General

If You Expect A Reply To An Email

What lesson did we learn today kids? If you want a reply to your emails, make sure you are using an ISP that will actually accept email…

0287048ACA     3833 Fri May 20 12:08:30  dr@zymeta.com
(lost connection with idcmail-mx1so.cg.shawcable.net[24.71.223.11]: Connection timed out)
                                         [email-address-protected]@shaw.ca

0EDE948AD9     6849 Fri May 20 11:11:22  dr@zymeta.com
(connect to idcmail-mx1so.cg.shawcable.net[24.71.223.11]: Connection timed out)
                                         [email-address-protected]@shaw.ca

DB7CA7B988     7218 Fri May 20 12:31:53  dr@zymeta.com
(lost connection with idcmail-mx1so.cg.shawcable.net[24.71.223.11]: Connection timed out)
                                         [email-address-protected]@shaw.ca

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Appeal Dismissed

I’m not a supporter of music sharing. Have I blogged that before? I can’t remember. But I am a fan of privacy and I am a fan of fairness to all. And to me, that fairness means that just because you have a lot of money and a lot of friends in high places doesn’t mean you should be able to muscle your way around the rules. Which means that I am not in favour of the way the recording and movie industries are going about trying to stop file sharing.

So it is with a sly grin that I read that the Federal Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal of a March 2004 ruling that ISPs do not have to reveal the names of users who were supposedly file sharing.
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Why The World Is In Turmoil

Over the past few months I have come to realize that the world will never be at peace. Why? Because there isn’t enough patience. Actually I knew this long ago, it’s just that I was forever an optimist. But I am no longer holding out for an Obi-Wan Kenobi because it’s just a pipe dream. Maybe I’ll feel more hopeful tomorrow or next week after meeting the Queen, but I doubt it.

Look at the Middle East. Palestinian children are brought up to hate the people of Israel and vice versa. Even if they don’t live there or weren’t even born there they are brought up with hatred. Oh yes, I know it’s easy to say that “I don’t understand” cause I haven’t lived in an area that has been at war for hundreds and hundreds of years. Blah blah blah. That’s a cop out. It boils down to a pure lack of patience and an unwillingness to forgive, forget and move on.

But, in a way, I understand a little why everyone is skeptical of letting go of the past. I think Jack Handey said it best with ” “I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.”
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[Mis] Information

If you’ve arrived at this blog, you’re either a regular reader or you’ve been searching for one of several things. Most people are interested in my success at getting the D-Link DWL-G122 working under Linux. A few people are looking for my comments on KDE related things like transparency and the fact that Gentoo still hasn’t marked KDE 3.4 as stable. And since I also write about my flying adventures, I like to think that some people arrive here while searching for info on general aviation in Alberta, though I know that a lot of people are just interested in airplane videos.

That all said, I work for Zymeta Corporation so there’s also a good chance you arrived here because you were interested in information on Zymeta. Which means that there’s also a good chance you also came across another blog written by an ex-employee of Zymeta. I won’t link to it directly as I see no need to raise it’s Google PageRank, but if you have trouble finding it and want to read it try this Google search. But go ahead and check it out and then feel free to contact Zymeta via email (investors@zymeta.com) or phone (403.802.2029) and we’ll pass you on to someone who can give you the real story. If you need investor information, contact us. Info on Zymeta in general? Contact us. Trying to find a venue with a Zymeta Jukebox in it? You could complain about that on a blog or you could just contact us. You get the gist. And if you’re having trouble getting through, feel free to contact me and I’ll make sure to put you in touch with the right person.

And if you don’t get the connection between this blog entry and the picture ask me about that too. And three points if you know what type of aircraft it is without looking it up.
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Spring Has Arrived

Spring has finally arrived. Yes, I know that the purists of the world will tell you that March 20th, 21st or 22nd is the first day of spring, but for me, spring hasn’t arrived until such time as I have to pull the lawn mower out and cut the nice green grass. Yes, now that’s a true sign that spring has decided to show up.
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Pretending You Know What's Going On

Right after university I started working at a small company as their only software developer. It was a pretty good job; I did a wide range of development and administered an SGI IRIX box. No one there really knew much about software so I made most of the decisions and I put in a lot of hours doing the work because not everything worked out according to plan. But it was a fun job nevertheless.

