New blog

I have set up a new blog over at node.mu. I will no longer post entries here.

#efnet.org

On #efnet.org right now I count 81 oped, 1 voiced and 33 opered clients. The channel has grown tremendously since lucy, Auriga, phillie, n909 and I created it 4 years or so ago. It all started as a forum conversation on the old efnet.org bulletin board. We were talking about IRC on a bulletin board, hitting the browser refresh every minute or so. It was blindingly obvious that we needed a channel and so #efnet.org was born.

Pills, Hardy, qurve and oz were some of the first oppers to join us. Of the early folks to join, lucy, Auriga and n909 are now opers. phillie seems to have stopped chatting. I also stopped chatting for a couple of years.

I think that the name of the channel, and the fact that the channel has so many opers as regular chatters, has helped it grow at such a fast rate. Power attracts hangers-on. Being oped in #efnet.org somehow makes one leet. The fact that the early chatters are now opers probably encourages the hangers-on too, which is pretty sad.

Bought some books

I've bought 2 PHP books from amazon.com today:

Items shipping soon:
Delivery estimate: October 27, 2005 
1 of: PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice
1 of: PHP 5 Power Programming (Bruce Perens Open Source)

I've been looking for books on PHP patterns for ages. I can't wait to get my hands on them.

Windows XP setup and SATA

I'm helping to build a computer for my frien's niece. It's now time to install the OS (Windows XP). Unfortunately, Windows XP, being a several years old now, does not come with drivers for SATA. We need to to load these drivers through a floppy disk at the start of the installation. This is a major inconvenience. We didn't buy a floppy drive for the new computer. Who does these days?

Permanent Residency

I recently got granted my permanent resident Australian visa. Am I happy about it? Of course. But to be honest, I was not really worried that it might not be granted. For skilled applications, if you meet all the criteria and your degree is assessed positively, it should be fairly straight forward.

In other news, I've finally replaced my dead hard disk. The new one is double in capacity and cost less that my old one when I bought it a year or so ago. I've been slowly installing my applications back. Right now I'm dual booting Windows XP and FreeBSD 6.0 Beta 1. I kicked ubuntu out.

FreeBSD 6.0 Beta 1 runs smoothly so far. It does not feel like beta software. I usually track the stable branches only, but 6.0 RELEASE is due soon and it will be easier to update the system from beta to RELEASE than from 5.4 to 6.0 RELEASE. I'm building world right now and a custom kernel will follow soon. I'm building a custom kernel to get rid of the debugging stuff that have been turned on for the beta release. This should give us a performance boost.

Long time

So, what's happened these past few months?

• Bought a new car.


• Anne, my sister came over to Perth for about a month.


• Parents came over too.


• Graduated.


• This girl crashed into my car, giving me a slight neck injury, and giving my car a $5,600 injury. Her insurance's paying for it.


• Learnt that the strategy that I've been using for developing PHP/MySQL applications has a name - ORM - for Object Relational Mapping.


• Got into the Smarty templating engine.


• Got lazy, and wrote a script to write my PHP classes for me - a class for each table in the database so that I can instantiate objects and deal with stuff on a higher level.


• Then we discovered phpCodeGenie, which does the same thing and more. The best part is that phpCodeGenie was written by fellow Mauritian Nilesh Dosooye. I've only looked at it briefly at this stage. Most of the form generation stuff I don't need, especially since the generated code mixes PHP code with html markup.


• Got rid of Arch Linux because packages were breaking way too often for my liking.


• Considering installing the newly released ubuntu hoary.


• Looking forward to FreeBSD 5.4 and Open Solaris

Aquarians

I just found out that at Bam, Adam was born on the 9th of Febuary, Kristy was born on the 10th and I was born on the 11th of the same month. That's freaky!