narnia 2: whatever the title is

Wednesday 3 Feb 2010 by Steve | No Comments
Filed under: Entertainment

So, I watched the second Narnia movie tonight (whatever the name is .. I thought the book went by the name the Silver Chair, but maybe that was the third one.  I don't remember.  Anyway .. ), and it was really good!  I was more than pleasantly surprised.

I had put off watching it for a looong time, pretty much completely until a friend recommended it in passing and I was like "Hmm, it's on Netflix Watch it Now, meaning it's probably not that great, so I'll go watch it."  Yah.  Don't ever expect me to explain my logic to you.

I was really excited when the first one came out, and I was sorely disappointed by how much I thought it didn't live up to the book.  I thought it was good, but I was really bothered by the fact that the "epic" battle scene at the end was seriously less than 5 minutes long, and I don't think you ever saw *one* person do anything battlerific.

The second one, though, was awesome.  Probably about half the movie was one big battle or another one, and well done for the most part.  I especially liked the duel.  Oh yah, spoiler alerts.  Whoops.

The movie was interesting, though.  I don't remember the book *at all*, so that could be why I enjoyed it a bit more.  I thought there was a lot of interesting touches.  There was just one thing that kept nagging me a bit, though.  I kept thinking that, no matter how good the movie was, it seems like they focused on making it a spectacle movie more than a really good story.  It wasn't poorly done, but it wasn't excellent, either.  I often wonder why movies with really gripping stories and dialogue are so few and far apart.  This one went both ways.  At times it had some class and grit and character all its own, and then at other times it took things a little less seriously.  I suppose that's not too bad considering it's a film for kids, and I have to say that, overall, they did a really good job.  I think that the sequel was far better done than the first -- although I will admit it's been a *long* time since I saw the original Narnia, and I should probably give it a nod again.

promises and deliverables

Wednesday 3 Feb 2010 by Steve | No Comments
Filed under: Computers, Gentoo

I was thinking about my earlier blog post about my ideas for the new packages site I'm still working on, and I realized that to a lot of people it must seem like I sure promise a lot of stuff, but then never get around to really completing it.  I wanted to address that a bit, since I imagine that at times I'm either confusing or frustrating some people.

First of all, I get a lot of ideas to do a lot of projects.  There's lots of cool stuff I want to do, and I have a hard time saying to myself "I have enough projects already in the works to finish, better not start another one," but I do anyway.  I tend to quickly overload myself sometimes that way, which can be bad for everything.  However, one thing I'm getting more strict on is only picking up projects that I'm sure I want to complete, that I'll see through until the end.  I very rarely, if ever, completely drop a project that I've started.  I will tend to put them on hold for a while -- sometimes years -- but I'll eventually revisit the idea (heck, the packages website is a perfect example of that).

I have a ton of projects I'm "working on," though.  So many, that I'm honestly afraid to write them all down for fear of being totally overwhelmed by the responsibility I put on myself for them.  I do, however, plan on getting them all done, and they circle around in my head on a regular basis, and often times I think of ways to integrate two projects (for example, adding an option to search gentoo planet(s) from the packages site).  I get a lot of interesting ideas all the time, but I really have to be careful not to overextend myself.

One thing I've been trying to do recently (as in the past year) is slowly shutter off some of the support I've been providing for the Gentoo tree directly, and ebuilds / herds I've in the past taken close care of.  It occurred to me way back when that it'd be a more efficient use of my time if I built out some project websites (like the packages one) rather than trawling the tree looking for ebuilds to fix, bump and repair (for example).  Not that I mind doing that, mind you, in fact I find it rather relaxing at times, but what's happened is that I've overextended my responsibilities again, and I'm trying to cut back.  Basically, my thought is that while I want to still work on Gentoo for a while, I don't want to make a career out of it.

