Older blog entries for dmerrill (starting at number 116)

Somebody has apparently hacked my Advogato account. I can't seem to find any way to change my password. Can anyone tell me if there is a way to do it? david -AT- lupercalia.net

The Roller Coaster of Life

I've been dealing with some serious health problems for months now. I was pretty much completely unable to work for awhile and lost my job. Didn't feel much like posting to Advogato either, as you might have noticed.

Things were pretty bleak and depressing for awhile, but they are getting better now. I've been on new meds for just about exactly one month now and they seem to have things under control. I am working full time again at a job I really enjoy. The downside is it's mostly Windows programming, although I have done some Perl/Linux stuff. Right now I'm learning C#. It's too soon to give any opinions about it.

Dave and I bought a new condo together and we're closing on the 28th, so we're really excited about that. I'm moving out of a townhouse, but Dave is coming out of a 5,000 square foot mansion, so for him it's a bit of an adjustment. But I refuse to live in the suburbs, and who can afford 5,000 square feet in the city, especially in a great neighborhood?

I moved in with Dave at his old house in February, and we closed its sale on the 3rd of March, so we're officially homeless atm. All our stuff is in storage and we're staying at Larry's. It's a bit cramped and we're starting to get on each other's nerves. Dave and I are not exactly slobs, but not exactly neat freaks either. Larry, however, is neurotic. Dave and I need to get into our own place while we're all still friends, let's leave it at that. :-)

Lampadas

I'm looking forward to getting back to work on Lampadas again after a long hiatus. Although I've been unable to work for awhile, I have not been unable to think, and I've done a lot of thinking and planning about Lampadas. It could be up to a month more before I am settled into the new house and have my all-important DSL line installed, but I'm eager to get back to work as soon as I can.

jfleck:

"david merrill is capable of churning out the yardage"

and

"linux documentation project is the place you should go when you someone tells you to rtfm"

but unfortunately,

"lampadas is a bloody mess".

Of course, you know that.

http://www.googlism.com/index.htm?ism=david+merrill&type=1
http://www.googlism.com/index.htm?ism=linux+documentation+project&type=2
http://www.googlism.com/index.htm?ism=lampadas&type=2

Lampadas
As always, lots of time spent working on Lampadas. The last couple of weeks I've been doing some pretty sizable rearchitecture, implementing a much more OO approach. I didn't realize when I first started this project how nice Python's object support is.

It wasn't a good time to rearchitect. I was trying to finalize a release for the Gnome Documentation Project. However, the weight of cruft had accumulated to the point that it was taking forever to fix each bug or add each feature, so I was approaching a GDP release asymptotically. Something had to change.

Lampadas
Making great progress in Lampadas development. My refactoring project is paying off.

Terrorism
I don't remember where I found the link originally, but I read through A Real War on Terrorism by Robert Wright yesterday and today. Much of it makes sense, unlike mglazer and his knee-jerk responses, based on what seems to be an inability to see shades of gray. mglazer will, of course, misread this and call me a traitor or something. Whatever.

Faggots
Speaking of calling me things, somebody made a comment about "faggots" to me yesterday, not knowing I'm gay. That was worth a good laugh. I've never seen quite that exact shade of red before.

I've been doing a lot of code cleanup lately in Lampadas. The feature set is pretty complete as far as the meta-data management stuff, but have just a bit to finish.

Unfortunately, I have turned my attention to reworking several parts of the system, because they need to be more flexible. Make one to throw away and all that -- seems to apply in this case.

I've been rather driven by trying to get a beta out. Now that we are actually there, I don't feel as much time pressure, which means I also enjoy the work more. I can focus on the lower level system more and less on the UI and specific features.

Lampadas
The first real live Lampadas sites are up or going up. The home page, www.lampadas.org is running all the LDP documents as well as all Gnome documents in a database. The Gnome project is working on their own Lampadas database. The many hours of work on Lampadas are about to bear fruit.

We're finding lots of things that need tweaking, but that's not surprising during the first test rollout of a new system, especially a system as complex as Lampadas. Overall, it is shaping up very well. I'm happy. Life is good.

Lampadas
Installed and configured a Lampadas database (a temporary URL) to replace the LDPDB. Lampadas is not yet "finished" (not that it ever will be), but the meta-data capabilities are much better than the LDPDB ever was, and that's the immediate need at the LDP. The other stuff can be rolled out as it is completed, and it will be more solid for having been dog food.

And That's Not All! The Gnome Documentation Project is also ready to begin rolling out Lampadas on the same basis. Their DocTable has been b0rken for some time, so they really need something to help them coordinate their work.

It will be interesting to see what shortcomings of Lampadas are uncovered once these folks start actually using it for daily work.