What's it all about, Alfie?

Today I went back to a little playing with Magic - the layout tool. I've had it built on sparky for a long time, and I've used it a lot in my days at Auburn, but I haven't done a lot with it lately. So I decided to brush up on my chops and layout a few gates. Specifically, an inverter, a two-input NAND, another 'folded' two-input NAND, and a four-input NAND. Nothing really earth-shaking about this, but it's nice to keep the eyes sharp and the skills fresh. While I can't imagine laying out a complete chip, it's interesting to think that if I had the dough to go to a foundry, I could lay out a chip and have it fabbed. It'd be kind of interesting... Oh well... just a little diversion.

I also got a few calls from headhunters and it's looking good for Bear Stearns and Bank of America. Hopefully we'll know in a few days. It'd be nice to have a job again, it's too boring to be doing nothing for so long.

No word from Joel on CIA today... wonder how that's going...

This morning I looked to see the status of AOL's blockage of the Oscar protocol from GAIM. As it turns out, there aren't a lot of issues left, but as AOL finds a bug in libfaim that doesn't break their client, they exploit it. As one would expect, they are working hard to find as many bugs as possible in libfaim. However, the authors know that and they are busy taking care of them. It's an interesting problem. At some point AOL is going to have to just let go and forget about it. It's a loosing battle fighting reverse engineers... they have your product, can see what it's doing, and have the benefit of being able to architecture the best system to mimic that behavior.

Anyway... I downloaded the latest GAIM and will build and install it to see if the Oscar protocol works. If not, I'll use TOC until a release does work and then stick with that.

Big interview today... gotta stay frosty...