Older blog entries for zeevon (starting at number 161)

A day of change for me. Got sick of my shaggy hair, so I cut it. Got sick of my messy apartment, so I cleaned it. Got sick of my lack of sleep, so I'm going to bed. :-)

I'm preparing a GPG tutorial for OCLUG which will take place in May, followed by a key signing party in June. Randal Leavitt, OCLUG president and one of the most enthusiastic people that I have ever met, has been bombarding me with questions about GPG for a few days now. Quite a few of them are questions that I didn't think of yet, but will definitely need to be addressed during the tutorial.

After submiting my intent to adopt wmdate a while ago, I finally found the time this morning to upload it for the first time. Got home from school and made a new version that fixed the last remaining bug. I also managed to fix a problem I was having with Login.app (god I hate imake), so a new version of that package should be released this weekend.

Last night was the first time in 3 nights that I slept for more than 3 hours. I'm dead. Unlike the stereotypical programmer, I don't function very well if I don't get a good night's sleep.

Someone asked if I wanted to be part of a group taking a sky diving class this summer (of course I said yes!). So it looks like myself and a few friends from engineering will be jumping out of plane four times in June.

Discovery of the week: gyms are extremely intimidating. So far I have been 3 times and every time I have been the smallest guy there (by a wide margin!). I'm trying to increase my upper body strength for skiing (for tricks, actually). My chin-up limit is currently six, which seems pathetic next to the guys that are doing nearly twice that amount with huge weights hanging from themselves. You have to aim for personal improvement, though, so I'll be going back 3 times/week now.

Trying to figure out who I'll be voting for in the upcoming OCLUG election. All of the current board, save one, are running again and there are two new faces added to the candidate list so far. This should be interesting.

A big congradulations to Bart Bunting, a Debian developer who won two gold medals in the 2002 Paralympics (in downhill skiing).

Just uploaded the wmcpu package into Debian's incoming directory. 5 bugs and 3 lintian warnings fixed. The grave bug only said "crashes when under heavy load", which makes it semi-hard to reproduce (not that I didn't try!). Hopefully the new upstream has fixed it (as far as I could tell, it was fixed - I was running MATLAB, Heroes of Might & Magic III and compiling a new kernel at the same time and it didn't do anything strange).

Tried out Enigmail with Mozilla 0.9.8 (as opposed to a nightly build) and it installs without any errors. I can't figure out how to check the validity of signatures, though (but encrypting/decrypting messages works fine). I doubt that I'll move away from Mutt anytime soon, but this would definitely help out some Windows-using friends of mine that would probably like to start using PGP/GPG.

I also just noticed that jedi is mentioned on the front page of mozilla.org because he's assisting with Mozilla 1.0 project management tasks. Cool!

Whew! Somehow managed to survive my midterms.

Debconf2 is taking place in Toronto this July, which means that I can attend! So I'll be attending OLS at the end of June, work a few days, then head down to Toronto for that conference (and hopefully have the chance to meet up with some non-Debian friends, too).

I have been looking at a few RC bugs in Debian today. Right now I'm going through wmcpu (in terrible shape, although it's far from a critical package).

Discovered Enigmail, which allows Mozilla to use PGP/GPG in both MailNews and in web-based e-mail services (Hotmail, Yahoo, etc). It's made for milestone releases, which probably explains why I'm having trouble using it in my March 1st nightly build, but it looks promising.

dyork: You know your country is crazy about hockey when a member of parliament asks: "How about that Joe Sakic?" during question period (and he wasn't the only politician to comment on the performance of our hockey teams). I worry that we'll soon be electing our politicians based on the NHL jersey that they wear.

Jennifer Heil of Canada just placed 4th in the women's moguls event at the Olympics in Salt Lake City, missing the bronze medal by 1/100th of a point. She had the fastest time of all the women and pulled a nice, huge air on the second jump (360 iron cross-spread; the cross wasn't well defined, but she is the first woman to ever attempt the jump in competition). She's also the youngest Olympian that Canada sent to the Games, being only 18 years old. Although her performance didn't earn her a medal, it did raise the bar.

Go Canada Go!

I went skiing at Gray Rocks this weekend and tried a few new tricks. The most impressive was a sunrise (see this photo, although the skier in it adds a 180 degree turn before landing). It's basically a cartwheel, but you take off facing forward and just spin sideways. It's probably the coolest trick that I have ever done so I'm totally psyched up right now.

I'm now reviewing Jim Lisi's grunch package (he's in the Debian NM queue) before I sponsor it. Besides that, I'm spending all of my time doing homework.

I'm back from a ski trip in New Hampshire. They have a funny way of opening runs that have very little snow cover (and a lot of rocks!) and keeping snow-filled runs closed. Needless to say, I ducked under quite a few "Trail Closed" signs. I was also doing a hell of a lot of 360s. Unfortunately, two days of skiing was more than my body was ready to take, so I had to skip the third day (my abdominal, back and leg muscles were so sore that it took me ten minutes just to get out of bed!).

I'm happy that there wasn't too much e-mail to catch up on upon my arrival last night. I sent in my vote for the OCLUG Logo Contest, too. I'll try to finish my entry for the programming wars tommorow (I keep falling asleep at random today).

Back to bed...

Quick release of the wmscope Debian package to clean up up the man page a bit (there wasn't a section that described the command-line options). The rest of the day was spent catching up on my reading. I finally got through my backlog of IEEE Spectrum magazines that had been lying around. I was delighted to find an article discussing embedded OS's, with a cartoon of a penguin, MS robot, Wind River tornado and BSD daemon all wrestling against each other. I also read another 100 pages of Atlas Shrugged, which is starting to get interesting.

Yesterday I started putting together a PHP entry for the upcoming OCLUG programming wars. I didn't get very far but hopefully I'll actually submit something this time around.