drained
Posted by mcummings
Not sure what's up with me today...just feel completely drained. Probably a side effect of the long (subjectively) weekend.
Saturday was fun if a little enlightening. Katy had another birthday party to go to. I know this is a side effect of the school she's going to preschool in, but I wasn't prepared for the size and "opulence" (not quite the word I want, but close enough) of her classmate's family. The important thing, though, is she had a blast, even if she spent most of it with Nicholas, who apparently is quite the ladies man in this prekindergarten class. But boy did I feel out of my league.
Yesterday we spent far too many hours at Home Depot, which has to be just about one of the worst places to order anything for your house. I think if we hadn't already committed to them doing our doors, I'd have gladly just walked out of there without spending a cent. But instead, we finalized the couple of g's it's going to take to replace our front and side door, as well as storm doors. Between that and the work the plumber is going to be finishing up later this week, I think we're about half way through the home repairs we wanted to do before trying to sell the place.
Which means we'll be in this place for at least another year, since the remaining "half" of what needs to be done is the remodeling of the kitchen and bathroom. I just have to keep reminding myself every little thing we get done helps us get closer to our goal.
[ Just to explain, when we bought our decrepit classic home, my wife and I were expecting our first child. The house was a nice starter home, comfortable, close to a school, yada yada yada. Fast forward five years, we have 3 kids, and absolutely no space in the house for either ourselves or the baggage that 5 humans and a dog entails. It's just not enough room, but before we can sell the place, we need to fix the things that the previous owner's let slide/fall/crumble. Or worse. Tried to do themselves. ]
Which leads me up to today. Tired. Drained. Unmotivated.
projects
Posted by mcummings
if you've been following universe and the dev mailing list, you know all about the latest craze in flaming, Seeds. personally, i think the idea has some merits. project status? not sure. maybe. too early to really say, isn't it?
now i have this problem with too many unfinished projects, and i've avoided it by not announcing anything until i have something to show. call it the "show me the money" attitude, but i prefer not to say anything about a project i'm working on until there's something viable to show for it. at that point, you can turn around and say "hey, here's this thing i've been toying with, what do you think, want it?" instead, folks are announcing ideas for projects and getting shot up (if not down) far too quickly.
not every idea is worth being a "gentoo" project. but that doesn't mean that the idea shouldn't be explored. host it externally until its accepted, move it into the fold when its ready. if its appealing, people will flock to it and let you know.
but then you have folks like this dev on slashdot who starts off his post that he's posting anon because (s)he "don't feel like getting fired for speaking out against a certain clique." wth? since when did expressing an opinion cause you to get "fired" (like its a job or a chore rather than a past time and hobby). but then they go further, and this is their real point, to sidestep seeds all together and instead bash seemant.
unfortunately, i probably count as a "seemant fanboy" because seemant and i get along pretty well even when we disagree on stuff. i can only guess seemant was picked out of the crowd because he's been around forever, and lately he's been a little more vocal than in the recent past (this, by the way, is what we call "a good thing" - seemant, good to see you blogging and voicing up again 
).
bah. what's the point to this ramble? I think i was aiming for two points actually: second, what a silly sod to turn a discussion on seeds into a bashing of someone you don't care for; and first (yes, that's in reverse order for those of you wondering), there should be a clear line between projects and "Gentoo Projects". Having a project shouldn't be subject to the level of pain folks have been getting lately - a project should be something you work on in your spare spare spare time ('cause your doing bugs and canoeing or whatever in your spare and spare spare time). "Gentoo Projects," imho, should be the next stage in the evolution of a project, when it's been looked at and has something tangible to it, and folks can say "this fits into the greater scheme of things, let's make it official so we can give it that backbone stability and legitimacy that it's earned."
If the worst that comes from it is tsunam's quote of "Gentoo: making mistakes in the open to prove we are just like you" then that's the case, cool, it'll be a lesson to the next person/group that wants to try something similar.
bah.
portage has failed me completely
Posted by mcummings
emerge -pv happiness
These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
Calculating dependencies
emerge: there are no ebuilds to satisfy "happiness".
But what does this say?
emerge -pv sex
These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild N ] games-misc/sex-1.0 4 kB
shiver m’ imagemagick!
Posted by mcummings
Arrgh, lest ye forget today be the day of pirate speakin', here be yer post.
Sven an' me might not be good at talkin' to one 'nother, but the skulleywag did scrib a patch in bug 121142 to make perlmagick build smoothly from the bowels of imagemagick (on demand, and correctly). So this here be his shout out, no walkin' the plank this eve. ebuild will be gettin' updated when the sun finishes setting ov'r the Cliffs of Insanity.
An' aye, that's a homage to the Dread Pirate Roberts, th' only pirate worth bein'. Now to go home an' see 'bout shiver'n m' timbers.
Linux.com’s “My Gentoo odyssey”
Posted by mcummings
Read through this article today about Joe Barr's fight with installing Gentoo. A few things struck me as not having followed the docs closely enough, a few as easy to fix newbie mistakes (rc-update del xdm default to remove the gui login to X, Joe). I'm pretty sure others are going to pipe up with their personal problem with the article, and I expect he anticipates that (though where or who said RTFM??). A few good things did come from it though, such as a shout out for the docs and the irc channels. Is it really this hard to install gentoo for a new person? (not being a sarcastic sob, really asking)