ken’s blog

It is now complete and cooked into my conary repository, currently at conary.vandine.org@ken:desktop.

Just shadowed all of the GNOME sources from the conary.specifix.com@spx:linux… woo hoo!

I am now gonna update the versions and cook up GNOME 2.10 Beta 1 into the desktop repository, stay posted.

iLife ‘05 has been delivered… finally! I have typically had good experiences with Fedex, but this was aweful. I spent a week getting contradicting stories from them. They kept telling me they had picked it up from the other address… but they weren’t delivering it. At one point they said they had made attempts to deliver it two days in a row… but Laurie was home those days and there was no notes left on the door. Then, they told me they still had not picked it up from the other residence… Anyway, I finally got sick of going in circles and called Apple. They overnighted it again. Should have done that from the get go… but it should have been simple for Fedex to handle it. I guess it is true, hind sight is 20/20.

I have worked out the issues I was still having with Beagle, works great! I pulled a snapshot from cvs as of this morning, which seems pretty stable… so far

Also added a script to /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/ to start dbus and beagled correctly when logging in with GDM. This also works well. Created a best.desktop file so now we have a launcher for Best. One note, if your home directory is big it may appear to take a while to get going… be patient, all is well.

Cool stuff…

Why is change control so hard? Why can’t people think before they release? I understand if you are in heavy development, Alpha or Beta phases even. But, in a production environment with customers depending on you… why would you deploy changes that simply break the way people do business?

At my job, we have a vendor, an ASP that provides an “API” for us to access our data. This “API” is really just an xml output from a web server, but it does the job. We suck data down and import it into our system nightly. This vendor, periodically, makes changes that break this “API” without even thinking about the consequences.

Change control really isn’t hard, but it just must not be human nature…

I think this is a common problem in IT, but not other industries. Imagine if a team working on a pipeline in Alaska didn’t follow proper change contol guidelines? Or an F-15 mechanic? If they can do it, we can do it!

Ok, I am done ranting for now…