Throwing it all away.

Thanks to several intrepid Fedorans who lined up bugs for me for the Installation Guide, including Marvelous Mike McGrath and Jason Taylor! I fixed all of them on the plane as I flew to the Left Coast Monday evening. I had no time to devote to FOSS this weekend at all, but the recording sessions went very well. Our guitarist Arch is an ace engineer who made everything magically go like clockwork. Everyone worked hard and had a great time hanging out between rolling tape, or whatever it is you’re supposed to say now that everyone’s using hard disk.

I am in a conference for a few days while I’m here on Pacific time, and our hosts will probably (again) fail to have any wireless available during the days, which is the equivalent for me of being stranded on a desert island, except with the added bonus of really boring presentations by non-engaging speakers. Sorry if this means you can’t reach me when you need to. The wifi at my hotel is THE SUCK, since it really doesn’t work well anywhere except, apparently, sitting directly in the lobby. Morons. Well, at least I’m only a short walk from some really good beer.

Weekend reprobate.

This weekend I am in recording sessions, doing preproduction work with Laura, Arch, and Rich. Things are going very well so far — We tracked rhythm section work for four tunes, “Helicopter’s Rope,” “Roads,” “Keep Talking,” and “Our History.” Tomorrow will be spent putting down vocals, some guitars, and fitting in a more general rehearsal for our show on the 19th at IOTA in Arlington. My understanding is that MANY people will be there so we want to be in tiptop shape. Since I’m gone all week on a business trip, our rehearsal options are limited.

If you try to reach me this weekend, or don’t see a lot of work flying over the docs commit list this weekend, now you’ll know why. I’ve been using Rawhide on my new laptop for a while now and things are looking really super — looking forward to the release!

As always, thanks to my beautiful and patient wife for holding down the home front while I play the part of The Entertainer.

I love it when…

…I realize I need a specific package for work, and someone is already working on it. That very day, nonetheless. Thanks Bastien and Parag!

Release Notes freeze.

Tomorrow night at 2359 UTC the wiki beats, where we collect the release notes for F8, will be “frozen” for the final release. From there, we produce DocBook XML sources which go to the L10N folks for translation for the F8 general release. I am hoping there is not too much more to change on the wiki, since each change we make means extra work for the L10N project contributors, but if you have something that needs to make the final release notes, now’s the time to get it in if you haven’t already.

If you miss the deadline, no worries — we will produce a later zero-day update for the release notes that will live on the web until we produce a fedora-release-notes package update.

Master of the b5add9.

It’s pleasant enough to work outside for a little while, and at least I can confirm while typing this entry that this Dell is, in fact, usable in more-or-less direct sunlight. I’m going to work on some side projects today since I’ve been keeping up with core Fedora docs work pretty well over the last week or so. As much as I’d love to work outside all day, the temperature is going up to an unseasonable 89 F today, and still no rain in sight.

I’m looking back at the drainage ditch that runs along the rear property line of our lot, wishing that we could get enough moisture to make it worthwhile to plant some erosion control. We’ve selected some juniper and other low shrubbery to help hold the soil together where the ditch was reconstructed this summer, but without any precipitation, I don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on new flora just to watch them wither away in this extended Indian summer.

The drought here is worsening and mandatory water restrictions are in effect in our county, as well they should be. I’ve been able to use the opportunity to “seize the learning moment,” and show Evie why it’s important that we conserve water and other resources, not just in a drought but as a conscientious, day-to-day activity.

We have a meeting for the Docs Project at 1pm at IRC Freenode #fedora-docs at which pretty much anyone is welcome, although we’ll probably try and stick to some sort of agenda for the first half of the meeting. We might be in #fedora-meeting, so if you don’t see it happening in one channel, try the other. We’ll probably decide at this meeting where to hold future instances.

Yesterday was a whirlwind of activity. The kids had swimming lessons at the Y, after which Eleya zipped home and I met her in the driveway. At that point I took over driving and brought her to her next destination, where she was teaching bellydance at a friend’s studio. When she was finished there, we picked her up and headed up to the nation’s capital.

We were attending the 40th birthday of my friend Arch, a superb musician who seems to have mastered pretty much every instrument he ever picked up. We try to keep Arch away from cloning technology because if he got a hold of it (which, in common parlance, is known as “falling into the wrong hands”), we’d all be out of jobs.

Arch’s SO, Chrstina, planned an afternoon shindig at Lucky Strike Lanes in the Verizon Center. Not only is this a gorgeous, upscale alley, but it has great food that really takes you back to being a kid. I was reminded of the Fair Lanes in Bowie, Maryland, where my parents used to take us once in a while when I was very young.

And if I can digress for a moment, I wanted to point out that the staff at Lucky Strike was AMAZING. It’s very rare to find any establishment nowadays that provides actual customer service at less than top dollar, and even more so to find one that makes you feel so at ease even as you try and corral small children amidst the bustle and brouhaha of bowling. The couple of small spills were met with smiles and a simple “No problem, we’ll take care of it!” In fact, “No problem!” was pretty much their response to any request I heard made of them.

A young lady named Jeanette, who coordinated the day’s entertainment, told me later, as I tipped her for her incredible service, that to her it’s as simple as treating others the way she would like to be treated. What? The Golden Rule in actual use in the new millennium? My hat’s off to Jeanette and the rest of the Lucky Strike D.C. staff for being, hands-down, some of the greatest customer service practitioners in the Washington area.

