Author: seemant

So, I haven’t posted in a while, right? I’m not asking, even though that’s a question. Now here’s the thing. I saw that piece of crap that everyone _wanted_ to like (even me) called Episode 1 (The Phantom Menace). The only menace was the movie itself. The phantom? that would be the direction, plot, dialogue, story, etc.

And I totally missed out on Episode 2 (Some Pretentious Title I Know Not). Apparently it was also crap, 2 minutes, except for, of yoda doing something with a “laser.” Or was that the last Austin Powers movie? I dunno, I’m sure someone out there can clarify.

So now it’s time for Episode 3 (The Other Title I Don’t Care to Know), which hopefully rounds out the series. Maybe we can all get on with life after this. Now, my wife is planning on seeing it with a few friends of ours. It seems I’m obligated to join them. spb advised me to do watch it after having had a stiff drink or two. Apparently that’s what he did, and his review follows:

“episode 3 has really cool effects when anakin’s eyes turn evil,
and has obi-wan fighting a four-armed lightsaber-wielding droid
that’s all you need to know”

I’m actually fine with that. Sounds like another 2 minutes, only spread apart to keep your attention.

Of course, the most sublime review I heard was this:

“Some peoples ejnoy EP III and some peoples not, I
cannot say, which side I should to choose. Movie is not so bad,
and not so dark and mystery like Lucas want to, and even awsome
Natalie looks strange ;)”

from matti in the old #gentoo-hardened channel.

So, will I or won’t I? I don’t think it’s open to debate, as I rather enjoy spending time with the wife. So in this case, I’ll take one for the team, as it were. I’ll report my findings when I see it.

Oh right, Gentoo news: er, nothing’s happening there, really. Got a few fixes to put in. xterm needs loving, kerberi need loving, samba needs loving.

So, as of a few moments ago: Andrea who manages our mailing lists finally converted bug-wranglers to a proper mailing list (it was weirdly placed in the old mailing list scheme. Additionally it is now restored to its original purpose.

That purpose? So that people can look at incoming bugs and act upon that information by reassigning/closing/dup’ing bugs as needed. I’ll let you in on a sekrit too: it’s been a valuable tool to find potential developers. SpanKY is the prime example of that. There are many many others along the way as well, but he was the first. Well, anyway, about a week ago we noticed that there were a tonne of people on the bug-wranglers mailing list (which is really more of an alias in the way that it works) than I knew about or of. So, we sent an email asking everyone to justify their reasons for being on the list. The non-respondees (apart from the @gentoo.org people) were removed from the list.

The new policy is that from now on, if you want to be a bug-wrangler, start helping on bugzilla, you’ll likely get noticed. Jakub is the most recent example of that. That bug points out the other aspect of the bug-wranglers changes. All the non-gentoo people will be put on a list somewhere that infra and others can see.

That’s all for now, seemant out.

Donnie, now that is a seriously sad situation. The simple hypocrisy of it cheeses me off so much, it’s unreal. Now, I don’t mean to get off on a rant here — but one of my biggest fears before Gentoo moved from Technologies, Inc. to Foundation was the potential for Debianisation. The problem is that in an online democracy (or maybe any democracy for that matter?), you will mostly hear only the vocal minoriry. The happy majority won’t be vocal so long as it’s happy. but the minority is inclined to get incensed about the pettiest of things, and then raise a ruckus (which is not necessarily a bad thing — it’s the reaction times to analysing the validity and then acting upon the ruckus which changes in a democracy).

Take a look at the Desperate Housewives at a Football game and the silliness that that caused, or the Janet Jackson boob thing to see an example of the vocal minority. There are many cases where the minority is, in fact, correct — or at the very least gives you something to think about (the antiwar movement is a good example). But the Housewife/Janet thing is an example of an idiot minority.

Anyway, the point is — hypocrisy really pisses me off. I would hope that Gentoo doesn’t get Debianised, now that we’re a democracy.

Now, just to fend off the people who might flame me for this. First of all — no, I’m not opposed to democracies at all. Second of all, I happen to really like Debian, and third of all — Ian Murdock and Daniel Robbins are two people who get a huge amount of respect and props from me.

