Older blog entries for gleblanc (starting at number 20)

Computers

I got one of my SPARCstation 2s booting this evening. Unfortunately, I found out that my 2 1000MB disks were actually 2 100MB disks. Darn, that's small. How can I run any software in 200MB? Well, maybe those can be used to run my new DNS server or something. I've got a few 4GB disks around, but they seem to be rather failure-prone. I think I'll need to get some more disks for these machines.

Life

My parents are back in town, which is cool. Maybe they'll beat some sense into my little brother. Probably not. I had to run and get them from the airport about noon time today, and while I was gone, the university president sent out a mail telling everybody to go home. Of course, I arrived back at the office around 1:45.

It's really frustrating, now that I've finally got enough courage to even think about asking, that the campus is completely deserted. I don't know what to do about my last forray, perhaps just let it slide away. Even if I do, I need to make it clear that ignoring people is a lot less desireable than telling them no, dontcha think?

Computers

Woo! I've been working on updating plain-GNOME today, and making some decent progress. Now, if I could just get people to actually send release announcements of new versions, this would be much easier. I'll probably upload a new RH7.0 i386 set tonight, and possibly even i586 and i686, since all of the hard work is in getting the first set.

Biking

I did some riding out at the velodrome again yesterday. It's actually pretty embarrassing, since I'm horribly slow. I'm going to see about doing 60+ miles this weekend, just to give my legs a really hard workout. If anybody who reads this is a decent bike coach EMAIL ME! I need the help.

Life

Well, my fortune program has been returning completely boring stuff lately, so I haven't had anything to send. And considering the response that my last email got (absolutely none), perhaps that's just as well. Sometimes I wonder why I even try...
Computers

Hmm, I got absolutely nothing productive done on the computer today. Wonderful. I still need to spec out the laptops that we're getting for work, and it's horrible. I wish we had a network tech, but my idiot boss is dragging his feet on that. He has a good excuse, but for cryin out loud, there's way too much to do for waiting to be a good idea. At least now that he's a manager, he's out of the office a lot...

Biking

It was 105 degrees outside when I headed home today (that's about 40 celcius/centigrade), which is WAY too hot to be biking. It's down to just under 30 now, but I'm going to bed instead of for a bike ride.
Oh yeah, yesterday's ride home averaged 14.9 mph, which isn't too shabby, considering the hills. Maybe next week I'll be able to hit 15...

Hmm, I haven't updated this since Wednesday, huh? Well, that's quite a while...

Computers

I spent a lot of time playing around with rpmlint on the plain-GNOME packages... Rather tedious, but I think I'm getting some of the errors cleaned up. I also managed to build a gabber 0.8.3 rpm, which actually built when I gave that vmware machine 128MB of ram (it was going on 4 hours when I stopped it before, probably because the system only had 48MB of ram to work with).
I spent $Diety only knows how long trying to make Red Hat's DocBook XML packages work with libxslt. They don't, but I'm still fighting them. Using the DTD from the web actually seems to produce better results, although it takes a bit to download. Bleh.

Biking

Well, I didn't bike at all on Thursday, but Friday looked really nice when I got home that I headed out. I toured around for a couple of hours, then watched the races at the Velodrome. Pretty sweet... I manged 17 miles at better than 15 miles and hour, although not by much, and I had some breaks in the middle. Saturday I went out and rode just under 10 miles, again just beating out 15 mpg as an average. I took Sunday off, but rode in to work this morning, and averaged better than 16mph. Too bad that will look bad after the uphill ride home...

Life

Well, unfortunately, absolutely nothing to report (save suspicions) on this front. I sent off an email to Ashlin to see about doing dinner this week, but I don't know if it's even been read. I had to go over to the business office to see that AP checks printed properly, and she was sitting there filing. I'm sure she saw me, but she avoided eye contact. Is that a bad sign?

Biking

I got out to the Velodrome again today. Bill, the guy who actually "normally" runs the lessons was there. I think there were only 10 people biking today, which was a lot better than last week, when there were more like 30. I used my new petals, and while I looked like an idiot getting into them a couple of times, I didn't fall getting out even once. I think I need to adjust the cleats a little bit, but they are nice petals. I'm not sure I like how much play there is in them, but I'm pretty sure a different set of cleats would give me less play. Oh, for those of you who don't bike, play is how much "twist" there is when you're locked into the petals. I tend to like a rather small amount, once I've got my feet at the right angle.
I had a blast, and nobody fell. I REALLY need to start biking to work every other day, or so, hopefully building up to every day very quickly. My legs are too weak, and I'm actually pretty beat by the end of practice, even though we didn't ride as much this week.

Computers

Well, I played with a bunch of RPM stuff today. I found a good way to determine which packages need work, called rpmlint. pzb has put together an rpmlint config file for GNOME, and I'm using that. Looks like I've got a -lot- of work to do. I think I'm going to toss these spec files into CVS tonight, and post the output of rpmlint being run on them to the mailing list, and ask for people to start working on them.
I worked for a while on the packaging guidelines again, but I rm'd my updated version somehow. Crapola. I guess I'll be re-writing those sections. Rather frustrating, but oh well.

