The past few days have been a tad rough -- some personal issues to deal with. On the plus side, I started reading bash.org.ru (in Russian, naturally), and it's awesome. http://bash.org.ru/quote/6011 is the funniest thing I've read in a long time.

I started writing a long post about this past year, but then I thought no one really wants to read that. So here it is in two sentences: This year has been the best year of my life. Also, 1L year at HLS is crazy.

All in all, I had a blast. I tried crew for the first time, and had a fantastic time.

Now that my finals are over, I should have more time for Gentoo work. Huge thanks to Gunnar et al. who picked up my slack.

Also, I'm in Mountain View for the summer. If you are around and would like to grab a beer or something, let me know.

http://metro.b3co.com/

The ones I've been to:

I started Planet 02138, a planet site for Harvard-related blogs. If you're a 02138 guy/gal, check it out, and let me know if you have a blog you'd like to add.

Huge thanks to Ben Schwartz who suggested gnome-power-manager. After reverting to gentoo-sources (I was trying suspend2-sources all along) and installing gnome-power-manager, suspending and hibernating just works!

Of course, there's a glitch. I'm using XFCE, and I discovered that all GTK theme info is lost on hibernate. The culprit is xfce-mcs-manager, which apparently must be run after restarting ALSA (really not sure why). I'm hoping that the gnome-power-manager folks will add suspend/resume hooks soon (they are working on it).

Now excuse me, I gotta go suspend.

I got a couple of useful suggestions for my suspend/resume problem. For a while, it looked like s2ram was going to fix it, until I discovered that on every other resume the system hardlocks and the screen starts turning all kinds of colors. Pretty, but useless.

I thought this was an issue with fglrx, so I tried vesa. No dice. Oh, I also ran into a lovely image corruption bug at 1400x1050, which I see has already been reported.

So, suspend still doesn't work. Fabulous.

I give up. For the life of me, I can't get any kind of suspend/resume working on my Thinkpad T60p. It's tantalizingly close: hibernate-ram wakes up but the screen remains blank, and hibernate is also almost there, but not quite.

If you have any suggestions on how to get it working, pretty please let me know.

I don't know if there is anything I can say about Stuart's departure. To me, Stuart was the human face of Gentoo. He was the first developer to actually talk to me when I was interested in joining the project. He was my mentor who always had the time and patience to explain how things worked, what I did wrong, and what I did right. He did all that without once telling me I was stupid, hackish, or otherwise unworthy of attention. He was always positive, never arrogant. Somehow, a bloke in England whom I have never met managed to make Gentoo more than what is starting to feel like a collection of email and IRC bots hurling insults at one another.

Farewell.

Last Friday, reiserfs on my laptop choked again. After rebooting, I was greeted by a kernel panic. fsck said it had to --rebuild-tree. If you haven't been through that, it's _scary_. Fortunately, I was able to recover everything.

Two days and some rsync-fu later, I'm running ext3 without crypto, happy as a lark. Oh yes, and now I have backups.

On the flipside, I lost my dev chroot so I will be out of commission for a few days.

Since mcummings has kicked off his campaign, I thought I'd repost my email to -core.

I accept [the nomination].

For the record, my goals are:
(1) resolve the legal issues, namely our 501(c)(6) application and copyright assignment stuff;
(2) help set up and maintain our bank account.

I'm a first-year law student, so I don't mind talking to lawyers.

Finally, here's my campaign button (I don't have fancy helpers like mcummings).

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wrobel has just committed webapp-config-1.50.15. This release contains webapp-cleaner, a small utility to replace calling emerge from webapp.eclass (bug #124440). I'll fix the eclass once w-c is stable on all arches. Please help test it and report any issues.

Update: we'll wait a few weeks before we ask for stabilization.

For a while now, I've been frustrated with my keyboard layout situation. Ideally, I'd like to be able to switch between three: US dvorak, US QWERTY, and Russian. For some reason, X refuses to switch between layouts if I specify all three in xorg.conf. Since I use fluxbox, kxkb isn't an option (it messes up my key bindings).

Well, yesterday I finally had enough and wrote a quick bash script that switches layouts using setxkbmap and loops through my three layouts. It even notifies me of the current layout via xosd through pyosd. Life is good.

Turns out that the SATA-on-wakeup issue is still present in 2.6.17, and the patches don't apply cleanly anymore. For now, I've worked around it by disabling AHCI in BIOS. Apparently, FC5 has the fix, but I'm too lazy to track down the right patches. If anyone knows how to fix it properly, please let me know.

2.6.17 includes an updated version of the hdaps driver that supports Lenovo ThinkPads. A big thank-you to Uberlord who added hdapsd to the tree. The accelerometer works now, and hdaps-gl shows a floating laptop!

I'm AFK until mid-August. Ping wrobel, Stuart, or CHTEKK if you need anything. I'll have occasional access to email and IRC.

