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Just noticed that I haven’t blogged since August – I know I posted something on my personal site, but nothing on here recently, so lets do some catchup…

DBus is rearing up and getting really close to a 1.0 release.  J5 got tired of waiting for someone to do the FreeBSD patches (and people complain about RedHat not caring about others!) and grabbed a FreeBSD LiveCD, and wrote a couple of things needed, though I believe a couple of things are still not up to snuff (by reading the postings on the ML) and I haven’t had a chance to play with any of it at all.

Someone named SaintDev has popped into the Gentopia channel “recently” (is it really recently, I don’t honestly pay as much attention to IRC as I used to these days, Email is probably better to get ahold of me)  and has been working on the Gentoo backend for NetworkManager.  Speaking of which – I am planning on getting a cvs snapshot into Gentopia’s overlay soon.

Speaking of the overlay – we are no longer on gentooexperimental.org (though many many thanks to BonsaiKitten for hosting us for so long!)  and are now on the official Gentoo site – http://overlays.gentoo.org – No, most of our trac/wiki items are not ported over to it, but the overlay itself is – so those of you who think we have been lying dormant…  we haven’t – at least, not entirely

Also on the DBus front… dbus-sharp… there are new managed bindings, and apparently, a few apps use them already, though alp says they aren’t really ready for prime time.  I haven’t looked into them at all honestly.  And, we also have in Gentopia, the bindings from the previous version of DBus – well, the last monolithic release.  These are not spectacular, and really, even though I wrote the ebuild for them, Genstef is the one who imported them (from my own personal overlay) – and as much as I don’t want to support them, any testing is greatly appreciated.  Assuming we go ahead and put both these, and the other dbus bindings into portage (possibly slotted, possibly just finally kicking the old bindings in the junk) then we can (finally) unmask dbus .9x which is what people have been asking for.

Other than that, on my end, not a whole lot is new.  Oh, I was supposed to goto the Google SoC Mentor Summit, but due to my pos car dying on the way to the airport, I missed my flight.  Leslie even tried to get me onto a later flight, but to no avail.  Alas, I did not get to meet the enthralling Christel, and try to take advantage of her   Oh well, there is always next year!

I have been mainly focusing on work related things lately.  I work for a company that has been around for, quite a while – in fact, at one point there were 100 employees, however, we have downsized (quite a bit!) and there are currently 8 total employees, and most of our sales is done by channel partners (about 70) and one main person here at our office.   Since there is only 8 of us, we all pretty much wear many hats here at work, with mine being mostly technical support for both our Windows clients, and our Linux servers.  Also programming, and research.  At the moment, I am trying to formulate the best way to sync our servers against our database (it syncs against the database and writes a flat file currently – WHEN it actually syncs.)  One thing we want, is the ability to “turn it off” – for example, we have customers who continue to use our machines after ending the contracts with us (and they don’t ship the hardware back to us – but we are working on it!) and so the ability to turn off them getting updates is an important feature.  Currently, my thinking is, rsync, with X.509 certificates, and generating the certificate to be valid for as long as the contract with us is initially, and if they renew, then generate a new certificate for them.  To that end, I have been looking into various ways of making it easier to generate and control them, as it needs to be easy for anyone else, who may follow in my footsteps (not that they would have huge shoes to fill ) or anyone else here who may have not a clue what they are doing, but can follow a few points and clicks.  Recently, Odyssi was pointed out to me, anyone have any experience with it?  Or know of something along those lines?  Or hell, if you do any rsyncing with authentication, what has worked for you, and what hasn’t – this is the research I am currently doing.

Also, I have picked up a few packages from Seemant recently, as he was simply proxy maintaining them, and I happen to use some of them for my job.  A few of which have some bugs that I have noticed from using them at work (if you use sqsh, don’t enter $ and hit enter!) and I haven’t gotten around to fixing them.  I keep meaning to, but just really busy at work lately, as others have been out sick, and then I was out sick.  Wireless still isn’t working at home, I think I may just bite the bullet and buy a new wireless AP – either that, or get an Atheros based PCI card to put into my pfSense box (or get a WRAP) and use it.  Since wireless isn’t working, I tend to not use the laptops as much at home, since I don’t like to be tethered there.

Work bought me an AMD64 machine as an upgrade for my workstation.  I am having fun learning about all the cool new features (and Firefox compiles in about 30 minutes!)  and I can definitely tell that the response time is better.  Expect some ~amd64 lovin on some packages I add to Portage that aren’t already in now!

I think that pretty much brings us up to speed.  Not sure if I forgot anything.  Lemme know if you have any questions about anything!

So, it has been a while since I have posted any type of personal blog post, so I guess I am going to now…

On the home front, my roommate is retarded… yeah…  and ninja (aka crackhead) our cat is now on a diet.  He isn't liking it very much at all.  And is extremely vocal about the fact that he doesn't like it.  Specially when someone goes into the kitchen to get something.  He is currently sitting on my lap, watching me write this heh.

 On the work front…  well, I am now the "goto" guy – Chris (Agent86) has taken on some new tasks at work, and they really want to make sure I know things that I need to know, and so I am pretty much being "fed to the wolves" – which is fine by me, I like it… Just wonder how some of these people got to be the system administrators…

I am sure you are wondering why the hell I am posting at 4am my time… Well, the reason is, I can't sleep – well, not so much that I can't sleep, as that I couldn't sleep a couple of nights ago because of a really weird dream where someone was trying to kill me.  So I didn't get much sleep last night either, and since I went in to work early yesterday, I left about 20 minutes early today (well, I was going to leave an hour early, but its kinda funny how I rarely leave work when I say I am going to) and when I got home, decided to take "a nap" – a 6 hour nap that is, so now, I am up.  Woo.

That is all for now.  Yes, I didn't mention anything on the relationship front, yes there is a reason for this, and no, I will not tell you (yet)