Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

The MFA Art Deco exhibition was pretty cool. Cool enough that (1) I bought the book and (2) I want an Art Deco theme for my desktop. I may have to settle for an Art Deco application/WM font. ;)

Played very briefly with Alexandria tonight. Very nice, simple. I might play (code-wise) with getting it to export to HTML, or with reformatting the XML it exports. I just noticed it claims to support CueCat. If I can get that to work, I will practically wet my pants with Joy(tm). [Later: looks like not; no one has ported the cuecat driver to kernel 2.6.]

Good day yesterday.

• Tried to make CVS my bitch. Discovered that CVS is a bitch. Slight distinctions make all the difference. :/
• Finally watched Red, after applying percussive maintenance to the DVD player. Beautiful.
• Helped Krissa make a wonderful salmon patty dinner. Followed that up with the finale Red Sox celebration cake. Yummy. Was disturbed, however, to discover that the stated goal of the restaurant is to become the ‘Starbucks of dessert’.
• Watched some good basketball, and some not-so-good football.
• Started on Handmaid’s Tale. May need to pick up something-not-quite-so-bleak soon.

MFA soon.

After some playing around, tinderbox now updates directly to ONGOING and as always the last completed build is in LATEST. I’m not sure these names convey quite what they are meant to, though- I’m open to suggestions.

It also now sends email to the build-status list at failure time, and only on modules which fail because of their own problems- if a dependency fails to build, no mail should be generated.

I’ve actually slightly reduced the stuff I do now to get this to work, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel slightly dirty about what I’ve done to jhbuild. Hopefully I can figure out a better, more extensible mechanism to do what I need for future changes (of which more may come this weekend or monday.)

More discussion of this will take place on the build-status list.

If true, IBM exiting the PC business would not be good for us- I know they’ve mostly paid lip-service to the Linux kick the rest of the company has been on, but still, it’s a good thing to have them as a hardware vendor ‘in our corner.’ And I’d been so looking forward to an X41 with continued decent Linux support… :/

In my ongoing quest to screw up my sleep schedule, I’ve added very basic email capabilities to the microtinder. Hopefully we can develop a small team of build terriers to listen to the gnome-build-status list and nag more regularly and efficiently.

[And hopefully someone will resurrect snapshots...</plug>]

Spent a bit of time exploring arch/tla/baz today, mostly documentation. My idea (not at all close to implementation yet) is that a bugzilla arch mirror + arch’s star-merge could make merging bugzilla.gnome’s changes with upstream bugzilla changes much easier. Problem is that I need a working copy of cscvs to do the initial cvs->arch export. Looking for a working copy of cscvs produces a list of seven branches I can choose between, with no indication of which or what or why I might want to use one or another. This since only one of the three archive links on the wiki page for cscvs actually has cscvs in it, and that archive hasn’t been touched since January. The ability to do distributed, self-published development is great, and will be a godsend if we can get it going for bugzilla, but it sure does seem to make it easy for things to fragment and become unmanageable.

Finished Fall of Hyperion. First book was better. Am starting on Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale but might drop it for something… a little less depressing.

Had a very nice dinner at Tamarind Bay. Very nice, flavorful food, well presented. Then came home and watched Duke beat Tennessee at Tennessee in women’s basketball. All in all, a satisfying evening :)

Have also today achieved a lifelong goal of being compared to Jacob Berkman. I can die happy now.

Nothing much of interest today. It’s possible I need to do more of that; I’m not feeling like I’m getting my head out of the game enough yet. Maybe less waking up early and more sleeping in and reading and being a total sloth.

Did a lot of small things- laundry, more cleaning. Made dinner, which prompted Krissa to be inspired to bake caramel nut chocolate bar things. Yummy.

There is a new Amazon Light. And there was much rejoicing.

Minor accomplishments today:

• Bathtub actually drains now.
• Bought stuff for dinner, and prepared chunks of it.
• Threw together the beginnings of a Duke Planet- had no idea there were so many college basketball blogs. Now to find the good ones.
• Did not completely succumb to my desire to lay down and sleep through my sinus pain.
• Kitchen and bathroom slightly better organized.

Big accomplishment: got ejabberd and jwchat working together on my laptop, thanks to this madly awesome tutorial. Played with gossip some too. Was pretty cool. Unfortunately, discovered that my WAP/router will let you… provide DHCP within your LAN, or route WAN requests to a machine within the LAN, but not both. So I didn’t actually get to expose it to the world to test during the Duke-Michigan State game. (Goal of all this being to provide chat.dukebasketballreport.com someday.) Ah well. there will be more games.