Joe’s Blog!

If you are a linux nerd like myself you may find gitstat interesting. From the site:

gitstat is an Open Source, web-based git statistics interface. You may browse up-to-date statistics information, search and overview changeset(patch) status and monitor the git tree.

Going here you can see the latest stats for the linux kernel. Pretty cool, much more interesting than viewvc. With a name like ‘gitstat’ and Linus’ abhorrence toward SVN [video], I suppose there isn’t a chance that it will eventually work with SVN (my perfered scm).

Looks like an epic battle:

…. no this is not me.

Apparently Transformers did well enough (I didn’t see it) that the movie industry is doing another classic giant robot movie … Voltron. I have to say that this is great news, as a child I loved Voltron and had the action figures and etc. Here is the Variety article. The IMDB  and Wikipedia pages too.

[via CyclingNews]:

Tailwind Sports has announced the end of the Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team today, confirming rumours that cropped up when the team failed to announce a new sponsor after winning the Tour de France. The team was given notice that the Discovery Channel would not renew its sponsorship back in February, leading to a long and intensive search for a replacement sponsor.

…

That the team which won eight Tours can not find a sponsor bodes poorly for the sport in general. “Tailwind has had an amazing ten years of success with U.S. Postal and more recently Discovery Channel as its title sponsor. This is arguably the most successful sports franchise in the history of sport,” stated Stapleton. “This was a difficult decision, not made any easier by our recent Tour de France success.”

As good as the decade of dominance by the Celtics in the ’60’s? I’m not quite sure, but he did say “arguably”.

The dissolution of the Discovery Channel team leaves one ProTour license up for grabs, leading to speculation that Team Slipstream could be the next American ProTour team. Manager Jonathan Vaughters told Cyclingnews that he wasn’t sure his team would be able to take on three Grand Tours. “The ProTour requires that teams race the Giro, the Tour and the Vuelta – and that’s a huge undertaking,” said Vaughters. His team has already signed ProTour riders David Zabriskie, David Millar, Christian Vande Velde, Magnus Backstedt, Julian Dean and Christophe Laurent.

You know Vaughters is gunning for this ProTour slot. Should they decide to give it to a US based team it sounds like he should have a chance with the names he has signed for next season. It would seem that Slipstream/Chipotle is better prepared for this and other US teams, although it may not be prepared for a full European schedule.

Lately I have been screwing around with XMPP (Jabber) and Ruby. It’s pretty slick what you can to fairly easily. The XMPP4R library makes things cake. Also, Jive’s opensource Openfire XMPP chat server is easy to get up and going. Anywho, here’s a quick example of how to connect and login to a chat server using the XMPP4R library:

require ‘xmpp4r/client’

bot_jid = “USERNAME@SERVER”
bot_pass = “PASSWORD”

client = Jabber::Client.new($bot_jid)
client.connect
client.auth($bot_pass)

client.send(Jabber::Presence.new)

As you can see, we first load the library. Then create a few variables for your credentials. Then we connect using those variables and lastly let everyone know you have logged in.