January 22, 2004
Technological problems are the only fun ones to solve
When I look at the work I do day to day (this includes any unpaid / open source work), I have to savor any opportunity to do challenging technical software development. That's not to say that work isn't challenging. In fact it is, but it is made up of technical and non-technical work. For me, the fun part is playing with the logic puzzle and making things work in an artful manner. Don't think this is a "I would rather be coding that writing documentation" type rant. I appreciate that successful software development is much more than just writing the code.
Let me share with you some of the non-technical aspects of my work
- Writing a technology comparison for a feasibility study
- Creating a small project proposal which involved estimation and negotiation
- Creating user documentation
- Applying patches and testing
- Packing and testing releases
- Answering support emails
- Making phone calls to clients
- Wearing a suit!
Most of the above are essential to be able to create a good software product (I am excluding wearing a suit from being essential).
So am I actually a technical professional? Well let me share with you one of the really fun technical experiences I've had lately.
I am doing a small project where I have an applet served from an embedded web server. This applet needs to be able to read and write some configuration onto the device that the user types in. The device has 1k of flash for misc. config like this, but this is just not enough room for what I need to store. So what about using the same storage place that the web server users? It is 512k, very nice. Files are uploaded using the TFTP protocol. Well no problem because I can use the TFTP implementation found in the Apache Commons-Net package. Great so I put the data onto the device. But wait! The TFTP server implementation on the device only supports PUT, not GET! Well no problem because I can PUT using TFTP and read from the device using the web server and HTTP. Well not quite. The device has it's own format for web content. Before you upload the content, you need to run it through this program to create some special binary format that the web server knows how to read. It's really getting fun now, because the only solution is to reverse engineer the file format and have my config stored in that format to be served up as plain text by the web server. H'Ok, so it finally works and I really enjoyed it.
January 12, 2004
Hello?!
Things just went really quiet in here. I was playing around with categories in MovableType and all my entries disspeared from the front page. I'm not even sure if this will appear! Hmmmm Any clues anyone?
January 04, 2004
Got the Star Trail Reprinted
I took the negative for the Star Trail into a good photo shop this time and have updated the results. Take another look
January 01, 2004
Switchable Battery Pack
In order to continue taking long exposure photographs I have had to create a battery pack that I can actually switch off. The SLR camera that I kind of inherited is an Olympus OM40 and it has some serious problem in the electronics where it chewes through the batteries. So instead of taking them in and out all the time I whipped the up the ugly creation below. It seemed to work very well when taking shots of the fireworks last night on the banks of the Yarra.
