the thought process

Some of my friends, notably the close ones who are brazen enough to try and figure out what is going on inside my head (heaven help them), often ask me what in the world my thought process is.  I can only assume that listening to me talk is like trying to watch someone on crack play a pinball game.

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. 🙂

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