2009-04-01: More strategy
I'm going on vacation in a week and a half, which turns out to be right in
the middle of the schedule for the second revision of our strategy
documents. The resolution turned out today to be that I'm supposed to
start revising mine fairly soon, as soon as I get the right permissions in
the wiki where we're doing the work.
I'm not particularly happy about this, but I suppose the work has to get
done at some point. There are advantages to doing all of this on a very
tight schedule: it does at least really get done, and if these documents
will be used in all the ways that we're planning, it will significantly
change how we do planning. But bleh, I was still recovering from writing
the first drafts.
Otherwise, today I took care of some additional cleanup in advance of the
lbdns upgrade Saturday morning (early again), fighting through feeling
tired and a bit unmotivated. I need to find some time the rest of this
week to stop working, since I've already worked 31 hours this week and
it's time to step back and do other things rather than working another 45
hour week. I'm good at continuing to work when I have good momentum, not
as good at stopping working and doing other things when I've accumulated a
surplus. But there will be volleyball tomorrow, which will help.
2009-04-02: Coal tipple
This is the reinforced concrete coal tipple at the Morden Colliery near
Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. The mine is abandoned, but there's a public
trail and some great places for taking pictures.
This seemed like a good picture for a day where I felt like I'm getting
more and more loaded on. I'm working on two different security releases
as well as getting ready to revise strategy documents, plus a few other
miscellaneous things cropped up. And that's on top of scheduled AFS VLDB
server upgrades and an upgrade of our load-balanced DNS service, which
starts Saturday morning at 6am.
I've now worked over 40 hours for the week already. I can't skip tomorrow
entirely, since I have an important meeting and need to do some prep work
for Saturday morning's upgrade. But I'm going to try to work as few hours
as possible and get some non-work things done.
2009-04-03: One more early weekend
Another picture of the Morden Colliery coal tipple.
Tomorrow morning is a 6am morning (better than 4am, at least). I need to
get up a bit before 6am, walk into work, switch a cable, and then do a
separate system upgrade before 7am. Shouldn't be a problem, but it's
always a little stressful that I'll oversleep or that something will go
wrong.
Then, once that's over, I'm done until after my vacation. One more week
of work (which is going to be hella busy), and then I'm off to Nanaimo for
a wonderful week free of work and full of photography, exploration, and
great conversation.
2009-04-03: Lintian 2.2.9
I finally got this released. I'm very sorry for the long delay; life has
been ridiculously busy lately. This release updates the list of valid
sections, fixes a few annoying bugs (particularly in diversion handling
and some problems with file 5.00 and analysis of source packages), and has
some additional checks for correct package sections. Many thanks to Frank
Lichtenheld and Raphael Geissert for their work on this release.
I've also started the full archive run for
lintian.debian.org, so it will finally
be up-to-date again. Apologies to everyone for the out-of-date results
there; I kept meaning to update it after the next release, and then kept
finding another bug or not having a moment to do it.
Lintian development will probably be slow for the next couple of months
(unless my co-maintainers end up with more time to drive it forward),
since I have a huge pile of work that I need to do, including deploying a
virtualization environment and lots of upgrades to lenny. Things should
start settling down again sometime around mid-June.
2009-04-16: Photography success
I was really struggling earlier today to get macro focus correct, but
towards the end of the day it just started working. This was the best
success by far. A fly stopped on a tree bud just about at eye level and
stayed there, letting me get quite close. Since I'd also switched my
camera to taking pictures at maximum resolution, I got one of the best
closeups I've gotten.
I'm currently on a much-needed vacation, which is why journal posts have
been very quiet. (As opposed to last week, when there were no journal
posts because I was crazy busy with work, or next week where there will
probably be few journal posts because I'm crazy busy with work.) It's
been a photography-intensive vacation, averaging around a hundred pictures
a day between the banter and great company.
Going into vacation, I thought I might have some time to catch up on
things like book reviews and some free software work, but I've been
playing it by ear and have found that I needed way more recovery from work
than I'd expected. It may be that everything else will stay on hold until
next week (including AUTH48 USEPRO review). Relaxing is important. The
rest can wait.
2009-04-18: Vacation continues
Rathtrevor Beach in Parksville, British Columbia (north of Nanaimo).
Vacation continues, and remains rather focused on photography. I've put
on hold just about everything else I'd been working on and instead am
doing little beyond just taking pictures and analyzing pictures. I'm
feeling my energy levels regenerate a little bit, although I'm not looking
forward to getting back to work and dealing with all the things I've put
off. It doesn't help to have left in the middle of a bunch of active
projects that will still be waiting for me.
I'm not sure yet whether I'm going to go back and want to get into a solid
schedule and flow and maintain it through all of May, or whether I'm going
to work remotely for part of May. I think I'll play it by ear and see how
I feel a couple of weeks after I'm back.
2009-04-20: Back home
A close-up of sedum growing along the Nanaimo waterfront. My camera
didn't want to focus in macro quite that close and kept focusing on the
rock, so I manually focused by moving the camera. It worked surprisingly
well. (Next time, though, I'll probably try resetting the camera focus
algorithm.)
Vacation is, alas, over, and it's back to work. I'm sad to leave, happy
to be around my own things, and not at all interested in going back to
work, but ah well. I at least have a much better attitude about it than I
did last week.
