Older blog entries for roguemtl (starting at number 13)

I sympathize with axboe.

Spent some time chatting with other MH devels in-person today. Good pizza to be had. Submitted my first patch to Spruce... more to follow tomorrow.

Yesterday, visited the FSF in Boston, as well as my sister.

Hacked on some miscellaneous code. Need sleep (finally).

Also visited the Delorme map store today (with their 3- story scale (including rotation) model of the Earth). Cool stuff. Also stopped at the visitor center down the road to ask why the State of Maine and Canadian flags were flying upside-down. Apparently they have a prankster in their midst.

Good day all around.

Has been an interesting pair of days. Bought a cordless drill yesterday (DeWalt 12V) and proceeded to complete furniture repair work as directed by wife. (By the time I was done, I came to the complete realization she has minimal knowledge of such matters (including how much of my time these repairs would take), though I did get some new tools out of it ;)

Worked on some code and discussed the 'secret project #2' further. Worked on a logo for Marble Horse. A graphics artist I am not. Discussed PHP3-driven software patch repository plans with snippy; a project for the next few days.

khemicals to arrive tomorrow (more cleaning to do before then). Couple of new tasks on the horizon for the weekend.

Sent two more patches off to the w3m maintainer. My list of things I'd like to enhance in w3m is staying about the same length on a day-to-day basis ;) Spent a bit of time reviewing dexter's patch; looks good.

Started cleaning the room a bit as I shall have a visitor at the end of the week. Also started wrapping my sister's birthday present.

All is well.

Was ill this morning at ~2:30 but am feeling alive again.

Split wood on Friday; started planning (with my father) an OS upgrade for their print server (moving from near-ancient Slackware -> semi-recent RedHat; mars_nwe -> samba). I am hands-off on this one (he runs the show :)

Fiddled with some Palm things. Talked a fair amount with snippy, fejj, khemicals and dexter.

As there has not been a notable response to our plans for SLPv5a (a backward- and forward-compatible format extension to SLPv5), it will likely be dropped (though the materials we have done thus far will be available for others). Stampede's SLP guy (sbaker) has basically decided not to use SLPv5a, SLPv5 or the work he previously did on SLPv6. He is now writing a completely new package format for Stampede, SLPv0.90 or somesuch. Details of his SLP plans will probably be included in the devel meeting logs for April 22. I believe this was the only remaining Stampede project with which I had ties.

Worked on [hacking] w3m and [heavily testing] spruce. dexter is working on w3m things now as well. Latest spruce release (0.6.3) seems to be working quite well.

Made some headway on the 'new project' yesterday; discussed it with one of the people involved for a good three hours. MHFSG things appear to be moving along well :)

Spoke with one of my good friends regarding training sessions at corporations. Two thoughts have resulted from this chat; one his, one mine.

First, what good is training if it is done in such a manner as to cause people who have been with the company for more than six months to quit? Silly goings on are not appropriate, in some cases. (his point)

Second, why do some corporations have a week of training related to teambuilding and empowerment? Teambuilding takes more than a week. Let's look at this another way: how long do US Marines spend in boot camp? They certainly spend more than a week on teambuilding; why would they sink so much time into it if they didn't need to? A week of "teambuilding" and "empowerment" seems absurd. Introduce people on good terms, let them know the ground rules and let them build their own team (unless lives depend on in, in which case, put them through boot camp).

As my friend pointed out: "Only 2 of my coworkers are on my team, they were on my team before the training session, and remain that way during."

Last few days have been interesting; wrote a song while singing in the shower.

Submitted materials to the 'nail' maintainer to provide autoconf support. nail has a goal of keeping the source tree simple; IMHO, autoconf meets these goals, allowing easier expansion, less maintenance and ease in supporting diverse configurations. As an added bonus, autoconf also keeps logs of the configuration process which can be used by devels/supporters/maintainers in resolving issues reported by end-users. I don't know whether these materials will be used; time invested in autoconf seems to be time well spent.

Did some additional testing on Spruce. One bug I found has been resolved in the devel CVS tree.

At the request of the w3m author/maintainer, I reworked my bigpatch to not include style changes; he is planning to implement a standard style on the w3m code base with this release, it appears.

All publically submitted patches can be had from the Marble Horse FSG patch respository.

Worked on some miscellaneous coding including 'the new project'. Thinking about aquisition of a trgpro. (Linux on a Palm seems advantageous. I do have an HP 100LX currently, though I believe ELKS is still a good distance out from easily working on the HP 100/200LX, despite someone getting Minix working on them.)

Talked a bit with a couple of people about SLAB things.

MHFSG web of trust should be complete sometime this summer (GPG). I would definetely be interested in key exchange with anyone who plans to attend OLS 2000 (or perhaps LWCE in August.

Yesterday (Sunday) was a decent day; I posted my first article on Advogato and it received a few responses.

Chatted a bit with my wife and her classmate Anne (Portuguese) regarding Palm, Handspring, etc. Doctor types certainly seem to have an understanding of technology in general, but do not always see the extremely simple ways it can be meshed into their lives, enhancing patient care and reducing the amount of time they must invest in certain repetitive tasks.

Spent a bit of time reviewing the work of others; made a few comments and posted their materials where they can be downloaded. Some people continue to impress me as they pick up new skills and start to farm their own ideas more directly.

