I’m now on the third week of exile from work.
Week 1: planned vacation
Week 2: snow
Week 3: post-surgery recovery

Next week, back to work. Sad but true. It’s been nice, but I’m starting to feel a bit of cabin fever, especially since I can’t move around much right now. On the bright side, I’m getting a lot of coding done here.

Now that I’m completely addicted to broadband, including recently subscribing to Rhapsody and listening to the radio 100% online now, Comcast sends me a letter stating that I am using too much bandwidth. As is typical of so many fucked up telecom companies they decide that they really don’t like people that actually USE their service. Apparently I am using 100 times the national average bandwidth usage. Strange that someone who makes his living and gets most of his entertainment from computers would use more bandwidth than some granny in Arkansas that turns on her computer every week or so to check for email from her kids. Anyway, they won’t (or can’t?) tell me how much bandwidth I’ve actually used or even what the national median usage is. Sadly, I don’t have any other broadband options here because we’re a couple of hundred feet too far from the nearest pop for dsl. Satellite you ask? Don’t know…

I can upgrade to Comcast’s business broadband for a hundred bucks a month, but their customer service rep told me not to bother unless I get a second letter. We shall see.

A couple of weeks ago I renamed phpGene Pro to Retrospect-GDS and released it as open source under a GPL license. Work has been rapidly progressing on the project because I took a week off over Christmas and now I’ve been stuck at home for the last four days because the entire Portland area is just about shut down due to the weather. Thankfully we’ve had power and internet the whole time.

Still making slow but steady progress on phpGene Pro. I think the adage that “the last 10% takes 90% of the time” is working out to be true for this project. I keep finding more small things that I want to add or change.

Got a new laptop (Sony VAIO Z1VA) a couple of weeks ago. I’ve finally got most of my development tools loaded and configured correctly. Now I’ve centralized all of my development on the laptop instead of moving between several different machines. I even installed php, apache, and mysql on the laptop so that I can work offline. Having everything running locally has really helped speed up the development of phpGene Pro. Having to do code, upload, refresh for every little change was really slowing me down!

I’ve finally started work on phpGene Pro again this evening. I think it’s been about a month since I worked on it last, and it feels good to get into it again.

I was reading through some documentation on php.net the other day and I found out that the PHP developers generally frown on products names with php prepended to them. In order to comply with their wishes I will be renaming phpGene Pro before version 1.0.