On the brink!The excitement mounts — less than two hours to release of Fedora 10: Cambridge! Last night I sent a thank-you message to our whole community for the work done on this important release. Today we can really kick up our feet for a few hours and celebrate the culmination of a lot of hard work. Kudos to everyone in the community for their effort! Today I ask that we all do our part to make sure people know about the release and have the opportunity to try out all the innovative new features. And remember that your words can make a difference in helping someone get into the free software community and take the next step toward actual participation. Our four foundations of Freedom, Friends, Features, First all are interlocked — so being a Friend to those who are trying out FOSS is just as important as the other pillars. All right, ’nuff said — rev those engines! |
In slumber, the sound of distant crowing.There are a lot of heartbreaks you set yourself up for as a parent. Perhaps you have a while before you need to deal with some of them — the first date, going off to college and moving out, the eventual wedding — but no dagger strikes so deep yet as the odd and unforeseeable moments when you look at your young one, and realize they will never again be as young as they are right now, and comprehend the two or the ten or the twenty-nine months you’ve lost forever since the last time your heart broke when you realized this. And if you happen to be mercifully oblivious in your distance from that place on some particular evening, there is nothing that snaps you, like an elastic band, back into that wistful reverie faster than coming in your nightly story time to the last chapter of Peter Pan, wherein the eternally young and impish boy returns after many years to the home of one Wendy Moira Angela Darling, now grown up and with a daughter of her own: |
The best laid plans, No. 73.I was going to spend some time tonight writing a big warm and fuzzy blog post about looking forward to Fedora 10 and all the good times ahead. That would have been awesome. Instead, it’s my sad duty to report that my spiffy little Dell XPS M1330 took its own life tonight somewhere between shutting down iptables and powering off. The screen turned white for no apparent reason, to which I thought, “Hm, that’s odd, haven’t seen that before.” Then my eyesight seemed to blur a bit and I looked at my glasses to see if they were smudged, and realized they were fine — it was actually “the magic smoke” escaping from the back of the laptop. It did manage to power off, but the powering back on? Not so much. However, the good folks at Dell were very responsive even at half-past midnight on Friday night. They will have a new laptop here in 7-21 days, and until then I suppose I can get along with my crappy home office desktop, IMAP, and a couple well-placed shell accounts. And I feel pretty confident in saying it had nothing to do with Fedora 10, which has been increasingly spectacular since after the Beta. Of course the Fedora Infrastructure team burst into action when they heard my sob story, and made sure I’d have something faster than the old hunk of junk desktop in my office on which to build the Fedora 10 release notes zero-day updates. Thanks guys, you rock hardest. I guess I’ll have a little more relaxing Thanksgiving than I’d planned. I think the worst part is that I’ve spent 9 months building up a nice, healthy covering of beautiful, colorful free software boosterism on my laptop’s lid, and I’ll have to kiss it all goodbye. Maybe the folks at Dell will get a kick out of it and give the lid a good home on one of their machines… Or maybe they’ll make a “mistake” and send the lid on a unit going to Redmond. |
Fedora unfiltered.Tonight I had the opportunity to appear on The Linux Link Tech Show for an extended interview with the crew there. I was really happy to be able to do this since fate didn’t allow us to sit down together at the Ohio Linux Fest last month. Tonight’s interview was more the kind of chat you’d have with a bunch of friends gathered around the kitchen table than a stiff, formal interview, and these guys made it a very enjoyable experience. Thanks to all of them for having me on the show, and letting me blab endlessly about every topic, from Fedora 10 features to open source ponytails. And thanks also to Dave Nalley for hooking us up. |
Far too long for snakes.It may have been a whole 26 minutes since I last sang the praises of the Fedora Infrastructure team, but lo and behold, what should end up in my inbox but an uptime measurement survey from the good people at Pingdom. And guess who’s at the top of the heap? I’d applaud but my hands are sore! And as a reminder, our Infrastructure team uses only the tastiest free and open source software to do it like they do. Being free software is in the blood for these guys, and we love them for it. And of course, we owe a grateful shout out to our sponsors as well, who have deeded over equipment on which to keep the freedom coming. |
The Return of G1G1.Probably most Fedora community members already know this, but starting tomorrow the Give One Get One program returns, this time courtesy of Amazon. You’ll also be able to get a 4 GB SanDisk Extreme III SD Card to run Fedora 10, complete with extra swap space and live persistence. If any readers are already trying out these cards and/or F10 on the OLPC XO, make sure you stop by the Amazon page and leave your thoughts there. I also note that OLPC has an intriguing new site (Flash required) to let people share their thoughts about changing the world. Nice design and execution, and really gives you a sense of the hope that people have in a brighter future for all the world’s children. Explore! |
