Older blog entries for daniels (starting at number 166)

dwmw2: "BBQ Chicken's", indeed. It's generally quite depressing ("whose an idiot? your an idiot!"); thanks for pointing out one of my pet hates.

"Blog"
I really don't like the word, and I've avoided using it for as long as it possibly can. However, I finally managed to set up Pyblosxom (through reading the source, Wikis, and guessing a whole bunch of stuff). It's running on my home machine (more or less disconnected from the real world), and also triplehelix (thanks Josh Kwan!). As soon as joshk gets apache2 set up with mod-xslt and such, and all the vhost setup sorted out, I'll have a setup similar to jdub's, only my Pyblosxom propagation script can also propagate to LiveJournal, depending on the content of a header. I'll post it here when it's nice and configurable and stuff.

Xwin/freedesktop
Keith's been moving xwin.org and freedesktop.org services to the new machine - x2.cs.pdx.edu - and that seems to be going quite well. The new machine will give us enough capacity to host a whole bunch of projects. Unfortunately, I had to filter out a moron who kept trashing the Xouvert wiki; he was using a script to restore the content to utter crap. *sigh*.

KDE
Kopete 0.7 (and, subsequently, 0.7.1) got released, and unsermake is quietly bubbling along. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to start working on it again. The conference in Nove Hrady is on right now, with havocp and clee in attendance.

Debian
XFree86 4.3.0-0pre1v1 was released to experimental a while ago, and preparation for pre1v2 is underway. I hope to find a few hours to work on it soon, so I can add in the Synaptics touchpad driver, the SDK, and a couple of other interesting systems.

obLyric
"I wanna tell you a story/and you know the story I'm about to tell you is true/do you feel alright?/do you feel alright?/let me hear you say it louder, do you feel alright?/do you feel it, children?/I just want you to do whatever you want to do/don't worry about what the next brother's doing/just do your thing/whatever's good to you, then you do it/if it's good to you, good for you" - Plump DJs, The Funk Hits the Fan

DVDs
At the risk of turning into hadess ... ;)
I bought the Run Lola Run collector's edition DVD last night for the low low price of $au19.95. Brilliant! It's a fantastic film, all the better on DVD. Great plot, great execution, great soundtrack, everything. It's really a fantastic film.

FLOSS stuff
Pia and Stewart Smith (president and vice-president of Linux Australia respectively, and unrelated) came to a special LUV (Melbourne's main LUG) committee meeting on Friday night, which was great. While Stewart's local, Pia was down from Sydney, and the committee meeting was very productive, and not just in terms of further defining the LA/LUV relationship - some great ideas came out of it. Pia and I went back to Stewart's place after and watched Snatch on DVD, and the next day we wandered out for food, pool, Sega Rally and beer - great to see her again, and some very good viewpoints came out of it. Oh, and I got a Debian t-shirt, too. The only size left was XXL, which would normally have been fine for a 197cm, 78kg guy, but I forgot these were geek t-shirts. Whoops. :)

The new fd.o machine apparently arrived recently.

obHip-Hop
"I got sounds to help you get down, so you can get up/and avoid them stinking rats that get me fed up/yeah, they make me wanna throw up, they gotta grow up/or they'll be failing, and bailing, while I be sailing like Noah" - 1200 Techniques - Karma

Life
Been very, very busy lately. School and other stuff have kept me very much occupied, with little time to breathe. Ah well.

Music
Got lots of cool music lately - 1200 Techniques (ChooseOne/ChooseMore, Eye of the Storm), Two-Up (Tastes Like Chicken), Squarepusher (Do You Know Squarepusher/Alive in Japan), Scratch Perverts (BadMeaningGood), and more. It's all very, very cool.

freedesktop.org
This is possibly the coolest announcement I've ever had the pleasure of being involved in.

obAussieHip-Hop
"Whatever happened to a conscious idea?/MCs talk verbal diarrrhea/caught up with gun talk and bling-bling/hip-hop producers who work with pop singers for ching-ching/I'm thinking" - 1200 Techniques - Eye of the Storm

Truly inspired
Not only is xjack (now a part of xscreensaver) brilliant, but the manpage is sheer excellence; proof that jwz is actually capable of doing good.

