Category: personal

Why, what?

If it’s a hardware failure, why does it strike twice in a row at 6 AM? If the four NIC goes bonkers, why is that related to the sound card? If it is a bus, why does a freaking centimeter make a difference?

I don’t know.

All I do know is, that I am back online. Different four NIC, different slot, minus sound card. So what the hell is really failing here? The four NIC, the sound card, the board — or a combination thereof?

Definitely a combination. Something died, something is about to die.

I am online. For the moment.

Hackergotchi

Finally, got myself a floating head. Woot! Yes, that’s me on the left (or right, depending where you actually read this).

After being physically maltreated to get some decent pictures taken to work with, getting nicened-up, re-assembled and undergoing other unspeakable treatment — it is done. Thanks a ton to the artist, a close friend of mine.

Oh, and yeah, unlike most pictures of me, I actually like my little hackergotchi. 🙂

You can find it live right next to my posts on Planet GNOME, Planet Openismus, as well as statically on my blog‘s main site.

SpamAssassin committer status

More backlogged news. I’ve been invited and accepted to become a SpamAssassin committer a couple weeks ago. Quite an honor, given there are not many hackers with this status. Even more so, because I did contribute to SA before in various ways, but didn’t yet submit rules or code for upstream inclusion.

I guess, coming up with a few rules that seriously hit low-scoring spam, while resulting in a (less than) negligible amount of false positive hits triggers some attention. The style of arguing and dealing with the developers may have helped, too. Anyway, I am now one of these developers myself. Yay me. 😉

Unfortunately, ever since I’ve been granted this status, I didn’t have the time nor sufficient sneaky spam to develop new rules. Until now. Spotted a pattern yesterday night, and hacked up some rules — turns out, this is a new ratware variant, no hits older than a week. I expect more of these, soon.

Thanks guys (you know who you are). Access to the nightly mass-checks is just awesome to check a rules performance in development.

You do not talk about fight club

Consequently, I shouldn’t have mentioned that in public either. Well, I’m not going to talk about fight club (even though it is a great movie, and I finally got the book)…

But myself, my involvement in Free Software and maybe some random thoughts and rants. I’ll try to keep rants low, though. 😉 Re-introducing myself, since I have neglected my blog for way too long, here are some quick facts in a nutshell:

I’ve been an active Community guy for a long time, dating back to the old Helix-Code / Ximian days. Bugsquad volunteer, lurker and occasional triager, have been a heavy load triager in the past. Maintainer of GARNOME, the build utility for the GNOME Desktop, member of the GNOME Release Team, and of course GNOME Foundation member.

And recently hired by Openismus as maemo.org bugmaster, together with Andre, to support the community around Maemo. An awesome opportunity, and working with the friendly maemo.org community already has been quite some fun. I’ll add more colorful bits soon while I go along. I promise.

s/written/oral/ # exam

Managed to negotiate an oral exam (for a later date), instead of the written exam, which was scheduled for the week of GUADEC. Yay.

Hasn’t been tough convincing the prof. Mentioning it’s a developer conference almost was sufficient, he supports things like this. While I didn’t really expect him to know about GUADEC… having to explain GNOME, however, was a little bit embarassing.

True Love should take all Night

If all these “pretty looking girl”s who are sending me mail daily really would come to my place like they promised, I’d need some of these advertised “mens pills”. And I can afford them, cause I sure take advice from a complete stranger with low spelling abilities who knows about the finest penny stocks taking off soon. But please, no more Rolex replica offers or member enlargement devices — the girls find me attractive just as I am.

That’s what you get when you can’t sleep, and instead decide to check the low scoring Spam mails for false positives. On the plus side, I now do know that my hand tweaked SA is catching 400+ Spams a day, and doesn’t catch even a single good mail. Yay…

Finally…

A blog. No, my blog. Yay. Now I am important, no? 😉

Seriously, I meant do do this for a long time already. Get me a place where I can drop some thoughts of mine, and maybe have the public read it. As opposed to the IRC way of doing this — keep writing the same stuff over and over again. A personal homepage you say? Nah, that’s so 90’s. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. In fact, I set up more than one homepage, or at least worked on it locally. But lost interest when it got to constantly maintaining it — developing is so much more fun than to just update it. So I ended up with dropping them sooner or later. Let’s see how this works out.

Of course I got my blog at gnome.org, rather than one of these, err, anonymous blog sites, where every random Joe can register such a thing. I got it here as part of the community.

What to expect? Not sure yet. Thoughts about GNOME related stuff. Yes. Maybe some personal matters. Politics? Sure not. What else… Well, we’ll see.

First, I need a target audience. Or rather, I need to reach my target audience. What’s a blog good for, if no one reads it? Oh, wait — personal review of one’s experiences, just as a diary. Will I do this?

Speaking of the audience — I want to be syndicated at Planet GNOME. Getting this blog was a pretty nice experience, and extremely fast. Thanks O.! Now let’s see how long it takes to get on p.g.o. Seems to be a good way to spread ones my opinion. Thus, I’ll probably not blog about most things currently concerning me, until I got there. No audience, no fun.