Flashback to no. 9247.Back in November I posted about seeing Fedora being used at Pixar in the production of Toy Story 3. Last night TS3 picked up the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film. Congrats to director Lee Unkrich the Pixar guys — my family and I loved the movie and it’s nice to think that in some teeny-tiny, infinitesimal way, I was connected to it! |
Making the most of the planet.With a title like that, I could go two ways with this blog post, right? One way would be to encourage people to do stuff that’s good for the Earth, like recycling and so forth. There are probably lots of people who could do that better than me. Instead, this post is going to be about making the most of the Fedora Planet, which carries information about contributors and their work to each other and to audiences outside the Fedora Project. I personally like to see a mixture of information on the Planet that tells me about our contributors, their work, and the things they’re doing in Fedora. Often I see stuff appearing on the Planet that isn’t really relevant to any of those topics though. When I reached out to a couple different Fedora contributors recently to ask them about posts, I found they didn’t know they could aggregate part of their blogs, based on a category or tagging, as opposed to the feed of all their content. The contributors in question were both interested in how they could do this properly, and I found that reaching out to them directly, with an offer to help, was a great way to discuss this topic in a constructive and educational way for both parties. Why is that a helpful feature of blogging? Because it allows the writer to express themselves however they like on their blog without worrying which aggregators the content will end up feeding. A single writer may be feeding content to several different planets or other aggregators, and should have the option of where their content ends up. By having a category that maps to an aggregator, it’s easy for the author to declare where they want their content will be carried. It also gives the author a chance, when publishing, to be thoughtful about their content and where it’s most pertinent. This is also helpful for the community, because category specific feeds keep each aggregator (the Fedora Planet is just one example) more useful for everyone reading it. I’ve been using WordPress for a long time for my blogging, and WordPress has a very easy way to set up categories for content, and provide a specific feed for each one. Interestingly though, both of the contributors I helped in the past week were using Blogspot. As I found out when I made a test Blogspot blog later, Blogspot does not make this process quite as simple or straightforward, although the feature does exist and work fine. So, armed with that knowledge, I set up a couple extra wiki pages with instructions for how to set up category specific feeds for a WordPress blog, and how to do the same thing for a Blogspot (or Blogger) blog. I also linked these pages to the general instruction page for the Planet. Hopefully, these pages will be useful to contributors adding themselves to the Fedora Planet. Even if you’re already on the Planet, if you’re not familiar with the process of categorization or labeling, you might find these pages helpful. Note that none of the above information is meant to stop people from discussing topics relevant to our community, but not specific to Fedora, on our Planet. My hope is that using categorization like this will continue to improve the quality of content on the feed, and even help bloggers contribute information to more aggregators. |
Contributions of late.Here’s a smattering of stuff I’ve been doing in the Fedora Project lately. Although I don’t get to spend as much time on Fedora in my new job, I’ve been putting aside some off hours and a portion of Friday (or as I like to call it, my “no meetings day”) to make extra headway.
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Free hugs.
Now that’s a nice way to go on Valentine’s Day! I love my wife a lot more, of course, but I’m also proud to say that I love free software. My most sincere thanks to all the people in Fedora and the free software community who work hard every day to make free software better. The daily effort you put in has inspired me and changed my life. Consider this your hug, and have a great Valentine’s Day. |
Respecting impairments.This tip is a short one, but it applies to a lot of people in the Fedora Project, since we all share responsibilities for writing stuff on the Fedora wiki. I often see instructions or guidance on the wiki where the writer wants to provide a link. Often those instructions say something like this:
Yikes! Hold on a minute here — Fedora, like many other operating systems, has users and contributors who are blind or have severe visual impairments. They may not be able to “see” your link, and in their cases, you’re giving an instruction they can’t possibly follow. This usage is very common in English, so it can be a hard habit to break. I know it’s still an effort for me not to fall into this habit. Fortunately solving the problem is easy. Use one of the following phrases instead:
Ah, that’s much better, and now everyone can follow your instructions. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking this issue is one of “political correctness” or social niceties, but I believe it’s simpler and less controversial. Fixing this particular usage makes the wiki more accurate. People don’t “see” a reference, they refer to it. In the case of a URL, they can refer to it by visiting it. This particular language fix doesn’t make the wording awkward or bloated, so it’s well worth using the more accurate version here. Happy wiki-ing! |
