Don’t get me wrong, the film itself was great, from the acting to the script to the story, but it was a bit too intense for me, plus it just wasn’t anything like Batman Begins, which is what I was really hoping for.

The story was really well done, though.  The Joker was extremely freaky, and had the real feel of a sociopathic killer — someone who was in control of his faculties, but just simply insane.  There were so many rough pulls of moral dilemma in the movie, and I don’t really go for those — at least, not portrayed violently.  I don’t like war movies, either, and I imagine some of them would be kind of like this.  So, the type of movie just wasn’t my taste.

Of course, I really can’t stand the original Batman movie either. In fact, the only ones I really will even watch (as in, a second time) are Batman Returns and Batman Begins. Those were both excellent, and I didn’t like any of the others.

That’s about that. The soundtrack was great, too.

Anyway, at home my box is a dual-core AMD Athlon64 something or other. I’ve stopped building boxes a while ago after realizing that while it may be only around $300 to get started, it ends up costing another $400 for all the stuff I really wanna get on there, like a decent video card and quiet power supply, so this has been my box for a while. In fact, I’m running the exact same motherboard in my media server as well. It’s actually really nice knowing that I can swap hardware between the two boxes in a pinch (which has already happened) without worrying about the specs.

This box has been doing great, and I really don’t use it for much more than just surfing the web, writing email and of course Gentoo development. I’ve had problems on and off with XFCE and X. Exiting out would kill all input, and I could never figure out the cause. It wouldn’t matter which video driver or video card I used, so I just worked around it — I’d switch to the shell if I wanted to kill X, instead of just logging out, etc. But, one thing I sorely miss is using tuxonice, so today I finally decided to take the plunge and scratch it all.

It has been a long time coming, too. I can’t even remember the last time I installed the system on here. Generally speaking, I usually reinstall anyway just to clear out cruft and what not about every 18 months or so. It’s also a good way to keep me on my toes with new installs — my biggest problem is *still* forgetting to change my root password from a fresh stage3 install.

I’ve gotten pretty far, as I’m writing this in Seamonkey right now, and I started this morning. I’ve already been going through the list of stuff I had installed and it’s amazing how many applications I try out and then completely forget about. I’m actually excited to try out the new jobs and resume options in portage, see how that changes things around.

Actually, the thing that kicked off the reinstall at home was that I finally broke down and decided to do my one at work, first. The box is also a dual-core 64-bit machine, but it’s an Intel Pentium D. Now, for some reason, I have *never* had much luck with any of the Intel boxes. I always have some stupid problem where they just end up unresponsive for some reason that I’ve never had on the AMD boxes. I’ve never been able to pin it down, and so I’ve been methodically getting rid of any Intel-based boxes I have around.

This one at work is particularly painful though, though it’s mostly my fault. It’s only got 512 megs of RAM in there which is the obvious bottleneck in today’s modern desktop scenario — especially for a Linux workstation like mine where running a dozen applications all at once is the norm. At first I tried to resist doing anything about it so I changed my CFLAGS to -Os to save on memory (which I probably should have done in the first place), and while that helped, everything of course slowed down by a huge magnitude. Still, at least I wasn’t having jerkiness — it just took everything twice as long to load and save.

I finally broke down this week and shelled out $50 to buy 2 gigs of RAM for the machine. I haven’t been watching computer prices at all recently, so I was quite surprised by how cheap it was. In fact, I’m tempted to put more in my box at home. I’m sure that’ll fix things up alright. In the meantime, it’s reinstalling right now, chugging along, and seeming to do fine. I think I needed my head cleared of all the crap more than that box did, really. Sometimes, even though we technically don’t need to reinstall, it’s just a good mental relief knowing that you’ve done everything you can to make things run better. That’s a hard belief to argue against.

