2008-03-01: Latest haul
Hopefully things at work will start calming down a bit and I'll have more
of a chance to post things here. I'm a bit behind on book reviews as well.
This book order was more of a random whim than anything, hence the weird
mix.
Lewis Caroll -- The Annotated Alice (classic)
Caitlín R. Kiernan -- Daughter of Hounds (sff)
Caitlín R. Kiernan -- Low Red Moon (sff)
Caitlín R. Kiernan -- Threshold (sff)
Hugh Lofting -- The Story of Doctor Dolittle (children's)
Laurie J. Marks -- Earth Logic (sff)
Laurie J. Marks -- Water Logic (sff)
Ian M. McDonald -- Brasyl (sff)
C.J. Murphy -- Thunderbird Falls (sff)
Terry Pratchett -- Wyrd Sisters (sff)
Colin Thubron -- The Lost Heart of Asia (non-fiction)
2008-03-02: Life update
It's been a while since I've written anything about the progress of my new
year. The news is a bit mixed.
On the plus side, I've kept up with the new exercise regimen quite well.
I'm walking every single night, including the weekends, and have only
missed three days since the start of the year (one day that was just
horrificially stressful, one sick day, and one day when games ran past
midnight). I still need to figure out what to do on games nights going
forward if they're routinely going to run past 10pm, since it becomes
exponentially harder to go exercise past 11pm or so. I may try to double
up the next day.
Also on the plus side, I've been slowly but steadily taking weight off
(although I've been letting myself eat more lately and therefore this has
slowed). Once I get through the current patch of stress, I'll try to go
back to weight loss mode rather than maintenance mode. My blood pressure
is also back down to something comfortable from borderline high.
The cost of this progress has been a lot of stress from shifting my life
around, and there's been a lot of other random life work that I've had to
do in the past two months. That, combined with two projects that are
behind schedule and extremely critical at work, has meant a lot of stress,
which I've been struggling with. I've now finished most of the major work
for our Kerberos upgrade and the work remaining on guest accounts feels
tractable, so I'm hoping this will partly let up in the near future. I've
also taken care of a physical, a dental appointment, car repairs, a bunch
of furniture purchasing and installation (with help), and similar work that
doesn't have to be repeated.
My mood is very much on edge. This is mostly a stress reaction. Forcing
myself to be creative and work 45-50 hours a week on tight deadlines takes
a lot out of me and makes me uncreative, irritable, and prone to
overreaction. Not much to be done for this except get through the current
stressful times.
One thing that I'd dearly like to improve is my efficiency of work. I
waste a lot of time poking at things, doing nothing while trying to do what
I'm supposed to do next, or feeling guilty about what I'm not doing. I
think the hardest part of time management is to either work on something or
not, but not do the unproductive inbetween poking. I've been doing a lot
of that poking lately, which often makes me feel like I'm only doing 4-6
hours of "real" work in a day. I'm then tempted to work later,
particularly if I finally get on a roll, which means I end up working or
trying to work hours that are far too long. Still no good solution for
that one.
Thankfully, I have a couple of days of vacation between projects and I'm
going to use tomorrow and Tuesday to further sort out my mail, work on
whatever feels the most interesting, and try to generally get back on top
of things. Usually this helps a lot with my work efficiency once I get
back to work.
2008-03-03: lintian 1.23.46
Well, I was going to do a bunch of other stuff today, but I decided first
to clean out my saved messages in my lintian inbox. Seven hours later...
But I'm all caught up, I started doing a bit of long-term reorganization
that I think will make lintian easier to maintain, and I got uploader
support working for lintian.d.o (although it isn't deployed yet). Not to
mention getting the bug count back under 100 again.
The days go by far too fast. I want more hours!
2008-03-05: Back to work
Back to regular work and regular life after a couple of days off (well,
"off", in that way in which I spent most of the time working on Debian).
The time was wonderful, though, as was being able to work from home today
to transition back.
I'm mostly done with the Kerberos upgrade project, at least for a while,
except for some minor stuff that should only take a few hours a week. Now,
it's on to guest accounts, with a goal of finishing it this month. The
first step is to get another release of WebAuth out, merging a bunch of
work that needed to be done to support guest accounts properly.
