Older blog entries for jdub (starting at number 39)

So, yesterday I woke up with a dreadful hangover. Four times. On each occasion, my second thought after "Uuuugggghhh..." was, "Buggerit! Why didn't I get her phone number?" I even thoroughly checked myself for phone-number-on-flesh-marks before having a shower. No such luck.

gnome

The waking dead of hangover seems to be good for getting GNOME stuff done, however, so I think I have a better understanding of George's perspective on things. "Better", as opposed to "full". Unless you were George, having George's perspective would be a serious health danger.

The release team meetings are Saturdays, 0400 Sydney time, which is a bit less of a challenge than 0300 before daylight saving. Or so I thought. I left the party at 0300, and went into the city to find a cybercafe and calling card. I then spent an hour and a half on the phone, trying to save the rest of the gang from the noise on my end... Squealing kids playing Random First Person Shooting Game. Worked OK though, and thankfully telsa helped out with the minutes.

Foundation elections are looking interesting. Much fanfare from the gutter press about RMS's candidacy, which I guess should be expected. It's not as hard to choose who to vote for as last year, but I don't think that makes my election any more likely... ;-) I didn't realise the short summary was for "who I am" stuff, as opposed to "what will I do on the board" stuff, so please read my long email if you're considering me.

Web work has been a bit quiet. Well, I think it's more that web cooperation has been quiet. I've been doing a lot of work (think a sea of crunched up paper) on the information architecture, and designing the publishing and news systems... I should really just concentrate on the publishing stuff for the moment. We still have the target of on or before the release of GNOME 2.0, and there's lots to do. I'll have to reinvigorate the team again soon.

I'm making a perky little app to manage our release engineering stuff, to reduce the work we do to manage who's releasing what, and where they're at. For the mean time, I've just made a little perl script that turns our summary into html. Now I have to get all the TODO stuff together.

random

People keep trying to convince me to write a book. Fuckers.

People who believe in big brother and organised syndicates trying to take over the world never cease to amaze me. There just isn't enough money in the fast-drying-up 'taking over the world' biz. It's too damn expensive.

So, all your common garden type MBAs and corporate lackeys look into mass invasion of privacy, building islands with underground intercontinental ballistic missile launch pads, large-scale food contamination, baby switching, and the usual gamut of world domination tactics.

Then they run up the numbers and realise that the fast track to rich, lazy and badly dressed is through the US congress, medical patents, or making bad coffee (lots of it). They may be greedy, unkind, pathetic piles of societal waste, but if there's anything they know, it's where to invest, and since JFK was shot, world domination has taken a nose dive for swank bad-guy bachelors of all ages.

Catie's response to this was, "You're just bitter that the coffee thing didn't work out", which is the funniest thing I've heard for at least six months. It just goes to show how crap everyone else is, and that you should all start making a fricken effort.

Slackers.

Thanks to Catie for this.

May as well do it properly:

CONFS=$(awk '$1 ~ /^\s*[Ii]nclude$/ && $2 ~ /^\// {print $2}' /etc/apache/*.conf | sort -u) LOGS=$(awk '$1 ~ /^\s*[A-Za-z]*Log$/ && $2 ~ /^\// {print $2 "*"}' /etc/apache/*.conf $CONFS | sort -u) ; zgrep -ch default.ida $LOGS | echo $(tr '\n' '+')0 | bc

With thanks to the Debian Apache maintainer, Johnie Ingram, for the CONFS and LOGS parts (used in his most excellent log rotating system).

But... is there a better way of doing the tr | bc bit? :) The zgrep -ch is certainly faster than using wc -l.

Far too busy, sorry. ;-)

SLUG

I've created a project for SLUG, the Sydney Linux Users Group from Sydney, Australia. So all you crazy SLUGgers sign up!

so long

It's been so long since my last entry. I'm pretty shocking at "diarising", although I very much enjoy reading the diaries of my Free Software inspirations (idols? Perhaps that's going a bit far), many of whom have diaries here. Advogato obviously needs a Doogie Howser colour mode for diary entries.

Sometimes it's easier just to clam up and/or be wacky than actually deal with stuff. A friend of mine took his own life late last week, and it has - for the most part - been a dank and bleak world since. I was somewhat detached from the events leading up to it all, as I still live in Sydney, and the rest of the gang are in Melbourne. That gave me some relative emotional space to come to terms with things before being thrown headlong into funerals and such.

