the corner office

a blog, by Colin Pretorius

Bedlam

Warning: pet post. Feel free to skip if it ain't your bag.

Basically, it's the end of the world as we know it. I mentioned way back that Tupac had puppies, but we've hardly seen them since they were born. Tupac still spends an inordinate amount of time with us (quite possibly because she's sick and tired of the pups), but apart from the occasional "aw cuuute" poke & prod visit next door, we've had nothing to do with them.

Of the original 8, 4 have been given away. The remaining 4 critters have developed very healthy lungs, and in the past week or 2 have have taken to barking and wailing enough to wake the Devil hisself, especially at night. Sleep doesn't always come easily these days. What the wailing has also done, is provide us with a constant reminder that a horde of canine cuteness resides next door.

So much so, that last night Ronwen decided It Was Time and opened the gate separating our front garden (which we almost never go into) from the neighbour's garden. At first the pups were wary of this new territory and were terrified of us, but within an hour they were loving us to bits, especially when they discovered that we have a stash of doggy biscuits (normally reserved for Tupac and Chillies, the gargantuan ridgeback). Tupac has a duvet stretched across one of our couches which is her napping spot, and last night we were treated to having Tupac plus pups all napping peacefully on the couch.

By today their evil sides started appearing, though. While they were all cute and adorable last night, when they popped in this evening they were a tad more rambuctious. We now have little horrors scratching and wailing at our door like demons in a horror movie, and when they do come in, anything not bolted down seems to be fair game for a bite, a tug, and attempts to drag it outside. One made off with a serviette which we thankfully recovered before it became doggy-gob paper mache. A telephone got yanked off a table. Ronwen's slippers almost ended up in the garden. A potplant was upended. An old chopstick was discovered and almost caused armageddon as 3 of them fought over it. Chaos, I hear thee calling.

They are dead cute though. We don't know their names (except for one, which the neighbours named Dre (as in Dr...). Dre seems an exact replica of Tupac, right down to the white spot on her chest and tendency to sleep on her back with front paws crooked and hind legs splayed. For the others we've settled on Rufus, Henry and George. No doubt their real names have more ghetto chic, but I think ours are pretty much on target. I'm not sure how much longer they'll all be here, but for now, I guess they're fast becoming part of the family. I don't think poor Tupac's too chuffed though :-)

{2004.05.03}

Baghban, Memories and Deep Thoughts About Curtain Hooks

About a month ago SABC3 started showing Bollywood movies on Saturday evenings. Not being favourably inclined towards the wholesome bursting-forth-into-song movie genre, least of all subtitled bursting-forth-into-song, I wasn't particularly planning to watch any of 'em. Given that there's bugger-all else on, I've ended up half-following one or two while I'm busy with other things. This evening I watched Baghban (meaning Guardian), a story of an elderly couple separated and mistreated by their conniving kids. Thankfully the singing was kept to a minumum, and the story was pretty engrossing, if not outright depressing at first. Thought-provoking stuff about how we relate to our family and parents, and all we take for granted. Moi watching Hindi Bollywood movies? Sheesh.

Apart from lunch at the Mugg & Bean in Hillfox which has unimpressive food and even less impressive waiters, the only other highlight of the day was that I woke up rather early this morning and decided to get stuck into the Boxes Of Junk which have been following us around for years. Dust off, sort, throw out. Going through these things always gets me down, me being a particularly sentimental sort and heavily prone to nostalgia. In addition to sifting through and occasionally throwing out dusty old ornaments and stationery and rusty curtain hooks and detritus of life in the 20th century, I sorted through a box of old software CDs. Sample software from computer magazines from the mid-90s. Notes 4.5 :-) AS/400 documentation libraries... recovery software for an old Thinkpad.

I find myself torn. It's not like I'll ever use the vast majority of the software on these CDs, but I can't bring myself to throw them out, either. In some cases I hang on to them for sentimental reasons - what better way to remember my first exposure to Notes than looking at a 4.5 CD, reminding me of the first time I ever installed Domino, looked at the black DOS box and thought "great, I have a server running, now what?" An early beta version of R5 cut to CD for me by a colleague, reminding me what it was like to feel privileged to be working for THE Lotus? Going further back, what better way to remember my first PC, a 200MMX, after being a Mac nutter, than looking at an old CD with the demo games that came with my S3 Virge video card?

