Moving in. And out.

So that’s it. That thing kids have been doing for years, I’m doing it too. It can only mean I’ll be a bit less of a dinosaur from now on.

I’ve resisted blogging for years thinking nobody really reads blogs. Except for the really interesting ones, for sure, and mine couldn’t possibly be interesting. However, the main reason I stayed a non-blogger for so long is certainly because everybody else was doing it. And just recently I thought I had better get into this blogging thing before my mother-in-law does it. Can you imagine that? Scary. I can’t afford to take that risk.

This is your typical mostly useless “Hello World” post. Mostly only because you usually post it to make sure everything works, but other than that it’s of no interest. So I’ll try making this somewhat less useless by giving an update on why I’ve been slacking for so long.

Some of you may know that I’ve been in the process of moving to the US. Again. Of all times it had to be now, talk about bad timing. It was supposed to happen quite some time ago but things got in the way. Things like some real-life work project taking more time than anticipated and requiring me to stay in Europe. And other things like some very recent mortgage rules in the US which make it virtually impossible for a foreigner to buy a house. On top of that the housing market in Boulder hasn’t fallen that much, if at all. Sure, things are moving slower but prices are still up there. A change of plans was needed.

So we made a decision. The Big Boss (a.k.a. The Wife) and the two Tyrants will stay in our summer house in Olympia, WA until the end of the school year because they can’t stay in France any longer. In the meantime I’ll have a lot of travelling to do for work so I may not be in the US that much anyway. Actually I may not be anywhere much. As soon as things settle down a bit I’ll be able to start looking at getting them a place in Boulder for the next school year.

At that point I’ll get a decent internet connection and I can resume working on Gentoo. My main task being recruiting, I need to spend hours on irc for the reviews, interacting with recruits in order to complement their mentoring, and threatening people to kill their cat if they don’t join us as Gentoo developers. Yes, now you know how we recruit: blackmail. Try it, it works. Anyway, not having a real place to live for a few months, I have to use pay-as-you-go HSDPA which costs 25 € for 6 hours. So I can’t idle on irc anymore. While I’m away Petteri is doing a fantastic job at keeping the recruiting pipeline at a not-too-shameful size. And he’s training two other recruiters which is excellent news. We’re finally getting some help after months of begging for volunteers. Training recruiters is a huge amount of work but it’s the best investment he can make of his time.

And there’s the packages. I maintain the sci-electronics category alone or almost and it’s slowly but surely rotting. I bumped some packages and fixed a few bugs here and there and it’s more and more difficult. Without a decent internet connection I can’t follow up. Whoever you are, if there’s one bug you can fix there please do. Don’t think you need to be an electrical engineer to maintain these packages. I’m one and there are a few in there that I maintain that I don’t even have a vague idea of what they do. All I know is some people use them and file bugs. I can understand these users giving up on Gentoo and switching to Fedora where people like Chitlesh Goorah are doing an amazing job at providing users with a great set of tools for electronics.

Another package that deserves more attention is hplip. An awful lot of people use it and it’s a few bumps late already. The problem with this one is you need to be able to test not only printing but also scanning and faxing. The latter is the issue as fewer and fewer Officejets have fax capabilities nowadays. Mine does, but it’s in a container somewhere between Houston and Denver. Timo nicely offered to help on the ebuild, but he can only test printing. If you can test scanning and faxing and know your way around ebuilds I’d suggest you comment on the various hplip bugs to make yourself known. Fortunately I have simplified the ebuild in the two years I’ve been maintaining it, and as far as I know there are no major bugs.

Feel free to touch any of the packages that I maintain. Don’t feel like you have to add yourself to metadata but you’re welcome to do so if you want. And don’t be afraid to break anything, you can’t possibly break more things than I did.

Congratulations if you made it this far. Next I’ll discuss Donnie’s excellent post on improving Gentoo.