It was a good movie, I liked it.  In fact, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, which surprised me.  The story was really well done, and unlike some of the other Batman animated movies, it really did a good job of keeping the feel of an original series episode.

That's not to say I'm really familiar with the Batman Beyond series.  I have to confess to seeing only about half a dozen episodes, if that.  I do have all three seasons of them on DVD though.  Again, just never really got around to watching them.  There's a lot of TV shows like that though that I own.  It's pretty common.  I just don't get to them until the bug kinda hits me.

One thing that really impressed me about the movie, that I kept noticing, was that I really liked their art style.  I remember one reason I initially thought the series was going to be cool, was because it borrowed from the same animation style of the original Batman: The Animated Series runs, but now it was based in the future.

I've always loved the retro look of the original Batman cartoons (well, original for younger audiences), and I think that Warner Bros. has always done an amazing job with the art style.  But one thing I've consistently noted is that when you get good animation departments working with a futuristic timeline, they really have a ball and can come up with some really amazing concepts.

That's one reason I like animation so much -- it's much easier to play with fresh ideas.

The story was great, as well.  I'll be the first to admit that other Batman animated movies were alright.  In fact, I remember going to see Batman: Mask of the Phantasm with a friend when it was in the theaters.  We got there about 20 minutes late, which was a real crime, since the story flips back and forth between flashbacks constantly.  We were especially screwed because we came in when they were in a flashback sequence, and the movie was really short, and we were *completely* lost.  It's still a good fun flick to watch, but the story is a bit strained.

This one, though, was much better by comparison.  A lot darker, too.  I've noticed that the newer WB animated movies are going in that direction.  I've got mixed feelings about that, personally.

I won't give any of the story away, but I have always remembered reading one review of the movie a long time ago that said that it was really cool how the Joker came back.  And, I'll agree completely.  I was pretty skeptical how they were going to work it out, but it was well done.  Plus, he is extra creepy in this one, and it seems like it delves into his character much more than before.

For that matter, now that I think about it,  the other main characters (Bruce Wayne and Terry McGinnis) both get some character development in the story.  We get to see a bit more about them as people.  Again, I thought the story was well developed.

The only thing that bummed me about the movie itself was the video transfer.  Warner Bros. is always great about their DVD transfers, but this one was non-anamorphic widescreen, meaning it was full-framed, but still letterbox.  On the flip side, though, the audio track was 5.1 Dolby Digital (not 2.0 like the Amazon.com listing suggests), and it was not too shabby.  It was well mixed, and even I, the non-audiophile, noticed the surround getting used quite a few times.  So, they didn't really skimp there.  It wasn't great by any means, but it was good.

I gotta say again how much I really enjoyed the art style in this one.  They really seemed to put some care into it.  I'm left to wonder if that transferred to the series as well.  I haven't seen any of the episodes in a while, but I'm certainly curious to check them out now.

There were so many great shots and backgrounds, and I would love to post more, but some of them would give away the story.

Good stuff, though.  Can't really go wrong with Batman.  I'm surprised I hadn't seen it before now.  I like.

I got an idea for another new Gentoo website this morning, and instead of summarizing what it is, I think it'd be more fun to kind of show what my thought process is when coming up for the idea.

The catalyst for all of it was that I got to work this morning, and I wanted to find a backup solution for a few case scenarios.  This is basically how it rolled.

