I heard from the chap about the interview. He's been looking for flights, and has found one for me next weekend:
PE-CTN 26th November. Depart 15:45 and arrive 16:55
CTN-PE 28th November. Depart 10:20 and arrive 11:30
Is it bad that I don't want to go that weekend because Tim and Bronwyn are leaving on the 28th? I don't think I can be picky, though, for goodness sakes. I'll say goodbye to them before I leave. Noodle is leaving on the 29th, and I shall be distraught if I don't see her before she goes, but that should be fine.
So, anyway, that's it. I'm going for an interview. Apparently I can't wear my jean-pant, so I need to go and purchase an Executive Pant, and maybe a shirt with Real Buttons, and stuff like that. Hectic. Getting a job means being a Real Person. Who knew?
Next step: try to convince Claire to come pick me up from the airport on the 26th.
So I had the telephone interview. It was really cool, actually. I prepared for it by having some coffee and listening to lots and lots of Fatboy Slim for the required mojo. Track 1 of the new album Palookaville is called "Don't Let The Man", and it has a sample from the Five Man Electrical Band that goes:
And the sign said "Long-haired freaky people need not apply".Which I figured was excellent motivation for my first job interview.
The interview itself went well. The guy seems to be a bona fide Nice Guy (tm). He used a Metaphor, and I like metaphors. And he said that one thing that stood out about my CV was that I'd done Philosophy, which made me want to give him a big hug. Because, like, Philosophy, it's my thing, you know, really.
He said, I think, that I could choose what I wanted to do. He wants me to do software development, he thinks I'd do best at that, but if I really want to do system administration, then it can fit.
Another bonus is that if I need time to finish my thesis (hah! No, but seriously), then that could fit, as well.
He asked me the nasty question. The one about "How much do you want to earn?". I figured "One million dollars" was not a good answer, so I told him what I actually thought. Namely, that I like to have enough money to pay my rent and eat food, and have a bit left over for a beer afterwards, you know? But apart from that, I really want to get out there, get some experience and stuff. So, we will discuss salaries later, it seems.
And then we made a plan to meet. We decided on the 17th of December, 9am, and I'd go to Stellenbosch, but if I couldn't get transport, they'd drive up to Cape Town to see me. And that was pretty much the end of the interview.
See, it's a good thing I didn't blog this straight away. Because, they phoned me back just now. They want to see me sooner than the 17th of December. They want to see me next weekend, or the weekend afterwards. And, they are going to fly me down to Cape Town in order to see them. Which, frankly, blows me away. So, ja. I'm going to Cape Town.
Well, I now have a working version of my system. Here is what it does:
You dial a certain extension on the PBX, and get music being played through the phone. Pressing '5' on the phone keypad will pause/unpause the music, '3' will go on to the next song, and so on.
You can go to a certain page in your webbrowser, and you are presented with what is effectively an HTML view of a music player - links to "pause", "play", "next", etc. Following these links simply returns you to the same page, but also has the desired effect on the music coming out of your phone. In other words, you can control the music coming out of your phone from a web-page.
Further, you can load up a little GTK application on your local machine, which looks (okay, it could look, if I put the effort in to make it pretty) like any old mp3 player, with pause/play buttons, etc. However, this app also controls the music coming out of your phone.
Basically, what was originally a "phone service" has been turned into a general service that can be controlled from any medium - it would be absolutely trivial to write an IRC bot that accepted "pause", "play", "next" commands and passed them on.
This is good, because it means I can write a thesis on the convergence of plain-old-telephone-systems and "next-generation" networks controlled by web-browsers and desktop applications and so on.
Wheee.
After this, they said I should go back in 4 weeks time. Which is now.
Apparently, the BI-529 form takes 6-8 weeks. That sucks.
"Ivan Groenewald passed your CV on to me, and we (Adept Internet) are interested in talking to you."
Oryx++
I'm keen!
Tamara and I went and booked our plane tickets the day before yesterday. Kulula has some amazingly cheap offers. I would never have even thought of flying, but the supremely organised Tamara compared the prices of every form of transport there is, and concluded that it would be better all round if we flew.
I have a meeting with Abraham at Frogfoot on the 15th of December, so I'm flying down on the 14th. I've booked a ticket back on the 5th of January, which fits in nicely with the little illusion I've been maintaining that I'm going to be handing a thesis in on the 15th of January.