One thing I also did on my box at home is I finally switched over to ~amd64. I’m running unstable, which may not seem that big of a deal, but my policy over the last six years or so of using Gentoo, on my desktop at least, was to use the stable tree. Slowly, though, one by one, on all my other boxes, I’d switch them over to unstable and just run that tree, and I found that more often than not, it runs just fine without a hitch. I first switched over with my myth box, when I realized that my package.keywords file was longer than my arm — if there was one thing I always wanted the very latest bleeding edge code of, it was all the bugfixes and improvements for the multimedia software. The myth box is an obvious choice, and even then, you get it to a working point and then just leave it alone for an eternity. Those last two sentences just contradicted each other, I realize, but anyway, the point was — well, I forget.

Ooh, this –jobs option is pretty cool. Good work, Zack. Gentoo rocks, what more can I say.  After all this time, I’m still a fan.

I just finished watching an old Sherlock Holmes movie today.  I’ve had the entire collection of the Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce movies done by Universal from the 1930s or whatever for a long time, but I’ve only seen half of them.  Part of the problem when I go to watch one is I can’t remember which ones I’ve seen and which I haven’t (there’s about twelve total, I think), so instead of going through the trouble of figuring it out, I’ll just watch something else.

This one was The Spider Woman (oops, 1944, not 1930s, ah well), and it was pretty good, comparing them to the other ones.  The movies themselves are actually really toned down compared to the radio drama show starring the two actors, who both do a great job in their roles.  I have about every MP3 of the old time radio show, I think … I’m probably missing a few, and if you can dig them up (I haven’t looked at OTR websites in a long time) they are well worth the effort.  The name of the show was The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and the sponsor was Petri Wine.  They sure knew how to do advertising back then, that’s for sure.

This weekend was like the first in a month or so that I’ve had time to myself and didn’t have anything to do.  I have had my Netflix account on hold since I knew I was gonna start moving, and finally activated it the week before, with the 8 at a time plan.  So I got a ton of movies in the mail and got to go through them.  About 5 of them were junk, and didn’t pass the 5-minute test, but the others were cool enough to keep me watching.

One I got to watch was Always.  Now, I should say that I’ve never been a big fan of Spielberg, at all.  Not because I didn’t like his movies, just because he seemed so extremely overrated by everyone else’s opinion, and since his movies always seemed no better or worse than everyone else’s, I’d always watch his with extreme skepticism.  I’ve never seen Always, but I knew the general premise, having seen bits and pieces on TV or whatever.  I gotta say, this one was really good, and it grew on me a bit.  Holly Hunter did a great acting job.  Richard Dreyfuss did alright, though it felt a little static.  I’ve never seen him in a starring role other than What About Bob? so I kept waiting for him to go crazy at any moment.

The movie really dragged on, though.  I remember watching it and thinking my crap a lot has happened, and then I realized it’d only been twenty minutes, and I knew I was in for a long one.  Sheesh, I hate it when that happens.  Never look to see how long a movie is.  The less you know about it before watching it, the less expectations, and therefore, disappointments, you’ll have.

Anyway, I’ve never been terribly impressed with Spielberg’s work, but I had happened to record Jurassic Park at the same time on my Tivo, so I watched that the next day.  Looking back now, I still think it’s a great movie, really well done.  I kept thinking that, for its time, the CGI and animatronics are extremely well done.  You still don’t see movies done that well today on a regular basis.  Universal must have put a lot of cash into that one.  The thing that I realized watching this one, though, was that Spielberg does a great job of capturing on film the human condition on a realistic level when they are in dire situations.  The thing that got me thinking about it was remembering his remake of War of the Worlds.  I remember watching it in the theater, and thinking that this was exactly how I imagined society would react during a huge calamity — bundling together for just survival and a sense of cohesion, but so fragile that they can all easily snap and turn into a mass of of self-preserving hysteria outbursts at any moment.

I have to interject something funny about Netflix here… it thinks I’ll hate every single movie, it’s pretty funny.  Netflix’s guesses for what I’d like are always at least half a star lower than everyone else’s.  My rating system is pretty strict, though, so it makes sense.  I *rarely* give anything five stars, which in my mind is a mind-blowing can watch the movie any time and I never get tired of it, so perfect, no problems kind of movie.  There’s only a small handful of those.  A four would be something that was between that and average.  A three means I’d watch it again, and so anything I don’t like gets two stars.  And since my success rate of finding movies is around 2% or so, Netflix just thinks I hate everything.  Which, technically, I guess I do, but whatever.  I really like the ones I do like, so it all evens out.

