Alright, after tonight's episode, I just have to ask. Who stole all the good Xena writers and moved them over to Buffy? Ok, I know. It's a rhetorical question, because I saw the opening credit. "Written and directed by Joss Whedon." Still, tonight's kickass episode of Buffy (and Angel wasn't half bad either) was a very welcome experience after the recent crop of shit from the once mighty chakram land. The drivel they tried to pass off as a Xena episode last Saturday night really had me wondering why I consider myself a fan.

Status of Bitscape's Lounge, version 2.0: Well, I spent some time on it over the weekend, and... well, hitting a rut, really. I don't know. It's frustrating because the whole thing is so damn close to being "ready to ship", so to speak (Uh oh. You know I'm working for a commercial software company when terms like that start to work their way into my vernacular). That last inch seems to be taking far more time than it should. Maybe I'm just too much of a perfectionist for my own good.

Well, in a certain sense, today marks a new milestone, I suppose. Not only did this mark the finish of my second week of work at eSoft, but it was also the first time in my life that I have ingested an intoxicating beverage. The primary subject I am here to muse about. (And besides, this page is well overdue for some lengthy, wandering, semi-philosophical musings.)

Alright, I know I wasn't going to talk about stuff at work here, but this time, I think it's warranted. Besides, there's little danger of revealing anything I shouldn't, since it's already public information anyway.

Despite the way my programmer's instinct is tempting me to do a minifest tonight and complete a postable interface for version 2.0, I'm resisting in the hopes that I'll have a little hope of maintaining some state of alertness at work tomorrow. Instead, I resorted to putting little FIXME's and brief pseudocode commments in various files where I know exactly what needs to be done. One of these nights, I'm also due for some quality time with Gimp, so it'll have something other than boring old text which could only be appreciated by lynx users. :)

Alrighty. Simpsons over. X Files a few minutes away. What better time to post a rambling, given that I haven't done one for a few days?

There's a 90% chance that I would have seen this movie had it not been for the abonimable actions of the MPAA. Looks like it could be an interesting flick. Maybe I'll see it when it hits the cheap theatres.

1. Yes, I am aware of the bug in the url of the previous rambling, and will be making a fix. Fixing the problem that caused it is easy (one escape sequence performed in the wrong order), but fixing what's already been entered is a bit more difficult, mainly because I haven't yet ported the editing stuff to postgres. Working with large objects is more work anyway, but when you've got to work around postgres bugs too, it's a pain. A fix will most likely be forthcoming this weekend.

As planned, I went to work at eSoft today. Didn't actually end up doing any real work yet, though. :) Was presented with a fresh-out-of-the-box new system with a barebones copy of Win98 preinstalled (promptly deleted by me), a Red Hat cd, some basic intranet info, and was basically left to mess with it for most of the day. :)

After spending the last few days wrestling with postgres, and finally getting all my data on Dagobah and Rage relatively synced, I've realized that the current interface for version 2.0 just isn't there yet.

I think. Ran into a snag yesterday regarding the size of postgres queries when I attempted to convert all my old ramblings over. The 16k limit was too small for some of my longer spiels.

In all likelihood, this will be the last rambling ever to be entered using the legacy engine.

Today, I finally got around to doing something I've been meaning to do since last week. An in depth examination of the SmartPlay code. There's no better exercise for a coder's brain than to read some good raw code, complete with global variables and one letter identifiers (fortunately, the two did not coincide much in this program).

After entering last night's Anti-Movielog entry, I remembered and realized that my first Anti-Movielog entry was for the direct sequel of my first Movielog entry. Strange how these coincidences happen. I didn't plan it that way, really!

Sweet. sweet. sweet. I just got the proof-of-concept for my new, super duper, elegantly abstractified, object oriented CGI form data system for Bitscape's Lounge 2.0 working. All the form objects are inherited from the entryform type, and it uses a funky little hash whose values are references to anonymous subs to handle the various input types. This should free me from the kludgy mess of manually writing laborious CGI forms forever! Plus, it's highly extensible, and will be even more so after I've done a little more tinkering with the method interfaces. Fun fun fun.

I was actually looking forward to seeing this movie, given that I really enjoyed the first two. They seemed to be just the right blend of horror and comedy, parodying slasher flicks of the past with a fresh slant which has since been imitated, but never quite matched by other movies.

Went to eSoft today. I now officially have a deal which I believe to be fair to both me and the company. I am SO glad to be done with that part of it. Oh yeah. My brain had just been going through conniptions the last couple days worrying about it. Now that that's settled, I can look forward to my first day in another week and a half.

I wrote this two days ago, and didn't want to post it immediately. Now that the deal is in ink, I see no reason why I shouldn't.

Alrighty then. Well, a little perusing this site's access stats and logs (something I seldom do) reveals some interesting stuff. Aside from the ever-present hits from the geek commune, and a strange agent on 26 January identifying itself as Mozilla 4.0, but exhibiting oddly spider-like behavior in that it systematically accessed every document on my page, I've been getting a fair number of hits from eSoft lately. In fact, every rambling I've written since applying there has been accessed (and presumably read). Since I'm sure this one will be no different, I'd just like to take this opportunity to wave. :)

It has recently come to my attention that the month of January has ended. Since it was one month ago that I made my resolutions for Y2K, and since everyone who listens to Miss Annabelle's lectures knows that a month is 1/900th of the typical human lifespan, it's time take account for that month. Besides, it's always more fun to do a progress check when you actually have some real progress to report. :)