Marcus Gronholm has won the Rally New Zealand over Peugeot teammate Richard Burns. Subaru’s Petter Solberg took home third, almost two minutes off Marcus’ pace.

It was an odd Rally New Zealand, with many retirements (including all of Hyundai and Ford’s Markko Martin). Skoda had a fine rally, with Toni Gardemeister finishing fifth, and Didier Auriol taking eighth. Tommi Makkinen’s seventh place pulled Subaru closer to Ford for third place in the manufacturer’s championship. The new Ford Focus was quick, with Martin setting a hat trick of fastest stage times on day 2, but Martin was forced to retire when he couldn’t restart the car after a spin on a later stage. Francios Duval has similiar problems on day one, leaving to fight for a place in the points. Nothing for Ford to be concerned about though…just the typical bugs that accompany releasing a new car.

With Skoda’s intended release of the new Fabia, this leaves Subaru as the sole manufacturer running a larger car (even the Mitsubishi Lancer is smaller). While Solberg had a decent rally, he wasn’t setting any fastest stage times (which he did quite a bit last season), and Tommi Makkinen struggled all rally with his Impreza. Is it time for Subaru to go back to the drawing board. The newest WRC cars are small and nimble, and while the Impreza is still one of the lightest cars, it’s just bigger than everything but the Skoda Octavia. Could change be in the air?

Posted on 13 April 2003

Saturday’s round of the WRC Rally New Zealand is over, and Marcus Gronholm is still in charge, even after flipping his Peugeot on SS13. Richard Burns is currently almost a minute back in second place, and Subaru’s Petter Solberg is another 50 seconds back in third place. Sebastien Loeb continues his fantastic season holding down fourth (in a rally he’s never run). I don’t expect the results will change much tomorrow, with the top five trying to maintain a steady pace to hold their positions….

Posted on 12 April 2003

Wonder what programming will be like 100 years? Here’s an article that theorizes about it. There’s a fairly interesting Slashdot discussion about it (and here’s my $.02 about it).

Posted on 11 April 2003

First, after six whole weeks, the World Rally Championship is running again, this time in New Zealand. The weather has been wetter than usual, negating any disadvantage early runners like Richard Burns (current driver’s points leader) might have. But the conditions haven’t stopped Marcus Gronholm, as he leads the rally after day one by almost 40 seconds. Markko Martin (in the latest evolution of the Focus WRC) is in second and Subaru’s Petter Solberg in third. While no one has certainly discounted Gronholm from winning the driver’s championship again this year, a win here could reassert his dominance, and give him some nice before points before the tougher summer rallies like Cyprus and Greece, where Peugeot doesn’t fare as well. Also….a non-factory team to watch: Antony Warmbold and co-driver Gemma Price. They’ve had a decent year so far, finishing just outside of the top ten in Monte Carlo.

Other news…I’m fairly convinced my consulting project will never end. I’ve become very good at sitting on my hands. I want to start my other job now, as I don’t want to start in two weeks, then have to take a week off when the anklebiter is born a week or two later. I’d like a solid three weeks or so before I take time off. Bleh.

Annoying linux note of the week…the inability of Mandrake 9 to read audio CD-ROMs. I’ve been trying to rip as many mp3s from my CD collection as possible for the new job, but most of the software I have just can’t see the drive. Thankfully, OS 10’s iTunes has a nice ripper built right in….the burn process is a little slower, since I have to go across the network to get the mp3s (since my CD-RW doesn’t work with the Mac).

Posted on 11 April 2003

I am desperately trying to wrap up this consulting project. I want to start my new job as soon as possible (and my new employer would like me to as well), but these folks just won’t play ball. I don’t ever want for a big company, no matter how much they will pay me. It can’t be worth it. Why? Well….

First, there are three (3) groups that my tech contact has to coordinate with just to get my code on their system. Not deployed, not tested, just put on their disks. Then there’s the group that oversees all web application projects. They’ve now begun the process of picking over the project, let us know what’s wrong. Now, before you think I’m getting defensive about my code, let me explain. I’m only implementing here, not really designing. I’m migrating a Perl application to Java. It’s the original application process they don’t like, and they’re only speaking up now (about a week before the client would like it go into production).

When I started this project, there was talk that the group I was working for would have to present their application to this web group, but that was nixed once the web group found out they already had a website (btw–these people all work for the same company). Right now, I wish we would have gone in front of this group in the beginning, because we wouldn’t be hashing out now. Fortunately, my client things I’ve been doing good work up to this point, so I can at least rest a little easier knowing I’m not the one screwing things up. Bleh…

The real bummer is that I’ll probably be spending a lot time over the next week in the concrete block that is their office space, trapped in a windowless cube farm.

At least I can look forward to my next job, working out a well-lit room in someone’s house….

Posted on 9 April 2003

Salon has an interesting article (sorry, you’ll have to click through an ad to read it) about a new program called CRACK (Children Requiring A Caring Kommunity) that pays drug addicts to take birth control or get sterilized.

