i am interested in giving dirvish a home on toasterz.org servers or wherever... it's behind my Easy-BACK network backup product so i have a vested interest in it moving forward..
i can provide all sorts of community building features or whatever the community wants. perl is one of the languages i pursue. best regards, -- kelley g http://toasterz.com open minds... open source 520.770.1200 >> What is the status of dirvish version 1.3.1? The website still lists it >> as 'experimental' and not ready for production. I tried to look for a >> changelog for 1.3.1 and I seem to be going in circles on the website. >> OH!!! ok.. I downloaded the 1.3.1 tar.gz and looked at the changelog in >> there. Hmm... 1.3.1 seems to be approaching an age of three years old. > > Keith responds: > > 1.3.1 was intended as a vehicle for making improvements to the layout > of the code. There is a lot of duplicate structure that I attempted > to combine, and I wanted to move away from the shell-script install > kludge and move towards a standard Perl installer like Module::Build. > > What I learned was that I am not much of a programmer, and I do not > have time to learn enough to do it right. I still hope to provide > a home for dirvish, maintain the shared server, clean out the wikispam, > fix the problems that are simple to fix, etc., but we really do need > programmers that (1) use dirvish (2) respect the needs of other users > and (3) have the time to contribute. That hasn't happened yet. > > In my ideal world, some young programmer would take this on as a > volunteer activity and move it forward, drawing in others to help, > eventually taking administrative control of the website. I will > keep dirvish alive until that person appears. > > BTW, I consider 1.3.1 an experimental release, and after it reaches > some degree of maturity, it becomes the 1.4.x production release. > We obviously aren't there yet. 1.5.x would probably involve an > object-oriented and test-oriented rewrite, with translators from > old config files to whatever works best in the new format. 2.0.x > would be the production release of that. > > >> What about setting up a community or member edited FAQ that can get >> updated with questions from the list. Maybe a faq-o-matic ? > > That can go on the wiki, cut and paste from the mailing list. If you > want to lead that, I will do what I can to help. Note: I am not too > happy with Kwiki wiki; it gets less support than dirvish. I would > like to move the wiki to MoinMoin, but Mr. Clock keeps saying 1AM > when I finish the day's work, and I haven't had time to plan the > move. BTW, there are a lot of Wikis written in PHP, but I am already > supporting Perl and Python on the server, and without more help I > don't want to support a third server language. > > >> "You haven't seen much from me, I've spent the last 6 weeks on a >> death-march-from-hell consulting project. Paid very well, and in about 3 >> years, everyone here will own a copy of the product we are designing. >> I'll tell more when permitted" > > Good catch. That company is dead, so I can say more - I think. This > is off topic to dirvish: > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > As many of you know, my day jobs are as a semiconductor design > consultant ( www.kl-ic.com ), and peddling a silicon identification > technology ( www.siidtech.com ). With volunteer activities > ( www.eeconsult.org ) and ( www.pdxlinux.org ) and ( www.freegeek.org ) > and tech support for my doctor wife. Free time, what's that? > > That KLIC job was working on chip design for a projection display system > for Steridian of Vancouver, Washington. The details are still under > nondisclosure, but the much of the idea is public (business articles, > patents). The basic idea is that there is a tiny Liquid Crystal > on Silicon (LCOS) display chip called a "write valve" that makes an > image in pulsed UV (or IR) light. That image is tranferred to a much > larger piece of magic called a "read valve" that acts as an optical > amplifier - the low power UV image changes its visible optical > transmissivity, allowing the very small (5 micron pixel array) write > valve to control 10's of square centimeters of inexpensive imager, and > a few milliwatts of UV image to control 10's of watts of visible light. > There are 3 read valves, RGB, and they can be electrically sensitized > or desensitized to the controlling image from the single write valve. > What that all means is that a $5 write valve, some cheap plastic > optics, 3 large $5 read valves, and a cheap large-spot light source > (such as a projector bulb) can project to a bright two meter or larger > display. It would be possible to construct a one-meter rear-projection > display box, perhaps 20 centimeters deep, with 2Kx1.5K pixel resolution, > for under $100 manufacturing cost. Beautiful high-contrast low-latency > wide-spectrum images, more energy efficient, no moving parts, no exotic > materials in land fills, etc. Most of the usage would be for displaying > HDTV and broadcast television, and while I think that is a vast waste of > time, I would rather that time waste be done while wasting less energy > nd creating less toxic garbage. This would be a "CRT killer"; we would > no longer be putting a few pounds of lead glass into land fills every > time a picture tube burns out or a television is discarded. > > Sadly, high defect density in the read valves (a few dozen spots per > image) killed the project. The venture capitalists pulled the plug > before the process could be improved. However, I expect somebody > somewhere is working on stuff like this. > > Since then, there have been many more death-march-from-hell projects; > it is the nature of the consulting business. Siidtech takes up most > of my time now. > > Keith > > -- > Keith Lofstrom [EMAIL PROTECTED] Voice (503)-520-1993 > KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" > Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs > > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Dirvish mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.dirvish.org/mailman/listinfo/dirvish > > > End of Dirvish Digest, Vol 47, Issue 4 > ************************************** > _______________________________________________ Dirvish mailing list [email protected] http://www.dirvish.org/mailman/listinfo/dirvish