Oddly enough, though, part of the reason I'm doing these community projects is so that I can more efficiently do other ones.  For example, at times I like to go through the multimedia packages and just check them to make sure we aren't missing version bumps, and go fix small bugs that I can take care of and just little stuff that isn't really important (in a sense of package popularity) but still relevant to a few users.  Those are fun.  But it'd make my life easier if I could more quickly track what has been neglected, more easily see what available version bumps are available (I still wanna hook into GnomeFiles and track their changes, for example), and stuff like that.  A lot of the tree-fixing stuff in Gentoo development is just monotonous, which is why it's hard to find volunteers to do it.  There's a good chunk of it that is just boring work!  And I'd like to help streamline that a bit.  That's one of my big goals.

With that goal in mind, a huge reason for doing the packages site was just so I can have a simple interface to get all the information I need, and finally a standardized set of data for categories, packages and versions.  That's mostly done, or at least the framework is, so now I can get going on the *really* cool stuff.  What I've done so far is really just the tip of the iceberg.

Anyway, I didn't wanna talk about just the packages site.  There's lots of other stuff I have going on.  It's interesting, even to me, to see which ones I'll want to juggle at a time.  I switch between them on a regular basis.  Sometimes I'll be working on the packages site, then my DVD ripper, then my scriptures stuff, then I'll work on theology ebuilds, then sound ones, then I'll look after ALSA, then mplayer, then I'll go back to tweaking MythVideo a bit, and round and round and round it goes.  I'm always working on *some* project, that's for sure.  It might do me some good to try and get a bit more organized, but I don't even do a good job of keeping track of bugs in my own projects.  I just track them internally for the most part.

So, I apologize for the epic behind status that I'm always in.  I'm starting to recognize more and more how much I'm holding people up on some projects, so I'm doing my best to gracefully exit those areas so someone else can come in and take over.  I'm still fumbling a bit at the best way to do that, but at this point in my life I have at least recognized the few areas that I'm sure I'm not passionate about anymore, and shouldn't be lazing around just pretending to commit once in a while -- of which, there are actually really few.  In fact, I can only think of one off the top of my head.

One thing that might be cool that I just thought of -- have a status indicator on my blog or something that displays the current project I'm working on.  That'd be fun. :)   Sounds like work, though.  I'm gonna go watch a movie.

some thoughts on php and oop

Wednesday 3 Feb 2010 by Steve | 5 Comments
Filed under: Gentoo

So, I was working on Znurt this morning (I woke up unusually early, and didn't wanna go back to sleep).  I'm getting close to opening the codebase, but before doing that, there's some really obvious glaring deficiencies that I want to clean up first.

The big thing I've been working on with the packages site now is making it more efficient.  The first step in that has been gathering some data on how often certain things are being called to see where optimizations are most needed.  So, the other day, I added a counter to the constructor of each class that would just tally each time the class was instantiated, and then I'd dump out the counter at the end of an import run.

One thing that surprised me is how often one particular class was being called -- PortageTree.  It's a really simple class, and all it does is set down some really simple variables that aren't going to change at all once they are declared, such as the location of the portage tree and it's metadata cache on the filesystem.  Pretty much used across the board on a lot of other classes that need to know the filesystem location of files (PortageCategory, PortagePackage, etc.).

Well, being still pretty new and fuzzy to the OOP approach, I thought it made sense to just extend the PortageTree class on PortageCategory and call the parent constructor to get the variables set.  That ended up in that class being created a huge magnitude of times,  all for the same pretty much unchanging variables.

So, I switched it this morning to use a singleton instance instead, so the class is only being created once and referenced thousands of times each import.  Much nicer already.

It's stuff like that that makes me wish I knew more about OOP.  I am studying it on and off, but there's still some concepts that I just can't wrap my brain around at times, like exceptions.  In my procedurally-attuned programming frame of mind, every time someone explains them to me, I think ... "Well, if something *breaks* why don't you just work with the return codes and work around that?"  So, yah.  Some stuff is still lost on me.  I'm trying to figure it out though.  Maybe it's one of those things that doesn't make sense so much when you apply it to PHP and it's general usage of websites.  A lot of the stuff I read about, I think how it would make much more sense if it were an actual application running.

Anyway.