• Run eix -S backup on my desktop, pipe it through less, start looking at them
• Open up the website of every single one I find that looks like it might fit my needs
• Realize that there's an app-backup portage category, which I could have browsed on my own website (oops).
• Start realizing that trying to find my own is tedious, how I'd really want is just to see ratings on which ones are best.
• Get ideas for a new Gentoo website.
• I really need to build a new Gentoo packages website, one that track's users ratings on packages, can have comments, reviews, all that crap.
• While I'm at it, I need to do something to get a universal login across all the Gentoo projects (Znurt, Planet, new unnamed package one).
• I should probably get a new domain for it.  Or bump Planet somewhere else.
• I don't wanna bump Planet somewhere else.  What's a good domain name.
• I'm almost out of cookies.
• I've got a good domain name, is it available?
• Crap, the .com is gone, but .org is available, I'll get that.  Click, click, click, spendy, spendy.
• Hmm, I wonder if my brother-in-law can help me design it for me.
• Chat with him on IM for a few minutes, tell him I need it in about 3 to 4 months, he says no problem.  Awesome.
• And it's gotta login through OpenID, because I hate doing user management.
• I'll integrate Planet in there so users can modify their own stuff
• And this'll go great with all the user preference stuff I'm gonna have on Znurt soon, just track it through preferences.
• It'd be cool if the packages one also tracked features, or did comparision, or did recommendations, like Netflix
• Ooh, and you can see what friends are using
• And at the same time, reserve all usernames for current Gentoo devs.  That'd be fun.
• And it needs LOLcats. (I just came up with that one)
• I gotta think of a new design.
• Ooh, look a cool backup program.
• I like the website, what are they using?  Ooh, Redmine.  I remember liking this thing.
• I wanna try setting up Redmine again.
• Ooh, someone put an ebuild in the tree.  I don't have to use my crapalicious one I wrote.
• Sweet, I can use SQLite.  Setting up a database on MySQL / Postgres is a pain if I just wanna test it out.
• The --config isn't working.  Crapsticks.  Well, I'll just re-emerge every Ruby package installed and maybe that'll fix it.
• That didn't fix it.  Maybe I'll see the exact command that it's running and debug it from there.
• The deps are bad, I have to use an earlier version of rake.
• All fixed
• Ooh, I can run it as a standalone app!
• I might need mod_ruby sometime, someday, even though I can't find any mention of it on the website.  I'll just install it anyway.
• Ooh, shiny interface!
• I like.
• I think I can use this to replace trac.
• Ooh, it supports git.
• How the heck do you change the Issue fields?  I don't like the defaults.
• I think I'm going to go buy a subwoofer today.
• I should put my local stuff in a Subversion repo for now.  I gotta learn me some git.
• What's a good subwoofer?
• *ping Jason on IM and ask about subwoofer specs*
• *go buy a subwoofer*
• *watch Harry Potter trailer*
• *eat lunch and head back to work*
• What was I working on?  Oh, yah, backups.
• This one looks cool too.  Ooh, shiny interface.
• Woah, it integrates automatically with cron.  Nice.
• There really should be a website to make finding this stuff easier.  I should write one.
• And it should have screenshots!
• How do you deal with the spam?   Hmm.
• It's been kind of a crazy day today.
• I think I'll blog about it.

And so it goes.

Tonight, I was bored, and was thinking how stretched thin I am right now (I essentially have three jobs at the moment, eek), and I started wondering about my skill set in general, so I wrote it all down.  You can see the lovely unordered list here.

I compiled it out of curiosity more than anything else.  I'm not interested in comparing my skill set to anyone else, or anything like that, and I'm certainly not trying to toot my own horn .. I'm certainly not into that.  But I did find it interesting.  I know I've always been a hybrid between web developer and systems admin, and then throw in some multimedia stuff on the side.  It's really odd.  I realize that.  I like, though, that I pursue everything that interests me, even if it does totally wear me out.  I like knowing what I'm into and what doesn't appeal to me.

So, yah.  That was fun.  It was hard getting them all down, and I'm sure I probably missed a few.  I don't think I could really categorize Gentoo too well, as it's taken up a lot of room in my life over the years, and really helped push me in a lot of directions.  I'm really grateful for that.  I love learning new stuff.

And, for the record, I really did write a CLI frontend to rip TV shows off your Tivo.  I've never released the code into the wild.  That's on another huge list .. of projects to eventually accomplish.

Edit: for the record this is one of those posts I was debating publishing or not.

I've been doing some reading up the past few days, and stumbled upon some great resources.  One really cool thing I found, that I'll write about later since I've got some ebuilds in the works, is GNOME Seed.  Seed is, basically, JavaScript bindings for GTK+.  In other words, you can build GUI applications in JavaScript.  How freaking cool is that?  (For the curious, read this, this and this.)

Anyway, one part of doing my research about JavaScript is building a little toolkit of common functions that I can use as a fallback when I need to understand what's going on.  I'm really familiar with PHP, so I've been using that as  a sort of inspiration.

I've got a little function I wrote, called var_dump(), which basically does the same thing as the PHP function, and with similar syntax output.  The code is here.  If any JavaScript gurus wants to look at it and give me some pointers, let me know.  I'd appreciate it.   Mine is making a call to Seed, but obviously it'd be easy enough to put into a browser.

