Sunday, April 27, 2008

<3 X, PulseAudio, and DAAP

So, right now, I'm sitting at my comp listening to Norah Jones. But this isn't like any other music-listening time. Right now, I'm:


  1. Logged into a lab computer via XDMCP: I could've used VNC, but that would've required someone to be logged-in on the lab comp.

  2. Using my laptop's PulseAudio as the lab computer's default PulseAudio sink: This makes the lab computer's PulseAudio send all sound to my laptop's PulseAudio by default.

  3. Connected to my laptop's DAAP share from the lab computer's Rhythmbox: The music on my laptop becomes accessible from the lab computer's Rhythmbox.



This setup results in me playing Norah Jones on the lab computer, and listening to it here :)

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Google Summer of Code, Gentoo

Right after the GSoC results were announced, Anant Narayanan sent an email to the gentoo-soc ML welcoming the students with lots of good advice about how to proceed, what all they can expect, and what all they're expected to do. Thanks Anant!

The only thing about that email that irked me was that third party source code management systems such as code.google.com, sf.net, and repo.or.cz were recommended for hosting the source code. Now, for a small project that does not have much in the name of Infra, this would be acceptable, but for a full-fledged organisation with a dedicated infra team, this looks quite shoddy (this probably happened due to insufficient communication between gentoo-soc and gentoo-infra). And on top of that, projects getting distributed across several repositories makes it impossible to find the code during and after SoC is finished. For instance, I am completely unable to find the code for a lot of the SoC 2007 projects.

Now, I understand that Gentoo Infra is very short-staffed and overworked at the moment, and hosting dedicated Trac setups for all the students is not an easy task. So I poked my mentor Patrick Lauer and asked him if he could host Redmine at gentooexperimental which could then be used as a central place for tracking/hosting all the Gentoo SoC projects. He agreed, but his dislike of Rails meant that I would have to do the setup and manage it.

And so it was done, and an email sent to the list. soc.gentooexperimental.org now hosts Redmine for project management.

After a small chat with Donnie Berkholz on IRC, we agreed that hosting the source code under Gentoo Infra and using Redmine for the rest of the stuff would be best. OTOH, Alec Warner was in favour of giving the students full freedom with hosting their projects as long as the place of their choice was usable. I replied to his email suggesting that in the interest of keeping the projects accessible from one place, people who want to do their development somewhere else be asked to create a dummy project at soc.ge.o which points to the place where the actual development is taking place.

Let's see how things turn out.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Wheeeeeeeeeee

So today was the day.
An insane night, on an insane channel.

So we were promised Cake.
Which got a bit delayed,
but the end we got a plate
Which was truly worth the wait

Translation: I've gotten accepted into GSoC, and the community bonding period has begun!

A couple of people I know got accepted as well -- Satya, Ramnik, and Siddarth. This will be a fun summer *grin*.

I was going through the abstracts of the accepted applications in orgs that interest me, and I found the following to be *very* interesting (in no specific order):

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

portage/pkgcore rhyme

Please don't kill me for the bad rhyming :)

I sit down to emerge -av
It churns through the dependencies
I get frustrated in 2 minutes
pmerge -a is what was amiss

I alias `emerge` to spit out a warning
that a crappy PM is what I'm invoking
Now I'll remember to always use;
pmerge so my time's not abused!


Comments on the crappiness of these lines are welcome.
More such rhymes revolving around Gentoo are even more welcome ;)

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

'tis a time to rejoice

net-libs/xulrunner-1.9_beta5 and www-client/mozilla-firefox-3.0_beta5 are in-tree!

If you wanna pat someone's back, hop onto #gentoo-bugs and holler for armin76 :)

Sunday, April 6, 2008

mewants





Give them to me.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Far too true:





Listening to: I am Turning Into God by Trent Reznor, remixed by chris_himself