Be interesting to see how many I actually remember going to. Its been a few so hopefully I can think of most of them.

Metallica
Beach boys
Herman’s Hermits
Steppenwolf
Bella Morte (one of the best live bands I’ve seen)
Counting Crows
The Crüxshadows
System Syn
Faith and Disease
Creedence Clearwater Revival
3 Doors down
Claire Voyant
Gwar (theatrics show is great…having clothing covered in fake blood not so great)
Jill Tracy (surprising and educational)
More Machine Than Man (another great theatrics band, one that I still should pick up a album from)
Voltaire (Best Show I’ve been to, and not just because he’s my favorite artist)
A total of Sixteen or so, the majority thanks either to Hot August Nights or DarkLight promotions.

As far as what I’d like to go to, including bands that are no longer together.

Genitortures (another theatrics show with audience participation *wink wink * for those who know what their shows are like)
Voltaire again, I was blown away by how one man with a guitar could be so powerful on stage while other bands just suck. Also a really nice guy.
E Nomine
Kidneythieves
Jack off Jill
VNV Nation
They Might be Giants

On a happier less speculative mood, I’ve gotten a new job. As some people knew I wasn’t the happiest at my current job, much of it the lack of any kind of advancement in the position. The new job actually even deals with linux. I will be working for a company that does Storage Area Networks for film post production houses. Its a small company right now but one that appears to be doing quite well for themselves. The company is called Bright Systems, and one that I hope I can fill a variety of roles.

One feature that I hadn’t thought about before but is particularly exciting is the possibility of international travel. One of the other people is going to be heading for Australia and Singapore for about two weeks. So its hopefully a good chance that I might end up close to some of our devs in other countries, and I’ll get visit with them at least a bit. So this is basically hopefully a warning that you might get a ping I’ll be in your area lets get together YAY!

There’s been some interesting things going on in gentoo as of late. One of which seems to be a sudden…we need to be nicer to each other. This naturally makes me think of this,

“C’mon people, now
smile on your brother,
ev’ry-body get together,
try to love one another right now”

and subsequently of the movie Pump up the Volume. For the ladies and curtis, you can join #gentoo-x86, there’s enough love there that its spilling over to yaoi(man man love for you people who are going what the heck is yaoi)! In part, I think its a sudden injection of woman into the project (which is always a nice addition to any project). However, its one of the things that I hope to see in action not just in talk. Its far easier to say sure I’ll be nicer to other developers but something that to people who you don’t get along with much harder to actually do.

It has also highlighted problems with how we’ve grown. I won’t make it a secret, and could very well be bonked for it, that the infrastructure has kept up with development, however relations between the various area’s of the project has not kept up. There are no defined rules for the various major area’s of responsibility, just someone fluid guidelines. Devrel, is developers relations..however what does that really mean? Christel, want to say that you did a very nice job with the email you sent out to the -bugs alias, and hope that you are able to act on what you asked and said in that email. Infra would seem to be simple but it isn’t that simple. Security, well the question can be when should a package be masked for security. Quality Assurance seems to currently be one that is trying to define their responsibilities now and limit what they can and can not do so that there won’t be any issues cropping up.

It’s all part of a transition in the project, one that has been building a while, but I think especially since Daniel stepped down as the guiding light of the project. In some ways I think it’d be a good thing for someone that everyone was to respect, doesn’t mean you have to like them, to step up and take a figurehead type role. The Council was to be a replacement of sorts however, with situations waiting till the monthly meetings, issues tend to spiral out and away from them before they can contain and handle it.

Oh, and cshields you arn’t allowed to go anywhere.

The world map of developers (found here ) spawned a interesting question by myself. How many developers have there been and how many are active. Luckily enough Kloeri had a easy way to look it up. LDAP showed that there were 485 accounts and of those 316 developers are currently active. Not a bad ratio (of course this assumes no one say like I would do, would go clean up the accounts that have been stale for 3+ years).

