And now to reclaim our lives…
Posted by mcummings
Over the course of the last three days, 4 out of 5 household members have been victims of a rotavirus. Oh, what fun! Details of this nasty diet aside, expect me to return to my ramblings soon.
emerge -av pain
Posted by mcummings
OK, so getting a Gentoo box up at home doesn't look feasible in the near future. So I thoughts to myself, "hey, self, you have that old Gentoo server at work that's going to be decommissioned soon, why not play with it until then?"
Why, indeed.
Looks like the last time I gave this box some love was in May of 2007.
So my first step, following an emerge-websync, was to try and upgrade portage itself. Except its blocked by a bash dep, which is blocked by the portage version. Ack. Trying bug 217479 initial suggestion of forcing an emerge of an older bash isn't working either - sandbox error (literally, can't build sandbox, though the fact that it wants to build sandbox really implies its still trying to upgrade portage). So ignore comment 7's suggestion, because using
emerge -avO portage ; emerge bash
appears to be the trick that works. Now that forces portage to reinstall without its deps, so I'd really recommend following that you go ahead and re-emerge portage with
emerge -av portage
to pull in the deps. Just for sanity's sake and all.
Then comes the real joy - my first emerge -auv system in years. The toll wasn't as bad as I expected, actually, which I guess is a good thing. Had to hunt around for a few minutes to remember its the -C flag to remove a package - seems there are some blockers that portage can't handle the uninstall for (or I'm too rusty to remember how to tell it to unmerge a package for me automatically). Off to see where the emerge -avu system fails - because I know its going to. That's karmic for neglecting the server for so long 
BBC NEWS | Technology | Calls for open source government
Posted by mcummings
article on BBC NEWS from this weekend caught my eye - "Calls for open source government".
Could be interesting times at work if this panned out. Never mind the PITA it presents since its a little short sighted. It doesn't take into account all of the money the government has already spent for FY09 for maintenance, etc., plus the manpower and training to do something like this. Its easy to say the government should just convert everything to OpenSource, but something else entirely when you look at the costs of replacing and migrating existing systems.
Yeah, I'm that jaded these days.
Wrapping up for the week
Posted by mcummings
Well, I can’t deny, it’s been nice having no work related concerns for a week now. I didn’t exactly change the world in my time off, though I did manage to get to most of my goals. I think its helped that my list of goals for the week only had two items on it – writing, and getting an oil change, and I can live without the oil change for a little while longer.
Granted, the week wasn’t without its random visit to the ER. Anna came home from school the other day complaining about a headache and running a mild fever (99/100). We kept her home the next day, fed her Tylenol, everything was fine, we thought. But as soon as the Tylenol wore off, pow, her fever returned at 104 (hence the visit to the ER). Still no clue as to what was causing the fever, but needless to say that put a spin on our activities for the week.
But, all in all, a nice quiet week. I’m a super spectacular day’s work away from being 50% done with the first draft of the novel. Granted, that 47% it currently hovers it is a bit misleading, and I must confess my guilt. The output has been steady, let me start there. Nothing I’ve done was to mask a slacking Mikey in the background. But it began to dawn on me that this is only the first draft. When I write short fiction (which, psst, I’m working on a piece on the side now 
, the first draft is all boney and bare, the second draft is where I overfeed the beast to see what gaps can be filled and where the story can go, and then the third draft is where I whittle it all down to the juicy story. If I follow the same formula here – and it is my intent to – then cutting my initial word count goal from 100 to 80 thousand words makes sense, since in the next draft I’m going to be filling in gaps, expanding scenes, adding missing things like “the” and “said Bozo".
So don’t be too proud of my progress, but don’t knock it either. And for any newcomers (or for that matter, the rest of ya – yeah, I know this will most probably never be published, but even if I classify it as a practice novel, at least it keeps me off the streets at night…er, yeah, something like that.
Off to get ready for my day, which includes a trip to the FieldHouse for a birthday party. w00t.
New Geek Score
Posted by mcummings
My new Geek Score: -6 uniVerse lengths (that's, like, really super big number times -6). I tried installing Gentoo on the old laptop; too bad I didn't make it past the kernel compile. Not for a lack of knowledge, to be sure, but because the old hardware overheated while trying to build the kernel. I could limp it along by restarting the compile process over and over and inching past every few compilations. But really, all that would buy me was a hobbled kernel - in Gentoo, everything is from source (remember?), and I had a long way to go before I could fire up XFCE and Abiword and cvs checkout my work in progress.
So, defeated, I put in the ubuntu cd - which crashed during the install. I smell hardware failure (figuratively), but am going to let the machine cool down and start over again.
At least I have the netbook still...hon, when you read this, find some wood for me to knock on...