One other one I caught recently was I Am Sam.  I’ve been meaning to watch this one for a while.  I’ve always thought Sean Penn was a good actor, but wow he did a good job in this one.  I’ve never seen Michelle Pfeiffer do so well, either.  She seems to be one of those actresses that doesn’t get challenged much, and she really shone in this one.  As far as the story, it really seemed forced to try and make you feel emotional, and so I got tired of that pretty quick.  Plus, I’m tired of seeing that little kid in every movie that’s been out.  How many 8 year olds have already starred in 23 movies or whatever.  Sheesh.  I’m all about movies that find unknowns and give them a chance.  It’s nice watching a movie when you don’t instantly know who the star is because it lets you forget where the story “should” be focusing on, and instead lets you decide for yourself who and what it revolves around.

Which reminds me of another movie that I’ve been meaning to comment on for a long time.  I saw this a long time ago, but it was so stunning.  The Winslow Boy by David Mamet.  This is one of those that so rarely comes along that you watch it, and it so unique and stunning that you are mesmerized and the next time you blink is about an hour later.  That’s exactly what happened with watching this one. I can’t describe it, the style was just really cool, very succinct, quick moving, interesting, about a minor moral struggle that the kid it involved was completely indifferent about anyway, and it was just amazing.  All of David Mamet’s stuff is just that way though.  If you haven’t seen The Spanish Prisoner, go check it out.  I can’t recommend that one enough.  There’s a movie you could spend a long time studying.

Ah, I swear there’s more, but I can’t remember them right now.  Just watched Better Off Dead, a classic 80s flick.  John Cusack has been doing films for a long time, and he’s a great actor.  Good stuff.  What else.

Well, I can’t remember.  I’m sure there’s one I just can’t think of right now.  And for the record, no, I haven’t seen The Dark Knight yet.  Gah, what kind of a Batman fan am I, anyway?  My pillowcase is a Batman one, I kid you not.  He rocks, man.  I gotta go see it — the longer I put it off, the more I’m going to find out about it from other people.  Don’t tell me anything!  Punks.

First of all, mplayer. The latest revision is 1.0_rc2_p27120. The snapshot itself is about a month old, and I don’t know of anything particularly major that’s in there (I haven’t had time to follow development for the past month anyway). It’s been masked for testing, not because upstream has done anything funky, but because there are some new use flags, which have helped me to go back and clean up some stuff that I should have done a long time ago. I haven’t heard a peep from anyone on bugzilla so either no one’s tried it, or it works great.

The big changes that I can think of off the top of my head are this: first of all, there’s an ewarn added if you enable the cpudetection flag. It finally dawned on me that this one might not make sense. Here’s what it *doesn’t* do — magically make the build detect and build for your CPU architecture. The build system already automatically detects and installs with the correct instruction set by default, using stuff like MMX, SSE, and friends. The only reason (that I can think of) that you would use that, is if you were deploying the binary package on another computer, since it is a runtime feature, not a buildtime one. So, you’ll get a little warning if you enable it, because, in general, desktop users don’t need it. I also fixed the use.local.desc to be a bit more specific as well.

Secondly, there’s a new use flag: custom-cpuopts which should finally solve the long-standing dance of trying to outwit users who always break their system but still allow real tweakers to do exactly what they want. Here’s how it works. MPlayer’s build system, again, by default, will automatically detect the CPU optimizations that are supportd for your platform (MMX, SSE, again, etc.). That means that, again, if you leave everything by default — it should work fine.

Originally the problem we would have is that people would have their CPU optimization use flags turned off (like mmx), which would normally break the build. The ebuild is written to only disable them if they are turned off, so my solution for a long time was to tell people to just turn them all on and let MPlayer *not* disable them, therefore, revert back to autodetection. This would then cause problems, though, for those few who were building MPlayer for some other box, and they wanted specific CPU opts on or off. This use flag will fix just that.

