Category: Gentoo

As it turns out, I really am Seemant Gulleen. Or more accurately Seemant G/Kulleen with a silent “G/”. So, John fixed the error I was having. Turns out it’s an off by one error in gtkhtml (poor evo just crashed because of it).

Anyway, his patch fixes it and I am back in Gnome, baby! I really missed being in Gnome. KDE was fairly quirky for me. For starters, the fonts in firefox were all big like I’m in Kindergarten or something. Konqueror was slightly less than idea for viewing some websites (like salesforce.com for example — how do you login?). Konsole didn’t highlight URL’s for you like gnome-terminal does. Someone told me to get used to the Klipboard, and maybe that would be fine, but hell, I might as well use xterm if I wanted that. Other things: kopete crashed a few times (but gaim isn’t the bees’ knees either so, we’ll call that one a tie).

Kmail I didn’t like much the behaviour where it automatically goes to the newest message when you klick a folder. Perhaps there’s a setting, who Knows. I will miss the news feed reader in kontact. That rocked, and quite honestly, shame on evolution folks for ever removing it.

And, oh yeah, my biggest gripe: now I can click on my clock in the systray and see my appointments and tasks for the day. You don’t even Know how important that is to me.

I’ve finished removing KDE from my system, and am now recompiling things like dbus without kde and qt support, because I’m done with them.

A HUGE shout out to John for this.

That’s right, folks, the results are in. I got my blood test results in the mail today. I don’t know what the half the stuff is, but my doctor underlines all the critical bits. Here’s the thing. In February my liver enzyme level was 219 or something (219 of what exactly, I don’t know, because dammit Jim, I’m a developer not a doctor). So, in April it was down by 190, in June or July it was down by 150, in September 120 and today it’s at 89.

So there it is. We have completely inconclusive evidence that the liver cleanse has any effect. I think it was actually more the result of the lifestyle switch to no fast food, less sugar, less dairy and of course the vegetarian bit.

I have another test in December, so I’ll post another update then. Now, I just want to address questions like this. The idea behind the fast is not to lose weight. I’ll say that again:

The purpose of the fast is cleansing, NOT weight loss

.

If anyone out there is thinking of this, please first talk to your doctor, then go buy Stanley Burroughs’ book and read it. It’s a short read, but it contains the exact instructions that you need. And, for your sake, for my sake, for f’s sake, do it for the right reasons.

I hate writing these. What I mean is that I hate having to write them. What I mean by that is that I wish people I care about (not only because they’ve become friends, but also because of the tremendous value they’ve brought to Gentoo during their time here) would stop leaving.

Yesterday, Jon Portnoy (aka avenj) announced his retirement from the project.

Jon came to us via the #gentoo IRC channel. In fact, if there’s a perfect way to become part of a project, then Jon’s execution is the exemplar of it. A few of us noticed Jon being generally helpful in #gentoo. He spent time with helping new users, and he spent time defusing volatile arguments among users, and he had mad irc skills. So, one day, we’re all just hanging out in there (I think the channel was less than a hundred strong at the time), when we get DOS’d by a someone (or some people?). You know, it’s basically a join/part bomb. Anyway, avenj had experience with IRC, so he was telling me what to do to protect the channel. It was easier to just give him the wheel and let him drive, so that’s what I did. And so Jon became the first ever non-gentoo developer to have Operator status in the main support channel.

I thought it’d be a good idea to just keep him as ops, and so for a while that status quo was maintained. As we started talking and exchanging ideas, he expressed interest in the ICC compiler. He also became a confidant with respect to the “developer relations” type issues I was looking at (Gentoo had started the growth spurt and devs were hopping aboard fairly quickly, as was the number of users). Anyway, after Jon helped me shoot a few bugs in packages I was maintaining, and giving suggestions to the then-current ICC maintainer, we decided we better just get out of his way, and so we did.

