Seemant Kulleen

So Aimee and I will be celebrating a white christmas. Beach sand can be white. And we're hoping it is. We're headed off to the tropics: the island of Jamaica. we're going to one of those all-inclusive deals that's like a cruise, except for the bit with the ship. There wll be a lot of swimming and diving and eating and sun and fun and water tricycling. I'll be offline for the entire duration, so I wish everyone a Happy Holiday. For you, dear reader, I hope the holiday is blessed.

We'll be back in a week. Stay out of trouble, kids!

So, a few times in my life I've had a conversation where someone will reveal that they "have expensive taste." Now, I try not to be judgemental, but you know it's hard sometimes, when you hear a line that contains utter pretentiousness like that. Now, these conversations have been in regards to clothing and/or food.

So, my younger readers are probably already hip to this -- but apparently, nowadays, you can shell eighteen to 20 dollars (US) for a t-shirt that looks like it's been in the washer 100 times too many. It's all faded and almost falling apart. I don't understand the appeal. If I buy something new, it better look new, dammit! But OK, fine, it floats people's boats, I guess, that fake vintage thing. Aimee and I went to some mall nearby a few weeks ago, and we walked into this one store that had some phat suits and ties. I mean this was really nice looking stuff. Of course, the ties were like a hundred bucks (what??) and the blazers on the order of a thousand dollars (!!). Way beyond my price range, for sure, but here's the amazing thing. Those fake-vintage t-shirts that you get for 18 bucks from American Eagle or something cost 50 (fifty!!) dollars at that store. That's xmms audacious, I'll tell you.

So anyway, that episode reminded me of this one food based conversation I had a while ago. A bunch of us were talking about restaurants in the area. I asked a passer-by to join in the conversation and provide some recommendations. After thinking for a bit, this person said, (and I quote), "well, I have expensive taste, so..."

Huh? How do you have expensive taste in food? I mean, seriously, is it the price that makes you go "mmm, this is some goooooood eatin'" or what? Can someone just plop some crap on your plate, overcharge you with a 1000% markup and you'll revel in the gastronomic experience because you've "made it"? Are people serious about this stuff? I mean, I understand expensive restaurants to an extent -- they offer you an ambience, a level of service and attention to detail that might be rarer in some of the more modestly priced restaurants. At the very least, they'll give you something exotic (or: not).

So I mean, I get that you might like expensive restaurants for certain things. But what in the world is expensive taste in food all about? I'll say this. Some of the best foods I've tasted have been in downright holes in the wall joints. Places like that don't give a toss about the ambience (and thus, they have a unique ambience!) and concentrate on giving you the best possible food.

Now that that rant is done, I have a bit of a situation on my hands. It's getting where I need to have a PDA in my life. I use evolution at work for my email and calendaring and contacts management. I do the same on my home laptop. I need a PDA to ping me about upcoming activities and meetings when I'm away from my computers (yes that does happen!), and where I can store all my contacts. So in other words, I am also looking for a smartphone.

On the must-haves:

• connects bluetoothfully with linux -- I'd be willing to settle for bluetoothlessly (US, though
• has bluetooth so I can have a wireless headset, and have Aimee's car recognise it and pipe through
• syncable with evolution -- this is actually the crux
• Quad-band GSM
• Unlocked
• Not so expensive that I have to rethink buying a house

Among the nice to haves:

• WiFi
• GPS
• radio

I don't care about mp3 playing or cameras. I just want a pda that happens to be a decent phone. I consider 500 bucks to be extortionist in terms of pricing. If anyone has recommendations, I'd love to hear them.

NB: I do fancy the E-Ten X500 but that's definitely out of my price range for now. What can I say? I have expensive taste

Oh yeah, the social networking/web 2.0 part of the topic: this weekend, omp introduced me to last.fm. It's social networking with mp3's -- what a concept. I love it. It's still learning my tastes (expensive, remember?) but it's been a fun ride so far.

Thanks to mkeadle I learned about delicious recently. What a great concept. I don't have to worry about being at my computer to find my bookmarks any more. And the ten or so emails a day I send to Aimee about things I reddit can stop. I now just have to tag them for her and she can see them from wherever. I love the idea. Donnie raved about the plugin this evening, and I have to say I agree. It's just fab. I'm liking this newfangled interwebs two point zero thing.

Am I harsh? I don't think I am: I am just calling it how I see it. And, I certainly mean no offense by anything I say. I thought initially to just respond to the comments in my last blog, but as you can see, I had a lot more to say on the subject: enough to warrant a new post. So here it is.

