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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

As Daniel so kindly pointed out that in a lot of ways that Gentoo is very likely a Dystopian society. Much like in 1984 you have your inner party that would be made up of your Developers, who could be split in a few ways such as by length of service, amount of work done, ebuild/non ebuild developers. Depending on how you split the above you can have Developers in the Outer party and users who make contributions as well. Finally you have the proles who are the users who use the product for their own reasons but also unlike the novel have the freedom to leave and go to another distribution that is the same as Gentoo in this respect. Ultimately, in any shared project that is Open source I tend to see the same global phenonomen that I described above with Gentoo. When you get down to individuals however is when you see a change.

Oceania(Gentoo), as we’re all aware is entirely driven by the vollunteers that join and contribute to make it better for what they need. Notice that its not typically for the betterment of the party but for their own individual needs. I’m not for example going to suddenly take an interest in clustering because I’m told that I need to. I’ll stick to what I’m doing which is a mixture of areas that I try to affectionately term as the Human Relations.

As part of the Relations aspect, I’ve been trying to get more information out to the proles and trying to request information as well. I know that the developers/inner and outer party are far outweighed by this large group and in ways I’m trying to organize at least some people who have a hint of motivation to give me ideas of things that they see. I’ve unfortunately not been successful with this task. Both here and on the forums which I’ve started posting to again after a year plus absense. I would hope that it would be agreed that I’m trying to reach out but someone has to take my hand and give me something as well. A few have done this and while I might not agree with the idea I will at least discuss it and give insight into the party because of that discussion.

I continue to ask for topics to talk about both from my fellow members of User Relations, who also seem to be busy with other things and do not simply have a few minutes to answer some questions I’ve posed to them. If I can’t even get an answer from people I should be working with, I’m not sure how effective I can be with anyone else. I’ve had a few minor successes with the request to discuss and explain what Glep-55 was about and would like to cover other things like it but I don’t know what people would like to know about.

So once again I’m here asking for people to talk to me and give me their ideas. Its not a trick to get you to commit thoughtcrime. Its simply a request from someone who wants to improve Gentoo for everyone. To have people who want to see it improve step forward with me and see if we can’t come up with ways that would help people. I still need to work on a few things naturally like a quick guide about submitting stable requests.