Now, I didn’t find out till Klieber told me in NYC that Jon was, in fact, 14 or 15 or something. Either way, he had the honour of being our youngest developer ever (I think cybersystem took that honour a little later, and probably someone else carries the title these days). So anyway, everyone was always impressed at how mature Jon is, and how well he handles himself in fiery situations.

Because of his even-keeled disposition, and interest in people, he became more involved in the “developer relations” issues. Finally, when the metastructure project came to be, and Developer Relations became its own top-level project, the natural choices to run it were Jon and I. I’ve never ever thought of it as me being Jon’s boss or whatever stupid hierarchies might exist. I saw in him, my partner in crime. We each had roles, but I can say this — devrel became as successful as it did (yes, it actually is a success, even if a tiny amount of vocal people are very critical of it) because of the work Jon and I put into it. When I retired from DevRel, Jon led it for a year, and then gave the helm to his co-lead, Deedra, and then she to Ferris (fmccor), and he to Bryan (kloeri).

Anyway, in the beginning two years, devrel was a fairly quiet place. As we saw the need to formalise a few things, Jon took the initiative on those things. He developed the intial recruitment guidelines, for example. And the latest iteration of the policy is actually largely his work as well.

Jon’s probably just moving on in life, as well he should. I hope that someday soon, he and I will have the chance to work together gain. As always, Jon, I wish only the best for you. Here’s hoping all your dreams are realised.

Take care, my friend.

Yesterday I wrote about switching my work laptop to KDE. After playing around a bit with the Kontrol Center, I’ve got it mostly looking and feeling like how I want. I’ll blog about that in the next article. For this article, I want to just reminisce about Evolution and Gnome and how I miss them. A picture is worth at least a couple of words, so have a look:

Now, my home laptop is for my Gentoo work, so it is still gnome-based. However, I’ve started the memo and tasks functionality here, so it seems like it’s only a small matter of time before things flake out here. Apparently, there’s an extension to t-bird somewhere that adds calendaring, so that may be a future option. However, that’s a completely non-integrated solution so it’s at the bottom of my list.

Some people may ask me why I don’t just use Google’s Calendar (I’ve definitely gotten suggestions to do so in the past). Thanks, but I barely use GMail for any of my personal email. I’m not about to give Google (a search engine, for eff’s sake) complete access to all my life’s goings-on. Besides, I have a desktop for a reason — I want to use the damned thing. Not everything happens in my web browser. Not everything should, either, I don’t think. If, someday, that becomes a short-sighted statement and the entirety of my computer experience is web-based, I’ll take that statement back (and I expect full integration). For now, it stands.

Tomorrow, I’ll go into some annoyances about KDE in general: font sizes in GTK apps (like firefox), icon sizes on the desKtop and the lack of clickability on URLs in Kterminal or whatever that thing is called.

Meanwhile, if anyone out there has a solution for me to make KDE’s panel klock applet integrate better with kontact, that’d be kool.

I’m actually Kulleen. And so, it really only makes sense that I’m pre-ordained to use KDE, right?

Well, I never subscribed to that belief. In fact, I’ve been an avid Gnome user since forever. I love everything about gnome: GTK+, Evo, nautilus, the works. And it only seemed to get better and better. Well, except for Evolution which only seemed to regress. Things finally came to a head on Monday, and I’ll tell you how.

So, I discovered two pieces of functionality in Evo: the first is “tasks” and the second is “memos”. Now, with these two things, I could put down my task list, share it with my boss, email it, watch it, update it, etc. And, if I have a meeting, I just create a new memo for that date and time and voila, instant meeting notes. Really, it’s lovely. And both functionalities allow you to attach files.

That’s all very well, and my productivity was definitely on the up and up because of it. Monday morning, I fire up my work laptop, and when I press a specific memo (to read or edit), evo crashes. I’ve no idea why it started or what causes it, but bug buddy doesn’t even fire up. It’s just a stupid traceback in the terminal or .xsession-errors.

