Found via The Blomsa Code, Margaret sent me this little gem. I should mention that the embed code the thing gave me appears to only include <embed> data and not Exploder's <ojbect> tags so I can't be sure it'll work in their browser.

I'm trying to post more here lately as it would seem that since moving to Vancouver, my posts have been more and more sparsely scattered about the month. To that end, here's a quickie post regarding my relatively good day:

I had my review today. Good news: they like my work, and they're giving me a raise (w00t!) The only somewhat negative thing the boss mentioned was how I didn't know enough about Drupal yet. I can understand her position really, I mean, a large portion of our legacy code is in that horrible framework, so it only makes sense that as a senior developer, I know my way around it. I guess I'll just have to take a deep breath, bash my head in with a crowbar, and work from there. ^_^

Anyway, aside from the good review, I found a new sandwich shop in the area that serves giganimous sandwiches, and then discovered some left over birthday cake in the office fridge. This, coupled with the fact that I got a big chunk of work done today (and documented!) made me happy with my current form of employment.

I also fielded a 1hour call with a University student out of Windsor, Ontario to give him some background on the TPSC's CCTV campaign back when I was running the show. That was a bit of nostalgic fun -- kinda like talking to the press, but you can be a little more candid since you know that you're not talking to the uninformed public, but rather a well-read academic.

And then, to top it all off, I came home to a clean apartment AND new groceries in the fridge! Butthead had been hard at work and it showed. Having a roomate might not be so bad after all ;-) He's making a lot of progress with his own life lately though. I'm really quite proud of him.

I'm back online! Yay for me! It's also really late though and I have to go to work early tomorrow (the hours were changed out from under me) so I really can't write much so here's the gist:

I went to Toronto and had a lovely time. It's funny the kind of perspective one gets on their home town by living elsewhere. Ask me about it sometime... I promise a healthy rant. It was wonderufl to see everyone again too, and not surprisingly, staying with Melanie was um... interesting. I reconnected with almost everyone and got to play tourist in my former home. I even went up the CN Tower (yay!).

Pictures of all of this will follow of course, but later. I need sleep.

My server (Moulinrouge) has been completely rebuilt and now sports a clean slate and a whack of services (Apache, Bind, DHCPd, Dovecot Imap, Exim, Fetchmail /w Procmail, MySQL, NTPd, Subversion and SSHd). My wireless is offline for now though since it would appear that I've run out of outlets on that side of the room. I left my good power strip at Melanie's so I'll have to go out and buy one tomorrow.

Things at the office are going very well. James and I are writing the Free software policy of the company and I got to write the preamble. When it's published, I'll post a link 'cause I'm rather proud of it.

That's it for now, to bed with me :-)

Those of you who aren't privy to my less-than-public posts, you might wonder what the heck happened to Reinvent and why I'm suddenly talking about The Donat Group. Obviously, it's probably a Bad Idea to talk about the nuts and bolts of it all publically, but here's the gist in my generation's favourite format: point form.

• Reinvent is a fun company with lots of smart people
• It's also run by management that feels that expanding their business into Software patents makes for an acceptable business model.
• I disagreed. I've worked for a lot of companies who did things I felt were Not Good, but there are a few things I won't do... supporting software patents is one of them.
• So I went looking for a company whose morals where more in tune with my own and I found one in The Donat Group.
• I handed in my resignation, offered to work 2weeks before I left and they declined. I guess the brass weren't happy with me.
• I started at Donat today and they seem pretty cool. Very dot.com startup-like but with actual paying clients.
• They like Drupal though, which from what I've seen, is really not good. My first impressions of Drupal is that it's a bunch of non-programmers pretending that they can write real software. Function and variable names bleeding into everything else, no objects, and horror of all horrors: their coding standard requires a two-space indent.

I made a work around for the back-assward indenting thing though. I call it undrupal. Basically it uses a regular expression to strip out the space-based indents and replace them with tabs. Then you can write your code in a sane environment, then use the same script to re-crazy it with spaces again.

Ok, so my first day didn't exactly have me neck-deep in super-advanced code, but hey, it's the first day. I'm really looking forward to this job though, the boss is pretty cool and his politics are more in line with my own, and even more fun is the fact that I'm now labled "Senior Developer" and I'll be able to actually head up new projects and such.

That's it for me now. If you want more details, just gimme a call.

One of my coworkers helped me out of a jam by writing some amazing math-foo the other day and I wanted to share:

public static function getDefinitionFromSerials($in) {

	$out = array();
	if ($in) {

		sort($in);

		$n = $in[0];
		for ($i = 1; $i < count($in); $i++) {
			$z = $n;
			if ($in[$i] != $in[$i-1] + 1) {
				if ($z == $in[$i-1]) {
					$out[] = $z;
				} elseif ($z + 1 == $in[$i-1]) {
					$out[] = $z;
					$out[] = $in[$i-1];
				} else {
					$out[] = $z .'-'. $in[$i-1];
				}
				$n = $in[$i];
			}
		}
		if (count($in) == 1 || $z != $n) {
			$out[] = $n;
		} elseif ($z+1 == $in[count($in)-1]) {
			$out[] = $n;
			$out[] = $in[count($in)-1];
		} else {
			$out[] = $z .'-'. $in[count($in)-1];
		}

	}

	return implode(',', $out);

}

The above is an algorithm that transforms an array of numbers (1,2,3,7,9,10,11) into a human readable range or fieldset such as "1-3,7,9-11". I spent hours online googling for the solution and found nothing so I thought I'd share it here in the hopes that someone else might find it useful.

