Jeremy Huddleston

Dear Apple,

I have been putting off purchasing an iPod ever since the first version came out for one simple reason: the lack of ogg vorbis support. I am a big audiophile and an open source developer, so it should be no surprise that I use the ogg vorbis audio codec when ripping my albums as it is entirely free and provides the best audio quality in the least disk space. AAC is a wonderful codec, but ogg vorbis just works better for me.

It's been a year now since Steve Jobs said that ogg vorbis would not be supported because it was not demanded by users (http://www.macobserver.com/article/2004/04/29.9.shtml), and I would like to know: have you heard us yet? I know there is demand among the audiophile and geek community as any casual perusal of any slashdot article on mp3 players will reveal, and you are loosing a niche demographic by not recognizing us. Many of my personal friends (and countless others' I've heard from online) have given up waiting for you to come around and purchased players from competitors like iRiver and Neuros, but I still hold out hope that iPods will soon support this great audio codec.

Oh my god. Last week was crazy! E3 was so awesome!! Tom, Dominica, and I drove down to LA last Monday with plans to goto E3.

Our industry credentials were rejected as insufficient to get us free admittance, so we had resigned to pay the $300 admission, BUT I convinced Tom to let my try once more. We went to the show the day before it opened to scope out the scene. We saw everybody scurrying to setup the expo which kinda reminded me of episodes on The Apprentice. I talked to people who told me to talk to other people who finally gave me the name of someone important who dealt with admission. So I went to see her, and she said that we were rejected because they never received our credentials and if I could prove that we sent everything in on time, we'd get in. So I was lucky enough to have a friend in the area who let me use his computer to get access to the fax log from back home. I printed it out, went out to lunch, and on the way back to the hotel picked up our badges =).

I bought a 5-speed 2002 Subaru Impreza WRX Sedan last month, and I LOVE it. I got a great deal on it, and it is by far the most fun car I have ever driven.

But now it's time to make it mine. I've been shopping around for practical and not-so-practical mods for the car, and it's getting me really excited. Here's what I've been looking at:

Wheels/Tires:
4x Roto Torque Gold 17x8
4x FALKEN Ziex ZE-512 235/40R17
McGard Spline Drive Lugs - GOLD (20 pcs. + key, 1.25)

Brakes:
CT721 Panther Plus Streetable Race Pads Front
CT770 Panther Plus Streetable Race Pads Rear
Power Slot Rotors Front/Rear

Tonight was a ton of fun. I went to see The Bravery at The Great American Music Hall with Tom, Dominica, Elliot, Gordo, and Erica. The music was great, and afterwards we rushed to Ghiradelli Square to get Ice Cream before they closed. We got there at 10:55, but they wouldn't let us in even though they close at 11 =(... so we just went back to Tom and Dominica's place for cupcakes and ice cream. Overall, it was a great night =)

Ok, so we've gotten a good start on multilib in portage over the past few months. amd64's 2005.0 has been great in some areas and terribly lacking in other areas. We've started seeing more design flaws, and I'm thinking of doing some revisions to the toolchain/profile logic which will allow for much better crossdev toolchain integration as well as phasing out the ABI variable.

ABI was introduced because CHOST was insufficient to ALWAYS determine the ABI being used... The main example for this is mips64-u-l-g. We have no way to distinguish between n32 or n64 with this ABI. Most other examples are a bit more obscure. For instance, we MAY want to make a.out binaries for i386-*.

Wow, I was actually excited for about 10 seconds yesterday when Bush unveiled his new energy plan. But, I am either completely naive, Bush is a liar, or Bush is a f*cking moron... well, it's probably a combination of all three.

Bush started off by stating, "We need to get on a path away from the fossil fuel economy." Wow! Yes! Amazing. We most certainly need to get away from fossil fuel. Let's throw money at cold fusion, fuel cells, and get solar panels on the roof of every home and business in America!!!

He continued, "I have asked congress for more than 2 billion dollars over 10 years for my coal research initiative." Uhm... ok... uh... excuse me Mr. Bush... Coal IS a fossil fuel!!! And, uhm... there's not that much of it left... oh, and it's kinda dirty and harmful to the environment, and uhm... why are you still talking?

So I got an email from James O'Brien yesterday saying, "If you get a letter from the department asking about your laptop preferences, I suggest the PowerBook option." Well, I haven't gotten the letter from the department yet, but it seems I may be getting a laptop =). I should've waited for the G5 laptops to come out before going to grad school... dang...

You gotta love passover parties. Kosher boogie!

Well gcc 4.0.0 was released yesterday, and within an hour a bug report was filed with Gentoo's bugzilla asking for an ebuild to be added to portage. I've added this ebuild, but I wanted to take a moment to let everyone know what to expect.

I have no plans to start supporting gcc-4.0.0. This means profiles will remain as they are, and the ebuild will still remain in package.mask. I still recommend using gcc-3.3.x and 3.4.x and will for some time to come. There are two major issues concerning unleashing this new compiler onto the gentoo community.

Firstly, gcc-4 is stricter than gcc-3.4. Many packages will need to be patched to compile correctly with the new compiler. Bugzilla has been getting bug reports (with patches, thank you) ever since we started providing the gcc-4 snapshot ebuilds a few months ago. Glibc is among these packages, so anyone intending to build a system from scratch using the 4.0 compiler should wait until glibc-2.3.6 is released which should include all the gcc4 patches.

Xmms development has come to a virtual standstill upstream over the past year while contributers are seeing their patches bitrot. I've been managing a patchset for the Gentoo xmms release, but it's becoming rather tedius as most new patches against upstream's release need to be modified slightly to work with our version.

I've mentioned the possibility of a fork on a few occassions, but I'd rather not go down that road. Unfortunately, it seems that forking might be the only way to keep the project alive since the upstream developers don't seem inclined to open up cvs to other developers no