alex.polvi.net

Wow wow wow wow wow wow. That was a great meeting. We moved around a lot of money tonight. I truly felt as a student I was empowered. This sort of feeling does not come around often. After funds have been awarded I will be able to walk around campus and physically see things that would not be there unless I had protested for them. Amazing. There were literally times where people said, “The student has spoken it shall (or shall not) be funded.” Pretty crazy. We are not talking chump change either. Being the only student on the committee, it was hard to understand why more of my peers were not involved.

Some times it is hard to see what your involvement does to the community around you. This is not one of those cases.

It would be neat if there was some sort of package manager that allowed you to build a package from source (like emerge) and let you build it into a package (like apt) but then allowed you to open up your local repository for others to use. This would create an p2p style mirror network. If I knew my friend had a package I wanted, that was tuned how I wanted, I could grab it from him instead of grabbing it from a mirror. I predict that large mirrors like ftp.osuosl.org will be replaced with some sort of p2p mirroring network in near future. The total collective bandwidth alone of home users is huge!

It’s my brothers birthday, so here is a cake recipe. Thanks to Beth, in turn Mikes mom for letting me have this.

Yield: two 8″ or 9″ layers, or one 9″x13″ layer

• 2 c. flour
• 2 c. sugar
• 1 tsp. soda
• 1 tsp. salt
• 2/3 c. cocoa
• 3/4 c. oil
• 1 c. water
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 2 eggs
• 2/3 c. buttermilk

Grease and flour two 8″ or 9″ round pans (or a 9″x13″ pan).

Stir together flour, sugar, soda, salt and cocoa. Add oil, water and vanilla. Beat for 2 minutes on medium speed.

Lightly beat together eggs and buttermilk. Add to batter and beat 2 minutes at medium speed.

Divide batter between pans. Bake at 325˚ for 30-40 minutes. To test for doneness the cake will spring back when lightly touched on the top or insert a toothpick in the center, it should come out clean. Also sides of the cake will be slightly pulled from the pan when it is done.

Let the cakes sit in the pan for 10 minutes, turn out onto a wire rack. Allow to cool completely before frosting.

Yield: enough to frost two 8″ or 9″ layers, or one 9″x13″ layer

• 1 1/2 cups butter
• 1 c. cocoa
• 2 lbs. powdered sugar
• 1 Tbs. vanilla
• 1/2 c. milk (whole milk works best though)

In a large mixing bowl carefully beat together butter, cocoa, one pound of powdered sugar, vanilla and milk; scraping sides of bowl frequently. Add remaining powdered sugar, beat until creamy. Add more milk if necessary to make it the appropriate consistency. You also might want to have extra powdered sugar on hand in the event you add too much milk!

It has come to my realization that making progress and overall just getting things done is great. It can be hard for me to motivate myself, but man, when I do, it kicks ass!

Woohoo for getting stuff together.

I am back in Corvallis. Great to see some of the friends I neglected over break. One of my biggest concerns over break was what the heck I would do with only 12 credits. All the classes I wanted to register were full, and I was running out of hope. But then, out of the midst, came BASH! In particular:
watch "(lynx -dump http://catalog.oregonstate.edu/CourseDetail.aspx?subjectcode=COMM&coursenumber=111|head -n 175|grep -i no-show-drop|grep -v Inac)"
This allowed me to query the catalog and see if the class I wanted was open. Just so happened, after about 15min, it opened up!

Looks like this term is going to be great.

It’s small, crude, and not all that creative, but it was commited! One down.

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76362

I guess I deleted this post, so here are my resolutions again:

• Submit at least one patch to an open source project every three months
• Blog at least once a week

I have been working on getting pure 64bit linux on my newest toy. The machine is a dual 2.5ghz G5 (powermac7,3) , radeon 9600 XT graphics card, and a 20″ Apple aluminum (ALU) cinema display. So far the hardest piece has been getting xorg to work. Hopefully google will find this for someone who needs it.

/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Technology + goodwill can go along way!

Resume: http://alex.polvi.net/~polvi/resume.txt

Alex Polvi
alex at polvi net