I also picked up some new music at the store the other day — new records by Iron & Wine, Jill Scott, and Annie Lennox (the last maybe not so hip, but I was there in the early Eurythmics days and have a soft spot for Annie). From an immediate listening standpoint, I like the Jill Scott record best, but I think the others will grow on me.

New IG beta.

I’ve posted a new draft copy of the Fedora Installation Guide at my FedoraPeople site. There’s now a rewritten appendix on using cobbler to make an installation server. Many thanks to my friend Matt Quigley for getting me started down that road, since I hadn’t had time to explore it previously. There’s also a link there for posting bugs; have at it!

The haves and the have-nots.

I finally got time today to revisit the package complement on my new Dell XPS M1330, and to put it through its paces doing some daily work. My early impressions are as follows:

• PRO: Bright. The slim display is incredibly, mind-blowingly bright at the top setting — too bright, in fact, for use indoors. I’ll bet it looks great outdoors, so I’ll be sure to try it there, once the weather cools down again from the unseasonable 85-88F expected for another few days.
• PRO: Light. Even with the super-big extended-life battery, which gives me 5+ hours of working time, the Dell weighs at least a pound and a half less than my ThinkPad T60p with its extended-life battery.
• PRO: Fast. This one is a Core 2 Duo T7500 (2.2GHz/800MHz FSB/4MB L2), and it’s screaming using F8 Test 3 x86_64. Once I take out the silly services I don’t use, boot time is short and sweet. I got the SATA-II 7200rpm 160GB drive, and it flies through document builds with the greatest of ease.
• PRO: Open (at least somewhat). I went with total Intel, including the Intel “X3100″ 965 graphics, HDA sound, and 3945ABG wireless. Using the “intel” Xorg driver and hints from Jesse’s helpful M1330 page on the wiki, almost everything Just Works.
• PRO: Well-packaged. Looks sharp as a tack, with a nice protective sleeve and many geegaws included such as the IR control, which lives neatly and invisibly inside the express-card slot, and form-fitting earbud headphones with their own carrying bag. I also picked up the air/car power adapter as well, which has plenty of connecting cords for every situation and an extender for longer reach, too.

And by the way, it Just Works in Fedora 7 as well. I did a goofy torture-test by swapping my ThinkPad’s hard disk into the Dell. Once I ran system-config-display and tweaked the configuration, and then redetected the soundcard once the desktop was up, everything was golden… almost.

• CON: Sound from the speakers does not work. I tried combinations of switches available through the desktop mixer, as well as other multimedia servers, but no luck. Headphones work fine, but that’s not much consolation since I can’t keep earphones on while I’m working in the office. I understand there are kernel patches that may be related to fixing this.
• CON: I’ve lost about 33% of my desktop real estate. My ThinkPad’s 1400×1050 screen is gloriously expansive. If only the M1330 had come in a 1440×900 variety! I really do miss the space, but I suppose I can get more aggressive about using virtual desktops, which I use frequently already with my ThinkPad.
• CON: With the extended-life battery in, the laptop doesn’t sit in a stable fashion on a flat surface, which makes typing on the slightly spongy keyboard a bit of a challenge.
• CON: With the bigger battery in place, due to the curve of the display, you can’t open the screen past about 135 degrees. This is a bit of a nitpick, but I need just a bit more obtuse an angle for working at our kitchen counter to be completely comfortable. My ThinkPad lid opens up over 180 degrees.
• CON: I really, REALLY miss the TrackPoint. If one is a touch typist, it makes no sense to have to move one’s hands so far from the keyboard to briefly use a pointer device. I guess this will force me to get more agile with the keyboard, even though I thought was doing pretty well already. Won’t someone bring back this device for mainstream laptops other than Lenovo?

All in all, I am pretty impressed with the M1330. I’m still trying to get used to its differences, such as the left Fn/Ctrl key placement, and those sorts of issues, but that’s just a matter of time and {un,}learning. It’s solid, fast, and performs great with Fedora. If you are considering a laptop, and don’t mind paying a pretty penny for high performance in an even more highly portable form, it’s a pretty sweet way to go.

Jumping on yet another bandwagon.

Also guilty as charged. I’ll also confess I left the results up in a browser for the last 24+ hours to see if anyone else was posting this. I’m such a wuss.

Auditory : 38%
Visual : 61%
Left : 45%
Right : 55%

Paul, you possess an interesting balance of hemispheric and sensory characteristics, with a slight right-brain dominance and a slight preference for visual processing.

Since neither of these is completely centered, you lack the indecision and second-guessing associated with other patterns. You have a distinct preference for creativity and intuition with seemingly sufficient verbal skills to be able to translate in any meaningful way to yourself and others.

You tend to see things in “wholes” without surrendering the ability to attend to details. You can give them sufficient notice to be able to utitlize and incorporate them as part of an overall pattern.

In the same way, while you are active and process information simultaneously, you demonstrate a capacity for sequencing as well as reflection which allows for some “inner dialogue.”

All in all, you are likely to be quite content with yourself and your style although at times it will not necessarily be appreciated by others. You have sufficient confidence to not second-guess yourself, but rather to use your critical faculties in a way that enhances, rather than limits, your creativity.

You can learn in either mode although far more efficiently within the visual mode. It is likely that in listening to conversations or lecture materials you simultaneously translate into pictures which enhance and elaborate on the meaning.

It is most likely that you will gravitate towards those endeavors which are predominantly visual but include some logic or structuring. You may either work particularly hard at cultivating your auditory skills or risk “missing out” on being able to efficiently process what you learn. Your own intuitive skills will at times interfere with your capacity to listen to others, which is something else you may need to take into account.