Posts

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Jake is back on Documentation?

First of all, let me just say that I’m not officially back. Yes, I made my first checkin to the docs in more than a year. Yes, I’m gonna try my best to get back up to speed. Unfortunately, I’ve got a few roadblocks in that department.

  1. I actually have a fair amount of time daily when I can use my laptop. Most of this time is spent far away from an Internet connection.
  2. I don’t have enough hard disk space on my laptop to do a linux install so I can’t really get back up to speed as easily as I like (as an aside, perhaps I should try a windows install so I can update that section).
  3. I’m still in the Army and still in Iraq, so everything is subject to change seemingly without notice.

My initial plan is to try and get existing patches reviewed and checked in (which is what the checkin I just did was (bug 264226 on the 2.16 branch)). I also am looking over the changes that have been made in the past year and will probably undo parts of some of them. While some of the changes were quite welcome and needed, there are some things that I liked the way they were (as an aside, I have to wonder if Barnboy felt the same way about some of my changes).

So, that’s where I’m at. One step at a time.

PS. Another thing that may cut into my time is the fact that my Halo 2 disk just came in the mail today :).

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Still In Iraq for Foreseeable Future

Once again, I bid you hello from Iraq where I’ll be for a yet to be determined amount of time. When I originally left, the plan was for a one year deployment. In the Army’s book, this “deployment” time includes things such as training (I spent 1 1/2 months at Fort Dix, NJ), redeployment (the Army term for going home), demobilization and terminal leave. Those last three things take about 2 months to do (redeployment and demob take about a month and terminal leave is simply leave paid at the end of deployment that wasn’t used during the deployment). That means that in order for all the paperwork to be completed on time you have to leave the area of operations about 2 months before the end of your deployed time. Being that my deployed time according to my orders ends in early January, that means I’d have had to leave here in early November. Well, that didn’t happen. Half our company did leave and they’ll be home really soon. Those of us that stayed behind will have to be issued extension orders as there is no way at this point to be done with all the post-deployment stuff before our current orders expire. I’ve heard rumors that those orders have been issued, though I haven’t seen them with my own eyes.

In other news, I was gonna give a shot at downloading the Bugzilla Documentation from CVS onto my laptop today (maybe I’ll get some time to look at it… no promises) when I noticed that cvs.mozilla.org now requires ssh in order to access it. I’m sure it’s a good thing, but being that I didn’t get the message when it was sent out in May (didn’t look at that mailbox) I never sent in a public key. Ah well, I sent it this morning so it should be activated soon.

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Howdy From Iraq

Obviously I haven’t posted to this blog for quite some time… well, at least it’s obvious to me. There probably weren’t any readers regular enough to realize it other than the author.

Anyway, I’m in Iraq now (as you can tell by the title). I’m stationed at a prison facility about 10 miles or so west of Baghdad. This facility, Abu Ghraib, has quite a reputation amoung the locals. It’s a place where Sadam tortured and excuted many of his political enemies and such. At least that’s what I hear and what I’ve read on the ‘net. We, being the Americans, reopened this facility as a EPW/Civilian Detainee camp though some of it still operates as an Iraqi prison. I’m sure anybody familiar with this type of operation knows that there’s not a whole lot of details I can give, but there are websites/news articles out there with some acurate information… though there’s also some out there with inaccurate information. Good luck trying to tell between the two :).

I’ve been in this little paradise since the morning of 28-Feb. For the first two weeks or so the entire company stayed in one big room, the MWR room. Once the company that we were relieving left, we were able to move into the cells they had been occupying. That’s right, I currently live in a jail cell. It’s actually fairly spacious… I can only imagine how many people were in here when this was being used as a prison, but right now there’s three of us. We’ve been able to get some wood and nails so I built myself a bed and a desk. Back home it wouldn’t really be much of anything, but here it’s near luxury. Sometime in the near future I want to post some pictures of various things, my bed will be one of them.

Well, I think that’s all I’m going to type for now. My intention is to semi-regularly post information to this site… I guess time will tell how well I do in that department. At this time I have no intention of changing the times I post to be local time here, just be aware that it’s not really 1:30am it’s 9:30am (I’m 8 hrs ahead of Eastern Time).