Apparently, at least a couple of people believe Gentoo to be a User focused distribution. And that is OK, to be honest. Gentoo isn't a strict set of anything for anybody, so each person brings in their own vision and their own baggage: they join for their own reasons and leave for their own reasons.

Most of the time, I would venture, people join Gentoo development (or really, any open source project) to scratch their own set of itches. Hell, my itch was getting rid of the cruft NLS stuff and GKrellM plugins (though I do see an XMMS version bump request there too). And you know why? Because I wanted that stuff in portage. I wanted all those plugins, I wanted nls-free gnome installations on my computers, and I wanted to use yahoo messenger, God help me.

If people are expecting something other than a developer platform out of Gentoo, then I would have to wonder: what exactly do you expect? And how will you get everyone to agree with you? Because, now you're faced with trying to define the user. Surely, Tiago is a user. But hey, so is Alex. Which of them is the right user? And there are other users with different needs: the people who want gentoo to power their firewalls, those who want gentoo on their gaming machines, those who want them to power their sparcs and alphas and other 64-bit platforms, their macs; there are those who want a great desktop system, those who want a better multimedia platform; those who want to replace their digital video recording devices; you name it. Who is the right user? Which is the right audience?
I don't know the answer to that. Let's not even forget the "holy grail": the Enterprise users. If you know the right answer, pipe up.

As for this being some sort of "new-found" developer focus. It isn't new-found. It's very old-found. It's, in fact, original-found. What else would you make of Daniel's thoughts on the subject?. After all, he founded this thing in the first place. Or hey, read Aron's observations (though gmane may be a better way for some to catch it).

I'm sorry, but if you want a user distro, there are far better choices out there: ubuntu being the primary one. You get coddled and you get sane and sensible defaults. Gentoo doesn't do that. We give you the tools for you to build whatever you want. So you can fall into all of the above audience choices and more (thanks to the power of profiles and USE flags, primarily). Hell, go nuts with your compiler flags, we don't care. Think that flies as a user-centric approach? It doesn't. It's a support nightmare, ask any Gentoo developer about it.

And finally, the pi

For those of you keeping track at home, we just released a new minor version of StreamBase (3.5.4).

There are a few fixes (as seen in the link above), and the Reuters adapter is now embedded. In prior releases, Reuters feeds were read in via an external adapter (so you had to run that and StreamBase, and it would pass the data to the StreamBase app). No longer!! Now we use the newer Reuters API, and the adapter being embedded makes it a native capability. To fill the void in external adapters left by the Reuters adapter, we've added a REDIPlus external adapter.

If reading streaming data in (to analyse and act on it) is your thing, check out StreamBase, baby, you might like it.

Apparently, some people who read my original XMMS post took away from it a conclusion that I had not made. To boot, these people have hung those conclusions around Diego's neck. Even the fact that the forums thread on the subject has gone on for 14 pages astounds me. I even know of at least one person who has written of the entire Gentoo distribution based on that package removal.

So let's stop with the nonsense for just a minute and absorb this post, shall we? First of all, it's a fricken music player. Second of all -- Gentoo is about choice. That does not mean that we, the annointed developers, should present you with every single choice. No, it means that you, as a Gentoo user, are on a platform that empowers you to create your own choices. Ladies and gentlemen, the very idea of Gentoo and Portage are to provide the tools to make your own linux distribution. If you don't like that XMMS was taken away -- then create your own overlay! It can be done, you know. In fact, there are tonnes of overlays published at http://overlays.gentoo.org.

So for all you people still inclined to send hate mail to Diego, I say this: get over yourselves. The decision to remove XMMS was never in question. It was going to happen. GTK+-1.2 is also leaving the tree. It is going to happen. I'm sorry, but that's just how it is. For people who want xmms, and want to be the "portage maintainers" of it, feel free! Take what we had in portage, stick it in your overlay, advertise it, and go! Take on the issues of maintaining it yourselves. In all honesty, that's what you should be doing instead of feeling all this negativity and projecting it towards people. You're wasting your time, everyone else's time and a whole lot of energy on criticising someone who certainly does not deserve it.

Anyway, I just wanted to inject a sense of perspective in the mini-hysteria. Most of all, I think this XMMS issue needs to be put to rest already. The horse be dead. Beating it like a pinata won't get you anything sweet.

In still other news, I've been playing with django's newforms module for creating forms on the websites I've got in the pipeline. It looks like the StreamBase website will finally be content-managed, though not by django, but by something else. I'm hard at work on getting the website for Aimee going. This weekend will be a ReaportLab weekend for me. There are some documents on the church site that will be in both web-readable and PDF-able form. I have this notion that I can do both, though I admit to that being somewhat hopeful. We'll see.

