majic's journal

Ok, after a good 2 months of looking and only 2 job interviews I am almost positive that job hunting thoroughly sucks.

I am almost positive monster.com is not worth the time it takes to apply for jobs on it.

I just wanna do IT work, I just want a job. Is that too much to ask? I don't want to drive 200+ miles a day to work. I just wanna pay my bills like a good little citizen should.

Note to self, next time you have a programming job interview prepare to be humiliated with stupid questions that you can't possibly answer with any coherent answer.

I'm negative by nature and if you think this is bad wait until I am behind 2 months on my car payment...

No wonder people shoot their bosses and fellow employees when they loose their jobs!

So I scored a job interview with a company that I really wanted to work for. The job position was for a senior help desk technician. The responsibilities were to scan major networks and push patches down to operating systems and other client software. I interviewed for an hour and gave a damn good performance!

Turns out now they selected somebody else because, and I quote "Unfortunately, we thought for this position, you were not the ideal candidate as you are more technically advanced than the position requires."

I wish somebody would tell my creditors and my mortgage company that I'm over skilled to work anywhere. I really wish this would pay my bills but I have a feeling it's not going to get me very far.

I wasted a week of my time and drove over 800 miles round trip to interview for this fucking job. Plus it took me over a month just to get a fucking interview (with anyone). I really suppose 8 years and 8 months and 10 fucking days in the US Army with IT experience means absolutely nothing to any employer.

March 18th has finally come to pass and I have joined the ranks of normal everyday civilians again. I completed 8 years 8 months and 10 days in the life of a US Army Paratrooper. I received another Army Commendation medal today for my service in the 2nd Brigade 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division. So my stats to date include 3 Army Commendation medals, 3 Army Achievement medals, 2 good conduct medals, Parachutist badge (25 jumps) and Driver badge, Army service ribbon, Global war on Terrorism service ribbon, Korea defense service ribbon and National defense service ribbon and the rank of Sergeant.

I had alot of good times and the Army was good to me, I also took alot of things for granted and also looked negatively on alot of other things. All in all it was a positive experience that I was not completely mature enough to fully comprehend. I suppose I'm okay with saying that, There are still so many things in this world that I am just not mature enough to understand (even at being 30 years old). Also there remains a big question in my life, That question is what am I going to do now? Where will my new road take me and how will it shape me to be the person that I'd ultimately want to be. I'd like to believe that everything happens for a reason and I'd also like to believe that the situation I'm in right now is exactly the situation I'm supposed to be in to help set me up for whatever is going to happen in my life. Over the last 6 months I've been growing more spiritually, I'm starting to gain a better understanding of my faith but my steps are still baby steps and I have so far to go. I am extremely naive in the words of the Bible and sometimes feel overwhelmed by the people around me expressing their belief openly and confidently. I get burdened down with the fast pace of life and my mind gets foggy sometimes, I have good days and I have bad days. I've professed my belief in a higher being and I've been baptized and I have asked for salvation and I'm an active member of a church. I'm a sinner and I have a foul mouth! I have a hard time coming to grips with how my mind gets distracted and foggy and my thoughts slip and I start questioning things that I should know better than to question. I want to be good in my faith but being bad is so much easier! I suppose this is one of those tests laid out before you to see how you will come to grips with it. So far I've failed this test, well let's just say I haven't done all that I could have been doing to walk inline with the faith I professed to have. ... Oh boy I'm rambling now...

So what am I feeling now? Well, I must say that I'm extremely excited to have my life back and am ready to seize this opportunity and new found freedom! There are a million and one things racing through my head right now! I want to do them all in the next 30 minutes, okay??? Haha.

February 3rd was my birthday... I'm 30, w00... Happy Birthday to me... =)

On another note February is also the month of the year I am at my lowest point (mentally/emotionally). Next month I'm getting out of the Army, I should be happy but the job searching is stressful! The constant thinking that I'm not good enough to make the kind of money I need to survive on...