On a totally different note, one thing I want to look at getting into the packages website is tracking a changelog of all the package's keywording history.  Right now, the import process is pretty simple -- if the content of the ebuild has changed, then the old one is marked for removal and an entirely new ebuild record is created in the database.  The reason for that is because that is far easier to do than it would be to examine all the myriad of data that is associated with one ebuild, track the changes, and then flag those.  Instead, I just dump the old one and treat the new one as a completely new record.

There's a tradeoff in the compromise, though, because instead of tracking ebuild modifications, I have to do all this coding to flag packages and ebuilds that things have changed and to treat them as an update instead of a new one.  That was tricky to get setup right, and getting that stuff in there in fact was one of the main things that pushed the initial launch back.  It was just one of those things that I couldn't run into the bugs until I started actually doing  a sequence of import runs, since they wouldn't show up until then anyway.

But, I'd like to start at least tracking the ebuild keyword status changes.  The reason is because that is really valuable data that can provide an excellent set of reports.  For instance, we can see which categories / packages / herds are getting ignored historically as far as stabilization.  Plus you can do cool stuff like import results from a statistics tracker as far as what people have installed, and you can start to see where maybe the tree could use a little more love.  And, it would help contributors who want to help out, but are overwhelmed by the enormity of bugs and packages and issues that need to be addressed.  I could see it being helpful saying, "here's an area that is suffering from neglect *and* is popular."  That would be cool.  And that's my goal.  In fact, that's *been* my goal for years.  I'm just now getting to the point where it's becoming possible, though.

Fun stuff.  I gotta hone my coding skills as I go, though.

skateboarding in winter … um, again

Monday 1 Feb 2010 by Steve | 6 Comments
Filed under: Skateboarding

I must be out of my mind.  I went skating again tonight (the second time in a week), even though its like 30 degrees outside.  It's freaking cold, man!  I dunno what came over me, though.  I just really wanted to go skating all of a sudden, so I called up Kevin and we went to Liberty Park and screwed around for a bit in the biting cold.  It was really fun, and I totally sucked at landing anything because I haven't been in at least six months.

Then, tonight, it was equally cold, but I went to Fairmont and was just screwing around.  Good times.  I really wanted to get a picture of the skate park, since it's half covered with snow, but there's enough melted that you can actually go around it in places.  Instead of that, here's a picture of me drawing pictures. :D

I think I learned a good trick though to skating tonight.  Just freaking relax.  I realized the other day that I get totally tense when I'm poised to ollie or shuvit and it's totally working against me.  So, tonight I tried to just relax and try and pop it a couple dozen times no matter how poised or ready I felt.  It wasn't very effective practice, but I did *try* a lot more, so that was good.  I landed one ollie, I think.  Barely.  I'm not sure I really went in the air, actually.  But who cares.  I went out, I had fun, it was worth it. :)

znurt hosting, bugs, code

Monday 1 Feb 2010 by Steve | 4 Comments
Filed under: Gentoo

I migrated the packages website to a new server this weekend, and so far I'm really glad with the setup. I originally planned on having the whole thing setup in a short time, but I went with a different web server setup this time around. Instead of using lighttpd for the server, I went back to apache, but this time with mod_fastcgi to run PHP. From what I've read, PHP doesn't like threading too much, so running at as CGI instead should avoid any possible headaches. We'll see. So far, the site is far more responsive than everything else I've tried, so I'm happy.

I feel bad about how things have gone so terrible since the initial launch of the site. I really was not ready for the massive load, and my interim solutions were just slow and clunky. Hopefully things should be much happier now.

There's still a lot of silly bugs in the code that I need to fix. I just found another one this morning where the caching is breaking if you change your architecture selection around. Oy. I'd like to get to them, but I've been pretty swamped for time lately, between starting a new job this month and dividing my remaining time doing consulting work for two other companies.

Having a break from it though has been kind of good. I've already thought of a few optimizations that I can throw in there that are kind of like, "well, duh" type stuff I can't believe I didn't think of. For example, one way that I check to see if an ebuild is new is to see if the file mtime has changed. I don't know why it never occurred to me to just read the Manifest file and see if any of the hash sums have changed. That'd save me a lot of time.