Before I even do that, I have to do major cleanup on the code already written. It's funny to see how my knowledge of Django has evolved in the last few months. I'm going back in, currently, to do some DRY'ing of a lot of the stuff in there -- gosh I repeated myself! But it was intentional, just to get functionality going -- I knew I'd go back in and clean up. And here I am on the other side of that. I'm not complaining at all, mind you, because I feel like I've learned a lot when I look at that old code.

I'll share one of the long-standing issues I'm having. The church has a calendars page which shows upcoming and past weekly schedules. Being a church, they have services every Sunday. During the week and in other rooms/halls they have other meetings (Rotary Club, etc). So, the calendars page needs to show all of those. I opted for this approach in the end: a BaseEvent which holds the date, the title and slug information and description field. The Event object has a one-to-one relationship, and it has fields for frequency and timetables (Timetables are a separate model, so they're foreign-keyed into the Event). The Service object holds the information on the priest, the crucifers, foreign key to the Sermons, etc, and it also has a foreign keys to the Timetable. If there's enough interest, I'll put up that file for you all to see and critique. I definitely have not gotten it right, so I'm glad of any input.

So the idea is that a request to the /events/ URL shows the archive of most recent and immediately upcoming events and services. The same with /events/yyyy, /events/yyyy/mmm/ and /events/yyyy/mmm/dd. So the query dictionary has to include all of them, reversed-ordered by date. A request to the /services/ URL is obviously a filtered query, and the like. Now, when you click on a specific event, it either goes to /events/yyyy/mmm/dd/event-name or to /services/yyyy/mmm/dd/service-name. That's the motivation for all this. If there's a better way you can think of, please drop me a comment. I'm definitely interested in the opinions of you ruby and rubyonrails people.

It's always nice to see people say some nice things about the company you work for. Mr. Halyer really wrote up something very nice about StreamBase and its capabilities, etc. Good stuff, indeed.

Meanwhile, I'm hard at work on those articles I promised, though it'll likely be post Christmas that I'll be close. Especially since Aimee and I are headed south for more tropical climes for the holiday. Now, it's a little disappointing on one hand, by the way, that Boston's weather has been so damned temperate. I'm the absolute last person on the planet to complain about the lack of snow, but really, it would have added to the feeling of "going to the tropics to get out of this harsh winter" if, in fact, the winter actually approached some degree of harshness. Having said that, I'm ok with a snow-less Boston, to be honest.

Stay tuned for some django news.

Well, I definitely did not do the cleanse for long enough, this much I know. The statement is true for last time as well. The first indication of this: my tongue was still pasty white when I quit on the 11th day. I actually quit halfway through the day, for several reasons: some social (I need to meet with some people this week over meals), and some not (I have a blood test on Friday, and I want my body to "normalize" -- no fake gluten allergy thing). The other reason: the day after I quit, I've gotten two or three pimples (one pretty big). It's as though there are toxins still wanting to get out, and that's the route they took.

Of course, this could be bullshit, and hormone levels could have just cycled that way co-incidentally. Let's go with that theory for now, because it's the saner one. Aimee wants to do the cleanse, so we'll do it together in March-ish. From here, I'm aiming at a 21-day Cleanse then. She's looking at 10 days. I'm looking at return to pink tongue. I opted out of the liver flush this time, but I'll do another one of those upon our return from the Christmas break. Sorry, political correcters, that's what we'll be celebrating (yes, I'm not Christian, but I've always celebrated Christmas my whole life).

Well, as promised, StreamBase is starting to get even more developer-friendly. I'm sure some of you have seen the new and improved DevZone (notice the sane URL ). Well, now in the add-ons downloads section, we have put up a Java Toolkit for Eclipse.

Now, to be sure, this is not the StreamBase studio, which is a separate download. Instead, this little ditty makes it easy for your java developers to build up custom operators, functions, enqueuers, and adapters for your StreamBase application. The idea here is that the architecture (and SQL, using StreamSQL) people would use StreamBase Studio to design their real-time applications (to react and respond to streams and complex events) on what is basically a high-level. A look through the GUI shows you how easy that can be. The java heavy people who really don't need StreamBase installed, and probably already have Eclipse (especially recently, btw, I've noticed more and more college grads simply raving about eclipse and java), to build you your custom operators and functions and things.