Moving?
Moved house (only about 400-600m down the road) on about 15 minutes' notice the other day, which was ... fun. It was even better when I had half of my clothes at the new place, half at the old, my bathroom gear at the new place, and my bed at the old (as well as the desk and computer) - back and forth reasonably regularly.

It's amazing how much stuff you accumulate without realizing it - despite having already moved a bit recently, I was quite amazed when the contents of my room (excluding the desk, chair, and bed) filled the entire back of a large Commodore station wagon with both back seats pushed down. How'd I get all this ... stuff?

Cocklefighting
A couple of months ago, I rediscovered that old Debian pastime of Cocklefighting. A few of us developed Perl and Python fighting scripts, as well as exploiting other vulnerabilities. You get "points" to allocate, as with most games, when you get to certain levels, but after a brief outage, I came back with -5 (yes, negative) points to spend - and I could spend them! They were obviously testing for points == 0, not points < 1, so I made the most of it by replaying a points allocation setup a few thousand times, until I could take on the top cockle (at level 550), and win every time, while I was at level 40 or so. Unfortunately, they realized this, and smacked the accounts of two of us back down to not nearly as many points. The reason I'm rambling about this is that I just discovered my Perl script (it's very simple - as I could beat everyone in the game, I just had it fight whoever came up, as opposed to my previous Python AI effort), and it makes me chuckle at how evil Perl can be.

Whoohoo!
A very, very cool announcement is due to be made this week; something that the open source/free software community has really needed for quite some time. Stay tuned.

obLyric
"You really think you're looking like a gangsta rapper/like Ice Cube's hanging out in Parramatta[1]/your ghetto is a food court, so what's the deal?/some call it Harlem, others call it Westfield" - Two Up - Why Do I Try So Hard?

[1]: Parramatta is a suburb of Sydney (slightly dodgy, I'm told).

funrecords: Not just "Linux geeks"; you can really hear a massive difference between Vorbis at -q 7 and 192kbps MP3s, for a slightly smaller filesize. Vorbis is seriously amazing.

Life, and other off-putting incidents
Apparently we're moving 400m down the road. Next week. The interesting part about this is that I found out from my (older) sister, who moved out a while ago. They just haven't bothered to tell the guy living there (hell, my sister was also the one to tell me they were breaking up in the first place). Good communication skills rock!

The RSI's getting worse and worse as the days roll on - I'm typing this look-and-peck styles, with one finger on each hand, and I've only been typing for around 20min now. Doesn't help that it's freezing cold here, but man this sucks.

School
I'm on holidays for another week and a bit, thank god. Doesn't feel like much of a break though, when you factor in the homework, doing real work, coming up here and seeing Mum, Dad's birthday, and other stuff that Has To Be Done.

Windows
Windows is feeling more and more clunky, arbitrary and crap every time I come to use it; Win2k is really, really annoying me right now.

Hacking
Set up a Subversion repository for Kiwi, an alternative KDE jukebox. It's looking really sweet - we've got separate media sources now, paving the way for Internet radio/CD playing and ripping/whatever. Wa-hey! It's myself, Chris Lee, and Cliff working on it, right now. XFree86 4.3.0-0ds5 was released to packagers, with largely positive reports - waiting on some porting work from ARM, mainly. Also working on debbackup/debrestore - it would basically get all your packages/conffiles/etc back to the same state they were, from a clean install, to be used in conjunction with a real backup regimen.

Life
"It" is apparently happening for real. Just in slow-motion. The house is being prepared to be sold. Positives: We get out of the sticks, a little more freedom. Negatives: It's gotta mess my little sister (four years old) up, and I won't get to see her as much.

More sweet Melbournian hip-hop
"I'm an addict of heavy drunks and the son of a broken family/it's a Carlton United tragedy/partial to insanity, half-full in a fantasy/it's a Carlton United tragedy/part of my divinity, Carlton's the vicinity/it's a Carlton United tragedy/on the path towards victory, sure to spawn savagery/it's a Carlton United tragedy" - Lyrical Commission, Carlton United Tragedy

Life
Up in Bendigo studying for exams, getting more work done than intended, which is rocking out. I've got about 80 pages of practice exams, wa-hey. There's a Just Shoot Me! marathon on TV1 this long weekend, which is proving a massive distraction from study, given the only desk large enough is in the lounge, right near the TV. The threesome episode, which was on on Friday night, reminded me of why it rocked - so utterly brilliant. And Finch's all-time best one-liner came up just before that:
Nina (to Jack): "I like to think of my body as a temple, ..."
Finch (walking past): "That explains the queue to get in on Friday nights."

