June 22, 2003

Welcome back, Kotter :p

He’s alive!! Yep, I finally come out of hibernation/hiding 🙂 One of my favourite quotes from Stephen King is something to the effect that time is a pony – that it sometimes trots, sometimes canters and sometimes gallop … These days, the pony seems to be galloping full tilt as far as I’m concerned since I just don’t seem to even notice the passage of time. I thought it was maybe a couple of weeks since I’d last written here and while it is essentially so, it seems to me that I’d effectively stopped updating on a daily basis much earlier than that. I’d thought that I had nothing to write about (at least that’s the justification I used to give myself whenever I happened to think about it ..) but when I decided that I was going to start updating this page regularly, I suddenly had stuff flowing through my mind without any conscious volition and I had enough for not one entry but maybe two or three :p

So what’s been happening? I’ve been busy with a lot of stuff and I won’t bore people to tears by reiterating all of the work and coding related stuff since I’ve already made an entry on my development blog about all that 🙂 Let me just take a moment to say that I do hate project proposals – I love writing but I can’t seem to think of project proposals as writing … they are just too dry for my taste. It’s a good thing that I intend to cut and paste from old proposals for most of the work I need to do :p
In fact, things have been so busy that I haven’t had the time to really do the stuff I enjoy – except for coding (and reading) of course 🙂 I bought around ten DVD’s on one of my DVD buying sprees week before last and how many have I watched so far? One! And this is I who manage to watch at least three or four movies a day when I’m not busy that we’re talking about. Ah well … I guess I’ll eventually watch all of them since most of them seemed pretty good and these aren’t movies that I had watched before and wanted to add to my collection but rather ones that I hadn’t seen before – some I’d heard about or seen the trailers and some I hadn’t heard of at all 🙂

While no movie watching is going on, I do seem to be reading at a rate. The book I’m currently reading is Ayn Rand’s "The Fountainhead" – the characters and the story has just got me spellbound and I’m usually unable to put the book down even to go to sleep. I’ve stayed up till 1:00am on weekends (that’s very unusual for me since I usually am in bed promptly by 10:00pm give or take an hour) because I wanted to know more. It’s probably going to be a long ramble if I were to launch into a discussion about the book though and so I think I will save that for my next entry and stop for now and give my fingers a rest :p

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Posted by Fahim at 6:47 am  |  No Comments

I haven’t written anything in a long time have I? Partly it’s been due to an extremely heavy workload but it’s also been due to the fact that I’ve been guilty about the fact that there hasn’t been any appreciable progress with the next release of Blog :p However, I see that that’s not going to happen for a while now and so I’ve decided to start posting again both here and at SM as often as I can – even if there is no Blog related news – just to keep the sites running and whoever is interested (if there are any faithful readers :p) updated.

So what have I been busy with if I’m not coding Blog? Well, at work I’ve been handed the new task of writing project proposals for the company since both people who used to do the job have suddenly decided to leave one after the other. So, I’m left with a task that I positively hate :p While I don’t mind writing stuff, project proposals just make me want to gag due to the amount of BS that you find people putting in there – I just can’t do that. I’d rather state the reasons why we should be hired clearly and concisely instead of writing reams and reams of hyperbole that nobody would read anyway – but that’s the business world for you .. or something like that. Anyway, I just got done with one such proposal (my first actually) and will have to start work on the next on Monday.

In the meantime, I’ve got my first real, paying client from Geek for Hire 🙂 So I’ve been working on that project during the evenings and my spare time. It’s an interesting PHP project since it’s an area that I’d not covered in PHP before – in fact, I’d not even been aware that you could do something like this with PHP before the project came along and now I have a pretty strong liking for PHP just because of the versatility it’s shown 🙂 So what’s the project? It’s a set of web pages to create an image on the fly based on user input text and a font, font size and font colour specified by the user. I completed a demo for the client a while back and have been working away at the final product for the last couple of days. I’m pretty happy with the way it’s turning out and hope the client is too 🙂

Finally, I’m doing another project whenever I have a bit of time to spare – again in PHP but also utilizing mySQL. This one’s a remote commenting system for Blogs (or anything else as well, if you want to use it that way) similar to the service offered by HaloScan, YACS, Ennetation etc. Is it any different from any of the previously mentioned services? Not really – except that the implementation may be slightly different since I’ve not looked at any of those services for ideas :p But the reason I wrote it was so that I’d have access to multiple commenting systems without having to re-deploy the same commenting script that I’d been using in multiple directories. Plus, since then a friend who has no access to PHP has expressed interest in a remote commenting system as well and so for the moment the system is just being developed for those reasons 🙂 In the future however, I might consider using the system a bit more broadly since it does allow multiple commenting systems under multiple owners and will have fairly extensive configuration options ranging from template based page design to an obscenity/swear word filter to smiley support … but all that is for the future, first I must get the basic system up and running 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 6:30 am  |  1 Comment