Apparently, if you forget to  pay your ISP bills for three months, they'll cut off your access.  Hmm, whoops.  That's why my blog as well as *.larrythecow.org went down for a few days.

I signed up for a Linode (and did automatic billing), and I'll be moving the sites there rather soonly.  That'll save us all from other responsibility-addled issues.  Well, financial ones at least.

Ok, we got a new council, I'm still there so thank you for renewing the trust on me =)

Looks like that less people found me or what I did that compelling to make me into the council, so surely I did something wrong. Solar got the first place so his cleanly cut ways are perceived better.

I started polling people about what they feel about Gentoo and what they'd like. The first thing I noticed is that people are sick of endless discussions on marginal stuff and even more sick of outside projects trying to push it's agenda on Gentoo using the shovel-in-throat way.

Second item is about trying to make the place nicer for everybody and better involve our large userbase. We used to be the nicest distribution regarding attitude towards newcomers and slow learner, now other distributions are better. We could re-learn from them.

That's what I perceived so far. As I said before I see the council just as the last resort to get something decided if we, developers, cannot find a large agreement. Solar likes more to be proactive in my opinion. You liked him so I guess we as council should try to push people express themselves and get new&interesting stuff done instead of discussing which is the new way to define a quantity next to infinity or why embedding information somewhere is right or wrong in theory.

That said, how wrong I am so far and how we could get Gentoo to improve even more?

Some time ago a user approached us and asked about a user guide...we told that it was a good idea and he should start writing it as we weren't too motivated to get that started. Marc Murphy provided a basic guide and extended it over the months to come but the Emacs team did not move to review it or whatever. Today I quit being a slacker, updated the guide a bit and added it to our official Emacs repository for everyone to see. It is not publishable but a good start and if something is missing or wrong, please point that out via Bugzilla or by direct email to the Emacs team. If you can provide patches we would be lucky, but also some unformatted text is welcome, we can integrate it into the GuideXML document.

Edit: There is a HTML version to make proof-reading easier. Yes, I know the image is missing and yes a lot of information is also still missing.

I was over at a friend's house yesterday, and I saw something on her refrigerator door. It was a small of Buddhist proverbs relating to difficult times and tough situations. At first I didn't pay much attention to any of the writings, but instead opened the door and got some ice out of the freezer. However, as I shut the door I started to read the first proverb.

Once I had finished reading the first piece, I was so captured by the interwoven simplicity and wisdom that I couldn't help but read the remainder of the writings. Having found such a large amount of wisdom and vast understanding, I decided that it would be selfish of me not to share them with everyone. I have therefore decided to post one per day here on my blog, and also to share some of my own thoughts regarding each respective proverb.

So, for today the first piece of Buddhist wisdom for difficult times is:

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
                    --Pema Chodron

The dichotomy that is initially established by the first line (a test and a way of healing) indicates a type of optimism that one might not readily see during a struggle. Firstly, healing is a fairly indisputable positive process, correct? Even if the healing process itself is difficult, the intended outcome (being a healed state) is universally recognised as positive. Secondly, a test in the traditional sense can have a positive or a negative outcome—one can either pass it or fail it.

At first, that seems like it could net a doubly positive result (passing the test and healing), or a null result (failing the test, but possibly still attaining a healed state). However, I don't believe that sentiment is what Chodron intended. As indicated by the second line, the outcome isn't the important part of the test or of the healing process. Rather, the processes themselves are the most crucial elements. Being a part of those processes, and allowing them to occur in their natural manner will give one the opportunity to find a medium between passivity and activity in one's own life.

When thinking of that medium between passivity and activity, it might be beneficial to picture a game of Tetris. While one can't choose the pieces that are going to come next in the continuous progression, one can manipulate the piece's orientation and position in the overall grid of the game. I believe that Chodron was trying to get us to understand that though we can't sit back and just watch our lives happen to us, we do have to realise our limited control over events and their juxtapositions. This idea is further portrayed in the closing sentence, where she says that the “healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen.” When one can accept that there will be rough and turbulent times along with the great ones, then one can be more at peace with the current situation, whether pleasureful or painful. The comfort may come in knowing that no situation is permanent, and that one does have an ability to change the situation in certain ways (though not all ways). This idea is not limited to Buddhism, but is also prominent throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition, especially throughout Israeli folklore involving King Solomon.

|:| Zach |:|

After having encrypted my home partition as described here I encountered a strange problem. After each time I suspend to RAM all partitions on the MMC card are gone.

