Whew! After a long absence caused by vacation, holiday, and disease, I'm more or less back...

RMS

RMS wants me to restructure my database to incorporate all hardware in addition to printers. He also suggested some changes to highlight the fact that there's nothing Linux-specific; pretty much anything vaguely Unix can benefit directly from the information. And of course he wants the usual s!Linux!GNU/Linux!g thing done. All this after he bumped into Till, apparently when speaking at Mandrake.

All in all, these are good ideas, and it will give the GNU project a mighty nifty hardware compatibility list. So I'll be working toward this over the next few months. Key for mirrors is a way to host a copy without Postgres+CGI; luckily I'm already planning a static flatfile database representation anyway; formatting a version of that as HTML should be straightforward.

Ghostscript

Mike announced an Epson-funded gig for Easy Software maintaining an Epson-friendly Ghostscript kit; this will be "ESP Ghostscript", an almost-fork containing gimp-print, various minor fixes, etc. Technically, this is at most a minor variation on what he was doing anyway in shipping Ghostscript as part of CUPS; logically, it represents a sort of pressure point for mainstream Aladdin Ghostscript to get it's license snafu un-fu'd. In any case it'll be handy to have RPM/DEBs of gs+stp readily available.

Disease/Travel/Work

For the holidays I went on a week-long cruise to various Carribean islands including St Thomas/St John, Dominica, Martinique, Barbados, and St Maarten. All really nifty places--especially Dominica, St John, and Barbados. The ship was Carnival's Fascination, which I can't really recommend; the onboard food/service/entertainment ranges from fair (food) to awful (entertainment). I guess it was good if viewed as a portable hotel.

At work the incredibly wrong email setup is now irrelevent, as I've established working email on the Linux server by carefully avoiding our company's DNS entirely. Of course, now the email addresses are unrelated to the company, which is sort of a flaw, but at least things from cron to version control can now work.

I'm finally recovering from a series of funny dieseases which culminated in Conjunctivitis (aka pink eye). This involved hemorrhaging, itchy eyes full of goo to the point that I couldn't really open them for three days. Fortunately my eye doctor gave me antibiotic eye drops, which cured things pretty quickly. Unfortunately this blew last weekend from a free software standpoint. Sigh.

Stupid Car Tricks

Today I parked by the door at work. Unfortunately, during the day, a huge chunk of ice fell of the roof four stories above and made assorted huge dents in the hood. Doh! This appears to be a(nother) design flaw in the building; fully 1/3 of the parking lot suffers from this problem.

LinuxWorld

I'll be going to LinuxWorld in New York later this month, courtesy of my employer. Drop me a note if you'll be there and care to meet up...