This particular choice of picture is partly a reminder: the goal for this
week is focus and detail. I have a full list of things that I need to do,
they're not all going to get done as fast as people want, and if I start
thrashing, I'm going to drive myself insane and get even less done. So I
need to be organized, focused, and good about continuing to work on
something until its finished. The first step for tomorrow morning will be
to go through all of my work tasks and put together a priority list and
plan of attack, and then be sure my manager knows about it as well since
she's probably going to have to run interference for the things that
aren't prioritized as high.
There are various things about coming back into the US and going through
customs and immigration that really bother me, but I don't have the mental
energy to write them up tonight. I'm not sure if the urge will persist.
Even if it doesn't, I expect the impulse will come up again, since the
same things bother me every time I come back into the US. This is a
placeholder so that I remember to think about writing something later.
I'm way behind on most of my volunteer work, including Debian, IETF, the
software I maintain, and chasing eyrie.org upgrades. Most of it is likely
going to have to wait for another week or two while I get work back in
order and build some structure around all the things I have pending.
2009-04-20: Lots of little starts
Today was a good start at getting back to work. I caught up on routine
mail, fixed or forwarded a bunch of issues, and then prioritized my
current tasks. I then did a lot of knocking off things from my quick task
list to reduce the total number of things I have on my plate. Finishing
21 distinct tasks makes this a very good day.
Tomorrow, I need to finish the prep work for the weblogin3 upgrade and the
next global change in Puppet, and otherwise continue my planning and
organization. This first week will be devoted to getting back into a
regular schedule.
Non-work stuff is still on hold and will be for a little while, although I
may try to knock off some quick things to keep reducing the total quantity
on my plate.
2009-04-21: Spikey but successful
This is not one of my best pictures ever, but it sums up how today felt.
There were a lot of things to catch on, tear a bit, and struggle through,
but at the end of the day, the post was solidly built and still standing.
weblogin3 is now running lenny, the global change has been pushed through
Puppet (and I got the diffs done only a couple of hours in advance), and
various other difficult things have been faced and gotten through. It's
been particularly hard coming back to work this time, and I'm still
feeling dissatisfied, but I'm also feeling like I can push through and
things will be better on the other side.
The primary part that's bothering me at the moment is that the amount of
stuff pending that I want badly to work on is just so large. I'm tackling
bits of it every day, but some of it is hard and takes a lot more time
than I wish it would. A lot of today, for instance, wasn't forward
progress on pending things, but rather administrative overhead and cleanup
on things that I'd already scheduled.
Tomorrow, I start working on strategy documents again. I suspect this
will end up being much easier than I expect it to be, which will help.
2009-04-22: Struggling with foundations
Well, today was also a struggle and much less successful. It was one of
those days where I spent the day largely sitting around and feeling guilty
about not doing anything, but failing to start anything.
Neither of the things that needed to happen today got done. Both of them
I still have to deal with tomorrow as well as the stuff already scheduled
for tomorrow.
These are the really hard days to deal with. It happens from time to
time, but I don't know how to react to them or push through them, and they
leave me feeling like my time to do non-work things will now get eaten
into because I need to make up for not actually accomplishing anything
today. I was hoping I wouldn't get back to this feeling this soon after
coming back from vacation.
Ah well. The one thing that I know works with time is letting the day go
and letting tomorrow be another day.
2009-04-27: Lintian 2.2.10
This is primarily a bug-fix release, cleaning up a bunch of accumulated
minor stuff. The largest single fix saves all the error output from tar
in the various places that Lintian runs it and analyzes it to turn it into
Lintian tags, which suppresses the occasional annoying record size
messages from tar and should provide better handling of other tar
problems. There are also fixes, several from Raphael Geissert, for
various packages that failed in the lintian.d.o log.
My tentative plan is for the next verison to be 2.3.0, incorporating more
infrastructure work by Raphael Geissert to work towards getting rid of the
separation between unpack and collection and make the data collection more
fully dependency-driven. I'd also like to take another pass through the
wishlist bugs and try to knock off a few more of them.
I'm going to try to get 2.3.0 started and get up-to-date on merging major
patches over the next couple of days, and then will probably take another
break from Lintian work for a while to work on Policy (and on finishing
the USEPRO RFC).
2009-04-30: Dreamwidth
For those who haven't heard, Dreamwidth
is a new journal hosting site using the LiveJournal code base (with
improvements) but a different business model and general attitude towards their community. They're
trying to be much more transparent and open about everything they're
doing, they're trying to run the business so that it's focused on building
a community than making a profit, and they're trying to do much better at
being an active open source project than LiveJournal has managed. They
also run all of their servers on Ubuntu, so they feel like part of the
broader Debian community.
I haven't had a lot of time to help, but I think their ideals look great
and I really would like to see them succeed.
Dreamwidth just launched open beta, which means you can purchase a paid
account but they're using an invite code model for free accounts. Since
they just launched, I have invite codes.
I think one of the things that will make Dreamwidth successful is to have
a broad-based community, and I'd also like to see Debian and Ubuntu folks
involved in their community, in a position to help with improvements to
infrastructure packages they use, and help with the open source
development of the underlying code base. I've therefore got a few invite
codes reserved for Debian and Ubuntu folks on basically a first-come,
first-served basis. If you're active in Debian or Ubuntu, want to try
Dreamwidth, and think there's a chance you'd actively use it, send me
e-mail and I'll send you an invite.
For more information about Dreamwidth, see
their wiki.
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