The beagle has landed.

OK, I apologize for the slug line; I couldn’t help myself. Could the news on Mono in Fedora have anything to do with this? Or is it purely an act of faith and community goodwill by the Fedora Foundation, still somewhat shrouded in a fog of obscurity and uncertainty? In any case, whatever the guiding motivations, I’m still eager to try out some of the software, it’s pretty swank. Obviously this should (and will) figure prominently in the release notes!

When it’s OK to be a heel.

My wife and I give to a number of charitable organizations, including many police charities that provide community support, like the Virginia State Police Association’s program that gives teddy bears to children involved in domestic abuse situations, and provides for families of officers killed or injured in the line of duty. So it’s not surprising we get calls from other “related” charities — some related in name only. Tonight I got a call from this group. When I looked up their report, I found they were associated with a number of other charities we have asked to put us on the do-not-call list. (See the link for the list; we’ve received calls from at least three of the others there.) Of course, they’ve never filed a disclosure to the Better Business Bureau in all that time. (Whenever I get a charity call, if it’s a firm I don’t already know, I always look them up at give.org to verify they are legit.)

Hmm, Gig Harbor, Washington is the address listed for the firm, but they were incorporated in California in 2001. Turns out that this firm (actually “Tomorrow’s Abundance”) is the brainchild of a low-life by the name of Robert M. Friend, who basically pockets as salary just about all the money collected by this charity after paying for the telemarketers and mailing costs. Oh yeah, and for his wife’s salary, since she’s also employed by the company. I guess we can tell whose abundance we’re supposed to be providing.

Crazy for those coca beans.

Eleya and I watched Tim Burton’s quirky but entertaining Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It’s a miracle of production and set design, visually stunning but thankfully anchored by a nearly perfect performance by Johnny Depp. We agreed that he’s one of the few actors alive with the power to make you completely forget every other role he’s ever played while he’s playing someone else. The pacing retains a little bit of Burton’s signature meandering (not to mention his penchant for static one-shots), but at a 1:45 running time, fortunately there’s not a lot of room for him to get lost. Eeriest effect: the bad kids’ makeup, especially during their introduction scenes. I’m actually not sure whether that was just good makeup work or CGI enhancement, but it just looked creepy. Best line: “Don’t touch that squirrel’s nuts. It’ll make him crazy!”

Tear off your own head.

Now that I’ve finished drafting some for-pay work I’ve been writing, I can move on to the Documentation Guide, which has become woefully outdated against our actual real-world processes. With some additional concerns about licensing and CVS i18n restructuring, just to name a few, it will be an interesting effort. Looks like letting the smoke clear WRT the former issue is going to involve ripping out the style guidelines, which are mostly derived from the GFDL-licensed material by the GNOME Foundation. That’s OK by me, because I don’t think we ever got resolved to our satisfaction a clear answer on how best to comply with the licensing requirements. Replacing them, though, will be difficult; this is why so many publishing groups rely on external style manuals as canon.

I spent a little more time cleaning up some Docs Project work on packaging, and wrote a couple of wiki pages summarizing how current doc maintainers can get their work into the proper format. Unfortunately we can’t automate the entire process of converstion from embedded <articleinfo> elements to external rpm-info.xml files, but we can make it a little less painful. Once translators fill in the titles and descriptions for the i18n’d sections in these rpm-info.xml files, and the new Makefile.common is complete, it’s off to the races.

It’s a docs revolution!

Boggled by blog.

I got a comment just today from a fellow Fedora Project person (he pulls far more weight than I, and on a more continual basis, so the term “colleague” is, I think, inappropriate — anyone have a better one?). I wanted to respond here on the blog and have the response go to him as well, but instead I was forced to duplicate effort to carry this off, pasting the comment text into my blog’s comment stream.

This is one of the few things that annoy me (a litle) about WordPress — there is no logical and easy way to notify someone that you’ve made a response to their comment in which that person might be interested. (Something like the feature commonly found in forum software, I suppose.) I realize this would present a problem, because how do you prevent any such feature — whether initiated by a user option or an admin option — from becoming an engine for spammers? Hmm.

Perhaps the answer would be that only the admin who receives mail for comment notification may initiate such an email notification, using an authorization code present in the notification. Perhaps I’m missing something obvious. In any case, maybe I can roll this into a suggestion for the developers, or even a PHP plugin when time allows.