Month: September 2006

The title really says it all. Gentoo has become so elephantine that like any large body, it takes more force to keep the momentum going. So, with all the odds, Gentoo is slowing and stagnating. Are there valid concerns about some of the newer ideas? YOU BET. ABSOLUTELY. I’d be a little creeped out if those ideas came out concern-less. But, these days, no matter what your new idea is, it’ll get shot down.

Josh’s post pretty accurately sums up the various reactions that are usual for any new project announcement/proposal. Then there’s the other segment of the population that says we should improve such-and-such first (most likely “${such-and-such}” == “qa”). And I say this: you’re right too. QA should be improved. Guess what, though? No matter how much you improve it, you won’t ever reach perfection. It’s human nature. So, there’s no real point at which you can go “ah well, we have enough QA, now, what ideas do people have for new stuff?” Partly because such a point doesn’t actually exist, and partly because the respondees will be required to fill out this form in triplicate, have it notarized, attach photos, a little bribe, and then wait to be skewered about it, before receiving the next set of forms, of which you only get one, but need to submit back 8 copies, with another 8 photos (updated, not the same ones as before!), have a different notary public attest each one, and then submit back and wait for some sort of answer from some people (council, and all those who feel their toes stepped on).

Now, I realise in this post and in my mail last night I’ve probably alienated a few of the developers who I consider to be my friends. All I can say is that we disagree. I don’t think we disagree on fundamental issues at all, but we do disagree on a few issues, and that should be ok.

I also wonder how many people had a knee-jerk reaction to Stuart’s announcement simply because of a personality clash with Stuart himself. And that is sad, because the technical merits of his project (the announcement of which followed policy exactly — the thing is barely a week old, and still quite in the idea phase) got overlooked in the process.

So, all of a sudden a conversation started up yesterday in the #gentoo-dev channel about bank accounts, retirement accounts, 401(k)’s, and just general finance. And you thought all we did was talk about portage, didn’t you?

Anyway, our two financial experts, Doug/Cardoe and John/AllanonJL were there to dispense their advice. Food for thought, really. There’s a side of me that thinks “Oh, I’ll be active and working for decades to come. I have so many dreams in the works.” Then, something happens to someone close to you and you’re reminded that all this could halt just like that.

And now that makes me think of what will happen to those I love in the unlikely event of a water landing. Their lives shouldn’t have to undergo any immediate financial changes. So I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the concept of finances and saving and investing. I’ve started (recently) taking steps: I’m signing up for the 401(k) plan at my new job; I’ve attached an Orange Savings to my account. I’ll get to putting to practise some of the advice I got last night in the channel: get a Roth retirement account; get higher yields on money in the bank already. Maybe someday I’ll even invest! Actually, I’m going to be vesting my stock options at my last job.

And the Gentoo connection to all this? (Courtesy of Mike/LoReZ, partly). Whatever information I have that is uniquely with me should not remain so. Copies of it should reside with at least one other person. Luckily, this is a very limited amount of stuff — it pertains to the Foundation and the legal aspects of setting it all up. All this justifies even more my desire to have Renat be up to date on the same information. I also will bring up that the foundation’s banking information also reside with at least one other person. The same is true for contacts etc we all have.

This may be a little depressing sounding, I suppose (though I’m not depressed, I’m just feeling practical/pragmatic).

I’m always open to hearing people’s thoughts on this subject, so lay it on me, people.

So, two weeks ago, I announced the new trustees on the mailing list. There was a little push-back, because we only had 5 nominees and 5 open positions. However, since then, there hasn’t been any movement on it. So, for now, I’m considering the people on that list of trustees to be accurate and up to date. The trustees@ email address goes to those 5 people. We are presently scheduling a first meeting.

On my todo list, I have the lawyer/paperwork stuff to wrap up. However, I’d like to have a trustee who’s more savvy on these matters to do it with me. So I’m looking to tap Renat for that. Chris has already been active in protecting Gentoo properties. Stuart has fund-raising and Gentoo meet-ups on his agenda. Grant and I are hopefully going to get our asses in gear this year 😛

Today was a very sad day. Gentoo lost a good friend. The FOSS community as a whole lost a good friend. Rob Levin (/nick lilo) of the Freenode project passed away this morning. My heart is heavy from the news, and I still can not believe it. It probably will not hit me for a while yet.

