O’Reilly recently introduced a new pocket guide to using Linux on desktops. They kindly made the first chapter, on distributions, freely available. In it, David Brickner has a nice table comparing the top 5 distros: Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, SUSE and Ubuntu.

On a 1-5 scale, Gentoo got a 2 for installation, a 3 for configuration, a 4 for package management and a 5 for documentation and community.

The installer project has put a great deal of work into what many see as Gentoo’s weakest point over the past couple of years. It’s now in its 0.2 release and working toward 0.3. I’m quite pleased to see that Brickner mentioned our beta installer in the book. Although I’ve since handed off leadership to Andrew Gaffney, I still feel some pride of parenthood.

Unfortunately the desktop research project has mostly died off, because that team promised much toward fixing our second-lowest point, configuration tools. If anyone would like to help revive it, please get in touch with me.

I’m a bit surprised that package management was only at a 4 rather than a 5, but perhaps that’s because Gentoo lacks an officially supported GUI package manager. Many exist, however, and porthole stands out among them.

I’ve decided to take a short break from IRC on Freenode and see how that affects my productivity. If you need to talk to me, try e-mail or IRC on another network, such as OFTC or EFNet.

In my life outside of Gentoo, I’m a graduate student in biochemistry and biophysics. But in a previous incarnation, I was a professional copy editor with about 5 years experience, and I worked at a number of newspapers.

As you know if you’ve ever read anything written by most open-source programmers, English grammar and spelling often are not their strongest suits. I’d like to give back to the community in a way that few people can, and that’s by copy editing. The rarest skills in open source are those that seemingly have nothing to do with open source.

That brought something to my mind. How do people with these rare open-source skills make themselves valuable to the broader community? No Web sites exist that say, “Copy editors sign up here. Graphic artists, head over that way. Public-relations experts, first hallway on the left. Lawyers, off this way, please.” The closest thing I know of is openusability.org, but that’s for just one narrow niche.

Do we need something like this? I say yes. The non-coding contributors to open source represent the rarest commodity we have. We need to find a way to get them involved, and to tell them how to get involved.

As a postscript, anyone who needs copy editing for your open-source project, just drop me a note and I’ll try my best to help you out.

My old HP PhotoSmart printer died the other day, so I headed to OfficeMax to pick up a replacement. Figured that if I’m going to get one, I might as well get a good one. Spent $200 on the PhotoSmart 8250, and another $100 on the miscellaneous junk one has to get with a new printer (spare ink cartridges, usb2 cable, more photo paper, etc).

I did some research before buying it and it looked like it ought to work alright, since linuxprinting.org showed the 8200 as fully supported. We got it home and it printed on standard paper nearly instantly, which I was quite pleased with.

But when I tried to print photos from Gimp, things went downhill fast. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to take paper out of the photo tray. I tried for hours, all these different combinations of settings plus the photo-tray button on the printer. I also upgraded from gimp-print 4 to the latest gutenprint 5.0.0-rc1, and that didn’t help either.

Somehow I’m left feeling like ESR.

Hopefully some sink time will get it supported. In the meantime, I’ll probably be trying the printer on OS X.

This morning, I went in to the big traffic+city violations hearing and waited my turn. All along I debated whether to go with guilty, no contest or not guilty. I figured that not guilty would be more likely to get me a stiffer fine if I couldn’t get the ticket dismissed because I’d require a trial etc. No contest seems like a really lawyer-y thing to do, and I wanted to come off as a nice guy.

So I decided to just plead guilty and hope for a lenient sentence, after explaining the situation. And damn, I couldn’t have asked for better. The judge bent the rules and let me go to traffic school instead of putting the ticket on my record. Normally, only minors can do that, but he figured since I’m still a student and I have a clean record, it was pretty fair. Also, I have to write an essay about what I learn.

Unfortunately that still means I’ll be paying about $225 instead of $425, for random fees and the class. But suddenly that amount is so much more reasonable, especially when considering I won’t get an insurance increase along with it. I got a delayed payment plan, so I’ll have some time to come up with it.

