We’re reinstated in New Mexico, expect a official press release soon enough.

All,

Google Summer of Code applications are due tomorrow, Monday April 7th. If you’ve not submitted yet its your last chance. Get your idea’s in and get paid to work on open source projects for the summer. There are a lot of projects out there so get submitting.

Google Summer of Code

As much as I actually like diego, he does tend to travel a very hard line when viewing things outside of the area that he can control. Specifically he talked about the lack of a news item for the extension of the Google Summer of Code. Instead of taking the initiative on seeing an item that should of been on the front page, he comes and blogs about it as a) and mentions it to me b).A news item was posted during the time I wrote this.

The reason I mention the above is to actually talk about one aspect of Gentoo that has developed that has bothered me for some time. The best way to describe the general attitude is that of kids when they first go to kindergarten to be quite honest. Many kids as you might know have issues with sharing. “No its my toy” “You can’t play with it because I’m playing with it” and other similar things are said at that age.

In Gentoo you have “Its my package, you shouldn’t touch it, you’ll break it” “Its my channel and I’ll kick you because I want to” and other similar things. I would think there is a similarity there. Quite honestly I’m growing tired of this childish behavior and what its doing to everyone who’s beyond that age range and just wants to get stuff actually done. If you notice the people who do the most work, don’t have time or bother with such minor or petty things and just work…perhaps everyone should step back and see when (not if) you’ve acted this way and change it so that we can be a happier family.

Had a nice relaxing vacation away from computers for a few days. It was a much needed break and I’ve been revitalized a good bit.

For those interested, this is what I was surrounded by for four days.

This is in essence a second home to me, a place where everything else melts away and life slows down. It made me realize how much I needed the vacation and re-tune some of how I have been thinking.

Have a good rest of the week to everyone who’ll be working. I’ll be flying up to Washington state to visit my grandfather who’s turning 90 this weekend. It’ll be good to get away to a place where the quick internet is 33.6kbps and as such, you won’t find me online. I might check my email but mostly I plan on being off the radar for some much needed resting and relaxing in one of the few places I really do let everything melt away.

I’ll be back and update about a few things once I’m back.

Lets see if I can’t start a little trend with the Gentoo Developers.

I’m going to post my setup for development and want to see if others will follow suit. Figure it might be interesting for people to see what others are using as their work environments.

Without further ado:

As you can see my lovely kitty pumpkin is modeling on the couch that serves as my primary spot for development with the ibm thinkpad t60p.

This is the other half of my living room, you can see my 1U server that acts as web/mail/file server/etc, as well as the desktop that is for relaxing by playing a bit of Team Fortress 2 or other windows based games. The tv can be used for tv as well as the displays for the server or the desktop if I so desire.

Please do excuse the bit of mess, I was doing a bit of spring cleaning and that was the state it was in.

So lets see your setups.

Well as most have probably noticed already, Gentoo has been accepted to participate as a Summer of Code Mentoring organization again. I’m overjoyed that we’ve been accepted again and would like to thank alec (antarus) for putting in the application. As well a thank you for Google considering us worthy to be a mentoring organization.

For all college students, please come up with idea’s to submit during this one week grace period. Any members of the team are available to talk to during the week.

Good luck to all Mentoring organizations and students. Have fun over the summer.

I need to get some stress relief going.

You have people who want to do everything as efficient as possible in the confines of what anyone defines efficient (which is never the same thing). For me personally that’s getting the results quickly without having to really think about or work for a few extra minutes at how to go about getting it with a single command. I’m far more likely to pipe something and grab what I need with another tool. For most situations this is fine and quick enough, as you’re not dealing with millions of records that would cause a difference of minutes/hours in runtime.

I have a few friends who always try to compress something into a single command and use some of the more esoteric abilities applications have. Find being one of the most powerful is a great example.

While I might do something like the following:

#note /mnt/floppy is just lazy mount of a external 1TB harddrive
find . -name '*.mpeg' | awk '{FS="/"; print $2}' | xargs cp -r /mnt/floppy/


those friends will point out and show that it can be done with:

find . -name '*.mpeg' -exec sh -c 'echo "$(basename "{}")"' \;

The two actually give slightly different results but the idea is the same. Both are valid ways to get the same ultimate result. The former took me about 10 seconds to write, the latter would take me probably about 2 minutes to write because I rarely make use of find’s -exec ability and would end up with a bunch of find: missing argument to `-exec’.

What’s really the point that I’m making here. Well its that this serves as a tool for learning for me. I might not make use of -exec often but learning about a new tool from a friend or a different way to think about a problem helps me grow as with my ability to script. For me, by looking at how others would do the same thing I’ve done, I get a clear picture of what each part of the program does. I’ve been introduced once again to applications I’ve forgotten about due to lack of use again by these people. tr was just such an application and is quite handy as well.

I also enjoy doing the scripting of stuff to make my job easier. It might ultimately take me longer the first time, but I save the time if I have to do it again. Course many of my things end up being used a single time to never be used again. It’d be interesting to just start collecting all the one time things I do with some notes to see what I have done/what I’m doing and see the progress/change over time.

Using the above as a metaphor, Gentoo and any Distribution in comparison (on a distro level) is very much like this. You use it for something and someone else will do it another way. Its no different ultimately as you get the same result. A working system, but it works for you the way you want it to and you get exactly what you want from it.

So what is it that you want to get from Gentoo?

I’ll admit I’ve quite enjoyed hulu for watching tv series when I want to. It doesn’t cover everything I want to watch but its a start.

Some of the things I want to watch are provided by Discovery, and of course their web based video player is only for windows and mac os x. I might be way off base but I’d say that the average linux user is probably the same exact that would fit in their demographic. So I decided to write to them and say exactly that. Response I got was of course a standard form factor reply:

Thank you for your interest in the Move Media player. We do not offer support
for any distribution of the Linux kernel. Supported operating systems include
Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Mac OS X 10.3+.

As well, netflix has the same exact issue. Why is it that these companies who are quite large can’t seem to manage to find a way to support anyone who would want to make use of services they provide.

In a very large stretch or not depending on how you look at things. Its almost a form of segregation. Windows users away from those of alternative platforms. Obviously Hulu is able to support anyone with a very simple design and I’m sure many unix users, myself included make use of it.

So here’s hoping that this will get other people writing about it and get some change within these large companies to get rid of archaic browser/os based platform tools.

That season is upon us again, students getting excited about writing code for the summer. Gentoo is planning to apply once again to be a mentoring organization and this is where we need your help.

Developers, we need you to figure out if you have the time to guide a student on a project. Needless to say you need to be a fairly decent programmer and take a valid interest in helping.

Users and developers, we need idea’s for projects. Toss them my way cause I want them.

Good luck to all organizations and students applying for the Summer of Code.