Older blog entries for eliot (starting at number 35)

So much interesting discussion! There's a lot of great topics floating around... wish I had time to respond to some of them.

Yes, Skud, I am an avid Debian user. But, I wouldn't know the solution to your problem. I would however send a message to debian-mentors@lists.debian.org as there are a lot of good people on there that can help you out.

Something I just noticed is that I would hardly know any of the people posting on here unless they were posting diary entries routinely. Take for instance dria. Since I have not been involved at the Open Source Writers Group or LinuxChix (cool site!), I wouldn't know who dria is. But after keeping up with her diary entries (which are interesting, btw), I feel like I know her personally (even though I still don't)... I also know that I would like to get to know her. Then when I was pointed to her interview on /., I was able to learn more about her and her ideas, projects, etc. But these diary entries give me (and everyone else here) a behind-the-scenes and very frank review of her life and work (or lack thereof ;) ). There are other people here that I would like to get to know better as well, dria is just the first person I thought of (and one of the coolest).

Okie dokey.. back to some press releases and some end-user docs..... Oh, I've got that speech to write up too. Is it already Wednesday?

Update

Oh! I forgot, I finally got back down to Apprentice level. That's where I really belong and I had to have a talking with the folks who bumped me up to Journeyer.... Yes, I'm a part of the Julian circle. :) That's a fun little map that pvg made up... Go julian!!!

I knew I shouldn't have been browsing in another window. Mozilla lost my diary entry. Lemme see what I can remember...

This week went by fast, it was kind of a frustrating week, but satisfactory nonetheless. I got a lot of good Gabber stuff done, including:

• Completing the wonderful manual for Gabber. I'm very proud of that. :)
• Debian package of Gabber.
• Debian packages for gtkmm/gnomemm 1.1.8... those weren't fun. Took me quite awhile and many many recompiles to get them built right. I hope someone uses them now. (They are on Gabber's home page)

I heard Sullivan (chrome for Mozilla by those Alphanumerica guys) came out this week.. I haven't had a chance to go grab it yet. I really like Aphrodite.

Mad week of writing ahead.... We're going to release JabberCentral this week if everything goes as planned. That means lots of writing.

I'm very sad at the sheer number of folks on Advogato.. There's no way for me to even get a tiny look at recent diary entries.. much less all of them. I can't keep track of anyone now. :(

Answer to dria's QOD:

Well, where praytell is here? I'm assuming it is Advogato.org since otherwise it would be asking the question so many folks have asked for so long... (where (here == 'earth')). I for one, am on Advogato to write my little ramblings and fragments of thoughts. I also like being able to have a central place to read others diary entries as well. It is very nice to be able to peak into the real lives of other active open source community members. Also, I like the design of the site. :)

Ok, other brain refuse:

I seem to have developed a pattern of writing diary entries every two-to-three days. I simply can't do one every day, and I want to do more than one a week. Seems to be a good compromise.

I've never used a <ol>.

Mozilla gets confused by pressing [TAB] in a text box.

Gabber documentation is looking *very* good. I'm very proud of myself. :) Writing docs for apps is much easier than explaining terms and illustrating compiling/configuring a program. I did two more major sections today and just have Messaging, Preferences and Panel Applet to cover. Does Gabber have a panel applet yet?

Despite warnings by stpeter, I decided to go ahead and start reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I hate having a book just sitting there without me reading at least a good portion of it. Just bugs me.

I need to go get a new band for my Grandfather's Rolex.. This leather is getting worn off quick (I bought the leather band like in January). Guess I'll have to go with one of those annoying hair-pulling strechy metal ones.

This college thread is very interesting. I may consider writing a piece on it. Unfortunatly, I have no experience in that area yet. I have thought about alot of this before though. The interesting point in this thread is about how college is supposed to teach more than just skills. That is definitly something I want to get out of college.. something more than skills. Of course, I want to take some classes (and possibly some minors/majors) in areas outside of Computer Science.. I am looking forward to apologetics, Biblical studies, and lots of liberal arts (writing & literature). The point really isn't for me to get skills to get a good job, but to do some intense learning. I may think otherwise next Fall though....

There's too many entries in Recent Entries!! There's no way to keep track of them all now.. maybe I need some hierarchy or something...

That's all for now.. gonna go read and listen to Dave Matthews.

Laleedaaa... Welp, March was fast. February was fast. January was fast. I remember hearing about when your under 20 life always seems slow. I've never experienced that. My life has always gone fast. That's probably not a good thing.

I've noticed a couple of things since I found http://www.advogato.org/recentlog.html. (Wow was I stupid to not find that page. I always wondered how people were keeping track of other folks diary entries so easily... here I was clicking on users.. sheesh.) Everyone has some very unique diary styles. There's Iain who does little phrases with bullets. Then there's crackmonkey who has bold headers over each paragraphs, sometimes the headers have little to do with the topic. That's cool. And well.. I guess there's not too many other styles. I just ramble. I wonder if anyone cares. Oh well, I like writing down what I'm doing... It helps me focus more.

I stayed up very late last night writing some more User Land docs for JabberCentral. I also tried to get all of the libs required for Gabber installed on my notebook. That didn't go over well. I've still got some weird errors. Today I really hacked at a Gnome Manual page for Gabber. I'm very happy at how that is turning out. No offense to Gnome folks, but most apps right now have such little documentation. I don't want x-virge's little baby to go without the best docs.

My summer is looking quite happy. While I don't have anything major planned (no camps or anything), I've got Freshman orientation at LeTourneau University, Sergeants at Arm at the Texas state Republican Convention and probably a couple of Linux / Open Source conferences. I may try to go to Cornerstone Fest with my friends... I dunno about that. I'm not sure if I'd get totally sick of music or not be able to get enough of it....

