Older blog entries for roguemtl (starting at number 18)

Spent some time hacking on Spruce; added some new word wrap handling and corrected a SMTP-related bug. Lots of things have happened since last diary entry; much work, some play. Glad to see people accomplish long-term tasks and have patches absorbed into the mainstream.

Nearly settled.

At OLS:

Wednesday: Saw Miguel's talk; much made sense. Rik van Riel and bcrl's talk on Linux MM was excellent. They did a fantastic job of covering all of the MM territory, discussing throughput and latency in a member of contexts. Their talk was geared well to the audience, IMHO; I was rather suprised that both khemicals and I took quite so much away from the talk (a credit to the presentation abilities of riel and bcrl).

Yesterday: Saw talks by tytso (filesystems), willy (Linux on PA-RISC), sct (ext3) and the ARPsec talk. Enjoyed the first three; especially sct's talk (I have been using ext3 for a couple months now and it has been working out well; so well, in fact, that I gave wife root on one of the boxes and am much less concerned with her mucking the fs in the event that she does not do a proper shutdown.). I have an HP 715/100 sitting at home which I'll be delving into when I return home from OLS.

Today: Stayed up late to work on some code and discussion with snippy and khemicals after dinner with that pair and snippy's girlfriend. Ottawa is a fun place. Got up late and plan to attend the sessions after lunch (and make especially sure to be around for the pgp/gpg keysigning bit at 5pm).

Have spent some time over the last couple of days on GNU Privacy Guard things. Visited the Detroit Zoo today (including the Penguinarium).

Will probably pack a bag for OLS tomorrow so I can figure out what I am still missing (wife and I have not yet received the delivery of our stuff from the moving company). Parents were kind enough to deliver a pair of spare power cables so I could get my work machine powered on (only had enough cables to power on the server box previously, since most of my gear is packed away in boxes in storage controlled by the moving company in another state).

Received logo materials from Xar (bassist and artist); they have been scanned and are being discussed by the Marble Horse crew over the next few days.

Have been hacking on this and that for the last few weeks while attempting to complete a 800 mile move; one can only understand the true need for furniture having not had such things for some period of time.

sab39: I suspect many of us read the bit about Al Gore in a March 1999 article on the Wired news service covering the subject.

khemicals, snippy and I shall be attending OLS in ~two weeks. Definetely ready for that "vacation" :) If anyone would be interested in gpg keysigning with me while at OLS, feel free to drop me a note.

Wife graduated yesterday; has been a long, busy four years. In-laws are visiting; visit has been much more comfortable than in the past (wife's brothers are not yelling && screaming quite so frequently now that they've grown up). I was awarded an honorary 'Doctor of Patience' degree, along with all of the other husbands and wives of the graduates. (Patience in supporting and tolerating the long hours, rough life of having this type of student in the house; the certificate is somewhat humorous in a way, since it was done up as an honorary degree from the college, but welcome nonetheless).

It is my plan to spend some time today posting other Marble Horse project materials to our website. There are no less than four projects whose proceeds have not yet made it to the public pages; today is the day to remedy that situation.

To those who have graduated from school(s) this year: best of luck with the coming months; congratulations.

I sympathize with axboe.

Spent some time chatting with other MH devels in-person today. Good pizza to be had. Submitted my first patch to Spruce... more to follow tomorrow.

Yesterday, visited the FSF in Boston, as well as my sister.

Hacked on some miscellaneous code. Need sleep (finally).

Also visited the Delorme map store today (with their 3- story scale (including rotation) model of the Earth). Cool stuff. Also stopped at the visitor center down the road to ask why the State of Maine and Canadian flags were flying upside-down. Apparently they have a prankster in their midst.

Good day all around.

Has been an interesting pair of days. Bought a cordless drill yesterday (DeWalt 12V) and proceeded to complete furniture repair work as directed by wife. (By the time I was done, I came to the complete realization she has minimal knowledge of such matters (including how much of my time these repairs would take), though I did get some new tools out of it ;)

Worked on some code and discussed the 'secret project #2' further. Worked on a logo for Marble Horse. A graphics artist I am not. Discussed PHP3-driven software patch repository plans with snippy; a project for the next few days.

khemicals to arrive tomorrow (more cleaning to do before then). Couple of new tasks on the horizon for the weekend.

Sent two more patches off to the w3m maintainer. My list of things I'd like to enhance in w3m is staying about the same length on a day-to-day basis ;) Spent a bit of time reviewing dexter's patch; looks good.

Started cleaning the room a bit as I shall have a visitor at the end of the week. Also started wrapping my sister's birthday present.

All is well.

Was ill this morning at ~2:30 but am feeling alive again.

Split wood on Friday; started planning (with my father) an OS upgrade for their print server (moving from near-ancient Slackware -> semi-recent RedHat; mars_nwe -> samba). I am hands-off on this one (he runs the show :)

Fiddled with some Palm things. Talked a fair amount with snippy, fejj, khemicals and dexter.

As there has not been a notable response to our plans for SLPv5a (a backward- and forward-compatible format extension to SLPv5), it will likely be dropped (though the materials we have done thus far will be available for others). Stampede's SLP guy (sbaker) has basically decided not to use SLPv5a, SLPv5 or the work he previously did on SLPv6. He is now writing a completely new package format for Stampede, SLPv0.90 or somesuch. Details of his SLP plans will probably be included in the devel meeting logs for April 22. I believe this was the only remaining Stampede project with which I had ties.

Worked on [hacking] w3m and [heavily testing] spruce. dexter is working on w3m things now as well. Latest spruce release (0.6.3) seems to be working quite well.

Made some headway on the 'new project' yesterday; discussed it with one of the people involved for a good three hours. MHFSG things appear to be moving along well :)

Spoke with one of my good friends regarding training sessions at corporations. Two thoughts have resulted from this chat; one his, one mine.

First, what good is training if it is done in such a manner as to cause people who have been with the company for more than six months to quit? Silly goings on are not appropriate, in some cases. (his point)

Second, why do some corporations have a week of training related to teambuilding and empowerment? Teambuilding takes more than a week. Let's look at this another way: how long do US Marines spend in boot camp? They certainly spend more than a week on teambuilding; why would they sink so much time into it if they didn't need to? A week of "teambuilding" and "empowerment" seems absurd. Introduce people on good terms, let them know the ground rules and let them build their own team (unless lives depend on in, in which case, put them through boot camp).

As my friend pointed out: "Only 2 of my coworkers are on my team, they were on my team before the training session, and remain that way during."