I wanted to continue updating my 9vx.org blog, but I seem to have screwed up the lighttpd configuration, and I don't really feel like figuring out what's wrong with it. I'm really just more interested in getting a blog out, since I haven't done this in quite some time now (not that it really matters much, since nobody reads this damn thing).
Currently listening to a bunch of music out of my nostalgic Holland days. It gets me thinking quite a bit about the ``back then.'' 'Twas quite the fun, care-free time. It also seems like it was forever ago. I've been back in the US for almost 4 years now, which seems like quite a long time. My Dutch has become somewhat poor -- I can still type it, but my pronunciation is extremely poor, I've forgotten the gender of most nouns (which consequently has screwed up my grammar quite a bit), and I really have no way to practice it. It saddens me a bit; I really don't have anything else from that time to hold on to, except perhaps the music. Listening to Air, right now, which is right out of that `era.'
Work
So here I am at work (not really slacking off, configuring a virtual machine to do some work, that's running in the background, and I've been here since about 8 AM). It's a fun job, and I've got a rather interesting role (at the moment). Currently, I work as a sort of intermediate between the front- and back- ends of our product, which is an enterprise SMTP server (it rocks, by the way -- my VMware instances can easily push around 3 million mails per hour in testing on a single node). The front end serves largely as a convenience for viewing metrics and configuring the system.
Since we've just released a new version of the product, Delivery Manager 3.0, I've spent a ton of hours fixing bugs, testing stuff, and adding new features (working both Saturday and Sunday for the past couple weekends -- I think I put in around 60 hours last week, if not more). One of the coolest things we've added to the product is a web user interface for creating policies and rules for alerts. This is implemented as an AJAX interface to a back-end that generates code in Lua. I could continue to explain how it works, but a picture is worth a thousand words:
Very cool stuff. I don't do the interface -- I'm really not that person. My part in this was designing the interface between the front- and back-end (a.k.a. ``architecting''), and implementing the back-end handlers for loading and saving scripts. It's a very powerful interface, and very minimal as well. I'm really pleased with how it turned out. It's looking like I'll be working on more of the back-back-end stuff (i.e. the core product) sometime soon, which will transition me into working primarily in C (as opposed to primarily PHP with a bit of C).
Today, I'm working on some bugs in the web console for the 2.2 maintenance release we've got coming up in the next week (or whenever that's actually supposed to hit the market).
Home
Home life is well. Alicia and I have a kitten (whose official name, I think, is just ``purr'', but I prefer to use ``Sir Purrgelot'' as his full name) -- he's quite the little terror, though if traumatized enough, he turns into a softie. We took him with us in the car up to New York this weekend; he slept in my lap all the way up, and all the way back. I don't think he likes the car much.
We've got a ton of DVDs. (Or what I consider to be a ton, anyway.) We've got 2 DVD shelves that claim to be able to hold 88 DVDs per shelf, and they're both filled. We're going to get 2 more this week.
As if travelling up to New York for Easter weekend wasn't enough, this weekend we will be travelling to Virginia Beach for a vacation weekend (my penance for throwing a huge party that probably got way out of hand a couple weeks ago). Looking forward to that; it'll be nice to relax. Hopefully the beach weather is nice, but I'm guessing the water will be too cold to really enjoy.
Plan 9
My bad habit. I'm serving as a mentor for this year's Google Summer of Code for Plan 9. It's looking like we'll get 7 students this year; I'm hoping that we'll pull in the project that I want to mentor, which would get Plan 9 NAT support and a stateful packet classifier (and thus a modern firewall as well). Definitely looking forward to that. It's a fun endeavor.
The strangest thing for me serving as a mentor for a student is that I never went to college. All the knowledge I have about these things is self-taught (or learned from others out of my own interest and pursuit). This year, I'd have a masters student. He's a bright guy, so I don't expect I'll need to do all that much outside of motivation and answering the occasional question about best practices and architecture.
Outro
I suppose that's about it for now. The VM is finally installed and configured, and I should really focus on getting these bugs squashed, as opposed to working on this blog post any more. Thanks for reading.