I'm running Gentoo sources 2.6.29-r5. I also tried Tuxonice sources 2.6.24-r9 but it has the same special effect. My MMC controller is the Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter. Perhaps suspend is just broken for it or something with my config is not right:(

So for now I'll just have to live without suspend to RAM and ensure that it doesn't do suspend to RAM as a powersaving measure.

A foreword, this post is mainly aimed at fellow devs or people doing a lot of ebuild work.

As many of you might know, bumping ebuilds is often not the hardest thing to do but to ensure a good QA, a number of little things have to be checked. There are various ways to go with QA, in no specific order:

• build with stricter package manager settings than usual (think FEATURES="test stricter")
• carefully read/grep throug build.log (a lot more tedious)
• verifying some files don't contain known bugs (gtk-doc, intltool)
• check that the user just gets the locales s/he asked for
• check that no lib is using a built-in when it should use a system lib
• check that RDEPEND/DEPEND actually match what the ebuild needs

and there is obviously a lot more that could go wrong that you don't always think about. Sure that's what ~arch and the infamous tinderboxes are for, some might say, but what if you could check for most of this with no extra cost for you than renaming the ebuild and trying to build it. Here comes the portage hooks (don't know if other PM supports this).

Let's take a real world example, recently intltool had a seriously buggy release (filled as gentoo bug #577133) and now most upstreams using intltool are shipping tarballs with these broken rules. With portage hooks, I wrote a little snipped that would tell me if there was not enough or actually too much locales installed for a given LINGUAS setting (ok that's not exactly it, but let's say it works this way). Then collected a list of md5sum of problematic files and wrote the following in /etc/portage/bashrc:


#!/bin/bash

post_src_prepare() {
if [ ! -e "${S}/po/Makefile.in.in" ]; then
return 0
fi

checksum=$(md5sum "${S}/po/Makefile.in.in" | cut -f1 -d' ')
tempfile=$(tempfile)

cat >> $tempfile <<EOF
26d0fa167a5a49e7f2b57b99d08c6586
f81285d13b63167be6981aad0e1a2038
955fb57559c7d112f749e185fc34e07f
EOF

if grep -q "$checksum" $tempfile; then
eerror "Bad intltool rules detected"
die "Bad intltool rules detected"
fi
}


And then any package using those bad rules will just die after src_prepare. No wasted time building broken stuff anymore. This example is obviously not perfect, yadi yada, but it's just here to show a lot can be achieved without touching portage code directly. Actually interesting tests would probably be gladly integrated into a PM so don't hide it if you write some. I'll try to drop a rewrite of this using my git hooks model in my dev space if there is interest in it.

LinuxTag 2009 is over. I slept 12 hours after that, slightly less than the total of sleep I got throughout the four days. But it was amazing. There’s so many people I have to thank that made this a unique experience. Here’s my attempt at a partial list. Thanks to…

• All visitors for keeping us busy through discussions, compiling buttons together, and by accepting all our sneaky attempts to hand out flyers.
• Gentoo e.V. for covering the costs for printing flyers, buttons, banner, sweets and drinks.
• Alex Legler for designing the flyers, the banner, making sure they get printed in time, and manning the booth.
• Sebastian Pipping for designing both the t-shirts and word cloud with me, and giving valuable of feedback on the booth presentation. He also organized sweets and the diner table of Tuesday evening.
• Christian Faulhammer for manning the booth longer than anybody else; he helped out throughout all four days, from the first minute until his train left.
• Tobias Scherbaum for approving all our funding requests; being there even at a busy time and organising the two Gentoo book samples.
• Wernfried Haas and Claudia, for creating and hanging up the great Larry prints again. What would a Gentoo booth be without them?
• Sebastian Dyroff for driving all the boxes to the exhibition grounds and back to my place, and staying at the booth for quite a while.
• Luca Barbato for being around every now and then, while not busy at the ffmpeg booth.
• Florian Streibelt for fixing the presentation machine, providing some hardware on short notice and his booth service.
• Daniel Sturm for lending the button machine and buying all supplies, and manning the booth.
• Fabian Groffen for taking the long drive from the Netherlands, and work the booth despite partying.
• Valentin Haenel for being at the booth on Saturday.
• Torsten Schmits for manning the booth on Friday. (Hope you get better soon!)
• Björn Tropf for preparing the flyer with Alex and being there two days.
• Gordon Malm for proof-reading and improving the flyer.
• Tobias Kral and an unknown messenger for getting the stickers and mouse pad to the event.
• Benedikt Böhm, Christian Parpart, and Hanno Boeck for stopping by at the booth and saying hello.
• All LinuxTag helpers for all the work they did, including full-time catering. Special thanks to Daniel, Sebastian Pipping and Fabian for participating in that.
• All corporate sponsors of the event, they paid for catering and parts of the Social Event.
• Fedora for the free pizza on Friday.
• Ubuntu Berlin for the barbeque on Saturday.
• All those who offered help for next year. We will come back to you, LinuxTag 2010 is June 9 to 12.

