citizen428.blog()

As my PR manager told me, large numbers of fans have already complained about the recent lack of updates. Since I’m only my reader’s humble servant, I of course have to comply with this wishes, so here are the long awaited news about yours truly:

Gentoo:
After being a Gentoo developer for 2 years, I finally decided to leave the project. Since I haven’t really been active for the past 4 month anyway for several reasons (e.g. work), this was long overdue anyway. I’ve met a lot of nice and interesting people in the Gentoo community and working with you guys has really been a pleasure! Thanks for that, I really appreciate what I have learned from all of you during that time!

Mac:
Today I’ve joined the team of Open.Source.Mac and have already published my first little article on the site. Enjoy!

Personal:
On the 2nd of August I celebrated my 27th birthday at Xeno. A lot of friends showed up, whereas certain people decided to get drunk somewhere else and then blamed innocent squirrels for their not showing up. It was a cool evening which I really enjoyed, but working on the next day didn’t exactly qualify as a good cure against the headaches…

Capitalism:
I have to admit that I love portable consoles, especially when they are as sexy as the black Nintendo DS Lite I bought three weeks ago. So far I own Advance Wars: Dual Strike, Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day, Feel The Magic XY/XX and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. All of them are really great and I can hardly wait until my copy of Mario Kart DS finally arrives.

I also got myself a nice M9 DX enclosure with a 250GB Samsung HD as a backup disk for the Mac Mini. Overall it’s pretty neat, although it could match the color of the Mini a little better.

Misc
Found an article about Habbo Hotel on the Pardus forums and just had to try it out. Like the author of the article I most likely won’t visit the site again, but I had a lot of fun during the hour I spent there.

teemow recently blogged about BumpTop, a new take at the desktop metaphor we all grew used to. The video is quite impressive and I’d really like to try out such an interface myself, as I’m interested in how well it works for everyday usage.

Prickle-Prickle, Bureaucracy 5, 3172 YOLD

June was pretty busy, so I only managed to blog once. So here’s a little update of what happened during the past few weeks:

Work:
Still the same old bullsh*t, except that I spent 7 days at a customer’s site in Upper Austria, where we set up several virtual Heartbeat clusters in VMware Server. Summary: the scenery and people in Upper Austria are pretty nice, VMware is one of the coolest things since the invention of sliced bread and Heartbeat really can be a bitch to set up correctly (no surprises here I guess).

Capitalism:
Got myself a nice widescreen 19” LCD for my beloved Mac Mini. I also decided that it’s about time to get a new digital camera, since my old one broke ages ago. I finally settled on an Olympus SP-700, which Amazon sold for a really good price. The camera arrived last Thursday, and from what I’ve seen so far I’m really impressed with my new gadget. Today I once again went on a DVD buying spree and bought Ken Park, Romper Stomper, Bad Taste and the first season of The Sopranos. Next on my list are an external Mac Mini HD like the miniStack and a new notebook. Unfortunately neither the MacBook nor the MacBook Pro does really cut it for me (no 12” version, too heavy, too hot and far too many issues reported by early adopters), so I will probably settle for an X60s running Gentoo. I’d really would have loved to buy a portable Mac, but I’m not enough of an Apple fanboy to buy a product which doesn’t really fit my needs…

Books:
If you want to read a really good book by a Cuban author, you definitely should try The Insatiable Spiderman by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. Next on my list is Playing the Moldovans at Tennis, which I’ll start reading tomorrow. I also got myself a copy of Mac OS X Tiger: Missing Manual, which has shown me some neat tricks although it mainly targets a non-techy audience.

Geek stuff:
I’ve always been a great fan of tiling window managers like Ion3. However, lately I fell in love with wmii, which I think is an absolutely amazing WM. I’m using version 3, which features dynamic window management as known from acme or Oberon. Reading the guide doesn’t take longer than about 15 minutes, after which I was already able to conviniently work with wmii. So far the experience is really great, and I haven’t even started using the scripting capapilites 9P offers… Additionally using wmii once again made me play around with Plan 9, an operating system I’ve been strangely interested in ever since I first heard about it around 6 years ago. Note to self: spend some time with the 9fans at 23C3!

