What's it all about, Alfie?

OK... I've complained enough about not having enough to do, so it's nice to have a lot to do - maybe even a little too much. I've been very busy these last few days keeping up on the coding I wanted to get done as well as keeping the production and UAT systems happy. It's a lot to keep going, but it's a goof kind of tired.

One of the interesting things I've been working on is the data model of a general grouping structure - a tree, and operations on that tree. It's all in C++ which is the preferred language for this application due to it's computations and multi-threaded nature. I have a lot of control with the pthreads as well as complete memory control which is really going to help as things scale up to very large datasets. It's another component of CKit and it's coming together quite nicely. I still have to do some work on a concrete subclass that populates itself with data, but that's not too bad, really.

Other than that, I'm waiting for updates to Desktop Manager for Mac OS X as well as Unison and a few others that I'm hoping improve quickly. Also, I've got my eye on the 1GB modules for my 17-inch PowerBook which would take it to 2GB RAM. When they get to be $250 each, I'll probably pick up a pair. Wild how the desktop of not so long ago is the laptop of today.

OK, it's probably not clear to the general populace that hackers are crooks. But they are. I've had problems of my own with them on my boxes, but today it's been a real problem for the web site I did for my cousin's business. The web hosting company that we put the site on is shutting off the SSH and FTP, including SFTP, until they get their servers locked down. While this is nice, I never went to their hosts via telnet or ftp - always SSH or SFTP.

Yet, I can hardly blame the good folks at the hosting company for if it were my business to host web servers, I'd be very very careful about access and make sure that I didn't have unauthorized access as that could put me in a world of hurt.

So I'm left wondering if we'll ever get the type of hosting we need. I'm concerned that I haven't been able to contact someone at the company, and hope that it's all just a matter of a little configuration on my part that won't take more than an hour or so and I can get my cousin back on the air.

They steal time, resources, money, and a sense of goodwill. Hackers are trash.