April 25, 2008
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Today marks the fifth anniversary of my time at the School of Computing. Barring any unforeseen catastrophes, it will also mark the release of the first version of the new School website that Tom, Richard, Dave and I have been working on since January. I have to say, it's nice to be able to give the School an anniversary gift.
I started at the School in 2003. I was fresh out of school that January and had been working since then for Biology. In December of 2002, Sarah and I made the rather monumental decision to ditch the high-stress,, high-energy, high-paying Ottawa Tech scene for a more suitable lifestyle in Kingston. So far, on balance, we have no regrets.
Since my starting at the School, Sarah has started and finished her Masters degree and is midway through her PhD, We've gotten married, bought our first house, made two trips overseas, and have made many lifetime friendships that – while brief – we shall cherish forever.
The School of Computing is a fantastic work environment. The faculty are great, my co-workers are a hoot, and the students are a joy to work with. One fantastic aspect of working at the School is that it accommodates employees as they grow. Here's an example: Several years ago I wanted to try my hand at a Linux Live CD. That September the School of Computing released an official CASLab Linux Live CD. This is but one example. Generally speaking, any directions that I've wanted to grow towards have been accepted and encouraged by the School.
In five years of work, I can count on one hand the number of times I've not looked forward to going to work. Personally, I think that's a pretty impressive record.
Yes, there are parts of my job that I like more than others. Yes, there are a few things I'd off-load if I could, but in general, the parts of my job that I now find boring are the best parts of the Biology job that I held before starting at the School of Computing. They are a fantastic employer and I am happy to be a part of this team.
Another half year has passed since my last update. Things aren't changing too much in our lives, which is a good thing.
Let's see, last semester was probably my best one yet. I got two A's, two A-'s and another A- in the first half of a full credit religion course. This semester is a light one for CS courses. I'm finally taking a database course as well as HR and Org Theory courses. I'm also finishing that full credit religion course.
In the summer I'll be doing my last full semester of school. I'll be taking a stats course, two business courses to let me get my business minor, and my honours project. As soon as I figure out what the honours project will be about I'll post some info.
As for the rest of my life, Sarah and I are fine and happy, the appartment is still great, though rent's gone up too much and the hydro has tripled in the last year. Our somewhat new '89 Saab 900 is also working out very well (touch wood.) Sarah has finally seen the light when it comes to European cars. ;)
I guess that's it. The webserver is now running Debian. It seems more stable and has been running trouble-free for three weeks now. All is well.
Another half year has passed since my last update. Things aren't changing too much in our lives, which is a good thing.
Let's see, last semester was probably my best one yet. I got two A's, two A-'s and another A- in the first half of a full credit religion course. This semester is a light one for CS courses. I'm finally taking a database course as well as HR and Org Theory courses. I'm also finishing that full credit religion course.
In the summer I'll be doing my last full semester of school. I'll be taking a stats course, two business courses to let me get my business minor, and my honours project. As soon as I figure out what the honours project will be about I'll post some info.
As for the rest of my life, Sarah and I are fine and happy, the appartment is still great, though rent's gone up too much and the hydro has tripled in the last year. Our somewhat new '89 Saab 900 is also working out very well (touch wood.) Sarah has finally seen the light when it comes to European cars. ;)
I guess that's it. The webserver is now running Debian. It seems more stable and has been running trouble-free for three weeks now. All is well.
Well, it's been a few months since I posted anything here, so I'll add a few words now:
I'm back at school now after an eight month co-op at webHancer. It was, without a doubt, the best co-op experience I've had. The people there are fantastic, the product is pretty cool, and the work was interesting. Hard to beat reall.
School. Hmm.. Sarah and I are taking five courses now. I had taken 5 in first year, 4.5 in second, and 4 since. Sarah's been doing 4 all along. It's more work, for sure, but we're coping. I'm presently in: 95.285 (Discrete II) 95.307 (Programming Paradigms using Scheme and Prolong) 95.401 (Distributed Computing) 42.343 (Systems Analysis) and 34.278 (Religion course, modern history of the Middle East.)
