A special pedigree.

I don’t usually take a lot of time on my blog to write about apps, but as I was doing some administrative cleanup this morning, I realized I needed to give some props. I’ve been using the mail reader Mutt for about a year now, coupled with the offlineimap utility, and as a result my dealings with email are far more efficient than they were before. I used to be a heavy Evolution user, but a combination of oddities in the way Evo deals with folder refreshing, and its use of memory, prompted me to try other things. Now I use offlineimap to sync my remote IMAP stores to my hard disk, which makes reading email incredibly quick since Mutt now reads from the hard disk and not the remote IMAP server. I can run offlineimap as a one-time process, before I take my laptop on the road, or I can let it run regularly during the day in the background.

When I send email, I pass it back up to my IMAP servers, which tends to cause a delay while I wait for the email to go out. This year, my goal is to get Postfix installed and configured on my laptop to handle sent email, so that delay will be eliminated. Postfix will take care of the actual email delivery in the background while I get on with other things.

Mutt itself is a great email reader to use. There is a very brief delay for very large folders while it reads information off my hard disk, but it’s only a few seconds for a folder with tens of thousands of messages (I have many folders like this). Operations on folders after that are practically instantaneous. My latest favorite toy is the l (that’s the lowercase letter L, or “limit”) command, which lets me show just specific email messages from the folder listing. A very useful limit is ~d DD/MM/YY, where DD/MM/YY is a date input. (The format for the date is obviously a little different than some people use day to day, but it’s easy enough.) I can easily go back to my Sent folders and look through the mail I sent on a particular day.

There are many other limits you can use, like ~f or ~t for locating messages from or to a name or address, or ~s for limiting by subject line, or ~b for finding messages with certain text in the body of the message. Again, the searches are incredibly fast when running off the hard disk, and you can stack them as well, as in ~d 01/06/09 ~t John, which would find email to John sent on 1 June 2009.

Of course there are a ton of other commands available with Mutt. And because it has an extensive set of configuration options, including operation hooks that allow you to reset the environment as you work, there’s almost no end to the usability improvements you can make based on your own habits and mail setup. With or without a pedigree, this dog’s definitely a champion!

Pushing ahead.

The days of summer may be hot, but they’re anything but lazy in Fedora. The Fedora 12 release, as many community members already know, is a somewhat tighter schedule overall. We had so many features in the Fedora 11 release, some of them particularly extensive and complex, that we drove a slightly longer release cycle. To make up for that longer cycle, the Fedora 12 cycle is somewhat shorter. That truncation returns us to release dates close to the May Day/Halloween calendar we originally set up back around the Fedora 7 time frame. As a result, the feature freeze for Fedora 12 is occurring on July 28, or approximately three weeks from now. That’s the date by which new features and major changes in existing packages have to be entered. Probably a good date to inscribe on your calendar (and maybe tattoo on your forearm)!

You’ll see that the release after that freeze is called “Alpha” in this release, because we really have only two test phase releases before our release candidate in Fedora 12. For Fedora 11 and previous releases, there were three. So there’s limited time left to get your features in gear for the F12 release, if you want the practical upshot. To me, Fedora 12 is going to be very much a tightening of a lot of screws and bolts, ensuring this release is even more solid than Fedora 11, which itself premiered many new technologies but yet is racking up overwhelmingly solid reviews and praise. Our hope is to release Fedora 12 on November 3, 2009, as listed in the F12 release schedule on the wiki.

The Feature List page on the wiki shows a number of line items that need to be updated by their maintainers to be retained for the current release. If you own one of these, please visit the page and update your status so your feature can be managed correctly. If you are hoping to get a new feature into the process, then now is the time to build your page and get it entered into the appropriate category on the wiki. This process will help people elsewhere in the project work on targeted testing, publicity, and other noteworthy bits that go into each release. Thanks for being a part of it!

FUDCon, Day 2 and 3.

Sorry this comes late. I took a couple of days off after the Goodwill Tour o’ Doom to unwind with family and my blogging suffered as a result. FUDCon Day 2 was our BarCamp, which we organized the evening of Day 1. Day 3 was a continuation of some hackfests from Day 1, along with a couple additional sessions.

• One of the hallmarks of FUDCon is the BarCamp segment and this FUDCon definitely didn’t disappoint. We had a great variety of talks on Day 2, from Ambassador development and equipment, to a UI design clinic, to getting started hacking on wireless, to an array of system administration topics. It was a great variety and there was practically no way you could show up and not find something to appeal to you for most or all of the day.
• I didn’t see many talks myself, between working on organization, having one-on-one conversations with some of the attendees, and just helping Max make sure everything was ship-shape for the other folks there.
• I did get to hold a session based on my little PulseCaster app. Unfortunately there weren’t many attendees, but the upshot was that I got a private design clinic with Mairin Duffy. She helped me find some excellent ways to improve the interface for the next version, which I’ll probably work on later this weekend if I have time. I did get some interest from a couple of the podcasting folks who were around, including the Linux Outlaws, who now have a show available in which they interviewed me and Max.
• Max has already written some of the post mortem stuff we talked about at the event, so it’s worth checking out that post if you haven’t done so already.
• Sometimes you simply can’t please all the people all the time. We seem to get conflicting feedback at every event about how the next event should go, and those changes inevitably lead to many people asking for the event to be planned the way it went originally. While that can be frustrating from the organizers’ standpoint, it’s very important to us to keep those channels open and always try to be improving these events, while realizing that it’s impossible to have one perfect event for everyone.
• When traveling, always make sure you leave a venue with every personal item you carried in. ‘Nuff said.
• The photos from the event are incredible, especially the one that led to the FUDCon Berlin 2009 poster. Thank you to Nicu Buculei and many others who did such a wonderful job showing how much fun and friendship we have in the Fedora community. (Hmm, maybe the fifth foundation is actually “Fun”!)
• Day 3 was a little light, but one of the highlights was Chitlesh Goorah’s talk on the Fedora Electronics Lab, where a number of attendees gathered in the main hall to hear about the revolutionary inroads he’s been making with the EDA and manufacturing business community, showing off the wide expanse of open source tools available in Fedora.
• I think the best part of FUDCon for me was seeing and catching up in person with Max, with whom I talk fairly regularly but don’t get a chance to see often since he moved to Europe. Great job on FUDCon, my friend!

I flew home Monday (with another slightly-too-long layover in the hell of Heathrow) exhausted but very, very happy with the state of the European community and the excellent work being done by so many Fedorans there. Many thanks to Gerold Kassube, Joerg Simon, Fabian Affolter, Jens Kuehnel, Jeroen van Meeuwen, Christoph Wickert, Thomas Woerner, and so many others for making this a fantastic event. Also special thanks to the Red Hat security team, including Mark Cox, Josh Bressers, Murray McAllister, and many more, for making a roosting place at FUDCon, and also for making themselves available for our community to ask questions and discuss issues.

There was a lot of talk about where to hold the next FUDCon EMEA — I think most people agree that we should do somewhere other than Berlin, to spread the FUDCon joy around the continent, just as we are going to try to do with the North American FUDCon later this year by having it somewhere other than Boston. Wherever we hold it, I am certain we’ll be graced with some of the brightest, most energetic, and friendliest FOSS lovers from around the globe. Thanks to all of you, for making our community such an amazing place to work and play every day.