Well, last week was rather relaxing for me. Besides adding German descriptions for GLEP 34, my Gentoo work only involved the occassional version bumping and keywording of Ebuilds.

This gave me some free time to start playing around with Ruby on Rails, which so far has proven to be an excellent and easy to use framework. Thanks to Rob for adding this to the tree, because I was too lazy to do it for several month…

I also spent the last week on trying out a borrowed Vodafone UMTS datacard for my notebook (nifty, anyone wanna buy me one?) as well as improving my Snooker skills (finally an 18 point break, woohoo!). And yesterday a friend and I did some good ol’ funny bluejacking while we were having brunch.

Finally I wanted to say that I really despise certain people who radomly whore out their Amazon wishlists. Actually that was just a blatant lie to shamelessly advertise my own wish list.

As I think that ciaranm‘s GLEP 34 is a pretty neat idea, I today went ahead and added German longdescriptions to 90+ categories. I’ll try to do the remaining categories tomorrow, which shouldn’t be to much work as it seems like Kugelfang is already taking care of the sci- categories.

Besides that nothing special happended, but I’ve finally uploaded a screenshot of my current E16 setup to my dev webspace.

Well, actually I just wanted to add alexandria-0.5.0 to the tree. This however depended on ruby-gnome2-0.12.0 which means I ended up version bumping around 15 additional ebuilds and testing them for 3 different Ruby versions. I’d love to say that this was a funny excercise, but honestly I would be lying.

Besides that I finally took some time to start redesigning my personal dev webpage. Lazy bastard that I usually am, I just copied the concept and the style sheet (which I adjusted to my own liking) from ciaranm’s site. As I’ve always planned to buy him a beer for app-vim/gentoo-syntax if we ever meet, I guess that adds up to a second one. Now let’s just hope he never makes it to Vienna… ;) Anyway, I hope that my shiny new page will motivate me to finally add some content to it.

For the rest of the week university duties and lazyne…other projects kept me away from doing useful stuff, which is a bad thing™. Bad citizen428, no cookie!

This semester seems to be even worse than the last one, although I wouldn’t have thought that possible. This means time for Gentoo may be less than what I’d want it to be, but I fear that can’t be avoided when one’s studies are in their final year.

Anyway, today I finally found some time to do a lot of long overdue stable marking and also created an archive of the gentoo-bsd mailing list, which I will host until Gmane picks up the list. I hope that I will be able to do some “real” work next week.

Oh, and thanks to dsd and all the involved -infra guys for finally making Planet Gentoo a reality!

I finally found the time to try out Gentoo/FreeBSD. While doing that I thought I might as well write up some documentation. Well, here it is: A short guide to Gentoo/FreeBSD. I’ve also joined the BSD herd to stay up to date on development progress, but nonetheless contributions are more than welcome, mostly because I’m not sure how much time I really can spare for this project.

Ok, most of the people don’t like getting older. Nonetheless – like everything in life – it has its upsides too. The great Bouncing Souls summed it up very well in their biography:

“Love became something deeper and lasting, parties became gatherings instead of escapes, home became a feeling instead of mortar and wood.”

A remarkably true sentence, that puts getting older in a new perspective. At least for me.

It’s time for some good Ruby-related news again! After version bumping ncurses-ruby I added two new packages to the tree.

The first one is ruby-mp3info and was submitted via Bugzilla. It’s written in pure Ruby and gives you access to a lot of low level information about mp3 files, like bitrate and samplerate. Besides that it can read and write id3v1 and read id3v2.

But the really cool thing I’ve added today is RubyTorrent. I’ve stumbled across this project a while ago and took the 0.3 release as a motivation to finally add it to the tree. Check it out, it’s really cool stuff.

Here’s an example that I’ve stolen from the project’s website:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

require 'rubytorrent'
bt = RubyTorrent::BitTorrent.new(ARGV.shift)
thread = Thread.new do
  while true
    puts bt.percent_completed
    sleep 15
  end
end
bt.on_event(self, :complete) { thread.kill }
thread.join

It’s done! Only 5 month (sic!) after our great trip to Ireland I finally managed to upload some pictures to my gallery.

Click and thou shalt see!

Looking at those pics again I just remembered how much I really enjoyed our time there!

Quoting from this weeks Gentoo Weekly Newsletter, section “Gentoo in the press”:

The German Linux Magazin carries an article by Gentoo developer Michael Kohl in its latest number. Michael explains the catalyst release engineering tool and the release process for Gentoo Linux on three pages full of interesting details, mentioning examples for using catalyst to create variant LiveCDs like the German “Fizzle Wizzle” release that includes a complete KDE environment running Knoppix-like from the CD without the need to install on the harddisk. The printed magazine is available at newsstands in Germany since Thursday last week, and also includes an additional Gentoo installation rundown by editor Oliver Frommel.

Unfortunately the article can’t be found online†, so you have to go buy the magazine if you want to read it.

†I’ve already talked to the editorial staff of Linux Magazin and should be able to put up an HTML version of the text next month.

Ok, I know Hattrick is only a game. But one I’ve played constantly for more than 25 month now and which has more than 500.000 users wold wide. Therefore I really get a kick out of being elected new national team coach for the Chinese U20, with approximately a third of all votes going to me!

I know this means that I will spend even more time on the site than I already do, but that’s ok, at least for me… ;)