General update

It's been a while since I've posted anything except reviews and I'm overdue for a general update.

With the Kerberos upgrade project finished last month, I'm currently in the wonderful situation of not having any large active projects at work and being given time to generally catch up. With luck, I'll have a couple more months of that before things really heat up. I only have to consult on a few projects and otherwise can deal with all the operational issues that I'd been putting off. A lot of my time lately has been spent on Puppet configuration cleanup and improvements, and there's at least another solid week of that to go, as well as a pile of overdue documentation to write.

On the Debian side, Lintian has moved to a new Git repository and Adam D. Barratt has started committing directly. Frank has also had time to do a lot of work, which means that Lintian development is proceeding quite well without a lot of active attention on my part. That's been wonderful and has given me time to focus on other things.

Most of my Debian effort of late has gone into the new Shibboleth packaging team and review of Shibboleth 2.0 packages, the last of which was uploaded last week and is sitting in NEW. Thanks to Ferenc Wágner for the fine work! All the packages are now in Git and migrated to Alioth and there's a wiki page for the packaging team. Scott Cantor, the primary upstream developer, has joined the mailing list and has been extremely helpful and responsive.

Sam Hartman has also migrated the krb5 packaging repository to Git and Alioth, and last Friday I finally finished migrating the openafs repository. Both are unfortunately rather huge since they contain all the historic upstream tarballs (extracting that would have been hideously complicated to do as part of the migration), but they shouldn't grow nearly as much now that we can use pristine-tar. This is the heart of the Kerberos and AFS packaging; there's now just kerberos-configs and my two PAM modules to move (more on the complexities of the PAM module Git migration in a later post).

On the personal front, I've been travelling a lot lately, but that will now calm down for a while. I have some company next month, though, and hopefully will be up for it by then (right now, I just want to hole up in my apartment and do my own thing and not interact for a bit).

I've been reading George Orwell: An Age Like This (1920-1940), the first of a four-volume collection of his letters, essays, and reviews. I was inspired to buy the first volume after reading one of his essays on-line after a Usenet discussion some time back, and I'm delighted I did. It took me a bit to get into it, but now I'm finding it absolutely fascinating. Orwell has a talent for concise and accurate descriptions of life (primarily of the poor) that capture the emotional tone as well as the surface details. That's mixed with interesting book reviews (I love reading book reviews), intriguing tidbits on his writing process and how he viewed being a writer, and snippets of the day-to-day of his life that have survived in letters. It's rather like reading a blog, and Orwell is a good enough writer that even his unparagraphed, abbreviated commentary in letters is full of memorable turns of phrase or observations.

If you like that sort of thing, I recommend it highly. I'm going to buy the remaining three volumes and read the whole collection, plus quite likely pick up Orwell's other books besides 1984 and Animal Farm.

Posted: 2008-06-29 23:26 — Why no comments?

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2018-07-15