Gentoo:
Another month spent without doing anything Gentoo related. To be completely honest, my Gentoo box has only been started twice since I moved into my new apartment in early March. Given that I’ll be on holidays for around 10 days in July, you once again shouldn’t expect too much activity from me… I’m really thinking about leaving the project, as I’m currently not doing anything which warrants my developer status. Probably the only alternative to that would be dropping all the ebuilds I’m currently working on, and to focus solely on Gentoo-alt, maintaining the Gentoo/FreeBSD and Gentoo/NetBSD docs, while also working on Gentoo for Mac OS X (although Fink works really well for me). Input wanted!

Random:
September 19th is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Yarr!

Boomtime, Confusion 36, 3172 YOLD

I’ve done it. I decided to finally get my first Mac and ordered one of those nifty new Intel Mac Minis. Since it will mainly be used for mailing, surfing the web and other things which don’t need lots of CPU cycles, I’ve decided to go for the Core Solo, which should be more than enough for my needs.

I’m really looking forward to have a new machine to play around with, and I think I’ll have lots of fun installing Gentoo on the Mac Mini (dual boot) and giving Gentoo for MacOS X a try.

Prickle-Prickle, Discord 26, 3172 YOLD

After a pretty long period of not doing any work related to Gentoo (blame my boss) I’ve finally come around to put together the upgrade of the Gentoo/FreeBSD documentation I promised Diego quite some time ago. I’m sure that our nice documentation developers will commit this soon!

Next week will again be rather busy because my girlfriend and me are moving to a new apartment, but after that I hope I’ll be able to regularly contribute to Gentoo again.

Pungenday, Discord 10, 3172 YOLD

Just a little info for the people who may wonder about my lack of activity lately (mainly the Ruby herd and some guys of the Gentoo/ALT project): I’ve started a new job as a Junior Systems Engineer for a company providing open source solutions for enterprise customers, which means I’ve recently been playing around with stuff like Linux Heartbeat and other cool technologies. It’s quite stressful, but also pretty interesting so far and I quite like it (despite my constant rambling about having a regular job).

However, in January I also had to finish the last few classes of my college career, so there actually was nearly no time left for Gentoo, as the measly 4 commits I did demonstrate pretty well. I still have a seminar this Friday where I’ll present the concept of my diploma thesis, but starting from next week I’ll try to do more Gentoo related things again.

Yesterday evening m3’s girlfriend Susanne organized a little surprise dinner at imás! to celebrate Martin’s 35th birthday, which was really relaxing and entertaing. It was just what I needed after a rather unnerving day at university, and it really made me look forward to my other “social events” this week (the monthly AGLUG meeting on Thursday and another Pardus meetup on Saturday).

Today was my second day in my new job, which I mostly spent on heartbeat scripts and a “funny” server which shows some irritating behavior. I also had to build my first deb package for the deployment of some in-house software, and I have to say that I now love Portage more than ever…

Setting Orange, Chaos 10, 3172 YOLD

This week I finally had a little more time to work on Gentoo related things again, so I commited some overdue packages to the tree.

The action started on Tuesday, when I commited the 20+ ebuilds from ruby-gnome-0.14.1 (mostly version bumps plus a few new packages like ruby-gtkmozembed). Quite a lot of users have been waiting for this, as the previous version we had in the tree (0.12.0) didn’t play nicely with GTK+ 2.8/GNOME 2.12. This problems are now sorted, so that quite a few bugs could be closed and marked fixed.

And then George released Nitro 0.25.0 yesterday, which found its way into the tree only hours later. This has mainly to do with the fact that I already had everything in place from the 0.24.0 release, which I then never commited because George said that there soon will be a release focussed on bug fixes and code clean-up. Apparently this has worked out nicely, so go ahaed, emerge Nitro and play around with it, I’m sure you’ll like it.

In the evening we had our montly Viennese Gentoo users meetup, which as always was really funny. I came home pretty late and my head still hurts, but it definitely was among the most entertaining evenings in the last few weeks. Thanks guys!

