Andy Kopciuch's Blog
Monday, March 28, 2005
Burglary, Time & Latin Words
Well it has been over a month since I last wrote. There have been some fairly major happenings in my life recently. I have been in Calgary for the month of March, and will be traveling back to Victoria sometime in April. It was really hectic when I was first back. I was doing all of my paperwork for my company's year end, and I went to see my accountant. All was good with the accountants.
Later that same night I arrived home to realize my apartment had been broken into. the police filled out the report, and there was pretty much nothing they could do. The insurance claim is going through just fine. Basically they must have jimmied the lock. I had not even completely unpacked from travels yet, and so I provided an excellent way for thieves to transport stolen property. they took my DVD player, CD player, gym bags, $125 in change, and foreign currency, some personal gifts, over 40 DVDs, 125 CDs, some computer CDs, briefcase, and about $500 worth of clothes still in my duffle bag. I guess it's just stuff, and I'll get new stuff. They didn't take my TV, or my computer. If they had I would probably be institutionalized right now. As my good friend Dayle said "At least you are alright ... you didn't surprise them and get knifed, and you'll get more CDs". Try to keep in good spirits.
I had had enough of life for a while. Still trying to catch a break. I decided (sort of a forced holiday) to take some time off. So for about 10 days I really did absolutely nothing. I didn't talk to people, other than necessary. I didn't work. I wrote no code whatsoever. I did not discuss work with anyone. I only dealt with critical problems (which were zero BTW). I can not even say what happened during those days. It all seems kind of a blur. But I think I needed to shut off for a while. I am now slowly starting to get the engines going again.
I did completely build a new web site for BDDF DEVELOPMENTS INC. http://www.bddf.ca. Please tell your friends about it. I was really proud of the banner image which I did myself. I normally hate image work. But I was determined to create something simple, and stylish, and have it all my own. The web site it really straightforward. Simple information about what the company does, what tools we use, and a little bit about me. Also a contact form. I did submit the URL to dmoz.org. I have not seen any listing yet, but it can take several weeks. I'll check out the forums in a few weeks if nothing happens.
I have been doing some work again for another client. They had someone else maintaining, and doing some new development on their web sites. they needed some low level guts of the system work done, and figured I was the best candidate to do it properly, and quickly. Not to speak poorly of colleagues in the industry, but some people just get in _way_ over their heads. I had to figure out some massively broken code, and complaints about things not working. I did realize the path that the new developers had gone down. I simply commented out their work, and fixed things. I told the client I typically do not do things like that, but the problems seemed urgent, so I made an exception. All the new developers have to do is ask me something ... I'll gladly share my knowledge.
Last week seemed to be the week for Tsearch2 questions on the PostgreSQL lists. I helped out several people with installation issues, and general questions. I'm excited that people are using this module more and more. I am also excited that people seem to be using my documentation http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/postgres/gist/tsearch/V2/docs/tsearch-V2-intro.html
One guy had some problems with different results from the tables ts_vector column, as opposed to the to_tsvector function. After some investigation I figured out that his table was using a default locale of en_US, and not the same configuration as the calls to to_tsvector. In addition to that the configuration used by the tsearch2 triggers were missing configuration mappings for lword, lhwords, and lpart_hword. That meant he was not parsing out Latin words, Latin hyphenated words, or partial hyphenated words. He has since fixed his problems, and Andy gets a gold star by his name.
I have some work to do, and mostly some design work to get done. Our PHPFWK code has some big plans, we just need time to implement all of our magic right Aaron?
good nite folks,
Andy ΒΆ 9:40:00 PM 0 comments
Later that same night I arrived home to realize my apartment had been broken into. the police filled out the report, and there was pretty much nothing they could do. The insurance claim is going through just fine. Basically they must have jimmied the lock. I had not even completely unpacked from travels yet, and so I provided an excellent way for thieves to transport stolen property. they took my DVD player, CD player, gym bags, $125 in change, and foreign currency, some personal gifts, over 40 DVDs, 125 CDs, some computer CDs, briefcase, and about $500 worth of clothes still in my duffle bag. I guess it's just stuff, and I'll get new stuff. They didn't take my TV, or my computer. If they had I would probably be institutionalized right now. As my good friend Dayle said "At least you are alright ... you didn't surprise them and get knifed, and you'll get more CDs". Try to keep in good spirits.
I had had enough of life for a while. Still trying to catch a break. I decided (sort of a forced holiday) to take some time off. So for about 10 days I really did absolutely nothing. I didn't talk to people, other than necessary. I didn't work. I wrote no code whatsoever. I did not discuss work with anyone. I only dealt with critical problems (which were zero BTW). I can not even say what happened during those days. It all seems kind of a blur. But I think I needed to shut off for a while. I am now slowly starting to get the engines going again.
I did completely build a new web site for BDDF DEVELOPMENTS INC. http://www.bddf.ca. Please tell your friends about it. I was really proud of the banner image which I did myself. I normally hate image work. But I was determined to create something simple, and stylish, and have it all my own. The web site it really straightforward. Simple information about what the company does, what tools we use, and a little bit about me. Also a contact form. I did submit the URL to dmoz.org. I have not seen any listing yet, but it can take several weeks. I'll check out the forums in a few weeks if nothing happens.
I have been doing some work again for another client. They had someone else maintaining, and doing some new development on their web sites. they needed some low level guts of the system work done, and figured I was the best candidate to do it properly, and quickly. Not to speak poorly of colleagues in the industry, but some people just get in _way_ over their heads. I had to figure out some massively broken code, and complaints about things not working. I did realize the path that the new developers had gone down. I simply commented out their work, and fixed things. I told the client I typically do not do things like that, but the problems seemed urgent, so I made an exception. All the new developers have to do is ask me something ... I'll gladly share my knowledge.
Last week seemed to be the week for Tsearch2 questions on the PostgreSQL lists. I helped out several people with installation issues, and general questions. I'm excited that people are using this module more and more. I am also excited that people seem to be using my documentation http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/postgres/gist/tsearch/V2/docs/tsearch-V2-intro.html
One guy had some problems with different results from the tables ts_vector column, as opposed to the to_tsvector function. After some investigation I figured out that his table was using a default locale of en_US, and not the same configuration as the calls to to_tsvector. In addition to that the configuration used by the tsearch2 triggers were missing configuration mappings for lword, lhwords, and lpart_hword. That meant he was not parsing out Latin words, Latin hyphenated words, or partial hyphenated words. He has since fixed his problems, and Andy gets a gold star by his name.
I have some work to do, and mostly some design work to get done. Our PHPFWK code has some big plans, we just need time to implement all of our magic right Aaron?
good nite folks,
Andy ΒΆ 9:40:00 PM 0 comments