I just booted up the Pegasos again and updated it to current Portage stuff, so I can start testing modular X on PPC. Next week, I should have some more time to begin working on this, because I have two midterms this Friday: quantum mechanics and linear algebra. Hope they go well; I haven’t made it to class much so far.

On the bright side, today my scores came in for my first departmental exams. First, I’ll have to explain what they are. Each quarter, starting in the second year, graduate students take an exam consisting of two questions. The questions are quite complex and regularly take multiple pages to answer. General topics are posted the Thursday before the exam, which is on Tuesday. We take all the time off in between and study 12+ hours a day.

Well, except for me. Relatives were in town for the weekend, so I didn’t get to study very much at all until Monday, with the exception of a few late-night jaunts to Shari’s (the local 24-hour restaurant).

To stay in the program, we need to pass 6 questions out of 12 opportunities, which many students barely make (and a few don’t). Minimum passing score is a 70.

My scores were an 89 and a 79. So tonight I’m going to celebrate.

Take a look at this great entry from the Passionate Users blog, based on a speech by Paul Graham.

Given all the talk about professional behavior lately on Gentoo public and private lists and IRC channels, it’s worth some thought.

I think this post really typifies the place Gentoo is at now — choosing between professional and staid, or “start-up”-like and crazy. But perhaps we can have the best of both worlds.

Out of procrastination, I decided to check my junk mail stats this morning. Since Aug. 1, 2004, I’ve gotten 153,828 e-mails. Out of those, server-side spamassassin caught 52,805 as spam. That’s about one-third spam, two-thirds real mail.

After that, I have Thunderbird’s junk mail filter. Since January 19, 2005, it’s caught 5701 spam. Let’s extrapolate that back to Aug. 1 to get around 8800 spam it would have caught, assuming roughly the same amount goes out every month.

Now my “real” e-mail percentage is down to (153,828 – 52,805 – 8800) / 153,828, or about 60%. But of that, I still have to mark undetected spam as junk so the filter will catch it next time. I’d estimate this is about 10% of the remaining email. Next, let’s consider that I haven’t used Thunderbird solidly for the past year, and take off another 10% for that.

So let’s say around 50% of what I get is real mail, and 50% is spam. Consider this: each day, I get around 360 e-mails. Half of that is spam, so I’m reading 180 real e-mails every day. I’m not on any high-traffic lists anymore, so these are all pretty relevant.

Once I’m done reading, how much of my spare time is left to do actual work?

How’s that compare with other people?

I just got a wonderful ticket for $421 today for running a school bus’s red light that was really yellow, four lanes over on the other side of the highway. Good thing that cop a couple hundred feet past the other side, behind lots of cars and three lanes over, had such a great view of what was going on and whether I was actually parallel to the bus at the time.

The most annoying part is that I was in this area with no clue where I was going, trying to read addresses in the opposite direction, and the cop didn’t have an ounce of sympathy. Seriously, my day, no, my month is already ruined, I’ve already been punished. You don’t even need to give me the ticket.

Really looking forward to my court date Oct. 26 and hoping I can get it either dismissed or at least reduced, based in part on my squeaky clean driving record, because there’s no chance in hell I can come up with that kind of money.

This is probably the worst day I’ve had in the past five years.

One more note: Even the cop who pulled me over told me to go to court and ask the judge to dismiss or reduce the fine.

For anyone interested in Magic, here’s my first deck idea: U/W control. Now I’ve got some cards to work on getting. It’s designed for a post-Mirrordin-block environment, but doesn’t have any Ravnica cards yet because I haven’t looked through the list.

4x Dampen Thought
4x Millstone
2x Keiga, the Tide Star
2x Cloudhoof Kirin
4x Serra Angel
2x Honden of Seeing Winds
2x Disrupting Shoal
3x Mana Leak
4x Hinder
2x Rewind
2x Twincast
3x Wrath of God
1x Final Judgment
2x Ghostly Prison

4x Adarkar Wastes
4x Plains
15x Island