Alright, its been a little bit since I’ve written anything. There’s a few reasons for that. One is that I’ve been so busy with work this week and preparing for the move to the new office that I can’t tell which way is up, and which is down. Monday I was busy doing prep work with acids and bases on a warehouse floor to get it ready for paint.

This was then followed by a 7 am flight on Tuesday for the NAB convention down in las vegas. The show was amazing in the overload sense. I might eventually post a full review of it but we’ll say now that I learned a good bit about what my companies customers actually do, and that apple seems to have a solid foothold on the 30 inch displays, as well as the 24’s. That was followed by a company party at a brew house down in Vegas, which was quite relaxing actually after my feet had been telling me to get off them long ago. A couple of waters later and a glass of chardonnay and It was back to the airport to get up to Reno again

Today I’m painting the warehouse, with a very aromatic epoxy paint. So that pretty much sums up why I’ve been missing for the past few days.

As the unfortunate side effect of that, the x86 team gained a few more bugs to our queue, and instead of getting closer to 0 we’re almost at 50. The two post quiz Arch Testers, David Morgan and Matthias Langer, have been a big help. The x86 team also has two people in their pre-quiz process as well, Mark Kowarsky and Sander Knopper, have also done a lot of good work to help out the x86 team. Thanks to all four of you. No, its not just the fumes getting to me and I’m delirious and saying thank you to everyone.

One thing that has been frustrating me a bit lately, has been the fact that I’ve no time for side projects, one of which is a design for gentoo that I think developers will like and hopefully use, just need time to sit down and do it. I’ve been basically coming home from work and catching up on emails and bugs till the time I head for bed. In some ways its relaxing actually doing the work (no you don’t need to get the padded room ready for me quite yet), just the lack of progress that seems to be happening on the bug count gets depressing. The other side project that’s just brewing in my head literally is the addition of themes to my website. I have a fairly complex but at least the finished product looks beautiful in my noggin, hopefully it’ll look as good once I can do it as well.

Finally, I also have a nice new mini-itx system to build as the replacement for my p3 500. Hopefully, in the near future you’ll see this site hosted on the new box. Its actually a upgrade in more ways then one, and quite happily should be a fairly decent power savings as well. I calculated it and its something like 60 watts of difference even while at max power.

One of these days, I might actually write a short entry. We are also still looking for more of you wanting to be x86 arch testers.

Well, its been about a week since I started my new job so I can give a general idea about it, as I’m bound by a nondisclosure agreement I can’t go into any details of course. So far anyone who knows me will say that my mood is markedly improved, and I will agree with them. I feel like I’m actually doing stuff now instead of the former job. The stuff in the current situation is wiring.

Normally, when moving into a new space its not much of a issue to get setup, however this place had a company that went bankrupt and the auction was very successful…so successful that all wires that come down the wall were cut just above the ceiling tiles. So In the 11 or so rooms that we have, I’m having to run new ethernet, fibre, and phone lines. The punch down block was even removed so we had to pick up a couple of 66 blocks so that we have room for expansion. I’ll be busy for a while doing that. As far as other things, working on a job with linux rocks. I’ve also gotten to do some of the things we do with the server. Looking at the prices for some of the parts we use as well have made me think of 15k 146 gb scsi drives as cheap.

The main reason for this post is actually for something entirely unrelated to my job. I’ve been having issues with my old p3 server, and figure that its time to replace the machine. I have decided that for space saving and just for what I use it for, a mini-itx machine would be perfect. However, the only sites I’ve seemed to find that has a decent selection, or have a site that doesn’t make them seem shady is based out of the uk. As I’m in the us, that’d be a bit expensive on shipping. So users, where have you picked up mini-itx motherboards in the states?

Finally, the x86 team is still looking for Arch Testers. If you’ve thought about helping out more, or trying something different. Then please feel free to drop by the #gentoo-x86 channel and have a chat with us in there. We don’t bite much.

The first thing I’m going to write about is the wordpress issue. It has been resolved with help from westi (thanks) for now but I’m still looking at alternatives. Typo has however been a bit of a problem. More I think due to ruby on rails being less of the miracle application framework and being a general pain in my booty. Diego, I owe you a beating for directing me to typo when I see you next * wink *.

In ways I think I’ve been spoiled by gentoo with the wonderful documentation that we have here, and when I run into something that, not to say half baked, but less then the quality I am used to is another story. Normally this wouldn’t be a issue if the install process was at least in my opinion somewhat logical, however compared to what I’ve grown used to with LAMP, Ruby on Rails applications are a spiders web of issues. I’ve spent a couple of hours with documentation on both typo and ruby on rails to no avail. Every doc I’ve read just glorifies how easy ruby on rails actually is. Naturally, reading that and struggling the way I have been has gotten me frusterated and grumpy. I’m also stubborn and refuse to give up till I get it working. So I’ll keep fighting it and hope I get something other then the wonderful Welcome message or a 500 internal server message because the application can’t find a file in the same directory.

In other less grumpy(ranting) writings, I’d like to ask the users of gentoo a question. One that I hope will either spawn some discussion on the irc channels or on the forums, or heck even in the comments section. The question was actually brought up in the #-dev channel on irc and I’d like to get a clear perception of what the actual view is from the community side. I’d also like to keep in touch with a few people and or direct them to who will hopefully be directing efforts in the direction I’ll be asking about.

The question is this: What do you feel the relationship is between the developers and the user community? How can we improve the relationship and is there any area’s that people really want to help but either don’t know how to go about it or feel intimidated to try for some reason?

Also please note that the x86 team is still looking for people who want to become Arch Testers. Please feel free to drop in on #gentoo-x86 and talk to Hparker, Halyc0n, or myself if you are curious about what is involved. Email will also work.

Well, for a while now I’ve been unhappy with the general state of wordpress. Its a decent software if what you want is something that holds your hand and is large enough to require a small town’s dam  for electricity to run. Please note that was the obligatory small town joke.

The thing that has just tipped the scale finally, as this annoyance has been growing of late is the seemingly broken rss feeds. The oddest thing is that it appears to produce valid xml. However, I am left with a puddle of mess that is something like, “http://tsunam.org An Environmentalist Blog Tue, 28 Mar 2006 09:10:07 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.2 en,” that. One of the alternatives I’ll be looking into is going to be a program that Diego(flameeyes) recommended. For those interested its a Ruby on Rails blogger called typo. It is actually one of the few open source apps that seem to have a back story about the name. The author wrote it while waiting for a client at a coffee shop, and he’d written the time of the meeting down incorrectly. So its aptly named typo.

Typo can be found here. It should be interesting as I’ve been curious about Ruby on Rails for a while and this is just a lucky opportunity to try out a application that makes use of it. For those using WP etc and want to convert over they have a conversion script that works with 1.5. I will try it out on the 2.0.2 install I have and see how it goes. If it works out well I might even add yet another blogging software to the tree.

Also as is my nature I think I’ll create some new banners for some new feel’s as well. So look forward to a bit more variety in the colors of the site (hopefully).