I’ve finally decided that I’m going to take an active role in getting myself out of this almost year-long development-less funk that I’ve been in. I’ve been pouring over information and ideas, trying to come up with something that I could spend my time on and make a personal project of. I actually came up with a few. They’re all Omega Vortex projects from back when we were trying to bootstrap a software company by consulting. The projects never got enough attention because of the consulting and we started to enter the really nasty area of the recession, so the consulting projects also started drying up, leaving us without enough income to allow us to move forward …

Fast forward a couple months where we were wrapping up our last consulting gig as I was taking a job at Highwinds as a Systems Engineer. Presumably to Engineer some cool tools and systems to help make our collective jobs easier. If only I knew then what I was really getting myself into. Honestly, I’m glad I didn’t. I probably wouldn’t have been so eager to take the job. Not too long after I started, our more senior engineer and overall badass Systems Ninja (hi, Matt!) got an offer he couldn’t refuse and decided to move on to higher places. It was about that time that my world turned upside-down.

With almost zero previous experience as a Linux SysAdmin, I started a journey that would lead me to a great wealth of knowledge, a much greater understanding of how our systems worked and interacted with each other, as well as roughly no amount of time to spend on any of my development projects. We went through several ups and downs as I came up to speed, learning everything I could about running our Linux systems and how all of our software worked, the way the whole deal was architected, and everything I needed to know to keep it all running. It’s a constant learning experience and I’m still picking up stuff as I go along, but I feel like I’ve come a very long way in a short amount of time and I’m far more comfortable on the command line now than I ever was even back when Linux was my primary OS on personal machines.

Since then, we’ve hired quite a few Linux folks. Less pressure is square on my shoulders now that we have more very capable people to help distribute the load. We’re making progress to working smarter and not harder, spending less of our nights in contests to put out fires and more time with opportunities to relax. Things are becoming increasingly stable which is giving me more free time during off-work hours to do whatever I want. At first, I took this time to goof off and not do a whole lot, because I hadn’t had the opportunity to do so in so long. Now, I’ve decided to transition back to active development work in my free time.

I’m sure those of you who follow me on Twitter noticed that I said I’ve officially started working on ComicShout and OmegaFlash again. That’s not all, and I’ll have a lot to say about these and other projects in future posts. In the meantime, you can keep track of what I’m working on via GitHub and Ohloh.

The repositories on GitHub are very ugly at the moment. They’re essentially dumps of what was in the private Omega Vortex repositories as of last night. A lot of code that never got committed was lost on a few of these. Keep in mind that these projects didn’t get enough love, before. My plan is to fix that. My current focus for a while is going to be OmegaFlash, so don’t expect too much activity on the others for now. As I’m able, I’m going to start putting up more information on my vision and goals for each project at their respective GitHub wikis. Anyone who’s looking to contribute after I’ve put up more info, please fork away. I’ll be keeping an eye on forks and will quickly integrate good additions. Habitual good contributors can be given direct commit access to the repositories.

If I’ve got your interest, please keep an eye on the progress at GitHub and Ohloh. Also, keep an eye on this blog. I’m going to start putting up some high-level overviews of what I want to do with the projects. Until then, I’m interested to hear ideas and suggestions from all of you.

Thanks to Dutch giving me a wireless keyboard and mouse that he wasn’t using, I decided to start using the HDMI out to hook it up to my TV. It worked out pretty well:

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying this setup, so far. It’s even really nice for writing code. I think the most awesome part about the whole thing is that it can do full 1080p. My previous HDMI-enabled machine could only do 720p. Since the video card is pretty beefy (for a laptop), I’ve been playing a few games in this setup. It’s nice. Just as good, if not better, than sitting in the recliner and playing on a normal console.

Now, I need to get a gamepad that’ll work with it wirelessly …

Thankfully, since I use Dropbox, it was easy to login to the website and revert the data file to a previous version and try it again. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have a copy of the data file and would have to re-assemble it from the pieces I had four hours ago.

Thanks, Dropbox!

[01:11] Jeremy Privett: Oh, and we’re coming up on 9:09:09 9/9/09.
[01:11] Dutch Buckholz: yes, yes we are
[01:11] Jeremy Privett: It was nice knowing you.
[01:11] Dutch Buckholz: nah – that’s 2012, everybody knows that
[01:12] Jeremy Privett: lol
[01:12] Dutch Buckholz: today is just a day without LOLcats

Either way, make some attempt to enjoy the day. I mean, you’re only ever going to see 9:09:09 9/9/09 once in your lifetime, after all. Well, twice if you count the PM version.