I decided not to reenlist in the US Army. It's time for me to move on, I'm tired if you know what I mean. Mentally and physically I'm burnt out. I've got over 8 years in and I just can concentrate on it anymore. I lost 12 pounds since I joined the 82nd Airborne Division in October from all the physical training. I'm in a weird state of mind these days, everything is a damn blur. Life is just too fast. I need to slow down and enjoy myself.

On an up note, Melinda (my wife) is pregnant with our second child! GOOD STUFF!!!

This post was edited by majic on Feb 05, 2005.

< technical journal entry below >

For about 4 years I've been obsessed with X Window System programming on Linux, specifically in the window manager space. The window manager is a special application which manages windows providing titlebars, buttons, taskbars and menus.

Now I don't do anything revolutionary in this area, I do my tinkering and I get immense pleasure from it. In early 2000 I believe it was, I discovered the aewm window manager. This little gem is written in C and was less than 3000 lines of code. I studied it, studied it again and again and then converted it to C++ changing stuff here and there. That resulting program I called aewm++. From a minimal window manager stand point I think it works pretty damn well and adds some missing things not found in aewm. I use this program everyday as my graphical user interface. It runs well at 400 mhz which is the speed of my box. However, the code is showing it's age and it also reveals how little I knew over the last three years about how to write proper code. I've been told before that I judge myself too hard, however we are our worst critics and sometimes it's a good thing that we are! Always striving to be better!

Anyway it seems to me that my brain just doesn't do well with native code. The language constructs are arcane and complex. I make tons of mistakes and spend hours laboring over stupid little problems.

I've been dreaming for about 2 years now for a higher level language to write a window manager in. Before I went to Korea I started on a Java JNI (Java Native Interface) wrapper around the X Windows C Library. I got pretty far and actually had part of a window manager coded. I was really stoked about having a nice highly object oriented language to describe a window manager in. This code never got finished because I had to go to Korea for a year and it got put on the back burner. I then forgot about it and when I got back the code no longer worked with the latest version of the Java Development Kit. There was too much code to go through to figure out what had changed and why it didn't work anymore.

So I went back the drawing board, chatted with my online friends in the #sandbox on irc.freenode.net and kept hinting about the possibility of coding another window manager. However there was one thing keeping me from making the plunge back into the code. That hurdle was the language. I really didn't want to do it in C++ or C. I gave in, coded a little in C then scrapped that and coded some in C++. The language choice was the huge problem. I just didn't want to use any of those languages, they just feel like they get in my way. I can't describe the program the way I want to with the syntax they provide me. I started taking notes, pages of them actually. I seem to think about this stuff at least 4 hours a day. I keep running through these scenarios in my head about how I'd tackle the different problems associated with completing a program like this.

I kept doing my research hoping that I'd find a binding to some other high level language that I could finally code this project in. Well that day still hasn't materialized. So on a whim I decided to try out C# on Linux ( go-mono.com ). I had been using .NET on Windows for a while coding some webpages. I was familiar with the language but not proficient. I started tinkering with trying to call native code from it. After a couple hours I discovered that for most things it was rather easy. I thought to myself, this just might work. I set a goal for myself, a few weeks ago I coded a C application that created a window and painted the current time and date in it. Not a very hard application to code in C, but a good challenge to see if I could figure out how to call enough native C code functions to write the logic in C#. It took me a week or so to work out all the issues. This time also involved learning alot about how C# can interface with native code. I also was quite rusty on the language constructs. So I set myself a goal and I set out and I reached it. On a scale of one to ten I would say my overall satisfaction level is ten! The application is coded entirely in C# with native methods that wrap the C low level functions found in the Xlib.

That brings us to today. Nobody that I can find is doing anything like this in C#. There are people out there coding applications using GUI toolkits like GTK# and QT# but nobody is coding raw Xlib in C#. I'm pretty stoked about this and that it's working extremely nicely and fast. My machine is just a 400mhz machine and I can't see any difference between my C# code and my C code. Since the clock is fully functioning and for all intents and purposes finished the next test is coding the aewm window manager in C#. If I can pull this off then I have what I've been looking for for 2 years, a language with high level constructs and that's completely object oriented to describe my GUI dream apps!

