Seemant Kulleen

So Aimee and I started off week 3 of our running programme last night. We were both a little uncertain as to how the 3-minute jogging blocks would go for us. I'd have to say we were both rather pleasantly surprised. It was definitely a tiring workout, but we could have both continued beyond the 3 minutes. It really was rather amazing -- and a first for us.

I keep thinking, though, that I need to supplement the running with some upper body type exercises -- press-ups and crunches and stuff. I may try one of the lower key Tae-Bo DVDs I have, or I might just do the bits before the floor stomping stuff. We'll see.

At Dan's house on Friday, we went to a Hallowe'en party. Since my hair is closely cropped anyway, I decided to "bic" it. Meanwhile, Aimee bought some fiery phoenix type wings. She wore a black outfit and strapped on the red/yellow wings and voila -- phoenix lady. I bought a gangster hat that, to me, actually looks more like a reporter's hat from those old movies. Anyway, I wore a black suit/black shirt with a green tie and the hat over my shaved hat. That's right, I had 3 costumes on. With the hat, I was a mobster. Without the hat, I was Lex Luthor. Without the hat, sitting down, I was Professor X.

I may put up an actual pic sometime.

Bonus points if you recognise the title of this post.

Emanuele officially announced his retirement from the project last night. Real life duties are catching up with him, and he's suffered a loss of motivation within Gentoo, and so he's decided to move on. This saddens me greatly, because in his short career at Gentoo, he did some pretty amazing things: he cleaned up xterm, he set the clean up of kerberos into motion (which my long time readers will note is something I utterly failed at), and posted various and miscellaneous fixes all over the place (I'll link to his CIA stats when that site comes back for me).

Anyway, there's a trend of developers leaving or wanting to leave due to a loss of motivation. I hope it stops soon, because I'm getting sick of writing all these farewell blog entries -- I prefer to write welcome messages.

So, any of you kerberos using Gentoo readers, please talk to me about how we can continue Emanuele's good work in that area. I'm very very fortunate that Thomas pays attention to our xterm bugs, but Emanuele helped him too.

Mood: sad/slightly discouraged.

So, Friday I went in for my verification blood test, as planned. I guess I'll find out this week some time whether I really do have a gluten allergy or not. While I'm all for being the rare exception, this time it just doesn't appeal to me. I'd rather be below the radar when it comes to medical things.

Aimee and I also did our third day of jogging week 2 on Friday evening. I got home early in the afternoon (right after my blood test), so we got to go while the sun was still up. It was, however, a little cold. Speaking of the cold: ever since it got cold around here, it seems my knees are acting up somewhat. The tendon or something below my knee cap on both legs (and both sides of each) hurt a bit when I bend my knees, etc. I've been applying Tiger Balm every night to my knees and to my achilles' tendons. It has mainly helped, but my right knee (which I injured about 10 years ago on the b-ball court) still aches a bit on one side.

So anyway, long story short: the run was very good for my spirit, but a bit painful on my lower legs. In many ways, it was the easiest day, but in other ways, it was really really hard. On week 2 runs, you basically do 6 jogging stints of 90 seconds each (with 2 minute walks in between). The first and last 2 jogs were painful, but the three in the middle were like gold. Towards the last few, though, I had to run on the grass rather than the concrete sidewalk, for a bit more comfort.

Yesterday, most of the Boston conspiracy met up for lunch/brunch in Brookline. I did not make it, because my wife and I do the Indian food thing on the weekends. We did not go on Saturday, because the weather was a prohibitively unfriendly. It was basically the perfect day to stay in and drink soup, which we didn't. We instead had vegetarian chilli, and we had to make a quick run to the grocery store for some ingredients.

Thus, on Sunday we met up with SpanKY and his girlfriend at Boston's best South Indian Restaurant. Actually, I daresay Chennai Woodlands is simply the best Indian restaurant in the greater Boston area. I grant you, they're not actually in Boston. In fact, from our house, it takes 45 minutes to get there, with about 75% of that time spent on the freeway travelling at high speed. And it's always completely worth the journey. The thing is, I don't like to pimp places, (I like my secrets!) but that's honest to goodness the best Indian food you'll find for miles around (barring people's own home cooking).

They've always been friendly, but now it's gotten to the stage that they know what drinks we want, and what kinds of dosai we want. Maybe that's sad. And if it is, I'm happily sad.

Anyway, we wound up talking and chatting till the wee hours of the afternoon, so by the time we got back home, the sun had set and the wind had picked up. We decided to demote Sunday from being Day 1 of Jogging Week 3. Monday (tonight) has been promoted to that title, in its stead. I have to say, the whole daylight savings thing helped in screwing that up. Now, every day for the rest of the season, I'll arrive home after dark, which sucks.

I remember xmms as well. I used to use it a lot. In fact, it used to be one of my favourite applications. I was even friends with one of the upstream devs (I used to maintain Gentoo's ebuild for it for a while). Well, two years ago or so, upstream decided that the xmms2 project was sexier. I even got a glimpse of an early version of xmms2, and I was slightly less than impressed. For one, they moved to a different build system that didn't play well with portage and me at the time (that may have changed by now). For two, they moved to a client/server model. Now I had to fire up two things to listen to music.

In retrospect, however, the XMMS upstream devs were being quite forward-looking. For example, they were the first project I'd heard of that was using dbus to communicate and send messages. All this happened before Gnome 2 came out, by the way. However, XMMS (1) was dead to them. They didn't want to have anything to do with it. As a result, our patchset for it started to grow like mad.

In that light, I can completely understand Diego's sentiment and his desire to extricate xmms from the tree (or shall I say, exorcise it from the tree?). My only complaint would the method behind his madness, as it were. As popular as xmms is out there, I think Diego did a disservice to its users, by not warning them in advance of this happening. Luis had barely announced his retirement from the project, when xmms and its plugins got masked for removal.

In the interim, Luis has decided to just go on vacation instead of quit. When he returns, he will contemplate exactly how to take care of XMMS. My guess is that he'll stick to his original plan of putting the thing into an overlay.

