Peter Weller

... do not buy these hard drive enclosures. One of mine was broken after carrying it around in a rucksack for a day... Which doesn't really say any good things about the quality of the enclosure.

Firstly, Gnome users: I changed all instances of the 'keyring' USE flag in ebuilds to 'gnome-keyring', and as such, you should 'keyring' in your USE flag configurations with 'gnome-keyring'. (In fact, I should go do this on my machines now ).

In other news! If there are any Gentoo users (or for that matter, developers) out there who use Jabber, feel free to come along to the Gentoo chatroom on Jabber (xmpp:gentoo@conference.jabber.org?join). I'll attempt to hang out in there as much as possible, and it would be nice to get a nice 'lil community going in there

... as 'gnome-keyring'.

Just a heads-up to all you Gnome (and possibly Xfce) users out there: There are currently around 9-10 packages in the tree which use the 'keyring' USE flag to enable support for the gnome-keyring package. As of this evening, this USE flag will become a global USE flag, and the name will be changed to 'gnome-keyring'. See here for more details on the decision.

So last night, I added my 100th contact on Jabber! This makes me happy!

Now, you might think that Jabber is too geeky, too oriented towards random Free Software Fighters, to be really useful for "normal" people. Well this, I believe, is where you are wrong! Jabber is being adopted more and more, GTalk has used it for a while, so if you have a GMail account, you automagically get a Jabber account! And, what's more, you can get a Jabber client on your GMail homepage! (This is what my mum uses - I don't know whether she would be able to handle a full blown Jabber client, but GMail's webclient is perfect for her needs).

I also think that the general movement from Windows to OSX by the general population could fuel Jabber, especially as one of the more popular clients, Adium, as it is based on libpurple, supports multiple protocols, including Jabber. This means that OSX users who opt to use Adium can use it for their GMail accounts (Okay, I might be making a bit of a stereotype here, by assuming that all OSX users use GMail, but it's generally true), as well as their MSN/AIM/ICQ/Whatever accounts in one client!

Oh, and in case you're wondering, my JabberID is welpie@jabber.org - just in case you wish to help me on my way to 200!

bleh.

That will be all. For now.

Hey,

As many of you are aware, I've been away from Gentoo quite a bit recently... Holidays, parents splitting, moving house, etc, etc. But! I have been attempting to slowly ease myself back into the Gentoo lifestyle, and I did some amd64 arch testing, fixed a few bugs and did some work for the GWN today. Tomorrow, I'll likely be mostly AFK again, but should still be able to get something done. Looks like the amd64 team is again needing an extra hand to get the number of stable requests down to a sane number... From what I can tell, there are only 1 or 2 devs dealing with (or rather, attempting to deal with) the crazily large number of stabilization bugs. Looks like I'll have to go on another couple of sprees .

Anyway. Yesterday, I got messing around with the Gnome-2.20 update on my laptop, and somehow, one thing led to another, and I have now got NetworkManager working perfectly, pam_keyring and pam_ssh working perfectly, my email setup more or less perfectly with evolution, Gajim's working beautifully, almost everything on this system is just how I want it... There are just a couple of little niggles, such as bug 188618 - the icon for gnome-power-manager doesn't appear, so I have to manually restart the the program before I can get my battery life monitor .

Next up on my todo list is to get my two Gentoo/FreeBSD machines up and running again, so I can get fixing bugs for that, and then... That's about it. I think I want to get my hands on some form of server so that I can run my own Jabber server (I currently have an account on jabber.org - welpie@jabber.org - but would rather run my own Jabber server. Just 'cos I like to admin stuff ), but that's somewhere closer to the bottom of my todo list for now.

Hopefully, you guys will be getting more regular updates from me over the next few months .

Yay for British Gentoo users!

Went to two different pubs this evening, with Naib, UberLord, igli and leio, played some pool, snooker, drank some stuffs, met up with edit_21, Hanni, taviso, christel, NeoThermic, NeddySeagoon, dertobi123, AllenJB, and a whole load of others! T'was all good fun! Now I'm at igli's place. I've finished all my food, igli and leio are still eating their chicken n' chips ^_-

As for leio's blog post complaining about my lateness, I blame... Uh. The train. It was 4 minutes late *nod* That's a good enough excuse for me. =)

And, now I'm off to start folding the programs for the event... Then I'm gonna try and get some sleep. Then I shall be heading off to meet edit_21 sometime this morning.