Bundling up.Release notes.It looks like we have at least 12 locales with 100% completed translations for Fedora’s release notes, which is great. A few more may be rolling in shortly, because there are several that are almost done right now. By tomorrow we’ll be rolling the RPM package that will go in the final Fedora 10 release images (CD, DVD, etc.). The deadline is formally 13 November at 23:59 UTC, but we can probably swing a few hours for those that need it. Offline.I have to take a long-ish drive down to Raleigh today so I may be offline for a good portion of business hours today. I am testing out the offlineimap package, which may make travel easier in the long run. It’s kind of like rsync for IMAP, was extremely simple to set up, and the only thing that seems to get in the way from time to time is Gmail’s tendency to swap servers out somewhat less than transparently from under the connection. It definitely does take a while to pull 2.5 GB of email, though. Tasks to the max.For some reason I’ve managed to shoulder way too much writing this week. I have a huge amount of drafting to do between now and tomorrow, and the roughly four hours of the day driving won’t help a lot. Tonight it should be easy to have uninterrupted time, so I’m putting off what I can to concentrate on those documents that need first priority. I try to do that sort of juggling every day, but when the balls multiply and turn into chainsaws, things get a lot more interesting! Rah rah.And finally, I am INCREDIBLY EXCITED that Fedora 10 is going to be out in just a couple of weeks! Intrepid folks are putting blocker bugs under the microscope as we speak, and this promises to be a really great release. Some of the things we must continue to consistently spread word about, to make sure people understand them:
I am incredibly proud of the Fedora community and equally so of the Cambridge release. It’s making me very eager to see everyone at FUDCon in January! All right, must go back to writing now, ttfn. |
In case there was still a doubt.Yes, Fredericksburg, Virginia, has more than its share of nerds. Go FredLUG! |
Notes from a Monday.Personal tidbits from today… Mom is back in the hospital again. She’s suddenly got a lot of pain again and can’t bear to walk or be upright. The orthopedic surgeon is not sure what the problem is, but thinks it might be a nerve pinched in the new hardware in her back. She was supposed to get an MRI today, but it’s looking like it won’t happen until the wee hours at this point. They’ll be keeping her for another day or two after that, we’re pretty certain. I went to the dentist and got a tiny filling in a molar. The dentist was in a bit of a hurry I think, because he didn’t let the topical anaesthetic set in as much as usual, and the novocaine injection was less than pleasant. Soon enough though, the lower left quadrant of my mouth went totally numb, and the filling went on without a problem. I was finally back to normal a little before 8:00 and had some (soft!) dinner. Everything electronic in the house seems to be taking a beating recently. My beloved iPod — the one I recently hacked to put in a 32 GB CompactFlash card to replace the busted hard disk — stopped working suddenly. Everything I was reading pointed to the battery being the culprit, and I knew the 5th gen models were known to have this sort of problem. I found a great deal at ipodjuice.com and ordered a replacement kit, including a new and superior opener tool, because the ones I had were close to useless after being used once. (Ugh.) When it arrived, I opened the iPod — which, like an imbecile, mind you, I hadn’t bothered to do previously — and found the problem — the CF card had come loose. At that point I remembered dropping it while returning home, which probably knocked it loose. So now I have a spare battery which I’ll just hold on to for a while. Not so easily fixed is the “kick drum” foot pedal for our Wii Rock Star game, which snapped in two the other day. And I swear I’m not a leadfoot, really! I found a nice replacement which SupaWife is trying to talk me into getting, since she’s observed drums are my favorite instrument to not-quite-play. (I’ve always wanted to learn drums so I could be a one-man band like Jon Brion.) There are cheaper alternatives but they all have substantial downsides or suffer from equally ugly problems. The Rock Pedal is apparently the pro model of choice these days, so bully! Guess I’ll order one so I can play again this weekend once I’m done catching up with work. The kids are off school tomorrow, but I’ll be on duty per normal. Thursday and Friday I’ll be in Raleigh, getting back late Friday night. |
Plugging away.Reminder: The FUDCon wiki page is ready for sign-ups. We have hotel information ready for you as well, including a link to the hotel web site where you can use a special code for our discount rate. If you need an extra day on either side (or both), the hotel staff has told me they’ll be happy to honor the discount. They’ve set aside a few rooms in advance for longer stays for that purpose. I’m working this week on refreshments, hopefully getting final word on the classroom space at MIT, and at the end of this week figuring out the roster of people we can fund for travel. Thanks to all those folks who’ve already agreed to double up, pool transportation, or otherwise cut costs for the trip. I’m going to do my best to bring as many folks in as possible. Please make sure when you sign up on the wiki, you also mark shirt size, whether you prefer vegetarian, any special needs, and whether you’ve got a roommate picked out already. |