So, to the users out there who are in some way pissed off, please consider a few things. While a lot of devs may agree with you, and certainly everyone sympathises with you about the loss of a favourite package, please consider that we don't want to become the upstream maintainers for packages. The removal bug has become a place for random users to insult Gentoo developers, which really does not help anyone.

There are two ways to help yourselves and the community:

• take over the xmms code and become the new upstream
• embrace audacious

aybe you're not talented enough to start hacking on xmms. That's ok. But then let it go, please. The power you do have is in helping the audacious hackers to fix bugs in the code. You think it takes up too much memory? Well, then, report that upstream! Talk the audacious developer, who seems to me to want to go out of his way to improve the audacious experience!

Please, though, enough with the "you developers have your heads up your asses" comments. The problem is a simple one: we don't have the time and the resources to become the upstream maintainers and resurrect a dead package.

You know, Dan left Gentoo a few months ago. And he was another who left with a whisper rather than a bang. Dan (danarmak) was already a developer when I joined. At the time, I couldn't stand KDE. I was a fluxbox user. A few months prior to my joining, Dan had basically become Gentoo's KDE team. He took care of all the version bumps, he made the decision (a very good one, by the way) to have the /usr/qt and /usr/kde directories in which to house the installations of Qt and KDE, respectively.

He was the classic ideal developer. He tested relentlessly, he made patches, he shot bugs, he communicated with upstream to ensure fixes and patches went back and forth. He helped people on the mailing lists, on IRC, via private email. Dan always made you feel like he maintained KDE just for you. He's an incredibly nice person. Incredibly nice. Talking to Dan always put a smile on my face and cheered me up. (I only hope to have had a similar effect of him for a fraction of that).

You know how you love the concept of eclasses? The idea behind eclasses is that you don't have to duplicate code. You just shove it into eclasses, inherit them in your ebuild, and you have access to them. That's how come Ciaran was able to make the excellent versionator eclass, and how Bart Verwilst (verwilst) (another old time dev) made the flag-o-matic eclass. The first eclasses, people, were the KDE eclasses. That's right, kids, danarmak invented the very concept. A month into my joining, I'd tried (and loved!) KDE, thanks to Dan. During one of those nights, Dan asked me if I would like to see "object orientation in bash". Boy, did I! He pointed me at the kde eclasses (portage didn't have native support yet). What an exciting idea! Granted, it's not *real* object orientation, but I don't have to preach the concept of eclasses to you, really. (I will, if you argue too much, in a future post).

Shortly thereafter, I took over the perl ebuilds because they were lagging and bugs were piling up. Well, I asked Dan if these eclasses would help ease the burden of perl module maintenance. He agreed they would. I presented the case to Daniel Robbins, and he liked it. Now, not only KDE, but also dev-perl were using eclasses. So Daniel threw in native support into portage itself.

And that, kids, is how come my closing dev-perl bugs for perl module updates became a mass influx of bugs for more perl modules, because people just used the eclass (and had to code nothing, basically). That led to the idea of g-cpan, which attracted Michael Cummings to the project to make g-cpan a reality, which led to him being our Perl team. That, in a nutshell, is how KDE led to Perl.

That, in a nutshell, is one snapshot of one small set of contributions that Dan Armak made to Gentoo. Two years ago, Dan went on hiatus because duty called: he was obliged to join the Israeli military for a tenure. That tenure is almost up, but he might be called again. Dan decided to leave Gentoo, because he just didn't know where life would take him in the next few years.

Well, I'm here to say that I have a candle burning for him to return. As far as I'm concerned, Dan Armak will always be welcome back to Gentoo.

PS Thanks to spb for inspiring me to write this article. It was one of the easiest I've ever written.

A few developers were retired from the Gentoo project in the last couple of weeks. I'd like to acknowledge those people here for a moment.

First up: Sascha (cybersystem). Sascha was 14 when he first joined Gentoo. He was immediately put in charge of our mailing lists and went on to set up our jabber system and maintained a few packages. At the time he and Jon were the youngest developers on our roster. And, I make no secret -- they were both exceedingly trustworthy and dependable. Sascha and I became friends during his tenure here, though his interests had begun to diverge out of gentoo a couple of years ago. I'm sad to see him go, but I believe him to be full of potential, and I know he'll meet with only success in all his ventures.

Next up: Brandon Low (lostlogic). Lolo and the third person below (wait for it!) joined Gentoo at around the same time in mid 2002. They both attended the same school (IIT -- that's the one in Illinois, not in India), in the same year. They were friends, and during the years they became my friends as well. Lolo did many many many things during his time year, but he might be best remembered as the kernel maintainer for a while (gentoo-sources and for those whose memory goes back enough: lolo-sources!). I think lolo felt increasingly out of place in the growing ecosystem in Gentooland (not unlike a lot of us), and he started focusing on his interests outside of Gentoo, but within the linux community (he's still active on LKML, I believe). Again, my best wishes to him, and hope for nothing but success for him.

Finally: Nicholas Jones (carpaski). Carpaski took over portage maintenance from Daniel Robbins back in 2002. Before then, he had been sending patches to Daniel relentlessly for various fixes and enhancements. Finally, Daniel handed carpaski the reins to portage and let him be. Carpaski did very very well with it. He even expanded the team to include Jason Stubbs and Marius Mauch. to whom he delegated portage related tasks. Together, the three of them figured out plans for portage maintenance as well as next-generation development. Due to time and real-life constraints (like working for a living), carpaski eventually became a silent member of the portage team. He was elected to the Board of Trustees last year. He was on the initial board as well, when Daniel created it. Nick finally retired from Gentoo once his tenure on the Board ended. Nick, wherever you are, I hope you're well and I wish only the best for you as well.

These three were good friends to me, they were my confidants, and they are very talented people. I'll be watching their progress in the next months and years, and I will always be here for them.

Good luck, gentlemen.

OK, I've been asked on a number of occasions since Saturday how I feel. Truth is I don't feel that much different, physically. The only noticeable thing is that my digestion seems faster, but I'll chalk that up to psychological.

