repl.ca

Yes, Phil and I will be installing Gentoo on his lappy; that’s his choice. For anyone else out there who’s considering using Gentoo, I’d recommend against it. As the Pragmatic Programmers point out, Don’t Repeat Yourself; this is just as true for repeating someone else, as well. Another distribution (say, Ubuntu), will provide you with pre-compiled packages, saving you hours upon hours of time. Don’t concern yourself with USE flags and C flags; the small speedup you may gain is counterbalenaced by the time you have to spend configuring and compiling, and the headache it causes developers when you submit a bug report saying you compiled with -OINT_MAX. »

Ian, maybe you should just use ready-made software, like the ever-popular wordpress. Then you could put off doing work by wrestling with the database schemas! Oh yeah, did anyone else get one of the Mike Smit life-size cardboard standups that Dal made? Mike Smit merchandise is gonna be huge this year. HUGE »

By popular demand, the number of posts shown on the front page has been increased (to 60 or two days’ worth, whichever is less 30). I’m also looking into removing the time normalization, which, besides making it look like Henry isn’t nocturnal, could provide some context about where people are. ** HEY UNDERGRADS, STAFF, AND FACULTY!!!** Your representation on the Planet is dangerously low. Some of you must have a blog of some kind, or a desire to start one. »

The most recent episode of the always excellent LugRadio features an interview with Miguel. Mainly they talk about Mono, though there is a small bit in there on Ximian’s history. The interesting point that one of the LugRadio guys brings up is this: what if, instead of paying 25 people to work full-time on Mono, Novell instead payed them to implement f-spot, Beagle(which is awesome), and iFolder in C, Python or whatever? »

Novell announced a new Free software project today, hula. It’s got a lot of good things going for it, not the least of which being a sexy logo. Mature codebase, scalable arcitechture… I could spout lame catch phrases about this thing all day. The important part is that the goals include making a halfway decent online calendar app, and an open DHTML-enriched webmail client (like your very own personal gmail). See Nat Friedman’s blog post for more info. »

A few people mentioned maybe increasing the number of posts visible on the front page of the planet, or perhaps showing two days’ worth of posts, no matter how many that may be. If anyone else has some feelings on this, let me know. In particular, is there any point in having the XXL version of the planet? In other news, if you want to get a photo manipulated for use as a CSHead, post your image on the wiki, and someone will get to it when they can. »

The planet launched today, after getting it’s delicous new domain name. Many thanks to everyone involved thus far, and to all those who will be soon (yes, I’m talking to you! I’m running ‘tail -f’ on the access logs right now, you know). »

Colin’s new CSHead is great, but it felt to me like there was something missing. Through a complicated series of experiments, I figured out what that missing element was, and now I give you… Colin’s new, improved CSHead! »

herk: you want eye candy? I got your eye candy right here: skippy 3D-Desktop Xgl Miguel de Icaza »

A friend on IRC was asking me how I did some of the CSHeads. Since a picture’s worth a thousand words, a movie must be worth, like, a billion. Allow me to present a short film for your enjoyment: gimping smit’s head Essentially, the process boils down to four steps: Get a photo of a head Mess with it in the GIMP ??? Profit! »