In other cases, I know I'm hanging on to these CDs simply because I have a tough time coming to terms with the fact that so much of what we do seems commoditised and to be blunt, inconsequential. I can't help but experience a twinge seeing an old Lotus Passport software pack. I mean, which programmers worked on "cc:Mail Maintenance Release #1 for R8.3 ASP Components" and were they proud to think that the software they'd written was out there on a shiny Lotus-branded CD, even if they knew that cc:Mail was all but dead as a mail platform? How many people really bothered to haul that CD out of its jacket and use it?

It would be nice to think that the programs we toil away at are like real-world constructions - bridges and buildings and edifices that might stand for decades and even centuries, admired for their craftsmanship and beauty. That's the dream, but it's not really like that, is it? In some ways, our work ends up on CDs and backed up on tapes, hidden away in the back of a cupboard, in boxes, like a clump of old curtain hooks, gathering dust until a spring-clean sees them dropped into the dustbin.

What a cheerful thought.

Of course, the millions of curtian hooks that end up rusting away in rubbish dumps doesn't mean that the poor dude or dudette who designed 'em failed somehow: I have no doubt that your average mass-produced curtain hook is a resounding commercial success and we'd all be far worse off without them quietly doing their jobs in windows across the planet. I suppose it boils down to how you perceive and try to measure the value of the work you're doing. Just because it's probable that nobody on this planet is still using the Lotus Notes 4.5.6 client for AIX 4.1.5 doesn't mean that at least some people's lives weren't improved, for it having been written and cut to CD.

It just means that our sense of achievement as programmers comes from the utility of the software we write and the things we ultimately allow people to do, not from having some physical object that we can point to and say "Look. Touch. Admire."

All the same, I think I'll keep those CDs for a little while longer.

{2004.05.02}

Bugger my previous post

Viva ftp.is.co.za which allows me to download gentoo isos at breakneck speed even though my ADSL cap is blown, viva!

{2004.04.28}

Connected

When Ronwen & I moved into our previous flat in Robindale, in 2001, we were stuck without a phone line for the first few months. (Telkom was over capacity in our street, and it was only through knowing someone who could do some serious pulling of strings that I was able to get a line at all, but I digress. The purpose of this entry is not to grumble about Telkom, as much fun as that is).

As I battled to get into the studying groove this evening, I got to thinking about those few months. At the time, having no home Internet connectivity felt awful. Looking back though, it was actually rather good for me. I couldn't spend my evenings mindlessly trawling the Net. If I needed to see certain websites, I had to do it from work, and so I tended to keep things focused. All my personal email was kept at work, and reading/replying was also kept to a minimum.

If I worked from home, I had no distractions or email tugging me this way and that, and I was able to really focus on what I was doing. Not that I worked from home much - I couldn't afford to stay away from the office for extended bouts like I do now. Since I was forced into more of a 9-5/6/7 existence, when I came home it was far less likely that I'd have brought work home with me.

If I think about how much time I've spent on various web sites today, exacerbated by not wanting to work on my assignment, I have to seriously question whether this is a good thing. I'm not saying the Net is evil or anything, since I know it's my own self-discipline that's lacking, but I can't help but think that ditching the ADSL line would do wonders for my personal productivity.

Ditch the ADSL line... if you hear reports of Ronwen having strangled me in my sleep, you'll know why :-)

{2004.04.28}

Late nights and despots

Jeez. I should stop blogging if I'm dozing off at the keyboard. Last night's review of Equilibrium reads like an answer to a Matric English exam question. Revelatory experience? Sheesh :-) Anyway, it's a cool movie, with cool ideas. Nuff said :-)

Tomorrow's another public holiday for us, since Thabo Mbeki is getting inaugurated tomorrow. One of the dignitaries at the proceedings is Bob Mugabe. Apparently he's staying at a guest house because at least two hotels in Sandton refused to put him up :-)

Tying into that, Archbishop Desmond Tutu is encouraging the English cricket team to boycott Zimbabwe, to "send a clear signal to the Mugabe regime". I'm not a sporting fan and the state of Zimbabwean cricket doesn't really shake my world - but I have a lot of respect for Tutu's willingness to speak up when others, including our president, won't.