I’m not really sure how I feel about the whole concept, and it would probably take me quite some time to work through all the issues, but I did find that people’s reactions to the program are quite telling.

First, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU are furious. Their argument is that the group preys on minorities and the poor. Well, a quick scan of the article will find statistics regarding CRACK’s patient demographic, and suprising, the racial percentages are fairly level. As far as preying on the poor, well, there is some merit to that. $200 is another fix for a drug addict. But….most drug addicts would do what they could to score that next fix, and part of me says that it’s better that they aren’t conceiving kids that will live their days in foster care with potential health problems. The argument is also made that money donated to CRACK might be better off given to drug rehab centers. There is truth to that as well, but I can’t believe that Planned Parenthood doesn’t receive both public and private donations to help pregnant drug addicts. Shouldn’t they offer to give that money up as well?

Second, there is the troubling allegation that this program amounts to “Hitler-esque eugenics.” That’s quite a stretch. A person can receive a one-time $200 payment for sterilization through the CRACK program, or $200 per year to stay on birth control. Granted, many people opt for sterilization, but isn’t birth control a better deal (they aren’t just distributing the pill either…most of the time it’s a once a month type method)? One of the heads of the group, Barbara Harris, responded this way:

Harris says that the claim that she and others involved with CRACK are practicing social engineering is ludicrous. “We are not picking on the poor,” she says. “We’re just helping people who need our help but have nowhere else to go.” She pauses and then adds: “Paltrow should adopt some of these children and then try and criticize me.”

I can’t argue with her there. Many of the critics of the program have probably never taken care of a child that suffers from the drug habits of their mother. Like I said, I’m not sure if this program is right, but its critics aren’t offering anything but criticism–and that doesn’t help the people that really need it.

Posted on 8 April 2003

I’m now in multi-tasking mode. I’m trying desperately to get the PNC project out the door, so I can start the full time position ASAP, but PNC is doing their best to prevent that. 99.85% of the development work is finished, but it seems as if there may be some issues with some of the functionality and how it will fit in with the PNC application server architecture. Our plan for the web app has basically not changed since we first gathered requirements, but now suddenly, someone on the Star Chamber-esque committee that oversees the app server environment decided that the app would be better suited using a database, and there are issues with the current decision of using CSV files. Now, this was not my idea. In fact, we pitched the idea of database, but the group that I’m working for decided they didn’t want to deal with it at this point (plus they didn’t want to have to pay for development of a front-end app to access the data in said database).

Now I’m stuck trying to explain how the app works, and why using CSV files for the short-tern isn’t a bad thing. Of course, I may still have to refactor some code to use a Lotus Domino server (blech), but a conference call tomorrow should clear things up. I don’t ever, ever want to work for a large company. The speed at which the IT staff at PNC moves is quite amazing—it’s soooo sloooooow.

While I’m sitting on my hands with the PNC project, I’m also learning about the Turbine development framework (this is what I’ll be using at the new job). It’s an interesting idea, but right now, as I sit in the middle of trying to get it up and running on my machine, I think there’s quite a bit of stuff going on…maybe too much. I dunno though….I’m sure my opinion will change once it’s up and running…..

Posted on 7 April 2003

Big changes are afoot for Mozilla. Lots of good news too, mostly in the form of ditching the kitchen-sink model that has made Mozilla a bloated process-vampire. A few interesting bits:

* Phoenix will become the browser for Mozilla.
* The yet-unreleased Minotaur will become “Thunderbird” and become the mail client.
* The development model will change, conforming to an Apache-esque community, instead of a developer-free-for-all.

Lots of good news here. Phoenix is a great browser, and I’m excited for Minotaur so I can ditch Mozilla on the PC and Evolution on linux.

Posted on 2 April 2003

This sort of response scares me a little bit. Why would Britain already begin to distance themselves from something like this if there wasn’t a chance it would happen? This is exactly the sort of situation I feared when we started this war. I think the last thing we want to is to be taking on much of the Middle East ourselves.

Posted on 2 April 2003

First…I accepted an offer for a fulltime job yesterday. I’ll be a Java monkey for a little collaboration software startup. Should be interesting. The work consists of using the newer Jakarta-Apache frameworks like Turbine and Velocity. Despite the fact it’ll be a paycut from consulting, not having to worry about things like health benefits is a huge relief–they ain’t cheap when you’re paying out of your own pocket.

I hope to never work on a Windows box again. I just lost about 3 years off my life (and I probably got about 10 grey hairs) trying to port my client’s web application from my linux box to a Windows laptop for demos. Yeesh. I’ll chalk some of the issues up my lack of knowledge about the Windows command line, but the lack of simple tools like unix tail can be really frustrating. That and the whole file separator issue….But it’s up and running now, and I’ve got a few demos to do over the next few days.

Posted on 1 April 2003