What’s down with the Foundation?

..is a question on quite a few minds lately. Overall the trustees list has been quiet forever. Seriously, we’re not talking about anything. Now, that’s not to say that things are not being done, because they are. As you know, Corey left the project. He was a trustee as well, and he was both the Treasurer and group contact for the foundation’s legal team. Two months ago or so, he finished up the 501(c)6 application, and mailed it to trustees for comment. A month ago he handed off the group contact to me, and so I’m in the driver’s seat for the application. There were not many comments on the application, so we decided to send it off to the legal team for their review.

So, as things currently stand, the Foundation’s counsel has us in a holding pattern while they consult experts and review our application. As soon as I hear back, I will report back to the trustees. I’m hoping that the process will now move along with haste.

Please stay tuned, and many many many thanks to Joshua for reminding me to blog about it. I must confess that this info as at least two weeks old, and thus I give my sincerest apologies for the late reporting.

Please do feel free to email me, snail mail me, call me or /msg me if you have concerns and/or further questions.

The bigger a group gets…

…the more of an asshole it becomes. Alternatively, the more things change, etc. What I will say is not intended as a remark against Daniel or anyone. It is merely observation. Mistakes were made, and they continue to be made. The sad thing is that they are the same mistakes.

In the days of drobbins (no link, you can google it), there was once an incident where a problem developer was acting up. Well, this problem developer was not malicious to gentoo. He made statements as did drobbins. The incident I speak of was sparked by an indirect quote that the problem developer made to someone else. When drobbins got wind of it, he ordered that the problem developer’s access be revoked. On a few occasions, I did disagree with drobbins (I know the perception about where I stood in those days, but disagreements were kept private). This occasion was one of them. I argued in semi-public (it was avenj’s presence) that the access be restored immediately, because the problem developer’s intentions were not known, and could have been misunderstood (misunderestimated, if you will). Thankfully, drobbins had the presence of mind to recover from his initial reaction and proceed calmly.

Proceed to today. We have a problem developer (I won’t link to him, but it’s enough of a circus and enough of a divisive issue, that if you’ve paid any attention in the last 5 minutes, you know who it is) of sorts now. He has an ongoing case. His case is under investigation by Developer Relations. In fact, the fact-finding portion has ended, and now the decision-making process starts. Yet, a small group of people have taken it upon themselves to revoke his cvs access. And that’s it. Nothing more can be done or said. No decision by the representative community (devrel, the council, etc). Just a unilateral decision within a vacuum, based on supposition of security. Granted, problem developer is a little immature, and tends to like stirring the shit, and indeed has done some stupid things that have been used as the basis for infra’s decision. The fact, however, is that this is now a community distribution. There are proper channels for this sort of thing. There is at least the assumption of civility, wherein people are informed (devrel/the council) beforehand. And the civility of informing the person with an email, not by having their commit failed. That is simply malicious (whether it was meant as such I do not know, but the perception of maliciousness is definitely there).

The thing that’s common in both cases is that the problem developer found out about it not by a nice email or irc chat, but because their cvs commit failed.

This is not a rant against infra, per se. It’s rather a rant against the general direction Gentoo has been taking in the last few months — let’s say 18 months or so. It’s the assumption of mistrust and presumption of disrespect. We used to be the polite ones (and the user community thankfully has remained so). Now, most of us are just assholes to each other and to the users.

Maybe it’s the size of the group. None of this seems prevaricated. It all actually seems like an inevitable consequence of growth. Have we become what we hated in the first place?

Bank of America? I laugh

So, apparently, the banking industry has made new rules to dick customers out of their money. It’s not enough that the bank holds all your money already. Now they want to keep some of it for good. So if you post-date a check by 2 days, your bank can still cash it and then charge you oodles and ooodles of money for “overdraft protection.” The date is simply unimportant to the honouring the check part. No matter that you have a history of clockwork deposits with them, and that you have an impeccable banking history eith them. No, they would rather risk losing a customer (yes, Bank of America you have lost 2 customers) because they make a couple of hundred bucks by *not paying attention* to the date. That’s just a racket, ffs.

Because, even though their””software” doesn’t look at the date, it sure red-flags if you try to cash a check more than 6 months old. This from the “supervisor” on the other end of the line. So which is it? Does the “software” look at the date or not?

Honestly, this is stupid business practise, and I’m definitely taking my business elsewhere. Bank of America isn’t all the fluffy good neighbourly bullshit they try to sell themselves as. Bank of America is actually acting more like a petty thief. Goodwill actually does have a meaning, you know. You, Bank of America, could’ve let the thing to rest by not trying to tell me you’re doing me a service by returning me 4 out of 10 “overdraft” charges.

