everburning

We went over to our friends Austin and Lori’s house on Saturday to do some St. Patty’s day drinking. While there we were taking a look at some stuff in their basement and I noticed Austins Warhammer figurines. He has a pretty good collection and they look really good all painted up.

Today I decided to try my hand at painting some. I don’t have any desire to play Warhammer at the moment, I just want to paint the little guys. I did a bit of painting many, many moons ago but haven’t done it in a long time.

So, I wandered up to the local gaming store this afternoon before going to read my book and picked up a few things. I got one Lord of Tzeentch that looks pretty difficult. He’s kinda my goal at the moment. To get started I picked up the Battle for Skull Pass Paint Set which comes with 10 Night Goblins.

I then sat down for about 3-4 hours and painted them. It takes quite a bit of concentration, and in my case, a good bit of touching up as I go along. I’ll have to admit, it’s pretty fun. You can see the final product taking shape as you go along. I get a bit obsessive and try to fix up as many of my little mistakes as I can, which just takes more time.

I think they came out pretty well. I’m also sure there are a lot of people that could do it better. I’m happy with the results. It was a good way to spend a few hours with an actual tangable thing that the end which is nice. I’m thinking I might go pickup another set, maybe dwarfs or something, to practices on next. Something to get me a bit more confidence before tackling the Lord.

Well, I managed to get my first patch into OpenSolaris. It wasn’t anything major, just a couple simple script fixes but, it did get me to go through the entire process of contributing. A bit of a daunting task as there are a lot of things to keep in mind.

I also opened my big mouth and suggested an article for new developers.

I’ve decided to put some form of money where my mouth is. Possibly Monopoly money.

Anyway, here goes, some information to keep in mind when contributing to OpenSolaris.

OpenSolaris can be a bit of a frightening community. There is a lot of stuff going on over there. Some parts have a lot of activity, some have none. I guess like any community. The problem with this is it can be really daunting to get involved. Where do you start? What do you need to contribute? Hopefully this article will help.

Your first step on this road is to start getting involved in the communities. This really depends on what you want to help with but in general, signing up for OpenSolaris Discuss is probably a good place to start. After that it depends on what you want to do. If you’re looking to submit code patches it’s probably a good idea to sign up to the OpenSolaris Request Sponsor list which I’ll explain in a little bit. There are also lists relating to documentation, new users, system administrators, DTrace, ZFS and many others. Take a look through the OpenSolaris Forums page and see if anything strikes your fancy.

Ok, the rest of this article is going to be coming at this from the coding perspective as that’s where I’m coming from. Things are probably similar if you’re helping out in the other parts of the community.

Before you’ll be able to commit any code back to OpenSolaris you’ll need a contributor agreement. This is an agreement between you and Sun giving joint copyright on the code you submit. Without this agreement your code won’t be allowed back into OpenSolaris. You can learn more, and actually get the agreement on the agreement page. There is also a contributor agreement FAQ available.

When the agreements have been processed by Sun you will receive a contributor agreement number. Hold onto this number as you’ll need to reference it when submitting code.

While our agreement is off being reviewed by Sun we can go ahead and get ourselves setup to do some development. The first thing you’ll need is a base system to install OpenSolaris onto. You can get more information on getting setup here. The downloads page also gives some links to various distributions and build instructions.

Once you’ve got a base system installed you can either grab the current source code as a tarball or from the Mercurial repository. The tarballs are available at: http://dlc.sun.com/osol/on/downloads/current/ and Mercurial information is available on the project page.

The process to build and install the software is laid out in the README and in the Developers Reference Document.

When you get everything installed correctly, and if you’re like me this means doing it at least twice as the first install turned the computer into a brick, you can start fixing bugs and adding features.

There are a few different places you can look for stuff to work on if you don’t have something in mind already. The OSS Bite Sized list is a good place to start. These are bugs that are considered small and good starting points. Before embarking on any of these you might want to check the Request Sponsor list to see if anyone is working on the bug yet.

You can also search the bug database for other bugs to work on. A couple of the possible search keywords include:

• oss-bite-sized
• speeling
• oss-request

When you’re change is complete you’ll need to make a diff of the change to send in for review. There are a couple of different ways to do this depending on what system you used to receive the code.

