Category: Gentoo

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.

Actually, looking back at the last 3 blog posts that I’ve made, I’ve pretty much given away who exactly I’ll be working for 🙂 In fact, one person out there guessed correctly.

Anyway, when I found the posting on the search engine, I sent in my resume with a cover letter, I stalked HR over on LinkedIn, and then finally I went into the place physically with another letter telling them why I was Seemant Kulleen. 7 interviews and a few weeks later, they asked me to work with them on a contract to come up with rules and judging guidelines for their contest. It’s actually a pretty sweet contest, with a ten thousand dollar cash prize at the end of it, with weekly one thousand dollar prizes before it.

I advised them on the rules and guidelines and indeed made two specific requests:

• deflashify the front page
• don’t launch browser windows on clicks, let everything live in the same window

For those of you who did go to that site before and after, you’ll notice the difference. I think it’s a lot more user friendly now, don’t you?

And now, it’s a few weeks later, and I’m joining their full time staff. I can not tell you how excited I am about this. I think the technology is fantastic, and I think the scope for growth and emergence of a standard for StreamSQL is tremendous. Let’s face it, people, the amounts of information that need to get processed are just growing. Fast. There are needs all over the place to process as much of it as fast as possible. And StreamBase, to me, seems to have the best position to do just that.

In the next episode, I’ll talk a little more about their technology and why I got all excited about it.

I’ve been really really quiet lately. I’ve ignored Rach, I’ve ignored James, I’ve ignored my new old friend Gordana in the emails. And I’ve ignored the blog. I haven’t been bullskipping or anything like that, though. I’ve been fairly occupied and busy.

First off, Aimee and I are moving out of our current digs and into a new apartment. Our current landlords are great, but the apartment is a little small for us. So we’re looking for a bigger place. We were going to move into another complex, but the company there has questionable business practises (they employ the bait-and-switch technique very very effectively). I won’t link to them, as I don’t need to be sending traffic their way. So we looked instead at a privately owned place and we really liked it, so hopefully we’ll be able to move in there. With two days to go on this lease, the pressure’s high!

As you know, Daniel is now here for a year. He’ll be working at Brontes. Yes, that’s right, I did not say “with me” even though that has been the plan throughout. Actually, I resigned my position at Brontes on Thursday.

I highly enjoyed working with the team at Brontes. Ed is easily the best VP of Engineering I’ve ever worked under. Phil was a fantastic team leader, and Dave is a great guy to work with.
I made some good friends at Brontes: Joe, Barbara, Janos, Tong, Justin, Dave, Tom, Brandon, Adam (I’m missing a url for Joe, but I’ll fill it in later).

Suffice it to say, I’ll miss them all terribly. It’s bittersweet, this parting of ways. I’m going to a new exciting opportunity that I’ve wanted for a long long time, and I’d kind of reached the end of where I wanted to be in Software Engineering.

The new opportunity? Ha, I’ll keep you guessing until I post the next installment.

Long time no blog — life’s been busy and crazy, no time to breathe even. World Cup takes up my free time these days: after work, school and homework.

Just wanted to check in and mention the webcast that a few of us were on the Linux Link Tech show last night pimping about Gentoo. Whew that’s a lotta links for one sentence.

True to form, because there were four of us, we kinda stressed their asterisk server. Actually, between the network lag and the dropped call, I’m not sure how coherent any of us were. Judge for yourself I suppose 🙂

Pat and the gang were just great though. Very gracious hosts, and it was a pleasure being on there. I’ve never been on the radio before, and this was a great first time!

Go England (in the World Cup), else Go Ghana, else Go Argentina, else Go Brazil.

Just a quick note, while I’m on lunch break waiting for the missus, watching a few Dennis Bergkamp, about xterm and the virtual/utempter.

I’ve switched all xterms to finally depend specifically on libutempter and not virtual/utempter (which was defaulted to sys-apps/utempter, but that has changed). I’ll be killing sys-apps/utempter entirely, as it is unmaintained upstream, and has bugs. A while after that, the virtual will disappear as well. The bugs for reference are: 75943 and 115533.

Edit: Added links. Food blog to follow