Contents
- 29th September 1999
- 28th September 1999
- 27th September 1999
- 25th September 1999
- 24th September 1999
Wednesday, 30th September 1999
Well, if anything bad happened today, I didn't notice it ;-)
Worst was getting soaked walking to work and back, and that just doesn't
compare!
Got back late from work, so no GNQS tonight.
Tuesday, 28th September 1999
The week just gets better and better.
Found out tonight that the head gasket in my car has gone. If
I'd driven it into work and back tomorrow, that would have been a new
engine :(
Yesterday - no work. Today - no car. Tomorrow?
I'm not sure that I want to know. Maybe I'd better just say in
bed ;-)
No GNQS work tonight, really. Answered a couple of
emails. Tomorrow night, tho, is free to further investigate our
nice routing problem.
Monday, 27th September 1999
Went into work today to find out that HP have no more work for
me. My last day with them will be Friday 1st October.
Speaking personally, more than five days warning would have been
nice.
I wonder if this means they're no longer interested in hiring me
permanently? <g>
(Before anyone asks, no I've not been fired. I work on
short-term contracts, and my current contract runs out on Friday.
The project I was brought in to work on will shortly be delivered
in-house, and now the code freeze is happening they no longer need me as
senior developer).
This is a bit of a mixed blessing. I'm hoping that I've got
enough in the bank so that I can afford to take a bit more time off
sooner rather than later. It's Kristi's birthday on Monday, so I
don't have to worry about getting the time off for that ;-) And
it means that I can put a lot more effort into GNQS for a week or two
in between job hunting.
But I've just (after three years living here in Bristol) finally
signed up for a night class (in Cardiff - it's a long story ;-).
The work at HP was the only work in Bristol I've ever managed, so odds
are my next job is going to be away from here too :( I don't
want to miss the new class, and all that traveling will (once again)
impact my ability to work on GNQS. Maybe I'd better see if
Orange are looking for UNIX programmers on short-term contract ...
To be honest, I'm not sure what will happen. Changes to UK
tax laws (IR35, for anyone familiar with this) mean that, from April
next year, I'll be unable to continue as a freelancer anyway.
Well, maybe I'll be able to charge some of the difference to clients,
but it is not clear whether many companies will be able to afford
this. A quick look at the usual job sites tonight indicated that
there are bugger all contracts up for grabs atm, and it probably won't
improve this year (sigh).
Worst case is that I'll have to go back to the 'orrible world of
permie employment. (Tried it once, wasn't too happy with the
experience). I'm not too worried about finding work; from what
I've seen my skills are at least better than average, and I've a
proven track record. I guess it's fair to say that if anyone is
interested in hiring me, a) you can find my c.v. here,
and b) I'd love to hear from you.
Saturday, 25th September 1999
Spent the day trying to get GNQS compiled on Solaris/Intel 2.6.
I took advantage of the offer from Sun (must have been last year now)
to get my hands on a copy of Solaris for a very low cost. I seem
to remember at the time that one of the reasons for the promotion was to
get UNIX developers porting software to Solaris.
So, how come it ships without a usable C compiler? Grrr.
Found a pre-compiled version of GCC on www.sunfreeware.com.
It actually works too! GNQS compiles and installs just fine, but
generates some compiler warnings. Tried to clean them up.
Looks like some of the Solaris header files are the cause of some of the
problems; more investigation is required.
Finally set things up so that www.gnqs.org
is automagically refreshed from my desktop machine every night.
Now I don't have any excuses for letting the web site slide.
Friday, 24th September 1999
Well, first entry in quite a while!
This summer has been dominated by the work I've been doing for
Hewlett Packard's Bristol site. It's been interesting in places,
but the hours have become just too much. I'm currently trying to
re-negotiate matters so that I can work part-time for them, leaving me
plenty of time to do other things.
GNQS has been a bit slow this year. I lost the debate on how
to do GNQS v4, so we're now going for the incremental approach.
My plan is to keep good notes on what we do, why, and whether it
worked or not.
General life has gone a lot better ;-)
Well, this time I have finished the overhaul of the GNQS web
site, and will be uploading it at the weekend.
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