I'm going on my eighth year or so of using it.  I don't know the exact timeline, but I'm pretty sure I've used it since around April of 2002 or so.  I'm also coming up on my fourth year of being a Gentoo developer.  That just blows me away.  I've also started recently getting a resurgence of interest in working on the development side again, something I'm really glad to see, since I have been progressively phasing myself out over the past few months.  Quite recently, though, I've managed to get myself much more organized and that has given me a much bigger picture of areas where I want to focus (and ones I want to drop interest), and so that has made it working on Gentoo fun again.   For the record, that's how it should always be.

There is one argument in particular I wanted to rehash here, and that is the one about stability as a distro.

I've often heard the argument, when debating Linux distributions, someone say something like, "Why would anyone run Gentoo .. it's not stable!"  I never have a really good retort to that answer when people bring it up, other than something simple like "Well, the obvious reason would be that I've used it for years and if I manage it, you won't have any problems."  Not to say that I don't have problems with my Gentoo installs, but these days they are usually stupid things ... like forgetting my root password or accidentally firewalling myself out of the box.

I don't really care about the "distro wars" though.  My motto has long been, "to each his own."  Find what works for *you* and apply it.  I could argue all day to someone about the merits of Gentoo, but really, all that matters is that it fits my needs well and does exactly what I want it to do, and how I want it to do things.  Everyone else can go find their own.  I've got mine.

But the fallacy in that original argument "Gentoo's not stable!" is a weak one.  It implies that the distribution should be the one providing all the support for keeping things constantly maintained, running and efficient.  To me, those tasks sounds like the description of a systems administrator job position.

My point is that, it shouldn't matter what Linux distribution you are going to use -- you need someone to keep it up and running.  I think Gentoo is great because it removes the veil from saying, "just run these versions of the software and you'll be totally fine."  Bugs creep in all the time.  Binary distributions stick you with a set of packages, that if,  you want to break out of that pigeon hole, it may be completely impossible to do.  With Gentoo, the definition of "stable" is left up to the user, the maintainer, the systems administrator.  I love it.

Go Gentoo.

I also can't believe I'm still a fanboi, after all these years.

So, the backstory is that the other day I was making a note of all the projects I have to do,  creating what I call my project tree.  It's basically an ordered list of general projects (Gentoo, home theater system, etc.), and then abstract projects underneath that.  It's nice because I can get a birds eye view of all the stuff I'm working on without going into specifics about any of them.  One of the home theater ones was to get at least ISO disc rips of the Blu-Ray movies I already have, even if I can't decrypt them yet, so I can at least play around with my options as they become available.

Well, I had moved my server setup around not too long ago, so I had two 750 GB harddrives just collecting dust.  I put one of them in an external USB drive, and plugged it into my PS3, which was already running Linux (see this pervious post for all the fun details).

I formatted my external USB drive as NTFS, so that I could read/write to it with Windows as well, and then I would insert a disc and just dump it to an ISO file.  That's easy enough:

$ cat /dev/sr0 > KFP.iso

I grabbed a couple of them (which took awhile, don't let me kid you on that part) so that I could get a good sampling in case I had more luck with one than another.

Once that was done, I trotted the little drive and plugged it into my netbook, running Windows XP, and installed both Virtual CloneDrive and AnyDVDHD.  The first one lets me mount an ISO as an actual disc drive, and the second actually decrypts the disc for me and dumps the contents back to the harddrive.  So, that's two passes now on all the data, which is making this take a long time.  But that's okay, it's fun.

Now that I have the actual contents, the MPEG2 transport streams, I can play it back with MPlayer, ffplay or whatever.  I'm having limited success with latest MPlayer on the files with VDPAU playback support, but it could just be my video card (GeForce 8600 GTS).  On my HTPC frontend, it works almost perfectly on there, with a nicer video card (GeForce 9300).  My desktop just craps out, though.  I can still watch it with Xv video out, though.

mkvtoolnix doesn't support m2ts files right now, so I don't have many options if I wanna change things around.  I'm still in a proof-of-concept stage, so I don't really care all that much.  Plus, my options are already limited.  AnyDVDHD is shareware that will expire in 21 days, and while it's amazing and works great, it's really expensive -- something like $200 for a lifetime license.  Eek.  With that, I'll keep trying my options on Linux.