Let me finish with a few bytes of statistics. There were more than 10 000 visitors, we sold 39 t-shirts, drank 34 bottles of Mate and 10 bottles of water, and ate 3 kg of sweets. Ohh, and here’s us again:

Yesterday I had a once in lifetime experience to attend a live Celtic ( and not only ) concert.

Loreena McKennitt is on a Mediterranean Tour. Yesterday she visited Patras to perform  an amazing, 2 hour long, concert.

My mind was traveling back into medieval times during the whole time.  Her beautiful voice in conjunction with the variety of mystical sounds produced by the fabulous musicians created an outstanding atmosphere.

Check out the Gallery

I just received word from Josh that the OpenBox3 HOWTO that I started writing quite a while back is now in the official Gentoo documentation repository! Josh went through and made some changes to the draft version, and as far as I can tell, they were:

• Commented out ~arch applications in order to stick with the stable branch
• Removed the notes about mixing stable/unstable branches
• Some syntactical changes to my XML

So, if you have a desire to try a really neat window manager with few dependencies and that offers a huge amount of customisability, feel free to read the OpenBox Guide

Thank you Josh!

|:| Zach |:|

There are many discussions about how Theora should be used and about how it smokes x264 somehow.

I do not believe it or at least I don't believe the proofs till I try myself.

Any of the Theora zealots reading could please provide a reproducible benchmark so everybody could see for themselves how good/bad Theora is?

A script that fetches the new theora encoder, ffmpeg, takes an original, produces two videos using theora and h264 (no audio), same bitrate for both and in the end outputs cpu and memory usage would be great.

I'm eventually back home, I'm dead tired, the c-base party was great in many ways (people, food, place) and ending the night (actually starting the morning) playing Go with beer and music was _quite_ fun (thanks again for the games =))

I'll try to wrap up everything in a short post before falling asleep completely: the LinuxTag had been a wonderful experience I had been more there as FFmpeg developer and less as Gentoo developer (mostly because I had to man the FFmpeg booth mostly since we aren't that many and that I failed to chat in a proficuous with the gentoo people even if we spent the evening in the same place most of the time =| In the end I had a refreshing conversation about Gentoo with rbu luckily and I managed to chat a bit more with fauli just before he was leaving...)

Was quite fun going at the end of the event to the fsfe stand to do explain the FFmpeg stance about patents, Theora (more will follow) and why, in our humble opinion at least, isn't correct to propose^Wactually shove down to the web users throat such codec just because of some claims that are yet to be validated...

The discussion was quite pleasant mostly because to my surprise fsfe people there weren't zealots, so the whole discussion discussion even evolved to touch more interesting topics, like reverse engineering, making sure our license is respected and actually multimedia, with a brief discussion on containers, codec and streaming (that part actually started from an explanation why Theora isn't that perfect fruit of opensource that is claimed and why Ogg has many
shortcomings as container and why in multimedia you do not have one-size-fit-all solutions... )

Recently, a few larger packages on alpha have seen major updates. There are caveats here and there. Thus, I'll point them out in this post.

xorg-x11-7.4 and xorg-server-1.5

After long last, we've stabilized xorg-server-1.5 and xorg-x11-7.4 (plus their dependencies, naturally). The largest blocker for this was the lack of kernel support for PCI accesses on alpha. Since 2.6.30 fixed that and due to the pressure from the X11 guys to get rid of old versions (and sundry other packages), we moved to 2.6.30 as stable vanilla kernel and .29-r5 as stable gentoo-sources.

