Real life continues unabated.

This weekend was as good a time as any to take a step back from work for a bit, so I might as well wrap up some non-Fedora things I’ve been doing lately — less accomplishments than enjoyments, really.

I got some reading done for pleasure, including one of Alan Moore’s latest latest works. Eleya and I also sadly bade farewell to our favorite regular comic that came to a glorious and touching end this past month, Y: The Last Man. Apparently some group of Hollywood-based mental midgets is trying to make this into a film; let’s all hope no one at that particular meeting is high enough to actually greenlight it. Need I mention LXG? I didn’t think so.

I also saw a couple of good movies with family members — Enchanted with my daughter, an irresistibly sweet movie about making your own happy ending, and (violent mood swing!) In the Valley of Elah with my wife, a moving and bitter elegy about the cost of war that, stacked up with No Country for Old Men, probably had Daniel Day-Lewis wondering if he should bother writing notes for an Oscar acceptance speech in the face of these towering performances from Tommy Lee Jones.

Evie turned seven on Thursday, and among other gifts we got our little shutterbug a 7MP camera of her very own. That’s turned out to be a mixed blessing, as she is always sneaking up to take pictures when one is not looking one’s best, such as on Easter weekend, lazing on the couch with a three-day growth of whiskers reading all sorts of mind-rotting comic books. But this is the pain one must suffer when trying to raise the next P. T. Anderson.

We also showed the house once this weekend — disappointed it wasn’t more — and, to allow for future showings without the carpets sporting tufts of dog hair the size of guinea pigs, got the dog an appointment at the groomer down the street. We had a nice family stroll to pick her up on Friday, with delightful springlike weather that it seems is going to return for most of next week. That should make it easy for me to start taking some lunchtime walks of my own, to get away from the computer for long enough to burn a few calories.

Time to sign off; Eleya and I are going to suck the marrow from the last of the weekend’s bones by watching Rendition, a heartwarming tale about — oh, wait, that’s not it at all. Nope, more high drama, tears, and deep social meaning, and nary an explosion to be seen, I’m betting. TTFN.

Save some Summit dough.

For folks attending FUDCon Boston 2008 at the Red Hat Summit, I wanted to extend a tip:

If you or your employer is springing for attendance at the actual Summit itself, and you attended a previous Summit, you’re eligible for a special alumni rate. Check your email from the last week and you should find a note from the Summit organizers with a special promotional code that will get you a substantial discount. (I just want to make sure no one misses the chance to save a little cash.) If you feel you should have received the email and didn’t, let me know and I’ll see if I can’t get you fixed up.

Close to the edge, V.

Took my main workhorse — my laptop — to Rawhide tonight. Looking pretty sweet so far.

And also, the one about your favorite window manager.

I updated the marketing surveys page on the wiki last night to include the full report from the FUDCon Raleigh 2008 event. Some people may have noticed that the available answers from Question 6 (as originally written) ended up truncated online, and we didn’t realize it until many people had started sending in answers. We’ll try to ensure that doesn’t happen again in the next iteration, but in the meantime, I’m really glad to see people continue to get energized at FUDCon events.

There is a lot of planning going on already for the next US FUDCon event to be held around the Red Hat Summit. We’ll have our own space, plenty of tasty hackfest, and some presentations too, some of which will attract a mix of attendees that should lead to some very interesting discussion (and food for the BarCamp). Make sure you sign up on the wiki page if you’re thinking about attending!

But here, do what thou wilt.

Even though saddened by Arthur C. Clarke’s passing, I still chuckled when I saw this, and the fact that I did again this morning means I have to post it here:

“Or we’re turning this car around! We mean it!

Childhood’s end.

One of my favorite authors working in the science fiction genre, Arthur C. Clarke, passed away today at the age of 90. I will never forget the wonder I felt when I read 2001: A Space Odyssey (in an attempt to better understand the Stanley Kubrick film). I didn’t realize the towering height of his imagination, though, until I later read Rendezvous with Rama, and boggled at the humanity he was able to bring to very hard SF stories. It’s a talent which to this day eludes many authors, in every genre.

