Monthly Archives: October 2006

Ports will stay frozen for a few more days

The ports tree will remain frozen for a few more days to fix some last minute errors that have popped up. Please bear with us and have some more patience.

Ports freeze extended to October 24th

To fix some more fallout from the GNOME import and as there will be an
extra BETA release as well, portmgr has decided to extend the ports
freeze by one week. This puts the start of the ports thaw at October
24th.

So far, a lot of fixes have been committed to ports that were broken
before and therefore not included in the release. Keep it up!

All hail xsltproc!

My site droso.org and also aarhus.pm.org have for a long time beer running AxKit. AxKit turned into a major burden to keep running and when I changed from apache 1.3.x to 2.0.x, I even had to make pass it through mod_proxy to an apache 1.3.x that was running after that to keep it alive. I couldn’t get it to work with mod_perl2. After I had to reinstall koala, I didn’t want to install AxKit again. The original plan was to have a look at mod_xslt, but that was also only for apache 1.3.x, so not an option. The Brix recommended xsltproc from ports/textproc/libxslt. WOW! It just worked! Not one line of the XML or XSL stylesheet needed changing, it just worked. A quick 20 line Makefile to ease installing all the files in the right places, and now I can still edit my XML and just upload plain HTML files to the webserver. No overhead of running additional modules in apache. Nothing. It just works.

koala is dead! Long live koala!

For the third time in its lifetime, koala burned down its CPU fan with the usual consequences. Fortunately, I already had been given some new hardware to reinstall to, but you know how it goes, postpone, postpone, rinse, repeat. Well, no more postponing now. After a long day yesterday and some fixes today, it looks like I got most of it working again. And of course, bigger, better, faster, more! Quite nice new hardware, dual Xeon 2.8Ghz, 3Gb RAM and 5x36Gb SCA RAID5 disks. Let’s hope this one is more stable than the old one. To say the least, I did test that the backup is working…

Apple harvest

Last Saturday, we went out to a collegue to harvest some apples to make cider. We picked a very nice danish autumn day and the fresh air probably did us good. The neighbours cows were very inquisitive, but quickly made run for it when someone suddenly popped up from behind a tree :)
We collected about 100kg apples from several trees and pressed 2/3 them, which gave about 30 liters of juice. Some pictures here. Now it’s just some patience for the yeast to do its job.

What to do during the freeze

To quote the words of Kris Kennaway:

” Hi all,

Some of you might be feeling bored during the freeze, so please
consider checking out:

http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/i386-6-latest/
http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/amd64-6-latest/

and working on some of the ~200 port failures listed there. Some of
them have been fixed since these builds, but many of them have been
broken for months but require only trivial fixes.

Kris”

Dry mead I

2,5 kg honey
7L tap water

Fermentation:
10L
Steinberger yeast
OG: 20,0 brix (1.083)

Racked: 29/10
Racked again: 19/11 – gravity: 8,3 brix

Ports tree frozen

From today 12:00 UTC, the ports tree is frozen in preparation for the 6.2 release cycle. See an earlier post for schedule and policy for what kind of commits are allowed. Everyone is encouraged to fix broken ports or ports that don’t build on the pointyhat cluster.

4 dead pigeons

Claypigeons, of course. Shooting claypigeons as teambuilding was quite a new idea and fun to try. The weather also was in a pleasant mood and it kept dry until we came home. Almost. But most surprisingly, I actually managed to hit a claypigeon. Pulverized it. And then one more. And one more. An finally a fourth. Now I’m not going to tell 4 out of how many, but don’t count on winning the war if you send me out in the field :)