Worked with khemicals on the Free Software Directory documentation; initial internal revisions are now complete and the materials have been directed to the sponsoring body... all is well.

I am ever amazed at the number of sight-unseen work-unseen job offers people receive when they resign from their volunteer projects ;) If one knows nothing about your company, what would make them want to work there if they can tell you have no idea what they have done in the past, what skills they have, or how they would fit into your company? ;) Headhunters can be humorous in their vast generalizations and classifications.

Have a bit more e-mail to respond to today from the weekend mailbox.

Tinkered a bit with Spruce; more testing of Spruce slated for today. Excellent mail client.

Monday is a holiday in two states in the United States; Maine and Massachusetts. The holiday is "Patriots Day", which marks the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775 (the beginning of the US war for independence).

Since I am in Maine, this will likely be a day of free software work :)

Has been a busy day; responded to a fair amount of e-mail. Have a few important e-mails which I shall address tomorrow.

Had a great day.

Spent some time with a friend in nearly Bath, Maine; then visited a friend in almost Readfield, Maine. Was a good day... had some good talks and had a nice long walk.

Fiddled with some Palm OS devices in the morning with a medical doctor and three medical students. Was a good time all around. USB cradle is useful for hotsync (speedwise), it seems.

Asked one of my friends from Arhus, Denmark if he belonged to a viking club... he had a good laugh :) Viking clubs exist (see May 2000, National Geographic, p10-11.

Spoke voice with lilo and had a good chat.

The SLPv5a package format specification draft has now been released for public comment; details may be found at: http://www.marblehorse.org/projects/slp/public -comment.html

Fiddled a bit more with the IPX decodes currently done by Ethereal (specifically, IPX SAPs and NCP packets).

Worked a bit on FSD things for khemicals. Chatted with dexter about a security tool he and khemicals are working on.

All is well.

I would like to make it clear that this announcement has been written by the developers who have resigned, not in any official Stampede capacity. Matthew Wood, Stampede Linux Head Developer, made statements earlier in the day that he plans for the Stampede Linux project to continue.

Our big Stampede-related announcement:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1

We have been developers, end-users and general supporters of the Stampede Linux (Stampede GNU/Linux) project for over two years. We have enjoyed working together as a team and pursuing many of our own interests in conjunction with expansion of the distribution. Many of us have grown up on Stampede.

It is now time for us to part company. Due to a number of reasons based on the current administrative nature of the Stampede Linux distribution, we are unable to continue supporting the efforts of the distribution. As a group, we feel that the needs of the group have not been supported by the current model of operations. Though we have tried, we have not been able to affect change in this regard. Despite our strong long-term commitment to the project, it is time to move on.

As a group, we shall endeavor to find a more suitable, democratic forum to express our interests. To those who have supported our efforts over the last two years, we thank you.

Signed (in no particular order),

- - Jake Moorman (roguemtl), former Assistant Head Developer (and Buildmaster) - - J. Daniel Powell (minotaur), former Lead Alpha Platform Developer - - Rob Aagaard (lenolium, rawb), former Buildmaster (and Assistant Head Developer) - - Gabriel Ricard (gabe), former Developer - - David Burley (khemicals), former Developer - - Erich Ziegler (needo), former Developer, end-user - - Per Linden (pli), former Developer - - Michael P. Gorse (vortex), former Developer - - John Hoffmann (snippy), former Web/Database Developer - - Klaus Naumann (spock), former Developer - - Janine Restis (mccoy), former Testing Specialist - - Adam Farrell (skate111), former Developer, end-user - - Timothy Krell (shinjisan), former end-user, supporter - - Misty Smith (rhiannon), former supporter, end-user - - Dan Knoepfle (deadmonkey), former Developer, end-user - - Chris Gahan (epitaph), former Developer, end-user - - Andrey E. Lerman (lae), former Developer, end-user - - Kristjan Kristinsson (doze), former supporter, end-user - - Mattias Eriksson (snaggen), former supporter, developer, end-user - - Arnvid Karstad (ievil), former supporter, developer, end-user - - Johan Lindman (tybollt), former supporter, developer, end-user - - Peter Dam Mains (dam), former supporter, developer, end- user

This message has been signed with my GPG key to prove authenticity. Please feel free to direct any questions and concerns to me,

Jacob Moorman Former Assistant Head Developer, Stampede Linux (or Stampede GNU/Linux) roguemtl@marblehorse.org

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rsync + ssh makes a fantastic combination. The world of free software needs more temporary tattoos. Each day remove the tattoo you wore the previous day and apply the tattoo matching the tool(s) which made your life easier in the past 24 hours. vi editor tattoo yesterday, rsync+ssh tattoos today. Having securely transferred ~4GB of data from a very remote machine in the last 24 hours despite occasional timeouts, rsync would definetely be the tattoo of the day.

Worked on the FSD documentation a bit for khemicals' over the last two days; things are nearly finished. Scope document for the project is next on my list.

SLPv5a spec draft is nearly complete.

Wacky things on the way on the Stampede front. More details coming soon (tomorrow's diary entry, perhaps).

ext3 seems to be holding up well in my two test configurations. I've purposefully crashed my machines a several times; ext3 recovered successfully and all seems well. I plan to do some performance comparisons against reiserfs/xfs/ext2 in the next week and shall make sure my formal results get posted somewhere accessible. Lots of useful tools and methods around for benching filesystems these days.

Good weekend on the way.