. It’s got a 1.8Ghz dual core Intel processor and 2GB of RAM, and I can’t make it break a sweat. I’ve already started reading the Apple documentation, and its yummy, so at some point in the future I hope I’ll be releasing some kick ass OS X software. Woo!

I think I’ve decided what to do. Since my PC is quite literally on its last legs, and I can’t afford the Mac I want yet, and I need to keep Windows at hand, and I don’t want to upgrade to Vista, and I don’t really wan’t to buy a new PC just to run Windows XP for the forseeable future.. I think I’m going to buy a Mac Mini and replace this eye piercing CRT with a shiny new TFT monitor from eBuyer. A little under 650 smackeroonies for the Mac and a little under 200 for the monitor and I can run both OS X and WinXP on it with the aid of BootCamp. Can’t be bad.

I’ve been sitting for the past ten minutes decided whether to clear most of my Cubase projects off of my spare drive and install Debian on it. I should probably have a Linux installation around anyway, but I rarely find myself using it as a desktop nearly enough to justify the space. So why is today any different? I’ve been using Ruby on Rails for a while now, and so far I’ve somehow managed to supress my frustration with the speed of the Ruby interpreter. But I’m slowly getting to the point where I need to do something about it. On my Linux based dedicated server, it takes a mere second or three to boot up a Mongrel instance, while here on Windows it can take up to ten. Even running a simple “Hello, World!” takes a few seconds to execute in my Microsoft hell (more on that later.. suffice to say I will not be upgrading to Vista..).

So what can I do about it? Well first off I can move to another platform. Ruby is pretty swift under both Linux and OS X, but I can’t afford a decent Mac yet. Moving to Linux is a viable option, but brings with it another set of complications. For example, I use Flash, and Fireworks, and Photoshop. Nearly everything I use is either cross platform or available for multiple targets and I’ve exerted considerable effort in my ten years as a software engineer to make that happen. Sure I can use Gimp for image manipulation, but it’s not Photoshop. And the majority of the files I’m sent by designers are Photoshop files. Sure Gimp opens them now, but does it support the latest PSD format? I have no idea. What if Adobe update the format again? How quickly will Gimp provide support for it? Will I have to change my workflow again? I can work around most things. For example I just got used to using E for my Ruby on Rails work, and I really like it, but I’ve changed IDE before and I can change it again, no biggie. And a Linux version of E is planned for the future, so there’s every chance it would become part of my workflow again. But not all of my concerns are as simple as which editor I use to write my code. Most of my questions can probably be answered simply and quickly, but they will be nagging concerns in the stability of the way I work for the forseeable future.

Holy cow Batman! It’s true!

http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

That was not fun. I just wasted a whole day or so trying to remove some evil spyware called “Vundo”. In short, it’s a nasty little piece of crap that pops up advertisements whenever it feels like it. It’s almost impossible to remove in Windows too, because it’s actually smart enough to resist almost every possible method of removal. Don’t take that as a complement, I’m just amazed that some moron somewhere has so little of a life that they have the time and energy to waste on something as pointless as this. In fact, it amazes me in general that morons who write spyware and virii don’t turn their skills to something productive, instead of joining the ranks of the scum and vermin of the internet.

So what did I do to remove it? After trying every single tool I could get my hands on to fix it, including (but not limited to) “VundoFix”, “Vundoh”, “Spyware Blaster”, “Spybot - Search and Destroy”, “Process Explorer”, “Advanced Process Manager”, “KillBox”, “ComboFix”, “Dellater”, “l2mfix”, “SmitFraudFix”, “Avenger”, “Brute Force Uninstaller”, and “HiJackThis” - none of which could actually remove the offending worthless piece of crap - I downloaded the Knoppix 5.1 Live CD, mounted my NTFS partition as read/write, deleted the offending DLL’s myself, then used HiJackThis to remove the offending registry entries.

What a pointless waste of time, and a tribute to Linux. Saved me again.

That’s all I have to say. There should be a law against it. Assholes.

Edit: I should have done something about this sooner, but I received an email a little while ago from a nice lady who pointed out that Cyber Sitters is a child minding agency in Australia and that my comments were coming up in web searches! Let me point out that while my original statement stands in the context of people who buy up ‘interesting’ internet domain names with the sole purpose of selling them on at extortionate prices, it does not apply to said agency. So to anyone who finds this post in error, my apologies ;-)

Edit: I should also point out that while I said ‘Cybersitters’, what I actually meant was ‘Cybersquatters’. Slipious tonguious. Oops.

For a moment there I thought we’d hit a quite period in the contract world, having received nothing from the Freelancers Network website. All is well however, as today I received nothing short of a slew of interesting projects. Wish me luck!

Well Tela finally got back to me, so the stress levels are back to a low hum. I still can’t fully relax as Al and Nat are still looking for work so it’s still down to me to pay the rent back in London, and despite protests I still intend to settle Athena’s medical bills so she can get help without worrying. She’ll still worry of course, but anything I can do to help I will. I tend not to talk publicly about this side of my life, for a few reasons. Mostly because it’s nobody’s business but ours, but every now and then I feel the need to think out loud, and my blog is usually my soap box, and right now I have a few things on my mind.

I understand this may be a misinterpretation on my part - exchange rate falls heavily on one side here, and when converting from dollars to sterling things seem really cheap over here. But while browsing through freelance websites I can’t help but notice that these projects are really badly paid. For example, a $250 budget for a complete member system user levels and document sharing really doesn’t seem a whole lot. There’s a few days work there and spread out over say 3 days (including testing and enhancement requests) it works out at just over $10 an hour. WIthout seeming ungrateful, this is actually less than I’d get working in McDonald’s back home.

So what gives? Are freelancers just really badly paid over here, or are companies just trying to take advantage of desperate contractors? Back home I make an average of $50-60 an hour. Something ‘aint right.