New job, new role, new challanges…

I’ve officially left Enovation Solutions as of 1700 on Friday, and as of 0900 on Monday, I go to work for dotMobi as a senior software engineer, to work on some more technically-oriented stuff. More specifically, I’m working with Andrea Trasatti on the new Device Database project announced recently (more here). I’ve been trying to get into more and more technically demanding roles over the past two years, but I’ve always been split between sysadmin and development roles; I still like both sides of the house, but it’s going to be interesting pursuing the development side alone for a little while, especially in this area, where I’m basicly writing tools for other developers. … Read the rest

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Kubuntu 7.10

Gutsy Gibbon.

*sigh*

Not a fan of the name. But, I’ve got that X server memory hole in Feisty on my machine and Gutsy supposedly has the fix. Tried it at home last night on my dual-booting laptop (XP and Feisty until last night). Insert CD, reboot off CD, let it run.

Perfect installation. Haven’t had time to play with the neat cool 3D stuff yet, but the successful autodetection and the full setup was very impressive, especially compared to the bad old days when autosetup was a fast way to lock your machine up or worse, but nothing more! Have to say, I still like Debian for servers, but for desktop machines, I’m sold on the Ubuntu model. I don’t install my desktop often enough to become an expert on the process, so an idiot’s interface is a good thing for that for me.… Read the rest

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Prado

On a seperate project from the PEAR work I’ve been doing of late, I’ve just rewritten an earlier project to use the Prado framework. I spent some time a while back looking at various frameworks, and in the end came down to a choice between Symfony and Prado. Because of the way this current project works, I thought Prado’s event-driven model was an easier fit than Symfony’s MVC model. Mind you, for other projects (including the one I was using PEAR for), I think Symfony would be ideal (and I didn’t use it earlier only because of time pressure).

Happily, the front-end of the project I was refactoring into Prado had no work done on it at all (the previous version was effectively a proof-of-concept with all the work in the back end).… Read the rest

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