Bringing out the nerd in me. Again

It’s incredibly hot these days, and I think that goes for most of Norway, not just Oslo. The office is a pleasant and cool alternative to my 40+ degrees Celsius apartment, but I’ve been here since around 8 in the morning, so I really should get going now. I desperately need something to eat and it’s nothing here except some old junk in a vending machine in another building. Going home and making dinner sounds like a much better plan.

I’m starting to get assignments at work that’s straying a little from my original work assignment, which was fixing NRK’s WAP service. Now they want me to make a utility spitting out a set of XML files when some data is sent to an Oracle database. These XML files are then sent along to an internal distribution system. They gave me some code in PL/SQL to look at that did roughly the same and PL/SQL didn’t seem too complicated, but when I realized that the Oracle database also like Java, I decided to go for that instead. So today I’ve been trying to get access to all kinds of servers and shares, and making the utility will probably take some time, since this is the first time I’m coding in Java for the Oracle database platform. Oh, exciting! At least semi-exciting.

And we’re continuing in the nerd-lane: I’ve now finished reading the FreeBSD book. I jumped one or two chapters that didn’t seem too important for me, and I have to re-read some other chapters to get the hang of stuff, but I feel I’ve got the essence of the FreeBSD operating system. Very clever stuff indeed. Today I downloaded the two 5.1-RELEASE CD images so I can start playing with FreeBSD on V-Box whenever i get time. Unfortunately, I don’t have a CR-ROM on the server, so I have to play a little with NFS. Hopefully I’ll get it up before Christmas.

This update was probably not very exciting for the general reader. But for tomorrow I’m planning a rather juicy entry. Yes, my good looking and intelligent visitors, be sure to check in tomorrow. (Previous experience has shown that even if I promise you something, doesn’t necessarily mean that it will happen, but you can always hope.)


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