Well, since I do depend on this functionality pretty heavily, I decided to listen to George
and try out Kontact. That led me to have a chat with Diego about the functionality I needed. Turns out — well, Diego said it best:

ah, generic calendar support then?

.

And well, kmail and korganizer and whatever else can do it just fine. So after installing kontact last night, I ran it in my gnome environment and it looked just fine with the functionality. At that point, I thought I might as well just try out KDE again after all these years, since I’ll be loading up most of its libraries anyway. This morning the computer was done installing kde-meta, and I was ready to go. I spent a little time here and there customising my new kde desktop (though I’m still far from done). I mainly spent time configuring kontact and importing the memos (journals in korganizer) and tasks (to-dos in korganizer) and contacts (or kontacts, I suppose, now). Now, the integration between kopete and kontact is a lot tighter than gaim and evolution ever got.

I’ll give you an example. I like to have my gaim contacts and my evolution contacts to be relatively in sync. So, with two of my evo contacts, I tried adding them to gaim. And that was all fine and dandy, until the next time I opened up evo’s contacts list and saw 20 duplicated entries for just the gaim portion of both contacts. WTF? Anyway, kopete hasn’t done that yet. However, it seems to flake out on a few off-line contacts in that it doesn’t show their identities at all, and when you click on properties you just get told they’re not online. It’s broken behaviour, for sure.

Meanwhile, my foray into KDE is going quite well so far, I think I’ll stay for a while. Evo still has me for the next week or two so if that bug gets sorted I still may make an early exit from KDE, but who knows? I like what I see so far.

Emanuele officially announced his retirement from the project last night. Real life duties are catching up with him, and he’s suffered a loss of motivation within Gentoo, and so he’s decided to move on. This saddens me greatly, because in his short career at Gentoo, he did some pretty amazing things: he cleaned up xterm, he set the clean up of kerberos into motion (which my long time readers will note is something I utterly failed at), and posted various and miscellaneous fixes all over the place (I’ll link to his CIA stats when that site comes back for me).

Anyway, there’s a trend of developers leaving or wanting to leave due to a loss of motivation. I hope it stops soon, because I’m getting sick of writing all these farewell blog entries — I prefer to write welcome messages.

So, any of you kerberos using Gentoo readers, please talk to me about how we can continue Emanuele’s good work in that area. I’m very very fortunate that Thomas pays attention to our xterm bugs, but Emanuele helped him too.

Mood: sad/slightly discouraged.

I remember xmms as well. I used to use it a lot. In fact, it used to be one of my favourite applications. I was even friends with one of the upstream devs (I used to maintain Gentoo’s ebuild for it for a while). Well, two years ago or so, upstream decided that the xmms2 project was sexier. I even got a glimpse of an early version of xmms2, and I was slightly less than impressed. For one, they moved to a different build system that didn’t play well with portage and me at the time (that may have changed by now). For two, they moved to a client/server model. Now I had to fire up two things to listen to music.

In retrospect, however, the XMMS upstream devs were being quite forward-looking. For example, they were the first project I’d heard of that was using dbus to communicate and send messages. All this happened before Gnome 2 came out, by the way. However, XMMS (1) was dead to them. They didn’t want to have anything to do with it. As a result, our patchset for it started to grow like mad.

In that light, I can completely understand Diego’s sentiment and his desire to extricate xmms from the tree (or shall I say, exorcise it from the tree?). My only complaint would the method behind his madness, as it were. As popular as xmms is out there, I think Diego did a disservice to its users, by not warning them in advance of this happening. Luis had barely announced his retirement from the project, when xmms and its plugins got masked for removal.

In the interim, Luis has decided to just go on vacation instead of quit. When he returns, he will contemplate exactly how to take care of XMMS. My guess is that he’ll stick to his original plan of putting the thing into an overlay.

