gravityboy (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} gravityboy) wrote,@ 2005-06-21 23:02:00 |
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Big Day
It's been a long time since I last blogged, mainly because I've been busy working on getting X.Org in to experimental. Needless to say, it's taken longer than I predicted, but I'm getting close. As of an hour ago, thanks to Branden's recent work, I'm actually running what will become the official Debian X.Org packages for the first time since I began working on them. I found a small error while installing them, and that's now corrected, so I'm going to rebuild the packages tonight, and test their installation tomorrow. If all goes well, I think we'll be ready to upload to experimental. I know a lot of people want these ASAP, and I'm building them as fast as my little laptop can possibly handle.
The other big news is that today I got to meet a guy I really admire, Sean Carroll. The guy just wrote a book which I have yet to read ("Endless Forms Most Beautiful") so his work will start seeping in to the general consciousness soon. He's basically on the cutting edge of studying not only how organisms develop and change during their lives, but also how that process of development evolves from organism to organism. What's new and exciting is that he's doing this on a molecular level, which is very much at the edge of what's known. He's already very well respected, and I think where he's headed will push our general knowledge of biology forward.
I got in to biology because I was interested in how you could build a coherent and consistent structure from a very small seed. That process is what I'm studying right now, but I heard Dr. Carroll speak about his work last year, and he managed to push my thought process further in that he's studying how the building itself evolves, essentially studying the process of a process or a mechanism behind a mechanism. I love this, and don't understand it nearly as well as I want to (although I try and read all the papers I can on the subject) so getting to speak with him for a while and thank him was wonderful. Evolutionary Development (Evo-Devo) is a new field that I hope will excite others as much as it does me, and getting to talk to one of the people really laying the groundwork was just awesome.
It's been a long time since I last blogged, mainly because I've been busy working on getting X.Org in to experimental. Needless to say, it's taken longer than I predicted, but I'm getting close. As of an hour ago, thanks to Branden's recent work, I'm actually running what will become the official Debian X.Org packages for the first time since I began working on them. I found a small error while installing them, and that's now corrected, so I'm going to rebuild the packages tonight, and test their installation tomorrow. If all goes well, I think we'll be ready to upload to experimental. I know a lot of people want these ASAP, and I'm building them as fast as my little laptop can possibly handle.
The other big news is that today I got to meet a guy I really admire, Sean Carroll. The guy just wrote a book which I have yet to read ("Endless Forms Most Beautiful") so his work will start seeping in to the general consciousness soon. He's basically on the cutting edge of studying not only how organisms develop and change during their lives, but also how that process of development evolves from organism to organism. What's new and exciting is that he's doing this on a molecular level, which is very much at the edge of what's known. He's already very well respected, and I think where he's headed will push our general knowledge of biology forward.
I got in to biology because I was interested in how you could build a coherent and consistent structure from a very small seed. That process is what I'm studying right now, but I heard Dr. Carroll speak about his work last year, and he managed to push my thought process further in that he's studying how the building itself evolves, essentially studying the process of a process or a mechanism behind a mechanism. I love this, and don't understand it nearly as well as I want to (although I try and read all the papers I can on the subject) so getting to speak with him for a while and thank him was wonderful. Evolutionary Development (Evo-Devo) is a new field that I hope will excite others as much as it does me, and getting to talk to one of the people really laying the groundwork was just awesome.
