First post

It's a new, pyblosxom-powered blog, and it was a fair effort to get here.

What happened is that my wife asked me about having a blog. Naturally, I
thought: "Hey, Gentoo surely has lots of blog software, I can put together
something for my wife". That's true enough, and I took a look at what people
are using on http://planet.gentoo.org. I winnowed a good chunk of the field by
making an executive decision that I really didn't want to deal with mysql,
although sqlite would be fine. I eventually decided upon typo
(http://www.typosphere.org/trac/), and I spent some time configuring
lighttpd to properly render a typo blog. Typo's a really nice piece of
software, and it was fun to play with. I did run into some weird glitches
using typo with ecto (on Windows), which is what I was considering for my
wife to use, but otherwise I would happily recommend typo to people who
want elegant blogging software.

Ultimately, we decided to go with blogger for Sarah's blog. Blogger's
web gui for editing posts is really nice, and that bit of usability made
Blogger a clear winner for Sarah.

Meanwhile, for me typo seemed just a bit much. It's beautiful, but I'm
rather more fond of simple, and besides I'd really prefer to use
ReStructured Text (http://docutils.sf.net/rst.html) for markup
rather than html. Unfortunately, pyblosxom looks awful out-of-the-box,
but Will Guaraldi was nice enough to e-mail his "flavour" and css
stylesheet, which helped enormously, and things look much better now.
Best of all, I can hack on pyblosxom without too much trouble. (Indeed,
I've already fixed the rst plugin, which hadn't kept up with docutils,
and submitted a patch to the pyblosxom folks.)

Wine walk 2006

Last Thursday we attended the second annual Woodlands wine walk. It was a tad less well organized than last year, but still lots of fun. We were able to sample over 50 wines, so I'm listing some of the wines that we liked best:

• Dog House chardonnay & cabernet -- Cheap and good


• Rosemount Estate shiraz grenache


• Little Penguin shiraz and white shiraz (for Mom)


• Palmeri syrah


• Messina Hof papa paulo port (private reserve)


• Toasted Head viognier


• Texas Hills orange moscato (like a port)


• Banfi chianti classico docg


• Franciscan Oakville Estate chardonnay


• Chateau Souverain chardonnay & cabernet


• Beaulieu Vineyard cabernet


• Georges Dabceuf beaujolais reserve


• Hogue cabernet


• Kumala shiraz


• Robert Mondavi pinot noir private selection


• Genesis syrah & cabernet


• Xplorador chardonnay (cheap)

We should have others that were recorded in the wine walk "personal wine celler", but we haven't figured out how to extract them yet.

First post

This is a first post with some funky formatting and an image:

Oh, I love my wife!!!

Getting typo up and running

First post (using webrick)

Here's the first post of this shiny new blog.

Surprisingly, it took me fairly little time to get typo running w/ the built in Ruby server. I still have to get it moved over to lighttpd, but I'm
very happy!

CGI working

Well, I now have typo working with cgi on lighttpd, but not yet with fcgi (which would be a lot faster).

FCGI now working

Cool! It looks like I needed ruby-fcgi to get fast-cgi working properly on lighttpd, but now
it is!

All in all, type is really darn cool, and the AJAX admin interface is
fabulous.

Foundation thoughts

To the best of my knowledge, we've never voted on the bylaws. In principle it
would suffice to have the trustees vote on it, but I'd really prefer that we
have a general vote on them. We can combine that vote with the vote for
trustees, presumably. That said, we may want to consider revising the bylaws
some. Last year we decided that all active devs who'd been with Gentoo for one
year were eligible to be foundation members, so our list of members is much
larger than that of the Python Software Foundation, which served as the source
for our current bylaws. For example, it seems unlikely that we're going to be
able to attract a quorum of 1/3 of the members and the required annual meeting.
Also, the current rule is that new members must be nominated by an existing
member, a membership application has to be filed by the person wanting to be a
member, and a majority of existing members must vote to approve a new member.
Assuming that last year's system was more in line with what we want, then
perhaps what we really want is a requirement that foundation membership be tied
to Gentoo devship (presumably continuing the must-be-a-dev-for-a-year rule). A
much more minor issue: the bylaws require a corporate seal; do we really need
one? I suspect there are other things we're going to want to change, too.

As far as elections go, it would be good to have new trustees in place before
our fiscal year ends (which is 30 June, I believe). This last year we started
with 13 trustees, and we finish the year having lost at least three, and
several others have contributed rather little during the last year. I'd really
like to see the number of trustees drop dramatically. The major issues for the
upcoming trustees are going to be: (a) moving the corporation to a state that
doesn't require a member to live there, (b) continuing to assert our
intellectual property rights (thanks Swift for all of your work on this area),
(c) move banking away from netbank, (d) make some sort of decision on copyright
transfer, and (e) get some sort of real budget put together, and (f) other
things that escape me right now. Of course, this list is fairly similar to last
year's list, which is not so good, although during the last year we saw a
complete transfer of all IP from Gentoo Technologies, Inc to the Foundation,
seemant, ramereth, klieber, and dmwaters all worked with our legal folks to
address copyright transfer issues, but it's such a complicated problem that we
still lack a definitive solution (I believe), we have a funding process in
place (thanks to spyderous, if I recall correctly), and we even have the Gentoo
name registered (in the US) as a registered trademark. Nonetheless, I really
think the foundation would benefit from having a much smaller number of
trustees, like five, with an expectation that if a trustee becomes inactive a
new trustee takes that person's place in a reasonably short period of time.

I'm sure there's more that I should mention, but that's all that I can think of
right now.

Still around

Just a note that I'm still around. Indeed, I've clearly decided that I now have
too much free time on my hands, since I've volunteered to be a mentor for
Summer of Code students. It should be fun!

Foundation elections should be happening sometime "soon", which means a lot
needs to be done to make that process be not quite so dead. I'll have an update
on that later this weekend.

Voted!

I just submitted my ballot for the inaugural Gentoo council. Of course, I have
the option to change my ballot until the end of the month, but I probably
won't, so I'm essentially done with it.

Thanks once again to Aron Griffis for our nicely functional voting software.