[Dirvish] Dirvish Digest, Vol 47, Issue 4

[Kelley Graham]

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          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
> KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
> Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
>
>
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> End of Dirvish Digest, Vol 47, Issue 4
> **************************************
>