yes it's been a fun ride. For the past 18 months, I had a nice job, but since yesterday not anymore. I think it's a nice occasion to look at all the stuff that eat all the space on my hard disks and see what can be reused and released as opensource.

but for now time to relax and enjoy the simple pleasure of doing nothing, of having nothing to do and also not having to be at the office on time ... this is life ... except without the $$$ :)

I think the title say it all.
so I wish everyone to have a nice year 2009, with
everything one might desire ....

A few weeks ago, I decided to write a small utility to
help me with my work and also to relearn Qt. This small
utility enable me to control the boot process, update
the firmware of various devices I have at home and at work.

The current version only work with a serial link, and it's
it's also hard coded for the specific devices I have.
I'm currently thinking about refactoring the current code base
so I can remove the proprietary stuff and make the thning more flexible
with different plugins, I will probably had jtag support and
maybe a nice kde4 gui ...

I want to wish everyone a great and happy 2008.
It's been a while since I last blogged and the reason is I'm pretty busy with the new job, which after nearly 2 months is still fun and challenging and I hope it will stay this way. It's having a nice effect on my, I start to want to program again (well I think I will go take 2 aspirins and wait until this pass) ;)

Tomorrow morning, I will start my new job at axentra.
I must admit I'm a little nervous but also excited by this new job. After 3 years of being self-employed, and with all the shit I had last year and until this May , it's a definitly a welcomed change in my professional life. Sure I will miss the fact that I was able to wake up late in the morning, not having to dress to go to work and also the 30 seconds commute times, but for a more steady income it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

and I must admit it's hard to stay calm when you get stuff like I had this week
but first a little background story is needed:

Last year, I had a job interview with a small company, ok 3 interviews with them, and they all
went well because I had the job but I had to wait 3 months so they can secure the money for the
project. the 3 months passed and they still needed to secure the money, so they told me that they will
call me when they will have it. The time passed and I completely forgot about them, who can blame me :) Thursday I received an email from them saying that if I still wanted the job I had to the end of the month to answer them and I would start by mid October ... So I decided to think about it and now I have to stop to think about it because this afternoon I received another email telling me that the Big Boss deceided to close the local office and transfert everything in Asia ...

And my familly wonder why I'm developing a drinking problem ... I think I need a beer

it took me nearly 2 months to go through 7 years of code.
and I came to the sad reality that only 5% of it is reusable and interesting
even the embedded firewall product is not that interesting anymore since it's based
on an ancient technology (namely freebsd 4.x) so I decided to ditch it too, no more new version
and no support for it since I don't have the setup for doing it. What I will do is
to take the knowledge and some of the cool concept I got while designing it and reimplement them
using something more modern, here my goal is to not let die the best thing (even if sometime it was
a pain in the ass) I managed to do in the past 7 years.

my idea is to merge most of the stuff (concepts, ideas etc) from the various branches even those who were basicly
"let try this to see if it make senses". I love some of those crazy ideas :D

Today a received a new toy, a shiny greenphone!!!
After the last year of extremely bad things it's will help me get back the love
of software development. And to help me find it again I decided to reorganise my office
which is still on the temporary setup I did when I moved in here over 3 years ago ...
finally I won't kill myself by tripping on network or electrical cable anymore ...

Afer a few months of really bad working atmosphere (see www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2523)
and some of legal stuff, I thought all of this was over until yesterday
when the fruitcase called me to ask me to join his new venture, offer
which I naturally refused. I just have to say he didn't liked this answer,
I have a few recorded voicemails as proof of this :(

On brighter side, since I didn't got fully paid for all the work I did
for him, the court decided that I was the owner of the code I wrote.
Now I'm currently reviewing all of it to see what could be reused if I decide
to start my own company (still a work in progress) and what can (this is a huge if)
be opensourced. One thing that come to mind is a CANOpen to jabber gateway and
a nice CANOpen ioslave. There a few other things that could be interesting but
they are incomplete and need specilized hardware ...

Slowly I think I will be able to be myself back on the track and start to have fun
again programming :D

And I must also add that the new theme of kdedevelopers is nice.

It been a while since the last time I wrote something in here.
I spent the last few months mostly dealing with personal stuffs
and so far I think I'm on the right track. I hope soon to be free of some [:/node/2523|bullshit]