There is a behavioural difference, though. What I'm not sure about is whether that's the result of the liver cleanse or the master cleanse. That is this: I chew my food a lot more now, and as a consequence I eat a little slowly. I used to eat really fast, but now, I takes my time about it. I'm still fast, I think, but definitely a lot slower than before. We'll see how long that lasts. The other thing is this desire for raw foods that I have. Last night we made a pizza and had salad. I had a lot more salad than I did pizza. Also, during the day, I get hungry and I want to eat apples and grapes and stuff. I bring more fresh fruit with me to work than I do leftovers.

Now, let me tell you about Saturday night's running experience. One word of warning -- if you do a liver cleanse, please stay in bed or a couch the whole day/evening. In other words, relax. I thought I was all that and a bag of chips. we hadn't run since Wednesday. Friday I started the liver cleanse, and couldn't ingest anything (not even fluids, I don't think) after 6pm, so running was out then too. So we thought we'd try on Saturday evening. It was really chilly and cold as it is, but we went out.

Saturday for lunch, we went to a Japanese restaurant to have some sushi. Well, I wanted some easy to digest raw food, so miso soup and avocado and cucumber sushi seemed quite appropriate and tasty. I did have a little bit of vegetable tempura as well, mind you. The food was delicious, but let me tell you this. I was feeling pretty tired after the cleanse. Plus, I lost a lot of water in the process, that I apparently didn't make it up during lunch.

So, five minutes into the running (the second 90 second jog), my lungs and chest started hurting as did my right side. I had to stop because the pain just intensified. So, we decided to just call it a night and started walking home from the park (which is just down our street and across the road). Partway down our block, I started blacking out and feeling like collapsing. I spent a few minutes prone on the ground to get my wind or whatever back. I struggled upstairs and just went to sleep for a few hours, drinking water every now and then. For dinner I had some saag from the dhaba.

Sunday, we went out to Framingham for the superior South Indian food that I hadn't had in weeks. It delivered as per usual. Oh, here's a surprise. I didn't even know. This weekend was Diwali. Aimee and I usually light up candles all over the house to celebrate it, but we didn't even know it till my sister told me late on Saturday night, and they confirmed it at the restaurant (by wishing us a happy one). Weird.

You might be happy to know that we did indeed go running last night. We decided we'd just do week 2 of the run over again this week. It went well and felt great!

To end: I will do the liver cleanse again in two weeks -- my intent is to do it several times until the pea green stuff stops coming out.

Well, I did what I said I'd do last night. I started drinking the epsom salts mixture. Let me warn you, the damned stuff is bitter. Pretty nasty. The only way to do it (you have to drink three-quarters of a cup) is to throw the stuff back. Just chug it. If you sip some water right afterwards, the water tastes sweet. So that's pretty good, and a sip is enough to remove the taste.

At about 10:20 or so I squeezed one and a half grapefruits (a little over half a cup, a little under three-quarters of a cup) into a jar. I added a half cup of that olive oil (organic, cold-pressed, extra virgin) into the grapefruit juice (or maybe the other way 'round, I don't remember exactly), and then shook the stuff vigorously to mix. It wound up fairly liquid. Again, the secret is to chug the stupid thing. It didn't taste bad -- a little sweet. Grapefruits are usually notoriously bitter on my tongue, but not last night. There was a hint of olive flavour though.

Right after chugging (I chugged at the bed), I lay down on my right hand side and fell asleep. Conveniently, when I side sleep, I do it on my right. I thought I felt contractions or something, but I think I was just imagining it. I slept fairly comfortably, actually. I woke up at 5, as usual, but went right to back to sleep again. I woke up at 6 as well, but by then I was feeling a little nauseated. And the flavour of olive oil kept wafting up in my breath. A little icky, that. At about 8 I got up and had another drink of the epsom salts drink. By 9:15, I started what would be the first of many forays into the, um, office.

ICKY BIT WARNINGL So, here's the thing. They say you'll see pea green stones or something floating at the top. Well, they don't lie. There were thousands through the day. I was a little disappointed that I didn't expel any big stones. I guess we'll see in the upcoming months whether this stuff is real or just boogaboo. I'll have my verification blood test this week (the whole gluten thing). And then the week after will be another liver cleansing, though I won't fast for that. I will drink the apple juice, but life will go on as normal.

I'll keep you all posted on how the next cleansing goes, and how the blood test goes next week.

Thanks for reading me, everybody

Follow how I got here in the in the first place

Edit: added navigation

So let's catch up quickly. Daniel started Gentoo, he led it, Gentoo grew and attracted all sorts, including (and especially?) those who would rather see Daniel not in power. I have a theory: some of those people who lobbied for distributed power structures were actually after being in control for themselves. It was certainly true of Zach (he admitted as much). To be honest, it was sort of true with me, as well. There were times when I thought it wouldn't be a bad idea for Daniel to step aside for a while and let me drive things. There, I admit it

Anyway, the momentum for distributed power started building (I believe largely due to back water conversations rather than any largely shared sense of unhappiness). After that, there was little choice left for Daniel but to relent. So Gentoo Technologies, Inc. gave way to Gentoo Foundation, and the Gentoo Managers gave way to the Gentoo Council. And of course, Daniel gave way to the Board of Trustees (13 in number). Various proposals happened in between, of course, to not let any one entity have too much power. So managers had to be neutered in order to be on the council (a note about this later).

And this brings us to the status quo for the last couple of years. Nobody allowed to "have" a vision for Gentoo. Actually, I think many people have visions for their projects, very few have a vision for the distribution itself. And of those, nobody has the power/blessing to see that vision through. There's a big power vacuum, a complete state of anarchy. Democracy has brought to us that everyone can have a voice. Thus people believe that they should shout, no matter whether they make sense or not.

The new thinking is that the Council itself should have a head (told you we would come back to that point). Part of the thinking is that the anarchy is good. It hasn't destroyed us, that's for sure. Maybe the dictatorship did almost destroy us. I don't know, to be honest. What I do know is that it's a lot more agonising these days, with endless discussion on endless discussion because of endless discussions about endless tangential points to the original endless discussions, ad nauseum. At least when the buck stops, you can feel a little bitter but at least you know it's done, and you can move on.

The point of bitterness for me is that two of those three who first advocated the idea of socialism/democracy to Daniel in the first place only succeeded in substituting one problem for another, and then not bothering with trying to fix either problem. I believe the best direction for Gentoo is to split itself into a core with overlays, as I've mentioned before in other posts.