The second piece of shareware I ran into (which also has a limited evaluation license, though this time for 30 days) is MakeMKV.  The Linux port is always a little more difficult to find, so here's a direct link to the details on the lastest version.  Boy, I never thought I'd be talking about shareware on my blog.

MakeMKV works really nice, too.  It's supposed to be able to do the same job as AnyDVDHD, I believe, but since I don't have the actual Blu-Ray drive, everything I've tried has never worked when just mounting the ISO direcly and trying to access that.  I believe that part of cracking the key involves having access to the drive.  I'm really not sure.  I've read a bit about the whole process, but it's still really confusing to me still.

Anyway, the software will let you access it directly through the decrypted contents, and that's what I did.  The interface is actually really simple and nice, and I would actually consider buying this one (it's much cheaper, at $50 for a lifetime license).  I'm trying to remember the last time I paid for a software license.  One that comes to mind, is that I actually have a valid registration key for Legend of the Red Dragon, the *really* old BBS door game.  Wow.  I think it cost me something like $15.

MakeMKV is pretty nice, though.  It snags the subtitles I select, and already includes the chapters as well as the HD audio formats.

So, that's it.  The whole process is pretty tedious, but it works, and I'm happy.  I don't really care about decrypting it *too* much right now, since I don't wanna go through the pain of trying to play them back over my HTPC just yet.  I'd need to do a lot of tweaks and upgrades to my system, and I really don't care that much.  It's not worth the hassle.  Especially, uh, since I just bought a new Blu-Ray player last month.

Really, though, I'm just doing this for the exercise since when I get bored, often times I'll want to play around with media files and formats and see what I can do with them.

Eventually I'll buy a BD-ROM drive and see what I can do, but for now I'm trying to save some $$$ and the whole point of this was to see if I could rip some discs with just the hardware available, and I could.   Woots.

On a sidenote, I posted aacskeys to the portage tree today, which is one of the tools users need to decrypt the keys on their discs.  Hopefully we can get some more hackers interested in poking at it.  That's always good.

Last but not least, here's an actual screenshot from the final rip.

I love TMNT.   Boy that's a post for another day ... which reminds me, I should get a copy of my home-made videos some day, that I made with my action figures.  Oh man, that'd be awesome.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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!"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Go weenie wooman.

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

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

You may or may not know, but Znurt is the name of another Gentoo mascot of ours -- he's the little UFO / whatever flying around that you can see on Gentoo's homepage.

I'm not real sure what else to say about the site, other than it's been a lot of work, and I'm really proud of it.  If I had any idea of how many hours it'd take to put together, I never would have started on it, that's for sure.  I think it's safe to say I've put in at least 200 hours working on it in the past 2 months or so.  I think it's turned out really well, though.  It's a far better improvement over my old packages site which was thrown together quite hastily, and the code was pretty nasty.  This time around, everything is object-oriented which made it really go by quickly.

I've tried to put in some of the best features for launch as possible, but some just had to make the cut due to constraints.  The ones I really wanted was a page for new ebuilds, and a chance to have a feed of those, and customized by arch.  Same for new packages as well -- a view for each arch.  The new packages section almost got cut completely, though, because of some issues I ran into at the last minute, but fortunately that one made it.

I'll still be adding more stuff, but probably not at such a clipped pace as I have been for the past month.  You can track the planned features I already want to implement here.  If there's other ideas you have, let me know, and I'll see if I can get them in.

Which reminds me, I'd like to give a huge shout-out to all the beta-testers that helped out with the site development.  Every single person that got involved had a unique idea or perspective that I hadn't even considered, and it really helped clean things up quite a bit.  Thanks, guys, I owe you one.

I hope you all enjoy the new site.  Please contact me about any bugs you find -- hopefully I didn't miss any obvious glaring ones.  Also, if there are any XML wizards out there, I'd really appreciate some feedback on the Atom and RSS feeds, in case I missed something.  Not really a strong point of mine.

The thing I like the most about working on the site is it really revitalized my interest in Gentoo, and working on the project as a whole.  I had been losing interest in it for a while, but I realize now that that was partly fueled by my slip-shod attempts at user websites (planet included).  Taking a weak thing and making it strong, though, has really helped to push me in the opposite direction, though.  Not to say I'm going to make a career out of Gentoo development or anything, but it sure does help fuel my passion when you have some work you can be really proud of.

