Gentoo’s system for maintaining packages, Portage, has had a significant speed boost with version 2.1. Synchronising the tree (the equivalent of Debian’s ‘apt-get update’) feels several times faster. I don’t mind compiling my own apps (I leave it going overnight), but I do mind if I have to wait for ages before I can start the compilation in the first place. Anybody who has been scared away from Gentoo in the past because of Portage should give it another go.
Note that this does not affect compilation times. It does, however, hasten the package management both before and after compilation.
Linux Australia was very well represented at the Sydney Education Expo (24-25 June) this year. Pia wrote
Just some entertaining links:
A must-see film for anyone who grew up in the ’80s.
More info here. It’s a shame that the official site requires Flash 8 to run. That locks us GNU/Linux users out 
KDE4 development is underway, and users and developers are having their say on how it should look. One thing that irks me is when someone posts a mockup of some ‘new’ idea, when in fact that idea is just lifted from somewhere else. I have no problem with derivation or inspiration from elsewhere (that’s how software evolves, after all), but for ghod’s sake please don’t pass off some other idea as your own.
Take for example this mockup. Look at the file browser. Can you say Windows Vista? Some person, whom I pray is not a Konqueror developer, was so enamoured with it that he created an interactive version.
I’m not saying that it is unattractive, but I don’t understand why this sort of blind copying takes place. I’ll admit that graphic design isn’t one of FLOSS’s strong points, but with that said we do have some truly innovative and beautiful designs. Amarok comes to mind.
Whenever most people go ice skating, they usually begin by clinging onto the barrier going around the edge of the rink. I am no exception, but considering that I hadn’t skated in close to ten years, I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to skate away from the barrier after only about ten minutes on the edge. I was able to build up some reasonable speed, and I didn’t even fall over once.
Despite the cold, I worked up a sweat, and I must have had a considerable workout since my hamstrings felt tender for the next couple of days.
After that, we went to see Superman Returns. The intro had me wrapped: it was essentially an updated version of the intro in the first movie. Unfortunately, I feel they borrowed too much from the original four films. Unlike Batman Begins (which I loved), Superman Returns, as its name implies, is a continuation and not a reboot. Lex Luthor was darker, but still felt like a bumbling buffoon surrounded by even greater buffoons. He played a minimal role in the film, with a large chunk of time going to Lois Lane. Lois, I feel, was very poorly written for and casted. What happened to the sassy reporter that offset the goody-goody Clark Kent so well? This Lois was like a wet blanket on the whole plot.
Superman himself was pretty darn good. The problem with Superman, though, is that he’s too darn powerful. Lex Luthor is a powerful adversary with his evil genius, but if you want a character to match Superman in raw power you’d have to look towards the likes of Darkseid or Doomsday. For the movie franchise to survive, I think they will have to branch away from Luthor, but hopefully not as badly as was done in Superman III.
I finally got off my lazy arse and set up a blog! I had been mulling over various possibilities of implementation, including setting up my own Web server, purchasing hosting and even coding the whole thing myself in Django or Ruby on Rails. There are some things I realised, though:
- these things take time to learn, implement and maintain
- I don’t have the bandwidth to host it from home, and hosting services cost money
- I don’t have much free time these days
- I’m cheap :p
So I got a Blogsome account for the supreme price of $0. This was some months after deciding to have a blog in the first place, and now I have a backlog of things to write about. At least something’s better than nothing, so be prepared for entries that begin like, "Four months ago I did blah."
I have thought ahead, though. Thanks to FreeDNS, my homepage links to here, and I have a redirect for http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog. The links for the RSS/RDF feeds also link to my domain rather than Blogsome directly. Hopefully, these measures should provide some degree of forwards compatability should I later decide to move my blog elsewhere. If you want permanent links to my blog, link to dhanapalan.com.
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