Boomtime, The Aftermath 30, 3171 YOLD

Seems like I haven’t had a post on Planet for quite some time now, which may have to do with he fact that I’m officially away in October… However, there are times when I just don’t want to learn for that frigging exam, so here’s a little status update on my Gentoo work:

• *Gentoo/ALT documentation: Since we will soon start to recruit Arch Testers for the Gentoo/ALT project, I converted our old docs to handbook format, moved them around and wrote some new things. This led to the not-quite-finished Gentoo/ALT Contributor’s Guide, which is intended to be the one place where people interested in our project should find all the necessary information. I’ll still need a few more hours to fix typos and check other docs for now deprecated URLs, but other than that it’s fairly complete, so I hope it’s useful to you!


• *Gentoo/ALT Arch Testers: As mentioned above the Gentoo/ALT project will recruit Arch Testers soon. Somehow Flameeyes managed to convince me to become the operational lead for our ATs, and hparker already brought me up to speed on what that task involves. As I think that good documentation is really important before we start bringing anyone on board, I first want to finish the new handbook before recruiting begins. Once we are actually starting to look for fresh blood, you’ll find announcements in the usual locations (GWN, gentoo-dev, here).


• *Nitro: Yesterday George released version 0.24.0 of his really nice web application framework! There are lots of cool new features, like a complete reworked annotation/property system, support for KirbyBase, SCGI support, experimental HTTP streaming support, improved scaffolding and lots of other great stuff! Seeing how busy George has been, I thought that the ebuilds for all Nitro related packages deserve some extra love, like moving the DBMS use flags to the og ebuild instead of the nitro one (where they really belong, in case someone wants to use og without Nitro), as well as adding some extra useflags. Given that I already commited cmdparse, KirbyBase and an updated version of Facets to CVS, it shouldn’t take much longer until an “emerge nitro” will get you the new and shiny 0.24.0!


• *MySQL upgrade guide: Lately there has been quite a lot of feedback on the MySQL upgrade guide vivo and I have written. Please rest assured that we’re trying to update the doc accordingly ASAP. Unfortunately last time I checked days still don’t have more than a measly 24 hours, and this guide isn’t exactly top of my priority list…

Currently I don’t have that much time for Gentoo stuff, so things are going rather slowly on my end of things. At least I managed to do a version bump of pdf-writer and to finally commit the ebuilds for Nitro 0.23.0 that were sitting in my overlay for some time now.

Today I’ve been a good boy and submitted patches for the MySQL upgrade guide and the Gentoo/FreeBSD documentation. I’m sure the great folks from the docs team will commit them soon for your reading pleasure. There also was a little update to the unofficial Gentoo/NetBSD doc, so now there’s really no excuse for not helping Damian anymore.

If you haven’t tried out eselect yet, you definitely should do so! Especially if you maintain one of the current foo-config and update-bar tools please consider converting it to an eselect module, to offer our users the benefits of a consistent and flexible framework, which additionally also has the advantage of fully supporting $ROOT. Also there’s good documentation for users and developers, so you won’t have any problems getting started. That said, I’ve written a replacement for ruby-config that Danny will commit pretty soon, so expect to see it in the next release of eselect.

There also have been some small updates to the Gentoo/FreeBSD installation instructions, and thanks to Cardoe’s input I’ve already done another patch that soon will be commited by one of our docs team’s members.

Last but not least I’ve written up a short guide for migrating from MySQL 4.0.x to 4.1.x which can be found here. It’s just plain text and based on Francesco’s mail, but he didn’t want to write something up himself. It was done late yesterday evening when I was really tired, but it’s better than nothing and we have a link to give out to our users.

Thanks to Xavier Neys, the Gentoo/FreeBSD doc has made it’s way into Gentoo’s official documentation. To celebrate this occasion there have been a few little updates and corrections, enjoy!