What does this mean anyway? Well, let's say you're trying to read in a stream of data coming in some format (let's say XML) which StreamBase doesn't natively read. You need to "adapt" that data stream to convert it into tuples that StreamBase will understand. The way to do that is to create an embedded adapter that starts and stop with the StreamBase server, and basically sits in front of the server. Adapters can also, by the way, be used for data output.

So, now, with the Eclipse plugin, it's trivial for the Java developers to just create a new adapter and fill in the meat (ie, the code that will do their work) into the appropriate spots in the generated code in Eclipse. Easy-peasy pie.

I'm still exploring my way around this, but hopefully sooner rather than later, I will start to put some articles up on my learnings. It's a really nifty platform to be working off.

I'd like to talk about future-proofing for a bit. One of the things that's niggled at me for quite a few years has been the suffixes you find in websites. In the beginning you had either ".htm" or ".html", and even that was annoying. It's one thing to have everything be .html. But then (I think FrontPage or its ilk were responsible, but someone please set the record straight here) we got .htm pages as well. Now, it was a 50-50 chance that your memory of a URL was correct. In time, we've gotten .jsp (with the hideous jsessionid nonsense), .php, .cgi, and (God help us) .pl pages or .py pages, and probably a whole host more. Is there *any* good reason for this rubbish?

You know, technologies underlying your webpages are going to change. There's nothing you can do about it, they just will. Slashdot is a good example of using .pl extensions. And again, why? Why use any extensions? What happens when you switch from perl to ruby or python?

The point is that the web is evolving. So, why deliberately lock down your site to embrace one web technology? So your website is up for 5 years with your ugly-assed jsp pages and you've gotten up there in your google rankings and what not. Then along comes your new business needs, driving your web infrastructure away from jsp to php. All of a sudden you change your extensions, and now you have to do a whole bunch of redirects. Do you see how this doesn't scale at all? Is it just me?

Honestly, .html extensions are there needs to be, if anything at all. What I really like are no extensions whatsoever. Django embraces this idea. You get really beautiful URL's with no extensions and other ugliness. Down the road, when you switch to RoR or Java or whatever, your URLS (gasp!) will not have to change!!

OK, that came off pretty rant-like, but the ultimate point I wanted to make is this: my employers are cool like that. They're paying attention to the things I say I brought up the point of future-proofing url's, and if you look around on the site (especially the revamped DevZone, you'll see a lot more future-proofed URLs. There's still some ways to go before we stop exposing the technology behind our web infrastructure, but it's a great start.

Tell me your thoughts on this -- I'm especially interested in you .jsp and .php people. How do you possibly justify that nonsense?

Well, the last day came and went. My tongue (writing this on the morning of Day 11) remained white throughout Day 10, signalling at least a Day 11 on the fast in my immediate future. I don't really feel hungry any more. I mean some stuff sounds good and I want to eat it, but not physically -- there's no craving. It's a mental, "I'd like to eat cheesecake or chocolate mousse or both sometime soon" thing. I did the flush in the evening, and that went well.

We went to the grocery store to restock on lemons and maple syrup. And of course, the one we went to didn't have any organic lemons. So we had to go to another one in Arlington where they usually stock organic lemons. And of course, they were out, too. So, I'm stuck with "regular" lemons for the duration of this fast. Aimee went out for Indian food to the Dhaba yesterday. She didn't want to bring any food back, but at this point, I'm way over it. The smell of food doesn't do anything for me. We passed by a Bertucci's in a mall yesterday. It actually--get this--smelled bad to me.

Gross: I'm still "eliminating" like a freaking madman. This, without ingesting anything other than lemonade, salt water, senna laxative tea. So, perhaps it really is toxins. I mean, 10 days without solid food and I still have eliminations? That's crazy.

That's right folks. The box is dead. The motherboard fan won't work, the media disk is clicking (that was 120GB SATA with all my multimedia on it). And it won't boot. Even the livecd hangs when trying to mount the livecd filesystem. So, I guess it's time to try and find somewhere I can take the other disks to mount and get data off. Oh well...

So here's the thing. I'm bothered and puzzled. I'm puzzled by the fact that even though I haven't had anything to eat, and I haven't been flushing consistently (see the two days I missed), I still have to go to the bathroom every morning. I don't what the reason is -- perhaps, I've been steeping my senna tea for longer periods this time around (10-15 minutes). Either way, I wake up every morning with cramps/pains -- not fun, let me tell you. I didn't flush again this morning because we woke up late and had to run to the malls to wrap up Xmas shopping.

I'm bothered by the fact that my tongue is even whiter. My last day of this cleanse is day 10 (the day I'm writing this entry), and my tongue is showing no signs of being pink. I fear this means at least another day or two of fasting. I can hack it, but it's definitely interesting.

