Sorry for the staleness lately, but between the technical difficulties with my project at work, getting started as a Debian developer, and the holidays, I haven’t had much energy left over to write. I’m sure to have much to say when the New Year kicks off, since the Debian Lucene package project and the Debian Eclipse packaging project will probably kick into high gear.

Well, I don’t really consider GovExec to be part of “the news”, but my project from last year is the subject of an article in the December 2004 issue of their magazine. The article is titled “Social Security computer system may reduce disability overpayments”. I was the database technical lead/DBA and the architectural second lead on that project. It’s one of the few instances where my work is publicly mentioned on a resource that can be found outside of the SSA firewall.

For those who now wonder exactly what my day job is, I work as a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin IT for the Social Security Administration through Compuware Corporation as an hourly employee. How’s that for convolution?

You always hear people refer to being “gainfully employed”. At what point does one become “lossfully employed”? I bet that’s an interesting calculation; especially since non-quantifiable factors like loving what you do and time away from (or with) loved ones, etc. are a part of the equation.

Last night was a first for me. I made my first contribution into a CVS repository for Debian. I had made no changes to the content, but nonetheless, I am pretty excited about it. Just seeing my Debian login on the CVS repository was gratifying. Looking forward to getting the 1.4.3 version of the Lucene Debian package done, thanks to the help I am getting from Jeff Breidenbach.

OK, some news about T-Mobile’s GPRS and using it for Linux. A couple of weeks ago, chat stopped working when I was connected via GPRS. Last week, HTML stopped working. As it turns out the ability to use Unlimited t-zones for full GPRS connectivity was a fluke; the result of T-Mobile not having yet blocked the appropriate TCP ports. They apparently have them blocked now. After switching back to the full-rate Internet plan, I continued to have issues with FTP. I called up T-Mobile to figure out what was the matter.
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