Elfyn McBratney

I was sorta hoping that I wouldn't end up doing this again, but I've really had enough of 2006 and would like for it to quickly end so that I can get back to normal. In other words, I'm going to be offline and pretty much completely incommunicado from now until early next year (late January to early February).

There are a few people who know what I've been going through lately and might be a bit worried to read this, but there really is no need to be - I'll be back once I've sorted my head out, honest!

So long (for now), and thanks for all the stinky fish!

After reading one of Stuart's recent blog posts, I'm left feeling just a little bit worried about the state of the Foundation. Part of me wants to shrug off what Stuart said (and given his stated mood at the time, perhaps that would be a good idea), but here I am wondering what exactly is wrong in Foundation land...

So, Stuart, care to elaborate?

A few of weeks ago, Christel got me an inflatable sheep as a gift. (Note for the curious: although the sheep I received did not have holes *ahem*, it did come with handcuffs!)

Now, word has apparently got out that I'm "into" inflatable things (which indeed is news also to me!) and edit from ##uk on freenode is going to send me his Trexy goat. \o/

*bounce bounce*

This last week has been trying, at best. And when I thought things really couldn't get any worse, they did. And when I thought I'd cried enough, I soon realised that I had evidently not...

Last Tuesday (16th September, 2006), Rob Levin - known to many as Freenode's lilo - was in a tragic car accident while he was out cycling in Houston, Texas. I'm told that he had not a mark on him, however he did suffer head injuries leaving him in a coma. On Saturday 16th September, 2006, while being treated in a local hospital's neuro trauma ICU (Intensive Care Unit) Rob passed away. This terrible news, still, has just not sunk in...

Over the last few months he and I talked rather a lot, and not just about Freenode; we talked about that obviously, but we would also talk about other common interests like Gentoo and Tor, but also life in general. This quite suprised me as he and I had "butted horns", so to speak, occasionally in the past; but, as suprises go, it was really a rather fabulous one.

The last thing I remember him telling me was: "have you tried breathing exercises?" (I was having some trouble sleeping at the time), and what do you know, it worked. Not suprising, really, as he was often good with advice - be it technical or otherwise. It saddens me deeply that we will never speak again...

Rob, you have taught me many many things; from the basics of IRC, to ways of dealing with the problems that life throws at you and that you throw at life. You have been my mentor these past few months, but more importantly you have been a most extraordinary friend. Your untimely passing has touched thousands upon thousands of people, and you will not be forgotten.

Rest in peace, good man. Rest in peace.

Hmmm, I've had some suspiciously cheeky comments about this thing I have over here on the right. It's apparantly called a hackergotchi. 8) I feel old now... this is totally not happening in the right order! But yeah, I'm not wearing varnish... *ahem* Gimp++

With this in mind - and because I'm in a really silly mood, and stuff, and things - I'm going to run a little competition during the day. Here it is:

The first person to e-mail beu[@g.o], or /msg beu@irc.freenode.net with the correct answer to the following question gets one free bug fix. Now, the terms are thus; the bug must be related to a web-based app (something in www-*) and the app itself has to be written in either C, Perl or PHP. That's it. I'll fix at max three bugs, so there'll be a winner, a runner-up, and a "one for luck" third-place prize.

Now for the question: Which picture am I actually drunk in?

(A) Is it this beu? The foreign-looking, tired-feeling, uh, me?
(B) Or is it this camera-shy shortie, chuck? Cilla? Where!! Oh noes!!1@#
(C) This person looks like he's been out on the town... that, or can't handle his vino...
(D) Or... could it be this [mc]brat[ney]?

The Choice Is Yours! </scouse> Oh, and you only have until 12AM UTC! 8)

So, it seems that I'm destined to blog a lot today!

pkgcore
I've started working on pkgcore this (fine, sunny) afternoon, and I'll be working on supporting binpkgs completely in pkgcore - hopefully! Thus far, I have a minimal doc (which will appear in my overlay shortly) with some random musings about, essentially, how we tac metadata onto a binpkg .tbz2 archive. Since binpkg code will be easy to do - it's mainly just keeping the metadata packed on the end of a binpkg up-to-date and reading/writing said metadata; basically, being able to introspect metadata for a binpkg easily...

I currently have a following "not all all pseudo" code:

1. mmap() open binpkg fd;
2. cast base + offset to a struct containing metadata;
3. ... manipulate data ...;
4. write-out data (if write operation) with a memcpy and msync();
5. munmap() binpkg fd.

Once this is done, we essentially do the following for all write operations:

1. fsync() all fds;
2. fsync all binpkg directory fds (to ensure sync!);
3. ... wait for disk for flush ...;
4. report status to user.

Pretty simple, fast, and effective. Note that this is just for the "update all binpkgs" case, not a single inspect/change binpkg metadata... Time to put this to the test!

I've had "funny" days before, where I learn things about people - things that you know exist and things that you know end up happening to some people anyway, but sometimes forget and think "nah, not them", et cetera. Well, today has been one of those days. I'm not going to name names or discuss why this subject is particularly relevant to me - at least not in detail - but I will touch on what I've learnt in the last couple of hours, and what its made me think about...

To properly (but perhaps poorly ) dissect this subject and explore, I'm going to start by explaining (sort of) why I left Gentoo last year/this year. Basically, I was going through a really bad time mentally, and physically; mentally because I wasn't able to speak to many people about my problems, thus my head was virtually defunct for a large part of last year (September to November); physically because I spent a large chunk of the last part of Q3/much of Q4 2005 either in bed/elsewhere hiding from my problems, not doing much at all. As some already know, it took me a long time battling against these d[a]emons (hah!) to make a comeback. Now enough with the personal stuff...