Speaking of interesting -- I'd gained 4 inches in my waist in LA and Boston. I'm now back to a 33" or 32" waist! That's pretty exciting. All that running and cleansing seems to be paying off!

So, the Genesi PPC box arrived in almost perfect condition. It was sitting packed in a box this whole time, so there was barely even any dirt in it or around it. It booted right up, and I got the data off it. It's a very quiet box. Since it has 2 ethernet ports on it, it'll become my new dns/dhcp server etc.

As for my athlon box, the CPU fan came loose and fell right off. So did the memory stick. So we had to go to a computer store to get a tube of Arctic Silver (last one!). Once I reformat the PPC and start the hardened gentoo install on it, I'll start repairing the athlon XP. I hope it at least boots.. If all goes well, I'll upgrade to kernel 2.6 on it (I had been holding off because the attempt I'd tried failed -- due to evms1->evms2 issues), and use it as a media server and print server.

Well, I had to flush in the evening on Day 8 again, instead of the morning, because of an early morning appointment. So, something strange. I was going to blog today that my tongue remained pink throughout the fast. Alas, that is not the case. On Day 8, my tongue has turned white. This can't be goodness, because that means this fast goes beyond Day 10. It takes like 3 or 4 days to get it pink again. I'm not craving anything specifically, but I am looking forward to getting off the fast so I can sushi and Indian food and pie and chocolate cake and ice-cream. In different sittings, not all at once, obviously.

Oh yeah, the city we live in has some weird strange parking rules. They don't bother posting them, you know, on the street, or anything. No, you learn the rules by getting tickets. Apparently, in winter time, regardless of the weather (we haven't had any snow to speak of), you have to park on one side of the street or the other. So last night, a whole bunch of cars, including Aimee's, got $10 tickets for parking on the wrong side of the street. We're going to fight it obviously, because you can't just ticket people for some hidden rule/law, this isn't Soviet Russia, sheesh.

So, I've been writing a CMS thingy to manage the website for my wife. That has taken a bit of a turn on the backburner, but it's returning to the front next week. In the meantime, I wrote up django apps for part of the websites where I work. It took quite some learning. Along the way, I learned about decorators and manipulators and validators and templatetags and context processors. Pretty much everything was learned out of James' blog, and the rest was divided evenly between Django's own fantastic docs and the fine folks in #django.

I don't know how the rails community or other communities are. But I'll tell you the learning has been fun and challenging and easy. The challenge came in to play in the material itself. It was easy because people are so forthcoming with information to help you.

So, I wrote the CMS for work, but I'm not counting on it getting adopted, to be honest. However, a lot of the models and ideas that got created and generated in that project will make their way into the church website. I'll start to talk more about that one as I make real progress on it next week. I'm looking for a place to host it so that I can share my progress.

Day 7 went off fairly well without a hitch. I did the flush thing in the evening, and it worked for the most part. However, I only wound up drinking 5 glasses of lemonade instead of 6. And I've discovered something -- the fast isn't what makes me cold. The flush is what makes me cold. I don't know why, but there it is.

I can't believe 7 days have gone by already. On the one hand, I can't wait for day 10 to arrive. On the other, I feel I could do it for another few days, maybe another week to 10 days. I even had thoughts of Arks (as in Noah's, you know with the 40 days thing). I won't, though, at least not this time. Perhaps next summer, though. This time around, since Aimee and I are heading out to a tropical island for the non-denominational holiday beginning on the 25th of-- Christmas holiday we intend to eat, man. Yeah, we'll be chowing down at the resort, I can tell you that.

These updates keep getting later and later. Here I am on day 7 writing about Day 6. Before I jump into it, I wanna share some absolutely useless and tangential information. I'm driving into work this morning, listening to the local KISS affiliate (I usually listen to NPR, but I tune out during the give-us-money drives -- I do, in fact, give money, so quell that right there), and they play this new song by Nelly Furtado. The chorus was almost something out of Kylie Minogue, to be honest, which made me a bit happy (because my Kylie CD is now here). Nelly's voice is a bit deeper and throatier in the verses, otherwise I would've thought it to be a Kylie release. Bleh, whatever. Useless, I told you.