The beauty about the old days that most people seem to miss for some reason was the size of the Gentoo development community. It was as efficient and friendly as it was precisely because of the kind of intimacy that is inherent in a small group. And in all honesty, that sort of happens already, because people tend to only care about the projects in which they have direct involvement -- be it the amd64 architecture, science packages, clustering, gnome, whatever. Most of those devs lose nothing by having their own out-of-portage overlays. Hell most people with @gentoo.org could probably even keep that address (or a derivative like @contrib.gentoo.org maybe, who knows).

The core group of devs would be people who make packages and programmes that are crucial to a running Gentoo: baselayout, kernel and sys-*. Even portage itself should be in an overlay -- with a party on the core team to determine the requirements for acceptance as an officially sanctioned package manager.

Things would work, because overlays could be given a lot more independence and a lot more visibility. Right now they are all overshadowed by what's in the tree already. Instead, overlays would create competition, and thus increase the quality of submissions. The barriers to entry in our current system are high. Overlays reduces those. Anyone can enter -- it'll take a lot more quality and skill to be accepted as official (requirements to be determined).

Those are my thoughts. I've tried not to slander anyone, but feel free to take issue with me.

Well, here it is. We're at T-minus-zero today. So, I had a breakfast of toast and blueberry preserves (2 pieces of toast, thanks!). And I had as much apple juice as I could before 2pm (14:00). According to the recipes I've seen, I'm not allowed to eat or drink after 2 (14:00). So, it's 6:45 in the evening (18:45) now, and I'm home. I didn't get to write my entry at midday today due to various scheduling conflicts.

So anyway, I did actually do the salt water flush this morning, with the usual expected results. Apart from that, I drank a lot of apple juice, but I didn't get around to eating any of the apples I took. Even for lunch, I only had 15 minutes between the end of one task and the beginning of a meeting, so I had to eat my rice and beans with the quickness. I find I'm chewing my food a lot more since coming off the cleansing fast. It's weird the things that I've become aware of that way. I used to just scarf my food down like the earth was ending or something. Now, I take a little more time about it.

So, anyway, at 6pm (18:00) I'm supposed to take a 3/4 cup of water mixed with epsom salts. Well, you're supposed to actually mix 4 tablespoons of epsom salt with 3 cups of water and then refrigerate (at 14:00/2pm). I wasn't home so that wasn't a possibility. Instead, I did it when I came home at 6:15 (18:15). At 18:40 (6:40pm) I drank my 3/4 cup. So at 20:40 (8:40pm) I will drink another 3/4 cup, and shortly thereafter I will mix a half cup of olive oil (cold pressed extra-virgin organic) with a half cup of freshly squeezed grapefruit (what else? organic) juice.

I basically have to get prepped for bed, then drink that mixture in under 5 minutes and lie down immediately and go to bed. That'll happen at about 22:20 (10:20 pm) tonight. So that's what's in store. Tomorrow I'll report on my unpleasant night. Wish me luck!

See what happened on Day 4

Read about my liver cleanse tomorrow

Edit: added navigation

First of all, my apologies to all your RSS reader users out there for filling up your screens with my other two entries for today. But, uh, back to the lecture at hand (Perfection is perfected, so Im a let em understand), the apple juice "fast." So, with all the bloatiness of yesterday, I was barely able to drink two glasses of apple juice at work. I got home and the bloat started to rid itself off, let's just say.

Aimee and I went running again last night (put off from the night before remember). We had a pretty good run, over all. I found it much easier yesterday, than even the first 90-second jog day. Aimee's shins were a little painful (not splints), but I suspect the cause is her cross-trainers. We're going, on Saturday, to get her a pair of running shoes. Last night was quite warm, in fact -- we definitely did not need those sweatshirts, though the forecasts indicate that we will need them this weekend. So, now I'm thinking about this running schedule, and I don't think I'll be able to run on Friday because of the no-liquids-after-6pm thing (we start our run at 6pm). And Saturday, I may be too weak/exhausted from all the expelling of stones, but I'll give it a good American try.

That means that Sunday can not be the start of our third week of running. It'll have to be Monday. Week three is challenging because it involves 90 seconds of running then 90 seconds of walking, followed by 3 minutes (!) of running and 3 minutes of walking, followed by a do-it-all-again. To go from 90 seconds of running per block this time to 3 minutes for half the blocks next time will be a challenge, I think. It might not be, but the prospect seems somewhat daunting, anyway.

Now, dinner. Let's talk about that. We must, even though I've been avoiding the subject thus far. Now, you'll recall that we bought red apples, green apples and pears for me to eat this week. I've been eating the pears and red apples. The green apples are sour/tart, and definitely not my favourite. So I had this idea, a brainwave really, that I would chop up apples and pears and maybe some boiled potatoes into squares, and then sprinkle some chaat masala over them. I figured the spiciness of the masala and the sweetness of the other apples and pears would help with the tartiness of the green apples. Turns out, we threw out the box of chaat masala we had before we moved out of Winchester last month. So there went that idea. I still wanted relatively raw fruit and vegetables, so I wound up ordering two chaats at the Punjabi Dhaba for take-away: a potato chaat and a banana chaat (which they ran out of so I got a papdi chat, which isn't so fresh fruity, but had some fresh veg in it). Aimee had chhole bhature of course (it's her favourite Punjabi dish).

I've noticed that my eyes pop open at 5 in the morning every day. The alarm clock doesn't ring until 5:30, so I always go right back to sleep, and then snooze till 5:40. This morning, I snoozed till past 6. As a result, I skipped the salt water flush (because I really really do need 90 minutes to 2 hours for the damned thing). Instead, I will do it when I get home tonight. For dinner, we'll be having rice and beans (probably Indian style rather than our usual Puerto Rican style -- minus the ham).

The Icky Bit: The reason for the rice and beans tonight and tomorrow for lunch (left overs, you know) is two fold: it's light and relatively fat free, and I need some weight in my digestive system for the liver cleansing process itself. Tomorrow, all this comes to a head, are you all excited as me?

Catch up to Day 3

Find out how the last day (Day 5) goes.

