A busy Tuesday

Lots accomplished today.

I sent Ben an update on my progress with PHPmotion. I described my progress, some of the problems that I had to overcome, the open problems, and my ideas for the next steps to solve them.

I sent updates to several recruiters. The updates contain a summary of my recent accomplishments: new technology learned, experiments, and such. I send them out twice a month, mostly to keep in front of recruiters. (And it worked: one recruiter called with a possible position. Unfortunately, it was with a company I interviewed back in March.)

I read a bit in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond's collection of essays on open source development.

I had a conversation with a recruiter about a position for a network storage engineer. (Different from the March position I mentioned above.)

I dug into PHPmotion and diagnosed some problems. I have identified the cause of the login problem - it's a failure to generate the captcha image. The failure occurs because the specific font used by the captcha is not available on my system. I ran tests on //desdemona (my main development system) and figured out the changes to make the routine work. I can migrate them to //grendel, the server I used for PHPmotion.

The solution raises more questions. My intention was to run PHPmotion on //patricia, a laptop that is more portable than //grendel. The PHP GD package apparently uses X windows to create the image. I have X on //desdemona and //grendel but not on //patricia, since that PC is slated to be a simple server. Maybe I will have to install X. Or maybe not. More questions.

I finished the day with some work in Ruby. I built the core routine for my 'interpret' program. I plan on using the same core routine in 'macron', the macro expander for XML files. Once again I made a lot of progress in a short amount of time.