I finally gave up and bought a laptop, thus breaking my streak of adopting unwanted hardware (my desktop box was the third machine I literally found in the street). The laptop is a ThinkPad T60p; I owe rajiv a big thank-you for reminding me to take advantage of the deal my school has with Lenovo, which translated into a 45% discount. indefatigable is a dual-core 2.16GHz Pentium M (Yonah), 100GB SATA hdd, 1GB RAM, and an ATI Mobility FireGL V5200. All I can say is, this is a beast. After invincible, a PIII 733MHz, this thing flies. Better yet, all the bells and whistles work with Linux, save one.

- CPU: -march=pentium-m, SMP
- SATA HD: works with ahci
- sound: ALSA with intel-hda-snd
- encrypted / and swap: I followed a couple of guides. It wasn't as straightforward as I had hoped: it took me a while to figure out the right setup for the initramfs image (uclibc/busybox, static gpg and cryptsetup binaries). gpg was complaining about the wrong console, and it took me a while to grok that the kernel was using /dev/console instead of /dev/tty. It was smooth sailing after that, and now I've got a fully encrypted setup.
- Power management: kernel CPU governor automatically adjusts speed when running on battery. Hibernate to RAM works beautifully after applying a couple of >patches
- Graphics: works with ati-drivers-8.24.8, but xorg.conf needs to explicitly specify ChipID=0x71c5. DRI seems to work fine, although the system tends to lock up after quitting X. Oh well.
- Wireless: works fine with ipw3945.
- Ethernet: e1000
- Built-in fingerprint reader: had to tweak a few of ebuilds out there, and screw around with PAM modules (folks, always keep a root console open when operating machinery^WPAM), but now I can log in by just swiping a finger;
- Extra buttons: sound/mute and reading light work out of the box. Thanks to tpb and XOSD, I have on-screen indicators just like on Windows. Back/Forward buttons work with xmodmap. As a side note, it turned out that the Windows key wasn't recognized by X as a meta key. I had copied over my old Fluxbox keys file, and was quite amused when instead of typing a, o, r, and i flux was opening up a bunch of programs. Sure made editing the config file in vim a lot of fun.
- I haven't tested bluetooth and IR yet, but I don't really care.
- The one thing that doesn't work at the moment is the built-in accelerometer which can be set up to park the hd when the laptop is bumped. There's a driver out there, but it seems that the IBM->Lenovo switch changed some hardware identifiers and the kernel module doesn't recognize the device. Someone has posted a patch to the mailing list out there, but I'm in no rush.

Also, I just discovered conky, the ultimate system monitor. I was never happy with gkrellm, and conky is waaay better.

As far as reusing old hardware: I shelled out $100 for a Hauppauge 350 card and turned invincible into a MythTV box. It has ~250GB of storage in hardware RAID-0, which should do nicely.

So, pretty much everything I need works, VMware is happily compiling my dev setup, and it's finally nice out. Life is good, kids.

I just committed our new documentation for webapp.eclass. We hope that it will help devs and users write and maintain ebuilds for web applications. Go check it out! Comments and patches are welcome.

We also have a brand new project page, courtesy of wrobel.

I finally finished going through the bugs assigned to webapps-request, an alias that has been accumulating ebuild request from users. Having closed what feels like ~30-40 bugs, I got it down to just 13 . Most of the remaining bugs are packages with weird build systems that I'm not interested in.

What did I do with all those ebuilds, you ask? What I didn't do was stick them in the tree. The web-apps herd is very much understaffed at the moment, so I've put a hold on adding random packages. Instead, I moved them to our brand new overlay. The purpose of the overlay is to make it easier for end users to install web-apps without adding work for our devs. So go check it out and let us know what you think!

Noteworthy package of the week: webgui from PlainBlack.

Update: I've gone through the maintainer-needed alias and picked up a few more relevant bugs. We are now back to 43 :|

I've registered for the FSF First International Conference on GPLv3 (Jan 16-17). Is anyone else going?

It's been a busy week for web-apps. I've made some excellent progress on my TODO list, which means I'm closer to the Really Exciting Stuff (TM).

Let's see how we're doing:
(1) With beu gone, it looks like Stuart and I are the only ones still standing in the web-apps herd. This means that Stu will be Strategic Lead, and I guess that makes me tactical lead. I suppose we still ought to hold official elections though.

(2) I finally fixed the long-standing otrs and rt bugs. I'm sure there's still bugs lurking around, so let me know if something's broken. In the process of fixing up the ebuilds, I discovered and fixed a few small issues with webapp-config and Apache docs.

(3) meatoo has progressed very nicely. Check it out, and let us know in #meatoo if you have any suggestions!

(4) wrobel has expressed interest in joining the web-apps team. He's already posted a few ebuilds to our Bugzie, so hopefully we can get him up to speed quickly.

(5) I've posted a list of QA-related thoughts to the devwiki. I'd appreciate if anyone with further suggestions could add to the list. I'll be starting the QA cleanup very soon.

(6) interchange is now p.mask-ed.