I actually planned on writing a longer retrospective of my year 2008, but failed at doing the writeup – just not my thing I guess. So just a quick and short one

2008 was a rather interesting year for me. I decided to drop my PhD plans, got my first car, gave up my job as a research assistant, saw some of my friends for the very first time, and of course also got some stuff done¹⁾ regarding private projects. I also finally moved to my own server (shared with a friend²⁾) and revamped the layout of this site by designing my first ever Dokuwiki template. Additionally I switched my distro of choice and now run Xubuntu on both notebook and workstation.

All in all I can say: It was a good year³⁾ and I'm looking forward to see what 2009 will bring⁴⁾.

Happy New Year to all of you!

Just wanted to wish you all happy holidays and – just in case – a happy new year. Have some nice calm days¹⁾; I certainly will

Over the last weeks I worked on a new Dokuwiki plugin for creating charts using the pChart library. With the pchart plugin there already existed a plugin integrating this library, however the syntax wasn't entirely what I had in mind in terms of flexibility and readability. Thus, I created the charter plugin – and accidentally deleted most of it when redoing my workstation on friday, yay me. I redid the plugin from the early version I still had on my notebook, and before I accidentally delete it again decided to release it to the public Enjoy!

… doesn't work very well, as the connectivity is simply gone upon resume, at least with the nVidia MCP55 Ethernet controller as built into the Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe mainboard of my workstation.

It was finally solved by adding the forcedeth module to the list of blacklisted modules, in my case by adding it to SUSPEND_MODULES in /etc/pm/config.d/00sleep_module¹⁾:

SUSPEND_MODULES="forcedeth"

Now upon resume from suspend-to-ram and disc, my network connection still works like it's supposed to (and I'm finally not forced any more to shutdown the whole rig everynight²⁾ and instead can just send it sleeping).

Edit: Made the motivation behind the wish for a working suspend/resume cycle a bit more clear I hope.

Don't worry, I'm not talking about this blog. But today – as some of you will already now – was my last day at my job. I was very unhappy over the last twelve or so months, just didn't feel in place there and missed some crucial things both in my software development as well as my admin part of the job, and on top of that the PhD plans felt more and more like a threat than a wish.

In July I decided to abandon the PhD, in August I had a long talk with my boss, told him how I felt and started to hunt for a new job. I got an offer from Capgemini sd&m and handed in my notice for the end of the year, and so my time at university today ended once and for all. I felt very weird when I wiped my PC there today and handed in my keys, and I had a hard time to fight back tears when my colleagues said goodbye (/me hugs them again) – I will definitely miss them!

I'm now looking towards three weeks of free time before my new job starts on 12th of January, and I'm glad it worked out to have the new contract start a week later, because I definitely need the time off to get my head clear again

Soo… that about sums up what's been upsetting me over the last months, weeks, days and hours. Awful load of changes this year for me, but no turning back now