My courses are all pretty interesting. Sarah and I both got slaughtered on the first 401 test, but we were recently talking to a friend who had previously taken the course, failed both tests, and still ended up with a B+, so there's hope for us. Scheme is fun, and the timing on the Religion course is.. appropriate. In fact, our first class was on September 11 at 9:30. The rumors were flying..
Life in general is going pretty well. Sarah and I are both happy. We've got a new car!! It's a 1989 Saab 900 four door. My parents gave us a grat deal on it back in July, and despite some initial hiccups it seems to be working out well. Sarah's excited, as this will be the first car she's owned that has snow tires.
Well, I guess that's it for now. See!! We're boring.
Well, let's see. It's been almost a year since I updated the news section, so here goes:
Sarah and I have been living together in our new place for almost a whole year now, and we're happier than we were at the outset. She's co-op'ing at Rational (nee ObjecTime) again and doing "top-secret" stuff with Java. She's actually hinted at a bit of it and it does sound pretty cool. She's learning a pile and having a good time, so I'm happy.
I'm working at the Ottawa-based software firm webHancer. They make a client piece of software that reports network metrics back to their servers. This data is then processed and put up into a lovely website. Access to this site is then sold to large internet companies who can gain an appreciation for what real end users experience when accessing their site.
What I'm working on is an internal tool used by sales and distribution to help target new customers and partners. It's very fun. The data collection server is written in C++ and the GUI to access it all is done using ASP accessing Oracle stored procedures that run queries against the database. I'm the only one working on this tool, and it has ben evolving very nicely since I arrived.
Despite the fact that everything there is either VBScript/ASP or C++ on Windows (not my favorite languages or environment.) I'm having a great time and learning a pile. The forray into large ASP-based websites has pushed me to learn PHP at home. This is leading to a much nicer website that will allow me to do all sorts of nifty stuff in the future.
On the computer front, I've dropped Rogers@HOME and signed up with Magma. They cost (a lot) more but have no problems with me running webservers using Linux. I've also moved the server up from Queen's to here. It's a beefy machine now (Dual Celeron 466 with 256MB RAM and a real hard drive.) All of this is because I may be setting up a business with a few friends in a couple of years. I'm hosting many sites now, and will likely expand this in the future. For now it's still non-commercial, but who knows what the future will bring..
Ben
Five minutes.. please?
Whew! I may actually have time to write something down...
Okay. Where do I start? Well, Sarah and I have moved out and are now happily living together in our first place. It's a great 1 bedroom apartment. I know that 1 bedroom sounds small, but it's not. It's 736sqrft. and has enough room for a Queen-sized futon, dining room, and all of the computer stuff. The bedroom is plenty big too, is it ever nice having a living room!
I could go one for pages about our new place, but I'll cut it short.
Hmm.. okay. The next thing is that my workterm at CrossKeys will be over in a week. I've been there for 4 months, and have quite enjoyed it. My first 2 months were spent helping to design and implement a cross-platform software management system similar in concept to PRM. It used symlinks and a programme named Stow to build a bunch of symlink farms, and then I wrote several perl and shell scripts that provieded wrappers around a database of XML files.
Then I spent a while learning a bit about SQL (via MySQL) before I started writting hooks (scripts) and programs that interact with Rational's ClearQuest, a problem-tracking system like Bugzilla. That was interesting too, as I did the programming in both Perl and Visual Basic. Go figure that I'd use VB.
Sarah worked at Entrust doing C++ in Windows and Unix. She had a so-so work term and is likely going back to ObjecTime (now part of Rational) for her next and final co-op term. I may return to CrossKeys on a different team doing development work in Tcl/Tk.
