Day: February 26, 2009

links for 2009-02-26

  • danieltenner.com — Counting hours doesn't make sense
    So the useful question is not “how many hours do you work?” but “how much energy do you put into your work?” Other useful questions that come with it are:

    * How much of your daily energy do you spend increasing your total energy? Do you feel you spend enough? Do you feel you spend it on the right things?
    * How much of your daily energy do you waste each day? How do you define waste? Is all that waste really unproductive or does it have some beneficial side-effects? Are those side-effects sufficient to justify spending that energy?
    * Do you spend energy on things which actively hurt you?
    * Has your daily energy increased or decreased in the last 6 months? year? 5 years?

    Any of these questions is more worthwhile than “How many hours do you work each day?”

    (tags: productivity)
  • Trolls
    There's a sort of Gresham's Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it. Which means that once trolling takes hold, it tends to become the dominant culture. That had already happened to Slashdot and Digg by the time I paid attention to comment threads there, but I watched it happen to Reddit.

    News.YC is, among other things, an experiment to see if this fate can be avoided. The sites's guidelines explicitly ask people not to say things they wouldn't say face to face. If someone starts being rude, other users will step in and tell them to stop. And when people seem to be deliberately trolling, we ban them ruthlessly.

    (tags: community)

Xorg-server 1.6 preview in Gentoo’s x11 overlay

To compete with Remi’s post about getting xorg-server 1.5.3 stable in Gentoo, here’s one about getting xorg-server 1.6, which was released today, into testing in the main tree. We’ve been maintaining the 1.6 release candidates in the x11 overlay for a while now. Tonight I added the final release to the overlay. (Update for Google users) What’s new in 1.6, you ask?

What’s left before it can move to the main tree? Here’s what I can think of, offhand:

  • The new XRandR stuff needs to get released upstream (randrproto, libXrandr, xrandr). Right now we’ve got the xrandr userland tool depending on live git of libXrandr, which won’t work for the main tree. (Update: randrproto and libXrandr 1.3 are out, just waiting on the userland tool xrandr)
  • We need to sort out the issue with XCB’s Xlib library renaming forcing recompiles of practically everything. This is becoming more and more of a blocker because now libXext 7.0.5 requires a new libX11. I think giving ourselves a hard blocker on 1.6 from this will help us get it fixed. See bug #248743 to track progress on this. (Update: solution in x11 overlay for testing)
  • The server now has a fix to keep looking for HAL if it’s not running when started. Should we change /etc/init.d/xdm to compensate for this change by no longer depending on hald, thus allowing gdm/kdm/etc to start earlier? This will give us one of the steps taken by the fastboot work seen lately in Moblin and elsewhere.
  • I think Remi’s going to add xf86-video-intel 2.6.2. (Update: done)
  • Our xinit is crazy stale, mainly because we patch it like crazy and I don’t like porting those. I’d like to get it updated to a current release for 1.6. In the longer term, we need to merge distro-neutral parts of our work upstream, but that’s not a 1.6 blocker.

To sum up, you can try xorg-server 1.6 now by adding the x11 overlay with layman, or you can wait for the above issues to get solved, and it will show up soon in testing in your main tree.