I'm past the (hopelessly useless, though fully warranted) anger and the guilt now. Not past the empty feeling yet, although that has been with me far longer than Jamie's death. We are all very angry because we have been dealing with Clara's death for some years now (she was without doubt the centre of the group), and Jamie has given us so much more to deal with, and taken his support away. We've all been lost little mice, and whatever progress we'd made has now been tossed to the wind.

wonderment

Wonderful things have happened during this time, though. The rift in our little group has been mended, which is at once inscrutible and predictable. There is a lot of love, and this feels very good.

I had already arranged a couple of things on the Thursday and Friday afterward, and for once I managed to force myself into doing them. I'm very glad. The first was dinner with Simone, who would have to be the only person I have felt a great amount of warmth for since Clara passed away. Unfortunately, for a bunch of silly and serious reasons, we parted just as I was falling in love, and finally sufficiently unguarded enough to do something about it. Luckily, we still see each other, and I had a very happy and comfortable night. I'm quite sure that Simone did too; she's much happier these days, which is wonderful to see.

On the Friday night, I had promised to go to the Spanky House to cook pizza for the inhabitants. This I did, with the help of SH member Liedra, who helped with the shopping and cooking. I was going to do it all myself, but more people were invited, so we teamed up. Fun night, and we ended up hacking up a Markov IRC bot. jackie, the bot, has offered much in the way of entertainment and hijinks since.

Impromptu lunch with Catie (Liedra), who was very willing to show off her Agenda PDA, as I'd been talking about buying one that morning. They rock very hard. Catie is one of those magnificently warm and cheery people who can't help but make you smile. Found out that Chatswood finally has a decent gelato/sorbet shop... Mmmm! Bumped into ex-girlfriend Silke on the way back, who happens to live around the corner from our current offices. She seemed well; 'twas nice to see her again. I don't think she's entirely over being cranky at my having gone out with Simone (who Silke doesn't like in the least). She would never admit this, of course.

Very good SLUG meeting this month; Catie did her Agenda talk (which had everyone oooh-ing and aaah-ing at all the right moments), and I think my completely unprepared Free Software Email Dream Team talk went down okay. There'll be a report up on the SLUG site on Monday afternoon.

conclusion

I think that all of these cheery things to do and great people have saved me from another terrible rollercoaster ride. I didn't even talk about my amazing employers, who seem to have unnatural patience and empathy. Next time; I'll write something about our Great Office Move.

- "Most gay men just don't come like Jon Cusack."

- "I want to know how you know that."

[ When your friends are mostly gay, expect hijinks. ]

Small world, again: That ominous dark stain near the front door of the office was me. Ask malcolm, who can probably better embarrass me than I can. (malcolm, are you getting your email?)

other

Nothing much to say. Missing LUG's CodeFest (that Jaq happens to be missing too, sadly) for reasons beyond belief. :( Seems this means everyone can take the piss (or worse, just be straight out nasty). I don't really know what to say anymore.

Gotta get out of here. Fast.

My, and sneakums previous two entries don't make sense without reading them together.

Back to not-fun coding, eh?

Aye, aye! When I was going through my Ex-Red Hat user stage (of course I would use myself as proof), I used to consider Debian the complete OS, and others... mess. One of the most important factors in my mind - to be a great OS - is consistency. The Rule of Least Surprise. Debian's rigid policies achieve this outstandingly - I hope Progeny can build an excellent OS for new users on top of this magnificent base.

My OS is built the same way as the software that I use. That rocks.

It's true, Debian users can be complete arseholes. Not just annoying prats, but full on complete arseholes. It's almost embarrassing - you're just sitting back, showing people some cool tech that will make their lives easier and hopefully impress them with it's elegance - when some slimey little pinprick comes in and squeals about how 1337 apt-get is or something.

the apt-get religion is bullshit

I have a theory however, and so far it has been confirmed in a number of different people: Ex-Red Hat converts are like ex-smokers; irritating at best, Napoleonic at worst. So, when you're looking for some serious insight into why Debian is such a cool OS, don't ask the Ex-Red Hat user.

Yes, the apt-get religion is bullshit, because there's too many other things about Debian that are far more outstanding. Everyone and their Chihuahua has heard about it and replicated at least some of it's functionality... Let's advocate the really interesting stuff now, shall we?

Next time, my theories on why comparing Free Software to Libertarianism or Communism is a red herring, and why homosexuality is a better point of comparison. (No, seriously.)