This weekend I have been spending most of my time rebuilding my KnoppMyth box by installing the lastest version, applying the patch to handle the new tv lisings provider, Schedule Direct, and adding a new 500GB drive for recording tv.  I wrote down most of the steps to get things setup and plan to do a blog posting about soon.  At the moment what I did want to post is a link to a page on how to add a second drive to linux. They are clear instructions and worked nicely.  I'm mounting this new hardrive to the /myth/tv directory so that all tv recording will go to it.

If you're trying to do exactly what I did, then you also need to set the proper permissions back on the /myth/tv directory or you will get a bunch of errors.  First set the owner of the directory back to mythtv by doing this

chown mythtv /myth/tv

Then to get the permissions exactly back to where the were I added write permission back on for the group by doing:

chmod g+w /myth/tv

You can compare the before and after permissions and ownership my doing ls -l /myth  before you make any of these changes and then again afterwards.

I said goodbye to Wells Fargo this week and hello to a new job that will hopefully fit my style much better.  Wells Fargo just wasn’t hitting the mark for what I wanted to be doing professionally and I found myself doing a lot of content changes and minor code changes, many of which were in classic asp and .NET 1.1.  I was about to start a new project from scratch in .NET 2.0 that would have taken the next two or three months to complete, but I realized that once that was finished I would probably be back to handling minor changes.

                I’ve worked at two different large companies in my development career, and I have come to the conclusion that they do not respect the individual developer as an asset.  Don’t get me wrong, in both cases my direct manager has been very good and I felt they considered me an asset, but in general I think management as a whole in a large company doesn’t care who the developer is sitting in the seat and thinks all developers have the same skill set.  From what I have seen this is definitely not the case and except for a couple of very smart developers I have met, a significant number of developers in general really don’t seem to have the aptitude nor ambition to do their jobs

                The biggest thing I think corporations with development departments need to start doing is charging their internal departments.  A significant amount of money and time seems to get wasted with users and management abusing their development department by flip flopping on changes, and general indecisiveness.  I think by billing the department that the application is for (at a reasonable rate) the requesting department would be more conscience of the time that they are utilizing for development.  It’s very easy to take advantage of the development department, when you have no consequences from it.

                So where are you off too, you ask?  Well I’ve headed over to work with Nick at Two Rivers Marketing.  It will be nice to finally leave my kakis hanging in the closet and be able to wear some comfortable clothes to work for a change.  I’ve met several of the guys there through the IADNUG and felt they had the type of attitude that I was looking for.  I hope that I can learn a lot there and maybe even teach them a few things.

                Lastly I would just like to point out that most of us developer work at least forty hours a week, probably even more, so if you’re not doing something you are enjoying then you owe it to yourself to do something about it.  If you’ve been telling yourself for awhile now that things will get better soon, or that a fun project will probably be around the corner, then you need to start considering a job change and at least stick your resume out there to see what the world has to offer you. 

Take a look at the decTop.  Its a small computer weighing three pounds that can run Windows CE or linux.  It has 128mb of memory and 10GB for storage.  With four USB ports you could easily add a wireless usb stick for network connectivity and do some cool things.  I came across this on LifeHacker and my mind is full of ideas for it.  Plus at $100 its not to bad of a price.