What custom-cpuopts will do, when enabled, is forcibly enable or disable the actual CPU optimization use flags you set. This will help out those on certain profiles and setups who need to tweak their build for whatever reason. For normal desktop users, you don’t need to enable it — if it’s turned off, the ebuild will completely ignore the other use flags (for CPU optimizations) and just use the default checks … which work great. It also means that your build will be optimized the best it can, yay!

I know I really went into depth on that one, but it’s been an issue with the build and users for a long time and I’m glad I finally got a cleaner solution working. Now everyone has the options to do whatever they want, but by default, everything should build and be optimized wonderfully.

Oh yes, one last thing — if someone wants to fix bug 228799, and submit a patch upstream, I’d be extremely grateful. That would clean up the LINGUAS hack in our ebuild, which I’ve heard breaks on paludis anyway.

As far as transcode — I’ve been out of the loop, and the media-video team has been taking things over and cleaning up (I don’t even know who, sorry guys, haven’t taken the time to look into that either — I know loki_val fixed up some imagemagick / ffmpeg dep crap that I didn’t want to touch, thanks man!). 1.0.5 is back in the tree, and should be the next stable candidate. I also added another rc for 1.0.6, and I have to add the 1.10 beta sometime.

That’s about it for now. Have fun. Go break your box.

I’ve got my Internet back again and now a phone line to, and Ive been trying to get Grand Central all hooked up and working right.  I still haven’t been able to verify that it’s actually ringing both phones at once — there might be some latency on the Comcast line or something.  My cell phone will always ring though.  Maybe I just set something up wrong, who knows.

Also, first impressions of the Comcast digital voice setup — it sucks.  I was gonna write a whole post about it, but I’ll probably not be that coherent enough anytime soon.  One thing I don’t like about it is that you can’t turn the voice mail option off at all.  That may be an odd request, but my opinion is that if you are going to add any feature, the first option should be to have it available.  In my case, I don’t care about any voice mails that go to my home phone, because I’m not giving out that number so anyone who calls there directly has either got the wrong number or is trying to sell something.

Their online interface is just really buggy.  To delete or view details about a voicemail, you have to listen to it first.  Even then, it will only delete the very last one in the list (there’s a bug), so if you want to delete all of them you have to do it from the bottom up.  Secondly, I went into the preferences menu (I forgot which one now, and this is totally anecdotal so feel free to ignore because of lack of details), changed two options which had nothing to do with each other, and got an error response.  Whoops.  One other thing that was weird was that in my account details it has my *old* address listed on the account.  Fail.  Finally, and this is the thing that I find kind of freaky, is it shows *all* incoming and outgoing calls made up to a month back.  Normally that would be cool — if I was the one making the calls.  It should have displayed the logs based on my activation date.  Plus I already got a voicemail of someone calling the old guy’s number and mentioning him by name, so if I really wanted to be evil I could go on a little identity theft digging spree based on the past call activity.  Not that I would, but being as paranoid when it comes to security as I am, the thought just naturally comes to me.

Despite all that, I’ll probably stick with it anyway — I still want to find a decent phone, and while this request may seem odd, I’d like to get one that at least has as the same basic features as my cell phone (minus playing games, of course).  I think stuff like hanging up on an incoming call but still letting it ring through, or changing call volume or simple stuff like that should be standard.  I dunno how much home phones have changed over the years, it’s been a long time since I bought one, and I just grabbed the first one that looked decent at Shop-Ko so I could have something.

As far as everything else in my life, it’s all been busy.  I’m going to be looking for a new job here in the next month, my family has been visiting recently (which is a rare occurrence which just happened to fall on the exact time I’m moving), and I’ve still got to move in and get all that crap done.

I *started* looking at Gentoo stuff finally this morning for the first time since who remembers when.  Between it being summer, skating, and getting a new PS3, it seriously cut into my time and desire to work on Gentoo stuff a lot, so I’ve been taking a bit of a long break.  What worries me though is that this is the first time that I’m getting the feeling that there’s too much to do and users are nagging on bugzilla to get their stuff done (contribute patches, people!  “me too!” comments on bugs totally suck), so I think I really need to scale back what I’ve taken on over the years and see where I really can and want to make a difference.  I’ve already stopped supporting or maintaining a lot of stuff in the tree that I used to take care of (little stuff, mostly) because of time constraints and lack of energy.  I dunno where I’m gonna refocus my efforts yet.  I dunno.  Too much going on right now to think about it anyway.

