No, I’ve not just had the football pulled away by Marcy again, like she does every time. I’m just really frustrated by the fact that I’m 2400 miles away from where I want to be right at the moment. *grumble* What good is it if you can’t be there when someone needs you the most.

Tosses the ball against the wall. *boinc*. Oh I mean that the new version of boinc 5.8.15 is in the tree masked currently. Please test it if you use it. I’d like to make sure that it works with all the projects before we unmask it, as I’m not sure what all it works with. In theory it works with everything…It at least connects to fightaids@home for me as a fresh install. So let me know if it works for you.

Well, I worked on my site and realized I did something stupid but now the links that were broken and the non existent email addy has been redirected to something that actually works. So I should get email..if you send mail to me on the contact me icon, it’ll actually go somewhere instead of dropping off into neverland.

Partially this was caused by the recent story on Linux.com. If someone had tried to contact me before going to press..well, they got no response. Oh well. That’s now more or less resolved.

Yes, yet again I did get quoted about Gentoo, and the issue that are going on. This is not the first time..nor do I suspect the last time. Each time its not been good press but that’s the way of it. I am however disappointed in the author, Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier, who seems to be biased towards the main source of the interview in this case. A former developer who was kicked out for his continual bad behavior. Who in this authors opinion bases too much of who he is on Gentoo. I’m sure if you’d like to hear stories about ciaranm, there’s a good number of actual current and retired developers who’d have a story to tell, both positive and negative. It’d of been much better to have talked with the council about it directly and gotten the story directly from the horses mouth. Instead of the hearsay by third parties.

The other interesting thing is the reason behind the quicker pacing of the CoC being implemented, without having the proctors in place..thus making it a document that has no enforcement. Doesn’t that sound like Devrel currently? Chris I will say is a member of pr and can spin things well..which is no doubt why he wrote the following piece. I’ve heard a couple of different things from parties involved with this, and know the council is reactionary, not proactive. So hearing Chris say they were acting before hand, is just silly in my opinion. The council I hope actually were taking a step forward and taking control like they should have when Daniel left in the first place. It’d be nice to see. But I just don’t see it happening, and even vapier who’s voice probably commands some of the most respect in the community..has lately seemed to have his words fall on deaf ears. I don’t know, that really worries me.

Mike Frysinger (vapier) on the other hand, I know well enough and trust as a upstanding guy to have told me the truth about the matter. The concern as suggested was about losing infra members, more then anything else. Infra as an group probably has the slowest turnover of any group out there, but I could understand a concern from an organization that graciously gives us hosting for many boxes.

We’ll just have to wait and see who ends up being the proctors and if they truly are what they need to be to be effective. We don’t need to be your buddies, you don’t need to like us, nor do we need to like you. Just remember that to anyone who becomes one. As any kind of favortism will allow certain people to pull and take that mile when you gave an inch.. remember that well and you’ll do well I think.

Well, today was a bit of a successful day. I got a new version of kmymoney into the tree so that all those financial people are up to the minute with the lastest and greatest simple single user money management software is available. Its only been out for two weeks but hey..still want to latest. I’m so the typical dev who uses ~arch when running applications.

The other was working on an update to the boinc software. As we as a distro are still at 5.4.11. 5.5 as anyone who’s tried it, doesn’t have the ca-bundle.crt in place so you have to grab it manually and work from there. I’ve taken what one user did as a direct bump of 5.5 and modified it to actually work slightly better. The most obvious change is the new gui. The minimal information is quite nice. It gives you everything you really want to know without being annoying about it. As well it feels like projects finish quicker.

The best feature of it though is that it raises the claimed points for linux users to be more in line with windows clients. Thus overall you’ll get more points. I know stat whore moment for me. I’m having an issue with it and graphics for the actually program. Not sure if its just fight aids at home or all projects that will have the issue. If you want to really try it you’ll need to get the tarball from my site currently and the ebuild as well.

Those of course are located hereand of coursehere. I’ll talk with cryos as soon as I can about it and see what he has on it. As I’m sure he knows if there’s still projects that don’t work with the 5.8 builds on linux. We’ll see thought and I’ll try and push it in as soon as I can. Cause I know I’d like the updated client in the tree.

Well its that time of the year again where everyone tries to come up with great ideas for things to implement into their open source projects. Again Gentoo has been graciously accepted by Google to be a mentoring organization to get people involved in Open Source Projects. Google I give a lot of credit for giving money to get people involved in the movement, even if it helps them as well.