In fact, working on this has inspired me to do a rewrite of Planet Larry as well.  Writing the XML feeds wasn't nearly as difficult as I imagined, and though I don't understand them too well, it's definitely something I'd like to learn more about.  So, I'm going to ditch the planet software we are using and write my own, and finally give Planet Larry some features and love that it really needs.

Oh, also, there's a twitter feed that I use just for the website development, if you want to see what I'm working on, there.  Have fun.

You seriously have to forget the past twelve or so releases that Disney has had that does any animation (not counting Pixar, of course), and go see this movie, because it is a serious throwback to the Walt Disney animation pictures of old.  The animation was top-notch, mixing art styles both old and new, and I could see influences from a *lot* of classic Walt Disney films, like Pete's Dragon, The Rescuers, Sleeping Beauty, Robin Hood, and more.

Everything about the film just blew me away.  It was hilariously funny with original characters and stories -- I won't spoil it for you, though.  The story was great and it deeply used the local culture to a completeness that, again, I haven't seen since Walt himself made the movies.

I cringed every time a song started up (and there were a *lot* of them, even for a Disney animated film) since I was afraid it would suck, but they were all really good.  I found myself tapping along to them in the theater, I was getting into them so much, which *never* happens with me.

The art style was incredible.  There were some really, really cool sequences with the songs and some of the scenes.  The ones with the Shadow Man just totally made the movie.  And this movie was *not* nubbed down for little kids, either.  It was authentically creepy and scary in parts, just as it should have been.  Extremely well done.

If I had to rank this thing, I'd say it would probably fit in the top five or so of animated films I've ever seen.  I'd say it rated up there with Beauty and the Beast, for me.  That seems like a pretty accurate rating -- not my #1 favorite, but pretty darn close.

So, suffice it to say, I was incredibly surprised ... and the best movies are always ones where you're totally blown away by your limited expectations, I think.  This movie is an animated film in a class all by itself.  Just an awesome treat, to see Disney put out something good again.  From the very opening title sequence, with the Walt Disney Animation Studios opening, I figured I was in for a good treat, and I was right.

The new design is in place, though, and it looks awesome, in my opinion.  I can't wait to show it off.   Right now, only the testers get to see it -- if you'd like to do some as well, just lemme know.  In the meantime, here's a little preview:

Now who is that little guy?

I've also got a Twitter feed set up now where I'm sending updates about the site progress, if you're interested in following.

I would cover a list of new features again, but this time I think it's embarassingly short since I've been just fixing bugs for the past few days.  I did get really basic RSS feeds added, but that's about it.

Here's some of the planned new features, though:

• display changelog with syntax highlighting
• display ebuild source inline
• show use flags, dependencies, reverse deps on ebuilds
• show open bugs on ebuilds (thanks to Mike for his help on this one)
• RSS feeds: new packages, version bumps
• Compact, verbose views
• Text-friendly design, for CLI browsers (elinks, etc.)

Like I said, no idea how long this stuff is gonna take, but it should make the site much more friendly and usable.  Yee-har.  Lemme know if there's something else you'd like to see, and I'll fit it in if I can, and it's reasonable.  Thanks, guys.

I have been working on this thing almost non-stop all week, because this site is by far the most complex one I have going for me.  Well, that's a personal project, at least.  I forgot how much work goes into this thing, as I've still got small laundry list of to do items.  But!  The good news is it should be ready and online really, really soon now.  Hopefully this weekend if I can squeeze more blood out of me.

I got to see the new design this morning, and I gotta say, I am absolutely floored by how amazing it is.  My brother-in-law was kind enough to do an original design for the rewrite, and I gotta say ... it's just spanky.  I love it.   He also redid the design for Planet Larry if you want an idea of his skill level.  Thanks, David!

Anyway, I'm not gonna open up the site just yet, but I do wanna start getting a list compiled of people who are interested in doing some beta testing for me.  Just send me an email if you'd like to help out.  It's not really a big deal if you wanna do it -- I just need you to poke around, use it like you normally would, but (and this is important) actually send me feedback about any bugs you find or suggestions you have.  Lemme know.