The Gentoo Foundation has pondered feature bounties. Thus, this post should be required reading for everyone involved in the decision process on them.

It’s also got some ideas on feature voting.

According to Learning Python, I am now an Official Python Programmer. Even though I can’t do anything useful in the language yet. =)

BTW, page 453.

Fortune:
“Success is determined by how and what you think about.”

This fortune really makes me think about Linux’s success, and how it relates to the community’s ability to focus on specific goals.

I got the latest issue of Linux Magazine yesterday, and I’m quite happy about it. It reminds me why I continue to subscribe to these magazines. There were three useful articles this time around:

• One on Nagios 2.0; I’m always interested in monitoring, particularly as it pertains to clusters.
• Another on Linux in telecom; I’m particularly interested in this because of the Gentoo embedded project.
• And finally, a fairly general article on abstracting system administration for large numbers of machines; again, this is cluster-related.

I suppose I should link Gentoo’s cluster project, since I’m talking about clusters.

Rizzo, maybe this will help. Bug #11359 is fixed in Portage CVS, and it should show up soon. Beeps aren’t too useful when tons of users start emerges and go to sleep, or leave for the day, or detach their screen session, etc.

Thanks!

I got to page 420 in this Python book during lunch today. But then I got home after work and did absolutely nothing all night. Just dicked around on IRC. I probably could’ve gotten halfway to the end of this book from where I am now.

About the only useful thing I did tonight was uninstall netscape-flash in favor of swfdec. That involved version bumps in my overlay, because liboil (a dependency) and swfdec are both a bit outdated in the tree. I’d heard of swfdec before when anholt was talking about hacking on it but didn’t realize ds was behind it.

I also spent a little time looking at some of the installer code. Python can be a lot more convoluted than I had realized. =)

self._arch_template = getattr(template, templates[self._configuration.get_architecture_template()])(self._configuration, self._install_profile, self._pretend)

Any good (Python coders and Gentoo users), let me know if you’re interested in helping out or hop on #gentoo-installer on Freenode IRC. The project is coming along quite nicely.

Gentoo’s Bugzilla is finally about to get some really sweet features that I’ve wanted for a while:

• Strikethrough on closed bugs in other bugs’ dependency lists (this used to work, then died)
• The ‘Reply’ link on comments (potentially the coolest Bugzilla feature ever)

Fortune:
“You will be awarded a great honor.”

Confident of his allegation? Many people have higher things on their priority list than caring about the flame of the day. And many others don’t actually read Planet Gentoo. There are so many channels for Gentoo-related info at this point that it’s quite difficult to follow all of them.

Everyone on the devrel alias got the log of the conversation with Ciaran regarding his “censorship.” So you’re left with a few possibilities:

• It’s a cabal of people, yet managers can still overrule it. The cabal is always gaining new members, yet all its members keep all these secrets.
• People think things are blown out of proportion, and they don’t care to fan the flame.
• People think this is the wrong forum for dealing with his claims, for various reasons.
• They don’t care what he said.

That’s all I’m interested in saying on the topic. If you want the whole other side of the story, bug a devrel lead. I don’t feel comfortable posting confidential info.

Another 50 pages of Python tonight. Only ~200 more to go in this book. I’m not sure where I’ll go next. Perhaps I’ll just look at a bunch of code to see whether I need more. Dive Into Python might be nice, since I can read online for free and pick up a paper copy later on — I saw one Sunday at Borders. I’ve been told Programming Python is outdated, so I should hold off on it.

Spent a bunch of my free time this weekend going through Learning Python, which I bought about six months ago but never started. I’m about 200 pages in, and there are another ~300 to go. With luck, should be able to finish it off by the end of next weekend.

Fortune:
“Creativity is your ace in the hole.”

Fantastic news! The D.C. circuit federal appeals court threw out the broadcast flag.