As that famous song [YouTube, last.fm] says, it’s been a while. Since last I blogged, that is. Lots of stuff going on in my world, although I haven’t been spending enough time on Gentoo lately.
I’ve joined the Web 2.0 trend, using Google Reader and saving my bookmarks on del.icio.us via the wonderful Firefox plugin. Next thing you know, I’ll be reading Digg or another equally trendy Slashdot replacement. The only thing like that I read now is the superb LWN. I just added the Planet Conary feed (thanks ferringb!), because I think there’s a lot Gentoo can learn from rPath, since it’s got a similar base.
My Gentoo activity is probably best illustrated via the CIA commit stats — only 9 commits this week and 41 this month. A large part of my drop in commit activity lately is thanks to Joshua Baergen (Josh_B on IRC), who’s really started to take over X maintenance with double my commits this month, mostly in preparation for X.Org 7.2 as well as the new input-hotplug work for X.Org 7.3.
In Gentoo, we plan to show you a mixture of 7.2 and 7.3. What we try to do is mix and match the latest individual X component releases wherever they’re compatible, regardless of which “official release” they come from. So you may already have a number of input-hotplug components, and the only changes you’d need to make are the server and drivers. This mirrors what you saw with 7.0 and 7.1, where the server and drivers lagged back on 7.0 waiting for Nvidia and ATI while all the other components jumped to 7.1.
I’d like to publicly thank Diego Pettenò (look, I got the accent right!) for his contributions to XCB, both in my overlay and upstream. On that note, I encourage anyone using my overlay to send me patches for anything that doesn’t work. There’s no reason a personal overlay should only hold commits from that person.
In the past month, I’ve gotten in touch with two new, exciting ventures using Gentoo. Engine Yard is a Ruby on Rails deployment provider that allows you to purchase virtual clusters, and SiCortex is an innovative HPC cluster creator that uses Gentoo on clusters with 5,800 nodes. Check out the videos on the Engine Yard site, they’ve got one specifically about their use of Gentoo.
I’ve also taken on the job of creating a monthly newsletter for the OSEL, which aims to get more students involved in open source at OSU and liaise with the academic side of the university, while the LUG interfaces with the local community and the OSL connects with the broader, outside community. This is really exciting for me because I’ve got a significant journalism background [PDF] (and no, that contact information is no longer accurate), but I haven’t had a chance to use it for a couple of years. I’ll share the first issue with all of you once I finish it.
Striving for greatness 