Using countify to determine who voted

For the trustee elections, it's important to have a record of who
voted because it is by voting that one becomes a member of the
Gentoo Foundation. Any election official, after countify --collect
has been run, can determine that list using the following one-liner:

while read num user; do grep -q "confirmation $num"
master-trustees2005 || continue; echo $user >> voted;
done < confs-trustees200

That's what we used to determine the existing Foundation members from the
2005 trustee election.

History of Gentoo mailing lists

In mcummings recent entry (http://www.datanode.net/?p=297), Mike
mentioned meeting Spider on -user long ago, and that he thought
that -user and -core were the only lists at that time. I didn't
think that was quite right, so I went digging through my own
Gentoo e-mail archives. The oldest -dev mail I have dates from
April 2001. (Back then I tossed most of my Gentoo mail, so I don't
know when I actually subscribed to -dev.) According to the wayback
machine, Gentoo at the time looked something like this:

(http://web.archive.org/web/20010405020443/http://www.gentoo.org/)

Back when "every user was a hacker", the only lists were -dev and
-announce. With a bit of additional digging I discovered that
-user appears to have been created in Oct. 2001, while -core didn't
exist until Feb. 2002. I faithfully read -user until sometime in 2003, when
the amount of traffic on -dev, -core, and -user became truly overwhelming.
Nonetheless, I'm embarrassed that these days my only contact w/ -user
is though the threads posted in the GWN.

(By the way, check out
http://web.archive.org/web/20010405020443/http://www.gentoo.org/dev.html
to see what administering a Gentoo system used to be like!)

Trustee election, redux

I'm Grant Goodyear (g2boojum), and if you're an eligible voter in the current
Trustees election then I'd like your vote.

Okay, that gets the boiler plate out of the way. Seemant did a classy job
of lauding the skills of the current candidates
(http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/seemant/2006/10/07/trustee_elections_2006_have_commenced), but he seems to have missed someone:

Seemant is the long-time developer who was once (in)famous not only for
breaking a vast portion of the tree with libpng, but also for the speed and
skill applied in fixing the breakage (along with spider's assistance, if I
remember correctly). Since then he has repeatedly proven to be responsible,
thoughtful, and willing to take on jobs that are necessary, but not necessarily
fun. For the last several months Seemant has been our lead contact with
Gentoo's legal team, and he has been doing an exceptional job of it.

As for what I think the priorities for the next year should be:

• New (and approved!) bylaws. Several times during the last year or two
  I've raised problems with the current proposed bylaws (problems which
  are my fault since I drafted them, borrowing heavily from the Python
  Software Foundation's bylaws), but I've yet to achieve any sort of
  consensus on new wording that would work better for us. (Actually,
  I've yet to obtain any comments at all.) We really need to get
  something sane in place, though.


• Move the corporation to a more non-resident-friendly state.


• Dealing with money between the US and Europe is a real pain. Right
  now we're using paypal, but that's imperfect. Google's "checkout"
  system may be an improvement, but it seems to me that it would be
  better to have regional organizations that can raise and handle funds there,
  with the US organization responsible for US funds and handling and
  licensing all of the Gentoo IP.


• Set a yearly budget for infra.

All that said, I'd also like to mention that if we can get the really
important items out of the way, then the Foundation, at least in my
opinion, should be a maintenance organization. It shouldn't be charting
the direction of Gentoo, because that's what the Council (and the devs,
first and foremost) are for. The Foundation's job is to collect and
disburse funds, provide a legal entity, and maintain and protect
Gentoo's intellectual property. That's pretty much it, and as such it
should be the least sexy part of Gentoo.

Another council election

We're a bit late running the next Council election. The problem is that
our vote counting software, countify, has a bug somewhere that
produces incorrect results under obscure conditions. Shrug.
On the other hand, the voting (and vote collection) software does
work, so we may as well hold the election, and deal with counting the
votes when the time comes.

It seems that getent passwd is having issues with the number of
users that we have, so a new trick is needed for producing the file
of eligible voters:

$ perl_ldap -S gentooStatus | grep \
> -i active | awk ' { print $1 } ' > voters-council2006

Roasted Cauliflower

It's been a good month for recipe tryouts from Cooks Illustrated. Last night
I made their incredibly simple recipe for roasted cauliflower. Even
Sarah liked it, and she doesn't like cooked cauliflower. The only
drawback is that it required a 475 F oven, which is not such a good
thing in Houston during the Summer.

Herb-crusted pork roast

A while back Sarah and I signed up as recipe tasters for Cook's
Illustrated. So far we've tested recipes for pound cake and
tonight's herb-crusted port roast. I usually claim that I don't
do "big meat", but pork roasts are reasonably inexpensive, and Sarah
loves pork, so I was willing to give it a try. I started working on it
about 4:45pm or so, and we had dinner about 8pm, and I think the time
was well worth it. We'll almost certainly make this recipe again.

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.)