So, why you might ask am I bringing this up. Well as is my nature of liking statistics, much to compnerds chagrin and my enjoyment of putting him in such a state, I’m going to do a few that users and developers might find interesting alike. In total as of 4:49 PM GMT on march 17th, 2006 gentoo has a total of 207270 commits via cia stats. In the 2.18 years that gentoo has been tracked that comes out to be a commit every 5.54 minutes, or 7923.16 messages a month. Taking every developer of the project, that would average out to 427.36 commits per person at a average time between commits of 1 day 20 hours and 39 minutes.

If, however you just take currently active dev’s of which there are some who’ve been around longer then the tracking no doubt. (Someone remind me to do some work with cia and chatting with dev’s about their time with the project…that’d be interesting as well. * hears compnerd die suddenly *)You would have something that looks like this: 655.94 commits per developer, at a average time between commits of 1 day 5 hours, and 6.6 minutes.

Now naturally there’s a few developers who commit a good bit more then the rest of us. Two that I can think of off the top of my head is vapier who happens to of the start of this writing done 18188 commits in the 2 years and flameeyes who has done a impressive 4537 in a year.

In all, its just some interesting data that I figured some other people would like to see. As for me I’ve done 238 in 3 months. I’m trying to do what seems to be a milestone of sorts in the group (or a subsection of it) to do 1000 commits in your first year, or approximately one commit every 8 hours and 45 minutes.

ps. by the end of writing this the total went up to 207274 commits

I decided recently after some issues with my chroots to change to Virtual machines powered by the currently free vmware-server (ebuilds can be found here). Setting up virtual machines is quite easy, and even without a actual clone function in the server edition its fairly easy to clone a machine. It’s basically a matter of copying the machine you want to a new directory and then doing a custom new image at the same exact spot.

Beyond that its a very nicely rounded program. Feature rich considering that at its core its a application that allows you to run virtual machines within a already running machine. One of the most common features I use is the quick switch, as it allows me to switch between my gnome machine and the kde machine to test bugs for each system at the same time. This naturally helps improve my ability to fix a couple of bugs at the same time instead of having to only do one or the other. With full screen, its exactly as if its the host machine.

As far as speed, its probably around 80% of what my max is in the non virtual machine. This is just a guess as I’ve not run genlop on comparison applications at all. Its just a gut feeling but one that I feel fairly certain of. Avoiding the pain of chroots and the problems they possible have, is worth it.

As far as bugs, I’ve only really run into three so far. The configuration didn’t remove the not-configured flag to be able to start the machine (very minor). The virtual machine seems to have halted, but started once I woke up the screen in the morning (minor, as I was trying to compile gnome at the time..and it stopped at 70 of 201 packages). The third tonight was a strange crash that could be associated with removing the usb keyboard and attaching it to the laptop so I could actually do stuff like stabilizing packages that I had tested in the virtual machines.

This advertisement not brought to you by vmware, even if I hope i get a free copy of workstation for it (just kidding mostly).

Had a nice fun surprise today, and felt that a few people would get a laugh out of the call I had with customer support. The entire issue began after I booted up and noticed that multiple keys were acting up..things like the pg dn button activating caps lock, alt and enter all at the same time.

So I go and call customer support and get a guy who informs me that all agents are busy and if I leave my name and number they’ll contact me as soon as a agent is available. Not a good start to customer service. I actually do get a call back about 15 minutes later, which surprises me more then anything. I then explain to the customer agent what is my issue. He asks if i’ve attached a external keyboard and if the issue continues. I explain no and why that is and he goes okie so its most likely just the keypad acting up. Then the cheeky devil says that well that should fix your issue then, just use a external keyboard. I just look flabbergasted at this point and the fact that he was quite serious about that as a solution.

I precede to kindly inform him that it is by no means even a suboptimal solution. I then am presented with two options. I can send back the laptop to the company who I ordered it from…but when I ordered it I was assured that one they do not do the repair service as they just sell the machines and two that asus would repair the laptop at their station. Joy of joys to find out that they don’t want to do that. In fact I’m still covered under my warranty if they send me out the part and replace it myself. Now what kind of warranty is that??