June 29, 2003

FreeCraft shut down

Hm, some work is coming up the road. We have to translate all our inline documented errors from German to English. Lots of work 'coz many many error messages ;) Bad news were that Freecraft has been shut down by Blizzard. Everything away, no website anymore, no SourceForge webpage, nothing. Perhaps there is much going on on interactive channels like IRC and so on, but I'm not that involved there. The only rumor I found is that a Freecraft-based project called 'Project Inferno' has been started. No website yet, but I'm curious if this can continue the path of Freecraft...

Update: The 'Project Inferno' webpage is at http://www.shadowconflict.com/projectinferno/

June 23, 2003

Cisco incompetence

Last week some of my co-workers were sent to Romania to do some tests with Ciscos telephony solution and our product. Cisco got everything they needed in advance, papers, required configurations etc. but when the developer-teams met, Ciscos people had not the slightest clue, what to do and how. Seems the world-connecting company has large problems with its internal communications and knowledge-exchange. I don't want to blame the people they sent there, but there was something terribly wrong in the whole process. This is stuff which must not happen in such a company...

June 20, 2003

Performance evaluation and SMP optimizing

Well, last week didn't bring many news: Tuesday I had a talk with my "performance manager" (why do all American companies have such silly titles?) about the goals I've reached in the last year personally and in my job and made up new goals for the future. For the past I think I've met the expectations but my PM thinks I've exceeded them. :) (Not too hard, if I'm the last remaining real developer in my team) For the future I've told him that I'd like it if I could get in touch with developers from our partner-companies and work on cross-company-projects.

Anyone out there who likes to work on a carrier-grade telephone-solution with me?

Anyway, the rest of the week was not that interesting, I've been still trying to optimize our system for SMP environment (AIX, Solaris) in a cross-platform manner. Still too much slowdown on massive parallel access if same heap is used for all threads (possibly false sharing?). Also began organizing the next iteration meeting which was initially set on Thursday but moved to next Monday...

June 15, 2003

Idea fountain

Created a new blog to throw in some of the ideas which cross my mind every day, something like an Idea fountain.

Summer heat

It's been terribly hot the last few days. Up to 36�C. Luckily, we have air conditioned workplaces and my car is also equipped with climate regulation.

But since yesterday the sky gets covered by lightning and heavy rain. I hope it doesn't start hailing suddenly, my car is parking unprotected.

June 13, 2003

Stopping all helpdesk activities

... I think I shouldn't have asked the helpdesk in the first place: I got a mail forwarded from my team-leader in which the helpdesk-guy asked some responsible for EMEA, who I am. This got forwarded to the IT responsible at our location who itself forwarded it to my team-leader. Seems I'm kickin' up some dust in the company.

All I wanted was some information on how to access the mailserver and global addressbook with Mozilla, because Outlook is too insecure and inflexible for me (no good spam filter etc). I'd like to know on which "watch lists" I'm on now...

June 10, 2003

Corporate mailbox issues

Well, I still can receive mail into my overloaded mailbox but I'm not able to send mail over it. Doesn't bother me, I can do that over our old mail-server with the new sender-address ;) Me is so bad...

Another funny thing, the helpdesk is not able to tell me the Base DN of the LDAP-Server which I need to have auto-address-detection in Mozilla-Mail. They just ask me what I need it for and to tell them what my mail-app does wrong (it can't do anything wrong without being able to log in to the server) ...

June 6, 2003

Migrated mailboxes now working

Ha! We finally found a way to connect to the VPN of our company without a migrated computer. Getting rid of that Outlook Webmail at last and using the real Outlook now. The first thing I did was to import my 90 megs of saved mail. Things worked fine until now, I think it took a while until the mailserver recognized, that I'm way over the mailbox limit I guess ;)

Beginning to delete old mail...

June 4, 2003

Instant vacation and XP experience

Been on spontaneous vacation for a few days. And being back I had to arrange an 'Iteration meeting'. (Ya know XP?) I think it was not that bad for my first time, perhaps I also have to manage the next one in two weeks.

Ever wanted to throw away all your old code and write it from scratch because it sucks? Don't do it...