Rob was, to Gentoo and to me, personally, a very good friend. Not only was he helpful to the extreme (and graciously so), he watched out for us. Freenode has been Gentoo’s IRC home since Gentoo’s inception, and Rob’s hospitality toward us was one of the major reasons for that. Any issues Gentoo faced, it felt like Rob faced with us.

His passing a big loss to Gentoo, to Freenode, to FOSS. Rob, I miss you already.

His wife Debbie and his son Benjamin survive him. If you would like to leave a note for them, please head on over to the freenode site. I would personally prefer people to send his family some help. Please see the freenode site for how to do that.

That’s what I learned this week at the training: StreamBase is a platform. That’s right, behind the registrations and logins and all that (more on that in a later post), you get to discover an IDE that’s easily the best IDE I’ve seen for event processing (in a very generalised way, a lot of GUI builders are event processing builders). Here you have an interface that basically gives you true drag-and-drop functionality to let you create powerful applications. Not only that, StreamBase lets you create your own things and drag and drop them as well. I’m being a little vague, because it was a lot of material and I’m still sorting it all out in my head, but I’ve come away from it being hugely excited.

This is reminiscent of the excitement that Gentoo generated in me way back in the day — and for similar reasons. I’m looking at the StreamBase Studio the other day in marvel at how this thing is a *platform* that is just waiting to be used. Well, there are some major players using it already — but my goal is to get developers interested in creating applcations on this platform.

My manifesto then: in the upcoming months, I aim to make StreamBase accessible to all you smart people out there 🙂

So, week 1 and I’m actually more excited about being here than I was before I got here (and I wanted really badly to get here).

Kulleen out.

You know, one of the things that has maybe gotten lost sight of in the past few years in Gentoo is: what exactly is Gentoo, anyway? Is it a distro? Is it a meta-distro? What the hell is a meta-distro anyway?

So, I’ve been playing with Django a lot lately. And that obviously makes people think of Ruby on Rails for some reason. But here’s the point: django and ruby are frameworks that allow me to build what I want to build. And that’s the real power of Gentoo, isn’t it? Gentoo is a framework for your own distro.

Its power is in being a platform. A platform upon which to build exactly the sort of system that scratches your itches. You know, you get your ricers and then you get the regular desktop user, and the server users and the hardened users and the embedded users (and I haven’t mentioned all the different architectures let alone the BSD people — well there, I just mentioned them), and most of these people probably installed the basic system in the same way and then went on to customise.

There’s a sense of empowerment there, and it awes me.

Well, this was the day I’ve been looking forward to for about 2 months. I finally walked into the StreamBase’s offices as their newest employee. It was a great feeling. I’m bubbling with excitement. There’s so much to do!

The first couple of hours consisted of the usual new employee thing with benefits selection etc. But first, I got to meet mostly everyone (and most for the first time). StreamBase is a really cool group of people. And for the afternoon? On the fast train to New York City. For the next couple of days, I go through training on StreamBase’s software in NYC. It’s a weird day to be here, when I think back of the events of five years ago. I’ve been to New York since then, but previously I haven’t even been able to so much as look in the direction of where the towers used to be. Perhaps I can this time.

So, from the Hilton Garden Inn near Times Square, this is me signing off this post.

There are none. Evolution used to have one. And it was my favourite. Feature. Ever. The gdesklets (no link, see rest of sentence) just suck. They’re unstable and they keep crashing. And there’s no standalone any more that I know of. I think surfraw used to be it, but it’s apparently dead upstream. So now, I’m thinking of going back to Claws because there is an rss reader plugin available for it. In order to do the migration, though, I have to make my laptop into a mailserver, to put all the mail from evo into it (over imap) and then read it into sylpheed. That’s a good thing to do anyway, but I was hoping to do it on a proper server box. Ah well.

Any you know, I’m pissed off because I missed the first 13 chapters of Night Flight Mike, which is the newest novella from the venerable CheeseBurger Brown, whose writing I just can’t get enough of. If I’m nonresponsive for a while, it’s because I’m catching up on Night Flight Mike.