Things afoot

I keep writing (long) posts and then decide against posting them. Social anxiety or something. How strange for an internet jot pad.

Lately I've started to get a bit busier and more serious with my hacking, so once I get something to a non-embarassing state, I might actually move forward with putting bits out there. Though, the reaching of a state of non-embarassment might mean a long wait. And i'm a little recitent about baring all to the world like that -- people might point and laugh, or even worse, start using it, leading to the descending spiral of the un-fun of on-going maintenance.

To that end I've been looking into hosting -- perhaps a bit prematurely, but it needs to be considered at some point. I had a quick look at google code, but it's license limitations rub me up the wrong way (one long-term project is server based, so AGPL is almost certainly the way i'm headed which rules it out anyway) -- it is also full of lots of rubbish, ugly, and doesn't appear to be maintained by humans. I never liked Sourceforge, it's got a sort of crappy host-of-last-resort feel to it. A mate mentioned github, but that seems a bit too light on features - mailing lists and issue trackers and so on, and I have no overt love for git, or proprietary services either.

Savannah will probably be the one -- it ticks all the boxes on features, and philosophy, and although svn has it's issues, I know how to use it. It even has some quite nice themes -- why on earth they use that god-awful super-ugly default is beyond me, but if you log on you can select some nice ones which turn it into a completely different modern-feeling site (yes I realise this thing has a shit theme too -- but this is just a single crappy `blog roll'). Their information is a little out of date on Java, to the point they suggest not using it, which I find a little odd -- but so it is in general with the FSF and GNU sites, someone needs to refresh their information. As far as I can tell (which is not far) it's all nice and happily free now. If it doesn't end up being suitable, I'll keep looking.

Apart from a couple of Java projects, a few people (well, me included) on the psubuntu list are slowly discussing setting up some sort of site for free-software Cell hacking. Since my interests have moved on a bit, and right now i'm quite busy with `other shit', I'm not sure I want to commit to such an endeavour, but I have some material which could probably help get the ball rolling.

The project i'm on at work will most probably be winding up around the end of the FY -- so I may be forced to have a LOT more spare time in a short few months. Actually i'm quite looking forward to the possibility, as the current project-winding-up phase isn't terribly exciting, and I've had more than a few gut-fulls of .NET and Windows XP to boot. Something might turn up by then, but if it doesn't, I wouldn't mind a bit of `time to myself' to re-discover some of the `knack' that went missing of late.

Right now, I just wish there were more hours in the day, and I was capable of being more alert for more of the ones that are here.