So the fast. Yesterday was also a fine day. I flushed a bit. Not all of it flushed, but some of it did. No idea what happened to the rest of the saline. I did not, in fact, flush this morning, because again there was this thing I had to do really early. Pretty much, it was the same thing I had to do on Tuesday, except that Tuesday's journey was unsuccessful. Today's was a success. Tomorrow is another early day for me, as we're looking at a drupal demo bright and early at work. This means that I'll flush this evening instead. That, in turn, means I should be done with my lemonade for several hours before I get home (usually I finish the last bits of it at 4:30pm/16:30 so it's only 2 hours till "dinner"). That, in turn, means that I'll be pretty much famished by the time I get home this evening. Heck, going home at 17:30/5:30pm causes me hunger.

I also couldn't talk about food on the phone with Aimee yesterday, because that made me hungry. Ironically, the smell of food had no effect. In other news, my sister is still going strong, and her fiance has pledged to reboot his fast on Monday. That should take him right to the beginnings of Christmas (2 - 3 days to transition to regular food, post-fast) foods.

Well, day 5 is almost at en end. As you can see, I decided forge ahead. There were a tempting few moments yesterday, filled with thoughts of veggie soup, sushi and chocolate (in that order), when I thought I'd quit. But since Aimee is pretty much on a soup diet (she a mde a big batch the day before), there won't be cooking smells around anyway, and hey, I'm at the halfway point besides. So there we have it, I'm going on with the fast. About the flush -- I couldn't yesterday due to scheduling concerns. I have to leave aside almost 2.5 hours for it, and I had some stuff I had to do early yesterday morning. I thought about doing the flush in the evening when I came home. But, I forgot.

Oh yeah, sorry, I'm writing this on the morning of Day 6 instead of the evening of Day 5. So no cravings as such, except for a faint desire to eat chicken at some point during the day. I think it was during the drive. Specifically, it was chicken curry that I had thoughts of.

And, it's cold. I think probably winter time is not a great time to do the cleanses. In the future, I'll cleanse before and after, but not during. I definitely feel colder than most. I actually had my big heavy winter jacket on inside the building during the day at work. Granted, the conference room I was in for 90 minutes was colder than the rest, but I really felt it. I came back to the desk and hung out in my winter coat for half an hour. Then that afternoon, just sitting at my desk I got cold, and on came the winter coat.

Today, I'm taking a fleece sweater with me

...is finally here. You heard right, ladies and gentlemen. The computer that's been in LA since I moved to Boston almost two years ago arrived tonight. I haven't switched it on or anything like that. I'll save that part for the weekend. I plan to open the sucker up and look out for dust and loose connections and stuff. The case did take a wee bit of damage, but nothing fatal, I don't think.

The Genesi ppc box also arrived. Good times ahead. My old box will just become the router, mail server and print server. The Genesi box will go back to being a general purpose desktop for work and testing of packages.

I'm pretty excited by all of this!

Oh, now that I think about it... I can play flight simulator again. OK, I may have to rethink my plans

So, things did change today. Aimee's cold stepped up in intensity. She's been achy and throat hurty all day. We decided it was best she go off the fast, and onto some soup. She had some veggie soup tonight for dinner (carrots, celery, red potatoes, white potatoes, mushrooms, squash, onions, and tomatoes). Smelled great. I helped her with the veggie chopping.

Now, I know why this time around has been so easy: there wasn't any food smell in the house! Tonight was a definite struggle for me. Not that I was craving anything in particular (though I did crave chocolate for a little while this afternoon), just that I wanted to eat something. I decided to, um, stay the course, since I'm almost halfway through the fast anyway. Aimee's feeling bad and guilty for leaving it, though she has absolutely no reason to. It's better, I think, she take the soup and stuff to help her body fight the cold.

We'll probably do another cleanse in January or February, and we'll do it together then. I'm rather inclined to wait till the worst of winter is over, because frankly this fast does make you a little cold anyway. Granted, the cayenne's heat helps to warm one up a little, but it doesn't last overly long. It's especially cold after a flush.

Speaking of flush, I didn't even do it this morning, because I woke up so damned late. I have a thing against public toilets, as I may or may not have mentioned in a prior post (I'm pretty sure I did), so I wasn't going to go to work with a full flush still to go.

Tomorrow will consequently be a big flush, I guess, because it's been 3 days since I've really flushed anything. Here's hoping.

Pretty much from the second week of my employment, I had made it my mission to make the DevZone area of the website a lot friendlier. For those of you that had checked out that site when I first mentioned it, you would have noticed that the http://dev.streambase.com link took you to a register/login page. Say what? So, in a nutshell, you had to fork over the 411 to get the 411, which in my mind was not a fair trade.