I've been poked a few times about getting the code in a live repo somewhere, too. I guess that's coming soon, assuming I can get around to it. Personally, I don't like the idea of doing it when I *know* my code is in some ugly stages, but whatever. I need to learn how to setup a git repo anyway.

Oh yes, that reminds me. I also moved all the Planet Larry stuff onto the same server. Everytime I poke at the site, all I can think about is how much of an overhaul the whole thing needs. I'm totally embarrassed that I haven't even switched over to using Gravatar yet.

My goal is to ditch the planet software and write my own software to pull in the feeds, drop them in a database, and have the whole thing searchable. Then build a user admin section as well so users can manage their feeds themselves, and stop waiting on me. I'm planning on making that my next project, once Znurt gets to a better stage of stability.

Right now, though, I just did some minor tweaks. I got rid of the subdomains, and all the other projects on the site that I let atrophy, so planet is just available now at http://larrythecow.org/

pole position

Thursday 28 Jan 2010 by Steve | No Comments
Filed under: Entertainment

Yay, cartoons!

So, I happened to stumble upon this one cartoon not long ago, that I had completely forgotten about ... Pole Position.  I think I saw a video about it YouTube or something, I don't remember.  80s cartoons is a popular subject in #uphpu.

Watching the video though, I was like, "meh, another old-school Japanese-styled animation show" until I saw the little computer face in the dashboard ... then all kinds of memories came back to me and I was like, "dude, I totally remember this show!"

pp10

I managed to snag a copy on Amazon, even though it's been out of print.  I didn't even know it was on DVD.  Since then, I've been totally obsessed with this show.  The theme song, in particular.  I can't get it out of my head.  Probably because I sing it to myself every 30 seconds.

pp12

Sadly enough, there were only 13 cartoons produced.  It looks like it could have done well.  I don't know why this one triggered such a response in me -- especially since I didn't even remember the title -- but I think I may have clued in on it a bit.  It features cool cars with electronic devices.  As a little kid, I'm sure I was totally enchanted by that.  Heck, I've always found computers extremely fascinating.  Just that they work how they do amazes me.

pp6

I don't remember the show, but I do remember the old Atari video game.  It was fun.  I also remember playing E.T. though, and wondering what the heck the point of the game was.

pp13

I've been watching the show since I got it last week, and I love it.  It's really cool, actually.  The first few I've seen so far start out with them (whatever their names are, on the secret Pole Position team) doing a live stunt show, and, it seems like, with totally random moves made up on the fly.  It's pretty hilarious now.  But man I love how old cartoons just do random stuff and don't even bother trying to explain it.  Good times.  I really miss shows like that.

adventures in a new job

Thursday 28 Jan 2010 by Steve | 6 Comments
Filed under: Computers

You know, there are some really cool blogs out there.  The ones I like the most are the ones that simply tell the stories of life as they happen to them, and document them in a cool way.  This is not one of those blogs.  Unless you're as obsessed as cartoons as I am, and I doubt it.

Anyway, reading one such blog tonight, it got me thinking that I should loosen up a bit and document more of my generic life stories sometimes.  I'll think about it.

In the meantime, here's something that happened at work today.

I've still been settling in (I started a week ago yesterday) at the new place, and it's a little odd for me because I am the only IT guy there.  Everyone else is an engineer with more degrees than I knew existed.  I don't think I've ever worked for a place that either wasn't an IT shop or didn't have an IT department before I came on board, so it's all been just a little bit different. (See, this is why I don't write general life stories ... I'm already boring myself.)

When I first got there, the boss set me up with a laptop, which wasn't bad, but it had an Intel graphics card on there, which makes me want to install Debian on babies.  He asked me what my ideal hardware was, so I told him, and we're working on getting that, and using something else in the interim.  Anyway ... where was I going with this ... I had mentioned in passing that the Broadcom wifi chip on there was crap, and so he went online and got an Intel one instead for like $15 on ebay.  He brought it in today, and I got to pop it open and swap it out.  I had no idea that the onboard wifi cards were just using PCI Express Mini slots.  That is way cool.  So it took about five minutes to get the whole thing swapped out.  Pretty cool experience.