If you’re using Mercurial you can do something like (note my Mercurial usage sucks and there is probably a better way to do this):

hg commit
hg export tip

This will output a diff of the last change commited. You can also do hg diff and give it a revision number to get all the changes from that revision.

If you’re working with a tarball then you’ll probably want to resort to trusty diff. Before you start editing a file make a backup copy of the file and then something like diff -u file.old file should do what you need.

With your diff in hand you can now send it into the request sponsor mailing list. In order for your code to be put back into the main repository you require a sponsor within Sun. The request sponsor mailing list is where you can go to ask someone to sponsor your work. In order to make it simplest for the developers you can set your subject line to be the bugid and bug synopsis (eg: 6489619 *nightly* options list should be sorted) or, if the patch fixes multiple bugs, just list the bug ids in the subject.

The body of the email should contain, again, the bug id, the bug synopsis, your contributor agreement number and have the patch attached. Any other information you think is relevant, like why you fixed the bug in a specific fashion can also be helpful.

At this point, hopefully, a Sun engineer will pickup the bug and run with it. They’ll integrate your patch into their repository, do some testing, send out a request to get some reviewers and all the other dirty work. There is probably a good chance they’ll come back and ask for some changes to the patch. Nothing to worry about, this is normal. Make any needed fixups and send them a new diff.

If the patch changes something fundamental in Solaris then you might need to get ARC review. I’m not exactly sure how this works as I’ve never had to deal with it. Just listed here as a quick heads up.

That’s it. Hopefully at this point you’ve got something integrated back into OpenSolaris.

Resources

• OpenSolaris website
• Improving the OpenSolaris project
• Developer Reference
• Sun Contributor Agreement
• FAQ Center
• Getting Started FAQ
• Nevada Development Community

Video games are a terrible evil that has been silently spreading over the land. Teaching people about gardening is one of the worst offenses I’ve seen from this so called form of “entertainment”.

If you don’t believe me, just watch this documentary. Game Over. I rest my case.

Back from bizarro land, Owen, great job on the video. Just the right amount of humour and mock seriousness to give a lasting impression. It’s made even more amusing if you ask Stacy about her garden sometime.

And yes, she is now taking about planting real plants outside come summer. The horror. The horror. The horror.

We’ve all had those times. When life feels like its gone to molasis. Everything is moving slowly, stopped or moving backwards. We’re stuck in a trough and can’t see the next peak coming. When it does come, and it eventually does, it’s usually a good one. Leah’s summed it up nicely.

It creeps up on you. That feeling. That, blah, when you go to work on something that you’ve slaved over for months or even years. Suddenly it’s a chore. You’ve got no energy, no passion. The fuel is gone. In my experience, even as you get sucked down, things can turn around.

Once in a while you get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

The Grateful Dead

Something will come up. Some new aspect, some new motivator. Something that’ll point you out of the rut. It may even be a new project, a new hobby. Something that lets us see again.

Just so. Opening your eyes is all that is needed. The heart lies and the head plays tricks with us, but the eyes see true. Look with your eyes. Hear with your ears. Taste with your mouth. Smell with your nose. Feel with your skin. Then comes the thinking, afterward, and in that way knowing the truth.

A Game of Thrones

We get to the point where we’re rushing to our goals. We’ve just got one more thing to do, one more place to go, one more person to talk too. We forget to see. We forget to hear. We forget to taste. It all gets back burnered. We’ll do it later, we’ll do it in the future.

The future is just a fucking concept that we use to avoid living today.

6 Feet Under

Eventually we remember. Something triggers. We stop. We see. We hear. We look back and say What the fuck was I thinking?. We live in the moment for a short span of time until the next project accelerates us forward. We hit the next peak and dive for the next trough.

Without the trough would there ever be any peaks?

You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Maybe we need to rush head long into something and burn ourselves up. We need to rush forward and hit a wall. We need it. We need it so we can grow. We can look back and see how it worked. We can look at it and learn.

In that learning we can decide to do it again. Why? Because when we get out of it, when we get to that peak it’s fucking legendary.

Dude, that image is bloody creepy.

But, I suspect you’re right. Their after your eyeballs. Sweet, tasty, eyeballs. Except when their frozen, then they’re just hard to chew.