My week with Gentoo and other stuff

Well, it's kinda a day for my weekly stuff.

In fact, I haven't see much of going on with Gentoo, this week was pretty calm. So few things then:

Non gentoo:

1. I'm twice an uncle now. My sis gave birth to another baby boy last friday, exactly one year after a previous one. So its kinda funny thing in a family now, we still laughing. But it is weird though.
2. Yet another "Is Linux ready for the desktop" type of article. I don't think we'll ever get rid of those. To the date, I think linux is just another OS, which gives you the choice. Because of the kind of a user I am, I do think Linux is better than anything else, because almost everything I do with computers, is either multiplatform (Java-Mono-.Net-Flash, and please don't flame on this - they all the same to me), webbased (gmail) or Linux/Unix oriented (shells, cli's of sorts, etc). Linux is great platform for that.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying that Windows is bad, but for the god's sake, why would maximizing Outlook from system tray to a full or opening a "new mail" window takes 15-20 seconds on pretty idle system?

3. I've read an article about OLPC project efforts, and man, I want to work for something like that.
Isn't it great project? I'd quit my current job in an instant if job like that would come up. It's not the money thing, its pure interest and excitement drive - I like challenges and, more important, seeing the result almost immediately of what you did. I already have ideas for what can be done with this kind of laptops, and it doesn't even exist yet!! That alone should show how bored I am at my current job.

Gentoo-related:

1. Userreps are little slow lately because they are busy, but don't let it stop you. If you have anything interesting or important to say, suggest or ask, do it on User Representatives Subforum or drop by #gentoo-userreps channel on FreeNode irc network.
2. Last council meeting logs were published. One thing I noticed, is that Bryan (kloeri) will review Devrel etiquette guide, because the current one has some ambiguities. I did suggest few things for that and it would make me really happy if some of my suggestions would find a way in final document. That would be great.
3. XMMS voes (part 4) - "it ain't over until I say its over"? This subject seem to affect so many people, that many cannot leave it in peace. So, in an effort to help all of those, User Representative kopp (and developers nattfodd, amne, metalgod, nixnut, and if I forgot someone - correct me) has prepared an explanatory article about an issue. Use it to solve your problems and I hope it will be the end of it.
4. "Automatic Tools" department (if I'm starting to resemble John. C. Dvorak here - sorry) - this time its about automatic deletion of an old packages (or rather, their distfiles).
   My stake on this, is that yes, there are unneeded files on you system that take considerable amount of space, and I understand that some people never heard of eclean. But this cannot be the reason to create automatic tools to do so either. As some haven't heard of eclean, what makes one think that people will know about settings in /etc/make.conf for distcleaning? Isn't this the same concept? Besides, you obviously can't delete the files automatically, so you'd default to option in /etc/make.conf, which will not even be set in that file, but in some else, probably in profile/ somewhere. How is that different from eclean? It just means integrating eclean into Portage, not as stand alone package.And if eclean is not good enough, maybe it should be enhanced.

I just don't understand why every time the existing tool doesn't do exactly what one needs, the suggestion for "automatic tools" appear. IMHO, its not always the best way.

Well, thats it for this week. Feedbacks are appreciated (I am usually having them for lunch) and if I missed something (or forgot to mention someone I should've) just let me know and this unfortunate mistake will (supposedly) be corrected.