I love the fall. The tropical storms sweeping up the coast, fewer days when air conditioning is required, the start of breweries releasing pumpkin ales.
I haven’t been going out as much lately, been hanging in and getting work done on projects. Even so, I’m tired, I need a vacation. I might talk to my boss this week about taking a long weekend for my birthday at the end of the month.
In the meantime, projects!
Following my article in Full Circle Magazine, where I mentioned Gourmet Recipe Manager I decided to lend a hand with it by offering to package it for Debian. The fellow who runs the project has been very helpful, so I’m excited to say he went ahead and added me as a Packager on the project. This weekend I went through the debian/ directory in CVS (first time using CVS for me) and was able to commit some changes to bring the lintian warnings in the package down from 37 to 16. It still needs some work, and after a couple of hours working with the unstable tarball I decided to hold off on packaging that until it goes stable.
Speaking of sourceforge, I’m also now a Packager on the LedgerSMB team. I uploaded my first .deb to the project on sourceforge late last week. Luckily they use svn ;)
All this Debian packaging, huh? I’ve been backing away from advocacy a bit these past few weeks and going back to focusing on the technical stuff. I seem to go in phases with F/OSS stuff, and the past year and a half I’ve been on a pretty solid advocacy streak. I missed the technical stuff, and after being away from it for a while I’m finding a lot of enjoyment in diving back in. Learning a lot again, becoming more familiar with the whole Debian packaging infrastructure past “phew it works” and into “I *get* how it works”. It’s actually got me considering starting the New Maintainer process in Debian sometime soon. We’ll see how I progress over the next few months.
On Saturday I had lunch at Capone’s in Norristown with Connor Imes, who just recently moved to the area from CA for work. He’s done a considerable amount of work with the Ubuntu Beginners Team, and I took the opportunity to try and nag him and the team into doing some classes for Ubuntu Classroom. We’ll see where it goes, if anything I got to meet a cool new local and to enjoy a Dogfish Head PunKin Ale.
Saturday evening I ended up skipping down to Union Jack’s to meetup with one of the help staff of DarkMyst where I enjoyed a Southern Tier PunKing and a slice of chocolate cake. They also had that crazy Banana Bread ale on tap, which is good, but so wrong, it really tastes quite like you’re drinking banana bread. Today I got snagged into helping a bit with the DarkMyst website, which needs to be redone a bit.
I started playing with VirtualBox this weekend. Aside from Xen at work, I’ve never actually played with much virtualization softwalre. VirtualBox is a treat, I grabbed the .deb from their site (the one in the Hardy repos is a bit old) and had little trouble getting a Debian Testing w/ Gnome and Windows 2000 install up and running. Fun stuff.
What did I do today? I don’t remember, I slept until almost noon and frittered most of the afternoon away after enjoying a breakfast of pancakes and eggs that Michael made (yay!). This evening was pizza from the last local place we hadn’t tried. Result? They had a good beer selection, but the pizza isn’t great, and their hotwings are abysmal. Pity.
Tired, now sleep.