Life

Things have been fairly slow around this week. It is mostly due to it being spring break, and despite trying to get myself motivated, I seem to sit around and do small things or nothing all day. I expect this to be a problem in the near future, because I have a project that I need to work on soon for at least three different entities, if not four. This state unsurprisingly doesn’t help my mood.

Debian

It seems that lately it is mandatory in any Debian developer’s blog to comment about the Etch release proposal. I have to say that I don’t like the idea of dropping so many architectures without a stable. One thing that made debian appealing to me was that I could not only run it on the old sparcs at my school (and put to use an otherwise unused machine), but I could also run it on old Mac LC IIs. I nuderstand that neither of these archs will be going away, but the fact that they all need to now deal with the fact that stuff may “just break” like it does in unstable every once in a while disheartens me. At the same time, I agree that we are in desperate need of a shorter release cycle and I think that dropping archs is the best and quickest way to get the job done, as it seems to be mostly a manpower issue. I’m pleased with the SCC idea and think it will be beneficial both to architectures on the decline and new archs (like amd64 was).

My packages are in desperate need of attention. This will be remedied soon, hopefully.

News Reading

Lately I have been using NetNewsWire for reading my RSS and Atom feeds. I find it excellent, but I am unable to cope with it’s client-ness. I used bloglines in the past but fear that it isn’t really for me - I am not a fan of their stated future business plan. I seem to be in need of a really good server-side aggregator. Planet is not right for me - I need something that keeps track of what I have read. It would be nice to have a server-side aggregator with an interface similar to NetNewsWire, which I have become fond of. The hotkeys and reading is really cool. Current plan is to look into Feed on Feeds and hope that I can extend it with some JavaScript and/or CSS in order to have it mimic the hotkeys of NNW. If others have some suggestions, I’m all ears (or at least my blog is).