Wouldn't it be nice ...

As that famous song [YouTube, last.fm] says, it's been a while. Since last I blogged, that is. Lots of stuff going on in my world, although I haven't been spending enough time on Gentoo lately.

I've joined the Web 2.0 trend, using Google Reader and saving my bookmarks on del.icio.us via the wonderful Firefox plugin. Next thing you know, I'll be reading Digg or another equally trendy Slashdot replacement. The only thing like that I read now is the superb LWN. I just added the Planet Conary feed (thanks ferringb!), because I think there's a lot Gentoo can learn from rPath, since it's got a similar base.

My Gentoo activity is probably best illustrated via the CIA commit stats — only 9 commits this week and 41 this month. A large part of my drop in commit activity lately is thanks to Joshua Baergen (Josh_B on IRC), who's really started to take over X maintenance with double my commits this month, mostly in preparation for X.Org 7.2 as well as the new input-hotplug work for X.Org 7.3.

In Gentoo, we plan to show you a mixture of 7.2 and 7.3. What we try to do is mix and match the latest individual X component releases wherever they're compatible, regardless of which "official release" they come from. So you may already have a number of input-hotplug components, and the only changes you'd need to make are the server and drivers. This mirrors what you saw with 7.0 and 7.1, where the server and drivers lagged back on 7.0 waiting for Nvidia and ATI while all the other components jumped to 7.1.

I'd like to publicly thank Diego Pettenò (look, I got the accent right!) for his contributions to XCB, both in my overlay and upstream. On that note, I encourage anyone using my overlay to send me patches for anything that doesn't work. There's no reason a personal overlay should only hold commits from that person.

In the past month, I've gotten in touch with two new, exciting ventures using Gentoo. Engine Yard is a Ruby on Rails deployment provider that allows you to purchase virtual clusters, and SiCortex is an innovative HPC cluster creator that uses Gentoo on clusters with 5,800 nodes. Check out the videos on the Engine Yard site, they've got one specifically about their use of Gentoo.

I've also taken on the job of creating a monthly newsletter for the OSEL, which aims to get more students involved in open source at OSU and liaise with the academic side of the university, while the LUG interfaces with the local community and the OSL connects with the broader, outside community. This is really exciting for me because I've got a significant journalism background [PDF] (and no, that contact information is no longer accurate), but I haven't had a chance to use it for a couple of years. I'll share the first issue with all of you once I finish it.

The OSL, which provides free hosting for Gentoo and a ton of other OSS projects including Mozilla and the Linux kernel, will put your name on one of its racks in thanks for your donations. Get in at the ground level -- the good spots will go fast, and lots of people have already given! They've given us so much, we should really give something back.

I had a great time at OSCON. As you'll see in what others say about it, the most valuable part is the "hallway track" -- who you talk to and what you do outside of the sessions. I talked with so many people that I'm not going to spend the effort mentioning everyone's names. Both the Gentoo lunch on Wednesday and the X lunch Thursday were fantastic, as well as the Wednesday night OSL party. At each of them, I reconnected with old friends and met new ones, all of whom were great to talk with.

Here's quick summaries of the sessions I attended. If you feel like looking up who led them, here's the schedule.

State of the Linux Kernel
A fun, Q&A-based session. Greg KH walked in with no preconceived notions of what to talk about, and the interplay between him and the lively audience kept things going.

Simple Guide to Linux File Systems
A user-oriented introduction to which file systems to pick for which workloads. There is no "best" file system, but there are different bests for different use cases. The most interesting part? When speed is needed, consider ext2, especially on read-only systems such as some embedded devices. Also, stop using jffs2 on current flash -- it has write-balancing built in, so certain parts won't wear out faster than others. Consider ext2/3 or minix instead for RAM disk use.

Getting Started in Linux Kernel Development
This talk would be much more useful to people not already involved in open-source development. I was hoping for an intro to kernel work for someone like me, but I didn't fit the intended audience. Still, it was a good talk, and the last 5-10 minutes were new to me too.

Lightning States Of
This was the 15-project series of 5-minute lightning talks that I took part in. The project list was quite diverse, ranging from SQLite to Gentoo to OpenSolaris to Java and back to databases with MySQL and PostgreSQL, closing out with a wild five minutes about the kernel by Greg KH and his daughter. Under-attended, but wonderful.

Marketing to Dilbert: How to Invite Developers Into Your Project
Amusingly, 90% of the audience was developers rather than business people, quite the reverse of what was expected. A fun paraphrase: "My entire MBA is these three things: sales, tactics and strategy." We spent no more than three minutes. The most intriguing part for me was creating a business using open source, and the key point here was, "How do I generate sustainable revenue?" I added the emphasis, because you need to think about ongoing revenue and how to get one-time customers to keep coming back. Another important quote: "Understand the market better than your competition."

State of the Desktop Infrastructure
What is "desktop infrastructure," you ask? In this case, it's X, the underlying graphical core beneath your GTK+ and Qt. A solid, concise talk on some changes since the transition to the X.Org Foundation, the new eye candy, and some upcoming changes related to Xgl and such. The last half-hour or so was discussion, since a number of X experts were there to answer questions in their respective areas.

OSS Project Press Relations
An outstanding talk, again under-attended because it's the last talk of the day. I typed pages and pages of notes from this talk, which I plan to apply to Gentoo's PR. Soon, I'll post my notes to the gentoo-pr mailing list for discussion and commit them to CVS in proj/en/pr/. Before this talk, the file systems one was the most useful, but this one stole the trophy.