I'm going to FOSDEM again this year. A bunch of old friends will be coming, so the opportunity is too good to pass up. Also, since I'll be in Paris at the time around FOSDEM, travel is both fast and reasonably cheap. (Three cheers for high speed trains.)

If you're interested in meeting me there, don't hesitate to fire off an e-mail. There's no Gentoo room this year, so I'll be hanging around elsewhere. I'm bound to drop by the Free Java devroom, for sure:) Another gang I'm anxious to meet again are the Nix people.

With my comp.sci PhD finished, printed and published, I'm now back to being a full-time medical student. It's really rewarding and fun -- being an introvert geek, I've learned a lot about how I relate to other people by being shoved into a room with a patient who expects me to talk to him/her about the most intimate details of his/her situation. Alas, being a student doesn't pay at all.

I've still some money left from earlier jobs, and I live quite comfortably, but prudence (and interest) requires me to look for a job this summer as well. If all pending exams go well, I'll get my temporary license at the end of the spring semester, which means I can apply for work as a hospital doctor during the summer. There's no denying that this would be quite a lot of fun, but I'm not all that hopeful -- the competition to get hospital jobs seems fierce, and I've not been a star performer when it comes to medicine, I'm sad to say (but hopefully things will pick up now that I can focus on it).

For these reasons, I'll probably also be looking around for comp.sci jobs as a backup because I'm fairly good at it, it pays well, and it's usually a lot of fun. Also, it's easier to get jobs abroad, even in countries where you don't speak the native language fluenty:)

I've not found the time to do any useful work on Gentoo for around 1.5 years, and I don't see that situation changing in the near future. It all comes down to motivation, of course, and I'm motivated a lot more by other projects and communities these days, I must admit.

I'll avoid discussing the whole community attrition we've had in the later years, but there's no denying that this has been a major component in my loss of motivation for working on Gentoo.

That being said, I've met and worked with some great people in this community, and I'm eternally grateful for that -- you know who you are.

To all of you still hanging in there: take care, and have fun.

Update: it's done.

There I was, idling my own business when all of a sudden:


22:06 :: Quit: genstef (n=genstef@gentoo/developer/genstef) [K-lined]
22:06 :: Quit: karltk (n=karltk@gentoo/developer/karltk) [K-lined]
22:06 :: Quit: Decko_ (i=Jonas@cpe.atm2-0-1041193.0x50a63582.bynxx14.customer.tele.dk) [Client
Quit]
22:06 @(seemant) k-lined?
22:06 @(seemant) wtf
22:06 @(tsunam) eh?
22:07 @(seemant) karltk and genstef just got k-lined
22:07 :: Quit: Renacor (n=kvirc@port-83-236-179-6.static.qsc.de) [Connection timed out]
22:07 @(seemant) christel: ^^
22:07 @(christel) OH SHIT
22:07 * agaffney giggles
22:08 @(Cardoe) hahaha
22:08 @(Cardoe) OWNED
22:08 @(araujo) :-P
22:08 @(christel) that was my fault
22:08 @(agaffney) hahahahaha
22:08 @(christel) they are unklined now
22:08 @(Cardoe) genstef needs to stop joining so many herds..
22:08 @(Cardoe) Now you see what his punishment is.
22:08 @(agaffney) christel: overly broad k-line? :P
22:08 @(christel) i wanted to test whether a automated thing needed X number of letters, and as i am kline excempt i didnt think...
22:08 @(tsunam) christel: haha
22:08 @(christel) and then the kline was set (on my host) disconnecting everyone not excempt :O
22:09 @(agaffney) heh
22:09 * agaffney mocks christel
22:09 @(tsunam) christel: you blond again?
22:09 @(agaffney) whoopsy :P
22:09 @(christel) next time staff asks me a question i shall not answer 'i dont know, lets find out' and proceed to try :P
22:09 * christel emauls karltk and genstef
22:10 @(seemant) now you're e-mauling people?
22:10 @(Battousai) so you ban them then maul them
22:10 @(Battousai) perfect
22:10 @(seemant) when will it stop??
22:10 @(christel) HAHAHAHA


I honestly didn't notice until I heard a bing in my inbox with an apology from Christel.


23:39 <@karltk> christel: god kveld til deg også;P
23:40 <@christel> jeg skal legge til slik at den hosten ikke kan bli klina :)
23:41 <@karltk> christel: man skal vœre forsiktig med slik klining offentlig:)
23:41 * christel kliner med karltk
23:42 * karltk er litt overrasket, men setter pris på oppmerksomheten;P


As the norwegian-reading audience can clearly see, we're still good friends:)

Today is a great day to be a Java packager. Sun has finally announced that they will be licensing the JDK under the GNU General Public License v2 (GPLv2). This is going to have a huge impact on how we package Java in the longer run, but will not change anything in the immediate future (in the short-term, enjoy the new Java binary distribution license -- the DLJ).

Currently, only the JDK source code for the Java compiler (javac) and the Hotspot VM is available (Sun also open-sourced J2ME and J2EE, aka "Glassfish", but these are not part of the standard JDK). In particular, the Java Standard Library, including Swing and most of the other library parts are not out yet. As I write this, the GNU Classpath gang is feverishly trying to get the Sun VM bootstrapped with Classpath, and given their track record, I expect to see the result sooner rather than later.

In a few months, most of the library should also be opened up, and license encumbered parts will quickly be replaced by an armada of willing and able open-source hackers (probably the same guys who've offered their eyeballs to make all bugs seem shallow). No, seriously, I think that the problematic parts will be replaced quickly enough.

At that time, we can probably get around to providing compilable sun-jdk packages for serious users and ricers alike. I wouldn't be all that surprised if we could also get PPC and SPARC support working, too. Time will tell, but the code exists, and is now free.