So, the hairdresser came over tonight. And, I got a haircut, as illustrated by the two pics below:

That's around 10 inches of hair I got lopped off! Gave the hairdresser a laugh

Right, so I've generally been slacking since my last blog post. Oh well, time for me to get back to work, methinks!

Firstly, today is Bugday! And it will remain so until 23:59:59 on Saturday in whatever timezone it is that it becomes that time the latest (if that makes any sense to you ). (Also, I know I'm not supposed to start sentences with 'And', but meh).

Secondly, I mentored my second developer, keytoaster, so he could get CVS access and start his work on KDE stuff (what sane person would want to work on KDE? ), he was already a docs dev and an AMD64 AT so he didn't have to do quite so much work as some of our current developers to get CVS access
Speaking of developers I've mentored, angelos has been doing a spiffing job of tackling the amd64 bugs, so we're starting to get back under control of our buglist

I've also been working on an updated ebuild for tea, but it doesn't seem to be liking me much, installing stuff to the wrong places, and so on. I blame debian. (No, really, I do, there's an --enable-debian option so that the binary and other files get installed to the right places on debian-based systems, but it seems to break everything else, at least for me).

Also, it seems that I have been nominated for the Gentoo Council... Three times. I'm still in the process of deciding whether to accept the nominations or turn them down.

And last, but by no means least, the annual Gentoo UK conference is going to be taking place next weekend(!) We have a wide range of talks planned, and there should be around 10 developers attending, by the looks of things, should be great fun, all-in-all!

So, I've been mentoring my first developer since, like, the 11th May, and today he officially became a developer! Obviously, I'm kinda pleased with myself (and obviously with angelos ).

angelos is gonna be joining the amd64 herd, which will hopefully help reduce the strain on us folks

(On a sidenote, angelos is from Germany, and thus the German Conspiracy is getting bigger )

I'm an INTP. What type are you? (The test shouldn't take too long. Try to answer the questions without thinking about it too much, and don't double-guess yourself. Check TypeLogic to find out what your type means. Have fun! )

armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76--
armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76--
armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76--
armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76--
armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76--
armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76--
armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76--
armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76--
armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76--
armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76--
armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76--
armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76--
armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76--
armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76-- armin76--

Now, is there any chance you could PLEASE stop stabbing me/giving me negative karma?

So, about 2 months ago, I was your average geek: between 5-8 coffees a day, a couple of cans of stimulant drinks (i.e. Red Bull), up 'til the small hours in the morning, waking up all tired, falling asleep at school, etc. And I wasn't happy with this...

So, after doing a bit of research into sleeping patterns, how sleep works, monophasic, biphasic and polyphasic sleep, I decided to change.

First of all: Cut out the caffeine. I did this in a really stupid way; completely stopped drinking anything with caffeine in it in one go. I suffered... The headaches were terrible! Fortunately, I didn't get the "shakes" I've heard and read about...

Secondly: Drink a lot (of water). Apparently you're supposed to drink around 2l (8 250ml glasses) of water per day; coffee and tea doesn't count towards this, so this went kinda well with the first thing! I started drinking lemon tea, more apple juice, and much more water. I need to go to the toilet more than in the past, but I started feeling so much better, physically. I currently attempt to have about 500ml at breakfast: herbal tea and applejuice, 1l throughout the day: water, and another 500ml at home: water and herbal tea. This seems to fit in with my schedule well, and I often find myself drinking over 2l per day .

Thirdly: Go to bed at the same time each evening. This seems to me to be one of the more important parts of the schedule... I go to bed at around 23:00 on a daily basis, and always attempt to stick to it. Sticking to your bedtime is especially important during the adaptation phase...

Fourthly: Exercise. Ride a bike, go on long walks, go for a jog, go to the gym, whatever! Just attempt to get at least 40-50 minutes of exercise done per day (IMO). Not only does it make you physically fit, but it also helps you wake up in the morning (when you first wake up) and early afternoon (when your body temperature slumps a bit and you get tired... this is why Italians have a mid-afternoon nap) by helping your body temperature rise quicker.

