New Year's Eve

I'm celebrating New Year's Eve with some friends tonight. This will be the third year in a row we've had a get together. We are having a buffet dinner a Chinese restaurant, then returning to my friend Robert's place to usher in the New Year.

2008 will be one second longer to compensate for changes in the Earth's rotation speed. Apparently it is getting dizzy... ;-)

Back To Work Mood

I finally shrugged off the vacation mood I was in for the last few days. I even did some mundane chores like depositing payments and sending out invoices. I made a lot of progress on the DNS server I'm setting up. It is not difficult but there are always problems, like my notes for the previous installs are missing a few steps here and there. There are a few more things I want to tweak so it is not finished yet. I'm also using the new server to try a few improvements that I might not want to test on a production server. One more day like today, and I'll be able to finish this job and get paid. Yay!

More Car Repairs

I took the car in for service early this morning. I hoped the early start to the day would enable me to get more work done. It didn't. I was so tired for most of the morning that my productivity was hopeless. I'm just not a morning person.

During the inspection they found the clutch hydraulic assist cylinder is leaking. Not enough to be an immediate concern but they are certain it will fail eventually. The parts were not in stock so I decided to take care of it next year but I cannot put it off for too long. The joys of owning an older car.

But 9 1/2 years and almost 117800km is really not that old.

Code Cleanup

I was a little more productive today and managed to do some code cleanup on a personal project, TomsProjectUtil, which I use to create my project management environments. Code cleanup is never fun but is always necessary, especially before adding new functionality. One of the new features will call the chown() function which requires root privileges. However running as root introduces other problems so I'm going slowly. I'm hoping that I'll think of another way to do this so I can avoid running as root, but so far it seems the easiest approach.

Lazy Day

Today was a very lazy day. I slept in until about 11 AM which wasted a good chunk of the day. I did get few useful things done. I archived some older TV shows to data DVDs to free up space on my hard drive which was about 95% full. Once you start watching video on your computer you use disk space at an unbelievable rate. I need to look for a more permanent solution to my storage problem.

I finally found a Canadian Tire store that had their synthetic oil in stock. Their store brand synthetic was always a good deal, even at $8/liter (Mobil is $11, Amsoil is $15) but it is sign of the times that the price jumped from $6.50 the last three months. When I first started using it in 1989 it was about $4.50/liter.

I'm in a vacation mood when I really should not be. I hope tomorrow is a little less lazy.

Vim And Nose

Vim is probably not the most common editor amongst Python programmers, but I've been using Vim since the Amiga (about 15 years) and I have yet to find another editor I really like, notwithstanding the modal design inherited from vi, Vim's spiritual ancestor. I found an interesting plugin to integrate Vim and nose, a Python unit testing framework. Once the plugin (actually a pair of plugins, one for Vim, one for nose) is installed, you use ":make" to run your tests, and navigate through the errors with ":cc", ":cnext", and ":cprev". The system works great and shows that Vim is an effective editor for Python development.

Christmas With Family

I'll be spending Christmas with my family. Given the events of the past few days, I'm sure the festivities will be livelier, louder and more chaotic than usual! Its all good fun and I'm looking forward to it.