First, though, we have school. We're both signed up in 95.304, a big group- assignment course that everyone hates. Out group is awesome, made up of me, Sarah, Suguru Kanbayashi, Nat Lockhart, and Jason St. Cyr. It ought to rock.
We're also in 69.311 a mathy/comp sci'ish course, 96.305 a database course and 34.101 (more religion.) Sarah's also taking accounting 101, and I'm in a 2nd year philosophy course about computer ethics. They say it's designed for CS student, so there must be no sentences :)
Speakins of sentences, I've been bussing to Kanata the last few months to get to worl. What a joke! 1 hour 15 minutes each way. Bussing in Kanata SUCKS!! OC Transpo, listen to me!! DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE BUS SYSTEM OUT THERE!!!
Anyway, life is going VERY well, we're both very happy. All is well. Sweet.
Oh yeah! I just finished adding a new section to the site. It's a site for Dad's Hammond friends on the net. I'm using some cool Apache SSI/Perl tricks there. I'll be implementing an XML back end shortly. It won't be unlike my work for CrossKeys, except better, as I know the technology now! You can get at this site by going to Hammond It's got a password, but if anyone wants to see it, just drop me a line and I'll let you in.
Ben
Too much... information... ack! Come back in a month and a half!
Well, a lot has changed. If you're reading this, then the new server found its way to Kingston, and is now being hosted at Queen's, instead of by Rogers. This means that Edwin won't be able to unplug me when he starts losing a game of Everquest...
Anyway, the new server is a P200MMX w/ 64MB RAM and a bunch of small harddrives. It's running FreeBSD 4.0, not Linux, so I ought to learn a bunch.
At home, I've been fiddling with the BeOS. What a nice little OS. Too bad it has no good browsers, no NFS, no SMB, and no Gimp. Other than that, it rocks! It's VERY fast, stable, does SMP beautifully, and seems like one of the best OS's I've used in a while. It's no replacement for Linux, though.
We've finished our exams (whew.) The first three went quite well, but Algorithms, the course that has fought me since the word go, was a little rough. Oh well, I studied for four days straight, and I did my best.
I forgot to mention, I now have my own domain: http://www.moses.cx.
Also, I figured out web-based mail and calendaring! I'm using IMP for mail, and WebCal for the Calendaring. It was pretty easy to set up, and didn't require any fancy databses.
Well, it's been another exciting half-month for me. I've written 3 midterms, and gotten a few assignments back. I seem to be doing well thus far, I hope it keeps up. Sarah's making sure we work hard, and that's a good thing.
So, what's new? For my reading week, we went home to Kingston. I watched a lot of religion class, and we started to study for 384 (an evil algorithm course...) I also traded computers back with Dad. I now have a dual Celeron 466 machine w/ 256MB RAM under my desk! Whoo hoo! It's working very well with the new burner and hard drive.
I tried BSD again on my machine, this time I went with 4.0-SNAPSHOT. It seems very slick. When it ships, I'll probably try to install it again. Once I ran into a few problems with BSD I put Mandrake 7.0 back on. This time I used Mandrake 7.0 final, rather than the late-beta. Wow. It's cool. The only problem with it is that the LPR RPM was bad for network printing, so I just downgraded to the 6.1 RPM. Goo thing there are newsgroups!
Hmmm... the computers are all working too well. I can print, have sound, VMWare works, the network is solid, the SMP system is working, I can burn, the PalmPilot works in Linux.. something's wrong. It's not supposed to WORK this well. Oh well, I know it won't last.
Finally, I have a summer job!! I'll be working at CrossKeys in Kanata (can you say long bus ride?) I'm very excited about this. Sarah is working at Entrust for the next 4 months. It's quite nice to have a solid summer job in hand.
I've updated the look of the site, added an annoying splash screen, and made a logo from a photo of Moses. Gee, the Gimp is cool.