As far as I know, a legal signed and dated document is valid on and from the date of the signature (presumably with a reasonable limitation on its lifetime). Same for a check, if common sense would prevail instead of thievery. You sign and date a check, indicating its validity. I’m pretty pissed off with them at the moment, and I’m happy to talk about it. Had they done the honourable thing of apologising and returning the money to my account, this blog entry would have been full of praise.

Certainly the bank that does get my money will be. So far no complaints about the Bank of Oklahoma who has treated us with nothing but respect. We need local, unfortunately, for the everyday banking stuff, so we can’t be exclusive to them. Ah well. I’ll report back on the bank of choice in a few days. But for now, Bank of America is not my bank, they’re just a set of hoodlums.

mood: peeved at corporate greed, which apparently knows no bounds. flame away, people.

Moving forward with heimdal

Thanks, torkel, for your comment. You’re right about krb5-config that both mit- and heimdal provide. That binary (or script) just tells the CFLAGS and/or LDFLAGS that this specific krb5 was compiled with and needs to link to, etc, for programmes building against it. That make any sense? So anyway, as part of the kerberos-config script that I’ve referred to before (though I might have inadvertantly and VERY VERY wrongly called it krb5-config. Actually, I just checked and I didn’t, but I also wasn’t clear on the name of the kerberos switcher script. So it is officially going to be kerberos-config.

At this stage of the game, the way I envision (yes, I will test test test and have ebuilds available for you all to test) it is that mit and heimdal will both install renamed binaries (mit-krb5-config and so on) and then kerberos-config will install symlinks with the expected names for typical kerberos install to the specific implementation. If anyone has better ideas etc please do leave me a comment.

Docs, PDFs and open formats. Huh???

So here’s an interesting challenge. Where I work, I had to put together a server that converts word .doc format files to .pdf files for some of our documents. After quite a bit of searching around (doc2pdf type programmes and scripts), I’d settled on linbox converter. Basically it’s a daemon that runs on a windows machine that has MS Office installed as well as ghostscript and python. A client sends a doc with a request for conversion into, for example, PDF format. The daemon receives, runs office and prints to, for example, a PDF file which it then sends back to the client.

The problem I’ve experienced is with this one document that has jpg pictures in it. Linbox-converter (and even printing to PDF from word itself) seem to fail utterly and completely. The result is some garbled 1.5K long file full of nonsense. Here’s the magic: openoffice (2.01) will do the conversion just fine.

Now the question: anyone out there know how one might send cmd line args to oowriter2 to do the conversion for me? That way I can write a daemon (kinda like linbox converter I guess) that’ll just wrap around ooffice2 for the conversions. Thoughts, suggestions? Note: it has to be programmatic/automatic/system addict- yeah.

The Boston Conspiracy

As you know, KarlTK was in Boston this weekend. We had a truly great time talking. Karl’s been one of my Gentoo heroes for a long time, so it was especially cool for me. Boston’s weather showed karl quite a bit of its repertoire as well. From the unseasonably warm temperatures on Saturday to the blizzard like will-my-flight-be-cancelled conditions of Monday before he left, he got to see quite the range. No doubt he is impressed. Oh there was also the Harvard, and Freedom trail stuff, though we neglected to wow him with the Citgo sign. I guess he’ll have to return to Boston for that gem.

The only Gentoo dev missing from all these proceedings was rajiv, and hopefully he’ll be able to join next time. We have quite a little troupe of Gentoo people in the area, hopefully we can all meet in person a little more often.

Doug Flutie, I never knew ye

Yeah, ok I’m missing the blog entries for my trip to Bangalore’s foss.in event. I promise to do that soon. In the meantime, I just read that Doug Flutie did some sorta drop kick which is great and kudos to him (as soon as I figure out what exactly a drop-kick is). I always thought it was some sorta wrestling thing. Anyway, the bit that dropped my jaw was this: Flutie is with the Patriots. When did that happen? More importantly, why is he following me around?

Seriously though. Flutie was quarterback for the Bills for a while. He joined them while I was in Rochester, NY (the town considers the Buffalo Bills to be the local team). He then went to play for San Diego the same year I went to Los Angeles to work. As you know (don’t yo?) LA doesn’t have a team, so once again, Flutie was in the next major city over (yeah, it’s a stretch to call either Rochester or Buffalo a major city, but they’re both about the same size city in that region of New York). Now, I’ve been in the Boston area for almost a year, and he joined the “local” team in March, a few months after I arrived.

Is my fate somehow tied to this Doug Flutie? And if this is his last year playing football, what does that mean for me?

OK, enough coincidences, I’m off to bed.