Fifthly: Get a lot of light. I'm talking real light here, not light from those flourescent lights you have in the office. You gotta get real sunlight. Obviously, this could be difficult for some people in the world... Especially in the UK, but I managed it... It's relatively simple to get more sunlight - open the curtains, walk places - don't drive. Don't wear sunglasses, go outside for lunch, go outside to think stuff over, move your desk to a window, etc, etc. You can also get artificial light generators (commonly used by recovering insomniacs), but I've never tried one... All this light helps your body temperature rise quickly, ensuring that you wake up faster and stay awake more throughout the day. BTW, please use your common sense here, and be sensible... Say, if you're on Tatooine, or someplace just as sunny, do wear sunglasses, do cover up, and so on... UV light is dangerous, and can cause irreversible damage to your eyes (eye problems can be influenced by the amount of UV light accumulated by your eyes over time). Just don't go overboard in either direction... there really is no need to stare at the sun all day long, but do you really need to wear sunglasses at 8am in the morning?

That's about it! I used an alarm clock (well, my mum woke me up) to get up at 07:00 every day, but after about a week, I would be up at about 06:55. "Amazing!", I thought... After a while, I would be up at about 06:45! After about 3 or 4 weeks, I was even getting up before 06:00! At the moment, I normally (read almost always) get up at between 05:00 and 06:00 without the aid of an alarm clock, and I've even managed to get up before 05:00 (This was after getting more exercise than normal). So, it seem that my body *naturally* wants me to get around 6.5 hours of sleep per night, which is pretty spiffy... I'm always amazing people when I tell them what time I wake up in the morning without an alarm clock... And they always seem to think I'm lying, or on some kinda drug or something... Even my own parents don't understand how I manage to do it!

After a while, you get to the stage where you can change your bedtimes on occasion, for example, go to bed earlier, and still get up at the right time. So far, I've only tried going to bed earlier, but not later than 23:00, but from the looks of things, I should be fine.

At some stage, I'd like to attempt polyphasic sleep, but this is likely to happen sometime later in my life when I have a less restricting schedule.

Oh, just an endnote.. drinking lots of alcohol makes you sleep more unless you can get it out of your body fast.
Also... I tend to find it good to only use the bed for sleeping... If I, say, lie in bed with my laptop, or start reading a book in bed, I get sleepy much quicker than I otherwise would.
Hm! Self-discipline is also important! Resist the urge to "sleep-in" when you wake up, that's a bad thing to do and is likely to muck you around...

**EDIT** Added stuff about using common sense to 'light' section ***EDIT***

Well, the HDD in my server failed, taking the blog down with it, 'til about a week ago, I never did anything about it... But! I ended up poking beandog for a nice shiny Gentoo blog (Which I now, obviously, have ).

Soo, anyway... Whilst I was blogless, I did a whole load of work (ish)... Did a couple of amd64 keywording/stabilization sprees, and with the help of a couple of other members of the amd64 team, managed to bring down the number of amd64 stabilization bugs from >100 to around 20. Success IMHO . But! Since I've been away (due to exams and such), the bug number has shot up again... Looks like I'm going to have to do some more work...

Xfce-4.4.1 was released, and I stabilized it on Gentoo/AMD64. Great fun . Whilst I'm on the topic, the Gentoo Xfce team are planning on revamping the project overlay in the near future, so keep your eyes on this space .

On the Gentoo/FreeBSD front, we welcomed back an old member, one who I'm sure that a lot of the Gentoo Planet readers will remember: the Legendary Flameeyes! So, yeah, he rejoined the Gentoo/FreeBSD project, and will hopefully sort out a whole load of stuff for us .

Just a couple more things before I STFU

Next Saturday is Bugday! And you'd all better join in! Or I'll stop hugging you. 'k? Excellent. So, #gentoo-bugs on irc.freenode.net, Saturday 2nd. Be there or be square (Hrmm, maybe you're all "square" anyway... *hides*).

Also, I've got myself an account on most of the IM networks (with the exception of Yahoo...):
Jabber: welpie@jabber.org
ICQ: 490140301
AIM: welp@01welp.co.uk
MSN: welp@01welp.co.uk

Feel free to add me