My server is plugging along quite happily. The only problem is that I've only got two patch cables. Most annoying to switch my box and my notebook.... (I've got three computers on this little network.)

I hate April Fools. All the jokes are so stupid. Call me a grouch.. whatever. It's just dumb. I do have to admit that Google's little joke was good.. but the rest, blah. Especially Slashdot. Geeze! Last year when they did I got *so* turned off to Slashdot.

Ok, enough babbling for now. I'll go write somewhere else now.

Ok! I feel like the master now! :) I *finally* got my poor montague (my desktop Linux box) back on the Net after ripping it's modem out to give it to juliet (my "new" server I pulled out of Eliot's Closet of Antique Computers & Other Junk). juliet was being a large pain, but mainly just a big time hole. She is now running Debian 2.2 (frozen / potato), with the Linux 2.2.14 kernel, ipmasq, sshd, etc.... All that with 35 bogomips! Gotta love Linux.

Other than that... umm... nothing else got done. I did install free BeOS 5 on montague, I got it all over to it's own partition so I can get to it from LILO. Works wonderfully..... BeOS is pretty slick. I wish I had a dedicated box to play with it. There's a *lot* of similarities with Mac, so the interface has some great little features.

Now I've got to finish that PHP admin system. The owner just e-mailed me to see how it was going. Eeek.....

Laaadee daaa...

Interesting week so far.. worked on README's, man pages and the HOWTO for jabber server 0.9-final. That was released today.

I got BeOS 5 installed on my notebook. Pretty fun stuff. I really like how fast and snappy it is. Only problem is that the keyboard doesn't work. Not even a ps/2 keyboard works with it.

Sheesh.. How stupid I am!!! I just shutdown my friend's web server that I use for e-mail and stuff... I thought I was shutting down my box.. no wonder mine wasn't shutting down. Oh well, it will be back up tomorrow.

Welp, I stayed up very late last night after Jer asked me to do some changes to docs.jabber.org. I also updated the page for jabber:iq:version and added a new overview of Group Chat.

Before all that, I was over at mrOpie's house with my notebook... we watched that post-modern / punk version of Romeo & Juliet (with Claire Danes & that Leo dude). It's been awhile since I've seen that, and mrOpie hadn't seen it. I really enjoyed it... Kenneth Branuagh's version of Hamlet is far better though. :) Yes, I am a Shakespeare fan... I've read Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, Julius Caeser, Macbeth, Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venus and A Midsummer's Night Dream. Love them all (except Merchant.. I didn't really care for that one).

We also worked on some stuff with JabberCentral. I'm starting to form some clear ideas of how to seperate the content from JabberCentral.com:Support and Jabber.org:Docs. As Jabber.org moves to SourceForge, we'll re-do the site to be just for developers. So I'll have one clear audience for all of the documents. As JabberCentral.com opens, we'll have all of the user oriented docs there. So there is a clear focus there too. Right now I've got to work on splitting up Dev & User docs and polishing them up for their respective new homes.

Aphrodite Mozilla rocks. I just wish there were right click menus. And I want to use *my* bookmarks!

I picked up Our Town and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. That was the only Ayn Rand book that Half Price Books had.... It's going to take me awhile to get it all read, but I'll just take my time with it.

Today I hope to do a lot of reading and not much computer work. Sunday. Aaaaah. Hamburgers anyone?

Ok, I forgot about updating with those links last night. Here they are:

• 1899 Wynkoop
• Live Cam

Ok, this is the second time I've written this. Mozilla crashed for the first time today while I was writing this post.

Anyway, I'm not really sure *what* I did today. I know I wrote 9 news items for JabberCentral.. and I know I fiddled with date for like an hour and a half.. Oh, let me tell you about that.

Date is evil. Actually, date's documentation is evil. I'm going to fix that. It seems as though --date='s format is not documented anywhere. For hours I was feeding it ISO-8601 dates, thinking it was working fine. Why should I not think it works fine? When I give date a bad format, it yells at me and says it is bad format. But when I put in IS-8601 dates, it just does wierd things to them and acts normally. So anyway, deltab finally told me to try using some weird format like "YYYYMMDD HHMM" .. that worked. Perfectly. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

The big monthly Jabber meetings are over at Jabber, Inc. I still wish I could have gone. Maybe next time... erbo sent me a photo from his camera with the four Jabber, Inc. dudes. It's weird to see these people's faces after talking with them so long.

For fear of crashing mozilla again, I don't want to open another window to find the following to URL's.. I'll post a new item after I found them. They are two URLs of the new building that Webb and Jabber, Inc. will be occupying. Webb gets floor 6, and Jabber, Inc. gets like part of floor 7. It's the first new building in downtown Denver in 13 years. It's a cool looking building too. Anyway.. this week is over. Time for the weekend!

Yay!! I'm done entering in articles for Time Pieces!! I hated doing that. Now I just need to go through and do clean up work, but that's not near as bad as putting the articles in. Then I'll get the forwards and contents done... then output to PDF and tada!!! Yay! I really like my design for that project. I want to make sure it looks good for a portfolio.

I think I'm going to get a couple of friends and go to Enron Field's opening day. It'd be cool to be able to say we were there on opening day.

Got back from going over to mrOpie's house to tinker with his i-opener. He got his in today, hopefully mine will come in Monday or Saturday. We talked a lot about Jabber and JabberCentral.. always gets me more excited about things. Or maybe it was just the high suger content in my Caffe & Cocoa drink at Barnes & Noble / Starbucks.

Almost the weekend! woo!