ompty

scale6x is over

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 08:56:07 GMT

Woo! SCALE6x is over. Although I had intended on going Friday to set up the booth, I put it off until Saturday morning, knowing that there would not be much to do. As I had expected, it was a quick process getting everything connected and configured. The network was a bit more of a hassle, but that did not take up too much time either. The switch I had brought with me was useful until we got wireless working on the laptops.

Developer turnout was not as expected; nightmorph and I were the only two who actually attended. However, I did bring my friend with me, and while he has no real Linux experience, he was still helpful at the booth. In terms of giveaway items, we unfortunately did not have too many. While we had stickers and flyers last year, we had only Gentoo discs and various snacks this year. It's worth noting that a number of people asked about buying shirts. I'll try to get some for the event next year.

Also, I was able to give a brief introduction of Paludis to a few people, mostly those who were already using Gentoo. I have been using the package manager exclusively for nearly a year, with not one package emerged since the day I installed Gentoo on my current hard drive. I would like to see Paludis overtake Portage as the standard package manager, as it is already much better in nearly every way possible.

Anyhow, I would like to thank the SCALE team for the great job they have done in organising the event. It was executed professionally and flawlessly from what I could tell. It was great visiting some of the other booths, and we had the extremely interesting OLPC booth beside us. I had a lot of fun and look forward to next year's event.

gentoo at scale6x

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 11:02:37 GMT

After much procrastination, I eventually got around to writing Gentoo's proposal for exhibitor status at the sixth annual Southern California Linux Expo. A few days after submitting the application, I received an email from one of the SCALE organisers stating that it has been accepted. Although Gentoo will not have any speakers at the event, this does mean that we will have a booth on the exhibit floor. SCALE will be the perfect opportunity for those near Los Angeles to learn more about Gentoo and have a chance to meet some of the developers.

Gentoo attendance at the last SCALE event was a massive success and quite a few Gentoo developers showed up. I do not yet know who will be attending this year, but hopefully we can achieve a similar turnout. While not much internal planning has yet occured, the fact that our presence there is now confirmed allows for more serious planning to commence. I have set up a project page which can be used to track progress and ensure that communication is present. I would also like to mention that the Gentoo Events team sent my way a beautiful poster which will be displayed at the booth.

omposter

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 09:25:18 GMT

I occasionally have something that I would like to publish and have propagate to various feed aggregators. However, my inability to find decent weblog software that satisfies my minimalist preferences usually leads to a complete halt in updates after an initial burst of articles. Instead of once again following this pattern, I decided to write my own script, allowing everything to be exactly as I prefer. This is where omposter comes in! Credit for the awesome name goes to arbscht.

Omposter is an extremely simple weblog application powered by Ruby and YAML. Each article is stored as a manually-created YAML file containing information such as the title and contents. A small Ruby script generates HTML pages and RSS feeds from these files, resulting in a collection of static files that can be uploaded to a web server. Although I only started coding omposter on Christmas day, I had a rather complete script by that night. The only area still in need of substantial improvement is the category feature. As for the layout, I put together a small CSS stylesheet loosely based on the one I made for the omptagger website.