busy day

I had to work today since I'll be away for Thanksgiving. I ended up juggling several tasks all day, which never leaves me feeling very productive at the end, compared to if I can just sit down and work on one hard problem for hours. Still, I think it was a productive day: I babysat the d-i rc2 builds in the background, while working on fixing the debian-edu CD builds again, writing the we site changes for d-i rc2, setting up a page to track debian-edu CD build and autotest status, and in the background every hour or two I fixed another problem in the s390 autotest script and got a little bit closer to finishing that. The s390 autotest setup job has been running as a very low priority background task for 3 days, and would be done, except I rewrote most of it last night to more closely match a "real" s390 install.

Oh and when I wasn't working on all that, I tried to avoid getting sucked into several mooix bugs and discussions that have popped up all of a sudden after most mooix folk being inactive for most of the year. Now some misc notes and replies.

themes

Erich blogged about Debian branding. I may be in the minority, but one thing I like about Debian is that we make minimal changes to the default desktop, and in particular don't change from the default toolkit themes. This makes the Debian "brand" be whatever the standard look is. I think this fits in well with Debian's place as the de-facto standard distribution (um) used by a majority of the people who write this software. I've seen too many toolkit themes and skins put together by people who know what looks cool in a screenshot, but not what is actually usable. I trust at least one of our major desktops to take more care about usability than the average themer. Also, the idea of a militaristic theme based on the name "sarge" gives me and quite a few of my family members hives.

family blogging

It seems that several of my sibs have taken up blogging now, and the parents are still working to figure this stuff out. If this keeps up I should probably put together a family blog aggregator based on planet. If any family members are reading this and would like to receive any/all of the blogs by email, I can set that up in minutes for you.