Well, that’s all the brain dump I can leak out right now.  I sure could use a week off of work right now just to get my life in order, but I’ll have to settle with doing what I can when I can.  It’s all good, I guess.  I’m just not accustomed to having so many things going on all at once.

Since I don’t get cell phone coverage on my block, this is going to come in really handy.  I can have it ring both my home phone and cell phone all at once.  I’m most excited about freely giving out the # to businesses though so when they sell me out, I can mark their incoming calls as spam.  I don’t know why I get a kick out of that.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll get my Internets back tomorrow and another piece of the puzzle will be put back together.  My new place is really nice, I’m liking it.  I think the best way to describe it is it’s simple.  The layout is simple and nice, the rooms are nice and big and just well designed.  Plus, the walls are really thick so I can watch movies loudly without annoying anyone.  Tonight I popped in ‘Flight of the Navigator’.  What a great flick.  The soundtrack is pretty awesome, too.  I wonder if I could find a t-shirt or something.  Okay, I did find some black and white t-shirt but it’s not that great looking.  My TRON t-shirt really rocks.  I’ll post a pic sometime.

In the meantime, I’m just trying to get unpacked, and get a sense of normalcy and stability back in my life.  I don’t have an Internet connection yet, and Comcast is coming out this week.  I don’t have cell phone coverage in my house (or the whole street, even), so I’ve got to get a landline installed as well.  I’m gonna have them install that as well.  Strangely enough,  all my neighbors use Qwest / DirecTV, so I’m hoping the cable guy doesn’t come out here and surprise me with the fact that they can’t install anything at my place — partially because then I’ll have to wait two weeks to get anything else in there and be cut off from the world even longer, and also because I can’t stand Qwest.

On the plus side, Civilization for the PS3 is supposed to come out tomorrow, and I can’t wait for that.  I did get Overlord this weekend, and that’s been fun (though harder than I imagined).

Anyway, I can’t wait for life to get back to a normal routine.  At least I’m sleeping, though.  Half my life might be in boxes right now, but at least I get plenty of sleep at night.

The park I go to most often is called Fairmont, here in Sugarhouse, which is a small little district of Salt Lake City.  I live about 15 blocks away, I’d say, so I go there a lot.

It’s actually been one year today that I first went there, and what an adventure my first time was.  I remember it was like my second day of skating, and I rolled up to this ramp and thought, “oh, this looks fun!” and just dove right into it.  The first thing I remember thinking was “holy crap I’m going fast” and then I bailed at the bottom and really hurt my legs.  I got up again though and thought, “I’ll just try that again” so I went down a smaller ramp and bailed again, hurting myself even more.  Then I figured I’d just try and push up to the ramp and go down a small part, and I fell down again.  By this time I could barely walk, and I went limping to my car and got out of there.  I don’t think I even went back for like four months.  It was great.

Now, I go there quite a lot.  It’s a great layout, and perfect for my level since there’s room to both screw around and practice.

Plus, the sidewalks come with inspirational messages.

“you suck at skateboarding”

I love skateboarding.  I never thought I’d stick with it so long, but it’s been a year and I’m still having the time of my life.  I tell you what.

I actually can’t believe I found something so fast, though I must say I was pretty inspired (and desperate) to get out.  Lucky for me, I found a place only four blocks away so I’m still close to the parks and I don’t have to move to an unfamiliar neighborhood.

Best of all, it has a new HVAC system put in just a few months ago.  When I went and saw it at noon, it was 66 degrees inside.  Man, it was nice.  I was ready to lie down and take a nap right then and there.  That wasn’t the only thing that won me over, though.  It’s on the lower level of a fourplex, has a huge living room and bedroom, and a very nice kitchen.  Did I mention it has air conditioning?

In the meantime, I’ve done the only sensible thing to do while waiting to get into my new place: I’ve moved my bedroom into the kitchen and quarantined the bedrooms.  It’s a nice 75 degrees in there and about 85 in the living room, so I think I can live with that.  As long as I get some sleep, I should be fine.

