I spent a couple of hours today adding the ability to determine Ruby module dependencies to rpm. rpm 4.1 already does this for Perl modules, so it seemed a worthwhile addition to be able to perform the same magic for Ruby, since I pretty much use that language exclusively these days (apart from bits and bobs in C, but that’s usually just for extending Ruby).

Anyway, I’ve submitted the code to Jeff Johnson, so perhaps it will make its way into the CVS tree.

Another year arrives and another passes by. The headlong march into decrepitude continues. This will be a year for major decisions and major consequences stemming from those decisions. One thing’s for sure: it’s going to be difficult, adventurous, exhilarating and revolutionary.

On a different note…

<RANT>
I’m tired of working with over-zealous twenty-something sysadmins who think they number among the profession’s elite and yet have no awareness of their limited experience and the resultant myopia that distorts their view of the field and hinders their judgment.

Working in Silicon Valley can make you feel your age if you’ve been around the block a few times, lived in other cultures and worked for a variety of companies, both pre- and post-Internet explosion.
</RANT>

Sigh… the old bastard is feeling distinctly cantankerous today, isn’t he?

Christmas is almost here and Sarah has departed for Providence, RI. That leaves me alone with my laptop and a bunch of unopened DVDs. Somehow, I think I’ll make it through the weekend. I, myself, depart for Providence Monday evening.

I passed my California Driving Test today. What a joke that was. It’s a mystery to me why you can’t obtain an American licence on the basis of possessing a European licence, since European countries require a much more stringent driving test.

The timing was rather grand: my Dutch licence expired two days ago, so it’s nice to know that yet another piece of bullshit bureaucracy is behind me.

I got offered a job in Purmerend the other day. This was an actual, real job; none of your recruiter-spun pie-in-the-sky, but a real honest-to-goodness job back home. This is encouraging. There really are still jobs available back in The Netherlands and my CV is still worth dropping me a line for, even though countless numbers of qualified people back home are on the dole and looking for a job.

I’m currently reading Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 Days by Mark Slagell. The Teach yourself books are often dodgy, but this is a great one. Even though I’ve been programming in Ruby for coming up on a year now, I’ve found quite a lot in this book that I either hadn’t found in other books or hadn’t been able to fully understand.

After years of inefficient use of both Emacs (for e-mail and DocBook) and vim (for everything else), I’ve finally decided to get to know vim inside-out and abandon the use of Emacs altogether.

Both programs are sufficiently complex that I’ve grown tired of not having mastered either in all the years I’ve been using both of them. It’s time to unlearn my workarounds and harness the full power of my editor in the hope that it will improve my productivity.

Finally, never mind The Lord of the bloody Rings; go and see Bowling for Columbine instead.

We’re back in the USA after travelling across Thailand, Laos and Vietnam and trying to adjust to the doleful drudgery of daily life.

Although we now feel thoroughly relaxed and refreshed, as always, it’ll be interesting to see how long we can hang on to that holiday afterglow.

We had a fantastic time in Asia and took lots of photos. I can’t wait to arrange a trip back, so that we can cover southern Laos, central Vietnam and Cambodia.

Just a couple more weeks until we head to Providence for Christmas. Another year flies by.

On the immigration front, I now have my employment authorisation card (which theoretically relieves me of the ball-and-chain that ties me to a single employer) and an advance parole travel document, the latter of which isn’t all that much use in view of the fact that I already hold a work visa.

My fingerprints have been taken, I’m in the FBI computer, and the green card process continues.

Another month has passed and much has happened.

For one thing, I’m now married. Check out the wedding photos that our guests have sent us and the professionally taken photos.

The honeymoon was a big project that could be postponed for another day, so we chose to give ourselves one less thing to worry about and concentrate on all the trivial crap that goes into making a successful wedding.

With that now out of the way, though, we’ve been free to concentrate on the honeymoon, and we’ve decided to spend a month trekking around Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. So now we’re busy reading Lonely Planet books and arranging visas.

Speaking of visas, I’ve started doing the paperwork for a green-card. I have no desire to stay in the USA long-term, but it would be more convenient to have one than to not, so it seems worth the hassle. My employer is paying for the application, anyway.

Can you believe that the INS wants me to prove that I don’t have syphillis or tuberculosis? I suppose there must be enough of that here already.

I’ve written a new extension to Ruby, this time an interface to Steltor‘s CorporateTime calendar server. It’s called Ruby-CorporateTime.

I’m not usually one for spending time and energy a proprietary product in this way, but we use it at work and I haven’t found a decent calendaring solution in the free software world, so it seems reasonable to spend some time on this until something better appears.

Speaking of open source calendaring solutions, whatever happened to Dave Sifry’s OpenFlock? The home page hasn’t been updated for going on two years.

Today’s the day the teddy-bears — or Google employees in this case — have their company picnic in San Jose.

This evening, Sarah and I fly out overnight to Providence and then drive up to Port Clyde, Maine for the wedding next Friday.

It’s still hard to believe that when I return, I’ll be a married man. Hmm.