Bloggy

So I start on the second phase of my Nuclear Prototype schooling today.
The first phase was similar to Nuclear Power School in that there were a lot
of lectures, even though it wasn’t the same classroom atmosphere, we still had
a schedule we had to follow for the most part.

But in this phase, where we begin to work on a crew and alternate shifts,
the required schedule is much reduced. We will have to make more progress
each day, and we will have to do so without a required schedule to follow.
The problem is that the shifts are horrible. :)

For instance, I’ll get to go in today for ‘only’ 8 hours, since it is the
last day of the shift I am rolling into. But normally I’ll be working 7 days
straight, 12 hours for the first 5 days, 8 hours for the last 2. Then follows
2 days off so we can readjust our sleep schedule for a completely different
shift. About every 35 days we get 4 days off in order to recuperate. I
already can’t wait for my next 4 days off.

Scott Wheeler and I engaged in a source code cleanup of the JuK 3 (for KDE
4) codebase today, standardizing the source code layout and some of the
standard style elements which had drifted apart thanks to contributions from
different people over the past couple of years. Scott is busy trying to make
it build and work. I hope to be able to devote some time to it as well but I
guess we’ll have to see. =D

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I was surprised to see so much hoopla about the recent Super Bowl on a site mostly familiar to those interested in computing.

Celeste started off the fun with a nice post celebrating the Steelers victory.

Adam Treat, a Seahawks fan, didn’t think the game was that great, however, claiming more or less that the Steelers would not have won were it not for many bad calls by the referees.

I’m personally a Steelers fan, so I was glad they won although I had hoped the game would have been better (and less controversially officiated).

Adam says that we earned the win with one of the worst quarterback performances in history. Actually, AFAIK, according to the NFL QB rating, Ben Roethlisberger (the winning quarterback) had the worst performance ever by a Super Bowl winning quarterback. But football is perhaps the consummate team sport. The Steelers have often won over the past ten years or so with mediocre quarterbacks. So even if the quarterback was having a bad day, is no reason to say the Steelers were guaranteed to lose. A good defense will keep a team in many a game that they would otherwise lose. In fact I think a good defense is better than a good offense. Just ask the Colts, Broncos, and Bengals.

I will say this: The Seahawks outplayed the Steelers for most of the game, especially on offense. Matt Hasselbeck (the Seahawks quarterback) was on fire, and would have easily secured MVP honors in my book if the Seahawks had won. But although the Seahawks moved down the field easily, they settled for punts or field goals far too often, even if you reverse the bad calls (more on that later).

The Steelers, on the other hand, had all of their scoring on pretty much three big plays. A great pass by Roethlisberger (who showed great awareness of the line of scrimmage, not bad for a second-year quarterback in his first Super Bowl) to Hines Ward (Super Bowl MVP) got the Steelers close to a touchdown. Three plays later, Roethlisberger runs in the ball for the score. Adam calls it a “phantom touchdown” but I will have to disagree with him there. All the ball has to do is break the vertical plane between the playing field and the white line separating the end zone. Even if the player is pushed back while being tackled the touchdown counts. I was confident that Roethlisberger got the touchdown after seeing like 7 replays on TV. Unfortunately I can’t find photos of the goal line touchdown on the Intarweb.

Adam also mentions a holding call that moved back the Seahawks, and a penalty on Hasselback for tackling a player. I agree that the call on the tackle was completely wrong, although I don’t see how it would have changed things. As far as the holding penalty, the view on the field at the time didn’t look like holding, but according to people on various sites I’ve been frequenting, especially Football Outsiders, the angle on TV masked whatever the actual holding was. I didn’t see the offsides call however.

May I remind the Seahawks faithful that on Roethlisberger’s long pass to Ward to set up 1st and Goal, that the reason it was 3rd and 24 in the first place was due to an offensive holding call on Heath Miller? The Steelers started out the game with two consecutive penalties (albeit minor), and had a fumble return taken away (correctly according to the rule book) by instant replay. I mean, I’m sympathetic, having seen a lot of Steelers games badly officiated, but the final score was 21 - 10, not 21 - 17 or even 21 - 20. And just three weeks ago the WORST CALL EVER happened to the Steelers, but they didn’t lie down and die on the field (although we sure did complain afterwards. =D)

I guess it’s a shame that a team always has to walk away from the Super Bowl as the loser. The Seahawks seem like a very classy team. Even Jerramy Stevens, who even though started the trash talking with Joey Porter, and dropped quite a few balls during the game (no mention of that, Adam?), stayed in the locker room after the game and answered all the questions people had for him. Lofa Tatupu, Matt Hasselback, and the rest of the Seahawks have been shown great sportsmanship in what I’m sure is going to be one of the more debated Super Bowl losses in history, and for that they have my deep respect. Hopefully they get Shaun Alexander back and make a second Super Bowl run, they’re one of the more deserving teams IMHO.

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So, another month, another kdesvn-build release, right?

Well, except that I’ve finally attached that beloved of version numbers, 1.0, to the end of the program’s name. What does this mean? Well, it probably means to expect 1.0.1 in a few days, knowing my luck. ;-)

On a more serious note, there’s a couple of cool new features I implemented. The coolest for those kdesvn-build users who don’t speak English natively is that kdesvn-build supports the l10n module finally, meaning that you can use kdesvn-build to download, build, and install a KDE translation along with the rest of your KDE build. Look for the “kde-languages” option.

What may be even more awesome, however, is that kdesvn-build supports the Subversion snapshot tarballs from the kdesvn-build website. What does this mean for you? It means that, on initial module checkout, if kdesvn-build.kde.org has a snapshot for your module and branch, kdesvn-build will automatically download it, extract it, and do all the neat little tricks required to turn it into a real live Subversion checkout. Only, without actually going through all the time of a real Subversion checkout.

This is much quicker for you, and has the potential to ease the strain on KDE’s Subversion servers. I ran the old version of kdesvn-build and compared it against the new version. The old version simply performed a checkout of arts. The new version used the snapshot of arts from revision 457934 (The Subversion repo was up to around 504000 at the time), and updated from the snapshot to get the latest arts. Both versions ended up with the same source checkout, at the same revision.

Here’s the times:

This includes the time necessary to cleanup. But, it doesn’t take into account the fact that arts wasn’t heavily modified after 457934. Modules like kdelibs and kdebase would probably show closer relative times if I allow their snapshots to become as comparatively out-of-date as arts’s was.

What I didn’t realize beforehand was how long it would take to actually release this. There’s websites you have to update. In my case, kdesvn-build.kde.org obviously, followed by my personal homepage, and then the entry at kde-apps.org. But that’s not all. I mailed kde-announce@kde.org so that the release would be picked up by websites all around the world (but especially to add to the KDE releases section on LWN.net’s Weekly News. ;-). I also finally created an entry for kdesvn-build at the famous freshmeat.net. We’ll see how important that is.

Finally, I just had to post about this on my blog to tell Planet KDE. If you find that kdesvn-build just doesn’t work for whatever reason, please let me know, or post a bug at bugs.kde.org. I’m trying to keep my streak of consecutive releases without a brown-paper-bag flaw alive.

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