Edit: Added navigation

I tend to not post political things, but I've been seeing something on those internets that has been pissing me right off for a long time. And since I just posted about governance within Gentoo, that put me in a political mood, so here I go. The Republican party has its issues. The Democratic party has its issues. By and large, I don't see much separation between the two. Justin Raimondo said it best: they are both just two wings of the war party.

On some message boards and blog comments I see some Democrat supporters lament that had Al Gore won in 2000, a lot of the problems we currently face would not be problems for us to face. I don't know how to even begin to gauge the veracity of such a speculation, but I will say this: do any of those lamenters even remember who Al Gore's running mate was? There's a certain irony there, don't you think?

It's that same mentality that led to the asinine "Anyone But Bush" campaign in 2004. How do you even imagine winning with such a campaign? "ABB" led Democrats to get exactly who they deserved: anyone, but Bush. Anyone even remember the guy's name? All he had going for him was that he wasn't Bush, for crying out loud.

There is a little bit of analogy to Gentoo here -- there are people with noble goals for the project, but with little vision/direction on carrying them out. Being on the Gentoo lists is probably what it feels like to be in congress: a lot of noise over absolutely nothing.

By the way, my tone here is one of observation, not one of frustration.

Edit: linked to the irony

This post may piss off a lot of people. I'm publishing what I have seen, that is all. If I'm wrong, I'm happy to be corrected. Daniel started this whole Gentoo thing. And while it was small, he led it. As it happens, Gentoo grew. And it grew quick and fast and beyond all expectations. It grew in size faster than it did in maturity. Yes, I say "it" because I refer to the entity of Gentoo: the collective consciousness of the Gentoo community of developers and users, if you will. The growth was unmanaged. That's not a criticism, it's just fact. I'm not sure how the growth could have been managed, to be honest, though I do know that we could have done a lot of things differently.

Anyway, there's been a lot of talk all over the place about how Gentoo should be governed, how it should be led (if it should be led at all), what its goals are, and so on. And these are good questions, and great discussions to be had. One thing I've noticed (and perhaps even I am guilty of it) is the idealisation of the days gone by. To many of us, those were the "good old days."

Let me put to rest any and all illusions. Those days were frustrating as hell as well. Someone might make a decision in their little sub-project, and then find out later that that decision got overridden by Daniel. A lot of bad blood came out of episodes like that. Hell, Daniel and I had numerous encounters like that. Anyway, there was a lot of back-talking and whispering and just downright frustration with this idea of "all the power in one place."

Daniel was hip to the fact that the distro was outgrowing itself, so he did his best to evolve with it. He, with a few others, developed the metastructure project, and designated a bunch of "Top Level Projects" that made up the core components of Gentoo. To my recollection there were 6 of those. Each project already had a leader of sorts, and those leaders pretty much became the official advisory board to Daniel: a board of managers, I suppose. All decisions would be made by the board, but Daniel had the power of veto. This point is crucial, so remember it, kids, because we'll return to it.

Well, that was not enough for some people (3 in particular that I know of for sure, from first-hand conversation and from first-hand confrontation). They idealised a more distributed power structure. Since then, one has changed his mind, one has disappeared entirely, and one is too busy to spend much time on Gentoo. There was a fourth, and he went off to form the Zynot foundation -- as a "fork" of Gentoo. My thoughts on the idiocy (zydiocy?) of that episode are not for this posting, but I may expound on that in a later entry.

That's just a bit of history. I'll talk about the current state in the next post.

Flame away, if you must.

Yeah, so I've discovered something. Unfiltered organic unsweetened apple juice is thick. It bloats me right up. I'm physically unable to ingest a gallon a day. So I'm doing my best to ingest half a gallon, on the theory that some is better than none at all. So, the idea is that the mallic acid (is that what it's called?) in the apple juice softens the stones. I'm not a biologist, an internist, a physiologist or a gastro-intestinologist, so I can't say that that statement is true. It is what I have read, and so I dutifully report.

So anyway, I did eat some soup last night. I even had it with a bit of challah-alike bread (very soft, and made even more so by dunking) with it. I had half gallon of juice yesterday during the day. I'll do the same today. I usually drink a glass or two at breakfast time, and then drink what I can throughout the day at my desk. For lunch. I'll be having an apple and a pear, probably. More soup tonight, or maybe arroz con frijoles (rice and beans, Puerto Rican style) or something. So, needless to say, the title of this miniseries is a little misleading. It should actually be "The Liver Cleanse: T minus 2 days".

Now, I'd like to have my insides clean for the actual liver flush, so I've been taking bentonite in the mornings for the past two days. So, when I first announced my cleansing fast, a good friend of mine commented with some wise words. And in response to my post about printer suggestions, I got an email from Renat saying I could have his old one for cheap. Aimee and I were planning on going to visit Renat and Anna (the first commenter, and Renat's wife) that weekend to see their new digs and to buy the printer. Turns out, Anna has gone on this fast before and had a few words of caution, which I took to heart.

Well, while we were there, Anna told me all about Bentonite and the eggshell effect, and how it cleans your insides as it passes through. She even kindly gave me a bottle of the stuff. That was during Day 2 of the cleansing fast, and so I did not want to add it to my regimen. Instead, I opted to try it once that fast was done. Yesterday was the first day that I tried bentonite. I didn't notice any effects from it, to be honest. I will be sure to report if I do see any, though.

So, the blood report did come in the mail yesterday, as did the ultrasound report. The ultrasound does show an enlarged (fatty) liver, but the blood report shows normal liver enzyme levels, but it has the added gluten allergy thingy in it. So, yeah, I'm even more sure that the hospital mixed up their blood samples. I'll be going in on Monday or Tuesday to have that redone.

We were supposed to go running last night. With traffic, I got home fairly late, and so it had stared raining pretty strongly (and got really cold), so we skipped. Today, Aimee's getting us some sweatshirts so we can at least stay somewhat warm for tonight's run. I do notice that my personal running schedule is now screwy, because I'm not sure I'll be able to run on Friday night (seeing as how I can't eat anything after 2pm and can't drink anything after 6pm). I guess we'll have to run on Saturday and still start the new week on Sunday. Or maybe our new week will start on Monday night instead. We'll play it by ear, I suppose, but I'm open to suggestions from any of you still reading me.