{2004.04.26}

Weekend

We rented Equilibrium on DVD last night. I was expecting it to be a shite Matrix rip-off, but I ended up quite enjoying it. The storyline is basically Farenheit 451 meets This Perfect Day. Orwellian hell. Instead of Christ, Marx, Wood and Wei, there's "Father" repeating his message on every TV screen, and every citizen has to take their "Equlibrium" medication daily, to free them from emotion and sensory experience: the reasoning being that these base human experiences were the reason for the wars and murders and atrocities of the past. Instead of book-burning, there's burning of anything luxurious or "sensory": paintings, trinkets, ornaments, records, books of poetry. The hero is a high priest-style policeman who learns to "feel", and ends up rebelling against the system.

The movie explores aspects of feeling and sensory experience that we probably take for granted and don't think about. There's a particularly poignant scene where the hero, who's off his medication, is walking up a wide set of stairs amidst a throng of people trudging along, and for the first time, he starts looking around him and taking notice of - sensing - his surroundings. Ahead of him, he sees an old woman (obviously not taking her druks either), who removes her glove and allows her hand to run along a railing. The power of the scene, apart from the revelatory experience the hero has, is that this scene could probably be played out in any of a million modern cities today. It's a metaphor for own lives, I guess: how often are we so caught up that we don't appreciate the simple things that make us human?

The Matrix-esque fighting has an interesting hook: a style of fighting called gun-kata, where the student is taught to anticipate gunfire patterns based on tons of statistical analysis blahdy-blah. Net effect: the ability for one "cleric" to take on roomfuls of machine-gun toting opponents and blitz the lot of them. Suspend disbelief for a bit, and it makes for incredibly cool fight scenes. Well worth the watch just for that.

Given that I've never read F451 (and saw the movie back in the 80s), I think finding a copy of the book and the movie are going to be my next project.

Apart from that, I spent too much time tinkering with computer games that wouldn't work. I managed to get Wing Commander: Prophecy going (sort of). Boy... I bought this game in 2000 or earlier, and I'd never gotten around to installing it. My Logitech Wingman joystick, bought in 2002 when I could scarcely afford it, got used for the first time since the weekend I bought it. Sad, man, sad. As for my WC woes, it seems Sound Blasters are the culprit: the cinematics skip and are unwatchable. I might end up hijacking Ronwen's machine to play it properly including narrative, but in the meantime I spent the day getting my ass whupped in the Wing Commander training simulator.

We popped into Cresta so I could return the second faulty copy of the Black Sabbath CD I bought a while back (note to self: don't buy locally-produced CDs, you should know this by now), and ended up popping into the Manhattan Grill for dinner. *Burp*

Oh yes, during the week, I also finished reading Masters of Doom: a biography of John Carmack and John Romero, the two personalities behind id Software and classics like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. A good read, even though I stumbled across an interview at a gaming site, where other id founders reckon the book is a bit sensationalist. Either way, I enjoyed it. What's especially cool about this book, is that unlike many of the annals-of-geek-history stories from the 70s and 80s (which I'm a big sucker for), this book's history is something I can relate to, because I lived through it :-) I remember spending hours playing the original Wolfenstein 3D, as a student. I remember myself and colleagues playing networked Doom after hours at KPMG. I remember playing the original Quake (the sound of the zombies' flesh blobs landing splat is indelibly imprinted in my synapses). Nowadays we take these things for granted, but jeez, back then these games were making the impossible happen. First-person shooters, where you were part of the action? Realistic 3D graphics? Fighting your buddies across a network? These were mind-blowing things once.

As always, the book paints a picture that many would see as geek nirvana: the obscenely hard work doing absolutely awesome stuff, the genius that brought these things to life, and the rewards that followed - but at the same time, it tells the story of how reality always comes knocking: the politics, the personal issues, the fallibility. Inspiring, and sobering at the same time.

{2004.04.26}

Old games

I learned this evening that Windows XP is not as "compatible" when it comes to running certain old games, as I would have hoped. I decided to reacquaint myself with one or two fairly old games which I haven't touched in years. As luck would have it, these games aren't completely well-behaved, even with compatibility settings enabled in the OS.

