tasting that fresh mono goodness.

So its been a while since I last blogged, and I’ve decided to give in on that whole “I promise to blog more often” routine which just doesn’t work, but after having a few things happen recently which someone might actually like to read about, I decided to write a new installment of my crazed thoughts to entertain those religeous few 🙂

I’ve been looking for a simplistic, yet powerful Podcast client for quite some time now, without any of the ones i’ve found (iPodder/Juice, Rhythmbox etc) being simple and specific enough. I fairly recently came across monopod which I wrote an ebuild for (0.3) and after finding a bug open for it on bugzilla, submitted it to portage.

At the same time, I decided to clean up v0.4 and got right into mono development. So far I’ve fixed up the deprecated code, fixed and partially re-worked the iPod support, cleaned up a lot of smaller UI niggles and started writing a plugin system fairly similar to Banshee’s to support automatic sync to iPod, daap, etc etc.

I’ve been in touch as well with Edd Dumbill and hope to start putting more time into turning monopod into a very convenient lightweight, but extensible podcast client. Of course, the fact that Banshee (which is awesome by the way, thanks Aaron) is actually getting a lot of attention from people writing podcast plugins for it means that monopod might end up being fairly short-lived. But obviously it has its purpose and I would never encourage playback support in it by standard anyways.

Anyways, on a totally different note Tim (Plasmaroo) lisa (lisa – funnily enough) and I met up in York for a bit of a gentoo get-together with a few other people on Saturday. It’s nice to catch up with people face to face, and Tim’s ability to shout russian in Pizza Hut impressed me! We met a rather interesting poet in the bookstore and ended up chatting about the ups and downs of (iirc) Jasper, XML, XSLT, Why not to use JavaScript, and then participating in some amateur filmography at the top of the stairs! 🙂

It was fun, hope to do it again sometime. The opportunity will come sooner than expected too with an unofficial meet in manchester shortly and a Gentoo UK gathering planned sometime near late May/June in London. Of course, everyone will be welcome and all interested parties should express their interest by badgering George (cokehabit) on #gentoo-uk 😉 – I’m curious about rough numbers as I’m sure George is as well.

So, I could go on for a while with all the things I’ve been working on recently, but instead I’ll give it a break and leave some beef for the next few days 🙂

Also to note, David Nielsen (Lovechild, some of you may remember him from his gentoo days) has been sexually abusing a lot of the UK developers recently. Word of warning for those tempted to visit us in London 😉

Long time no chat

So, its been quite some time since I last blogged. I thought I better update everyone as to my whereabouts, what I have been doing, and what im going to do 🙂

Lots of things have happened in my life recently. Shortly after christmas I took the leap and moved across to York (England) leaving my job, friends and family behind for a new life. I’m currently in new employment, study and have a great flat with my girlfriend. Its taking some time to adjust, since when I arrived the first weekend we were here I was sat in A&E, and have been nursing a wound from surgery since 🙂

So, on a York note! Live nearby? bored (very!) and fancy a drink? Drop me a mail!

On a gentoo note, of course everything has suffered. No internet access is still a burden for me until next week, and I suspect several days worth of updating and reading mail will follow before I get back into productive mode. I will be reviewing and making some changes to our current genpatches release maintainence to benefit older stable kernels in the tree with security fixes, which in turn should mean kernel sources won’t get bumped to stable purely for security releases alone.

Following on from this there are several changes I will be making to allow pre and post merge execution of scripts (likely wrapped to execute as required user) in module-rebuild. A few people have also suggested to change its name to modules-rebuild to better reflect its capabilities and also to match modules-update. I think I’ll do this fairly soon – but I’ll mention it on the -dev/-user mailing lists first.

Anyways, lots of other interesting plans, and also a few kernel patches to push for inclusion at some point – but for now I’ll leave it there and commit to blogging more frequently 🙂

Cancer

I am not sure if cancer has ever touched on anyones lives, but in the past year a lot of people who I am friends with have turned ill through cancer. It is a truely horrible illness which people suffer, and having to sit and watch people fight against cancer has really opened my eyes a lot over the past several months.

Recently, my grandmother was diagnosed with a very rare case of Lukemia, which is apparently on a dramatic rise. It has been, and still is a hard time for my family as my mother is under no illusions that it is fatal (she is a well qualified matron) and of course, no one enjoys seeing loved family members pass away. As I now realise, nothing can ever prepare someone to be told that they have as little as a week to life, and no more than 9 months.

A good friend of mine is overcoming chemotherapy as an after-effect of bowel cancer. He is making a good recovery.

My boss and his wife have also both suffered cancer over the past two years, but both appear to be making excellent progress.

I also know of several people, often young (younger than me) who are having an ongoing fight with cancer, taking life a day at a time.

This morning an email arrived from my boss asking us to sponsor him and his wife to the Parish Walk. a 19 mile walk around the parishes of the island in aid of raising money for Cancer Research UK. I also recently read the blog which lilo posted to freenode (http://overcode.yak.net/3) of John Hall (not maddog) fighting against a serious type of skin cancer. It has some interesting links to other sites as well.

It reminded me that even in a world where physical limitations dictate existance, people are a unique experience and can never be replaced. I hope that my presence in this world has been meaningful, even if only in a small way. After all, when all of this is gone and all traces of your life have been lost you can be happy in knowing that for that brief period of time you were alive you helped make someone elses life mean something.