that’s whacked

ramblings

Thursday, Jun 1. 2006  –  Category: Computers, Football, Musings, OpenSolaris

i’ve been horribly delinquent in posting to my blog recently (aside from the brief cheer for a Bay Area MLS team a few days ago)

so, here goes one of my patented brain-dumps about what i’ve been up to recently. work stuff first. then personal.

i’ve become an intern sponsor for OpenSolaris, and started out sponsoring a few of Rich Lowe’s fixes. it’s been great to see the process working first-hand, but there’s nothing like being an actual sponsor and working hand in hand with someone in the community to make OpenSolaris better. the collaboration is great… IRC, IM, email, we have almost all the tools we need….

….one tool we don’t quite have yet is full SCM for ON. it’s coming, i swear it is. actually, a lot of my time spent recently has been on getting ON to build in Mercurial. this encompasses a few things: converting ON to Mercurial, and making sure ON builds cleanly without Teamware/SCCS around. these were actually some of the bugs that Rich and I have been working on. all my scripts/code to convert ON to Mercurial seem to be working well… well enough in fact that we started publishing Mercurial bundles on Tuesday. this was really gratifying, it’s a huge step forward to allowing community members to properly get diffs, build patches, etc.

the other OpenSolaris related thing i’ve been working on is getting the infrastructure ready for the SCM beta test phase. the companion CD, and JDS will be our first beta testers, and i’m sure it’s gonna be a rocky first few steps - but this is a big step forward to getting SVN/Hg hosting on opensolaris.org for our projects. this has been heinously complicated, mainly because there are so many groups involved. i’ll spare you all the details, but suffice it to say - that this has at times been tedious and frustrating - but it’s also been necessary, so oh well… some things you just have to put your head down and work on for the better good i guess.

as for all my copious spare time away from Sun, i’ve been working on the house - cleaning up the basement and painting in an attempt to remodel one of the rooms into a storage/work-area. we’re getting closer to having a non-repulsive basement now. wendy and i bought a 37″ LCD HDTV which has been nice. conveniently, in time for the HD coverage of the World Cup. the TV purchase, and the recent gift of an Opteron 185 chip from a friend gave me impetus to finally build the HDTV MythTV box i’ve been dreaming of for a while… so i went out and purchased all the components i need to build a super-uber-coolio HDTV MythTV box with 2 tuners. this will be my summer project, and one i’ll be blogging about periodically. i’m also hopefully going to install the SunRay server software on it and have an uber home server.

it’s been years since i’ve built my own machine (freshman year of college i think…), so i’m pretty excited to be geeking out on a project like this. it’ll be a lot of fun.

last weekend we headed to Denver for Wendy’s sister’s wedding. it was weird being in Denver with 90 degree weather. my body and brain is so conditioned to Denver being only a place to go snowboard… it was bizarre.

anyway. random ramblings are over. the webapp is done building (or complaining, at this point), so i need to get back to work. stop reading this junk, and go get some work done yourself.