Oh, and for the record, the new Intel one worked out great.  Fired right up without any stupid issues (kernel or otherwise), though I still can't ever get NetworkManager to even recognize any wifi for some dumb reason.  Oh well, wicd works fine, even though it's bugly.

See?  This is why I don't write life posts.  They're not well formatted.  Meh.  I'm going back to blogging about cartoons.

life is weeeeeeeiiiord

Tuesday 26 Jan 2010 by Steve | 2 Comments
Filed under: General

How is it that I can go from unemployed and pandering around in my  pajamas all day to so slammed busy that I get home and just sit on the couch stunned from it all all within a matter of like three weeks?  I dunno, but that's what's happened.

First of all, I got a job (yay!), so I'm glad for that.  Can check that one off my list.  I was honestly starting to get used to the whole unemployment thing, though -- get to work on my projects, stay home and watch Star Trek all day, and complain about my heater kicking in too much.  Oh well.  Getting laid off in the middle of December was kind of a good thing, in a way, because it gave me a break.  I didn't really think many companies would be in their right mind looking for employees because of the holidays, so I just ignore it and put off job searching until January.  My little vacation was nice, and much needed.  I got to spend Christmas at home all by myself, and did my best to make it a cool little holiday just by myself and my friends around here.  It went well. :)   It felt a lot like Christmas, in fact.  I haven't enjoyed a holiday that much since I spent it by myself like 15 years ago in college.  That was cool.  Anyway.

I'm really glad I got the packages website launched (znurt).  I worked like a madman all through November and December to get that ready to go, and pushed it live pretty much just a few hours after finishing a few touches.  Unfortunately, I had no idea I'd get such a high amount of traffic and, at first, I hosted it at home on my Comcast connection, and it absolutely crippled my poor network here within like the first 8 hours.  Whoops.  So, I scrambled to get it online somewhere else as fast as I could, only to realize that the server setup I signed up for was not *quite* as fast as I had hoped it'd be -- I don't know what possessed me to do *anything* with the word "Celeron" in it.  Yikes.  But, I pushed myself against a wall, and I haven't had time to look at it since then, so ... it's running slow, bugs and requests are backlogged, and I feel kinda bad about the messy launch.  However, if I hadn't launched it when I did, I probably would be obsessing still over the very tiny details, so it was good if only for my mental health to get it out there.

So, I got that whole thing going on.  I just started my new job last week, and I'm still getting settled in.  I'm not sure what I think of it just yet.  Could go a *lot* of different ways.  Right now, I feel like a fish out of water because for the first time in, well, ever, I'm the only IT guy working there.  Takes some getting used to.

There's a bunch of other stuff going on .. or maybe I just keep telling myself that.  Maybe it's just more like catching up to my previous obligations.  Who knows.  Either way, I feel swamped, but not overwhelmed.  That's good.  And a first.  I promised a friend yesterday that I'd help him build a mini Gentoo multimedia image to run on a VIA C7 system, so I gotta build that for him.  That shouldn't take more than a day or so, though.

Lots of cool, good stuff going on, though.  Most of it is of a more personal nature (not *that* personal, but as a general rule I don't get too detailed on my blog), and that's good.

Right now, though, I'm mainly just trying to adjust to the new job.  Get down the rhythm of everything new and all.  Yah.

That's mah life about now.

uncle steve

Thursday 21 Jan 2010 by Steve | No Comments
Filed under: General

My little sister gave birth yesterday to her first, a little girl named Mabel.  Yay!

web

Go weenie wooman. :)

los nuevos ebuilds: es.znurt.org

Friday 8 Jan 2010 by Steve | 11 Comments
Filed under: Gentoo

No es completo, porque no tengo las traducciones por las categorias, pero basta para anunciarlo a lo menos: aruajo me ayudo (o sea, el hizo todo) y traducimos znurt.org a un locale en castellano. :)

El sitio esta aqui: http://es.znurt.org/

Translation: I'm all out of cookies.  May I date your daughter?

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