This had me doing a bit of research into what the masses do. It seems the masses are a bit stuffed. For DOS games, free software such as DosBox seems to be doing the trick. The games I want to play aren't that old, though, they're Windows 95 and Windows 98 games from the late 90s. Before Win2k and XP, but firmly in the GUI/Windows era. I had wondered whether VMWare would work, but sound emulation is apparently shoddy, and VMWare obviously can't do 3D hardware acceleration, so it's not much help. Dual-booting is a possibility, but hardly an optimal solution, and it's probably not sustainable as the years go by and hardware gets more exotic.

Searching the Net, it's obvious that there are a fair number of people wanting to play these older games, who're stumbling as they upgrade to XP and Win2k. One crowd of people may have the answer: the WINE/Linux folks. Projects like Transgaming have a lot of promise. I'd love to get my current machine running a current, healthy Linux distro and see just what can be accomplished.

In the meantime though, I'm more than a little disappointed. I bought some of these games years ago, hoping that I'd one day get to sit down and really play them. Now, it seems that might never happen. Bummer.

{2004.04.25}

Random diaryesque observations

  • I bought Unix Network Programming Volume 1 by the late W Richard Stevens. ETA on getting to work through this famous tome: around 2010 at current workloads.

  • Gym two days in a row has me feeling suitably tender. Learned to use the BodyIQ contraption that now tells Virgin Active (and no doubt Big Brother Discovery Health) what I weigh, my body fat percentage, and blood pressure (is it good to take this measurement after 60 crunches and 60 leg raises? I think not). At least I now have a baseline to measure myself against. A dearth of cardio work means I've not shed too much fat (thus far I've added a kg), but Ronwen says she can see changes. I have triceps trying to poke their way out of the cushioning, basically. To me, the real victory is getting my butt to gym at least twice a week, and having stuck with it. But yes, I'd like my next victory to be around my waistline, thankyouverymuch.

  • A ten minute dash to the Nandos/Woolies around the corner this evening has me wanting to pull a Columbine on the majority of the twats there. Four impatient assholes who squeeze past me and leave me jammed as I try to maneuvre into a parking from a bad angle, asshole in BMW who parks in disabled parking and laughs at the security guards trying to tell him off, asshole in Merc who shoots up a one-way to get an open parking, miserable cow pushing her way into the queue when a new till opens to handle the mass of shoppers at Woolies, and the old fart behind me who almost nudges my stuff off the counter before I've even properly paid for my groceries. I am reminded that I tend towards misanthropy for a reason.

{2004.04.21}

Decisions and ennui

Time to change mail clients for my POP3 stuff. Eudora is getting a little long in the tooth, and I'm just about ready to move my mail to a Linux client.

Back in the old days, I used Netscape (version 2 on my PowerBook :-), and I stuck with Communicator on the PC until version 4.7, by which time (early 2001) the browser had become virtually unusable, and Communicator seemed a little too big just for mail, and it became too frustrating losing one's mail client every time a dodgy web site brought everything to a halt.

Is it time to move back? I think so. The only question is whether to stick with Firefox + Thunderbird as separate apps, or glop up with good ole Mozilla. I've read in a few places that FF + TB are the "NextGen" Mozilla, and once they've reached 1.0 status, the old Mozilla browser and mail client will get nixed. That would make my decision easy, except that I've stumbled across a few comments saying that the old Mozilla mail client is better.

The only way to find out is to try them both, I suppose, but I must be honest and admit that these days, installing software just to poke and prod is nothing short of a mission for me.

{2004.04.20}

Busy weekend

Jeez, the past few days have been a whirl of work - mostly the horrid (beancounter) stuff, not the technical, but there is light at the end of the tunnel, and hopefully it ain't a train. I can't wait to return to some normalcy work-wise.

Ronwen & I drove through to Braamfontein today, so I could show Ronwen how to get to the Civic Theatre. Ballet stuff and whatnot. I almost never head into 'old' Joburg anymore, and so now it's always a big trip down memory lane to drive through suburbs like Parktown, Braamfontein, Saxonwold, Killarney. It's weird: for the first 7 years that I lived on Joburg, many of these roads and suburbs and sights were things I took in daily. Then you move elsewhere, start working elsewhere, and your experience of the city is completely different. Let's be honest, as nice as Randburg (home) and Sandton (work) are, they just don't have the character that older parts of the city do.

We stopped off in Rosebank for lunch and window-shopping. I bought a few games development books at Exclusives - hopefully I'll be able to indulge in some armchair geek tourism. Soon :-)

{2004.04.18}

« Older | Newer »