Tuesday, I finally caught up on Debian Policy work, and thanks to Raphael
Hertzog, many of my patch pings have gotten responses. So now I have more
patches to apply, and we should hopefully only be a week or two away from a
new Policy release.
Also queued up to happen soon are new pam-afs-session and new remctl
releases, and it looks like a new kadmin-remctl release for some additional
guest accounts requirements.
The focus, though, is on working steadily and not too much each day,
setting my own pace, not letting other people drive me into stress,
concentrating on each thing I'm doing as I'm doing it, and trying to make
work time high quality. One day at a time.
2008-03-06: Meeting day
I hate Thursdays. It's amazing how much just having two project meetings
cuts out my day and makes it hard to concentrate and finish something. I
did, however, accomplish my major task for the week and am continuing to
make progress on the plan I put together Tuesday night, which makes me very
happy.
Tomorrow, I see how much WebAuth code I can merge, and maybe take some time
to release pam-afs-session. This weekend, taxes. And hopefully more
Policy work.
Now, treadmill, before it gets too late to do it.
Someday, more book reviews.
2008-03-08: pam-afs-session 1.6
Well, that took longer than I expected, since I hadn't realized that my
generic krb5.m4 file didn't support Kerberos being optional. So it needed
quite a bit of work to be usable for pam-afs-session, I needed to rewrite
the rest of the configure machinery, and then I found several other things
to tweak.
Finally out now, though, and the first release in a while. This should fix
various problems on Solaris and should now build with the native AIX
Kerberos.
Now, of course, I have to merge my krb5.m4 back into the other packages
that use it, but that can wait for a bit. remctl is probably the next
thing I need to finish a release of, and then maybe new Debian rssh
packages. But tomorrow I may take as a reading day.
You can get the latest version from the
pam-afs-session
distribution page.
2008-03-11: Policy status
Today was very bad for getting productive work done. Oh well.
Some interesting discussion of the interaction between the Debian technical
committee and Debian Policy came out of the debian-vote discussion, though,
which makes me happy. I need to go commit a bunch of pending Policy
patches, and then I think I'm going to start closing the Policy bugs that I
think are bad ideas and refer people to the technical committee for
appeals. This gives the technical committee more direct work to do and
hopefully a chance to demonstrate functionalness and starts reducing the
Policy bug load.
Oh, and gluck.debian.org has finally been upgraded to etch, which means
that lintian.debian.org is now going to be much easier to maintain. I'm
doing the full regeneration now using the current lintian release.
2008-03-16: Policy bug triage
Slowly but steadily I'm making progress on getting Debian Policy into
shape. It's hard because each bug requires far more effort to resolve than
the average bug in a package, and there are a ton of open bugs. Hopefully
I can hunt up some more help.
Today, I committed patches for various pending Policy issues that have
reached a sufficient number of seconds, pinged all of the other Policy
delegates on their plans, and then did the massive bug triage one more
time. Now, the default bug displays and usertags are all set, the bugs
should have reasonable titles, and it should be much easier to see what
work remains to be done.
I also now have a pile of wontfix bugs that I need to either close or
appeal to the tech-ctte, but unfortunately ran out of time today.
Tomorrow I have to go back to work on the day job, and I didn't get all the
Debian work done that I wanted, but hopefully I can steal some time this
week to continue following up. I think the next version of Policy is
almost ready to go, and there are at least three more slam-dunk bugs that I
can resolve, maybe more like six.
2008-03-25: WebAuth 3.6.0
I actually released this last Saturday, but I've not been in the mood to
make journal entries lately. This release incorporates the work for
Stanford's guest accounts project, mostly done by Dmitri Priimak, as well
as adding support for credential delegation to the WebLogin server and
fixing a memory allocation bug in mod_webauth found by Ian Ward Comfort.
With this release, WebAuth has all the configuration parameters necessary
to deal with cross-realm Kerberos authentication in a sane fashion. One
can prevent cross-realm principals from authenticating as valid-user and
use a wider variety of options for canonicalizing the authenticated
identity.
You can get the latest release from the WebAuth distribution page.
All posts