recon

I have updated MT on this site more times than I have posted to my own blog in the last 400 days. Good thing I have a blog.

Well, I said somewhere in my prior posts that I probably wouldn't write another blog post until this August, and I guess I was right! I updated the site to MovableType 4 last week, and have yet to get everything smoothed out, but at least there is some novelty to writing a post again. I do like MT4, except for the dropdown menus in the admin interface -- they tend to open when I don't want them to, and fail to close when I want them to... Maybe they'll fix that in MT4.01. I'd consider a switch to Wordpress, but once upon a time, I actually paid for my copy of MT, so I feel that I now should get the most value for my money :).

The next phase of my media center quest is to get some sort of network attached storage solution.  Of course, I could just go and buy a Buffalo Linkstation, or some similar solution from Linksys, but my requirements outstrip what these boxes offer.  I want to be able to run whatever software on the NAS that I want.  For instance, now that the TiVo S3 is here, I want to share my photos and music out from the NAS system, and that requires something that speaks the TiVo beacon protocol.  There are a couple of open source solutions which make TiVo Desktop-like functionality available in Linux, like javaHMO, which, as the name suggests, is entirely written in Java.

Ideally, I should be able to expand the NAS box with USB 2.0, so I can finally set up a backup solution that doesn't involve me burning DVDs.  It should also be nearly silent, and use very little power, as it will be on all of the time, connected directly to my router, on the UPS.  Sounds like a tall order, doesn't it.  Surprise.  I found a box that solves almost all of these problems, the Kuro Box. This tiny box is basically the developer version of the Linkstation, which runs Linux on PPC.  It is BYO storage, so any 3.5" disk can be installed -- from the pictures in the linked article, it looks like the drive must be PATA, though.  The unit even has an integrated USB 2.0 hub, so adding external storage should be a snap..  Very promising!

After a looooong stint with the Comcast "Hell Box" (TM), TiVo finally released the Series 3.  My initial thought was to wait a bit, see if there were any initial adoption issues, then buy when the price came down after the holidays.  Not to be.  I couldn't wait that long, as the Comcast box started misbehaving again, chopping shows apart, dropping the last N minutes of a show, or being frustratingly inflexible when scheduling recordings.  I don't know why anyone writing PVR software would not support ending a recording before it is scheduled to end (the Motorola PVR with TV Guide software only allows you to record longer than the scheduled end time).

Well, after a six year run at Sun Microsystems, I finally decided that there were greener pastures elsewhere.  I left Sun on June 2, and promptly started work at Pixar Animation Studios on June 5.  What with a new daughter and all, I figured it would be a good move in terms of future popularity, and more importantly, it will put me in a happier mental state, which is important.

So far, I've just about completed my TD (Technical Director) training at Pixar -- I get to learn how to animate, even though I'm really working in software engineering.  My initial assignment is in the QA department for the new animation pipeline tools Pixar is developing, so it's nice to get some comprehensive training on the last version of the tools (we're learning the version that the studio is currently using for the upcoming film Ratatouille).

In my week plus at Pixar, I've witnessed first hand what a great place it is to work. Not only are there the perks that everyone always reports in the press, like a great cafe, food and drink, movie screenings, et al -- the more important aspect of the experience to me is the people. Pixar is chock full of people that are leaders in their fields. I look forward to learning everything that I can about software design and engineering from the software teams I'll be working with.

My goal is to move from QA to software engineering within the next year or so. Although what I did most recently at Sun was primarily software design and implementation, not QA, I figured that coming to a new company with a massively complex new tool, being in QA would be the best way to learn how everything works. One can only build with a solid foundation of knowledge, so that's what I aim to "develop" over the next year. Of course, I always follow the mantra of "if it's worth doing once, it's worth writing a tool", so I'm sure that there will be other development going on within QA over the coming months.

Welcome, Audrey Jane -- today is your birthday.

In my day job, I developed a module which makes access to complex Perl data structures easier. I couldn't find any modules on CPAN that did exactly what I wanted to do. I needed to expose relatively complex networks of Perl references to non-technical end users, and make it easy for them to understand the structure, and search within it. The consumer modules expose Solaris 10 fmd event telemetry information to Perl programs. After writing modules to gather information from the telemetry logs, I planned to provide filtering abilities, which boils down to searching for particular structure 'fingerprints' within the telemetry, based on paths through the Perl data structure. Rather than make users write (and comprehend) unwieldly paths like '$top->{key}[0]{key}{key}[0]', which have far too much punctuation for people that aren't used to programming, I wanted to have them write paths like 'key[0].key.key[0]'. This seemed to be much cleaner visually, and therefore easier to understand.