The Tar Pit

I ended the past few months with Gutenberg, Feedbot and a lot of walking around the country; time to look now at what I'm to do in the next few weeks. Let's start with another look at the outstanding items on the list, in mostly arbitrary order:

• Cuntoo is still screaming to be tested, with ebuilds for various stuff to be added etc.; Alf even sent over a neat little laptop for me to test it on, although I'm most probably going to have to run the actual bootstrapping on a beefier machine, on account of the GCC 6->5->4 fandango requiring too much memory.
• FFA is still screaming for a (re)read.
• Ircbots (deedbot, auctionbot, feedbot and others) are still disconnecting from Fleanode without even reconnecting, even though the code for that is right there. Trinque is still looking at this; while I'm keeping an eye on the matter from the maintenance point of view, I myself will probably have to actively debug it in order to determine the cause and a solution.
• Speaking of this, there has been some discussion of logging everything on IRC; this sounded like an interesting item for my list, but Lobbes is going to look into it.
• Adalisp is still screaming to be turned into a proper useful thing.
• The forum has seen quite a lot of discussion of gathering together a set of Common Lisp WWW tools, since these seem to be sorely needed by Republicans; they include e.g. Drakma (also used by e.g. Feedbot), but also a HTTPtron (which Lobbes will also look into) and a CL-WHO; really, I should have signed that way back when, but well, better late than never.
• Recently Mircea Popescu came with the idea of implementing an image pastebin, which really, could just be a file pastebin; item needs to be properly specced and implemented by yours truly, right now we know it depends on the HTTPtron item.
• My blog software is still screaming to be genesized, signed etc. This depends on a couple of WWW items being published first.
• More recently Mircea Popescu came up with the idea of starting a Romanian political party centered around TMSR ideology, and well... I'm living in the place, for one; and as for the other, I'm thinking it'd be genuinely fun to do something other than tech work for a change. The problem's on one hand that, as Diana points out, and as can be easily seen above, there's a lot of work to be done on the technical front, and who's gonna do that in my stead? and on the other, that I need to first become more familiar with the subject matter.
• What else? Well, there was some hardware stuff, e.g. FG design, I was going to look into at some point, there are articles I want to translate, old logs I want to read, plus cultural debt and others that oughta help me get on my own two feet. Did I miss anything?

As the reader can see, the list is considerably large, not even accounting for all the things that I don't remember. Thus, I will plan not for one, but for two items for the following period:

• WWWisms: a. rereading CL-WHO and publishing a genesis; and b. studying TBNL, Hunchentoot, possibly other HTTP server-side artifacts, and syncing up with Lobbes on this task -- one of us will have to publish a genesis sooner rather than later. Based on my previous experience with said items, I will give a generous estimate of two weeks for this.
• Specifying and estimating the time needed to implement an image pastebin: shouldn't take more than a week, really (although really, it could take as little as one day).
• Getting Cuntoo bootstrapped, or, at the very least, publishing some experimental results on this: hard to say, running the scripts doesn't take long, but I'll have to read them, understand what's going on there and so on, so I'll give this another one to two weeks.

Well, three items. So based on the estimates above, I should be back here about next month this time -- although experience shows that delays may occur, either caused by imperial business trying to swallow me whole, or due to imperial rot trying to swallow other things of importance. I'm still working on my estimates; and same as Lobbes, at the end of this round I'll just circle back to the list above.

Filed under: asphalt.
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