Wow. Just under four years since I've touched this thing...

Haven't been in a blogging mood for the past few months.

Main thing I've been focused on lately is Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. I've been porting/packaging things for kfreebsd-i386 and testing out a lot of things. But the best part is, my GNU/kFreeBSD installation guide (mentioned a while ago. http://jrac.hostrocket.com/?page=gnukfreebsd) is now the official install guide. I've been given commit access to the glibc-bsd subversion repository so I can maintain the guide. I feel like such a leet open source contributor.

Speaking of contributing, I got a small patch of mine included in XFce :) Wasn't anything very significant, but it just feels nice knowing I'm giving something back. Hopefully I'll have a few more together soon.

I've been checking out the GStreamer documentation lately. I'm interested in writing some sort of graphical sample library manager to suit my needs. I use things like Hydrogen, Audacity, Beast, Ardour etc. to create songs/beats, so something specifically designed for samples that can handle playback, category organization etc. would be nice. If I can wrap my head around doing this with GTK+ and GStreamer, I'll give it a go.

Looks like I'll be moving to Coffs Harbour by the end of the year. I haven't really got a good chance of finding a job in general, but there'd be way more of a chance of getting job in a city with a population of 55,000 than in this 3,000 person shithole.

Built some XFce 4.0.3 i386 Debian packages. Over here. Don't hammer it too hard, I've only got 2gb of bandwidth....

I'm in need of some new hosting for my site. If anyone is willing to help me out, the latest post on my site contains the details, reasons etc.

Not had a very good last few days. I've had a sore tooth for a while which I got checked and an appointment to get fixed. That was on Thursday or something and the appointment is on Tuesday. On Friday I woke up after a few hours sleep with an aching tooth, an aching ear and wanna-vomit-but-can't-then-a-bit-comes-then-nothing sickness all day. Thankfully I got some Panadeine Forte goodness from someone the same day. Been ok now that I've got codine. Now I've just gotta face the drills and other various pain inflicting devices at the dentist tomorrow.

When bad luck hits me it hits in spurts at the worst times.

During my doped up painfest my main system's audio decided to go on a holiday for no reason (might've had something to do with the 2.6.2-rc2-mm1 kernel I booted beforehand. dunno). One dirty hack later and I've got XMMS using the OSS plugin pointed at /dev/sound/adsp (don't ask me why that works and /dev/sound/dsp doesn't anymore. Or the ALSA plugin for that matter.). Then video playback (mpeg mostly afaict) decides to crash randomly in gxine and mplayer etc. Not sure if it's going to continue, but either way it's annoying.

Then last night, while in the middle of playing Tony Hawk 2, my keyboard's spacebar died. I threw an expected "ffs I hate this shit" tantrum and headed off to a friend's place to cool down. When I came home I started googling for broken spacebar info. I then decided I might as well try fixing it myself. Many tiny screws later, I had it open and realized the little rubber thingy that touches the membrane thingy had just started to split and broke when I removed it. I then removed the Windows key's rubber thingy as a replacement. In the end I fixed it and was very proud of myself since I'd never fixed anything like that before (yeah, it was simple, but still :P). Saved myself $50 and only lost a stupid windows key.

Spent most of my time away from home at aforementioned friend's place playing Vice City on another friend's PS2.

Development

No activity. See above.

Bloggy goodness

I'm loving Planet Debian/GNOME and other developer blog goodness. The XFce developer's weblog is very nice to see. I've also just fallen in love with kuro5hin. Never paid much attention to it before.