Jiffy Pop meeting minutes.For some reason this week I feel like blogging about some of my time-saving tools. I’m certainly not a superstar when it comes to eliminating wasted time. But when I was FPL I had to figure out ways to be more effective so I could spend more time on the tasks that truly required it. If you run meetings online, you probably already know there are cool projects like Debian’s meetbot to make the process easy. You can give instructions to the bot during the meeting, which are recorded in the minutes, using commands like #info, #agreed, #action, and so on. We use meetbot in Fedora as well, for just about every meeting we run. We even use it to log hackfests and other groovy online get-togethers. But how do you get those minutes out to subscribers of the team’s mailing list? I’ve seen some people encounter problems doing this quickly. Those problems cause stress, because you want to do a good job for your teammates. If the process is hard, it’s tempting — heck, sometimes it’s necessary — to put it off, so you can do other priority tasks. Then you feel guilty about it later when the minutes aren’t out on time. Wouldn’t it be great to eliminate that stress and guilt? Now, I have zero doubt that someone could automate a no-time-required solution, and maybe some folks out there use such a system. But in my case, I do like to look over the minutes first, and sometimes prepend a little text at the top. For instance, I might want to add an explanation or extra pointer for context, or a note about something that went wrong mechanically. If you’re in a similar situation, or just not ready for full on automation for some reason, here’s how I do minutes very quickly. Maybe it will help you in the future:
That looks like a lot of steps, doesn’t it? But since almost everything there is copying and pasting, the actual time to complete this is under 2 minutes. (If you’re a fast typist and good with your editor, it’s more like 30 seconds.) Thus the title for this post! Many thanks to Kevin Fenzi and the Infrastructure team for providing meetbot functions for our use in Fedora. They’re a big, big help every week for me personally. * Well, it does matter a little. When I used Evolution, there wasn’t a way to insert the output of shell commands easily into my compose window. That’s totally sensible because Evo isn’t designed for the 0.1% of people who like running shell commands. It’s barely more work to just use a terminal and then Evo’s function to insert file content. ** The Alt+1 means that the following shell-command, run by Alt+Shift+!, will dump its standard output into the current buffer, which is where the email’s being composed. If you were using a terminal with some other email program, you could do curl -O <paste link address> which would retrieve the minutes to a file. Then you could paste the file into your email compose window. |
XML editing with Emacs.I’ve been using GNU Emacs ever since I started working with the Fedora documentation team years ago. I wouldn’t call myself a power user by any means, but it handles my modest needs very well. Other people may have different preferences, which is fine. (Holy wars to /dev/null please.) In the intervening years some really nice tools have evolved for dealing with different kinds of XML documents. I used to use the old psgml-mode to do editing of XML documents, but nowadays things are even more elegant and functional with nxml-mode. In truth, I was probably late to switch, simply because I didn’t have time to fix that which wasn’t broken. However, ultimately psgml fell out of favor and the switch was necessary. But I discovered an array of helpful configurations that made XML editing even easier than before. I use these tools for editing DocBook XML, but they’re equally powerful for other schemas as well. For instance, you could use nxml-mode to hand-edit libvirt domain files with good confidence on their validity. You can probably find directions like these (or even better) in a lot of places around the web. What I found difficult about the process was discovering the why as opposed to the what to do. How does all this stuff work, anyhow? None of the pages I read did a great job at explaining that. Admittedly, some of them were parts of much larger works, but I just wanted to get something done, not read an entire book. In writing the above page, I thought to myself, How can I improve this situation for the next person? The key to solving that problem was this fantastic post by Mel Chua (and her lightning talk at FUDCon Tempe) where she talked about baking croissants. Short summary: it’s not enough to write a recipe and expect people to follow it, if your goal is to get people baking who aren’t bakers by trade. You have to take the time to fill in all the gaps. So the result is this page I added to the Fedora wiki: How to use Emacs for XML editing. Thanks, Mel, for the great advice. If anyone finds something wrong with that page, why bother commenting here? Just edit the wiki page if you’re a Fedora contributor (in other words, someone with an account and completed CLA). I’ll get notified when you do and everyone can benefit from your changes. UPDATE: I revised the page slightly to give some needed background information up front and make it even more Mel-icious. Also I slightly edited this post to eliminate some awkwardness from where I rearranged text. |
They love a good bandwagon.It looks like my honorable associate Joe Brockmeier has also discovered the beauty of the offlineimap utility, which is one of my favorite productivity tools as well. If you’ve been reading my blog for some time, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of using offlineimap in cahoots with the Mutt mail reader and postfix as a local server. Joe writes about using msmtp as a sending utility, or mail transfer agent (MTA) as mail geeks say, but I prefer postfix because it gives me the ability to do slightly more sophisticated deferrals. If I’m on a plane or otherwise offline, I like to be able to simply hit send without worrying about my connection status. When I connect to a network later, my configuration allows my email to flow to the proper relays as needed. If my system can reach GMail, that account’s email gets sent. If my system can connect to Red Hat’s VPN, email from my Red Hat account gets sent. In July 2009 I wrote more about this setup here, here, and here. |
