• qboosh’s anal-retentive package corrections. Things work consistently. Very, very consistently. And he can spel, too.
• Out of the box IPv6 support, and no ifconfig(8) needed.
• Choices aren’t made as distro policy except when there’s One Right Way, or having one way is the only possible way, no matter what it is.
• Packages are as small as possible, but not annoyingly fragmented like a certain distro’s Ruby package
• Things work out of the box most of the time.
• It uses RPM.
• Development is transparent — enough so that I as a non-Polish-speaker could get involved. The technical clarity makes up for most of the lack of English developer docs.
• Up-to-dateness without actually bleeding much. I’ve been running GNOME 2.10 since shortly after it came out from gnome.org, and the breakage was nearly nil. No reason to delay the update forever.
• Effort into solving things solidly. I can confidently upgrade a kernel with RPM, and not fret that the system won’t boot. I’ve had two exceptions to this, both with some exceedingly odd (read: unreasonable, and using bleeding-edge softtware) setups that I created. Both of which PLD’s current RPMs handle, actually.

Ruby’s packages in PLD are decent (I made most of them), but there’s some nasty quirks around ri because it doesn’t play nice with RPM: a package that adds methods to a core class like Array generates a new cdesc-Classname.yaml file, which would require a programatic merge (and worse, unmerge) from the installed copy. This isn’t acceptable, because it makes MD5 checksum verification much more fragile, which is one reason people use an RPM-based system: the validity checks are powerful when the packages are made right.

I’m planning on doing several things to PLD’s ruby packaging in the coming time:

• Package setup.rb as a package in its own right, for build scripts to draw on. I have a copy in CVS right now, but I’m manually synching it with upstream, and there’s no versioning that way. Now, I can declare which version of setup.rb I coded the package spec against, so that when I update setup.rb, I’ll know what packages have to be updated to match, since there are no backward-compatibility guarantees.
• Patch ri to use more than one YAML file for its class description format. Or maybe scrap it entirely since ri is amazingly slow, when compared to man(1).
• Make a new, less ugly and more useful and easier to index RDoc template.
• Perhaps centralize ruby docs into /usr/share/doc/ruby/{core,stdlib,packagename}, for easy mass-publishing to the web, since most docs require a browser to read effectively.
• Package some of the Heretix system administration scripts, to toy with at least.
• Pipe dream: find an effective way to replace init(8) and rc-scripts with ruby, and make the boot sequence faster and better organized.
• Code a nice full-text index to the installed documentation, and an XMLHTTPRequest-based UI for it, for efficient searching of the entire installed set of package docs.
• Patch Ruby (or maybe just Ruby’s build) to look for architecture-independent libraries in /usr/share instead of /usr/lib{,64}, so that noarch packages can be built, and are actually the same when built on all architectures. Sparc64 and AMD64 are problematic in that there is both a /usr/lib and /usr/lib64, but Ruby only looks at the one it was built with, and in /usr/share not at all.

Illustration Friday‘s theme this week is “Heroes”. Sometimes it just takes some determination and a will to speak up to be a hero, not be the biggest and baddest…

Insane idea of the minute: Curry lasagne.

I have always been obsessed with stories about transformation. I I spent much of my teen years seeking out books about people being changed in so many ways. I love the transformations in Dealing with Dragons, I Capture The Castle is one of the best books I’ve read more recently, about two girls going through th transformation of adolescence. I loved Ender’s Game as a coming-of-age story, children transformed into adults, and a world transformed by the end of a war. Treason, Isaac Asimov’s Robot novels, all of my favorites are in some way tied together this way.

My childhood favorite story was The Velveteen Rabbit. I didn’t read it often, nor listen to the audio tape my family owned often — it was a painful, powerful story to me, but one that’s shaped how I think in immeasurably deep ways. It still makes me cry every time I think about it, or the music comes on my random-play list.

Does anyone else have a theme to their favorites like this?

The most welcome sound in my life today: You have no messages. Press 0 to change voice mail options.. That was far too much work.

This town needs more tree and more cowbell.

The days where I get up at 7 go so much better than the days when I get up at 9:45. Wow.

Looking back, I should have realized I was trans a lot sooner.

I always had few friends — I really wanted to be one of the girls, but I wasn’t really one of them there. I didn’t want to hang out with the boys on the playground in elementary school. I was pretty sensitive as a kid, not itself a girly trait, but I think the feelings were starting then, and it was easy to upset me. My 11th birthday party was ice skating. I invited mostly girls. (I think my mom figured my hormones were kicking into gear. I really just wanted them to be friends outside of school, too.)

I’ve always gravitated toward situations where gender lines either don’t matter, or where I could slip into hanging out with the girls without being noticed. The theater company was good for that, the drama class at the high school was good for that, and the art classes I’ve taken were good for that, if relatively solitary most of the time.

It wasn’t until NBTSC that I really started developing relationships — the open, accepting atmosphere let me really be myself, or at least started me developing with no fear. Each year, I felt more like me and less like I was pretending.

Oh. And I’ve also had a strange propensity to end up with pink things with no effort on my part.

This was something I read every week at the Unitarian-Universalist congregation my family used to attend. It was on an unassuming bronze plaque, placed off to one side off the round hallway in the classroom half of the building, at the perfect height for a tall child such as myself to read as she passed.

Mostly for forecaster15 and the Portland crew, but anyone who cares to should look at some shots of the sky development in Portland this evening.

I am so tired but very happily so. I rolled out of bed at a very early 9am, met Ethan and Eric and Ruth at the coffeeshop. There was a hike planned that I didn’t know about, so we shortly left and headed for the hills to hike to the top of Mount Baldy. Notably, Mount Baldy is the only mountain visible from my house that doesn’t break treeline. Go figure on that one.

I filled the card on my camera, not that that takes much, and got a few good shots. I should give up on the panoramas for a while so I have enough flash to get really good at framing shots, but I didn’t today.

The hike was eight miles, and over 5000 vertical feet (counting the downs too). On the way home, I collected a half pound of stinging nettle for dinner, which is now sitting happily in my stomach as curry, along with some comfrey and marshmallow from the garden.

I had a rude awakening yesterday, talking to my father. My parents, on a scale of one to ten, usually rank somewhere right around nine. I didn’t pick up too many bad habits from them, they’re tolerant of most everything and truly accepting of nearly all of that. What I realized, though, is that my father has some very strange ideas of what mental health is. To quote him, “You’re not really mentally okay unless you can do it without medicines or anything”. It made me realize that there’s an all-natural 1 elitism that I used to share (this is why it bothers me so much, I think), and now reject.

This partly illustrates why they just Don’t Get the “transgender thing”.

1Remind me some time to give an earful on my thoughts on nature — for now, suffice it to say that I believe humans are a part of nature — all we do is natural. There’s nothing automatically better about something coming from plants or that existed before the 19th century or anything like that.

Arr. I will not get depressed right now, I have work to do. I will not!.

Sigh. I’ll do my best anyway.

Guadelupe molted again this week. This is her sitting on her rather large web.