Personal

Friday at 7:53 PM, a little girl was born to us. She's adorable, and will most definitely be a Daddy's girl. So we named her Abigail Sue; Abigail means "Father's Delight". Here's a link to Nichol's blog post, which has a couple of pictures.

Nichol gave birth to a beautiful baby boy weighing 10 pounds 8 and 3/4 ounces, measuring 22 and 3/4 inches with ruddy blond hair and dark blue eyes the evening of May 19, 2007. I am amazed at the resilience and stamina shown by Nichol as she brought this new life into the world. Participating in the birth was such an amazing and emotional experience for me. I'm very glad to have Teagan as part of our lives. We'll take Alex to meet him today. More photos in Teagan's Gallery

I realized today that a lot of people haven't heard that Nichol is pregnant with our second baby boy. In fact she's 36 weeks along already (though the baby is measuring at 40 weeks). Alex was 10 lb 3oz when he was born so there is some concern for the baby's size. Alex only measured 2 weeks ahead of schedule. Nichol is due May 13, but we have a second ultra sound scheduled for May 5 to see if he should be evicted, er, born earlier. We haven't really decided what his name should be, but if you know good Gaelic, Germanic, or even Slavic names feel free to list them in the comments below.

First of all it sucks to be sick. I don't know what I caught, nor where I caught it from, but now I'll be coughing for at least a week and my lungs are already sore from the last two days of hacking. I just hope that my wife and son don't catch it. Alex already has ear infections and a nasty cough coinciding with the arrival of four new teeth. At least his black eye is better.

A lot has happened since December, and I won't even begin to enumerate it all, just to tell you that I was working feverishly to get VMware and QEMU/RAW Hard Drive images working in rBuilder Online. With that task completed I am no longer working on rBuilder, instead I'm working with Ken VanDine and Xiaowen on something to be announced soon.

Yesterday I modified the PHPAppPackageRecipe class to make it more friendly to sofware upgrades. Previously the tarball containing the PHP application was extracted directly to /srv/www using whatever root folder was in the tarball. Then the recipe made a link connecting /srv/www/ to whatever folder was extracted. The problem with this arrangement is that if that directory contained the version, as many php apps do, the next version would be installed to a different location causing a manual step to move settings and data to the new folder.

Now the recipe extracts the application as most other packages do to the conary build folder. Then I copy the contents to /srv/www/ and eliminate the link. Hopefully this will ease upgrade pain. I rebuilt Gallery bumping its version to the newly released 2.1 and Serendipity in the LAMP rBuilder project so if you're running either of those be aware that there will be some one-time transitional pain. Feel free to contact me for help in upgrading to these new packages.

Alexander Burton Tate was born on Wednesday 29 June 2005 at 11:44 PM EDT. He measured 22" long and weighed in at 10 pounds, 3 ounces. His cranial circumference was an astounding 14 3/4". He was discharged from the hospital today along with his mother. They are both doing very well. I have established two galleries with pictures and hope to post a video or two soon.

I've upgraded my blog software from 0.5.1-CVS to the latest release version: 0.8.1. Looks nice doesn't it?

I began working at rpath, Inc. on June 13, 2005. rpath works on a next generation packaging technology for Linux called Conary. I'm excited about the opportunity to work on Linux full time, and to step away from the world of Windows for the foreseeable future. I'm also getting my feet wet with Python. I think I'm up to mid-calf by now.

In more personal news; no, Nichol hasn't given birth yet, but it will be announced here as soon as I'm able after the baby is born. In the mean time, we have a gallery set up for "X". "X" is the unknown quantity, we don't know when he will come, or what he'll look like, or what he'll do to our sleeping habits, and we certainly don't want to give him a name prematurely. Plus, I figure it's better than Ira Tate.

This is my rolling wish list at the request of my lovely wife and her family.

I've found a new position contracting for IBM in their Imaging Technology Center. I started at the end of April, and have been enjoying it so far. I'll fill this in later with more information.

As of April 16, 2004, I will no longer work for Mi-Co. As such, I'm actively seeking new employment in a programming or system administration position. My resume is available at http://www.dragonstrider.com/resume/ feel free to pass it to whomever may be interested.