I've also added a hardware section, discussing the odd hardware I've used in Linux. Maybe I'll add a scanner to the mix. I guess I should write about my WinTV card I had too...
So, what's new? I'm back in to the swing of things at school, I've got an Operating Systems assignment due in 2 weeks, as well as a business assignment due Feb 2nd I'm loving being a lab TA, and am thinking about becoming a REAL TA next. I think I'll apply to be a TA for 95.205, which is a great HTML/Perl/XML/CGI/Apache/Unix course offered by the school.
On the computer front, things are going to be changing shortly. First off, my HP7200i CDRW died after 2 faithful years of operation, in that time I produced about 5 bad CD's, only one of which was the burners fault. (well, I made 5 more in the last month making sure that it was the burner that had died, but those don't count.) I'm replacing it with a nice new Acer 6x4x32. I swore I'd stick with a fancy name like HP or Ricoh, but they cost about $200 more.
At the same time as I am doing the new burner, I'll be installing FreeBSD 3.4 on Moses. I feel like learning something new, and it's supposed to be the BEST server OS, so what the heck. I can always give up and throw on Linux in about 2 hours.
As a result, my neat SMP system (the Dual Celeron 400, Mickey) has gone to Dad. He needed it and the UDMA4 ports it had for his Music software, I ... downgraded? Sidestepped? to a K6-2 450. Initially, it had 64MB of RAM. This may be fine for a lot of people, but you can't run many VMWare instances while compiling, and running Mozilla w/ 64MB RAM. So I upgraded it to 196MB of RAM, now all is well.
At the same time, I changed Cally into the new Moses. It's a Celeron 300A running in the crappy BXPro "Tomato" board I bought a while ago. I'ts got 128MB of RAM in it, so it's a huge improvement from the 486, which has been decomissioned, and is sitting in the shop in Kingston. The old 486 served us well, it's best uptime was 45 days, and it was rebooted because of a power outage - not it's fault by any stretch.
The new Moses is responsible for file serving (as it has the 17GB in it) playing my music, and burning, in addition to Web, FTP, SSH and WebCal. Now that I have a machine with some guts, I'll be looking in to TWIG and JetSpeed, so I should have a web based mail client soon.
All that was new was not just hardware! I originally installed RedHat 6.1 on the new Moses, but switched over to Mandrake 7.0 beta instead. Boy, is it slick! It's definitely still beta, but is shaping up VERY nicely. The graphical install program is very slick (Though I found a bug or two) and the supermount stuff that has been integrated into 2.2.14 is very nice for a machine that sits as a server (No monitor or keyboard)
Mandrake continues to amaze me, as they have kept up with the habit of pre-packaging almost all of the programs I go out and install! It's got XFCE, cdrecord, Postfix instead of sendmail, IMAP, XEmacs, Gvim, grip, and Gnometoaster built in.
Speakings of Gnometoaster, I re-did the documentation in HTML, and it should be rolled into the source distribution of Gnometoaster soon. This will be my first real contribution to the Linux community!
Hmm, I've also been playing around with Java some more. I downloaded Borland's JBuilder. Boy, is it slick. What a nice GUI builder, and the included tutorials are very well written. You can check it out at Borland's website It's free (as in Beer) and worth the time.
Hey! I know what else is new, I'm wrapping up work at Queen's (The PHE site) in favour of my new job at Carleton! I'm working in the School ofComputer Science as a lab TA. While this isn't the most glorious of jobs, it means I get some extra cash, get to help out students, get to maintain my precious Linux Image that I built in the summer for them, and get to spend time with my new (old) boss, Peter, who knows more about Unix than I'll ever forget!
Finally, I was talking to Sarah about.. you guessed it.. Linux, and I got to thinking about all of the various OS's I've tried. If you want to see something scary, check out the list! I really must be a CS Freak. Sarah must REALLY love me. Just think it he hours I have sunk in to that list.
Anyway, thanks for reading all of this, you must be fairly bored!
