the corner office

Nice, uneventful journey. Home is chaotic and dusty, just as we left it :-)

I have ADSL Internet connectivity again. Words cannot describe...

Last night in Durban. Sad our break is over, but a little eager to get back home.

It's been a relaxing week. On Monday we drove up to Maritzburg with my cousin M and his girlfriend L to visit my grandmother and aunt. M & L are moving to the UK and were flying on Tuesday - more folks off on an overseas adventure. On Thursday we went to the Durban Museum (of Natural History, I think), and the museum in the old courthouse. Nice but depressing - South Africans as a nation don't give museums the appreciation or support they deserve and it shows. We had lunch at Joe Kool's on the beachfront (it's been 3 years since our last visit, and the JK's chicken calzone was as goopy and excellent as ever). A stroll along the pier and back home driving through the 'old' suburbs on the hill. Durbs is a beautiful city, really it is. The weekend was spent at my parents' place where I managed to make my way through Jeffrey Archer's Kane and Abel, and picked up some cooking tips from my mom. I think I was also at least partly successful in satisfying the parental units that despite me being unemployed that yes, I'm a grown-up and I do know what I'm doing with my life and Ronwen and I are not about to go hungry or be thrown out in the streets just yet.

Apart from that, I've basically spent the week lazing around, soaking up too much brain sludge on satellite TV and playing around on the 'puter. In addition to having some deep thoughts, I got Eclipse up and running again and stared at the screen trying to decide exactly what I felt like doing. I eventually banged out some code for pet projects, and spent quite a bit of time working through some parts of the Java API that had been hit-and-run affairs in the past. It's nice to be able to muck about with tech stuff and just play, without being in a mad rush to churn out working code.

On a slightly more embarassing front, I would have posted something to the effect that it was roughly a year ago that I kicked the smoking habit, except that I'm afraid I've been "backsliding" a bit the past 2 weeks. Not quite regressed to the point of smoking full-time or buying m'own, but I'm guilty of the occasional post-prandial puff, and a few more besides. Eh well, the holiday's over tomorrow, and I'll be back on the straight and narrow again. Why is the all the fun stuff always bad for you?

I'm devoting a few cycles to the issue of file system storage and representation. I know that very bright people have devoted lots of thought and research to this and it is exactly this sort of problem that fairy-dust operating systems like Longhorn are meant to help solve, but the small little problem domain I'm dealing with right now is filing and categorising all my "reference" files. (As an aside, all my files are stored in directories named after places from Middle Earth, and my reference folder is called Gondor - the scene with Gandalf digging through the old scrolls in the cinematic version of The Fellowship Of The Ring perfectly captured why I'd always chosen 'Gondor' for the reference stuff.) The saved web pages, web sites, ebooks, pdfs, Word documents, text documents, quickly typed notes and miscelleous files that comprise my library of electronic knowledge.

My current 'system' such as it is, is fairly simple: categorised directories, subcategories, and subcategories again, like a great big tree. The problem is that it forces a single category on a document or set of documents. What's more, some directories imply categorisation and others imply structure of a single 'block' of documents. For example, an html version of an electronic book usually has one or more 'images' or 'data' directories. Which directories have semantic purpose and which are purely internal document structure? What's more, directory names like Teach_Yourself_DATABASE_PROGRAMMING_WITH_VB5_in_21_Days_2nd_Ed are not very handy, and vb_21_2 doesn't really do the job either. Somewhere in between is a what-to-name-it minefield that causes me more stress than the issue deserves, but I can't help myself.

So while my system isn't unworkable, I'd very much like to overcome its limitations. There are a number of really great things I'd like to be able to do and they all revolve around the issue of categorisation and annotation. I'd like to be able to plop a bit of work about Java programming in Notes into a Notes and Java category. If it's related to web development, then I'd like to put it in a WebDev category too. I also want to be able to note that it's a document generated by me, and I want to be able to find other such documents with minimal effort. I want to be able to generate a list of ebooks, websites, etc. Of the many electronic books I have, it would be nice to store the usual book details, such as publishers, year published, editions, etc. I'd like a history of when things were checked in. I want to be able to add comments and descriptions and cross-references and notes as I work with documents.

Does this venture firmly into the realm of document management systems? It's not an area I've worked with before, so perhaps these problems have been already been solved. Perhaps someone will think "you dufus, Domino.doc does this!" It's worth investigation, I suppose.

Notes might provide a good way to store the metadata for this system because the ideas of multiple categorisation, full-text searching and so on are all already there. There are a few caveats, though. The first is that I don't want to store the documents as attachments: I want them stored on a filesystem so that I can dig around in the "raw" stuff if I like. So Notes would have to synchronise with the actual file system data (then again, so would other systems). I want the system to be cross-platform so that I can manage the library from Windows and Linux. Finally, (and perhaps contrarily), I would like the metadata to be easily browseable in a way that acts much like a file system browser, and it must be small and easy to use (or else I'll always just fall back to the file system, which would be pointless).

Another thing I want is to maintain a strong distinction between the 'archived' version of some reference info and a more accessible version. What I often do is zip up the original html version of a book. Then, when I need to use it, I unzip it into the data directory of a home web server. At some point, things get out of sync and it becomes a pain to clean up. A system that knows what's where and what's "checked out" would be great, so that if the fancy takes me I can keep the metadata and archived, raw files and simply regenerate the more publically accessed bits.

Well, this is what I want, and there's nothing stopping me from fidding with a simple little system to manage all of this. It's quite possible that I'll lose interest soon enough, but if not, it might be useful to others as well. That's assuming the wheel hasn't been invented already, of course. If you have any thoughts or ideas about how a problem like this should be solved, feel free to chime in.