Till tomorrow then.

If you missed Day 2, it's probably a good thing.

Will we run tomorrow? Will I eat more apples? Will I throw up the apple juice? Find out in Tomorrow's (Day 4's) entry!

Edit: Added navigation

So, over the past few months, I've sent in numerous requests on bugzilla for various packages to be stabled across the different architectures that Gentoo supports. Mostly, they've been for xterm and gnucash. In most cases, the early responders to those bugs are the Gentoo Architecture Testers (Arch Testers, or ATs, for short).

These fine people are running stable profiled machines and this is what they do -- they test packages that are candidates for stable and report. I've had bugs reported back to me through their efforts, and mostly they verify my requests, and make it easier for the architecture teams with commit access to change the keywords.

So, props and a major shout out to all the architecture testers out there in Gentoo land. Your efforts and work are very truly appreciated.

Ickness Alert. Skip this entire blog post, is my advice, quite frankly.

True story: When I was an undergraduate in the arctic colds of Rochester, NY, I lived, for a while, in the on-campus housing. Now, a central facet of most dormitory buildings is the shared bathrooms. So each "hall" typically has its own set of bathrooms and showers that is shared with your neighbours. I detested these for anything but showering (and even that because my choices were rather limited, as you'll see). My uncle has a phrase "making water" to refer to it, and that was fine. I could do that in there. Number 2, on the other hand, was a complex issue for me. Actually, it still is (as you'll see as well, later). Anyway, I had to come up with something creative, or just die, I suppose. Now, since I was in the College of Engineering, I frequented the science and engineering library on the far end of campus. It sat right next to (and was connected, physically, with) the Computer Science building. Up on the 5th floor, the bathrooms were smaller and got cleaned at 1 in the morning every day (except weekends). Thus, my bathroom time was 2 in the morning on weekdays (including Friday). It was relatively untouched on the weekends as well (with me being the only user), so that was OK.

What? Neurotic? Me? Seriously?

The implication here is that I don't much care for public restrooms. They tend to be dirty, filthy and disease ridden (they may not be, but I perceive them as such). This is why I go before a long trip and at the hotel at the end of the trip. Throughout the trip, I will not go (except to make water). If, on the off-chance, I do have to go (this happened once in my life, when I was 12 I think), I went in the airplane's restroom -- I was flying unaccompanied, and so I was the first one on the plane.

Oh yeah, the shower thing. I solved that by wearing rubber slippers (chappals if you're in India) in the shower. Icked me the hell out, I can tell you.

So, yesterday, I did the salt water flush in the morning, as per usual. And I thought I'd gotten it all out of my system before I left the house (took 3 visits). I got to work, and I still felt like I had to go. This was 8:30 in the morning. So, I decided "it can't be that much, I can just hold it till I get home." Well, that wasn't happening. At 9, the pressure was too much, so I had to go. I had to perform the ritual of carefully layering the seat with pristine t.p, of course. And I went. I had to. I'm almost ashamed of it.

At 11, I had to go again. Same ritual, same feeling of shame, heightened level of "ick!"

I had to stay late, so I got home at 7 that night, and I had to go once more. I don't know if all that was from the salt water flush, because it all "whooshed," or whether it was because I finally had something other than lemonade. But yesterday was not such a pleasant day.

The soup last night was simply delicioso. Aimee did well. she made a broth with potatoes and celery and carrots and onions and tomatoes. It was relatively bland, but the flavours of the vegetables were so rich. The master cleanse fast surely cleared up my nasal passages (!). My sense of smell has definitely improved significantly. I used to have a horrible (read, virtually non-existent) sense of smell up to now.

I brought some soup for lunch, and am about to eat it. I also brought with me today two apples (of which I've eaten the green one) and a pear, just in case. I've gone through about a third of a gallon of apple juice as well. This isn't a starving fast, that's for sure.

My sincerest apologies for all the ickiness in the post, if you've made it this far. Frankly I'm astonished that I even divulged all that. Just, um, keep it to yourself, yeah?

My on-the-scene thoughts of Day 1

I bet you wish you had skipped right through to Day 3.

Edit: added navigation

I want to thank all my readers for enjoying my adventures in the Master Cleanse. To be honest, I don't know if I could have finished the fast, had I not constantly blogged about it. I kept having this 3pm like deadline to submit a status report to you all. And really, that helped. It kept me motivated to continue on with the fast, despite some of the unpleasantness.

I should shout out to The CureZone forums and FAQ for all the helpful information. Well, the information I took from them were the other users' experiences with the fast. It helped knowing what kinds of things to expect.

Before I began the fast, I invested in the inventor's book about the fast. Dr. Stanley Burroughs apparently developed the fast in 1941 and published that book(let) (it's only 50 pages long) in 197something. Granted, the book does not have any real clinical information, just anectdotal evidence; still, it was good to read his directions for the process.

If anyone is inspired to do any of the fasts (or indeed other naturpathic cures), I'd be really interested to know about it, so by all means leave me a comment or send me an email!

Thanks everyone!

Obligatory Disclaimer: Dammit Jim, I'm a Gentoo developer, not a Doctor! Please seek the advice of a professional, before embarking yadayada.

Edit: Added Disclaimer

Well, I transitioned this morning from the lemon juice to a glass of orange juice. I did the salt water flush, of course. There's still flushing happening, which is inconceivable to me. Whatever, I'll be flushing all week anyway.

Right, so I took a half gallon bottle of apple juice to work with me. Sure enough, the apple juice takes care of your hunger. People, I'm at the point where I can watch someone eat and smell their delicious food (today I could smell my boss' pesto pasta thingy during our lunch meeting), and...

...it does nothing for me. No salivation, no pangs, no hunger, nothing. I'm full up on apple juice, and apparently satiated. I will be having a light vegetable brothy soup tonight that Aimee's making for me for dinner. I'm pretty excited about that. And mainly behttp://planet.gentoo.org/developers/seemant/2006/10/17/the_apple_juice_fast_day_2cause I'll have that tonight and for lunch tomorrow, then it's back to apple juice until Friday lunch. I bought fruits to eat, but this apple juice makes me not hungry during the day. In fact, it's after 5 right now, and I'm still on my last glass of juice. Certainly, I will not be drinking the full gallon today, but half a gallon is still pretty good.

