All Work and No Play
This is the worst lull in updates I’ve had since I started my blog. On the other hand, it took about seven years from when I bought the domain to my first post, so things aren’t that bad once you put them into perspective.
I’ve been working pretty hard, lately: Work is gearing up for a product release in early January so there’s a lot to do—especially since situations like these tend to bring a whole bunch of “Oops, we forgot to do x, can you handle it?”’s to the surface. In particular, I’ve been playing with Apache FOP for the past couple weeks to enable us to generate dynamic-content PDF files on the server based on SVG source material (and possibly XHTML as well, now, too). Very interesting technology if you have to work with PDF documents.
On the professional development side, I’ve recently developed an interest in the pythonic CherryPy web application framework and the related pythonic Cheetah template engine in an effort to expand my horizons a bit and leverage my comfort with Python for doing rapid prototyping-style work. Eventually my hope is that I might get to my know-how doing work for a startup and make a bit of cash, but I’m not going to hold my breath on anything materialising in the near or distant future.
On the social scene, not much is new. I had wanted to take a couple weeks of vacation over the holidays, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to or not now because of the product release—I feel bad even asking (which is why I haven’t, yet). My mother and father in law will be making visits over the holidays to visit their daughter and grandson, so whether I’m working, doing a bit of professional development or relaxing to do a bit of drawing or reading, hopefully I’ll have a bit of a longer stretch between having to hold, change and feed a baby and accomplish more.
On a positive note, I got back in touch with a good friend Jesse Henderson recently and will be heading out to a small party of his later this month; it will be nice to see him again after many months as well as a few other friends and acquaintances from my Canterbury days.
Anyhow, soup is just about done so time to end my little lunch-break. Hope everyone out there reading is hale and hearty, wherever you are.