Tag: work

weekend redux and a look ahead.

Posted on By admin 1 Comment on weekend redux and a look ahead.

The weekend was not one of the more relaxing ones I've had. In fact, I'll just say that it was rather emotionally charged and leave it at that… My shoulder gave me grief for most of it and, as a new twist, a glass of bad rose wine went down like a molten goblet of acid and took up residence in my stomach for most of last night. That was really horrid too, because I'd cooked a kick-ass curried roast beef too. Bleh.

This week is going to be a wild one, I forecast, cause I have to do a lot of prepwork on short notice. I need to write up a conference poster for PRIDE and get the student intern geared up to maintain PRIDE in case there are problems while I'm away next thursday and friday. Katy's leaving for Leicester on tuesday night and having her op on wednesday. I won't have a chance to see her until thursday night (if she's home) or friday morning (if she's not). She's getting anxious about it. It's a routine operation… it should go ok. Right? Right!

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Welcome to monday morning

Posted on By admin

Nice way to start a week.

Get into work, check my email, do some routine sanity checks on the servers… only to find that PRIDE has been down all friggin' weekend because the database server went belly up on friday night. Nice. The log partition was full. Nicer. Tables got corrupted. Nicest.

I hope this isn't an omen for my week.

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A week of hard work!

Posted on By admin 14 Comments on A week of hard work!

*does the happy dance*

I've finally released all the documentation and bug fixes for PRIDE that I've been working on all week.

For those of you who might want to have a quick read to see what it is exactly I work on, you can have a gander at the user namual. The more adventurous can also read the implementation documents.

Edit: This just made my day. Email from my boss:

Hi Richard,

Great job, especially on the documentation side!

Best regards,
H.

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Conference hell

Posted on By admin

I've been holed up in a small lecture hall for the past 2 days, listening to academics drone on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about their pet project.

Observation #1 about conferences:

  • Academics can't speak in public. They drone. They have no social skills to make them interesting.
  • People assume that you know just as much as they do about what you're working on. No, I don't know what LC-QTOF-MS/MS means. Intro slides are not wasted
  • Powerpoint is the evil. Slides should NOT BE YELLOW ON A BLUE BACKGROUND! Also, it's called a bullet point, not a paragraph mark. Condense what you want to say in a single sentence, don't read your fucking slide.
  • The comfort of the seat is inversely proportional to the time you have to spend in it for a session

I have to go back for it. I so don't want to.

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I want this day to eb over

Posted on By admin

I'm not having the best of days today. So far, I've done nothing productive. Not one damn thing. While trying to fix a small annoying bug, I managed to bring down the whole framework I'd been working on. I don't know how I did it but it takes talent to kill a whole server. *grumbles* I got everything back up and running, but the bug is still there. Since this is something only a small number of people use and very infrequently at that, it's going to on the backburner cause there are more important things to deal with. This was supposed to be a quick fix but ended up wasting the better part of my day.

What's also aggravating me is that I need to get a test version up and running so that we can beat the shit out of it with functional tests before it goes live. Unfortunately, it won't deploy. It should. Everything is there for it to be up and running. It just doesn't want to. Fuck it, I'm going for coffee.

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I've been told I haven't been writing enough

Posted on By admin 2 Comments on I've been told I haven't been writing enough

The last few days have been rather uneventful, really. Work has been mostly aggravating, to be honest. We're at the point where we're testing the code in real-life scenarios with actual data and it's making gremlins pop out of the woodwork. I spent the whole day today wrestling with Oracle JDBC. We're trying to load data that has very long text blobs to load. We found this out the hard way when JDBC was complaining about strings above 4K. We then changed the back-end tables to handle CLOBS, but then we found that the oracle:thin driver didn't handle CLOBS above 4K, so that was rather useless too. We tried to switch to the oracle:oci driver, but that needs oracle client library binaries. I spent the afternoon trying to get a windows oracle installation to play nice with java ant under cygwin. Basically, I was asking for trouble. In the end, we gave up on my laptop and we got it to run on Phil's laptop (a native linux install) and lo and behold, everything worked. I'm happy that I got it to work, but I could have done without the aggravation.

On a completely different issue, I installed a wiki on my website (http://www.flubu.com) so I have a rapid sandbox for notes and such. It's basically the electronic equivalent of my little yellow post-it notes I always carry with me.

On a final issue, I have too active an imagination and this is going to bite me in the ass shortly. Katy's become obsessed with a TV series called Millenium (I got her the series on DVD). In the last few days, she's gotten through something like 10 hours od it. Some of the themes in the show give me the serious heebyjeebies. Not good.

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