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We have bought an entirely fresh set of hardware, and done a complete reinstall. All the data has been migrated. Any irregularities should be reported through the usual channels. Hopefully it will live on forever now.

As some of you may know, I had a great shooting day yesterday
and I knew I got a really good shot, if I might say so myself. Knowing
that given a good shot it's all about the extra twiddleedum that make
it go the extra mile. So I'm happy about the assistance I got from
Terje, Liem and others on the irc channel on how to find a title,
the font for the title and postprocess the McHungry picture. Apparently
it struck a nerve with a lot of people and it made Daily Deviation
on deviantArt today (Thanks
to anjules and daniella/moonbeam13 for the feature as DD).

Since you're all fond of photos I might as well let you have a
peek too. Then I'll head down to McDonald's for a real happy meal.

As an intended side-effect, the conference will be held in Nara, Japan. I've never been to Asia before as the travel expenses have typically been outside of my meager budget, so I'm naturally pretty excited. Getting decent airfare matching the dates of the conference turned out to be impossible, so I had to stay for two days longer than strictly necessary (with the added hotel costs, I still save ~500EUR). What a pity:) I also had the pleasure of meeting some Japanese natives in my kitchen last night, who shared some local knowledge and recommendations for sights to see and things to do. (When I came home at around 22:30, I had to wade through a 20+ people kitchen party equipped with DJ, mixer board, boom box and an ample supply of beverage, just to deposit my sweaty Gouda in the fridge).

Now that the real Planet Gentoo is finally up, I will take Planet Gentoo Experimental out of service. It has served its intended purpose as:

• a gauge of the popularity of the planet concept;
• a technical test bed where all interested devs could add their journals and iron out their wrinkles;
• a demonstration that a complete planet can be fully configured and deployed in less than 10 minutes;
• kick in the butt for infra, who came through brilliantly this time with a pretty-looking and solid solution.

I'd like to extend my thanks to Daniel Drake for writing and pushing the infamous GLEP 30 in the first place.

Opinion: I'll refrain from entering the bigger GLEP debate this time, save to share an obvious observation: The adage "build it, and they will come" seems to hold true for Gentoo still. I find this reassuring, as we are mostly developers (builders) and rather capable at that, judging by Gentoo's popularity.

Let the blogwars ensue!

Since I'm too lazy to write proper documentation, I'm letting the rest of you know about the upcoming changes to how we handle Subversion, ViewCVS and bugtracking on boblycat.org in the future.

First off, torh decided that gForge was simply too much work, so we dropped it. On knute's command, we took a peek at Trac, liked what we saw and went for it.

Unfortunately, Trac doesn't do any project mangement, so I'm piecing together a few scripts to solve this issue for us. I'll explain two of them now.

Creating a project

In order to create a new project, run the storm-new-project command with two arguments, project-name and username of the project owner. The username can be anything. It will be stored in a project-specific user database.

Once the script has finished, it will automatically restart apache and you should be able to browse https://svn.boblycat.org/svn/<project-name>. This is also where your subversion client should be pointed to. The Trac software, which takes care of "viewcvs", issue tracking, wiki and reports is available at http://projects.boblycat.org/<project-name>. By default, only people registered with the project are allowed to post. Initially, only the project owner is registered.

Project membership management

In order to add new people to a project, use storm-svn-passwd with two arguments, the first being the project-name, the second the username. The project password database for a project is separate and self-containted. It is shared between subversion and Trac for that project. This allows us to add off-site users to a project without giving them ssh login to storm.

The storm- prefix

While I forget: I'm going to slowly rename all storm-specific scripts such as updateplanet, etc, to use the storm- prefix. These scripts will live in /local/bin, as usual.

Obviously, I've been back from FOSDEM for quite some time already, but due to recent, accidental censorship imposed by a faulty Perl upgrade (is there any other kind?), it has not been possible to update my journal.

This was fixed today, so I can say a few words about FOSDEM. First off, I'd like to tell everyone who was not there: you really missed out. It was really nice to meet the Gentoo crowd in real life. Most of them were clean shaven and did not smell bad (except Jochen, who either hadn't shaved in days or suffers from teenwolfism:P).

I held two short talks about Java on Gentoo, one on enterprise development, another on the development environment. We were supposed to have an open discussion about the subject, but as neither Thomas nor Jochen showed up for the discussion part, it simply did on not happen. Furthermore, Alan Cox was about to hold a talk immediately after me, in a different room, so people were rather anxious to leave at the end of the talk.

Both the turnout and the feedback afterwards was really encouraging. From what the users tell me (the guys who try to run Java on Linux in production environments), we seem to be on the right track with respect to the development environment. Whether Gentoo ever will make sense as an "enterprise operating system", whatever that really means, is another matter. I don't think providing a well-implemented Java deployment environment alone will make Gentoo useful in the enterprise, except in cases where the sysadmins are really talented.

In an attempt at returning to normalcy after over a week of nothing but frantic documentation writing (in the form of an article), I have spent this week looking at module systems, modularization techniques and known methods for exposing variation points in these.

Apart from reading papers, I decided to experiment with extending frameworks, and I also had another itch to scratch. The result is a very rudimentary syntax highlighting text editor plugin for Eclipse, for the Stratego language.

For now, I've put it up on the temporary front page of spoofax.org, and I even provided a screenshot.

If you run Eclipse 3.0 or newer, you can download and install it using the Update Manager, as usual.

A lot of things are still missing, the most important (to me) of which are: context assist for strategies, rules, variables and constructors; outlining of strategy and rule definitions; a sensible indentation strategy; and semantic highlighting of variables in rule conditions and strategy expressions.

If you search for the phrase "karltk: Probably that your house" on Google, you will find that I have become something as revolting as blogspam.

The phrase is actually plasmaroo's, so I suspect he's in league with a spam cartel. This is the price to pay for being part of the Gentoo project, where marketing people obviously keeps continuous watch over #gentoo-dev for new catch-phrases and slogans.

I wonder if my new found status as poster-child for erective aids confers any monetary benefits or perks. I would find that only fair, since they use me in their marketing of a multibillioneuro product.

I'm sure there's a standard for this somewhere, and I'm even more certain that somebody's been paid heaploads of money to travel for days to some meeting to approve it too, and that even more heaploads of people have spent countless megabytes blogging (read: braindumping vacuously) about it, but here it is: We now have an rss feed on journal.boblycat.org.

There. That should help fill my vacuous quota this month.

Isn't it striking how much time and energy one has left over for trivial projects in the face of a deadline?

For example, having the time to set up a planet for Stratego when I should be hacking and bugfixing.

Or, learning useful phrases in the Dutch language such as "mijn luchtkussenvoertuig zit vol paling" ("my hovercraft is full of eels") and "Ik kan glas eten. Het doet geen zijn" (you guess:).