Today, I've spoken to three people about my problems (you all know who you are <3), and I feel a lot closer to these people. Now, the question that's probably running through your mind is something akin to: "Why is this at all relevant to Gentoo?" Well, here's why:

• Knowing a person you're working with (for example, a fellow developer or user) decreases the chances of heavily misunderstanding something;
• Knowing the people you will have to work with helps just as above, but also you build bigger and better and most importantly stronger relationships, and you build social networks too.

Again, you may be still be wondering why this is appearing on planet.g.o, and why it is relevant. It may not be to all, but I do think it is relevant to how we, as colleagues - and perhaps friends - work and interface with others, and could help/encourage us to sit down and think for a little bit... I'll give an example so everyone is (hopefully!) on the same page:

I started working for $telco in *thinks* late 2004, and when I started I hardly knew anyone. I quickly made friends with a few people, but a lot of people just wanted to keep to themselves, which is fine, until this way of thinking starts damaging the work flow of your peers. Not only this, but the atmosphere was bad because hardly anyone knew each other. Sure, there were small circles of friends, etc, but the fact that nearly all of my staff (hah, yes, my staff... and yes, I'm only 21 going on 22 ;P) were strangers to all the other, uh, strange staff, it made things difficult to say the least... But this situation was soon flipped, and I'll explain why.

Basically, I decided that things needed to change. My boss wasn't happy; my staff weren't at all happy; their boss (me) wasn't happy, and it was very very noticeable. But this story has a happy ending: through initiatives others and myself started - and saw through to the very end - we all started to socialise, and get to know one and other. (We even had a [jokingly] forced "social time" where we'd go up to the roof for a cigarette and chat about life, work, and generally anything.)

It took a few months for this to start to work, but it did; we quite quickly saw the rise in our productivity level; we were not only having fun getting boring work done - sometimes by playing silly games while fixing equipment or dealing with customers! - but we all made new and exciting friendships. And not only this, but because of the very apparent change in how we worked, we got more work done, and all of us - my entire department no less - got a pay rise. And guess what? Internal "flames" on internal extranets/mailing lists completely disappeared!

Now, I'm going to leave this story there and let people think about it a little before I take it somewhere else, but I hope this story has made at least some people think. I think the common term for people smarter than I (yes, I'm quite dumb without caffeine - and high dosages, too!) would be "Food for thought."

And happy Wednesday/Thursday to those in the right timezones!

Hmm, I just had an email from "an American chick" that wanted to pay compliments to my shoulder and arm muscles that are apparantly on show in my pic on planet.g.o... must say, I'm terrible at taking pictures of myself - which I had to do in this case - and, personally, I think that that pic and the original are quite bad! But hey, you know who you are Ms. "American chick", thank you! What a shame I'm no longer available...

Long time no blog... I kinda stopped doing this lark 'properly' when I left Gentoo earlier this year (and I say 'properly' as when I did blog, it wasn't anything all that big... nono, some of it was!) But. Now that I'm back as a developer for Gentoo (yes, if you haven't already "locked-up yer ebuilds" like you would lock up your daughters [hah!], you're too late!), and I have this here blog, so I figure that I may as well use it. :)

I also have so much to write about, but I don't really want to fill the whole front page of planet.g.o with it; so, here is a little break-down of things that I'm working on related to Gentoo.

Developing for Freenode
Yes yes, it is indeed true. As those of you on IRC may have seen from my hostmask (aka 'cloak'), I am a Freenode developer. But how does this relate to Gentoo, pray tell? Well, it does and it doesn't. Gentoo's primary IRC network (if there is such a thing) is Freenode; we have developers there, we have users there, and we have plenty of channels there. Without Freenode (or another network that could handle our collective 'load' - bandwidth, services, servers all over the world, etc), Gentoo would be screwed.

So, yeah, you now have one Freenode staffer (Christel) and one Freenode developer (me) in the ranks. ;) (And, if you do happen to notice bugs, or think of anything which may be useful if implimented in Freenode's services/related software, please do let me know via email.)

Gentoo Things
I came back with the interest of helping out the Perl team again, as well as possibly working with the web/server folks (web-apps, www-servers, etc - Hi, Stu! :P), and possibly the kernel team. I'm slowly getting back into those teams (have been helping out with AXKit updating, and squashing some www-* bugs - mainly lighttpd), but the kernel team... not so.

It turns out that my help isn't required when it comes to the kernel. I have to say, I can sort of understand why; my "new dev" announcement had a mistake in it which was my fault - I said that I wanted to help the kernel team, but because the email was of course sent to -dev@g.o, it "looked" like an official statement. Not only that, but when I talked to one of the higher-up kernel team members - after they had "complained" that I should not have said that I wanted to help them, essentially - I was told that my help wasn't required. Which kinda made me curious, as another team member told me that the kernel team always needed more eyes, etcetera. I guess personal grudges exist everywhere, eh? :)

Another funny thing relating to that "rant" up there... I spoke to another prominent kernel team member shortly thereafter, and to say they were quite suprised that I would not infact be helping them - yeah, my knowledge of the USB and related subsystems really wouldn't have helped anyone - would be a very large understatement. :P

Action Is Eloquence
Anyway, enough blogging for now; time to finish off some remaining "things" in my queue and get off to bed! Otherwise, I shan't be able to start work on pkgcore tomorrow! :)