Drew Scott Daniels' Blog Personal, usually technical posts

I was planning on writing about the problems I faced at work looking up 
open source software for SMPTE 125M convertion. I kept finding SMPTE 
timecode stuff (for MIDI), and other usages of the acronym SMPTE without 
reference to which standard was being used. The one's related to SMPTE 
125M are SMPTE 292M (HD-SDI), SMPTE 259M (transport of SDI and SDTI), 
SMPTE 305M (sometimes called SMPTE 305.2M which is SDTI), and the 
document on ancellary data. Actually SDTI really is quite different from 
SDI except that it goes over 259M.

Anways, tonight I think I write a bit about linking and google. Yes, 
part of the reason that I'm writing these notes is to increase the 
ranking that I'll get for topics that I'd like employers to see. The 
bigger way that I plan to get a good ranking is something I've 
accidentaly found before. I've put a one line signature in my e-mails to 
mailing lists with my resume's URL. I was hoping I could find someone on 
the mailing list that might be interested, or might refer me to someone, 
but instead I found that the html mailing list archives looked to be 
increasing the rank of my resume. I guess this was a neat trick that can 
work on google, and maybe on other search engine's that look at what's 
linking to a page to give it a score.

When I finnaly am happy with the testing scripts that I'm working on for 
my tarball enhancements I'll post the results to various mailing lists 
that are development forums for projects with large tarballs (e.g. the 
lkml, some kind of gimp mailing list, maybe some OpenOffice.org AKA OOo 
mailing lists...). I've got my resume's URL in the scripts themselves, 
but I also plan to put my resume URL tagline in my messages.

One of my problems with my tarball enhancement postings is that I'll 
want a perminate place with my domain name that I can host the scripts, 
but I'm getting free hosting from a friend (thanks Dean). I don't want 
to generate a lot of hits on my friend's server due to the fact he 
likely has better uses for his bandwith, and his ISP may not apreciate 
it. To prevent such a load on the link to his server (and his server), I 
plan to keep the scripts only on the mailing lists (archived in their 
archives) until interest drops down a bit. I figure a few weeks would 
do, but I'll probably wait a few months.

I'm really quite kean to get my scripts out the door, but I feel they're 
not yet ready to stand up to the kind of critism that one gets on the 
Linux Kernel Mailing List (lkml). I've got a script to do the actual 
tarball creation, and one to show the difference between a normaly 
generated one, and the one my script makes, but I don't have something 
showing the amount of time that it takes. Measuring the sorting isn't 
easy, as it's a series of piped commands. My shell scripting really 
isn't put to enough use for me to be able to quickly work around such a 
problem. I've checked a few howto's like the bash one, I've asked in the 
bash scripting IRC channel, but I couldn't find an answer. I decided to 
put the commands into a separate script and time that whole script.

The other problem I've run into is testing. My home computer was taking 
a beating compressing and untaring etc.. I decided to use my 
SourceForge compile farm shell to do the testing, but it's a pain to put 
files onto them. It took me a while before I figured out I had to 
download the files to my computer, and then upload them to the compile 
farm's central server via sftp or scp. That's something I can do, but it 
really compounds another problem I'm having. It takes me a while to make 
progress on my free time coding projects, so new target files are 
comming out for me to test. I want to be able to post on the lkml the 
results of recompressing the latest 2.6 and 2.4 kernels. I keep 
optimistically downloading the latest kernels and then having real life 
interupt things long enough for me to need a new version to continue. 
I'll stop doing that for a while though until I've actually got a draft 
sitting in my posponed box of an e-mail to the lkml with the scripts 
already finnished and attached or actually inline I think. That's 
another problem. The lkml only accepts certain posts, and Linus only 
usually accepts things that are in a certain format (plain text inline 
iirc). That put me on a tangent of looking up the mailing list rules, 
and reading the Linux Weekly News. It'll likely do the same once I get 
close enough again.

So with all my knowledge, reading, and interest in digging deep into 
open source stories that I see writen/posted, I've thought about trying 
to get payed to write. These notes are a bad example of my ability to 
write, but a good example of what I enjoy writing about. I've been 
solicited once to write a book on Intrusion Detection from a genuine 
publisher, but I kind of "fubbed" my responce. I said that I'd be 
interested in contributing, but I didn't think I'd have time to write a 
whole book. I kind of regret doing that, but I think it was the right 
thing to say (just look at my bad record finding time to do coding). I'm 
hoping however that a paying gig would actually let me take some time 
away from real life to actually get things done (and I'm sure it would). 
Of course I've got to stike a balance to keep my home life happy and 
healthy (fammily, friends, and my own condition). I've offered to write 
a peice on the history of the BSD's to the Linux Weekly News, but they 
didn't seem interested. They do post BSD articles, and I was pitching 
that I could write one that would show the parallels between AT&T vs The 
Regents of Berkly (BSD) and the current SCO vs IBM etc.. It's 
interesting how the history repeats itself. For good reference I'd 
suggest reading the FreeBSD mailing list archives (a google search found 
some good stuff).

Later I might publish the research that I used as part of my pitch for 
my BSD history repeats itself story. I'm also probably going to consider 
writng about why I don't want to publish my unrealized ideas. I'll also 
probably talk about:
- Why I don't write about office politics
- Why I don't write much about my personal private home life (well, 
maybe I made that clear <g>)
- My music idea's
- My thoughts and research into a self powered home (well actually 
getting power form alternate sorces like sun, wind, water...)
- Thoughts on using "image stacking" for ameture (and hopefully 
professional) astronomy (I'll talk about this because other people have 
already implemented some of this)
- Some idea's for how people can generate data that's easier to compress 
(e.g.'s typing in lower case when there's the option, removing obvious 
redundant information, using the same words...)
- Perhaps my ideas on natural language processing
...

I may eventually post my project ideas from the last fourteen years that 
I've been writing on paper.

Consider sending me money! My resume is at 
http://www.boxheap.net/ddaniels/resume.html

Oh, and I'll probably write about resume creation and open source tools 
to do it (hey, maybe lwn.net would be interested in buying that 
article).

Originally from: http://www.boxheap.net/ddaniels/notes/20050811.txt