During my day job at $BIG_MONEY I’m behind a restrictive corporate firewall and as such can’t ssh to anywhere in the outside world. Which makes me sad. Step in AjaxTerm: What you are seeing is a screenshot of my screen session for a project I’m working on. Editing a Perl script with vi in my web browser, I love it!

I picked up a new bicycle earlier today after probably a decade of not as much as even getting on one. I’m suprised how quickly it all came back to me, almost instantaneously in fact. It only took me 10 minutes to get home from Sainsbury’s with a pannier bag stuffed full with groceries. My life has taken on new meaning!

A Windows 2000 workstation, the bloated Office 2003 suite, web-apps that only work with Internet Explorer…

The past 4 weeks have been hectic: I’ve been overwhelmed with new information and I’ve developed a dependence on searching old emails, miscellaneous text files and word-of-mouth information. There is a plus side though: our team has a wiki. Free software to the rescue once again! The only problem is that a lot of relevant information is either missing, incomplete or of otherwise poor quality, so I found myself compulsively editing and I’ve set myself the challenge of improving the documentation of the various processes our team is associated with.

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I started my new job as an Analyst Programmer with Citi today and so far I don’t have a login, my own machine or a permanent pass card and I’m not completely sure what exactly it is I’ll actually be doing but I have mastered the use of the coffee machine. It’s all good :)

I finally got sick of not being able to use SQL subqueries and decided to upgrade my MySQL installation from 4.0.x to 5.0.x. I had wanted to do this previously but was afraid I’d end up breaking something and be left without a working development environment or a website either, for that matter, so I resorted to complicating my custom queries in CakePHP with JOIN statements :( I couldn’t find a 5.

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I was having a quick look through some second-hand books last weekend and happened across a copy of Neuromancer by William Gibson, the “father of cyber-punk". I had to have it and this marked the third time I’ve purchased a copy of this seminal work. I started into it on the bus home yesterday and it still seems fresh. Neuromancer is one of the very few books I’ve read more than once and I’ve enjoyed it every time, so much so I’ve lost track of the exact number of times I’ve read it.

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On my way out to work this morning I deposited a freshly signed and dated contract into the post. More details will be forthcoming :)

I thought I was out of the woods. I upgraded my development copy of MacServ to the alpha version of CakePHP so I could make use of it’s pagination features; I tweaked my views to replace calls to various deprecated html helper functions with the new ones in the form helper, made one or two minor changes and thought I was good to go… First thing this morning one of the engineers was having problems adding a new repair.

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I submitted a minor contribution to the CakePHP framework today, a patch to a patch, to be specific. It’s good to give back :)