Insert something clever but sensitive about cancer here

Last June, Missy and I were home visiting for our baby shower when my mom received word that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Luckily, they caught it early and the tumor was only about 1 cm in diameter. After her lumpectomy, she underwent chemotherapy and just recently finished her radiation treatment. She is currently cancer free, and her hair is starting to come back in. With everything my mom went through during her treatment, my sister Elena decided to participate in this year's Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure walk. If you would like to sponsor her, please donate at her participant page.

Baby announcements, showers and graduations

Missy posted about some significant events in our family life over on our shared blog. Rather than duplicate them here, please take a look. Unfortunately, we fell off the wagon on that one too and it hasn't been updated since last May either.

If you don't write code, you can stop reading now.

Last May we launched a new service for Project Hosting on Google Code at Google I/O: hosting for the Mercurial version control system! Our Mercurial implementation is somewhat unique in that it doesn't use a traditional filesystem for storing data, it uses Bigtable instead. This allows wide horizontal scalability to host thousands of repositories, which my co-worker, Jacob Lee, explained quite well in his Google I/O talk. Since then, we've added support for server side repository cloning to allow projects and users more flexible working methods.

Let's try this again

After almost a year w/o a single post, it's time to make an attempt at reviving this neglected space again. To kick start the process, I'll make a series of posts recapping some of the events of the last year.

Summer is a'comin'

The Enlightenment project was accepted for Google's Summer of Code again this year. If you are a student interested in Open Source, please take a look at our ideas page and apply if you see anything interesting.

Always be a good boy, don't ever play with guns

I don't know how many people from "back home" actually read this, but it doesn't look like we will be coming back to Minnesota for the holidays. We haven't seen Missy's parents in a couple of years and this was the first real opportunity we've had in quite a while. So we will be traveling to Reno, NV from the 24th until the 29th. There isn't much chance we will go anywhere right after that since I think we'll be traveled out by the time we get back, but who knows, stranger things have happened.

*Sigh*

I think this is one of the longest gaps between posts on my blog/news site since I started in '97. Not that I ever posted regularly, but it was usually closer to once a month.

The unusual thing is that this time it wasn't because I had nothing to say or no major events going on, but exactly the reverse. There were some pretty major events, but every time I thought to write about them they completely demotivated me. At this point, I'm hoping this rather meaningless post will help me to get past that block and feel free to start from a relatively clean slate. We'll see how that goes...