However, not everything is peachy. The glint driver, which is used for the Permedia cards that came with many earlier PCI-only Alphas (like the 500au and XP1000) does not work. There's a bug report (freedesktop bug #21546, referenced from g.o bug #268626) but no X11 dev has seen fit to react to it. I've been told that the failure is the result of a changing API and a lack of update to the glint driver. If you do use such a card and want to use recent X11 I suggest bugging the X11 people about it; ideally, via the report mentioned above.

Regarding Kernel 2.6.30, there have been reports of SMP compile failures on LKML, but I have been unable to reproduce those. Feel free to bug me if you encounter them.

glibc 2.9

A few minutes ago, I stabilized glibc-2.9_p20081201-r2 for Alpha. It has been running on all of my alphas for a while now, without any noticeable flukes (besides one, which I'll detail below). Armin76 has rebuilt his testing chroot with it and found no errors either, so I'm quite sure this'll work out nicely.

The one caveat isn't a bug in glibc per se but actually one in Netfilter. Under certain circumstances, a race condition can be triggered in Netfilter which results in a silently dropped DNS packet which in turn results in a timeout when connecting. I noticed this a few months ago and hunted it down.

The main ingredients are: a machine running a glibc of the 2.9 series, an SMP Netfilter machine and low latency between the two. What happens is that newer glibc resolvers rapid-fire the two requests (ipv4 and ipv6/A and AAAA) that are triggered by gethostbyname(). Due to the specifics this sometimes triggers a race condition in the Netfilter code it traverses on your router/firewall. The easiest solution right now is to add "options single-request" to your resolv.conf. This will make lookups slower but not perceptibly so unless you do a really large number of them per second. If you occasionally experience delays when connecting (typically with SSH) and it's not a delay on the other side, you might want to try the fix described above. Details on the bug can be found in my post to net-devel.

The fix to Netfilter is very much the opposite of trivial, I am told. And even if it were fixed tomorrow, it would take quite a while to phase out the old code.

For LinuxTag 2009 we had three t-shirts for sale:

• White
• Black
• Larry

Robert’s blog post shows Larry and White. Here’s a front shot of the black one to complete the collection:

Since I had a little bit of extra time today, I decided that I would make some minor changes to my OpenBox3 HOWTO. Though it has not yet been committed to the official documentation repository, I do think it is finally in a "publishable" state. The changes that were made to this third draft from the second one were:

• Fixed some grammatical errors
• Updated package list information
• Added note about keywording/unmasking packages
• Changed xorg-x11 references to xorg-server
• Added a nicer example of menu.xml entries

I'm still wanting to add some links to the relevant portions of the Handbook for the sections on keywording and unmasking packages. However, when I try to link to the Gentoo Handbook which is broken down in specific chapters and sections ("perfect for online viewing"), I get XML parsing errors regarding the equal signs contained in the links. For instance, the URL for keywording section is:

gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=3&chap=3#doc_chap2

Also, I should note that the draft on my Gentoo Developer page is NOT current. I will update it as soon as I can, but I don't have my keys on this work laptop.

That's all for now, and I hope you all have a wonderful day!

|:| Zach |:|

P.S. Just for reference, the previous drafts and the progress of my OpenBox3 HOWTO can be found in Gentoo Bug #256693.

This is basically a heads-up for Qt users on Gentoo. We are about to add the new 4.5.2 release to portage. With this release we have changed a few things. We no longer have certain useflags enabled by default that are already enabled by the desktop profile. This means that if you are not using the desktop profile, you should look if any useflags have changed and decide which ones you want to enable. Or otherwise, that you no longer need to disable them if you want a minimal install.

We also have removed the need for the libX11 dependency in qt-core and a couple of other non-gui modules. So you can now for example have a server-only install of quassel with minimal dependencies. The libX11 dependency is now only pulled by packages that really need it.

Another thing that changed is that we dropped the custom-cxxflags useflag. After a long period of testing we haven’t come across any problems with “advanced” cxxflags in Qt 4.5, so now we always let the Qt modules be built with the user-specified flags. As this is an eclass level change, this means also users of the stable branch will see this change. An emerge --newuse world will trigger a recompile of Qt, but this means you will get better optimizations.

After watching the news a couple days ago, I realised that apparently nobody cares about proofing anymore. The story was about an elderly woman dying of heat exhaustion, but that isn't what the screen headline reported:





|:| Zach |:|

Time flies and so here we already are on Day 3 at LinuxTag in Berlin. We are almost sold out on T-Shirts, lots of people are running around with a Gentoo button on their shirt and we are sitting in “Larry’s Hackcenter”, stabilizing packages and wrangling Security bugs.