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Going to the Sandbox

Not that I was updating this blog regularly any more anyway, but it will be even less frequently now (probably) that I’m getting deployed. As of right now I don’t now for sure where I’m going, but Iraq seems a strong possibility :). Perhaps I’ll have the opportunity to post here when I’m over there, but quite possibly I won’t. So I’ll type at y’all later.

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Closing off Comments

Well, the spammers have finally done it. I’ve gotten so sick of dealing with spam that I’ve decided to no longer allow comments on my blog. I will slowly but surely remove the ability for older posts to have comments and will not be allowing comments to any new posts. I’m deeply disappointed in having to do this, but I’m sick of constantly having to delete the crap they put on my site. If you do have something to say, feel free to email it to me and if you give permission (and I think about it), I’ll post it here.

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Spammers suck

This is probably just opening myself up to attack by some lame spammer, but so I’ve gotta say it. Spammers suck. If I actually wanted to buy some viagra, what do you think I’d do… visit some random person’s blog and start reading comments about random topics until I found one that contained a link to some online vendor I’ve never heard of or go talk to a Doctor? Apparently there’s a bunch of losers out there that think it’s to former and that they’re doing the world some great service by posting links to their pathetic sites everywhere they possibly can. Do I sound upset? It might have something to do with, yet again, having to waste my time deleting comments that only contain spam links. Sure I can ban that IP address, but more likely than not whoever is the person behind posting these spamlinks is on a dynamic IP address. After all, I don’t think any reputable company would want to piss of a bunch of people by littering their personal blogs with links. Which brings my to another point (I have those?). Why would anybody deal with spammers? Giving them money (even if it’s $.50) just encourages them to continue doing what they’re doing. Besides that, these companies seem to be most bottom feeding pharmaceutical companies selling “male enhancement” drugs. Who would honestly want to by medication from some random company they’ve never heard of? We’re not talking about some cheap “as seen on TV’ do-it-all knife/kitchen sink, we’re talking about medicine; the former is just a waste of money, bad medicine can kill you.

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SWG Developers Chat

Unfortunately I was unable to attend the developers chat this evening hosted by Stratics.com. Fortunately, I was prepared for this possibility and had my IRC client logging. I filtered the logs to remove many of the join/part/quit messages and put them on my site. I haven’t had a chance to read them yet, but will be doing so shortly :).

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Welcome to my CIS 153 class

All I have to say if you’re from my CIS 153 AW Online Access class (wow, that’s a finger-full) is: “Wow, you actually clicked that link.” I really didn’t think anybody would come (and as I’m writing this I may yet be proven right). Anyway, this is my humble little blog. If you’re not from CIS 153 and came to this page because I had a new entry and though you might see something witty… well, there’s never anything witty at this page. But if you though you might see something new about me or my plans, about as close as I can come to that is that I’m in an online Access database class (yes, even though I don’t like Microsoft, I still learn their software).

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Another new time sink … I mean character

Sony Online Entertainment had some problems with a patch they did this morning resulting in many of their galaxies (read, servers) being down for an extended amount of time this morning. This included the ones I normally play on. While I was waiting patiently (ya, right) for the game to be playable again I created a new character… as if I didn’t waste, I mean spend, enough time on the existing two. Anyway, this new character’s name is Oplem Koped and he resides on the Sunrunner galaxy. He hopes someday to be bounty hunter and a loyal servant of the Empire (even though some Imperials don’t like bounty hunters). I spent most of the day playing this character and helped him to learn a couple of skills. He’s about half-way to the required faction points to join the Empire… I really forgot how fast that initial 200 FP took to earn.

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School’s starting soon….

Has anybody else noticed a decrease in my posting frequency since I bought Star Wars Galaxies has decreased significantly? If you haven’t, I certainly have. My other online activities have also fallen by the wayside (such as Bugzilla‘s documentation. Heck, bugzilla.mozilla.org transferred to their new server and I didn’t even know it until I was actually going through my bugmail and clicked on one of the links to get more information. So let that be a lesson to you: don’t buy Star Wars Galaxies… it’s full of bugs and extremely addicting (does that even seem like a possible combination?). Maybe now that schools starting I’ll play games less and accomplish more. Maybe.