In the sun, married.

Sorry I’ve been less bloggy this week. I am up in Westford at the Red Hat offices and, since I’m rarely here, the meeting compression ratio is frankly enormous. My calendar had almost no white space left after around Monday at lunchtime, and I actually have had to double-book a couple things and trust that the other party was going to cancel.

Today was had a scheduled but fun jaunt out with a few people to shoot some video footage for a feature interview that I hope will air at some point in the near future. I don’t want to talk too much about it because it would spoil the surprise, but it involves a buildout of a previously non-functional feature, and a car chase. That’s it, I’m not saying any more. If it ends up looking dope you can credit Colby Hoke, and if it’s dopey you can blame me.

It’s 7:10pm now, and I’ve been in the office about 12.5 hours at this point, so I’m going to head back to the hotel shortly. I will catch up on posting info soon, but maybe not until this weekend. Tonight it’s all the email waiting for triage.

Who watches the watchmen?

In front of “The Dark Knight” last night was a teaser trailer for “Watchmen.” To quote another geeky staple, “I have a bad feeling about this.” The Smashing Pumpkins music didn’t rattle me — very often there’s temp track music used for teasers to drum up a certain kind of audience, and this is something to which the “300″ crowd would probably respond fairly well. The visuals look stunning, especially in that they seem to be extremely faithful to the original book, as worked well in “Sin City” and “300.” But I have grave misgivings about the screenplay after reading articles like this one.

The 1989 script by Sam Hamm — who, among other atrocities, was responsible for that year’s “Batman” script — was laughably bad. But David Hayter’s 2003 version was everything Hamm’s wasn’t: smart, sly, and ultimately moving like the original book. Some elements had to be condensed to fit a movie running time, of course. (I always wanted to see “Watchmen” done as a HBO miniseries, but I think the production costs would be prohibitive.) But the sensibility of the book was there in every page.

But if Alex Tse’s work is as bad as it’s made out to be in that article, I can only hope that the rewrites have eliminated the problem. It’s very possible that Tse attached the unnecessary chaff to distract clueless studio executives (is there another kind?), with the filmmakers fully intending to simply ignore or excise that material later, with the material being unharmed in the process. I’m pretty sure having to do that kind of double-dealing is fairly common in the moviemaking industry.

But it’s a slim spot on which to pin one’s hopes for a decent film, especially given the excessive use of slo-mo fight scenes I saw. I would like to see a more mature look at the story in a later trailer, emphasizing the mystery of the Comedian’s death and the troubled lives of the latter-day masked vigilantes, subtly weaving in the “Nostalgia” ads that were so effective in the book. Also troubling is the March release, meaning the studio could be hedging its bets to bury “Watchmen” if the executives in their limited imaginations can’t figure out a way to sell it. I do hear, though, that the studio is already looking at a greatly expanded DVD edition of the film, which might do it justice in the same manner as Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven” benefited from its longer cut.

So all I’m saying is, the teaser looks visually impressive, but don’t get your hopes up too much at this point.

Getting in tune.

It’s not a bad idea, before you embark on a week-long trip away from home, leaving your wife with the mutant beasties called “children,” to make sure you give her a sanity break. So I sent Eleya out today to go see “The Dark Knight” on her own. I still haven’t figured out what I’m doing about dinner for everyone while she’s gone, but it’ll come to me soon enough. If nothing else, the dog is getting quite a bit slower in her old age. (Kidding. She’s a tough, crusty old hound anyway.)

In the meantime, I’m getting back in touch with my love for The Who. I was lucky enough to catch The Who on their 1996 Quadrophenia tour here in the States — the better shows with Billy Idol, and when the Ox was still with us — and it was a life-changing experience. Feeling a bit nostalgic today, and maybe the glass of saké isn’t helping. So I’ve put “Who’s Next” on really loud, and I’m cleaning up some bugs, and hoping that Eleya will let me sneak out for the late show.

Happy SysAdmin day!

Our Fedora Infrastructure team keeps everything that we use for our project running. Day in, day out. They nip the problems in the bud. They find the dark corners of innumerable web apps and sweep them clean. They do it while you and I are asleep sometimes. And they do it all with aplomb, courtesy, efficiency, and good humor.

You guys are the greatest — Happy SysAdmin Day!

Decidedly not the Evil League of Evil.

NOTE: I thought I had posted this last week, but apparently it got filed away as a draft. Mea culpa.

John Poelstra and I introduced an informal release day planning group for Fedora 9. The goal was to act as a sort of cross-project resolution center, making sure that the different groups had what they needed as we push toward release. I’d say it was a fair success because:

1. No one fell asleep in the calls.
2. Some people told me it was very useful.
3. We all agreed that sunrises are so much prettier than sunsets.

The last part there? I made that up. But seriously, the meeting actually did help us do some organizational depsolving, to hijack a bit of jargon. The ultimate goal is to make the release day a headache-free event. My hope is that in doing this again, and starting earlier, we can have an even more positive effect on the Fedora 10 release.

Just to be clear, the purpose of these calls is not to make policies — that’s the province of the lists and other more public and asynchronous venues. Instead, these calls are the equivalent of a high-bandwidth IRC chat. We tried to include a lead from every team we thought could help, including all the usual technical groups as well as artwork, marketing, docs, l10n, and so on:

• Artwork – Mo Duffy
• L10n – Dimitris Glezos
• Docs – Karsten Wade
• RelEng – Jesse Keating
• Marketing – Jonathan Roberts
• Engineering – Tom ‘spot’ Callaway, Jeremy Katz
• Websites + Infrastructure – Ricky Zhou, Seth Vidal
• QA – Will Woods

…and myself and John Poelstra. I’m not sure all these people are able to play the same role this time around, so if you’re interested in this group, we’d be happy to hear from you.