I actually scheduled this blog entry to post exactly at 9:09:09 9/9/09. In some timezone. I don’t remember which one it’s set to.

Since I stopped blogging, I’ve looked at this thing almost every day. As if something was going to just pop up here on its own. Or you folks were going to comment on something (oh, wait — you can’t). I’ve been so smashed by work that I’ve sort of lost connection with a lot of really awesome people and I’m really not okay with that. Blogging again is going to be my first step to getting back in touch with all the folks that have kinda been swept aside in the wake of all of the crazy stuff that’s been happening for the past ten months.

I have projects I’m working on that I want to talk about. Life elements I haven’t talked about here. There’s a lot still to say. And a lot has happened over the past several months. It’s going to be interesting to see if I actually will write about any or all of it, but this is me saying that I’m at least going to make an attempt. You’ve all heard that before, though.

I’m still @jeremyprivett on Twitter and I’ll be trying to be more active there, as well. Encourage me! Help me be more active with all of you. I don’t forget about any of you on purpose, I swear. There’s just a lot going on. A lot of stuff has just kind of dropped off my radar and I want to get it all back.

It’s Round … 3, I think. Let’s do this thing.

I’m going to put something else up in this webspace (jeremyprivett.com) which will probably be better than a blog. My goal is to aggregate all of my web presence into a single feed and present it here, as well as details on projects I’m working on and what I’m doing on the work-side of life, be it with Highwinds (as much as I can reveal, anyway), Omega Vortex, or otherwise.

Thanks to all of you who followed along and kept me company while I was actually doing this. You all can find me on other places on the net, if you want. I’m @jeremyprivett on Twitter. I still hang out on Anfiniti and it’s pretty easy to find me on Facebook.

Well, I was going to put a list of update sites that you need here, except I still haven’t found them all. I can’t seem to get all of them that you need and because the resources document is just flat-wrong, this process is pretty much just dead in the water, at this point. It is absolutely pointless to install Zend Studio as a standalone editor when I want to use Eclipse for other things besides PHP (sometimes two different languages at the same time).

I think I’m done with Zend Studio. The Eclipse move frustrates me to no end. Prior to now, I’ve absolutely hated Eclipse with a passion. I’ve tried to work with it, several times. I just don’t like the workflows, the memory hogging tendencies, the fact that it slows to an absolute crawl when trying to do anything in a project larger than a handful of files. It’s ridiculous.

I’ve been giving NetBeans a shot for the past couple of days and it’s pretty decent, but it’s missing something that I can’t really place my finger on. An IDE that doesn’t suck and has support for multiple languages would be a killer app. Aptana seems like they’re on the right track, but there’s that Eclipse dependency that irks me again. I’m not above giving Eclipse another shot and trying to make it work, if someone can come along and make an IDE worth using.

As much as I hate to admit it, Microsoft owns the land of development tools, hands down. I love Visual Studio 2008. If VS.PHP didn’t suck and there was good support for CPython (not IronPython!) available, I think I’d use it for everything. Maybe more language plugins for Visual Studio will start to appear. Even if they were commercial plugins, it would still be worth it, as long as they were solid language support that properly utilized Visual Studio’s features. Even just being half as awesome and intuitive as working in C# in VS would be leagues beyond pretty much any other IDE I’ve used, so far.

… it’s kind of sad, really.

For those unfamiliar with the game, one of the game modes is the “Tower of Souls” which features a 60 floor tower that you can ascend or descend. Ascending takes it 1 – 4 floors at a time with pauses in between to select different characters for the next set of floors and gives you information on the treasures available and whatnot. Descending is a non-stop run from the top to the bottom and you only get to select two characters for the entire run. So far, we’ve made it to the last two sets of floors for the ascent and have  gone 25 consecutive floors in the descent.

The tower is technically supposed to be a single-player game mode, but in the areas where we’re allowed to select multiple characters we’ve been selecting one for me and one for him and when it comes time to switch character’s we’ll quickly pass the controller over to the other person. It’s actually been quite fun and helpful, because we’re both proficient in different styles of play, so when one thing isn’t working we can pass it over to one another and see if they have better luck.

Maybe we’ll get through the last two sets of floors soon. It’s probably a long way off before we can even hope to manage to accomplish the descent. Unless we do it the cheap way and find a character who we can successfully spam the same attacks over and over again or something.

I’ll be maintaining a list of planned articles in the sidebar and adding a category for the articles so they can be easily accessed from the header. If possible, I’d like to write solely based on reader-submitted ideas, so please get a few ideas in comments so I can start deciding what I want to write about first. Thanks in advance for all of your suggestions!