Tag: work

Working like a dog

For the last couple of years my working schedule has been pretty much stable. It was sporadic and random in a sense that I was working a lot of night shifts that I had to compensate with a lot of weekends shifts, while managing to screw in some regular office hours, but it was stable. I was getting from one week to another with five nine hour periods on average. Sometimes I was getting a bit more, sometimes – slightly less.

Today and yesterday are different though. I finished yesterday’s night shift at 7:00am and went home. I had a light breakfast and went to bed. Two hours later I woke up and went back to the office for an important meeting. The meeting was supposed to take two hours, but it continued for three and a half instead. When it finished I had a choice of either going home and getting more sleep before my tonight’s night shift or staying in the office and registering for one regular office hours day. With almost four hours of the full working day behind my back already, I decided to stay and work.

About five hours later I released myself and went home to get some rest. I was exhausted already, but couldn’t sleep well for some reason. My mind was working on something without letting me know what it actually was. I’ll find out eventually. Anyway, four hours passed and I went back to the office for the night shift. And here I am.

Calculations for the HR office: for the period between Thursday, September 29th 23:00 and Saturday 1st 8:00 (the total of 33 hours) I am registered for 3 working shifts 9 hours each (the total of 27 hours). Not bad, eh…

12 minutes

They say that your unpatched Microsoft Windows machine will live for only 12 minutes on the net before getting 0wned. Now, a lot of people are saying a lot of different things about Windows security, but I tend to agree to this particular one. I’ve seen it plenty of times at work. In fact, we now have a requirement for all colocated clients to fully patch their servers before connecting to our backbone.

Slashdot has a story. And a dup.

Jazz all the way

Usually, when I work I need absolute silence. Especially when I write code. Any sound disturbs me. Those which have to do with human voices (phone calls, talks, music) are the most harmful. I never turn the music on or anything else when I program. I also prefer to leave all my development tasks for my night shifts.

But toda I found out that I can actually listen to music while writing code. I was looking for some new radio stations at Shoutcast to add to my music player and stumbled across some Jazz stations. I decided to try one before adding it to the list. I wasn’t yet programming, so it was OK to liste to it for some time.

It was only in the morning, 8 hours later that I noticed that I’ve programmed and did everything I had to do and never switched off the Jazz music. It didn’t disturb me even one bit. In fact I have a suspecion that it actually helped me. I will be repeating the experiment, but until than I’m surprised anyway…

Telling Gnu Arch the truth

Yet another problem (and solution) that I’ve stumbled across while using Gnu Arch. We have two branches in our archive: program--vendor--0.1 and program--local--0.1. Vendor’s version has all the source files in SomeDirectory, while our local version has all source files in somedir. Except for the name and few local changes, these two directories are practically identical.

But when we were creating branches and importing code, we weren’t very careful and ended up with these directories and files having different arch IDs. This makes comparing two source trees close to impossible, as arch thinks that directory SomeDirectory was removed together with all its content and directory somedir was added together with a bunch of files.

Telling Arch the truth is very simple. Basically, all that needs to be done is =id and *.id files under all .arch-ids/ directories in one source tree should be copied to the appropriate places in the other source tree. After that tla commit should be done.

In order to minimize the pain of manual labour, I wrote a tiny perl script to find all needed files and copy them appropriately. On the command line just specify two directories, which you know are the same, but which arch considers different. If any of the files weren’t copied, you’ll get their names in the warning. When script finishes, you’ll get the total count of copied files.

The script is here: fix_arch_ids.pl

Fedora Linux Core 4 is out!

I know that everyone is waiting for it, so I’ll break out the good news – Fedora Linux Core 4 is out. I am currently downloading it from one of the mirrors, but the speed is dicreasing. Hopefully I’ll have it before everything stops completely. I will upload all 4 CDs to Thunderworx FTP as soon as I have them. Meanwhile, you can read the Release Notes.

Update: Fedora Linux Core 4 is available via bittorrent.

Update: Official announcement.

Update: Fedora Linux Core 4 ISOs are uploaded to Thunderworx FTP. You can get them from here.