Labix Blog

Today, Sunday, on the mailman day, I decided to change my reading habits.

You’d certainly laugh if I told you how many mailing lists, blogs, and IRC channels I try to follow (won’t include IM networks here as I don’t really read them asynchronously). What I look for is pretty obvious: I want to exchange volume for quality.

The first thing I’m doing is unsubscribing from all high-traffic lists I’m part of. The reason is clear: one hundred messages a day can’t possibly be all interesting. I’m not saying there are no interesting posts among these, of course. But with such a vibrant community of followers, a few smart readers usually bring up the most interesting discussions in more selective formats. I’ll track these instead.

For the same reason, I’m unsubscribing from most feed aggregators. Planet and similars are a great way to subscribe to many feeds quickly, but let’s face it.. how many posts in an aggregator with lots of feeds are interesting to a single individual? While getting off from them, I’m selectively peaking the feeds that interest me and subscribing to each.

Then, for the not-so-high volume sources, I’m checking the last 5 posts or so (or days, for IRC channels). Anything that hasn’t had information worth tracking will be phased out too. Interesting topics eventually will find their way to the sources I’ll still follow.

I want to read less, to read more. I want to go faster through the queue of pending books, and also follow a wider variety of topics with less pain.

After a somewhat long effort, all posts were moved to the shiny new blog on labix.org, including comments!

The new blog is based on WordPress, and brings a few new features that I was missing in LiveJournal. I of course missed control over the environment, but most importantly, I was missing tag-specific RSS feeds, so that people can keep track of topic they have interest in, rather than every topic that interests me. For instance, to keep track of Python-specific posts, one may link to:

http://blog.labix.org/tag/python/feed

The new toy makes me feel motivated to post news about interesting things I’ve been working with lately (some cool stuff is coming, but some of it will unfortunately take a bit longer to become public), and perhaps even some past work I forgot to keep track of.

I’ve also installed a WordPress plugin to crosspost entries to LiveJournal, so that new entries are still seen there. Please, update your links or remind someone to do so if possible, as this will eventually be disabled.

From Progeny Componentized Linux page:

Our future development efforts will center around bridging
the gap between Debian APT and the APT variants that have
emerged in the RPM world, as well as adding support for
emerging efforts to standardize software repository formats.

There is only one APT “variant” which works with RPM. It’s named APT-RPM, and was developed at Conectiva. Of course Progeny knows that, since they certainly remember where their code came from.

It’s really sad to see a company like that, with Ian Murdock behind it, not giving credit to a project which was forked from a Debian software, and that gave back to the original project so much. Perhaps the only way to fight against that kind of behavior is working even harder to produce good software.

Hey, Progeny, want some new ideas to reinvent.