Note that some of these links lead to private posts.

2006 was a big year for the planet. Americans woke up and realised that their leader was insane (well enough of them to kill the Republican dominance in the House and Senate), Europe and China gained momentum on the world stage and the "War on Terrorism" did little more than make more terrorists.

Canada ousted one leading party and invited in a new one that promised to be much the same and our reputation as an environmental leader is now in the toilet. The air is dirtier, the water murkier and we're all trapped in this handbasket of our own weaving.

But contrary to what some might think upon first reading this blog, this site is not about the world, it's just about me and what I'm doing in it. ...and on my own front, a lot of good things happened this year.

On the personal front, some wonderful ladies made their way into my life. Most notably of course would be Melanie who I've been with for over 6months now. We've had our ups and downs, but I'm quite happy with her and I'm glad she's here for the New Year.

I also made a good many new friends through my activist work, not the least of which is Stephen, who I've come to hang out with outside of my responsibilities to the TPSC.

On the professional level, I hopped around a lot this year. February saw me start my career in network administration at Rydium. I loved working there, but couldn't stay for my own moral reasons so I moved onto Primus who treated me so poorly that I chose to leave after only 3months, where after a couple months of job hunting, I found Bodog, a place in which I'm currently quite content with my working arrangements.

I'm proud to say though that the biggest changes for me this year rest in the Why I'm Here section. I joined the Toronto Public Space Committee, a "within the lines of legality" political action group devoted to making this city a place for people not cars or corporations. It's been a great place to get into politics from the bottom up. I've come to learn how City Hall works, talked with councillors directly, given deputations (albeit badly) and most importantly come to understand what needs to be done, and where the power to make those changes rests.

I've worked on campaigns opposing the selling off of street furniture to companies like CBS, helped write the philosophy document for the group, wrote the code for the TPSC website that made headlines during the municipal election and now I'm heading up a very high-profile campaign to fight police cameras on the streets of the city. It's exciting work and its exactly why I came here.

So while we're all still trapped in this handbasket heading straight to hell, I suppose I can still be an optimist. I'm doing what I can to get us out of there, and I suppose that's all I can really hope for. I'm looking forward to 2007.

I just got a call from another recruiter, that makes FOUR this week. It would seem that the best thing to do when looking for a job is to find one first :-)

Seriously though, the job market here is pretty good for IT. I've never felt so wanted (professionally) in my life.

I've decided that it's ok to post the name of my current employer in my blog since it will eventually make its way into my resume. Obviously office gossip etc won't be in here but I see no problem with the mere association.

Bodog is awesome. We're on the 15th floor of a 15-floor building (the building actually has a 13th floor!) and we have the entire floor to ourselves. There is a giganimous kitchen, a workout room, a shower room and a pop machine that sells cans of Pepsi for $0.50 :-) They even have a reasonably-sized recycling section in the kitchen complete with glass, plastic and cardboard.

While there is no Zuppa's to speak of, there is a crappy sandwich place in the basement, a Subway down the street, Panzerotto Pizza a little further and, get this, a commercial complex 5minutes away complete with Loblaws (groceries), a Wendy's and a Milestones... not to mention Future Shop, Staples and a movie theatre. Sure, it's North York Station, but it's not too isolated. (Beats the job in Missasauga... ew).

The people I work with are very cool. Laid-back and excited in a very Vancouver-ish, dot.com boom way. I work in an office with a very pretty girl and we share a great big window with a reasonable view of the smog. My workstation is a superawesome Athlon64 dualcore with 1GB of ram and TWO 19" monitors... running Gentoo Linux of course.

There are a few hiccups though. The company is using a lot of Microsoft products, the proprietary nature of which is wrecking havoc with my Linux toys. Just getting the messenger service working has been disturbingly convoluted... and don't get me started on email.

I'm happy here though. The people are cool, the office relaxing, the job reasonably complex. ...did I mention that they have a Vancouver office too? Yeah, I like it here.

I am no longer among the ranks of the unemployed. Thanks to Noreen, who worked tirelessly to help me find work all the way from Vancouver, I've found a job with a nifty little music company that needs a web developer who knows his stuff.

The pay is pretty good, the hours alright, and the location is less-than-ok, but better than Primus. Overall, I think things will be ok.

Big thanks to all of you out there who helped me out and especially to Noreen who rocks from on high.

You'd think that being unemployed with no definite job on the horizon would be a scary thing but so far, I'm rather optimistic. I had a job interview today (details below) and have another one tomorrow. Not only that, but Noreen has been super-awesome and has been sending me job ads she's discovered in travels every day. The market is pretty good in Toronto presently so I'm not too worried.

Today's interview was awesome -- at a nice medium-sized company with a small company atmosphere right downtown. The HR guy was friendly and receptive and the job looked to be exciting.

It's at about this point that you should notice that the tense of the above paragraph is in the past. You see, while I killed on the interview, they ran into one rather important sticking point: They're a 100% Microsoft shop and I don't do Windows.

Now I should make it clear that my position on Windows is not one out of spite. I'm sure there's a lot of really neat things that can be done with Microsoft software. No, I couldn't take the job because frankly, Linux stuff is Very Different from Windows stuff. Sure, if you know one you can work your way through the other, but it's practically unheard of for one person to be straddling both architectures. The technologies are just too foreign to each other.

And so I'm onto the next set of interviews, hoping that the next company is as cool as this last one. But I'm not worried.

Not yet at least.