alex.polvi.net

Tonight we had a meeting with Greg and he blew our socks off. He had heard that mozilla released during one of our meetings, so being the Linux kernels 2.6.x.y maintainer he did the same. He showed the entire release process from checking his email for patches to uploading the .tar.gz. He even went as far to name this kernel release “Woozy Beaver” (2.6.11.8)!

In the announcement to the Linux kernel mailing list he thanked us, but the real thanks goes to him! Greg, thank you thank you thank you for everything you have done for the community including our own!

Photos here

Let it be known this is my first fly. Gorman said, “It only gets better from here.” Lets hope so.

Did an ACM workshop today regarding installing a blog on onid webspace. It was poorly advertised, so only one person showed up. At least they learned something. :)

Speaking is fun, perhaps I will do another.

The Linux Users Group shirt is finally coming together. I asked my friend Logan, who is very graphically inclined, to try and whip something up for us.

Needless to say, Logan rules. I could see this becoming a great logo for Linux in general.

Full pdf: front, back

The server that runs spreadfirefox was melting down because of the new firefox download counter. Going in to fix it we decided we would get much greater performance by caching the feed once a minute. This broke all the fancy live download counter plug-ins (sorry about that).

Since then it has been neat to see the evolution. The fancy live counters came back, this time using math to simulate being live. People have even started using regressions to find when we will hit 50,000,000 downloads.

Never really realized how many people were watching this little chunk of xml…

As silly as it sounds, it is a busy time to be a beaver. Today is sort of the last chance to sit back and breath. Here is a brief overview of the future:

• 30 mozilla servers land at OSL
• ACM Workshop on installing web apps, taught by yours truly
• GregKH is coming to visit OSU
• MTH351 Midterm
• New FTP hardware lands
• Physics + Botany midterms
• On going server madness at OSL
• Finding place to live in CA
• InstallFest3
• Finals
• Move to CA
• …

Good thing it is fun to be in way over your head!

I set up a guestbook based off of a wordpress plugin. Yeah, so, if you are out there and don’t mind letting me know you are, please sign the guestbook. :)

There has been a lot of talk about rss recently. One idea that I threw out to some of my friends is to have a free online rss planet creator for people to build communities. It would be like livejournal communities, except open to any feed. Seems like all sorts of interesting things could come out of it. I know I would use it to build a planet with just the blogs of my friends.

Some websites exist that allow you to create an online rss reader. However, I have yet to find one that will specifically publish combined feeds for anyone (for lj communities, you need to use lj) to read. For example, http://ziap.org/friends-of-alex would be the feed I set up for myself, but is still readable by anyone.

Another application could be mailing lists (thanks for the inspiration danny), you could set up “planets” that are just questions and have people blog comments as responses.

You could even add some smarts to avoid the problem of people cross posting to multiple planets.

If you know of a website that does this… let me know :)

Today I participated in my first “Rebuilding Together” event. A group of about 18 college students headed up to Portland and painted, fixed, and helped landscape Louise’s, the home owner, house. Being disabled, she had paid someone to do similar work and they just ran with the money. She then contacted the Rebuilding Together folks and they sent us!

It was surprising how quickly we could help clean the place up:

It ended up just being a good time hanging out with peers and doing community service. I think the best thing about it was that we were not affiliated with any student group or campus organization, just Andrea. We really took rebuilding “together” to the extreme because students were both from OSU and UO.

This was a grand ole adventure and I hope to do it again.

Good friends rocking out in the quad today. This is the first time I had seen them play outside the garage.