Read ahead to Day 2

Well, Yahoo! officially broke the story today that 3M is buying my old employer, Brontes. That's really good news for the people there, I think. And it's certainly a tremendous opportunity for Dan. Just for the record, I had no idea this was coming, so I'm very surprised (and pleased!) about it. This means that for at least a little while, Gentoo will be running on 3M-owned servers

The final day is here! I'm really happy to be at the end of the line here! Now, don't get me wrong: the lemon juice/lemonade drink is actually quite delicious. And it satiates hunger. It's just, well, it's not exactly a dosa, you know what I'm saying? It's definitely not warm chocolate chip cookies or apple pie or pumpkin pie or anything I'm looking forward to eating. I may be taking back the whole apple pie thing next weekend, after a week of apple juice, apples and pears.

Tomorrow night I'll be eating some veggie soup for dinner and I'll have the cooked veggies (sans soup) for lunch the day after. Tomorrow morning's breakfast will be organic orange juice with pulp (Aimee likes it without, but I don't). But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's wrap up this fast first.

All in all, I'm really glad I did it. I certainly feel clean. My tongue is pink again, by the way. This morning again I had some dark stuff with the flush. And even some before, but mind you, I forgot to drink my laxative tea on time last night. I remembered to go make it once I was in bed, and I kept intending to go do it. Next thing I knew, it was morning. Apparently, I didn't need it.

Now, yesterday was a bit of a down day for me, but I think it was just because I was decompressing from the week. Today was a lot better. Aimee and I went out to Nashua to get me a replacement wedding band (I lost mine a week ago). Then we bought some sweaters for me to wear to work, because the weather has definitely taken a turn -- it's truly autumn, now. Finally, we went grocery shopping to get some apples, pears and organic unsweetened, unfiltered apple juice.

Aimee and a few of my friends have been worried throughout that I wouldn't have enough energy. To be honest, I didn't really feel lethargic or lazy at all. In fact, we went running three times. Our second week of running kicked off earlier today. This time it was alternating 90-second running with 2-minute walking for 20 minutes. Actually, 21 minutes, but let's not split hairs The whole idea for running was inspired by my friend, Felipe. We were talking in some irc channel once about weight and fitness and stuff, and he runs and highly recommended it. That, combined with my secret desire to run (but my consistent failure at it), made a compelling case. That Aimee felt the same way sealed the deal. Plus, we get to work out together for a change.

In sum: I recommend this clean if you're feeling a little stuffed up with toxins and left over stuff. I definitely lost some weight in the bargain, though I will actually gain half that weight back (water weight, you know).

Tomorrow I take a break (hence the soups), but I also start my apple juice fast in preparation for the liver cleanse that happens on Friday/Saturday. I'll fill in the details of that as the time comes. So, we bought 5 gallons of apple juice. One gallon per day for me. I don't know that I'll get hungry at all, but I got the apples and pears just in case I feel like eating anything solid. Additionally, the salt water flushes will continue up to Friday morning. I stick with my original statement that I made on day 1: no pictures of anything.

Wish me luck! Oh yeah, it's almost 7pm, and I still have 3 glasses of lemonade to go!

Catch up to yesterday

Edit: filled in some links and added navigation

Here I am, on the penultimate day of this fast. Looking back, it hasn't felt as long as I thought it would feel. Admittedly, there was a day back there when I thought it would never end. I woke up this morning from the effects of last night's laxative tea. I woke up in pain from the, well, contractions, I guess. And that is strange, you know, because I haven't eaten anything, so the only thing it can be is the old waste stuff. So, again with the dark stuff. Not a lot of it, but there it was. Salt water flush went as expected.

I had to go at about 6:30 this morning, then I went back to bed to arise at 8. I did the flush at about 8:15. by 9:30, I was done with it, so I drank some water, hung out, cleaned the house. I had my first glass of lemon juice at 11:30. Since then, I've been drinking a glass of it every 75 minutes or so.
I've also felt like going all day, with nothing there to actually go.

I'm sorry for the exceedingly graphic nature of this post, by the way. It's 9:27 in the evening (21:27 for all you hip people) and I'm only now writing, because of how limited this day has been in terms of things happening.

Tomorrow is the last day of this fast. We'll be heading out to the grocery stores for apple juice and cold pressed olive oil and grapefruits and, oh yeah, epsom salts. Oh right, lots of fresh fruit and veg. as well, because that'll be pretty much my diet for the week: a gallon of apple juice a day and fruits/veg when I'm hungry in between chugging the juice. Will I even be hungry I wonder?

Well, good night, everyone.

See how Day 8 went for me.

Look at my summary in the final day of this fast.

Edit: added navigation.

Exactly a week ago was the first real day of my fast. I hadn't eaten since 7pm the night before (though I did not do the flush that morning). I had an ultrasound and a blood test, but more on that in a bit.

Aimee and I went on our run/jog last night. No hurty muscles before or after, which was nice. We kept transitioning from jog to run though, so I think our legs are getting used to this stuff. Sunday should be exciting, though it does seem a little daunting to run those 90-second blocks from running these 60-second blocks. We're both looking forward to that. I got home late, so by the time we started, the sun had set, and so we ran under the glare of the floodlights at the park.

During one particular stretch of the run, there are houses right across the street. In front of one house, I kept smelling barbecue or steak or something. Interesting/freaky: it made me hungry! It didn't smell bad, though it didn't smell like something I wanted to devour right away either. It just made me want food.

We get home and Aimee put a pizza in the oven (one of those Amy's organic pizzas with olives). Oh man, that was the roughest dinner I've had to be around. I came thisclose to breaking my fast right there and then. Instead, I drank my 5th and 6th glasses of the lemonade, and that satisfied my hunger. But I could still smell it! And that was torturous.

Now, others have certainly blogged about their Master Cleanse experiences. However, one lady in particular goes into fairly graphic detail, which I actually appreciated. It was somewhat nice to know what to expect. Well, except that I don't have the menstrual thing happening, of course.