Farewell, Mr. Clarke, and thanks.

Open everything.

There has been some discussion lately about how to use our Firefox landing page, start.fedoraproject.org. The search bar there right now defaults to a Google search, but aren’t there better ways to use this page?

One of the things we might want to do is to help seed a project like Wikia Search, which aims to do for search what Wikipedia has done for knowledge articles. Wikia aims to be fully free from top to bottom, including their algorithms and engines. In fact, they are using several widely available technologies like Lucene from the Apache foundation.

Part of wikia’s strategy is to enable users and community members to help crawl the web, sending results to wikia for indexing, again in an open, well-mannered, and well-audited way. Since people have started talking about a community grid built around the Fedora community (but hopefully open to clients of all sorts), how much would it rock for us to give people a choice to contribute to open search such as Wikia as part of installing their system? A LOT.

Thanks for the packages.

While I’m catching up on a couple bugs and some email early this morning, I realize that I owe some props and gratitude to Brad M. Walker. Brad has a Xft-enabled Emacs available at his yum repositories for Fedora 8 and Rawhide. He tracks upstream pretty closely; the Emacs I got this morning is from yesterday’s CVS, and replaces a version not more than a few weeks old. Thank you Brad!

What does it profit a man?

The community first started talking about a desktop solution for helping people find available open source codec solutions in the context of the ubiquitous MP3 format. The Fedora community has never made any secret of the fact that we think MP3 has severe problems compared with Ogg Vorbis, both in its patent encumbrances and its sound quality at lower bit rates. We know our users have MP3 and are faced with it every day, as they’re faced with many other patent-encumbered, proprietary formats. Codeina was originally designed to mediate some of these problems by pointing people to solutions for these media needs.

Recall, though, that the Fedora mission — the whole point of the project — is to rapidly advance free and open software and content. Some of the solutions offered in Codeina as it ships in Fedora currently are closed source and proprietary, not to mention patent-encumbered. Moreover, there are freely available, open source solutions available to users who live in places where they’re legal. So how is pointing to closed source solutions, when there are open source ones available for people for whom they’re legal, the right answer? We’re going about this the wrong way; the failure here occurred some time ago, and we’ve just got around to acknowledging it.

Codeina hasn’t really put users any closer to free and open source solutions. We do think it’s helped us educate some users about software patents and the importance of open, non-proprietary formats. Furthermore, it does offer an open source, albeit patent-encumbered, solution for die-hard MP3 users. The Board feels that success is worth building on. Karsten said as much in a blog comment earlier today. But you can get the exact same results from Codeina by following the link to our wiki site, and from there to the Fluendo webshop, which offers all these codecs for people who want them in a closed source form for some reason.

Pointing people to closed-source solutions is not a way to advance free and open software and content. And of course, all of this begs the larger question of how we do a better job of championing software patent reform and preserving a vendor-neutral information ecosystem where truly free formats aren’t discriminated against. Providing users a way to get a patent-encumbered but open source MP3 decoder doesn’t sacrifice those ideals; patents don’t work the same everywhere, which is why, while it’s still a big concern, it’s far less onerous than the problem of providing black-box fixes.

We need to keep pursuing all these opportunities, in a way that stays true to Fedora’s principles. The Board’s decision was motivated by passionate individuals who care about users and their freedom, in the long term and in all its troublesome glory. I encourage you to discuss this with us at the usual places.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Since I’ve had websites on the brain this morning… Did everyone get a chance to see this post from Adrian Reber? What do you think about the results, and what do they tell us about the state of our project? (Please trackback rather than comment so our Planet readers will benefit.)

One of our great opportunities for improvement in this release cycle is more aggressively marketing Fedora. Greg DeKoenigsberg led a very vibrant meeting last week to assemble a true messaging plan for Fedora. I’ll talk more about that in another post.

For now, observe the statistics and theorize as needed.