However, I’m disappointed in Gentoo again. One of the proposals is for a project that is not part of the Gentoo sphere. That one being Paludis. Yes its in the tree, but so is gnome. So should we be doing something for Gnome because its in there? No, that’s not something that is going to help us. The java related ones are different as they are improving a large portion of how an entire section is handled. Its clearly depend what its goal is and how to obtain it. I give credit to the java team for coming up with clear concise objectives…if albeit it maybe not the most realistic for a student to get done. Another that I’m actually looking forward to seeing is the LVM integration into the installer. That’s one that has real benefits for a ton of users, as LVM allows you to grow and shrink your filesystem so easily, while trying that with the actual file system utils can be impossible at times.

I don’t know..I just think it’d be better if we focused on Gentoo official projects then something that is associated with Gentoo because it works with the ebuilds..and some Gentoo developers work on it. Blehness…..

There are times where I realize how much of a geek I can be. I just had one of those. I was having a discussion about proper English use in a sentence…using sed replacements for various parts of the conversation to fix the grammatical errors.

*shakes head* Now its gotten into the fact that s/*// is just a regex. I really will need to remember to take Saleem out for a drink when he moves down to cali. Get out from the technical type of talks, and just see if he can be one of the guys for a change. Should be interesting if nothing else.

Note: This isn’t meant to detract from others efforts, but an opinion of the futility of the situation..but I hope that the people who are tying to make it different (with action) get something positive accomplished.

Its been a bit of a odd situation for me lately. It feels like every time that I turn around I have someone pulling me into a discussion about how to improve devrel. This has actually only happened twice and I just hate being involved because, its one of those things where I know all my suggestions are going to end up in the dumpster out back of that little Chinese place you swear to never visit again.

I see as well Christel has put up the new proposed laws we all live by, and leave so much up to interpretation, that I feel that its no better then having no rules at all. Its not really any different from this document. Course I’ve always pushed for a much tougher devrel who takes more action then they do currently. Situations where developers, simply delete their mail because its all a bunch of people calling each other names is entirely unacceptable. I know its not just one developer doing this either. There’s been a few I know that haven’t really read -dev in over a year. This is a sign of something.

In my opinion…if you are going to act like a child, expect to be treated as such. You call someone a doody head (we’ve had lots of that lately), you get put on timeout from quite a few things for a short time. Course that’s not a popular opinion..because “we’re all adults and shouldn’t need timeout” “banning is no good” etc. Well frankly put. We’ll be better off if we actually took care of these things sooner then later, as it certainly wasn’t handled at all. All apparently because of the perception of devrel, having too much power. Well they have apparently none, and are so afraid of their own perception of what they were..that they won’t act in the best interest of the project.

Hopefully, something good comes out of the new “old” rules. However, I doubt anything will change. Thats being cynical but I don’t think anything will. We’ll be good for a couple of weeks, then it’ll be the same old same old yet again.

Well, I’m off to another wedding of someone I know this weekend. This makes about six or seven people I’ve known that have gotten married in the past two years.

Should be a good time and a nice little mini vacation away from home. However it does get me to think about my own status, and the outlook is looking a lot better then it has in a long time. I’m seeing a very intelligent, attractive woman to me, even if we’re not together physically now. The use of cell phones and free night and weekends has made it really nice, to talk for long extended periods of time. Which as any of my friends can attest to…is nearly impossible to do over the phone. In person I am able to chat just fine. So the distance certainly sucks, but in this case, I entirely feel that all the sucky parts of a distance relationship are worth it. Course the worst seems to be the fact that I want to just be there, holding her and being in contact with her.

Yes, as you can see I’ve got some romantic tendencies when I really adore someone so..we’ll see. I’m happier then I have been in quite a while, and hope it stays this way, well except for the distance, but thats something that’ll be handled when its time to handle it.

I now have pretty permalinks..I got off my bum and got them fixed so no longer will you see =p123 but date and name ^_^. Yes silly simple things like that make me happy, and right now I need that so *pfft to you*

Seemant, has unlike normal been very vocal about the current situation. Its nice to actually see him have some spit and vinegar so to speak about Gentoo still. As as much as we all want to in some ways deny that we consider it our baby..we all do.

I’ve been doing some things lately that are a bit unusual for me. This includes simply deleting all email that I get from the dev and private mailing list. Simply put we have too many dev’s with ego’s that are overly large and basically all need to get knocked off of their pedestal’s. Instead of innovating (which we aren’t doing), we’re spending time talking and yelling about stuff..that will not change. You all know that fact as well.

