Older blog entries for walters (starting at number 22)

Been sick recently, it's no fun. On the other hand, I did manage to squash a few items from my todo list.

I keep having doubts about Debian-CORBA. Sometimes I think that it might be easier to export the data via LDAP or something. On the other hand, though, that precludes doing any of the cooler stuff we could do with CORBA like modifying things.

Yay, one more of my Debian bugs (#135579) is squashed. Now I only have a few normal level bugs left; the one that really needs fixing is 112236, but I just haven't had time to debug it. The Crux GTK+ theme seems to make other GNOME applets go awry too.

Found a research topic for this quarter: advanced macro systems. Should be interesting.

I must say, not having class on Friday rocks!

Woo, first day of spring quarter classes here at OSU. This is when all the attractive women who went into hibernation for the winter quarter come out :)

Did a bit of Debian hacking today, nothing too interesting. Hm, it's really about time I squashed bug 135579...

I noticed SBCL got into Debian/powerpc; very cool.

It was interesting to watch the Debian Project Leader debates. It's very exciting to be participating in a project like Debian and being able to vote on issues like who the next DPL is going to be. I actually originally joined the project because I wanted to vote on the GR to remove the non-free section (I would have voted for it).

I can't believe it has been two weeks since I wrote this little patch for Evolution to make it optionally not render HTML at all, but I still can't get the damn thing to work. It is linking with both libgal19 and libgal20, which I assume is what is making it try to allocate 1 gig of memory at startup (and obviously failing)...

jamesh: That spamassassin-as-a-postfix-agent hack is cool.

An interesting day today. Our club finally got our petition against BitKeeper advocacy sent out. There was only a small amount of constructive discussion, but I think the point was made, which is all we wanted.

This quarter is rapidly coming to a close, and with it graduation draws nearer. A scary thought.

So, today I tried rdiff-backup, and I'm completely blown away. It is the coolest backup utility I've ever used. Backing up my home directory to a remote machine is as easy as:

rdiff-backup /home/walters
walters@monk.debian.net::backups/space-ghost/home

That's it. Please excuse the extranenous newline I can't figure out how to get rid of in this crappy Galeon input box which insists on filling my text for me. Gah.

In another small victory, the Debian boot-floppies build on PowerPC again. Now all we need to do is get Linux 2.4.18 in the archive, and I think we'll be good to go.

One thing that I love about university life is the wide variety of things that can happen on campus. Today I went with SyntaxPolice and others to a cultural food festival, where for only US$3 I was able to try food from the Phillipines, Hong Kong, and Iran. There were lots of other representative countries there, too. My favorite was this fried bananna sort of thing (I forget what it was called) from the Phillipines table. Mmmmm.

Tonight I think my means of procrastinating on school work will be adding an option to Evolution to prefer plaintext over HTML in multipart/alternative mails. And probably another option to not render HTML at all.

Woo, it's very exciting that Debian might actually be releasing woody by next month. I've realized that I've allowed myself to become somewhat complacent, thinking woody was still far off.

I am continuing on my project to learn Dylan. It's a very cool language, and quite ahead of its time. Think of the raw speed and ability to interface with C of C++, the flexibility of Common Lisp, a nice clean syntax, compilation to native code and to top it off, an object system that totally kicks ass.

Ok, time to get off my butt and upload my Debian packages of the XML Resume Library, and try harder to convince the Cabal to let me deploy Debian CORBA.

Today I am actively trying to beat the drums of war against BitKeeper, a propretary revision control system that is attempting to spread through our community. If you care about freedom, petition the Linux kernel maintainers to not advocate using BitKeeper! Other, free choices include CVS, Arch, and Subversion.

I noticed the other Colin in Debian certified me; thanks Colin!

Whee. Long time no diary entry. I've been pretty busy lately working on Debian. Having a four week break from school is great!

In other news, my school's Open Source Club is getting some new members, and a lot of people are interested and working on projects. It's neat to have the feeling that one is creating something that will last for years after one has left.

And finally, if you're a roller blader, and you haven't been to Central Park in Manhattan, you have to go. By far the best skating I've ever had. Lots of interesting things going on, plenty of beautiful girls, and there are hills and such to get going very fast on. Highly recommended.

Well, despite the fact that finals are over, and I should be feeling relieved, I can't keep up with the projects that I'm working on. I hate the thought that some of them have to suffer. Unfortunately, none of them are in a state where I could hand them off to someone else. Sigh. Maybe I'll instead spend my waking hours figuring out how to remove my need for sleep...