Man, I’m glad that’s resolved.  I never expected anything to happen so quickly.

I got sick this weekend so I had to stay home and rest the whole time, but I seriously went delirious from the heat. I went to the doctor today to find out if it was that or just something else that’d been making me tired, and I’ll get the results from the blood test tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m looking for some practical ways to cool off my house.

This morning I went to the hardware store and spent about $200 on drapes that are designed to block out supposedly 99% of the sunlight. It’s so bright in my living room that it blocks out about 80% I’d say in my main front window, and that’s with a canopy already out front. I’m on the top floor in my complex, so the heat gets in all day, and then never leaves.

I just spent about three hours drawing this awesome picture of my setup while eating ice cream.

The annoying problem I have is that in the kitchen, there is an AC unit sitting in the window, which does a great job, but only keeps the kitchen cool. The circulation in this apartment is horrible (no central air), so only the kitchen stays cool. The bedroom gets hot, but I don’t mind so much because by the time I go to bed I just open the window and turn on the ceiling fan and that’s usually enough to get me through the night. Plus, I’m sensitive to noise so I can’t get an AC unit in there.

Probably the most practical thing to do is to get another window AC unit for the living room since that’s where I spend most of my time when I’m at home. I’ve just been stubborn and don’t want to spend the money or install it, but dying from heat tends to change your mind about things like that.

Either way I still have the problem with poor circulation. The office and the bedroom both have ceiling fans that are almost always on full blast, and while it cools off a little, no air is moving from room to room. So I’m not sure how to solve that one.

Anyway, I’m open to ideas. In the meantime, suddenly work is the most exciting place to be. Now that’s pathetic.

So I downloaded the incomparable video Charlie the Unicorn, used audacity to cut out the Candy Mountain song, and then uploaded it to my cell phone with Bluetooth using my co-worker’s Mac. Freaking right on.

It’s a mecca of love, the candy cave!

Okay, so if you wanna know the technical details, here’s specifically what I did:

Download the youtube video using youtube-dl:

$ youtube-dl -b -t “http://youtube.com/watch?v=Q5im0Ssyyus”

Extract the audio to WAV format using MPlayer:

$ mplayer charlie_the_unicorn-Q5im0Ssyyus.mp4 -ao pcm:file=candy_mountain.wav

Edit the WAV file with Audacity, select the song portion, and export it to MP3 with a64 kbps bitrate. The start point was 2:26 and it’s 42 seconds in length

$ audacity candy_mountain.wav

And that was it! Instant ringtone goodness. Here’s the MP3.

The animation was absolutely incredible, both in style and design. The fight scenes were pretty intense, too — for a kid’s movie that is — meaning, they actually *fight* and kick butt. Also, it was incredibly hilarious. I was laughing out loud about every 30 seconds.

I’m no good at reviews. I’d recommend going and seeing it though.

Actually, now that I think about it, one thing does come to mind.  The movie was filmed in scope instead of flat, and it added a real cinematic presence.  That is actually really rare for animated films, and A Bug’s Life is the only one I can think of off the top of my head that also has done that recently.

If I missed anything, just let me know.

Edit: If you are getting redirected to Planet, then clear out your browser’s cache.  I originally had a permanent redirect going there, which should have been temporary to start with.  Whoops.  The old RSS feed links still work though, for everyone who never updated their entries.

Right now, I’m not too sure what the SQLite database generated by portage is doing, as far as setting DEPEND and RDEPEND.  It *looks* like it’s dumping all of RDEPEND into DEPEND, which makes sense as far as pulling in which packages to install, but that makes it hard on me to determine what the actual run time deps are — assuming that’s what it’s doing.  The fact is, there’s a number of possibilities (no DEPEND, no RDEPEND, empty DEPEND, empty RDEPEND, packages in both, etc.) that really the best way to determine which is which is to do something I should have done a long time ago, which was to write something that will parse the ebuild files directly for the variables.  Then I could easily see which ones are set, and which ones are included.