For the curious the code is on my website. The code is still rather small and I'm trying to make it as clean as possible. The glue to make it work in C# is written in C. If you look at the code I think you'll see that I've tried to keep it as simple as possible so to keep hard to find bugs at the absolute minimum.

For those that want to know how to call C code from C# I'll give some examples. C# uses a technology called Platform Invoke by which C# can call native code. Say for instance you had a function in C that looks like this:

#include <stdio.h>

/* My super cool C function */
void myfunction(char* str) {
  printf("%s\n", str);
}

On a linux/unix box you'd compile this code as a shared library. Then you'd define a function prototype in your C# code like so:

using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

public class Test {
  [DllImport("mysharedlib.so")]
  public static void myfunction(string str);

  public static void Main()
  {
    myfunction("Hello,World");
  }
}

Now your resulting C# app can call down to C code. This example is extremely easy and for probably 80% of the time you'll have an easy time wrapping C functions. It becomes more tricky when you want to pass arrays and structures back and forth between C and C#. But if you design your API correctly you can minimize this.

So in me reaching that goal of having a more descriptive language to write my graphical user interfaces in, I have to make a sacrifice by writing just a little more C code. However, once that code is done then I'll be able to focus once and for all on coding the app I want instead of getting tripped up with 20 year old language constructs and methodologies.

So in the future I'll add more and more too it, continually monitoring the feasibility of reaching my ultimate goal. I'm almost certain that there is a solution to this out there. Wether it's the most sane is yet to be determined. If you are interested in anything I've been talking about feel free to contact me.

The proverbial screenshot can be seen here of aewm++ and the brand new C# based clock app.

This post was edited by majic on Jan 23, 2005.

Life is good, I really can't complain and I'm already on my way to writing yet another chapter. After spending a year in Korea I finally left on September 17th, I flew to Hawaii again for a 30 day vacation. The wife and daughter flew out and I got my official government tickets to fly through Honolulu so I could take leave. We all met up at my moms house in Mililani for the second time this year. Mililani is on the island of O'ahu which is the most populated island of Hawaii. It was bloody hot and I didn't catch much fish. That kinda sucks but the time was more about spending with my mom, sister, wife and daughter. I had a really good time, took lots of pictures and chilled out in the best place imaginable.

In the back of my mind throughout the vacation was what was going to happen once I returned home to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I had official orders to the 82nd Airborne Division. If I was told a year ago I had orders to the 82nd, I would have freaked out. However, this year is a little different. I don't freak out at the unknown like I used to. I suppose I've learned to deal with it on a much more mature level. Don't get me wrong, I still have trouble accepting the unknown and will from time to time get extremely nervous but I've developed some better tools to deal with it over the last year. I'm rather proud of myself even if I do say so myself.

I returned home on the 16th of October and reported into the 82nd on the 17th. Nothing too different, I kinda had it all pictured correctly. I was terribly out of shape from sitting on my ass for what it seems like a year. That has put me behind the power curve a little but I've done ok under the circumstances. I've ran 12 1/2 miles over the last 4 workdays and haven't died yet soooo... The real kicker is the unit within the 82nd I was assigned to. I was figuring I would go to a Signal Battalion since I'm a support guy who works everything computer related. However that was not the case, my eyes opened up wide and I got extremely excited when I heard that I'd be assigned to the 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment. Not only was this totally unexpected but it would seem as though I am their first computer support dude ever. This is fucking exciting, I'm gonna be ground pounding with the grunts kicking ass and shooting people in the face. I'm stoked, I am still in shock and awe. I'll manage computer assets for a Brigade size element. This is more than I can imagine, I will truly be an "Army Of One".... Fuck, I can't contain myself.

I could not have imagined that this would have happened. Not only will this be a challenge but we will see if I have what it takes to hang with the "Real Boyz!".

story at 11pm....