So, to the users out there who are in some way pissed off, please consider a few things. While a lot of devs may agree with you, and certainly everyone sympathises with you about the loss of a favourite package, please consider that we don’t want to become the upstream maintainers for packages. The removal bug has become a place for random users to insult Gentoo developers, which really does not help anyone.

There are two ways to help yourselves and the community:

• take over the xmms code and become the new upstream
• embrace audacious

aybe you’re not talented enough to start hacking on xmms. That’s ok. But then let it go, please. The power you do have is in helping the audacious hackers to fix bugs in the code. You think it takes up too much memory? Well, then, report that upstream! Talk the audacious developer, who seems to me to want to go out of his way to improve the audacious experience!

Please, though, enough with the “you developers have your heads up your asses” comments. The problem is a simple one: we don’t have the time and the resources to become the upstream maintainers and resurrect a dead package.

You know, Dan left Gentoo a few months ago. And he was another who left with a whisper rather than a bang. Dan (danarmak) was already a developer when I joined. At the time, I couldn’t stand KDE. I was a fluxbox user. A few months prior to my joining, Dan had basically become Gentoo’s KDE team. He took care of all the version bumps, he made the decision (a very good one, by the way) to have the /usr/qt and /usr/kde directories in which to house the installations of Qt and KDE, respectively.

He was the classic ideal developer. He tested relentlessly, he made patches, he shot bugs, he communicated with upstream to ensure fixes and patches went back and forth. He helped people on the mailing lists, on IRC, via private email. Dan always made you feel like he maintained KDE just for you. He’s an incredibly nice person. Incredibly nice. Talking to Dan always put a smile on my face and cheered me up. (I only hope to have had a similar effect of him for a fraction of that).

You know how you love the concept of eclasses? The idea behind eclasses is that you don’t have to duplicate code. You just shove it into eclasses, inherit them in your ebuild, and you have access to them. That’s how come Ciaran was able to make the excellent versionator eclass, and how Bart Verwilst (verwilst) (another old time dev) made the flag-o-matic eclass. The first eclasses, people, were the KDE eclasses. That’s right, kids, danarmak invented the very concept. A month into my joining, I’d tried (and loved!) KDE, thanks to Dan. During one of those nights, Dan asked me if I would like to see “object orientation in bash”. Boy, did I! He pointed me at the kde eclasses (portage didn’t have native support yet). What an exciting idea! Granted, it’s not *real* object orientation, but I don’t have to preach the concept of eclasses to you, really. (I will, if you argue too much, in a future post).

Shortly thereafter, I took over the perl ebuilds because they were lagging and bugs were piling up. Well, I asked Dan if these eclasses would help ease the burden of perl module maintenance. He agreed they would. I presented the case to Daniel Robbins, and he liked it. Now, not only KDE, but also dev-perl were using eclasses. So Daniel threw in native support into portage itself.

And that, kids, is how come my closing dev-perl bugs for perl module updates became a mass influx of bugs for more perl modules, because people just used the eclass (and had to code nothing, basically). That led to the idea of g-cpan, which attracted Michael Cummings to the project to make g-cpan a reality, which led to him being our Perl team. That, in a nutshell, is how KDE led to Perl.

That, in a nutshell, is one snapshot of one small set of contributions that Dan Armak made to Gentoo. Two years ago, Dan went on hiatus because duty called: he was obliged to join the Israeli military for a tenure. That tenure is almost up, but he might be called again. Dan decided to leave Gentoo, because he just didn’t know where life would take him in the next few years.

Well, I’m here to say that I have a candle burning for him to return. As far as I’m concerned, Dan Armak will always be welcome back to Gentoo.

PS Thanks to spb for inspiring me to write this article. It was one of the easiest I’ve ever written.

A few developers were retired from the Gentoo project in the last couple of weeks. I’d like to acknowledge those people here for a moment.