It will of course also be interesting to see where the VM code ends up as time goes by. It contains a lot of really nice engineering that could potentially benefit other VM-based languages that resemble Java (without naming any). However, the code base is rather immense, so wrapping one's head around it will take a while. We live in interesting times.

I find it reassuring that the good work of the Classpath and Kaffe communities did not go unmentioned in the webcast where the GPLing was announced, and that the final license follows the Classpath exception.

It may seem odd to pit drivers for two very different cards against eachother, but I will give some background. I decided to try Dapper (yes, yes, I know, where's my faith...) on the old X30 recently. Everything installed reasonably well, but Ubuntu is certainly no "turn-key" solution either. After booting the beast, I noticed a few peculiarities: There was no eth0, even though the X30 has a bog standard Intel ethernet card. I noticed that e100 was loaded, so just for the heck of it, I removed it and loaded eepro100 instead. Still no go, but I quickly discovered that it had become eth1 instead (The ethX assignments to network cards in Ubuntu are rather fluid; on another laptop I've tested it on, the wlan and ethernet card swapped places between eth1 and eth0 after every reboot).

With the ethernet working, I proceeded to download the bcm43xx firmware and install it (It was less hassle to use a pre-packaged .deb than the cutout version I had on another Gentoo box). ifconfig up eth2, et voila!

A word of advice: the bcm43xx firmware doesn't really get loaded before you do ifconfig up. This means that iwconfig will not report any connection with any accesspoints before you've run ifconfig up.

After this, everything was working really until I rebooted. After the reboot, the interfaces stayed the same (probably a new feature of Dapper), but the bcm43xx card no longer worked. Hmm. Hmmm². The only thing that was different from last time was that now I was using e100, which was the default driver for the ethernet card.

Out with e100, in with eepro100, and things started working again. I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonably explanation why the two drivers (e100 and bcm43xx) are conflicting, and I hope to figure it out one day, but for now I have some more pressing issues to attend to.

On Saturday evening, I noticed that connecting to the wiki on projects.boblycat.org was extremely slow, and when I sshed into the box, Apache was eating about 100% CPU. A peek in the logs told me that I had a few requests coming in per second for comment submissions in an old copy of Moveable Type we had left running.

After some digging, it turned out that the requests came from two subdomains of powerstorm.ai.net, namely www143.powerstorm.ai.net and www142.powerstorm.ai.net. These two hosts were hamming us with the usual spam comments as fast as they could.

I consulted Håvard and we quickly decided to firewall those machines out. Since ai.net is a know bad guy (Google a bit and you'll see), we did not bother to inform them that we'd notices their evil machinations.

As usual, spammers should be castrated. People near 11700 Montgomery Rd, Beltsville in Maryland should feel free to pay AiNET HQ a visit.

I met up with Lisa yesterday. She stays in NYC with Laura, a friend of her, pending a hearing of her complaint about her UK visa refusal. After some general hanging about in galleries, and even more general watching the old (Dutch) masters, we waded through Central Park and I got to see fireflys for the first time. Fireflys must be one of the coolest inventions in nature ever. It's even more spectacular when you run into a tiny swarm (though they don't appear to be the swarming kind of insects, in general).

A bit later, we went to a piano bar near Times Square where some of the Broadway washouts are reputed to hang out. As one might expect, they were rather excellent (and funny!) singers. Most of the songs were Broadway classics, and most of the singalongs were entirely unknown to me, but smiling and mumling melodically gets you a long way when you don't know the words.

Last Friday I had the pleasure of lunching with some of the RedHat guys in Toronto: Tom, Ben, Andrew, Igor, Bryce and Ben's office mate who I'll refer to as Rasputin, since I forgot his real one. Lovely sushi (thanks, Ben!). In true geek style, we mostly discussed shop, in this case, Java, Linux, Eclipse and gcj.

It was rather serendipitous that I ended up there in the first place. The previous Friday, I was out with John here in Waterloo, and we ran into Ben at Ethel's (which is not just any waterhole, I'm told). I had already had a few encounters with Ben over at bugs.eclipse.org, so it was pleasing to see how small the world can be. He invited me to drop by Toronto so that we may discuss the future of Eclipse packaging on Linux.

Together, Igor, Andrew, Ben and I went through Ben's master plan for The New Way of compiling Eclipse plugins outside the Eclipse UI. The thing's still pretty much on the drawing board, but looks rather good. The best part is that Ben's paid to do this stuff, and that all distros will instantly profit once it's out.

In short, the plugin does what you would expect from any sane development environment: it allows you to compile any plugin from the command line, instead of forcing you to do this interactively inside the environment. Anybody who claims that this can also be done with the "Create Ant Build File" in the PDE is a liar, and should be forced to try packaging a few dozen such plugins before being allowed a second opinion.

After the Master Plan had been agreed upon, Ben took me around the UofT campus and taught me the basics of trespassing through highrise buildings. To prove his skill, he successfully managed us through two closed cocktail parties, in plain sight, without anybody asking us a single question.

Just woke up from the inevitably long slumber on New Year's Day and thought: this is the day to make another stab at cross-indexing the Portage tree. I hate it when this itch comes up, so full of resolve, probably from the new year's resolution spirits still in action, I hacked together Gummeldur.

For now, it's pretty primitive, but at least it indexes all packages in our tree. There are numerous additions that need to be done before it gets anywhere interesting. As usual, I don't have enough time to spend on it, but eventually, I hope to get there.

And, no, this is not intended as a replacement for packages.gentoo.org. This is more inspired by projects like lxr, though admittedly, my ebuild parser needs more love to get there.

Update: Fixed bad link. Sorry about that.