In other news, the dev mailing list had a nice little flamefest over what is Quality Assurance and what exactly the QA team’s job is and how they are to do it. There was a lot of the extremes where QA would have no power to change anything other then report bugs and hope the developer who maintains the application (if one actually does) will fix it. The other extreme that seemed to come from the same people, appeared to make it appear that QA wanted to go in and basically take over another persons ebuild. Its been a long standing thing with gentoo that people take personal space with the packages they maintain. To a extent this is warranted, however as we do have cvs…we can see exactly what a person did to your package. Sometimes they screw up the delicate balance or sometimes they just go in to fix added white spaces or a improperly committed manifest. In the latter case we can safely assume that minor changes will not kill anything and shouldn’t be any real issue. Fixing a white space problem shouldn’t have to go to the council for approval as was suggested by another developer. This would just jam up the council with a lot of pointless business that is like taking a squabble over the last cup of coffee to the CEO of the company…its just not something you do.

As always the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Now I by no means have the answer, and have stayed out of the topic because I am not impartial, since I am a member of the QA team. The x86 team has I hope shown that QA does work with this project on a smaller scale. I believe that overall x86 has become stable, instead of being called “stable” by user’s and developers alike. Now we have a full fledged group of people who want to focus on QA with the specific goal of improving the entire tree instead of just individual archs.

Without flames, and discussion about other people’s comments. I’d like to hear what everyone thinks QA actually is and the responsibilities that go along with that. Yes I know I sound like a teacher in that last line. I will however snap a ruler on anyones fingers who doesn’t follow the rules of my question. You’ve been warned.

First things first, some will notice a new google adsense block on the bottom left of the site. I’ve heard so much good and bad about it from people that I finally have decided to see for myself what all the hoopla is about. Now I know I’ll never actually get to the point of being paid (which makes google go yahoo we’re getting paid more money and not having to sent this sucker a check). Now as we all know we don’t like the ad’s but they can apparently get results as I’ve heard from sites much more popular then my own, to the tune of thousands of dollars. So this is my little experiment to see the effects for myself. Now all you firefox users like me who use adblock won’t still see it so that’s all well and good.  Considering that the vast majority of you that visit are firefox users it further leads me to feel that it’ll be at 0.00 for a while.

Rufus, actually made it into the tree after a bit of delay by myself. Hopefully, in 0.7.1 the patches I’ve submitted upstream will be implemented so that I can kill the nice large patch I do currently. I’m still looking into a few of the most common complaints about it, such as the refreshing blinking and downloading only certain files from a multi file torrent.

Its slow because I’ve been watching the Olympics, and trying to help out in other area’s as well. Currently, I’m working with nattfodd on getting a small introduction to latex going for the gentoo documentation project. I’ve actually gotten to really enjoy latex because it reminds me so much of html that I learned many a year ago when I was in jr high/high school. As such its amazingly easy to write in. Not to mention that it has the nice benefit of outputting to postscript or pdf with ease. There are even plugins to make it into a html for you as well. Converting to .doc was a bit more of a pain though. I had to do a .tex->pdf->doc, but it worked eventually. Look forward to that doc eventually.

As a afterthought, I knew that developers do a lot of work to keep gentoo the way it is and improve it slowly and surely. However, until I became one I didn’t realize how much time is spent doing stuff for the project. Quite a few dev’s seem to work two full time jobs, one making actual money for living and then this one for gentoo. While I spend considerably less time then them. I’ve sort of taken it upon myself to try and learn more in the way of programming. This currently is trying to learn C++, once the book I ordered comes hopefully I’ll be able to dive in and actually start to help patching and tracking bugs in C++ programs.

I’m one who will freely admit that I basically am one of those programmers you don’t really want on your team currently, as I’m inexperienced and bound to make more mistakes then write good code. Like say for example, loading emerge.log into memory instead of only a small section I want. I just do need to buckle down and work on learning the various languages I do know now better. A good way to do that is actually sit down and start coding the few things I’ve had floating around in my head for a while. Just need to find my motivation to do them.

Not sure when I picked up the habit again but I’ve started drinking caffeine again, well have been for about a year now. I just thought about it and I should get off the stuff again. Its much like my cycles of vegetarianism. I’ll go through periods where I can’t stand any meat, doesn’t matter what animal its from. Other times, I’ll be fine with turkey and chicken.

Contrary to most people I didn’t have any issue giving up red meat. Course as my mother loves to point out I was a odd kid. I loved fruits and veggies and abhorred hamburgers. To this day I still enjoy a good apple or orange to most any other kind of snack.

Where’s all this come from..well I just feel I need to start working out a bit again. Do crunches and pushups again in accordance with the other things I’ll change.

In other news, I have a interview Monday with a placement company for IT positions. I’m hoping that something good comes of it. With all the applying I’ve done in both the IT and Environmental Science field its nice to get some kind of reply. I never put stock in sites such as dice.com or monster.com but I have to say I’ve been exuberantly surprised by the responses I’ve gotten. Some job offers have been more then I know I could handle at this point in time but its still nice to see people are actually looking at me as a potential employee.