Current doings

I imagine that people have been wondering a little what I've been up to lately (although likely haven't been looking here for information, since I've not been posting much newsy sort of information here lately), particularly since the book reviews have been a bit slim.

I'm currently power-watching the Olympics. This is the first Olympics where I've both had a TiVo and thought to really use it in a comprehensive fashion, and with the essentially 24/7 coverage this year, there's been a lot to record. I've already lost a few segments because my TiVo ran out of room, and I'm perpetually running a day behind on watching (which is about how much space my TiVo has). This has been a lot of fun, and I expect I'll do this with every Olympics from now on.

I also have company, a very good friend from Canada, here to spend several weeks. That's been just wonderful, and has already resulted in a couple of trips shopping for books (as mentioned in previous posts).

Work-wise, I've gotten essentially no work done on standardization or on INN lately because I've been completely focused on Debian. I finally learned how to write Debian packages, and I've been packaging everything that we need to put together a weblogin server for WebAuth, since we're upgrading the weblogin servers to Linux and Debian before the end of the summer.

So far, I've packaged a fair bit of our local Kerberos software, WebAuth, a variety of Perl modules, xfonts-jmk (in an attempt to adopt it), the Apache 2 FastCGI module (which Debian can't distribute due to the license), and some additional bits needed to put together a weblogin server. I'm extremely impressed with Debian's packaging system now that I've used it for, as well as the supporting tools like svn-buildpackage.

The plan is to become a Debian developer, something that I'm slowly working on by making sure I have some solid contributions to point to before I submit my application. I've been submitting quite a few improvements to debarchiver to make it better at maintaining my local apt repository, did some bug squashing for the sarge release, and am currently working with Sam Hartman on the various AFS- and Kerberos-related packages (starting with libpam-krb5). I've also been doing lots of reading; I still need to finish reading the developer's reference, and then it will probably be about time to file my application. (I wish I could find a sponsor for xfonts-jmk first, but so far no luck there.)

Oh, and amidst everything else that's been going on, I also acquired quite a bit of new furniture from Ikea (another seven-foot shelf, three shorter shelves, a set of office drawers with a hanging file, and two seven-foot CD shelf towers), so last weekend I put those together with help and got them put where I want them. Since then, I've been moving books around, taking books home from the office now that I have somewhere to put them, and rearranging things the way that I want them. Just now, I finished shelving all of the books I just acquired.

Expect to hear more from me, at least in the form of book reviews, once the Olympics is over (or a day later, since I'll still likely be a day behind).