Bug and Darb have both blogged about http and what Google's first match for an http search is. They (rightly) do not think it's a good thing that Microsoft has managed to get the top match. After all that that corporation has done to destroy various standards, they definitely don't deserve the match for that one. However, I can't say I agree with Bug's choice of Google itself as the right benefactor of the search. My other option would be the W3C, but if you're going to start a googlebomb to give them "http", then you should damn well make sure that they get "html" and "xml" as well, which they don't.
I'm not sure I really agree with all this googlebombing anyway. Dom has his link to Microsoft's browser that he uses all the time, and there was the famous litigious bastards Googlebomb that worked so well. But that was for fun. You shouldn't interfere with nature. Let Google work in its mysterious ways, its wonders to perform.
To summarise: we're all way too bored and worry to much about arb crap.
There's an article in the Dispatch about our prize for iLanga: http://www.dispatch.co.za/2004/11/03/Easterncape/fawards.html
The Compsci Department is doing it's two-yearly (what the hell is the word? "bi-annual" isn't right. Dodeca-monthly?) roll-out of new PCs. It's come at a particularly inopportune time for me, as this is the point where I'm trying to look like I'm working the most, and to have to install a new machine, and get everything copied across just so, is a bit of a break in the thought process, so to speak.
At first, I installed Ubuntu, because I wanted to see what it was like. And I did. And it was very like. I was really impressed. The installation was smooth, everything worked out of the box, and the configuration tools were all very graphical and easy and impressive. Honestly, my gran could use it with ease. And not the gran that codes MUDs in her spare time.
However, it soon became apparent that if I was going to carry on doing any work, I'd have to go back to Gentoo. Ubuntu didn't have identical packages, and so on, and while I'm sure I could have made everything work, given a bit of time to look around, time is not what I had. With Gentoo at least I could just emerge the same packages, copy the config files over, and be done with it. Which is what I did. I really plan to go back and have a proper look at Ubuntu and/or Debian, but now is not the time.
Having said that, even a direct switch over was not a trivial operation. Admittedly, I could have gone the Yusuf route and basically tarpiped everything from the old machine to the new machine (although that's not the way I would have done it, I probably would have taken an actual hard-drive image with dd), thus directly mirroring my machine. But my old machine was getting messy, and there were one or two things I wanted to get Right. For example, when I installed the new machine, I got it working with a framebuffer bootsplash, and udev/hotplug, and so on, right from scratch. My /dev directory on my root partition has only three nodes in it! That makes me feel leet and geeky.
So, having installed my new machine all nice and pretty like, I needed to get all the vital stuff across. /home was easy enough to do, and gave me a chance to remove the gazillion user accounts that I'd dished out over the year. /etc (where good old Gentoo stores all of its configuration files, unlike FreeBSD, etc, which store them here, there, and everywhere (by which I mean /etc and /usr/local/etc)) was not so easy, but I rsync'd the directory hierarchy across and stored it somewhere that I could get a look at it. Then, every time I installed a service, I could just have a squizz at my old machine's config, and make the necessary changes (diff is a wonderful tool).
My only worry now is whether or not I've got everything across. Most people (you know what I mean. Most geeks, or whatever) would say that /home and /etc are the most important things, but that's not all. For example, I need /var/www/localhost, for my apache stuff. I needed to dump my mysql databases (who remembers to do that!?). I took a copy of my Gentoo World file (/var/lib/portage/world) that stores the packages I've installed. I got all my "data" (i.e. music, etc). Have I got it all? I damn well hope so, because I've taken my machine back now.
Anyway, two days later, I think I've got a machine that's pretty much as functional as the old one (still missing, e.g. the gimp, since it hasn't been necessary in the last two days). And now I can get back to my work.
(A little footnote: The number of people that relied on old-nihil for music, shells, etc, was unreal. It's going to be interesting to see whether I've made the transition transparent. I copied the md5s of their passwords across, thought about keeping uids, and so on. At the most, ssh'ers will notice that the host key has changed. The majority of the rest of people (e.g. the entire journ department, which used my music share) shouldn't notice a thing.)
I declare this last weekend to be the biggest of the year, and one of the most fun. I declare it to be the Weekend of the Stantons.
