Okay, so I finally went and created an Advogato account... when I mentioned to others that I'd seen their postings, they kept asking when I'd join... primarily there have been two factors preventing me: 1) just been way too busy between shows; 2) it may sound strange but I find the whole certification thing somewhat... well... I'm not sure what is the right word... "intimidating" or something. It's just that it still seems somewhat vague - or perhaps I just have a problem with the names...
<Tangent> I wonder how much my certification of others is influenced by the ratings of people already there? Does the inital certification of someone start out oscillating between various levels and then settle down to more of a steady state over time? Or is that perhaps part of the research?</Tangent>
In any event, since it's after 9pm and I'm still here in the Linuxcare office in SF, I decided to join this experiment... let's see if I actually keep up with it.
makefaq
Finally found some time to do a file release through SourceForge. I've wanted to see how the file release mechanism works... I filled out all the information I thought was necessary and supposedly released it, but the project page still doesn't show it. Hmmm... I'll wait until tomorrow and see if it shows up. How immediate are these things supposed to be?
starting diary entries
Can I just whine and say that it was not intuitive to me how to start a diary entry after I created the account? I was dumped onto my account page... and that was it. I looked around for quite some time before I figured out that I had to go into
CVS
Today I attempted to automate the export of the LPI web site from CVS into the main /home/http/html directory. We've started using CVS over ssh so that multiple people can be editing the site at once. It was set up that the CVS repository is separate from where the HTML docs normally reside. And the idea was that a cron job would just export out of the cvs repository into the apache working directory.
However, I ran into the problem that a CVS export seems does not overwrite files in the target directory. Normally this is probably a good thing, but I really want it to do so. The commands I'm using are:
export CVSROOT=/home/cvsroot cvs export -d /home/httpd/html -D tomorrow LPI-webdev/html
It works fine, except it just warns me that I need to move files that are conflicting. I went searching around through man pages, the CVS book and other sources... in search of the elusive command-line argument kind of like rm -rf, but couldn't find what I'm looking for. Any advice would certainly be welcome.
And if there's a better way to be doing this, I'd love to hear it. I know there's an apache module for CVS or something... I'm still a relative newcomer to the world of CVS.
I've now got about 6 volunteers willing to help with the content of the LPI web site... I've just got to get this cvs export working in order for them to be able to help.
DocBook
Went to Stacey's bookstore last evening (on a beautiful San Francisco evening) and picked up DocBook: The Definitive Guide from O'Reilly. Several reasons: 1) It's been thrown around as a format for the storage of courseware (since it's text based and we could use CVS). 2) I've thought about offering DocBook format as one possible data format for makefaq; 3) LDP uses it; and 4) I'm a long-time SGML geek. (I taught people to use FrameMaker for 5 years and as part of that did a good bit of work with SGML.)
Fascinating stuff (to me)... a lot of it was familiar but it does do things a bit differently than the DTDs I worked with in the past. Lots to learn... and a bunch more tools to install on my computer.
ClueTrain
I had read the cluetrain manifesto some time ago, but in the Philadelphia airport (enroute to Ottawa for ".commerce2000" earlier last week), I happened to find a treeware version that had expanded essays. Very interesting... but I'll comment on that some other time...
Weather in NH
Okay, so here I am in San Francisco with beautiful weather... and at home in New Hampshire it was in the 90s and my wife said she could have used our air conditioners! (which were packed away in the attic for the winter). 90 degrees in early May? Way too weird...
Okay... my first diary entry... and a long one... typical...
no one has ever praised me for my brevity!