I started to collect the more interesting links:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/index.php?p=350

http://researchlab.homelinux.org/log/?p=47

http://www.pro-linux.de/news/2005/8313.html
Nice pictures, but the text is totally off…

Just got two emails.

The first told me how proud our manangement is of the 250 million dollar deal the customer just signed (which is over 50% above the plan).
The second told me that we won’t get a salary increase … due to the low sales…

WTF?

A 15 person team just made a quarter of a billion dollar and won’t even get an inflation compensation ?

After this years breakpoint we had some very hot discussions with the organizers about linux entries and the demoscene in general.
Hanno (aka the “ueluelue” guy), who wasn’t involved in this, has written a nice (and short) article about this for hugi.

I ported a few OpenGL Windows Intros to linux (mainly Cubalid 7 stuff) and it usually wasn’t a big problem.
The “installing an additional OS on the compo PC”-reason was what pissed me off the most and hanno hits that nail right on the head
with his “just use gentoo games” response. Which I had already mentioned before the party, but nobody would listen…

Had a bad flare up on friday.
I managed to keep it under control,
but it’s still bad.

I guess I’m at 50% (from the overall maximum) right now.
Doesn’t sound too bad, but considering that I was running around 15-20% for the last few weeks,
makes this the worst I’ve been through for a while.

And keep in mind that the “I could live with this if I really had no other choice”-level would be about 1-2%.

Let’s just say it’s bad.

But I’m flying to California tomorrow.
And I’m pretty sure they will fix it for good

Had a call with an engineer from a wannabe employer yesterday.

Didn’t expect to get into deep technical detail on the first call, but did anyway.

Didn’t went to smooth.
I guess the engineer was expecting to talk to a graduate student who did nothing but compare sorting algorithms and data structures.

They had a pretty specific problem and wanted me to write code … over the phone.

So I asked a few questions and calculated the magnitude of the problem (worst case: 4^7).
Got into a little “fight” with him over that, since I was sure that would average around 10K and he insisted it was more like 3billion.
Well, 4^7 = 2^7 * 2^7 = 2^14 … and I guess every programmer can tell you what 2^14 is … 16K.

Nevermind,
so I decided to do the dummy brute force implementation (telling him that you could always tune that later).
He didn’t believe that this would work.

Well, I took my notes today during my lunchbreak and had a working version about 10 minutes later.
(No googling for the answer … I had to prove it to myself !)

Took about 14 seconds … slow.
So I changed just a tiny bit of code … about 10 lines, replacing my brute force lookup with a simple hashtable.
And went down to 20ms

No black magic.

The problem through the whole call was:
The last few years I did (mostly) very high level design and architecture.
When I needed an implementation I used the simplest one I could think of.
Then I gave the simple (100% working) version to one of my interns and they applied all the nasty tricks.
In the end I only had to verify their results against my solution.

But I digress.
He was trying to make solve a problem that would be far to easy for 15 year old schoolkid.
(No problem here!)
But he expected me to explain my answer like a 15 year old schoolkid.

Imaging a car designer explaining to you how to clean out your fuel pump

At the end he asked me for “the nastiest bug” I’ve ever seen.
I guess they expected to tell them about “the nastiest bug” I ever produced.
Problem:
I never produced a nasty bug.
Usually my “bugs” are something like “missing closing brackets” or “missing semicolons” which are usually caught by the compiler anyway.

Sometimes I create “off by ones”, but I believe in unit-testing so they are caught pretty early, usually within 5 minutes after I produce them.

Well, in the end I thought I was to stupid to solve an easy problem,
but 20 minutes after the call I had the perfect solution in my head

Communication problems.

I’d say his expectations were wrong.
And I assumed he would know what he’s doing … totally confusing me with some of his “hints”.
And I guess I was just a tiny little bit nervous.

You know I get calls from headhunters about once every other week,
but I always declined, since I love my job here.

But this job … I wanted.

Wait and see … they’ll give me a second chance!

Just added a page to remind myself of stuff I want to implement … someday.

I know that I should be saving my money,
but the low dollar exchange rate is making it hard to not buy.

So here is my shopping list:
iPod shuffle (512MB) ~98$ -> 80Euro (saved: 18 Euro)
External (USB+Firewire) 3.5″ dard drive enclosure ~30$ -> 25Euro (saved: 15 Euro)
(maybe) 80GB HD for above enclosure

2 pairs of vans
2 pairs of dockers
some shirts
2 pairs of shorts
sunglasses