Disclaimer

The content of this blog is my personal opinion only. Although I am an employee - currently of Nvidia, in the past of other companies such as Iagination Technologies, MIPS, Intellectual Ventures, Intel, AMD, Motorola, and Gould - I reveal this only so that the reader may account for any possible bias I may have towards my employer's products. The statements I make here in no way represent my employer's position, nor am I authorized to speak on behalf of my employer. In fact, this posting may not even represent my personal opinion, since occasionally I play devil's advocate.

See http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcxddbtr_23cg5thdfj for photo credits.

Thursday, July 01, 2010

What I want to do on my vacation

I'm on vacation. 11 days (10 now). Needed one. Haven't really had a vacation in 2-3 years. Went straight from Intel to IV without any idle time in between.

Of course, maybe it's good that I didn't take any time between jobs: Last time I changed jobs, from AMD to Intel in 2004, I wrote up some inventions during the time between employers.  Worked with IV to patent them.  Disclosed them to Intel on being rehired, and re-disclosed them to Intel when it looked like these inventions might be relevant to Intel projects.   Got frozen out: wasn't allowed to work on such projects at Intel, in my main area of expertise.  Not so much for fear that I would influence Intel to use my inventions - heck, knowing me, I would probably try to surpass them.  But (according to an Intel lawyer, verbally - they never email stuff like this) because if I worked on such a project, I would be able to see if Intel was infringing my patents.

But, in any case, I'm on vacation now. Needed one.  Recover from the full court press, the end of quarter rush to meet (and exceed) quotas.

So, what do I want to do on my vacation?:

  1. Invent Stuff. On my own time, using my own resources.  Write up disclosures.  If I can get IV to patent, great.  If not, I'm allowed to publish it.
  2. Write articles on comp-arch.net
  3. Webadmin work on comp-arch.net and my other websites
    • I am grudgingly concluding that I need to run my own server.
    • No shared hosting site that I can find allows me to have suexec withing subdirectories.
    • I hate this need to run my own server.  I *like* having someone else responsible to apply patches.  But it appears that no shared hosting service makes it easy or cheap to run suexec and SSL at the same time.
  4. Coding for comp-arch.net and my other websites
    • Drawing and table editor - in particular, I want to try to incorporate svg-edit
  5. Share software
    • my Igetnumber and Dgetnumber libraries, that recognize expressions such as 4K-1 (=4095)
    • PerlSQL
      • my "noSQL" database tool from 1997-2000
        • not really noSQL - it actually supports SQL, but does not require schemas
          • I'm not aware of any other schema free database that supports SQL and operates on plain text files.  Not sqlite, not ...
        • haven't worked on it since I rejoined Intel; now I'm at IV I'm allowed to work on this in my own time
      • written in Perl 4 IIRC, needs to be upgraded
      • feature wishlist: JSON, XML, ...
  6. Software I want to write - actually, software I DO NOT REALLY want to write, but which I have not been able to find good existing software for
    • a distributed version control system that natirally supports single file or sub-directory checkouts, etc.  I think Git and Mercurial have it wrong.
      • although Git's apprach of treating it as a user level filesystem is right. In fact, I wouldn't mind being able to use git's storage backend.
      • basically, I want to get back to VC'ing my home directory, treating it as a tree of subprojects.  Something that I was able to do with SCCS, RCS, CVS, SVN, but which broke with Git and Mercurial.
    • Graphical editing - as described above, for my wiki
    • Offline wiki
      • Probably means I have to move off mediawiki
This shall be the start of my personal to do list on

http://wiki.andy.glew.ca/wiki/To_Do_List

Although really that depends on me getting my servers sorted.


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Oh, yeah: I also want to do some R&R.  Read some SF.  Get some exercise.  Go on hikes with my wife and daughter and dog.  (The wife and daughter are usually too busy, the dog is happy to join me.)