The fact is, though, that I wouldn’t have been able to do that until recently anyway, and the first time I tried it was when I first started on the package.  At that time, it was a such a disastrous mess trying to parse them as text files because you have random comments and straying lines and unquoted variables that it was just too much of a hassle to deal with.  Now that I’ve got regular expressions setup to figure out the difficult stuff like breaking down atoms into every version component and finding the package name from any atom, it should be much simpler to handle.

Until then, though, at least I’ve got dependencies, so I can add support to GPNL real soon now so we can dynamically query which packages at least depend on others.

In setting up the system, I’ve run into some interesting scenarios as well, as is usually the case.  I’m always thrown a few curve balls that I never would have expected and they either turn out to be QA issues or gentoo culture that I never could have accounted for.  One of them I hit this time was that I kept having ebuilds with dependencies for packages that were no longer in the tree.  At first I was confused, as it seemed like an obvious QA bug, but then looking at it closer, (almost) all of them are blockers — that is, don’t include this package in RDEPEND or DEPEND.  It leads to an interesting question like, how long should that be in there once the package is removed from the tree?  Who knows.  It’s fine to leave them in, I guess, but still, it’s interesting to run into stuff like that.

There’s still a lot more work to do, besides breaking down the actual RDEPEND and DEPEND variables more closely.  One thing I didn’t realize until tonight is that included in the variable is all the dependencies of the eclasses.  So if you have an ebuild using the kde eclass, then the ebuild will also have a dep for system packages like make and libtool.  I need to find a way to clean those out as well, obviously.

Fun stuff.  I hope to have an additional section soon for GPNL on the ebuild page that will display the dependencies, and in turn a possibility to display them in reverse.

Something interesting I realized the other day is that Universe gets about 5% of the traffic that Planet does. As a result, I changed it from updating twice an hour to once every 2 hours. Planet, on the other hand, I changed it from twice an hour to every fifteen minutes, and I might make it update even more frequently than that.

Anyway, all that’s changed is a bunch of boring backend stuff, which was some much needed cleanup that I’ve been putting off for a very, very long time. The fact that planet has been a maintenance nightmare is what has mostly kept me from dragging my feet on getting anything done, but now that that headache is gone, I feel hugely relieved.

There’s still more stuff to do, but I think I’m over the worst of it. What I’d like most is to work on next is getting the actual frontend cleaned up, and get a new design. That’s not really my thing, so if someone can help out, that’d be much appreciated.

The design itself hasn’t changed, I just reorganized everything, and it seems much simpler to navigate now.

I should hopefully have that new release ready real soon now.  The problem I run into is that I’m so particular about details, that it never gets done.  It is, of course, much more important to get it out there, even with all my human flaws, then to keep it all to myself, but I just can’t stand doing version bumps.  I like to have things done the first time.

Anyway, I’m glad this is finally cleaned up.  I like the layout much better.

I took this last night with my cell phone while I was at Liberty Park skating. I was getting tired so decided to walk for a bit, and the shadow was just really cool looking. My crappy camera phone doesn’t do it much justice.

I ended up going out today as well for about four hours, two in the morning when I got up, and just got back home right now from another jaunt. Fun times. I’m slowly getting better, but not nearly as fast as I’d like. My body just isn’t used to doing any kind of sports, so it’s really slow progress. I need to find someone to get some lessons from.

I’ve mostly been cleaning up really small stuff, small bugfixes that have been annoying me for a while.

GPNL / Packages

For the packages website, I finally fixed it so that you can search by just package name again. It’s still messed up where it searches way too much stuff by default, but that’ll be fixed soon. It was originally searching by atom and description, so stuff like package$ would break.

I did, however, put the basic search I want to add to the packages website into GPNL: search by atom, package, category, description or all. I need to add changelog to that list. It’s not much, I know, but it’s a start on the long road to getting an advanced search going. I also cleaned up the front page a bit, and added a link to the nightly database dumps.

I also cleaned up the bash script to import the data. It actually has the beginnings of some error checking now, so you shouldn’t be seeing blank pages anymore. And the database is vacuumed correctly, and on a regularly basis, so things should be slightly snappier. I’m also importing the entire portage tree 3x daily now instead of twice. The import script is actually a nice cleanup for me, because if something breaks, I can run parts of it partially, instead of having to manually fix it. It’s much nicer.

