next project

I’ve been thinking about what I want to work on next, since I’m actually finishing up a few things all at the same time.

All within the past little while, I’ve finished up three big projects, or at least come really close to where the status quo is gonna work out great. I got my new Mini ITX media frontend setup, and minus a few tweaks on the remote and configs, it’s good to go. I’ve been hacking on drip and dvd2mkv, my scripts to automate ripping and encoding both TV shows (drip) and movies (dvd2mkv). Oh, and I keep meaning to make mention of this, but I’ve given up trying to dream about getting those things in a “release” state. It’ll never happen. But if anyone is looking for a class to access a DVD through PHP, well, it’s all in SVN. And the third thing, crazy as it is, is that I’ve pretty much bought up all the DVDs (movies) that I’ve had on my wishlist for years. Again, there’s a few exceptions (like two) that can either wait or they are out of print so I’m waiting for the price to come down, but mostly … I’m done!

It’s been nice to go home and watch Buck Rogers in peace, and knowing everything just works, but now I’m wondering what I’m gonna work on next. And when I say next, I mean, which project am I going to finish that I’ve been putting off for so long.

The first one on my list is also the one that I’ve been putting off the longest by far: getting the last release of this scriptures database complete. I sat down this morning for a quick second and documented all the stuff I have left to do, and there’s really not much. Part of is verifying that the schema is correct on all the exports, and the rest is mostly just getting the documentation and changelogs written up. I don’t know why this release has been taking me so long. Some of it just seems a bit overwhelming. I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself to get this thing done right, because I really want it to look good and work without problems.

That shouldn’t take long though. Really, if I sat down, it’d take just a couple of hours to hammer out and get out the door. I still don’t know what’s next though. There’s a lot of Gentoo stuff I want to work on, but I’ve kind of been hovering for the past little while, not really committing to any one area. I’ve been trying to decide where I wanna focus my time on that, as well. There’s pretty much just two areas that I’ve kind of settled myself into: ebuilds and projects. Documentation used to be a third one, as I used to write a lot of stuff on the wiki, but now that it’s kind of gotten hit pretty hard, I lost interest in going back to it. I am, however, working on one official Gentoo doc right now, though I don’t want to promise anything since even that is going pretty slowly.

As far as the portage tree goes, I need to figure out what areas I wanna work on. I’m thinking about dropping out of the media-tv herd completely since I don’t even *record* TV anymore. It’s all about ripped DVDs these days. There’s still a lot of stuff I’d like to cleanup before I go though, and if I do stay on, it’d mostly be because I don’t wanna see stuff rot and be forgotten.

The projects, on the other hand, have always been something I’m interested in developing further. I’m talking about stuff like the packages website, GPNL, and the stats tracker. The packages frontend is about the only one I’m really satisfied with the way it is. All of them could use a lot of work though. GPNL hasn’t even come close to my original vision of what I’d like it to be. Part of the reason is because it’s just so hard to get metadata into the database, and it’s so time consuming to do trial runs and things that I’ve spent way more time writing scripts to collect data than analyze it. People keep asking me about the stats program, which I want to work on as well. The one that is currently online was really nothing more than a proof of concept to see if I could collect data remotely using shell tools, and how complex it would be. It turns out it was much simpler than I expected, so it’s given me a lot of ideas of where we could go with that. I think, though, that I probably won’t work on it until I get the other two finished up or at least advanced a bunch more though.

Also, a side note that just occurred to me. I don’t know about anyone else, but one thing that helps for me to get these things moving is knowing what kind of features people are interested in. I usually write these things so that I can fill a void — mine, to start with, but I’m always open to slapping on some useful features that I may not have thought of. Besides, it’s usually not hard once you have the base framework either. So, I need some ideas.

One last thing that’s been bugging me — I need to find a new domain name for this stuff. larrythecow.org is too long to type. I can’t think of anything I like, either. Something short would be nice.

Ah, my, lots to do, and not sure of what to work on next.