Some pictures:

The Emacs team is collecting ancient and normally obsolete tarballs we once provided. We collected a lot of them already but are still missing some. So if you have one of the following in your DISTDIR, please mail them to us (emacs@g.o):

• ebuild-mode-1.0.tar.gz
• ebuild-mode-1.1.tar.gz

If you by any chance used the Emacs overlay and installed some packages from there, we are still looking for:

• ebuild-mode-1.4.tar.bz2
• emacs-daemon-0.3.tar.bz2
• emacs-daemon-0.4.tar.bz2
• emacs-daemon-0.5.tar.bz2
• emacs-daemon-0.6.tar.bz2
• eselect-emacs-0.1.tar.bz2
• eselect-emacs-0.2.tar.bz2
• eselect-emacs-0.3.tar.bz2

Thanks to flameeyes and Frank Krömmelbein for providing all of them.

After Robert posted the first photos yesterday, I have to do some status report: We have 

• a MacBook showing an installation screencast
• an Intel machine with a Gentoo installation running Windows in a virtual machine...and in there a Gentoo Prefix
• Compile Your Own Gentoo Button, we have all materials and different designs
• inspection copies of both German Gentoo books
• T-shirts for sale, and they sell great. If you live in Germany you can write an email to rbu, maybe we reorder after the exhibition

We were just filmed by German Linux Magazin, so you can hear rbu and myself talk about our stand a bit (only two questions though) as soon as it goes online. If you are near Berlin come visit us.

Almost two months after sane-backends-1.0.20 appeared upstream I finally managed to complete the first ebuild attempt.

It took me so long because

• there were a few internal changes with the new version and I wanted to check if the ebuild is still OK
• I made SANE_BACKENDS a USE_EXPAND variable now. So you can see which backends are available and enabled without reading the ebuild or the SANE homepage. Well, and it gets a lot harder to attempt building non-existant backends as some people tried in the past for understandable reasons.
• I can't complain about too much spare time and I hardly ever get to do anything that takes more than an hour or two, and I was new to the USE_EXPAND business.

Some frontends (including sane-frontends xscanimage) fail(ed) to compile with this version because a hardly ever needed flag named SANE_CAP_ALWAYS_SETTABLE which was not part of the official API (though in sane.h) has been removed. If you run into problems because of this please let the maintainer of the frontend know, it is not really sane-backends' fault.

So the first day of the four days of Gentoo at LinuxTag is almost over. It’s a very exciting event, talking to users, visitors, and devs, and in the end we could even convince some unhappy Ubuntu users to try Gentoo. Here’s some pictures of what happened so far.

Pictures were taken by Florian, amne and fauli. The word cloud poster is by sping and me.

As most of you probably know, about 2 months ago, I retired from Gentoo. I have been using Fedora as my “distribution of choice” on my laptop since that time, and I have been very impressed with it on the whole.

However, there have been a number of niggles which have been putting me off using Linux for a laptop. It’s highly likely that less “advanced” users wouldn’t experience the same issues I’ve been having, but none the less. I’ll outline the issues I’ve been having, then expand upon each of them in turn.

• Photo management software (F-Spot) is not particularly feature-rich, is slow and relatively buggy
• Need to fiddle around with things to get, for example, VPN connections working
• Hibernate/suspend doesn’t work
• Not much in the way of “set and forget” backup solutions

Although F-Spot does what it needs to do (mostly), it is extremely basic, and doesn’t offer solutions such as colour curve adjustment, converting images to black and white, scaling images, cropping images, and so on (unless I’ve missed something). It also doesn’t allow you to organise your photos quite as well as other photo management software, such as Aperture and Lightroom. I discovered a bug in my installation, which left both the F-Spot developers and me scratching our heads: attempting to export photos to Flickr crashes F-Spot if I launch it from Gnome’s menu. If I launch it from the terminal, I have no such issues… The options haven’t changed, and I can’t work out any way to pipe the error messages from when I launch it from Gnome’s menu to a file…

I use the VPN functionality quite a bit these days to connect to the University’s VPN whilst not on the University network. Although I have managed to get the VPN working thanks to one of my friends, I had to fiddle around with adding and modifying keys in the GConf editor, which I really should not have had to do. It might be possible to do it all through NetworkManager’s interface (I know that some of the options were available in the “Advanced Settings” dialog), but it was still a nuisance to sort it all out (and it was also undocumented. DO NOT WANT.)

