2004-10-08

GMail forwarding

Ian sison just pointed out that GMail now allows a filter to forward matching email to be forwarded to another email address. That looks like free email forwarding. I wonder how long that'll remain free. Mail.com had free email forwarding, but they eventually made that a payware feature (which is why I lost tiger@kami.com, since I couldn't remember the password, since I only used the forwarding).

This is a great feature, allowing easy off-gmail archiving of email (I've actually turned the corner and prefer using gmail, previously I couldn't stand webmail and only used eudora, sylpheed, kmail, or evolution, whichever of those clients I was using at the time).

CVS on USB flashdisk

I recently got a sandisk 128MB USB flash disk and I've decided to use it as my CVS repository (or arch, I'm looking into that, or svn, I'll look into that after I look at arch). I shuttle between multiple sites, and they're not all on the internet. Some of them are completely firewalled off from the world.

I don't share the repository with anyone, so there's no problem keeping it in usb. Of course that wouldn't work well for a team. But for me, well, I just like having all my code, editing history, and releases in a repository, so a USB disk is fine as a repository.

The only thing I'm worried about is the write cycle. Need to research on that. Some flash memories are supposed to have only a limited number of write cycles and beyond that limit it's not possible to write to the device anymore.

Porting blogs

I've got another blog on another server but I'll be moving those posts here. Did one already, I'll be doing the rest slowly. Maybe one or two posts a day. I won't be doing the comments though. Not motivated enough for that. Hmmm, I should go over there and get the mysql database so I've got it here, in case the server goes away.

2004-10-02

Consulting

I recently moved into consulting, after a few comfortable and enjoyable years developing software for an internet service provider.

I'm enjoying it a lot. It's not the money (I've seen more of that than I used to make, but I've also moved to where things are more expensive, so things even out). Rather, it's the fact that I work with many different technologies, so I get to learn more as I work.

Lately, I've been learning postgresql functions and triggers in plpgsql. I went back to something I used to do all the time, code generation. I wrote a multi-threaded program in C/C++ and learned the benefits of STL at the same time. Of course I already knew what the STL could give me, I just hadn't actually experienced the benefits yet.
After using STL for a few days, I dropped my handcrafted string and container classes.

Doxygen is great and I'll be getting into PHP+SOAP (it should really be java+SOAP or something similar, but I need quick wins, like results within a week, and java is too complicated for that kind of thing, maybe on my next project I'll work with java).

One thing about consulting is, there's always something different happening, so burnout due to boredom won't happen. Although burnout due to stress is always a possibility :). But then I can usually set my own schedule, so that's *less* likely than it seems.