Don’t shoot the piano player.Overnight on the fedora-devel-list, from a hapless non-native English speaker:
This was followed immediately by the terse but accurate response by one of the overworked developers:
Apparently the original poster had never really used Bugzilla before, or at least without any gleaning of how it works:
Note that the purpose of Bugzilla is to allow users to enter bug information. When they do, the bug is assigned a number. Unfortunately, the user had no experience actually doing this, and didn’t understand that the list wasn’t just a dropoff for Other People to Enter Your Bugs. More unfortunately, the developer in question either didn’t pick up on this (?!), or more likely, decided he was too busy to reply with more than the minimum number of words:
Oh really? Is it because he has no account that his searches don’t turn up any bugs? Or could it be that maybe he just doesn’t know what to search for? And why is that to be held against him, when he’s trying to Do the Right Thing by reporting an important bug that affects a whole country of potential users? Why would anyone jump to this kind of wacky conclusion? And what’s with “log the request”? That doesn’t make much sense to the user. Why not just say clearly, “enter a new bug”—which has exactly the same number of keystrokes, and is more easily understood by the user? Situation not improving:
It doesn’t take a genius to realize the user is trying hard to stay upbeat even though he is no closer to understanding what to do now than he was when he first wrote in. I decided to defuse the situation before the list created another “jumper,” what I call people who either move off the forums where people actually know things, or leave the distribution entirely for one they feel will be nicer about giving them advice. My response:
Note that no smileys were required to get the point across that I was trying to be helpful, and not assuming the guy couldn’t learn what to do. I provided him the link to the form, so he knew where to start. Problem solved, and a minimum of effort expended. There are two lessons here for the FDP and the whole Fedora community:
The response from the user:
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Stylin’ and profilin’.Karsten finished editing the Style chapter for the Documentation Guide last night. After a quick once-over to correct a few inconsistencies â??- Iâ??m sure there are other bugs in there to stomp out -â?? itâ??s going up to the web server. The next major project Iâ??m going to tackle is editing on the Fedora Installation Guide, which we hope to have finished for the release of Core 4 in June. With the Fedora CVS now open, collaboration should ramp up pretty quickly. This sets the bandwidth starvation purely in the supply chain of new writers. Hopefully we can make that pay off with some aggressive recruitment. Apparently there are several projects that have activated in the past year to garner larger labor pools for open source development and documentation. If we can jump on those we may be able to start feeding the pipe a little more efficiently on the supply side. |
Free as in beer. EXACTLY as in beer.Finally, someone’s combined the two greatest things in the world: Open source and beer. Zymurgists, take heed! |
Gig and a half.Saturday night we have a gig at Andy’s in Chestertown, MD with our good friend and very special guest drummer Evan Pollack. Y’know, I need to check with Evan on something… turns out that if you google him, you’ll see a hit on a Jeff Lynne tribute album. I keep meaning to ask Evan whether that’s him or some other session drummer coincidentally named Evan Pollack. |
Eight days a week.I did a huge amount of work this weekend for the Docs Project: I also had time to take Evie for a walk to the grocery store, which is always enjoyable, and since we did that Sunday morning, there were many of the little kiddie carts available. Evie loves “driving” around while I give directions. (“No, honey, your other left.”) Eleya and I watched Spanglish on Saturday night, which was just perfect—another James L. Brooks slice-of-life masterpiece with a killer script and great acting from everyone. Equally hilarious and heart-breaking, I would have to mark this most highly recommended. |
Amidst his gorgeous feast.This is an outrage! Who among us does not know the immortal classic “C is for Cookie?” Sorry, I think I’m capable of teaching my kids that they don’t get to eat cookies ALL THE TIME. Cookie Monster is lovable because of his gluttony; the hyperbole of this little sweets-gobbling puppet is precisely what teaches the necessary lesson. The fact that he would pound down all those Chips Ahoys is what made him comical. If there’s one thing that kids will learn early on, it’s that they don’t want to be the object of ridicule. I say, give ol’ C.M. free reign in the cookie jar! Let my Muppets go! (Thanks to Chris as usual.) |
One love, yo.I couldn’t be more psyched—I found the coolest anti-racism site ever on the Internet! It’s like Sally and Johnny are saying exactly how I feel! I’m going to send a story to Slashdot so even more people can learn how to spread the love, dig? |