I had one of those the other day with hparker..asking me to come into -devrel and explain some of the things I had said in -dev about the organization. I will start with saying that I like kloeri. He’s a decent chap. However, he’s not cut out to be the leader of devrel. He’s just too nice. One of the issues with devrel..was the appointment of Deedra to the position of leader. She was not fit for it..and it showed with the massive backlash against devrel while she was in control of it. It wasn’t her alone but devrel lost all ability at that point. It has since then done nothing in reality. Its not actively trying to handle anything at this point and in my personal opinion filled with people who just want to be “liked and not cause trouble”. Well damnit, you are developer relations. You are literally the arm of the social contract that enforces it. Yes you need the help of other groups like infra to ban someone for being an asshat (yes I said asshat). Personally, I’m a cynical person with Gentoo, and have been for quite a while. Those kind of people are perfect for the position. They don’t care who you are or what you do for the project. You act like an idiot and you’re going to get punished.

As many would say, vapier is nigh immune from anything of the like because of how much he does for the project. He isn’t and shouldn’t be. If he goes off and starts cussing at 12 developers, revoke his access for a few days. The entire project isn’t going to fall down, will some things not get fixed and or updated 5 minutes after its out..yeah, but its not going to result in a massive exodus of users and developers. Devrel, as it stands now..doesn’t have a spine. It doesn’t want to have one..and its a source of a great ability to fix the 600 reply threads we have going on right now. If I was reading it and having the power, I’d of probably locked posting to the mailing lists that this always takes place, both public and private…and then given 20-30 dev’s a vacation.

I’ll also put the shot out the bow that devrel has a leaning preference for being friends with the ciaranm clic. Its not something that I think can easily be denied as most people notice that the clic is nigh invinible and able to say what they want. Ciaranm also has a voice in Gentoo, via the minions that he has. SPB included in that, who many consider to be the “voice” of Ciaranm in the project still. I’m sure the point will be argued, but a lot of things I hear from SPB seem to sound like it came directly from Ciaranm.

The council, while a good attempt at the technical direction for Gentoo. Has to this day not set any technical direction for the project at all. So really guys, what is your point? You above all else should be giving us the direction to innovate…yet…there’s nothing. You don’t have a desire to lead us and innovate continually. Are we as a project going to become irrelevant because no one wants to be that disliked and push for things to change? Well quite frankly I’m tired of it. Make a bloody decision about the technical direction of Gentoo, and give us a bloody direction to move towards. The innovation right now is from projects outside of the development community. Look at paludis and pkgcore. They are implimenting new features into the core uniqueness of what makes Gentoo special. Is there a reason we are slow on new changes. Do we need to audit the code for portage, and rewrite vast stretches of it and remove all the nasty hacks in it?

Can we innovate by sitting on our ass and not having any goals at all. Being a rhetorical question, the answer if of course no. So council get up off your bum’s and do something about it. Set short term goals that are reachable, and farther reaching goals of what Gentoo should be aiming for as a distribution.

Will this fix any and all problems, no. However, a devrel who has a spine and is around 24/7, doesn’t get questioned internally by their own members. Would go a long way to fix a lot of issues, we’re currently having…I would guess so. Devrel, and its members should be allowed to act in the best interest of the project, and hold that “social contract” that we’ve all at some point taken a dump on (don’t even bother denying it, because I’ll have no problem pulling out 2 years of logs and searching for something you’ve done that has violated it). This is a contract that to become a developer you agree’d to follow. Well you haven’t, I haven’t, none of us have to the letter. Should you get a few slaps on the hand before you get worse punishment of course.

However, do you think the poisonous people in the project are going to stick around when they constantly are getting into trouble, getting access revoked to this or that? No, its not worth the hassle. Course you also need to find the people who won’t get on a power trip over it as well. Which is why I mentioned the cynical people…as they are also the ones who probably have the best vision of what Gentoo was, and really should be to continue to move forward. Course you also need someone to lead who has hope that things will get better…which again most of us cynics no longer believe. Its a fine balance.

So in essence, don’t be a tool. Stop acting like an idiot, use your own brain to make your own decisions. Use some bloody common sense. Yes you have the ability to think rationally and calmly…so actually do that. Cause if this was an actual job, we’d all be fired by now. Luckily, for you and for me on a couple of occasions it isn’t. However, bring some of that workplace mentality with you to the project. You might hate the guy across the hall from you, but you still have to work with him, and get along enough to actually accomplish the tasks that you need to. Compromise.

Simply put…after Gentoo, I’m no doubt done with the open source movement. I won’t want to help another project in any active way. I’ll submit patches no doubt..but won’t be part of a project. Its simply not worth the pain in the ass it really is.

This has been your quota for the year for tsunam’s asshatness

edit: Thinking about it…I think the main problem is that we’re all just a bunch of spoiled little brats who never learned to play nice with each other and instead of sharing toys like you were taught in preschool. you walk over, smack them on the nose (causing it to bleed) and then take their toy. Rinse and repeat…because you want that toy back.