Hibernate and suspend do not work on my ThinkPad T61. I’d suspect that this has something to do with using discreet nVidia graphics, but I would still like such features to work out of the box. I’ve had this laptop since Feb ‘08, and I’ve *still* not managed to get it working. With the MacBook Pros, you can just close it and wander off: everything just works.

Linux doesn’t really have a “set and forget” backup system such as Time Machine. With Time Machine, you set it up to backup to $external_harddisk, and it does it all for you. You just plug your MacBook in, and it automatically starts backing up in the background. You don’t have to think about it at all until you need it, at which point, you just fly back in time through their shiny interface, and you’re sorted. It really is quite nice.

I guess that I’m just “shifting” my expectations somewhat now that I’ve been at university for a year. At the beginning of the year, I was happy to fiddle around with things to get them to work. I was happy to make tarballs and scp or rsync them to remote locations to back things up. I was using Gentoo, and happy to sit through long compiles and reinstalls. Now, though, I just want things to work. I don’t want to have to fiddle around with obscure settings to make it work. I don’t want to have to sit through long compiles. I guess I want to be able to use my computer for what I want to use it for, without being side-tracked along half a dozen different mini-projects to be able to complete my main goal.

On top of that, Macs are shiny. I think that the Apple LED Cinema Display which has been designed specifically to go with the MacBook Pro is amazing, and just perfect for what I want. It allows me to compromise on the display resolution on the MacBook Pro itself (the MacBook Pro has a 13″ screen which operates at 1280×800. I’m a huge fan of portability, so I want to get the smallest model I can.), as I can just plug it in to instantly upgrade my resolution.

I think I shall probably write a number of blog posts about the software which I currently use and compare it to what I plan to use. Doing so should help me confirm the “upgrade route” I’m going to take, and how I’m going to manage my files and hobbies.

After about 4 years I eventually managed to get there! Today is the first day and I'm actually sort of manning the FFmpeg Booth and from time to time I could happen to be in the Gentoo one as well.

In the FFmpeg stand we are showing BBB high res in a big LCD screen from a small beagleboard. The operating system image is obviously Gentoo as well the other system present showing some jumpy Japanese idol video (not my idea).

See you! (Pictures will come later)

I am very pleased to announce that Avogadro has been nominated as a finalist in the SourceForge community choice awards this year. We are in the "Best Project for Academia" category, and I would like to encourage you to vote for Avogadro.

This is a real honour for all of us, and I appreciate all of you who nominated Avogadro. We are all pushing very hard on polishing Avogadro, getting ready for our 1.0 release. It would be absolutely amazing to see Avogadro win this award, so please vote for us.

There are also some other really nice projects in there too, such as Lancelot, ClamAV, phpMyAdmin and RepRap. So please take a few moments to place your vote, and tell your friends!

Update: You can vote even without a SourceForge account - just enter your email address and verify your vote.

Exactly two weeks ago today my son was born, weighing in at 8 lbs 13 oz and measuring 21 inches long. Louise and I have named him William Aaron Alexander Hanwell, our new addition has been thriving after a bumpy start. I would like to claim first foetal attendee of a KDE conference, getting him off to a brilliant start listening to some great technical talks in Jamaica. I know most people play classical music to their unborn children, but we like to be different I need to find him a KDE baby grow!

You can see him in the above photos just minutes after his birth, and a little more relaxed the next day in his hospital crib. Not wanting to be too run of the mill he was consistently breach, delivered by C-section and had his cord wrapped around his neck 2.5 times. Not a problem for that kind of delivery, but it would have been had we had the natural birth we were hoping for. As he was born in the US he also manages to get dual nationality (US by birth, UK from us), whilst his poor old Dad is still waiting to hear back about his H-1B visa...

I think three days prior Carsten's wife gave birth too, and I believe Mauricio will also be growing his family later this year. So the KDE Edu developers all seem to be expanding their families this year, I guess the greater question is whether this was a coordinated effort As with all true geek babies I will be setting him up with his own blog and online photo album, mainly so that our family and friends back home will be able to keep up with him as he grows.

So far I am really enjoying being a new father, although aware that this isn't the only big change over the summer!

