James Rodenkirch

I’ve been playing around with the idea of using debian packages to deploy updates to various servers (virtual machines, dev servers, production servers etc). I was curious to see how this could work for a variety of tasks, but mostly I needed a way to help keep our development virtual machine up to date without physically maintaining a virtual disc that all developers use. Because we each modify the vm to fit in our specific environment, the need to enforce the existence of *packages* and not specific *configuration* is paramount – this turned out to be a godsend for us.
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If you are like me, you probably spend time every so often reassessing the methodologies and tools you use to organize your life or work. I find myself spending large amounts of time trying to streamline processes in an effort to squeeze every bit of productivity out of my day, but I usually find that my efforts make little difference, or I just revert back to old habits.

I’ve been on a work related productivity kick lately, I found myself spending too much time during my morning routine which eats into my work day. Things like RSS news feeds, facebook updates and email sorting were starting to take WAY more much time than it should. I’ve wasted hours on stupid facebook games like mob wars, and hours sorting through news feeds I never actually read, and more hours sorting through my email trying to maintain some sort of organization while retaining some resemblance to a task list. Continue reading

Searching for a job in this economy is a very difficult thing to do. Trust me, I’ve been there.

Around mid January I got a call from my manager telling me that I was being laid off. Now this was not a *total* surprise since there were 3 rounds of layoffs previous to this one, but it was still a shock. Truth be told I was actually searching for a new job since the second round of layoffs, but it is DAMN hard to find a job right now and I could not find anything. So, after a month of being on unemployment I can happily say that I start a new job tomorrow.

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Holy crap batman!!!

I saw on slashdot today that Nokia is going to be releaseing QT under the LGPL license starting with version 4.5 (site). Back in the day, when I was toying with leaving the web industry and going more into traditional software developement, QT caught my eye. The thing that stopped me from diving into QT at that time, was the $5000 license fee for anything non open source.

Now that it is being released as LGPL only, there are no more entry fees. Guess I will be looking at QT again

At my current job I am constantly dumping mysql databases from a v5 server to import into a v3 server. In order for this to work, I have to dump the database in a mode that is compatible with version 3. Here is a quick reference for the compatibility modes available for mysqldump. Continue reading