I'm zonked. Ronwen and I drove down to the UNISA office on Old Fort Road and dropped off my graphics assignment at 1AM. These late night runs aren't any fun. I spent more time working on this assignment than on the previous 3 assignments I'd done in Durbs combined. All to generate a measly 70 pages of source code that the lecturers almost guaranteed won't read. They'll check for nicely formatted header files and be done with it, if that much. Here's hoping they even accept the damned thing. It's 2 weeks late, and I just hope to high heaven that they give me the 10 measly credits I still need for the subject.

I realised two things though: I really dig graphics programming and I really do like working with C++.

But enough of that for a while. I'm worn out. We're probably going to spend another week in Durbs... here's hoping I get to resurrect some semblance of a holiday. We're off to Pietermaritzburg in the morning with my cousin and his dearest to see my grandmother and aunt. Best I get some sleep.

Braai down at M and B's this evening. G and S were there as well. Ribs ribs and more ribs. Awesome. Interesting talk with G about wireless/satellite data in South Africa. Veeery, veeery interesting stuff.

On the studies front I'm still banging my head against this damned graphics programming assignment. It's taken me a depressingly long time to come to terms with lighting and the various subtleties of how OpenGL handles it. It would have taken less time if I'd actually done some meaningful RTFMing instead of rushing in and starting to tweak a huge, complicated chunk of lighting-less code without really knowing what I was doing. As it stands, I think I've ironed out most of the issues, except that the super-fancy object-oriented infrastructure I built to handle the rendering I wanted to do, is causing the lights to go out - literally. I can't figure out why and I've just about run out of time, so I'm probably going to have to rely on a less elegant system and just crank out as much code as I can with next to no reusability. Then again, that's what the model solutions from the lecturers always do, so fuggit.

I'm not superstitious but if I was I'd be thinking that kick-starting the Olympics on Friday the 13th was quite a brave thing to do.

Ronwen and I went down to visit my folks this evening. The conversation went to the issue of funerals and the fact that almost everyone wants to be cremated these days, and what people want to happen after they're gone. My mom and stepdad both want their ashes to go to the farm in Dundee. I've never been there but apparently it's a beautiful place. I knew we were into morbid territory when my mom started talking about "sprinkle me by the willow trees where all the ducks used to be." My grandmother, who's also quite elderly, and has given us a few scares in the last 2 years, told my aunt recently that when her time comes she wants her ashes scattered at the Pietermaritzburg Botanical Gardens because that's where her happiest and most peaceful times were. That's where my sister and I, and our two cousins, used to go with my gran every Saturday afternoon when we were children living in 'Maritzburg. My mom telling me that tonight brought a lump to my throat.

Ronwen says she'd want her ashes scattered in the Drakensberg somewhere. The sad thing is, I don't think I have any special place I'd want to be scattered. Haunts from my youth would feel like cheating, somehow. More accurately then, I can't think of any place I've been to or grown so attached to recently, that I'd want someone to up-end my urn there. When I think about how far back "recently" stretches, I realise the extent to which my adulthood has been a blur, too much in a state of flux always for me to pick one place and say "this is the spot."

So I'm currently Without Designated Final Resting Place. Is this a bad thing? Or is it a very firm affirmation that I'm nowhere near ready to shuffle off this mortal coil just yet?

I think I'll go with the latter.

Cancer took my stepdad's father last night. Everyone was expecting this but not just yet. He passed away in his sleep, and despite the sadness of losing him, I think everyone is grateful that it happened before his condition had deteriorated much further. I have very fond memories of Oom B and it's hard to believe that he's gone. My parents are leaving for the farm in Dundee tomorrow and the funeral is on Saturday. This is the second funeral in Dundee in less than a month - my stepdad's brother in law also passed away recently - and also from cancer. I feel really sorry for the family.

Rus in vrede, Meneer B.

Sunday saw K's christening and a Christmas lunch for Ronwen's cousins from Ireland (they weren't here for real Christmas, so the family had a pseudo-Christmas now).

Apart from that I've been studying like mad. I've sequestered myself in the study here and surface only for tea and munchies (when I can't get Ronwen to bring the toasted gammon sarmies to me, that is ;-). Three assignments done since I came to Durbs, two to go. When we came down I rather gingerly asked Ronwen if we could cut the holiday short and head back up to Joburg after the weekend, if I wasn't making any progress. As it stands the lack of Internet connectivity has seen my productivity skyrocket, so much so that I'd be nuts to head back right now.

At this point I'm a little too scared to take that observation to its natural conclusion, which would start somewhere along the lines of "so exactly how much time do I spend reading blogs and news each day?"

MWEB are so full of it. I'm connecting via my mom-in-law-to-be's gatewayed machine which is dialling in to an MWEB account. I too have an MWEB account. Since it's her dial-up, they won't let me send my mail to an MWEB SMTP server despite SMTP authentication and the lot being enabled, because they think I'm relaying. Grrrr. I've had this grief in the past, I can only imagine what sorts of hoops I'll need to jump through, short of using their utterly rubbish, IE-only web mail interface.

Screw you MWEB.

I owe some people mail. If you read this and you thought I was just being rude, apologies for not getting back to you. Hopefully soon. *mutter*

Safe and sound in Durbs after a mad rush getting assignments and admin and packing done and enduring a long schlep down in absolutely crazy traffic. Is there some big sports or holiday event I don't know about? It seems half of Gauteng decided to drive to the coast yesterday.

Connectivity's a bit erratic (hastily setup home network, 56k dialup, chug chugetty chug) for the next few days. Busy recovering from the family engagement party champagne breakfast thing this morning. Good lord, by the time the extended families from all sides get together, it's a whole platoon of people. Really really nice though.

The bummer is I missed out on the the rag-Ed-Brill-for-his-birthday deluge. Happy birthday Ed!