I’m going to take a few days off from Gentoo. I’ve been feeling particularly unmotivated and luckily enough Opfer has been kicking butt on bugs so I don’t feel guilty about leaving people hanging waiting for bugs to amass with only Wolf and Ticho doing a fair amount each day. WIth the three of them I’m sure that x86 will be fine.

I will still be around to answer questions and all that but, no bug hunting or anything like that. I might even take a few days away from irc more or less. I just need to clear the head get back to a point where its not like UGHUUU to working on Gentoo. Hopefully I’ll come back revitalized and be motivated to squash a ton of bugs again.

Tsunam out, and looking for some lawyerly advice.

Well I’ve had a bit of time to play with Firefox 2 and it has left some very good and some very bad impressions. One of the minor things that annoyed me was the go button that really doesn’t have a actual use as far as I’m concerned. Its far quicker to hit enter then use the button and only serves to clutter the ui up.

The fix for that one is to go to your about:config and set browser.urlbar.hideGoButton to true. The second appears to have been caused by a plugin. The plugin in question is Tabbrowser Preferences, so if you randomly finding yourself always going to .com sites instead of what you expect (google’s I feel lucky) then uninstall that plugin and you should be good again.

I was hoping for something that would have less initial issues, but I guess I wasn’t that lucky. The spell checker  is nice though. Thats one feature that I’ve made a lot of use of so far as my spelling is far from the best.

Well I had a very nice relaxing night, after a very long day at work. I decided to go out for the night and go see a play at the Bruka Theater in town. The show that they were showing was, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. It was a decent showing and I met a couple of interesting folks for the second to last performance. Theater was something that I used to do a lot more often and then..for some unknown reason I got out of it.

It wasn’t until recently that I actually realized this and decided to start going back, so tonight was the first time that I’d done it in quite a while. I’ll definitely be going to more, however one show that I want to see is not coming any where close. Wicked the musical is based off a book by the same name. Wicked is the story about the wicked witch and her story from childhood til her eventual death. Its a twist on the classic story and I’m sure would make a great musical. Course I also want to go see Phantom of the Opera again as its probably my favorite of all time

Well interesting enough, I popped open the Holiday 2006 issue of Maximumpc and see a article about linux. I assume its going to be about Ubuntu or redhat or something common. Quite the surprise to see that its a article about livecd’s and the three flavors they choose happen to be:

Custom Gentoo Goodness

Krunchy Knoppix

Outrageous Ubuntu

The talk about gentoo is of course about performance and the fact that its not for the faint of heart. The performance talk is about the fact that you can custom-compile every component of the os so its tuned to your processor. It also talks about portage being the heart of gentoo’s ability to the customization of the distribution.

The cd and distro talks about the features for Gentoo as such:

Boots from cd

Easy hard drive install

Simple package management

Compiles for your hardware

It’s interesting to read about the distro that I work on in a magazine I really enjoy. I’ll try and scan the pages later for everyone to view.

Just a quick note to say that tonight I reached 1000 commits for gentoo in 0.88 years ^.^;; go me. 1000 is big number for me as it was a goal I had set for myself in a year. It amounts to 3 commits a day and I’ve done it quicker then I expected.

For those who’d like to see it themselves, cia stats

Well, its been a busy weekend, in the good way. I appear to have fixed a bug with my raid card by updating the bios on it..course I had to remove it from my server and put it into my dev box which runs windows, as the updater is naturally only windows based. This is a good thing as the false drive failures were getting quite annoying.

As well on Friday, I had my first game of racketball. The game is actually surprisingly fun, Its also very rough on the body. I have two bruised knees from tumbling around the floor diving for the ball. I also woke up Saturday with some very sore muscles. The one that surprised me the most was the top of my left foot, which was caused by all the starting and stopping. The legs naturally and racket arm were both sore as well. I think I’ll start doing it weekly though and get better, as my partner kicked my butt in a major way. I was happy to get 4 points on the second game. The first we didn’t keep score til I got the basics of the rules down.

Saturday, I went out to a friends place to celebrate her climbing up Mount Shasta while undergoing kemotheropy. She is a truly amazing woman to climb over 14 thousand feel while fighting a disease that is not only deadly…but weakens you to a point you don’t feel you can do much of anything.

Finally, I committed something to the tree with the help of Alex Heck, who’s been working with upstream and maintaining the ebuilds in the Coffee overlay. So yes…you can guess what it is, Beryl the fork of compiz with a whole lot less in the way of dependencies is in the tree currently for you ~amd64 and ~x86 users. I’m excited about having this in the tree as its a major package and one that I’m sure a lot of users will be using. So hop to it in a few hours and test out your eyecandy!

Well I just sent a complaint to my Attorney General about Adamant Computers. We’ll see if they can do anything to stop this company and their unfair practices. Don’t know..I just hope something comes of it. Not much I really can do at this point, over 4 months invested with Adamant alone, add in a few for Asus directly and I’ve spent more time trying to get the machine fixed then I have actually using the thing.

At this point beyond serving as a warning…and getting our legal system involved for business practices there isn’t much I can do. I just get to sit and wait some more, and call later this week to see if the “new” machine is going to be a downgrade as well.

The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last atleast until we’ve finished building it.

Well, another topic of discussion that got started from talking to another developer. There is a bit of irony in the GLEP functionality, the typically glep if you look at it is a long term goal for the project. However as many notice is that we don’t actually have any long range goals as a project. This is something that we are sorely lacking, that needs to corrected sooner then later. A goal even if its far into the future will give us a direction as a whole.

What that direction is and should be I’m not sure. Some will suggest generic things but I’m looking for directed idea’s for long term goals. I want to hear what the developers believe we should be going. This is not a time to just sit there silently and give up. If we have a set of longish goals then we can all work as a group to that goal, fostering a lot of things that have been lacking in the project. Its not going to change things overnight, but it will give us a focus we’ve been lacking.

If you don’t respond I will personally come and email you or poke you on irc for an answer, as many of you know I poke the foundation and other developers quite often so I will have no problem poking you for some kind of response. No comment is not a option. If you don’t want it public, then send me an email. I’ll get it and I do actually read my email.

And no I will not write it as a glep, this goes beyond what a glep is. If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed now, and I don’t think the vast majority of us want that. So fill my email or fill this post with replies.

When someone who’s been around since the beginning leaves, it always causes a period of reflection. For many of us that don’t remember these people who started at the beginning, it might not mean much. To some it will actually matter and cause them to reflect.

As others have pointed out that spider hit on a lot of the issues that we have going on with a air of civility that has felt lacking within the project for quite a while. Many of which have caused me to be depressed about the situation at hand. One of the points that I feel most is the herds and touching packages issues. I am in part a source of the touching problem. As I allow few developers to just mark things to stable when they feel that it is ready for that. So in essence I am part of the problem, and not helping to fix the issues at hand. You could also say that I am one of the people who cause others to be obligated with not breaking the tree.

Its a hard thing to think that you are in fact part of the problem.

I’m going to go be depressed about Gentoo for a while

I’ll be gone for the next two days for business, if you need to get something handled in the immediate future, please poke either wolf or ticho. I’m sure they’ll love me having said this without asking them ^.^;

We’ll see how things go, I’m not looking forward to this trip as much as the previous one. As this time its solo. I know I’ll do fine but still nervous. It is after all a easy update.