Now, however, is a new time and a different story. We've spent a few weeks rehashing the DevZone. Among the changes:

1. No longer on a subdomain -- the new DevZone is off the main site at http://www.streambase.com/developers/
2. The DevZone is now a link on the main navigation bar on the corporate pages
3. Documentation is opened up entirely -- that's right folks -- 900 odd pages of it, free to see
4. We've put up a small training video -- essentially it's StreamBase in 6 minutes (a getting started guide)
5. a contrib area with code and articles and FAQs and contest winners

There was a lot of work by a lot of people to get that in and going. My favourite change is the disappearance of the .php suffixes on most pages in the DevZone, towards future-proof URLs.

Please go in and check it out. Leave me comments here or on email (or the devzone feedback email) about your thoughts. I hope that we've succeeded in making it a friendlier, more inviting and engaging place for people to check out StreamBase, and explore its awesome stream processing power. I hope at least 4 of my 8 readers check it out

And then there were three...

My sister's fiance backed out of his master cleanse programme. They went to the mall, and he went through the food court, with all its smells of pizza and who knows what else, and that did him in. They got home and he made pasta with garlic bread. He feels guilty about it, of course, but he'll try again the next time. It's definitely a difficult thing to keep at, especially in the first few days. Those cravings!
And more so than the cravings is the simple desire to put solid food into your mouth. Chewing and all that.

For Aimee and I the day started ok. We lay in bed till late, and then got up to do the flush. Again, for me, there wasn't much flushed. She had a lot more success. I wonder what's going on with me. I'll try again tomorrow morning. If nothing happens, I may reconsider this cleanse this time and reschedule it for January.

The cold that came over me in Oklahoma last Saturday hit me pretty hard. It wasn't till Thursday that it finally subsided. And now, as of this evening, it hit Aimee. I don't know if it is the same cold, or a different strain (in which case, should I now be looking forward to another cold?). She's in bed with a fever. She had some peppermint tea and she took some NyQuil before hitting the sack. She had a slight fever at bedtime. I'm more inclined to take her off the fast, but she's going to pull it for another day at least and see what it's like.

Now, because we were so late this morning, she did get a little weak from low blood sugar. A glass and a half of lemonade later, she was feeling much improved. It's weird for her, because the lemonade does actually cure her hunger, even though it's not so satisfying. It doesn't give you a "full" feeling. Or at least not one that lasts more than a few minutes. Being mostly water, it pretty much goes right through you.

So, let's see how tomorrow goes. This whole fast may come to a halt, or it may not. Will our heroes make it, kids? Tune in!

Today was a pretty good today. I have had no cravings at all. I've been hungry -- or rather, I've had the inclination to eat -- several times today, but nothing overwhelming at all. In fact, I've not even had overwhelming urges to drink the lemonade. Since this is Aimee's first time, she's had cravings pretty much all day: cinammon rolls and deep-dish chicago style cheese pizza in the morning, and homemade spinach/tomato pizza this evening. And, we stopped by this new plaza near here that has a really good ice-cream shop in it. As we walked by it on our way to a gift shop, she was quite tempted by it. She's being strong though, which is great. We're done with Day 2 now, which means that we have a little over a week left!

Oh yeah, remember how I said the salt water flush tasted posionous. Well, it's no wonder. Remember kids, don't do things when you're lacking sleep. Instead of two teaspoons of salt per quart of water, I put in two tablespoons per quart. That explains the nausea, the incredible thirst, etc. Today's flush was very light -- I think my body absorbed all the water instead. Weird, because I did drink quite a lot of water yesterday all day.
Aimee had early morning class, so she skipped the flush. The senna tea did have a painful effect on her this morning though.

It's weird to see what she's going through with familiarity from having been through it myself. I'll say that so far, this second cleanse is going a lot more easily for me.

A few people have talked about Stuart's departure already. And I didn't read any of the planet yesterday, when I posted.

So that means it's been 2 days since his official announcement, and I've been suspiciously quiet about it

Well, no longer. A few of us knew Stuart was going to retire a little bit before his resignation from the board. I will be honest here: I did not even try to talk Stu out of it. I wanted to. I felt the pain of his leaving pretty strongly. Over the years, however, I've learned a little bit about him, and so I knew that I'd not make a dent in his decision. He didn't resign in a fit of rashness or anger. He's most certainly exasperated/frustrated and probably a little angry, yes. But his action was not impulsive. It was thought-out. His mind, what I'm getting at, was made up. And nothing I or anyone could say or do was going to change it. So when he confided his intention to me, I could but accept what I was hearing.