Then the company was bought by another company and a few more developers were added. And then that company, in turn, was bought by yet another company. This new company was a publicly traded company and they brought even more developers with them. Suddenly the environment was not at all what it had been like when I first started and despite my best efforts they made lots of dumb decisions. Decisions like blowing a sizeable budget on designing how the application would look, even though no one had even bothered to figure out what the app was actually going to do.

In my defense, I was still a rather junior guy but still, some of the blame likely falls on me for not explaining how things should be done. In the end, I left the company because I felt the entire operation was a complete gongshow. After giving my notice, I told a few people close to me the real reason for my departure but to everyone else, I simply said “it was time to move on”. Even as a 23 year old wet-behind-the-ears developer, I was still smart enough to know that you shouldn’t burn bridges unless you have your entire route mapped out. And in this turbulent work world, it’s impossible for anyone to map out their career. Besides, after I left, who knows how things were? Maybe they smartened up and realized that some of the things I pointed out were right. But I don’t for a minute pretend that I have the faintest idea what’s going on there, because I don’t work there anymore.
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Quake 3 Urban Terror

I’m an addict of sorts, though I can completely control my addiction, so I’m not sure that I qualify as an addict in the strictest sense. I love playing Quake III. I love playing the Urban Terror mod for Q3 even more. If I could, I would play the game during all my free time but I suspect I would grow bored.

When time permits, the Zymeta dev team plays Urban Terror during lunch breaks. It’s a great way to take a break from programming (or encoding in Dean’s case), clear your head and have a few laughs. I suspect most companies would frown on game playing but for me, I am a solid believer that with the right people networked game playing is as good a team building experience as anything else. And Zymeta definitely has good people; the best people, in fact. I would pit our guys against any other development team that Calgary has to offer.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Urban Terror. As it stands now, we play Urban Terror internally only. It’s faster and way more fun, even though it’s just the four (or occasionally six) of us. Why? Because all around the world there are noobs, UT players who think that they are cool because they can sit in some remote location and just take you out with a sniper rifle. I admit it’s fun to do that once in a while, but all the time? As if. Some of them are newbies and don’t know any better and some of them are, well, just noobs. At Zymeta, we tend to play with close quarters weapons: the shotgun, the two pistols, HE grenades and knives. Nothing is as satisfying in Urban Terror as slicing someone, more so if they are a sniper noob. So on the occasional day when we play on an external server, we go out of our way to work together and slice, slice up all the noobs. I swear on those days I laugh harder than I ever do anywhere else, no matter what the funny situation is.
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Moving Forward

If there’s one thing I really detest (in addition to the over and inappropriate use of the words really and very) is the expression “moving forward.” It’s another disturbing trend of society; crappy euphemisms. “Challenges” instead of “problems” or “moving forward” instead of “in the future”.

I was originally going to write this entry about WestJet and it’s downward spiral, especially after this morning’s article in the Globe & Mail about how WestJet’s employees hated the new ad campaign. But as I was reading the article, I noticed that my favourite expression was used… in writing. Bah.

”These specific ads did not hit the mark with consumers and I have made the difficult decision to pull them until we are confident in moving forward,” Sean Duffy wrote. What the heck does that mean? Mr. Duffy is vice-president of marketing and sales. Doesn’t he have a communications department to help him write “stuff”? Now, I’m not a communications major by any stretch (though I am married to one), but I do know that Mr. Duffy’s comments make no real sense and are basically an effort to hide the truth; that WestJet is pulling the ads, most likely indefinitely, ‘cause someone made a poor decision and accepted ads that sucked.

Luckily, this brings me full circle. Remember when WestJet Airlines first started in the late nineties and Transport Canada was on the verge of grounding the airline for a technicality of sorts? And remember that WestJet grounded themselves instead and told everyone so? Yes. Remember when WestJet was a company that didn’t hide behind sales and marketing speak? I do. Of course, I wasn’t a huge fan of the airline then either because I believed (and still do) that if you want professionalism anywhere, it’s in a multi-million dollar aircraft at thirty-thousand feet.
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Announce Often, Announce Early

And yet another disturbing trend in society, though it seems mostly localized (for now) to the software industry: announce often and announce early. Microsoft did it earlier this year with IPTV, which at least was apparently in limited testing. But some game companies have been doing it for quit a while and now it seems that Disney too is guilty. Summer 2006? That’s a long time for what little excitement that was generated to disappear.
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