My next big thing is getting RDEPEND searchable.  In the database, it’s combined with the DEPEND variable, so I have to separate the two out.  Once that’s done, we can finally dynamically query the tree to see where ebuilds need to be fixed for binary packages.

MPlayer / Transcode

Looking better, closed like eight bugs the other day for mplayer. Finally fixed some asinine bugs of mine for transcode, have one more to go.

Took out the masked libdvdnav because it will conflict and break libdvdread. I already wrote about how I put it in my overlay so if someone wants to use it, they can.

Sword ebuilds

I finally got pretty much all the main ones in the tree that I wanted to get in. There’s still two LDS ones that I have to make myself. Shouldn’t be too hard. I hope. In all, there are 150 sword ebuilds in the tree. Freak. That reminds me of something else I fixed on the packages website: it lists the number of results. That’s something else that’s been annoying me for a while.

I still need to remove the old sword-modules ebuild and add a new virtual-type one that will pull in all of the ones based on which language they are written in. Not hard to do, just slightly tedious. Should be done soon.

lds-scriptures 3.0

Believe it or not, I’m actually planning on getting this finished this week. The actual data has been finished for a very, very long time… it’s writing the documentation that I am extremely particular about because I plan on this being the final release.

That’s about it for now, that I can remember.

I bought a Playstation 3 on Saturday.  I mostly got it because I wanted to cave into getting a Blu-Ray player, but holy cow, this thing is a freaking world of fun.

I’m going to see Indy tomorrow.  I don’t think it’s gonna be that great.

Haven’t slept well the past few days.  I’m pooped.

That’s all.

I’m no economics master (nor do I have any interest in becoming one), but one thing seems pretty obvious to me.  If you’re going to pay $3 for a piece of crap lunch, chances are if you spend a little bit more, you can get something on a magnitude of 2 or 3 times better for you.

Here’s one specific example I’ll use.  At work, there’s a grocery store in the same area.  There’s a Subway a little bit down towards the end of the strip mall.  If I went there, I could get a crappy sandwich with nasty cheese and disgusting bread for about $5 after tax.  It’s not glamorous or great, but it’s cheap, right?  Well, if I go to the grocery store and order a custom made deli sandwich with really fresh meat and really good cheese, it cost’s me an extra $1.50.  Sure, it’s more money, but I’m not going to have to worry about having stomach problems.  And $1.50 extra is nothing in comparison to a $500 trip to the emergency room.

My take on the whole economics of it is, you’re already going to spend X amount of dollars for food.  Why not increase your budget by about 25% and get something *really* good for you.  Ever since I’ve started doing that, I have been feeling so much better.  Lots more energy, less tired, and just healthier in general.

A few other quick examples.  My sister who is a food guru, convinced me to switch from margarine and instead just buy real butter.  I was always, of course, put off by the higher food prices.  But then one day I looked at the ingredients of the margarine I was buying, which was basically nothing more than whipped plastic.  Looking at the one for the butter, it had one ingredient: whipped milk / cream.  That was pretty surprising, so I checked it out, and I loved it, and of course it’s nice to know that I’m eating less garbage.

Another thing little sis has warned me against is checking the ingredients for food where the first item listed is high fructose corn syrup.  Well, I’m a big fan of juice and everytime I go to the store I buy some weird combination of juice to try out, like Apple Cranberry (which is always my favorite).  I just barely looked at the ingredient list the other day and sure enough, the syrup of death was the first item on the list.  Ick.  So, I switched to buying 100% pure grape juice and apple cider instead of my regular stuff.  Again, it costs about 30% more than the old stuff, but I feel a lot better overall.  It’s been great.

Anyway, nothing major so far, but I’m making progress.  It’s pretty interesting how just quickly checking the ingredient list will turn you off of buying something.  I’m getting in the habit of spending slightly more for food, but I’m feeling better all the time.  And I’ve had a lot less stomach problems, too.  I tell you what.