I want to use Fedora Talk for these calls, so ostensibly anyone can call in for the conferences. I’m not sure how well the Asterisk server’s current configuration can handle a high number of callers. It may just be a matter of using a lower-bandwidth codec to support a large number of callers; that’s a tradeoff to CPU load, but I expect these codecs (all free as in speech, of course) are extremely low cost overall.

I’ll post more news on this over the next few days as we iron out some additional details.

Y! Y? Z.

Red Hat just posted an interesting press blog entry about how Fedora’s licensing requirements — far from being a hindrance — are helping the broader open source community. By doing our part, in collaboration with Zimbra, to fix a troublesome bit in the Yahoo! Public License, we’ve helped them achieve their goal of freeing the code. And with Zimbra all over the tubes today, this all spells fantastic news for millions of Zimbra users.

Email folders, years delayed.

I’m still working out better organizational methods for my email.

I tend to keep copies of publicly archived mailing lists. I do a lot of server-side filtering, and all my lists get filed into folders away from my Inbox. My Inbox only contains things sent directly to me.

I have several IMAP accounts, and I hated having to jump around to find my new messages everywhere. I usually end up with some folders gathering dust because I demote them mentally before ever trying to handle the email in them.

So I used Evolution to set up some search folders for more efficiency:

New Mail – Simple: any mail in any account that hasn’t been read. All in one place where I can whip through it quickly.

Priority New Mail – Anything in the “New Mail” search folder that’s actually from an Inbox folder (i.e. directly to me).

VIP New Mail – Anything in “Priority New Mail” search folder that’s from a specific list of VIPs.

I’ve cut my mail processing time in half just from avoiding all the client navigation (clicking folders, getting distracted, etc.). And no, this isn’t rocket science. But since this is my first job where email is so vitally important, I’m a little late off the blocks. Nevertheless, it’s working for me, and I’m finding new and more useful ways to use these features.

Today’s rating: 55.8 Poelstras.

The {bl,n}ame game.

Fedora contributors can now vote on the Fedora 10 release name. You have your choice of nine names of varying appeal. For each choice, you can indicate a level of approval by rating it from 0-9 points. You do not need to rank names against each other. In other words, it’s perfectly acceptable to rate more than one name at the same number of points. The number you enter for a name indicates your level of approval of that name.

Remember that the voting system asks you to confirm your vote after you enter it. On the confirmation screen, you must select Submit to have your vote recorded. ‘Nuff said — go vote now — the name election ends Monday evening, 28 July, at UTC 2359.

Notes on a weekend.

It was a nice weekend even though it was blisteringly hot. Saturday my wife took my daughter out for haircuts and some shopping, so I stayed at home with Trouble (we should probably just get around to changing my son’s name legally) and we played a bit. I also checked to see how his reading is coming along, and at age 4.5 he’s doing about as well as we could possibly hope. He trips a bit on words like “casually” but generally he can read even things he’s never seen before at a decent speed.

I also tuned my wife’s old autoharp — which has been sitting in various closets since we moved in together close to 20 years ago — so my daughter could use it. In actuality it probably badly needs new strings, but those generally cost upward of $60 and I have yet to see if Evie will keep up with it. They’re kind of limited, but very easy to play, and there’s a huge number of songs that are within reach with just a handful of chords. She seemed pretty psyched about it, but she’s much more into reading, writing, and making crafts.

I worked a little on a revamp of the Fedora release notes to try and get them building with publican. However, I ran into some pretty thorny problems because publican doesn’t seem to do things with XML in an XML-ish way. Instead, it relies on a lot of awk and sed commands to query or change the XML during the validation, translation, and build processes.

I remember several years ago when I was one of the people working on the Fedora documentation tool chain, that I had initially tried doing a lot of work this same way. The downfall in that methodology is it makes assumptions about the way the input document is physically formatted, which is a huge fail when it comes to XML (as I later learned, slowly and painfully). It also makes life very hard for people who want to use your tools on their pre-existing documents. Instead, there are a large variety of ways to do these same things programmatically using XSLT. Your input document is “understood” as a set of data nodes, and can be queried, manipulated, and output in ways that are sensible.

In any case, I was pretty disappointed, and although I was initially very enthusiastic about getting our Fedora docs working using this toolchain, I’m a little less so now. I’ll probably see if I can’t pull out some specific problems and file them as bugs. That means I should probably publish a git repository of the document on which I’m working, as a sort of test for the toolchain. Hopefully I’ll get some time for that this week.

Saturday night I stayed up a bit and watched Le scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), which was simply superb. The lead, Mathieu Amalric, was great, but the actor who most surprised me was Max von Sydow as his father — phenomenal performance.

On Sunday morning Evie and I went out for some more bike riding practice. There were a couple of near-spills, but nothing too traumatic, other than the usual whining because she couldn’t immediately do it perfectly. I think it’s just a matter of a few more practices and she’ll be confident enough to start turning. By lunchtime, it was practically too hot to be out, but nevertheless I was running alongside her down the street as she went. We finished up covered with sweat, and went in to get cleaned up and have lunch.

Last night, Eleya and I watched another great film — El Orfanato (The Orphanage). It’s a Spanish language film that purports to be a horror movie, but only in the same sense as The Sixth Sense. Notably, it was produced by Guillermo del Toro, who seems to be racking up quite the résumé of tragedic horror fantasies featuring children. Well worth seeing.

The job is well done.

IN SOVIET RUSSIA, THE FOOD RAVES ABOUT YOU.