irssi proxy sux!

Today I switched to ZNC, a real IRC bouncer. New opinion: ZNC rules, irssi proxy sux! Plus, now I don't have to worry about screen problems.

I spent a while looking into Diaspora* and Tor again. They're both amazing projects; you should go check them out.

Finally, I installed Debian on a real partition (which is apparently minimally possible even on a netinst CD) in preparation for migrating from the VM. I still have to wrestle wireless into working, though, so we'll see how that goes. I spent a good portion of the installation procedure waiting for it to randomize disk space, because I set up an encrypted /home and swap. Pretty boring.

(Note: I cannot be bothered to properly link to things in this post. Just Google them, OK?)

Debian week, day 5 (I think)

Done today: made it about a third if the way through the Debian Policy Manual. I also spent a lot of time waiting: waiting for my GPG incremental Tor key refresh tool (I forget exactly what it's called, parcimonie I think) to build dependencies, waiting for bitcoind to sync up with the network (it's still going and has, AFAICT, at least 5 more hours to go), and waiting for my Debian VirtualBox hard drive to convert into a raw format in preparation to move to a partition. I spent a lot of that time reading the Debian Policy Manual, but I also spent a lot of it on Freenode in #archlinux.
Hopefully tomorrow I can make the switch to a real partition!

GPG and Sid

I want to go to bed but here's a quick update on what I've done today:
I have moved past steps 1 and 2 on my checklist. That is, I have installed Debian and upgraded to Sid. I spent a long time waiting for things to download, and I did various things during that time (like browsing Unix & Linux). I spent a fairly long amount of time getting the feel of my new Debian system (although I already had some experience from Ubuntu) and customizing it to my liking. I still have a bit more to do, notably installing the awesome window manager (I couldn't do that during the day because build-essential and the Sid updates were downloading and locking the APT cache). But overall I'm pretty satisfied. I've got my Emacs, I've got my Firefox, and soon I'll have my awesome - what more could you want?
Anyway, the second thing that I've done today is I've generated a GPG key for myself to use. It's GPG key 0xA8DA10C057F65FA7, with the fingerprint B105 3164 B6C8 F4F7 C2B4 356F A8DA 10C0 57F6 5FA7. I have uploaded it to keys.gnupg.org and keyserver.ubuntu.com. You can also find this information on strugee.net.

So I eventually gave up on installing Debian on a real partition and began installing it in a VirtualBox. My eventual plan is to move the VirtualBox partitions to real partitions, but we'll see.
Anyway, installation is proceeding smoothly except for the fact that I'm waiting for 1402 packages to download on a network with 600 ms ping times (which IIRC is super slow - even if I'm wrong and the ping times are OK, everything else is slow, sooo...). This problem is exacerbated by the fact that I chose the "desktop environment" task in the installer.
So, I have been searching for things to do in the past couple hours. One, I have fixed ALL OF THE DNS PROBLEMS! I've no idea how, but somehow, I made it work.
Also, I started (and then stopped, to not hog bandwidth) downloading the Armory Bitcoin client. Because I (as of about a month ago) do Bitcoin. Yay! I'm also going to do mining on my MacBook soon (I'll join a pool).
Other than that I've just been messing around, mostly with my irssi proxy to add the server that #debian is on.

Debian week, day 2

 It's Debian week, day 2! I am still stuck on step 1.
The Internet access is super terrible here, so I can only get some stuff done at certain times. Like blogging. Anyway, I tested whatever I said I'd do last night and it failed. So I have one more thing to try: I have made a full backup of my Arch flash drive and I'm about to wipe it and reformat as VFAT. Hopefully I can then put the firmware on there and it will finally work, as this is an exact setup that the Debian installer expects. Hopefully.
Also: the Ubuntu Edge is a new phone that has desktop system specs, custom-made by Canonical. Much as I have grown to be bitter towards Ubuntu and Canonical on a personal level, they, along with the Ubuntu Phone project, are our best bet to making GNU/Linux succeed in the consumer market. And to be perfectly honest, the Ubuntu Edge looks like a really amazing piece of hardware. Therefore I actually chose to back it with $20, and you should too.
Anyway, back to Debian.

Misadventures in firmware- and cabin-land

Today I drove with my mom to Port Townsend, where we have a cabin. I ended up building a fire because Mom was out, which was an interesting experience. It took me four tries but eventually I got it. Yay!

Try #3

Try #3, burning

Also, I bought the Humble Weekly Sale with Jim Guthrie, because Jim Guthrie is freaking awesome.
So it's now Debian Week, the week where I become a Debian maintainer. Here is my approximate plan:

1. Install Debian Jesse. Fairly easy except for the fact that I'm doing it on a MacBook Pro that a. has Apple's moon-man of an EFI implementation and b. has a Broadcom chip that needs firmware.
2. Upgrade to Debian Sid.
3. Read Debian Policy Manual.
4. Write Debian package.
5. Submit Debian package.

Currently I am stuck on step 1. I've tried to put firmware in a FAT partition on my Mac, on the EFI system partition on my Arch flash drive (which, because it is the EFI system partition, is FAT), on the ext4 partition on my Arch flash drive, all for autodetection by the Debian installer. Nothing. Next I tried downloading the installer from the Debian package archive, but that uses a wget script that obviously won't work, since I can't get wireless and don't have an Ethernet cable. Therefore I extracted the .deb archive, extracted the control files in it with tar, and modified the script to copy the firmware from /mnt instead of using wget (this is assuming that I've previously mounted the needed partitions manually). Then I rearchived the whole thing back into a new .deb file. However, when I rebooted into the installer recovery environment again, it turns out that the shell doesn't have dpkg. Very frustrating.
It now looks like Debian distributes its own firmware bundle, and that may work. I will try that after blogging, but I swear, I'm this close to just burning the unofficial image with the firmware already on the disk. Assuming I can find a CD in the cabin.
I am going to attempt to blog every day that I can this week, and if possible, the rest of the summer. We'll see how it goes.
On an unrelated note, a little while ago I started version-controlling my dotfiles with Git. This seems ridiculous but it's actually pretty common - just search for "dots", or even better, "dotfiles" on GitHub. You can find a ton of interesting stuff that way. I have now merged configurations from my server, from my MacBook (just did this today!), my Arch install on my flash drive (from which the initial commit originated), and my Arch install on my ACER laptop. I have made every file in the repository portable across each of these systems, so I don't do anything funky with branches, or anything like that, to differentiate between system-specific configs. For example, at the top of my .zshrc, you can clearly see OS detection that sets the DISTRO environment variable to either "DARWIN" or "ARCH" (because those are the two that I use with zsh). Exciting!

Remember that time I said we need the V8 of rendering engines?

That would be this time. Anyway, I wanted to write a quick post to state that I lied, because I forgot about Mozilla's project Servo. It's written in the Rust programming language, which is interesting because it [Rust] is designed specifically for writing browser engines. It's also created by Mozilla. So actually, someone already is working on the V8 of rendering engines.