Recent blog entries for jonallen

Wow, one year, that's not toooo long between posts! Heh. So, boy do we have some interesting news to report.

1. I've done some randomly useful things for gnome/linux/et al over the past year. Mostly a lot of running around in 'hands flailing above head' position to please the gods. Besides that, some tinkering here and there.

2. We're still trying to get a LUG going in the Missoula area. So many folks are interested, it's nailing down a good meeting time/space that's hard. We're aiming for a room in one of the univ. halls w/network access.

3. The 'darnedest' thing happened to me this week. Jonallen.org, or I should say, the former jonallen.org, became an *cough* adult *cough* site with absolutely no effort on my part! Short story: I was busy, let the domain name expire, scumbag fsck'ing loser registers it, and boom! adult pr0n starts for your enjoyment. I'm serious, don't bother checking. Now get this, it gets better. I'm not exactly a wee lad anymore but I'm not exactly old either. So who happens to call me this evening to tell me about this fine achievement of internet intelligence? That's right, you guessed it, my Mother. Mother! !@#%#$@! So, a quick check to make sure no one was smoking crack and a ping to the whois record confirmed the woesome state of jonallen.org. Wtf. That site barely got any traffic, I can't imagine it's useful... So, today's lesson is: If it's important to you, renew your domain name registrations in a timely manner. Otherwise you never know who just might call . Anyway, randomgeek.org is now registered and will soon contain many gems of wisdom for your digestion.

4. Ever try to tar up something and write the tar file to the beginning of your / filesystem? No? Are you smirking yet? Well, I did that last week. To a client box the day it was supposed to ship out. *After* my comrade finished setting up the modem for dialin access and was ready to box it up... what a hoot was had by all. It's fun to watch that happen. I've deemed that my "Royal Mistake For The Year 2002" and hopefully I won't have any runners up.

Enough about me, what's new with you?

It's very difficult to concentrate. My family and friends are OK. That's how I made my personal connection to this tragedy, or just the enormity of it (jfleck). Many things in life seem inconsequential and/or insignificant right now.

I wish ESR wouldn't use his perceived status to launch such inappropriate opportunistic diatribes. Concealed weapons carried by common citizens on planes. Yeah...ok.

Well, it's been a month. I was in NJ for 2 weeks. I flew back home out of LaGuardia 2 weeks ago Tuesday. I'm thankful I didn't visit the coast later than planned. Damn thankful.

Darin and Martin got the bugs moved to bugzilla.gnome.org. I offered some peripheral support to help things along.

I don't know what to say about yesterday's events. Many thoughts but none clear enough to write down. I'm considering taking the train home this winter. I'm happy I saw the WTC from Liberty State Park (NJ side of the river) while I was visiting.

While I can easily say that, yes, life does go on, there is still a sunken feeling somewhere in my chest. That best expresses how I feel. Oh-bla-de-Oh-bla-da...

*Sigh*

Scratch #'s 1 and 2 off the list. Sent mail to gleblanc about the categories. Jfleck informed me someone else was working on logview. I'm glad - I didn't get much work done on it and I hadn't heard back from muet about my doctable login. Yay! Off to whip up content for Harvey. But I have to get some apartment stuff done first.

OK, it's been way too long since I've written an entry. It's also been too long since I got any real work done. Here's some recap on what I've been up to:

1. Installed Debian on my home box. I've been using RH for the past 6 months but decided to try out Debian. I like the sense of the Debian community and a true *free* distro. Made a couple initial mistakes which set me back over an hour. Got setup and let apt-get do its magic. With minimal plodding I've got the basic setup w/X and dialup configured. Next to get other devices, sound, etc. And then finally plain-GNOME and Nautilus. Wonder if Kitame has up-to-date Naut debs. Or I could build from CVS - hehe, who am I kidding?

2. I'll be flying east for the 16th-28th. Since I don't get my Vacation days until Sept. I've been spending most of my time at work making up the time in advance. Fun, fun, fun.

3. Might convince people to setup Bugzilla at work. We've got a clunky foxpro database setup now - the windows client gui is pitiful and the 'apache-java-foxpro-magic' web interface is too slow. I'd like to implement bugzilla but I'm not sure it'll be faster than our current setup. But I like Bugzilla a lot.

