schedule; g-cpan; errata
Posted by mcummings
Schedule: after "experimenting" with the later schedule at work for the last 6 months, I've relented and and asked to go back on the early shift. I can't start quite as early as I used to, but I'll be back on the morning to afternoon shift, so my time on irc will fluctuate again. On the upside, I'll be closer to on schedule with my close to GMT offset friends 
g-cpan: I think we're about to hit critical mass on the bugs again, time to pull in what ian and dams have been toying with and looking to do an 0.14.1. It may even be time (*gasp*) to consider an actual release schedule.
And finally...I can't believe it's been almost a week and I haven't blogged about it or anything. Thank you to all who voted (whether it was for or against me 
in the trustee elections. I look forward to working for Gentoo for the next year on the Foundation. Thanks everyone!
On removing perl 5.8.7 (not my brightest move this week)
Posted by mcummings
So, we talked it over in #gentoo-perl, and by email, and came to a consensus (of sorts) that no one was running perl 5.8.7, all of the arch's had marked 5.8.8 stable, so really there wasn't anything holding back on our removing it. So I did.
Stupid, stupid Me.
When I went through and created the versioned virtuals for some of the perl core modules, it was supposed to be to help us out. At the time, we had ebuilds in the tree that duplicated what some versions of perl shipped with. Now, these ebuilds also contained versions that superceded what perl came with (hence the ebuilds), but this mish-mash meant that in some cases we had an ebuild for the same module and version that shipped with a particular version of perl. I stabbed the versioned virtuals into place so that folks wouldn't have to install additional modules if the version of perl they had installed already gave them what they needed. Makes sense, right? Keywording for these virtuals was based on whichever had the best keywords for each arch, so that if either the perl-core ebuild or the dev-lang/perl ebuild was stable for an arch, the virtual was also stable. Made sense still.
Now fast forward back to this week and the removal of perl-5.8.7, and the mess I'm trying to sort through. I advocated (and performed the deed, it's true) the removal of 5.8.7 for two reasons: perl-5.8.8 was stable on all archs that 5.8.7 was stable on, and none of us running it to be able to backport bug fixes. Arch's (no blame, no stones cast here) have been inconsistent about marking virtuals stable, and the timelag of bugzilla to dev responses makes wanting to files bugs for all of this painful.
This is very much a case of poor planning on my part. The sad thing is most people will be fine even though some of these cross deps are broken because most if not all of the virtuals have a ref for perl-5.8.8 in at least one version. I just need to find the time to compile the lists, check them twice, and report where I've been naught and nice.
ugh.
What next?
Posted by mcummings
In the last week:
* TV burned out
* Speakers on the media server were burned out (unrelated to the tv - this was my own foobar)
* Unknown overdue bill for Anna's accident last January showed up via an arbitrator
* Downstairs toilet has begun leaking out the base
ack. That's enough for now, universe, thanks, call back once we're on our feet. <beep>
An experiment by force
Posted by mcummings
When I was a pre-teen, back in the mid years of Reagan, we found ourselves living in Nuremberg (well, Furth actually). Thanks to a mix up in some paperwork, here we were in Germany without a TV. What's a kid born and raised on Saturday morning cartoons and afternoon specials to do??? I adapted, of course, and became quite the nerdery (some things never got better). I'm reminded of these nostalgic times because this morning, in the blink of an eye, our main TV decided that life wasn't worth it anymore and stopped accepting input or displaying anything, but instead chose to give off a high pitched whir accompanied by the smell of warm, very, very warm plastic. Power button was useless, and in fact the only thing capable of stopping it was to remove it from its source of power. Even waiting for it to cool down and plugging it back in didn't help - it is toast, joined the choir eternal, pushing up the daisies.
Of course our first reaction was to hop online and price out a new tv. But we didn't just want to have a tv to have a tv; we acknowledge that it is worth it to buy something a little more robust, say something hdtv ready (given that I play the PS2, and the PS3 is rumored to be a set killer if you aren't running high def). That of course put tv's right our of our price range unless we wanted a 14 inch (hmmm...smaller than either of my lcd's....no....). I should interject that we still have tv's in the house - the kids have a small one they watch movies on, and we have one in the bedroom, plus there's my mythtv setup, so it isn't like we are looking at being bereft of tv all together. What we are removing, though, is the convenience of sitting on the couch and watching something, of having that living room locust.
And the crazy thing is, once we grappled with the cost (out of our budget right now - we just paid for new doors, a plumber to replace a bunch of stuff, etc., ie we're pretty tapped at the moment), we started talking about ways to rearrange the living room to suit our needs (rather than being centered on the tv like it is now). There are going to be some rough patches, its true - tomorrow morning when the girls come downstairs expecting to watch disney and instead get offered the choice of a dvd or nothing - but i'm kind of excited to see how long this will last. On the plus side, it spurred Kim into looking at how I use mythtv, glancing through the console on mythweb, and playing with the windows file plugin (myth's nuv files are on a samba mount) to watch things I've recorded from her computer (and on wireless to wireless at that!) [If you are in need of playing with this, winmythfrontend seems dead to me, no updates in a few years, but one of the file format plugins for windows, coupled with an nfs or samba share, makes it doable. And if you hover over a file in windows, you get most of the recording info like title, recording date, synopsis, etc - not too shabby]
Now I've always wanted to read my way through one of those 100 greatest books series. I've admired the Easton press catalogs for years now, but I'm just not sure I'm ready to make that kind of investment, no matter how nice their high quality leather bound books are, if i can't even get a copy of the list they're working from. Now I have an idea of the kinds of books I expect to find on such a list, some I've already read, some I've looked at and acknowledged over the years. What I think I want to do, while this no tv in the living room thing lasts (whether that be weeks or years) is to pull together one of these lists, and work my way through it. Maybe i'll even post my tentative list here (once I've had a chance to go through the lists everyone else generated at the end of the 90's to celebrate the upcoming century).
festival talks too much (really)
Posted by mcummings
i've been trying to play around with festival a bit lately, but on two different computers I have this common problem - it's ok for reading off a line at a time, but if I try to use tts to read a file, it's like it starts reading each of the lines *at the same time*. Anyone know what causes this?