Saturday night was ... unproductive. Instead of summarizing about 6 chapters on the train, I slept. I got home, watched a bit of TV, ate, showered, and, uh, slept. I was just wasted on Saturday; did no work whatsoever. Got plenty done today, which was, of course, nice.

Debian
I seem to always be assigned packages which are horrifically bad to package. First it was dbtcp, the php4 module that builds out-of-tree (hand-hacked Makefile), then it was aspsearch (doesn't even come close to building with gcc3). Ugh.

obLyric
"In its own little way, my body was trying to say that you'd better stop drinking brandy." - The Streets, Too Much Brandy

"You do seem to make life difficult for yourself in style"
Blah. Got everything out of the way except my International Studies SAC (tomorrow/Friday), and my Physics exam (next Wednesday, not next Tuesday, as previously asserted). I'm going up to Mum's place in Bendigo from Saturday->Tuesday to unwind - I'm finding myself increasingly tired and drained, no matter how much sleep I get (or don't get), so it'll be good to get away from everything up there for a few days.

The quote in the header was from an IRC message; one that I find difficult to disagree with. ;)

KDE
Chris "clee" Lee (not clee, but clee), is rewriting the abomination known as the Kicker clock's configuration interface. All I can say is that I owe that man a great many beers; it's possibly the single worst-designed UI in KDE. Unfortunately, I haven't had any time to work on unsermake - I sent coolo a huge diff to do a great many things, but he bounced it back with a few suggestions, which I haven't yet had time to implement. I should get around to it in a couple of weeks.

Debian
Packaged mod-xslt and dbtcp, the latter for work. Haven't had a lot of time to work on XFree86 at all, but it looks like it's finally been bootstrapped on {Free,Net}BSD, the damned S/390 bug has been sorted, and it should also now work on m68k. Now I just have to get a compiler.h patch for ARM, and it should all be good. Mmm. :)

According to Branden's -devel-announce message, I'm the guy who's getting ready to slam 4.3.0 into sid. While I've been struck by the same time issues lately, I should start preparing 4.3.0-0pre1v1 in a bit over a week, as I start collecting old reports, and various architectures; watch this space. Also, ISHIKAWA Mutsumi has created an area for separating the Xcursor/Xrender builds, so we can have them as separate source packages, just like we currently have Xft2 and fontconfig - the versions in the tree are just too old. It's great to see so many contributors in the repository - myself, fabbione (who has some excellent IPv6 patches available, and has also been build-testing on funny architectures, and feeding me back great reports), Ishikawa (who laid the grounds for my packages by working out which patches had been applied and throwing them out), Juliusz (whose font-fu astounds me, whose font-fu extends to "ooh, purty"), Joel (who's been great on the NetBSD side of things), and, of course, Branden. Team maintainence with version control is looking to be a brilliant idea which will make life much easier for all of us - it's already given us some great benefits, such as not having to have mile-long changelogs, being able to see changes easily, being able to revert at a pinch, etc.

A couple of weeks ago, I merged Branden and Ishikawa's changes into my people/daniel/debian branch, which was promptly moved to branches/sid/4.3.0/debian. This prompted a flurry of activity - for the first time, 4.3.0 had moved out of the domain of a single person (me), and into the hands of multiple people, who have already made quite a few changes. It's really exciting to see this happen, and represents a huge leap forward; the flurry of activity when branches/4.3.0/sid/debian came into existance probably shows how excited we all are about this.

Does anyone else think Debian Weekly News covering jwz bitching loudly is not only utterly unnecessary, but giving him oxygen?

XFree86
Damned lack of time has prevented me from finishing my Radeon TV-Out work. I did discover something interesting, though: my old Diamond Stealth64 Video 3200, which has a supported video capture setup. Means I can do TV-Out without dragging my computer into the lounge, where the only TV with S-Video/RCA is (mine is an old B&W job with a BNC antenna input).

?!?
"Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaenskajuetenklinenputzergehilfehinterbliebenenlebensversicherungsgesellschaftskrisenjahrhundert" is a word in German (meaning "Danube steam shipping company captain cabins klinen finery suppl. assistance survivor life assurance company crises century", apparently). I couldn't make this up if I tried.