And, in a way, seeing him resign took some wind out of my own sails. I guess, ladies and gentlemen, that that made Stuart one of my rocks in Gentoo. I need not paint a picture of Stuart, because anyone who's used Gentoo for a few months will recognise his work. He was an integral part of the overlays project, the Seeds project, the webapps team (which includes apache and its sexy configuration, and php which is not so sexy, but that's just me), and a lot more.

The thing about Stu is that he always tried to build and mend bridges. He had this uncanny ability to swallow pride and make the first steps to peace. He's human, of course, and so he's not perfect, but I'll tell you this: if 80% of Gentoo developers did that, we wouldn't see as many dismal and sad blog posts on this planet.

He's going to continue the Seeds project as much as he can outside of Gentoo. And there's certainly a fair share of us who will champion it within. So my tiny comfort is that at least Stuart Herbert is still involved, in some way, with Gentoo.

Farewell, Stu.

Day 1 went off fairly well without a hitch. We started the day bright and early with a yucky salt water flush. I'd forgotten exactly how yucky it really is on the tongue. I remember it being fairly salty last time, but this time it almost felt like salt-poisoning or something. To boot, it made me feel a little ill to my stomach for a while (until the flush part of it). Aimee had similar symptoms. Strange effect, and I'm thankful it's a one-a-day type situation. I'm almost dreading tomorrow morning.

Turns out my sister and her fiance started on Thursday, then ate out Thursday night because, well, they got hungry. They realised that that's not how this works, so they restarted today.

I did not feel hungry today at all. There was free pizza at work for the company meeting and they even had cookies and eclairs for dessert. The pizza smelled great, and the eclairs looked fantastic, but both failed to induce thoughts of fast-abandonment in me. It's just Day 1 though. Aimee, meanwhile, had a different experience. Her colleague brought in coffee cake, and that did lead to thoughts of abandonment, but she stayed strong. She was definitely hungry by 17:30 (5:30pm) when I got home, so we had our 5th glass each soon thereafter. Our final glass of the evening was at around 20:00 (8pm) and we had senna tea 2 hours later. She stayed strong. My prediction is that the next 3-4 days will be really rough on her. I don't know how tough it will be for me, but it'll certainly help to know that we're doing this together (and hence neither one will have food cooking).

In summary: salt water flush tastes nastier than I remember; it's as flushy as ever; lemonade tastes great still; cayenne gets hot the longer it sits in the drink; Yogi Tea's senna tea tastes better than this other brand we bought. (More details + links on the teas tomorrow).

So the thing about blogging is that when you stop for a bit, you stop for a bit longer. And then a bit longer and on. Well, that's what happens to me anyway. Take Rach, for example. I owed her a letter probably 6 months ago. And then I'm thinking of what to write, and more and more, then I wait, because there's more to be thought of, and then I realise it's getting later and later, and so I get more and more sheepish. And 1 week becomes 6 months. So, I'll be catching up on my letter writing this weekend, because there's so much to tell.

Meanwhile, we're back from Thanksgiving vacation. At work, we're wrapping up the final bits of the new Dev Zone (not yet published, but at least the docs have been opened for a couple of weeks). We'll be ready to unveil it soon enough. I also put in the new xterm release into portage this evening. So those of you on stable profiles waiting for xterm-222, your architecture team should be putting that in for you soon.

I wasn't going to do another Master Cleanse till the new year, but a few things have happened. We'd started running, if you remember. And we took our gear to vacation with us. Before we left we ran the first 2 days of Week 4 here. Kinda. The first day we couldn't do the last five-minute block at all. The second day, we did 4 and a half minutes of it. The third day was in LA. The park there is on a bit of an incline (a slight one, admittedly, but you can feel it). So we were struggling again, and couldn't do the last five-minute block again. Then we got to Oklahoma, and the first morning there, I felt the beginnings of a cold. My glands swelled and my throat closed up painfully. That did us in. I couldn't run like that, because swallowing was painful. That lasted till yesterday more or less (ie, our first day back in Boston). I even missed my first day back at work, due to fever and throat-achiness.

Today, I'm much much better, and because of all the food and stuff that was consumed during the holiday, we decided to go on a 10-day Master Cleanse. This time, Aimee is doing it with me. And also, my sister and her fiance (both in Rochacha) are doing the Master Cleanse right now!

So anyway, we had a dinner tonight (order-in Chinese), and it's a few minutes to bedtime, so we're drinking senna tea. Tomorrow morning: the first flush. Aimee's nervous. I'm ambivalent (about the flush). We have a truckload of lemons, a boatload of maple syrup, a tonne of cayenne and we'll need to refill on water tomorrow afternoon.

I'll keep the blog updated with the progress on both of us.