Radke Land

Ok, to start with, it's been forever since I've blogged.

Time/Life/Work seem to interfere with the best of intentions. Also, life seems to introduce swings in interests, motivations, foci, etc. I've spent the 'silent' time trying to escape life (games, SNES emulation, family) with my home server, which has worked absolutely brilliantly since the original flurry of blog posts. Not to say there haven't been other projects: Two MythTV systems (punch line: Try MythBuntu for simplicity and elegance), broken employees, endless pursuit of USB Bus reset problems, which several very ... good groups could not resolve, Fedora 7->8 in place migration, learning to backup my own DVD's (ugly in way too many cases), consumer firewall issues (maybe more to be reported later) new IPCop deployments, Human resources pain and genius, and many other issues that may be written about if ... inspiration comes.

What really got me going again is that I'm working on a Drupal 5.x to 6.x migration, and part of the process is to check your sitemap. You may or may not recall http://www.radkeland.org/cleaning-your-sitemap-done, which was a nice multi-threaded application to clean up your sitemap. Unfortunately, I recently did a slew of upgrades, which included an upgrade to 5.8.8, and threading broke ... at least as I had written it previously.

As I've burned myself out on (useless) game playing, and have come back around to creation (see http://www.radkeland.org/users-and-creators), I hope to contribute an updated http://www.radkeland.org/boss-worker-threaded-model-implemented-perl post, which is appropriate for changes in the updated version of Perl.

For what it's worth, I'm disappointed in the 'breakage' of threading from 5.6 to 5.8, but I'm more disappointed in my very shallow understanding of threading which is much more likely the cause of the aforementioned 'breakage'.

I'm committed to this topic, so please do expect a follow up.

Happy Hacking!

For a great (kinda short, well targeted, reasonably succinct, slightly comprehensible to non-geeks) interview with Richard Stallman, I definitely recommend http://kerneltrap.org/node/4484. For geek-oriented masochists, I can also recommend reading the entire comment section ... but only for the truly persistent.