This is the icky bit, kids. She stated that there's some dark stuff that you start to eject. I couldn't find anything in the Burroughs book about it, so I didn't know what to make of it. The thing is, I had to "go" before the flush this morning. And what little there was, was certainly dark. Who knows?

OK, icky bit done with (for now!). So, after my ultrasound last week, I went upstairs to get my blood drawn. In the waiting room were 4 other guys. There were two nurses taking the blood, so we pretty much went in two at a time. They took my blood and I left. My doctor called me earlier this week and said that I have a pretty severe allergy to gluten, apparently. Now, I know next to nothing about it. He asked me if I have any caucasian blood in me. People, as far as I know, I'm 100% Indian, though I guess a DNA test or whatever that is that you pay a hundred bucks for would confirm that. Anyway, apparently this gluten thing affects caucasians and only in extremely rare cases does it affect others. He wanted me to go in for an endoscopy. Question: which end does the scope go into? I don't think he understood when I asked him, because I still don't know. So anyway, I asked him to please let me have another blood test to verify that because I'd rather be sure, before some camera starts exploring my innards. Especially if it's entering the exit-only zones of my body.

So, since I am fasting, I'm not going to go in for the blood test today. And next week I'm pretty much on apple juice and fruits, so I'll go in during the week following instead. I'll probably report here what happens thence (if "thence" is the word I want).

Oh yeah, the appetite update, I almost forgot. It's about 3pm and I'm slightly over halfway done with my flask, so hunger @ work is apparently a non-issue for me, but Aimee's food is.

See how Day 7 went for me.

Check out how I'll feel on Day 9.

Edit: added navigation

As Mike pointed out, Spider is no longer a Gentoo developer. Logically, this makes sense, because he has not done any development for Gentoo in a long time. However, Spider was one of the early pillars of the Gentoo project. He holds an especially poignant place in my heart, because he and I joined Gentoo at about the same time (followed closely by Matt Kennedy). And he and I were the ones responsible for Gentoo's Great libpng Debacle of 2002. We were just three weeks old at the time, and we happily broke every user's system. I have talked about this in other fora (I think -core mailing list), but I'll do it publicly here.

When we screwed up, we realised pretty quickly what we'd done. We'd had the best of intentions, of course. For the record, we unmasked libpng-1.2 to replace libpng-1.0. That, of course, was an API change, and so everyone running anything that depended on libpng (think gnome, gimp, all of KDE) had a broken system. The KDE users got it the worst of all. To complicate matters, someone in the press had just finished installing her brand new Gentoo Linux system (1.0_rc6) with a brand spanking new KDE, and did her first update. Her dismay is probably archived on the -user mailing list somewhere.

Anyway, the point of this story is to echo what Spider said about those early days. We didn't get beaten up. Users were irritated, but understanding. Our fellow developers were amused, and understanding. Daniel was unaware, but understanding once he found out. Spider, in his forward-thinking, had had an update script in files/ in place long before the unmasking, so the only thing was to inform the userbase about it, and their pain was automatically taken care of (albeit, their pain of waiting was not, but hey, they ran Gentoo). Me, I learned to be very very very very careful about bumping libraries.

And I learned that lesson (gasp!) without being called "stupid" or a "moron" or a member of "the peanut gallery" or any number of derogatory terms that get strewn about like so much confetti these days. Listen carefully, kids, to your Uncle Seemant: mistakes happen. We can choose to use them as tools for learning, or choose to use them as weapons against the people who made them. One is civil.

Spider was part of that civil culture. He turned me back onto Gnome after I'd fallen out of love with it (at the time he started, he'd amassed his own personal overlay with the next version of gnome -- of course, at the time, we didn't call them "overlays").

I will miss Spider greatly. Even though, he wasn't active for a long time, it was a personal comfort to me to know that my brother-in-arms was still a part of Gentoo. To me, he's inextricably intertwined in Gentoo.

Spider, best of luck to you, and I hope that you'll stick around.

Wow, it has been a week since I started this fast! Time has gone by fairly, um, fast. There isn't really that much to report, but I will make a few notes here.

No hunger pangs this morning. I've been drinking a lot of water lately. I keep on running out of lemons, maple syrup and water at home and poor Aimee runs to the store every 3 days to replenish supplies for me. She's been very sweet and understanding throughout all of this. My tongue is still a little white, but I think it might be slightly less than yesterday.

Fair warning, here's the icky bit, so skip this paragraph. I didn't think I had any wastes left in me after 7 days of not actually consuming anything solid. But sure enough, I do. There's not much, but there it is.

OK, that's over. The salt water did not taste as nasty today. In fact, it was downright bearable. Someone please do something if I ever say that I like the salt water. The funny thing is I was able to drink all 32 ounces pretty much in one go this morning. That's definitely a first: I've always had to drink half immediately and then the remainder over the next 7-10 minutes.

Back to the hunger pangs for a minute. It's 1:30 pm now and I've only gone about 1/3rd of the way through my flask. Last night, I wanted to eat (I was hungry, but the lemon juice did satisfy that -- which irritates me slightly, now that I think about it). I wanted, actually, to eat with my wife. I wanted that interaction you get from preparing a meal and eating it together. The smell of the food she made didn't help. She had these spinakopita things that really did smell divine (can I say that word as a straight man?).

As it turns out, the running from Tuesday did not leave our muscles sore. I guess the stretches really helped! Because of that, we decided that we will do the third and final run of the week tonight. Sunday starts the second week with 90 second jog/2 minute walk blocks!

See what happened on Day 6

Follow the adventure to Day 8

Edit: added navigation

Today marks exactly one month since I started my new job here at StreamBase. This is important for me, you see, because I got this job (I think) largely based on my experience setting up, running and being a part of Gentoo's Developer Relations team. The thing is, I loved doing DevRel so much that when I had to do coding at my last job I didn't feel as inspired. I mean, I loved that job and I loved the people there, but the best part of that job, to me, was getting Gentoo in there and making it be a part of their company. As it stands, Dan and Rajiv both work there, and I like to think I played a part in that. There are others who, over the years, did a few consulting gigs there too (and I like to think I played a part in those as well ).

So anywa