Life

I'm feeling almost normal again today, which is a great change from this weekend. I forgot to set my alarm, so I haven't had anything to eat since dinner last night, except for a bag of corn chips.
Ashlin stopped by to say hi today, and I almost got two complete sentences out! But, uhm, no, I don't get tongue tied at all. I'm not even sure if I smiled, but I really was glad to see her. She didn't stay long enough to talk about anything, but that's probably because I wasn't saying anything, and in the middle of working on a software install.

Bikes

Rex (that's a friend of mine, not a dog) seems to think that carbuerator cleaner won't harm this derailer that I'm rebuilding, so I'm going to try to find a time to go over there and soak it for a half hour or so, and see how clean it gets. I'm not sure what I'll do with it after it's rebuilt and cleaned. Anybody want to buy a used derailer?
Velodrome tonight, although I haven't riden since last time I was there, as I been sick, and yesterday didn't look like a good time to go biking (rain, wet, yuck). I think I'll try my petals on the apron and riding alone for a bit, and if I can manage it, I'll use them all evening.
Computing

Somehow I volunteered to start working on a set of automated builds for GNOME 2.0 today. While I want to do this, I hadn't really planned on starting it until June. Oh well, at least somebody is helping out with the GPP RPM packaging guidelines. I almost hacked on those today, but I had too much work to catch up on. It feels like I've done a lot of work on CVS accounts since I sent out that message, but the database still has a lot of blanks.
Well, Eazel is officially dissolved. Kind of sucks, but some of the hackers are going to stick with GNOME, which is a great thing. Eazel introduced quite a few hackers to GNOME, but the only one that I know really well is Darin. I'm really glad that he's going to keep being the maintainer of Nautilus, because he seems to do a great job at it. Well, that's my obligatory bit on this, perhaps I'll write more as things unfold. The Europeans don't even "know", for sure, yet.

life

Well, the only interesting thing to note is that the vase I gave flowers in showed up on my desk this morning. This is good, because I needed to get it back. It's worrying because there was no note with it. I sent off an email asking for a little more information early this morning, but I very rarely get anything back within 2 days, so I have a while to wait before I know I'm being ignored. Hmm, I said some of that this morning, oops.
Life

Ugh, I seem to have gotten ill sometime Thursday, and so I got to spend almost the entire weekend sick. :-( I think I'm mostly recovered now, hopefully this won't come back.
Somehow the vase that gave ella (that's Spanish, assuming that I haven't completely forgotten the language) flowers in has mysteriously appeared on my desk sometime between when I left Friday afternoon, and when I got back to work, at 6:20AM Tuesday morning. I don't usually go in to work quite this early, but I had to take my mom to the airport today.

Biking

I was sick all weekend, which left biking out of the picture, and it's rained yesterday and today. While this doesn't bother me for riding, it does make the velodrome unsafe. We'll see if things dry out by tomorrow.

Computers

We had some good discussions yesterday in #packaging, although the jury is still out on who should own files that are installed by the GPP rpms. Peter Bowen was doing some hacking on the rpm guidelines, but he didn't commit his changes, so I decided not to hack on them yesterday.
Biking

I went out to the Velodrome again, and actually got on the track. It's impressively cheap to rent a bike and get a lesson ($5 for each), and it's REALLY fun. If you go slower than 15 mph or so, you'll fall off the track, but it's not hard to keep up going much faster than that. I'll definately be back there next week, but I'm really out of shape, so I need to bike to work a bit more often.

Life

Yeah, well, we're giving lots of space. I email the "fortune" out every couple of days when it's fun, but I can't tell if it's even getting read, let alone appreciated. I've got much to say, but I don't know when it's kosher to stop giving so much space. Maybe when the summer semester starts up (we're on the break between spring and summer term now).

Computing

The GPP fares pretty well, although I'm really busy. I was going to try to finish writing things last night, but there was a new The West Wing, so I had to watch that. Tonight I'm stuck going to an Investment Club meeting. I need to start pushing to get gnome anoncvs syncing more often, since the current status makes things really sloppy for people who are trying to keep up on quickly changing modules. It looks like the GNOME 2.0 release co-ordinators will be supportative of binary release of the 2.0 betas, so GNOME 2.0 should be -much- better than 1.4 was, at least WRT testing.

Err, yeah, I didn't get anything up on the 30th, 1st, or 2nd. GPP seems to be sucking all of my available time.

Bikes
I went out the the Alpenrose Velodrome yesterday, with the idea that I'd get a lesson and ride some. To quote their webpage, "The Alpenrose track is not your typical 25 to 33 degree banked track", it's more like 44 degrees. WOAH, talk about steep. Since I got there too late for a lesson this week, I just watched them practice a bit. I'm going to get their early next week, and make sure get a lesson, and see what this track riding is like. Maybe I'll even do a race in a week or two.

GPP
Wow, lots of stuff. I've finished another section of the RPM packaging guidelines now, and I've even got them in CVS, in the gnome-docu/gpp/rpm-guidelines/ directory. I got a couple of corrections from people on the mailing list, and I've been getting a lot of questions from people in the #packaging channel on irc.gnome.org. Looks like I won't need to do nearly as much of this work as I thought. :-) I still haven't written a mission statement, mostly because I don't have any idea what the mission statement should be. Maybe I'll keep slacking off on that mission statement for a while...

So, that's it for the past couple of days, I'll try to post what I got done today when I get done with it all later tonight.

11 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!