First up: Sascha (cybersystem). Sascha was 14 when he first joined Gentoo. He was immediately put in charge of our mailing lists and went on to set up our jabber system and maintained a few packages. At the time he and Jon were the youngest developers on our roster. And, I make no secret — they were both exceedingly trustworthy and dependable. Sascha and I became friends during his tenure here, though his interests had begun to diverge out of gentoo a couple of years ago. I’m sad to see him go, but I believe him to be full of potential, and I know he’ll meet with only success in all his ventures.

Next up: Brandon Low (lostlogic). Lolo and the third person below (wait for it!) joined Gentoo at around the same time in mid 2002. They both attended the same school (IIT — that’s the one in Illinois, not in India), in the same year. They were friends, and during the years they became my friends as well. Lolo did many many many things during his time year, but he might be best remembered as the kernel maintainer for a while (gentoo-sources and for those whose memory goes back enough: lolo-sources!). I think lolo felt increasingly out of place in the growing ecosystem in Gentooland (not unlike a lot of us), and he started focusing on his interests outside of Gentoo, but within the linux community (he’s still active on LKML, I believe). Again, my best wishes to him, and hope for nothing but success for him.

Finally: Nicholas Jones (carpaski). Carpaski took over portage maintenance from Daniel Robbins back in 2002. Before then, he had been sending patches to Daniel relentlessly for various fixes and enhancements. Finally, Daniel handed carpaski the reins to portage and let him be. Carpaski did very very well with it. He even expanded the team to include Jason Stubbs and Marius Mauch. to whom he delegated portage related tasks. Together, the three of them figured out plans for portage maintenance as well as next-generation development. Due to time and real-life constraints (like working for a living), carpaski eventually became a silent member of the portage team. He was elected to the Board of Trustees last year. He was on the initial board as well, when Daniel created it. Nick finally retired from Gentoo once his tenure on the Board ended. Nick, wherever you are, I hope you’re well and I wish only the best for you as well.

These three were good friends to me, they were my confidants, and they are very talented people. I’ll be watching their progress in the next months and years, and I will always be here for them.

Good luck, gentlemen.

Well, I did what I said I’d do last night. I started drinking the epsom salts mixture. Let me warn you, the damned stuff is bitter. Pretty nasty. The only way to do it (you have to drink three-quarters of a cup) is to throw the stuff back. Just chug it. If you sip some water right afterwards, the water tastes sweet. So that’s pretty good, and a sip is enough to remove the taste.

At about 10:20 or so I squeezed one and a half grapefruits (a little over half a cup, a little under three-quarters of a cup) into a jar. I added a half cup of that olive oil (organic, cold-pressed, extra virgin) into the grapefruit juice (or maybe the other way ’round, I don’t remember exactly), and then shook the stuff vigorously to mix. It wound up fairly liquid. Again, the secret is to chug the stupid thing. It didn’t taste bad — a little sweet. Grapefruits are usually notoriously bitter on my tongue, but not last night. There was a hint of olive flavour though.

Right after chugging (I chugged at the bed), I lay down on my right hand side and fell asleep. Conveniently, when I side sleep, I do it on my right. I thought I felt contractions or something, but I think I was just imagining it. I slept fairly comfortably, actually. I woke up at 5, as usual, but went right to back to sleep again. I woke up at 6 as well, but by then I was feeling a little nauseated. And the flavour of olive oil kept wafting up in my breath. A little icky, that. At about 8 I got up and had another drink of the epsom salts drink. By 9:15, I started what would be the first of many forays into the, um, office.

ICKY BIT WARNINGL So, here’s the thing. They say you’ll see pea green stones or something floating at the top. Well, they don’t lie. There were thousands through the day. I was a little disappointed that I didn’t expel any big stones. I guess we’ll see in the upcoming months whether this stuff is real or just boogaboo. I’ll have my verification blood test this week (the whole gluten thing). And then the week after will be another liver cleansing, though I won’t fast for that. I will drink the apple juice, but life will go on as normal.

I’ll keep you all posted on how the next cleansing goes, and how the blood test goes next week.

Thanks for reading me, everybody 🙂

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