Whew! After a long absence caused by vacation, holiday, and
disease, I'm more or less back...
RMS
RMS wants me to restructure my database
to incorporate all
hardware in addition to printers. He also suggested some
changes to
highlight the fact that there's nothing Linux-specific;
pretty much anything vaguely Unix can benefit directly from
the information. And of course he wants the usual
s!Linux!GNU/Linux!g thing done. All this after he bumped
into Till, apparently when speaking at Mandrake.
All in all, these are good ideas, and it will give the GNU
project a mighty nifty hardware compatibility list. So I'll
be working toward this over the next few months. Key for
mirrors is a way to host a copy without Postgres+CGI;
luckily I'm already planning a static flatfile database
representation anyway; formatting a version of that as HTML
should be straightforward.
Ghostscript
Mike announced an Epson-funded gig for Easy Software
maintaining an
Epson-friendly Ghostscript kit; this will be "ESP
Ghostscript", an almost-fork containing gimp-print, various
minor fixes, etc. Technically, this is at most a minor
variation on what he was doing anyway in shipping
Ghostscript as part of CUPS; logically, it represents a sort
of pressure point for mainstream Aladdin Ghostscript to get
it's license snafu un-fu'd. In any case it'll be handy to
have RPM/DEBs of gs+stp readily available.
Disease/Travel/Work
For the holidays I went on a week-long cruise to various
Carribean islands including St Thomas/St John, Dominica,
Martinique, Barbados, and St Maarten. All really nifty
places--especially Dominica, St John, and Barbados. The
ship was Carnival's Fascination, which I can't really
recommend; the onboard food/service/entertainment ranges
from fair (food) to awful (entertainment). I guess it was
good if viewed as a portable hotel.
At work the incredibly wrong email setup is now irrelevent,
as I've established working email on the Linux server by
carefully avoiding our company's DNS entirely. Of course,
now the email addresses are unrelated to the company, which
is sort of a flaw, but at least things from cron to version
control can now work.
I'm finally recovering from a series of funny dieseases
which culminated in Conjunctivitis (aka pink eye). This
involved hemorrhaging, itchy eyes full of goo to the point
that I couldn't really open them for three days.
Fortunately my eye doctor gave me antibiotic eye drops,
which cured things pretty quickly. Unfortunately this blew
last weekend from a free software standpoint. Sigh.
Stupid Car Tricks
Today I parked by the door at work. Unfortunately, during
the day, a huge chunk of ice fell of the roof four stories
above and made assorted huge dents in the hood. Doh! This
appears to be a(nother) design flaw in the building; fully
1/3 of the parking lot suffers from this problem.
LinuxWorld
I'll be going to LinuxWorld in New York later this month,
courtesy of my employer.
Drop me a note if you'll be there and care to meet up...