[url=http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm]wow.[/url] that’s pretty creative.

—–

i’m not much for change, but recently we’ve had some changes in our development environment at work and so i’ve been forced to change some of my routines. now it’s been a long, long time since i’ve done anything really geeky, but i decided that it was about time for me to do something about my various unix prompts so that i can tell them apart.

and oh, i’ve rediscovered the joy of ANSI. yeah, pretty nerdy, i know.

—–

apparently i haven’t been very careful with my spam filtering and i accidentally added [url=http://www.bastalaranza.com]geoff[/url] to my blacklist rules. ooops. i guess his emails have been going into oblivion for a while now. silly me.

i guess i should be more careful now, but if you don’t see a reply from me, try and get ahold of me in some other way, ok? =)

“that is the right wrong thing to do.”

that’s what a co-worker of mine said today when i asked him about a design decision on a project that i’m working on. basically, i’m extending an existing application and there’s a lot of code that’s already out there that’s doing a bunch of “stuff.” now, the right thing to do is write very streamlined code and get rid of everything that isn’t necessary. but because of time considerations it seems that everyone is in agreement that the right thing to do is not necessarily the right way to do things, but is right given the circumstances.

my first inclination was to do the wrong thing, acknowledge that you did the wrong thing, and then move on. i just felt bad that i wasn’t doing it the right way…but now that i’ve gotten some affirmation that i’m doing this ok, it’s time to just plow through and keep doing the wrong thing.

—–

i wrote a white list mail filter for my primary email account. i was just getting way too much spam and it was getting to be quite the pain. hopefully this filter will work out much better. i still haven’t figured out the management side of things yet but i need to find an easy way to add to my white list. it’s kind of a mess right now. i think that i may end up rewriting a good part of what i’ve done to help facilitate that…but for now, it works well and i’m pretty happy.

the only thing that i’m scared of is new people who email me. how am i going to make sure that their emails don’t get lost? i think that i may need to do some kind of whitelist/blacklist combination for this to be really effective…maybe make a graylist too for the fuzzies…i don’t know…i’m sure someone else has solved this problem before, how did they approach it? hmmmmm.

i was thinking about installing spam assassin or something, but i’m really afraid of any false positives that may come up. we’ll see.

i don’t know about you, but i have to say that [url=http://www.apple.com/imac/]the new imac[/url] looks pretty cool…and i hate macs. but still, apple has consistently been innovative enough to impress me with their amazing design concepts and execution.

i’m not so sure what your options are in terms of upgrades, but i am pretty impressed with the new imac. enough to get one? nah. but still, it’s come a long way since the imac first came out. we still have one of the classic imacs in the apartment, though. it’s now a glorified mp3 player.

—–

programmers are a wacky people. myself, included. i just got called for some code that i wrote that they wanted me to update. it turns out that there were some error messages that i wrote in an application that basically spits out some rather…damaging error messages.

for example, there was this one case that i thought should NEVER EVER come up. because i thought it would never come up, i added a message that said:

“we use an internal enhanced text database in a pipe-delimited format.”

…

enhanced text database?

eh?

—–

one of the projects i’ve been tasked with is to figure out how to bypass some of the performance problems we’ve been having due to various factors, not excluding INTERNET LATENCY. basically, one of my projects uses external web services to access information. apparently, these one trusted internet web services are no longer as trusted as we would like them to be so i’ve been tasked with trying to better optimize the way in which we utilize these web services.

so this, of course, screams for some kind of caching mechanism. i have never been a fan of programming caches. i think the concept is great and i think that those people who love to eke out performance from their apps should be held up on a pedestal because i hate performance tuning. i was telling nelson the other day that i would never work at a job where i would be forced to write code as tightly as possible for performance reasons.

now i don’t write sloppy code, but i don’t sit around fumbling with assembly language bypassing every little JMP and INT’ing this or that to get what i want. man, that’s some serious pain, yo. that’s what nice high level languages are for. if i had my way, all of my code would look something like:

function bigProject(someVars) {
  doIt(someVars);
}

see….easy cheesy. someone should get on that and make it work. anyway, i hate optimizing code because now that you’ve got something that is working perfectly well you have to start doing crazy things with them. cache management, expiration, manual override, force update of the cache, indexing, ugh, who knows what else? they just aren’t fun things. i just like making things work. after that, the fun of the project sort of fades away.

i don’t know why i feel like this. i used to LOVE performance enhancement work. i used to sit and try and devise new and clever ways to get things to work faster and better. i guess i’ve been spoiled lately with all the cheap hardware that’s available for servers these days.

*sigh* i’m such a lazy programmer. i could never do work like [url=http://www.track15.com]dardy[/url] either. man, trying to get a response in nanoseconds is just crazy. the benchmarks i run make anything subsecond still GREAT!

maybe that’s what i should do…promote a slower pace of life because in this day and age we are all caught up in the rat race that maybe we need to wait every so often to gain a little perspective. it’ll be a code feature: reflection time^TM, i’ll call it. yeah, that sounds like a great idea!

ugh…back to writing the cache…

—–

[url=http://www.pretec.com]pretec[/url] is going to be selling a 12GB CF card by the end of the year…for $15,000.

crazy.

—–