I haven't gotten anything done recently. Here's a TODO list. If I don't get these things done the appropriate parties are free to flame, banish, pelt tomatoes at, and generally boo/hiss at me for a long time.

1. Nautilus: bugzilla.eazel.com -> bugzilla.gnome.org transistion. Must give gleblanc list of prods/categories/versions so that he can (hopefully ;) create the same in b.g.o. Pass word onto Darin when done.

2. GDP: I volunteered to update the docs for logview w/screenshots et al a long time ago. Will do.

3. Nautilus: testing page content. Harvey/Jdub are working on the proposed Naut. community site. Have to complete initial Naut. Testing content and forward to them. Rally the troops.

4. Nautilus: tinderbox has been stuck for a month now. Need to get those rpm builds cranking again - they're a real convenience for people and facilitate testing.

5. Nautilus: test plans. Peter has been kind enough to forward gnome/naut-related test plans for Solaris to me. Have to review and adapt for general testing. Add to N. Testing content. Begin setup discussions of web-based test plan result reporting. Will be very nice when done.

Most of this won't be done until I get back. I'll try to get as much done as possible.

Tomatoes

We're seeing small tomatoes on a few of the plants. It'll be great when they mature and ripen. Mmm...

Gnome

Updated to Ximian Gnome 1.4 yesterday. Also snarfed the current Nautilus rpm's. I'm enjoying ximian 1.4 so far. Nautilus bugzilla cleanup plods on - did some work last night in the wee hours.

jfleck: I'm eager to see the doc style guide once the initial draft is complete. I'd like to help move existing docs to the style standards once they're established.

Life

Saw "The Original Acoustic Hot Tuna" last night. It was great - just Jorma and Jack on stage. The University Theatre is an excellent venue for such shows - very intimate.

Spent much time outside today - bright, sunny, and hot. We scoured the local pawn shops for bicycles - none were had today, but one place will have some cheaper ones on Monday that I'll look at. Nothing fancy, something to get around on for now. I'd like to start biking to work, but have some stamina building to do.

Funny-thing-of-the-day: My dmoz application for the Missoula category was rejected. I'm still chuckling about it. Oh well.

Life/Work/etc.

Hmmm... let's see. Getting anything productive done at home these days?

Nope.

How about work (the one where they pay you)?

Kind-of.

What about Nautilus?

Well, you see, I have the best intentions, but there's this great weather, and, well...

I've joined the gnome-bugsquad, woohoo! One goal this weekend for me is to hit Eazel/Nautilus bugzilla component- by-component and clean it out.

I wonder if Darin's back in town yet.

I completed my draft of an article about Open Source testing efforts. Included some comparison to commercial development testing teams. I'm still amazed (and proud) that such development work gets completed by volunteer communities. I don't care if that's a broken record by now, it makes me all warm and fuzzy! The article will be published sometime soon, a great publicity tool for Nautilus and GNOME testing -- come, all ye testing volunteers! Now if only I could get our testing page updated on nautilus.eazel.com. Sure would like to do a bug-day.

Work

HVAC systems are evil. We have a vent/blower thing about 20 feet from my head that is excessively LOUD. And it runs constantly, cooling this part of the building to a cozy 50 degrees. Well, when my fingers are too numb to type I'll just go home. He he he.

I spent part of the day setting up TWM on my machine. I've been running GNOME w/Nautilus for awhile, but the performance hit is too much on a 300mhz w/64 mb of ram. I've gone desktop-minimalist until I grab some more memory.

Community

The flamefest has subsided. I hope something constructive results from it.

Life

Productivity is at an all-time low. I've done squat with Nautilus the past few nights, and don't really have anything to show for the time I wasted. I've spent some time on an article that'll be published soon, but not enough time, and the crunch is on. Back to the bunker.

Life

The past two days have left me frazzled. Two days ago, a friend from the East Coast called - whom I haven't talked to in like a year and a half. It was great! He's coming out here this summer, whether he wants to or not :) Crazy.

I got an email yesterday from family telling me that my Grandfather's wife passed away two weeks ago. I didn't know her very well, but it's still very sad to see family pass on. I wish I had heard earlier, or something...

I haven't been productive with Nautilus Testing the past few days. There's that whole Real Life (TM) factor that plays into volunteering on free software projects. I'd much rather spend my days working on this project than at work, but that rant doesn't deserve space here.