So, last night (well, the early morning – at least my time) welp and I were talking, and he linked me 2 articles that I found interesting…
Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?
and then
Who Killed the Software Engineer? (Hint: It Happened in College)
So, I use pfSense as my router – it has a spiffy web interface, and the shell isn’t too horrible either. It is FreeBSD 6.2 based… and the wireless cards are Atheros based.
02:0b.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)
is what both are reported as in Linux, and they work fine, as long as they aren’t in ap mode… Once I put them into AP mode, clients can associate, but they can not/will not pass any traffic. And if I look at the Interfaces page in the webgui, it shows tons of errors. One card is brand new, courtesy of Robert Piasek, and one card dsd sent me a while back, since I had no Atheros cards, and I was the madwifi-ng maintainer. The reason for the Atheros based, is that they are rock solid in FreeBSD (typically) however, as I stated above – I get nothing but errors with them now. This is why I haven’t done anything with NetworkManager lately, and really, all I can do at this point is to test the madwifi-ng drivers by loading them.
Kismet and the like work with them as well – the errors that I see don’t seem to affect that operation at all… just when I try to use the card in ap mode.
Anyone have any ideas what would cause this? Sure I know most people are using Gentoo, but perhaps someone in the Gentoo/FreeBSD team has some idea, or someone might point me to something they’ve seen…
Okay, so I was talking with Patrick, and he said “you should blog this!” and I thought, eh, maybe… so I’ve decided to go ahead and do it, perhaps someone out there will actually implement it while I work on other things and I can benefit from the fruits of their labor 
First off, issues that tend to crop up, keywording packages. Sure some arches are more responsive than others, and you can usually keyword it ~ if you have the hardware and can test it… but what if you don’t? You have a few different options – you can find someone who does, and beg them to do it, you can open a bug and beg them to do it, you can join an irc channel and beg them to do it, you can request an account on a box that infra controls and see if it works and do it…
I sumit… my idea…
Koji, Mock, and Xen.
Koji and Mock are a couple of Fedora projects that ease building of packages, with a web interface to request and see the status of builds… creating chroots to do so…
What if you took it a step further with Xen? You could then use domU’s to run the various arches (I think – this is just an idea, I have no idea of the feasibility of it, comments are more than welcome to flesh it out!) and get things compiled and keyworded…
But you could also take it a step further. You could integrate it into Bugzilla as well, perhaps even submitting ebuilds themselves to be tested to the build machine(s). Automatically submit bugs for keywording requests including the logs and possibly the package(s) as well so that rather than having the developer keyword it on his machine, he can install the binary package, and USE the program to see if it works without waiting for the package to compile…
Another usage would be… BINHOST – Gentoo’s portage DOES support installing from binary packages, and its quite easy to do so as long as you keep everything built with the same settings as whatever the BINHOST uses. So these packages could be synced somewhere for *anyone* to download and use as well. Which would give the packages more testing (since sometimes a developer of an arch might have no idea what to do to even test the package, but a user out there might want to – might even have already keyworded it on their machine and are already using it but hadn’t tested it. Along with the web interface, you could perhaps submit that you use the package, and any issues with it – if there are any bugs associated with it, these comments would get forwarded to the appropriate bug….
Thoughts? Comments?
Interesting – Sun already has PostgreSQL, wonder why they want MySQL as well…
(hat tip drac who unfortunately, I don’t have a link for)
So I’ve been working on a few things lately… and I just got a mail in my inbox from Amazon, about needing to add payment information for if/when my spot becomes available for the Amazon SimpleDB beta…
And it got me thinking… exactly why is it that I should be paying a company to beta test for them?
J5’s Blog » [ANNOUNCE] D-Bus 1.1.3 (1.2.0RC1) – “Quit nagging, it’s comming ” released
Woot… the release note that I’ve been waiting for… so I go to update it in cvs… and forgot to install cvs on this machine. Should be finished any minute now and I’ll be checking the tree out, hopefully, this should be in the tree tonight, I just need to verify all the patches that I’ve been using have been applied, I saw that quite a few from fdo’s bugzilla were, so we will see. Quite a few goodies in this release.
Update: This is now in Gentoo CVS (and should be on the mirrors by now) – Please test!
Also, for clarification, yes I know that dbus is in git – I meant the gentoo-x86 cvs tree that we Gentoo dev’s use to commit our ebuilds 
So, I know there is the greasemonkey api – and I haven’t delved into it much – but something I would like to see – something that uses google gears that would allow you to save all your saved chats via google gears so you can view them when offline – I realize this is an “online world” we live in these days, but there *are* occasions where you are offline. Anyone happen to know of one? Sure, I can use Pidgin, or some other random IM client that saves IM history but even then the viewers for the logs aren’t exactly stellar. Something akin to tracker would be nice as well, but I am curious if there is anything out there – I wasn’t really able to find anything in a *cursory* glance.