Robert (rbu@gentoo) and I have started playing with wordle.net yesterday and created this Gentoo word cloud with it:

Here’s the SVG source file (licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0).

We made a 120×70 cm² poster from that for LinuxTag, cutting and glueing pieces together ourselves today. Please excuse the image quality.

3D excerpt view:

Full view, on table:

Gentoo wordle and Robert/rbu:

I’ll try to provide some kind of “sources” (for reproduction of variations at least) next:
Worldle text input

ACCEPTLKEYWORDS ACCEPTLKEYWORDS ccache choice choice choice community community community compilation compilation control customization customization debug distcc documentation documentation ebuilds ebuilds ebuilds empowerment eselect eselect flame~wars FreeBSD GCC GCC Gentoo Gentoo Gentoo Gentoo Gentoo Gentoo Gentoo Larry Layman Linux Linux make.conf make.conf OpenRC optimization overlays overlays overlays package.mask Paludis perfection pkgcore portability portability Portage Portage Portage Portage~Prefix slots source~code source~code source~code speed speed USE USE USE USE USE USE USE USE volunteer~developers webapp-config webapp-config world~file Forums Wiki Summer~of~Code Summer~of~Code Bugzilla repoman USELEXPAND you kernel wireless stage server bash unicode rsync GRUB Foundation sunrise free~software free~software open~source open~source handbook catalyst gentoolkit colors colors baselayout sandbox genkernel etc-update crossdev

Note, that we produces underscores from big “L”s and cutting them down with Inkscape. No, really.

Further wordle settings were:

• Font = Meloche RG Bold
• Layout = Straight Edges + Mostly Horizontal
• Color = Ghostly + A little variance

With a small “patch” for net-print/poster we made it produce pages that overlapped strongly:

--- poster-20050907/poster.c
+++ poster-20050907/poster.c
@@ -949,7 +949,7 @@
            "/posteryb %d def\n"
            "/do_turn %s def\n"
            "/strg 10 string def\n"
-           "/clipmargin 6 def\n"
+           "/clipmargin 150 def\n"
            "/labelsize 9 def\n"
            "/tiledict 250 dict def\n"
            "tiledict begin\n"

For normal posters that’s no use but for our case with words scattered on a white background it allowed flexible cutting of pages so we had to hurt no letters, in hope to produce a higher quality result.

Come by at the booth to see it with your own eyes

So here's one of those small things that go beyond the limits of my patience, bit might be very easy for others:

Bug 267267, the virtualbox stabling, is on hold for now. The trigger is a pre-stripped .so. VBox uses kbuild, which has a severe lack of documentation.
I haven't been able to find a way to sanely disable that behaviour. If you have the skills - show the world how awesome you are by writing a patch for any VBox version between 2.1.4 and 2.2.4, attach it to the bug and enjoy that smug feeling of superiority.

If you don't have the skills, don't worry. You'll get there one day if you keep on working on it. Find a simpler bug and try to fix it. Try to fix one bug every day. After 5 years you'll have fixed over a thousand bugs (hey, some days off in between are acceptable) and learned a lot!

In the last weeks I've picked up a few packages mostly because someone pointed me at them and there were lots of open bugs. I've "inherited" virtualbox like that (although Jokey and X-Drum are still doing an awesome job whenever they have the time), I've mostly taken over xen for now (even though I don't use it at the moment and test it in *ahem* VirtualBox).
Samba is another one of those packages that many people use, but few devs maintain. But it's a lot harder to test, so I mostly leave it alone for now.

So I'm beginning to wonder - what packages are "orphaned", where did users provide and test patches and no dev is around?
How can we improve our response time to users so that they are happy and keep helping us, and how do we notice that a package doesn't get the love it deserves?
My current mechanism for that is quite crude and biased - if I notice enough people complaining I have a look, and if the build system doesn't make me want to get drunk I start playing around with it until a few bugs are closed.
Maybe we need a "Package Fix" team of users and devs?
The users could cooperate on collecting bugs for a "topic" like samba and test them, and the devs can give assistance and then commit the fixes. It would most likely be quite fun to cooperate like this, might be a theme for a bugday - but who has the time for that?

If you have an open bug with a fix that hasn't been committed feel free to Mail Me or drop by in #gentoo-bugs on irc.freenode.net. I can't promise much, my time is limited and sometimes things just don't work out as expected, but still I try. And maybe it gets a few old bugs killed - that would be worth it :)