What's it all about, Alfie?

One of the things I really like is getting surprised by really well written software. It doesn't happen everyday, so it's really nice to be really shocked by a chunk of code.

Thankfully, today is one of those days.

I was working with a few of my web sites and one of them happened to be on an NT box. I have the NT box for several reasons, but they all seem to be less important the more I try to do something on that box and find out that because it's NT, I can't. No good telnet server... no really solid ftp server... no OpenSSH server for security... it's so unlike all my other systems (all Unix of one sort or another), it's difficult to get some things done.

So I was trying to figure a way to get the web site fixed and I thought about BBEdit's "Open from FTP Server..." functionality. It's nothing short of amazing. I was able to look at the directory structure and load in the file as clean as you please. Then edit it a bit, save it and reload the page. Everything was working perfectly. I was stunned that it was as easy as it was.

In the end, it didn't matter that my NT FTP server wasn't really 'good', it was good enough for BBEdit. I got everything I wanted done.

Interviewing can be a pain and it can be a lot of fun. When you're out of a job and you really need one, then interviewing can be a lot of grief trying to make yourself fit into each and every interview simply because you need the job. When you have a job, and are looking for something better - more interesting work, more free time, more pay... then interviewing is a lot more enjoyable. At least it is to me.

This morning I had a lovely talk with a company, and while nothing's perfect, this place sounded as close to it as I've ever heard. They're looking for someone to do just the kind of work I like doing, in a small team, with the right tools for the job - and get this, they are even looking to use Mac OS X on the developer's workstations. This is almost like a dream. I can hardly believe it.

Of course, this might be a little bit of a sales pitch as many interviews are - "please like us so you'll come work here". It works both ways. So I'm not expecting all that I heard to really materialize when (and if) I go and talk to them in person, but it's a lot in the right direction and that's a really big step forward for me. I'm looking forward to see what the reality of the place is. It promises to be a very interesting time.

Things are very predictable these days at work. More data, more views, it's like I'm a super-DBA where the "Database" I manage is all the data they are interested in seeing. It's not particularly exciting work, but it's OK.

A few days ago I did a minor overhaul on one of the input parsers I had in InfoShop. The flat file parser was really pretty limited and I wanted to make it more general in it's parsing as well as in it's inputs. So I added the same style of code as the database parser to allow the creation of nested data structures, and allowed for a command to be executed and the output of that command be the input to the parser. This will give me a much greater capability as I can put scripts there as well as programs and such. It'll make for a much larger universe for the parser and it's needed that for over a year.

Other than that, things are moving along at their own pace. Not too bad given it's July.

Well... dealing with boredom is certainly one of the more difficult things I've had to deal with lately. When you've designed and built large, serious systems, it's hard to stay mentally challenged doing web pages. Especially when they are all basically the same - some data source feeding a graph or a table. Yet it's really important to feed and care for your Creativity.

I'm getting the impression that I'm not doing a good enough job of taking care of that part of myself that is the Creative side, and it's costing me more and more each day. I believe what I do is basically creative, that the job of building systems is as much art as anything else. Yes, there's certainly a lot of science, but there's a big difference between only using science and using art as well.

But like any tool that's not used daily, creativity will get rusty and you need to exercise it for those times you're really going to need it. Seems obvious when you think about it in the same terms as any other skill, but I'll admit to having neglected by creative side of late.

So I need to do something about that. Don't quite know what it is, but it certainly doesn't have to be something to do with programming. I built a fence a few weeks ago and it was a lot of fun and exercised those same creative forces/muscles which felt very good. But I can't keep building fences - they're just too darn big. I need something that's portable.

So I'm going to go on the hunt for something that's more reasonable and in the end serves the same purpose. I've searched osx.freshmeat.net and haven't found anything - yet, but I have a feeling I'll do some more searching before I give up. I've really enjoyed working on the OpenSource projects that I've worked on in the past, and they always needed more help than they had.

If that doesn't work out, I'll go back to some of the projects I've set down in the past and pick them up again. Sure, they're not the most interesting things to do, but it's something and exercise is like that - it's something.