Now, what is my frustration? Nothing at all — I’m just ranting 🙂

Oh yeah, and wget will get a new update soon.

So, hot on the heels of -O9, mike showed me this bug where pretending and wishing for a 6-way cpu system is apparently enough, if you wish hard enough.

The pennies drop, and developers have their time wasted again.

Hmm, I seem to have lost the content of this post. OK, so anyway, there was some stuff about this thing where this guy did some stuff and some things that was, like, cool. But I can’t find the link any more, so blah.

Update: OK, I found the one I was looking for, but I also found a second, which is actually worse.

What’s this new craze of “Oh how I wish I had a 16-way computer. Instead, I’ll just live my life in some deluded state where I believe I do have a 16-way computer. No, I’ll tone it down — I actually have, in my delusion, a 15-way.” And then why bother filing bugs about things? Wouldn’t it be better to delude those bugs into non-existence, while you’re at it? Oh, and I want a pony.

Not much time lately, but the people love their optimisation, don’t they? I can’t believe I missed that report and sent it on to foser uncommented. Anyway, it’s at least a candidate for the top 10 of this year.

So, it seems like there’s a general convergence in the ether, because for the past few weeks I’ve been sending emails back and forth to our samba team, about the messy samba ebuilds in portage. Meanwhile, both slarti and beu noticed the messiness and talked about it.

So, trying to shuffle that in between work-work and gentoo-work took a while. Anyway, the result was the new ebuild that I put into portage yesterday. Major props to beu for testing it for me, between cvs commits and rsync updates. It looks like the new ebuild is about half the size of the old ones, which is a plus. The cleaning, however, has only just begun. The next step is to move the other two ebuilds to use patch tarballs offada mirrors as well. The final step, before I finally relinquish the packages back to our samba guys will be to move the configs outtada files/ directory and ontoda mirrors.

See, here’s the thing Donnie, I think the planet should honestly make available all the blogs from a dev who chooses to be on it. I think it’s a silly rule to have it be only on-topic. What is on-topic really? I mean, just because you don’t say (in your case, xorg) in your blog entry, does not mean that what you talk about (even if it is about Constantine getting kicked off) affects your work as a dev. Just as a by the way, constantine’s kicked-offness doesn’t affect me, personally, but I wanted to see how much off-topic I could get with this post. so ha! Anyway, I do think it’s a bit silly to have to go to three different sites to read your blog, instead of one-stop shopping. Kulleen out.

So, I made a HUGE mistake the other day when I put xterm-201 into portage. First of all, I hate when people do the straight to stable thing on architectures they know nothing about. So, that means I hate myself this time around.

The other thing is — well, now that xterm has a toolbar, we got requests to be able to enable it. I used to do it off the local USE flag. I decided, instead to just enable its building, but suppress it from automatically showing up when you fire up an xterm. So, I made a little patch, and released into the wild, after having tested it on my box.

Then, I tested some more on my box, and it turns out that a command like this:
xterm -sl 14000 -sb -hold -geometry 150×10+10-30 -title “Camera” -e “time sudo nice -n -10 sudo -u $USER python MYPYTHONAPP.py $*” &

doesn’t actually work. In fact, it doesn’t work at all. Well, the xterm shows up, but it’s all blank. It’s hard to see whether the command in it is actually running, because the xterm is blank, and non-responsive. And trying to terminate those programs is a pain. So, like, I dunno what to do about this — but if someone out there knows, please let me know. I’m rather tempted to hard mask it in 24 hours without input, to be honest. (Though, I am planning on taking my problem to the excellent and brilliant Thomas Dickey and maybe he can guide me through this jungle.

In other news, can you believe Constantine got kicked off? Shocking, when people expected otherwise.
Not that I’m a big fan, or any fan of the guy, but who’s voting for the other two yahoos?

So, now there’s bug 90663 which shows a user clearly using compilation flags gleaned from some 1337 ch4nn31 on some freaky irc network somewhere. People, if you’re going to be filing bugs, please at least tone down your cflags before you do. Bug reports like this are a waste of:

• Gentoo developers’ time
• Your own time

It’s a small enough list that you can probably memorise it. Please pay close attention to the first item there.