Additionally I’ve also done an installation guide for Gentoo/NetBSD this afternoon. Note that this is NOT an official Gentoo project though! Instead all the work so far was done by only one person: #gentoo-bsd regular Damian Florczyk aka “thunder”, who keeps track of this effort in his personal blog. If you’re interested in this project feel free to contact Damian to see how you can help!

Last but not least today saw the release of a new Nitro version! As I was just checking my mail when the release announcement came, I immediately started working and had bumped ebuilds for glue, og and nitro (including two new ebuilds for new deps) ready less than an hour later. Unfortunately there seems to be a packaging bug in one of the deps (filenames get all messed up, so require can’t find them), so this stuff is not commited yet. I’ve reported this bug upstream and hope this gets fixed fast, so nitro-0.23.0 can find its way into Portage soon.

This week I not only had time to finally install Gentoo/FreeBSD on one of my machines again, I also completed the long overdue update of the related documentation. What bothers me a little is that the pre-tags (and the comments inside them) look a little odd, but maybe the guide.xsl I use is just too old (I used the one from swift’s webspace mentioned in this doc)... However, the long term goal is to finally make this document conform to the documentation team’s coding style and make this an official doc, and I guess these problems will go away then.

On a somewhat unrelated note I recently bought a copy of Mono: A Developer’s Notebook. I really like this book, and working through it is a lot of fun, I’d just wish I had a little more time for it!

No, this is not about a certain patchset for the kernel sources, so you can get your blood pressure down again. Instead it’s about “an efficient, yet simple engine for developing professional Web Applications using the Ruby language” (quoted from Rubyforge).

I know, this sounds a lot like the much hyped Rails, but Nitro definitely is diffent! I now could try to sum up the cool features of this framework, but I think some excerpts from the README can do a better job than me:

The wonders of FOSS: jabber4r is a Jabber library for Ruby, which has seen its last release in early March 2004. As the package seemed to have problems with newer (>=1.8.2) versions of Ruby, I refrained from adding it to the tree. Well, at least until today, when my Rubyforge tracker informed me that jabber4r-0.8.0 has just been released. It’s in CVS already, so it soon should be available on a mirror near you. Enjoy!

Also new to the tree is PDF::Writer, a library that allows you to create PDFs from Ruby. Sounds cool? It sure is! Go check out the demos if you don’t believe me…

Also some kind soul informed me that yesterday I posted a wrong link to my Gentoo related ta-da list, so here’s the correct URL: http://citizen428.tadalist.com/lists/public/95952. I also updated my original post with the correct address.

The last paragraph of this blog goes out to all the Gentoo/FreeBSD developers, especially Flameeyes who submitted a comment to my last entry: if you need anything added to the Gentoo/FreeBSD guide, just send me an email with the desired content and I’ll update the doc ASAP. Really.

I haven’t posted on Planet Gentoo for a rather long time, so before anyone thinks that I’m MIA again, I thought I’d better post a little update.

1. I left the games herd. Nobody there will probably miss me, as I never found the time to do more than adding some small games (try Tornado!) and games-util/xgame to the tree.

2. I’m currently trying to clean out the Ruby herd’s bug list. I’ve finally added some long overdue packages to the tree and set up Rubyforge monitoring so I won’t forget about them in the future and will try to poke some people to get some of our other old bugs closed.

3. Over the next few days I’m going to add ruby-gnome2-0.13.0 to the tree. It’s not exactly a fun process, as I’ve learned when I did the version bump to 0.12.0… While I’m at it, I also want to add ruby-gtkmozembed and ruby-gtktrayicon, which currently aren’t a part of the official ruby-gnome2 releases.

4. I created a shared ta-da list for my Gentoo work, so everyone can see which packages are next on my list to get added to the tree etc. If you are really interested in being able to edit this list, just send an email to citizen428@g.o so I can add you to the trusted people who are allowed to do just this (NOTE: this offer only concerns people who have a mail adress ending in @gentoo.org, sorry guys).

5. I’ve done German longdescriptions for all the category metadata.xml files which got added since I first went on a translation spree (except for sci-*, which were done by Kugelfang).

Last but not least here’s an old but still good article called Extending Vim with Ruby.