I've been unimaginably busy lately. Both of the consulting projects I mentioned a few months back panned out...at the same time. The first, a redux of a spam filtering system and webby frontend that I developed for a previous employer, is thankfully something I can do remotely; thankfully, because the load-balancer cluster I'm building for the other client is requiring quite a bit of on-site work.
Met with a couple of people that I'm working with on the second job and a good friend from my last employer to go see Blade II tonight; afterwards, my friend and I did a little catching up, and it sounds like he might be able to refer another job my way, dealing with helping with their spam problem.
I can't believe how this is working out. I've been looking at the bills piling up, and realizing that I'm actually going to be in a position to start paying them properly very soon. Add to that the incredible luck I seem to be having with getting jobs into the pipeline (luck that I don't suspect will hold up much longer, though), and I'm in a fantastic mood right now about the whole idea. I'll get realistic about things again tomorrow, but I get to ride on this a little more tonight. :-)Advogato's XML-RPC interface
Nice work, gary! I've incorporated a simple version of my Advogato diary on my home page, done up using the Useful PHP XML-RPC implementation, owing to the fact that I can't seem to wrap my head around the non-existant documentation of the xmlrpc-epi stuff that appears to have been integrated into PHP proper. If anyone has any decent pointers to trivial example client implementations using the EPI stuff, I'd love to see it.GARNOME
More commendations for excellent work: jdub's GARNOME is an excellent idea that's been needed for some time now. The BSD ports system has always been a favorite of mine, because of how attractive they made building non-trivial combinations of packages into a cohesive system from source. It's nice to be able to honestly say I know how much faster the new Nautilus is compared to the 1.4 version; Xnest is a godsend for trying out things like this.procmail and testing
An interesting development from the work I'm doing for my old employer's spam filter is that I've built a testing harness for validating filter rules. It's fairly crude, but writing testcases for each rule is now easy enough to make me really buy into the XP idea of writing tests first. The whole time I've been working through debugging some of these rules, I've been thinking back to how hard it was when I originally developed this thing to validate whether the rules worked or not (in reality, almost half of my original rules failed on corner cases I added tests for as I was developing the harness).
I'm not usually one to buy into methodologies, but XP really provides a solid set of ideas for programmers to build their practice on, if you have a little self-discipline.
Enough for one night, time for bed. More later.