Apartment Annoyance

This sunday we got a note under our door about clearing out around the windows in the bedrooms in order for them to install new windows. Now, normally I would be happy about this, because the windows in the building are getting fairly old, and it may help the heating in the place. Unfortunately though, the replacement of the windows requires 2 feet of clearance on the inside of the window, which requires me to completely tear down my office, so I couldn’t work at all last night or this morning. They better be finished when I get back today though, otherwise I consider requesting compensation for the $120 worth of work that I can’t do.

At least today they came and replaced the lock so I don’t have to be around every time they want to do maintenance, which may be soon again because our fridge is leaking and we are still seeing bugs around the apartment. le sigh.

Easter

Easter came and went, and due to some extra work, I wasn’t able to travel to be with my family this year. Instead I took Di to the California Cafe at the Mall of America. The environment and the food there were wonderful. Of course we had some fun being out of place - most of the people around us were in their Easter Best clothing, and we were just out of waking up. I was surprised at how many things were closed in the city this easter - Sams Club, Cub Foods, Rainbow.. Makes me wonder what all of the non-christian people are supposed to do.

Unstructured time

It’s taken me a bit of time, but I finally realized that I am horrible with unstructured time and it is ruining my work. I need to schedule the time for getting work done, and get to work early in the morning. I get much more done when I’m actually at school/work than when I’m home. Unfortunately some of the work that I need to do can’t be done at work – for that I have scheduled time when I’m supposed to be working on one project or another. Here’s hoping I can stay on track.

Files, Files, Files

I seem to have one of the hardest configurations of all when it comes to files that I want to keep syncronized. Let me just put a little lowdown on my situation. I have 4-6 machines on 4 different networks that I want to do work on. To further complicate matters, I have my laptop. I would like to be able to log onto any of these machines and get work done. For legal reasons, I have filesets for work, consulting, personal, and school. To make things slightly simpler, I rent a server every month, and can run basically anything I want on it. It houses enough space to hold all of the files I want to work with and because it’s personal, I can store all the filesets on it.

At home and on my laptop, I want to be able to get to all of my filesets, and have them updated. At school, I can only have access to my school fileset. I read my mail on the server, and would like to make it easy to inject attachments I recieve into any one of the filesets. My home system runs Debian 3.0, My laptop is on OS X (no Debian yet), and school runs on linux, but I can’t install extensive programs on there because I don’t have access to change the files. Just for happy-fun-time, I’m also space-limited on the school machines, so I archive off old classwork every semester and only keep the most current semester available at all times, with other semesters available when I need a file from them. Ideally any tool I use would be able to be compiled for OS X, linux, and sparc (some of the machines at school).

In my dream world, I would login to any of these systems and it would automatically sync to the server, and when I logout it would automatically sync to the server again. If it was really nice, it would check back with the server periodically and sync again or the server would tell it when files change on the “master” copy. This “push” type thing is important for both my home machine and the laptop, which I rarely logout from. Of course, the laptop goes with me a lot, and some of the networks I deal with are not secure, so the tool should use ssl, and not key off of the IP being used.

Right now I’m using unison, with a single syncronization directory with separate ignore paths for the separate filesets. It works okay, but not as well as I’d like. It’s also getting crufty. I would like to switch to something possibly involving cvs, svn or arch.

Other stuff

Other than that, life is just getting interesting with work and school and everything wanting more of my time. One of the papers that I have been working on off-and-on for the past year has been accepted to a conference, so it will need to be dragged out of the past and updated with some new experiments and more work. The conference is in Greece, so there is a possibility that I will be heading there sometime this summer. I have been on a budgeting binge in the last week and I think I have everything worked out in gnucash the way that I want - I may post a bit on how I finagled that soon. Also big things happening in Diana’s life.