Another true report from Iraq.This just in from a “friend of a friend” who passes on this report from the front. Please, please, please pass this link on to others you know, but do not copy the story verbatim. If you’re visiting this story, please feel free to leave a comment below. CG FIRST CAVALRY DIVISION TALKS ON IRAQ Went to an AUSA dinner last night at the Ft. Hood Officers’ Club to hear a speech by MG Pete Chiarelli, CG of the 1st Cav Div. He and most of the Div. have just returned from Iraq. Very informative and, surprise, the Mainstream Media (MSM) isn’t telling the story. I was not there as a reporter, didn’t take notes but I’ll make some the points I remember that were interesting, surprising or generally stuff I had not heard before. It was not a speech per se. He just walked and talked, showed some slides and 1. While units of the Cav served all over Iraq, he spoke mostly of Baghdad and more specifically Sadr City, the big slum on the eastern side of the Tigeris River. He pointed out that Baghdad is, in geography, is about the size of Austin. Austin has 600,000 to 700,000 people. Baghdad has 6 to 7 million people. 2. The Cav lost 28 main battle tanks. He said one of the big lessons learned is that, contrary to doctrine going in, M1-A2s and Bradleys are needed, preferred and devastating in urban combat and he is going to make that point to the JCS next week while they are considering downsizing armor. 3. He showed a graph of attacks in Sadr City by month. Last Aug-Sep they were getting up to 160 attacks per week. During the last three months, the graph had flatlined at below 5 to zero per week. 4. His big point was not that they were “winning battles” to do this but that cleaning the place up, electricity, sewage, water were the key factors. He said yes they fought but after they started delivering services that the Iraqis in Sadr City had never had, the terrorist recruiting of 15 and 16 year olds came up empty. 5. The electrical “grid” is a bad, deadly joke. Said that driving down the street in a Humvee with an antenna would short out a whole block of apt. buildings. People do their own wiring and it was not uncommon for early morning patrols would find one or two people lying dead in the street, having been electrocuted trying to re-wire their own homes. 6. Said that not tending to a dead body in the Muslim culture never happens. On election day, after suicide bombers blew themselves up trying to take out polling places, voters would step up to the body lying there, spit on it, and move up in the line to vote. 7. Pointed out that we all heard from the media about the 100 Iraqis killed as they were lined up to enlist in the police and security service. What the media didn’t point out was that the next day there 300 lined up in the same place. 8. Said bin Laden and Zarqawi made a HUGE mistake when bin Laden went public with naming Zarqawi the “prince” of al Qaeda in Iraq. Said that what the Iraqis saw and heard was a Saudi telling a Jordanian that his job was to kill Iraqis. HUGE mistake. It was one of the biggest factors in getting Iraqis who were on the “fence” to jump off on the side of the coalition and the new gov’t. 9. Said the MSM (Main Stream Media) was making a big, and wrong, deal out of the religious sects. Said Iraqis are incredibly nationalistic. They are Iraqis first and then say they are Muslim but the Shi’a – Sunni thing is just not that big a deal to them. 10. After the election the Mayor of Baghdad told him that the people of the region (Middle East) are joyous and the governments are nervous. 11. Said that he did not lose a single tanker truck carrying oil and gas over the roads of Iraq. Think about that. All the attacks we saw on TV with IEDs hitting trucks but he didn’t lose one. Why? Army Aviation. Praised his air units and said they made the decision early on that every convoy would have helicopter air cover. Said aviators in that unit were hitting the 1,000 hour mark (sound familiar?). Said a convoy was supposed to head out but stopped at the gates of a compound on the command of an E6. He asked the SSG what the hold up was. E6 said, “Air , sir.” He wondered what was wrong with the air, not realizing what the kid was talking about. Then the AH-64s showed up and the E6 said, “That air sir.” And then moved out. 12. Said one of the biggest problems was money and regs. There was a $77 million gap between the supplemental budget and what he needed in cash on the ground to get projects started. Said he spent most of his time trying to get money. Said he didn’t do much as a “combat commander” because the war he was fighting was a war at the squad and platoon level. Said that his NCOs were winning the war and it was a sight to behold. 13. Said that of all the money appropriated for Iraq, not a cent was earmarked for agriculture. Said that Iraq could feed itself completely and still have food for export but no one thought about it. Said the Cav started working with Texas A&M on “ag” projects and had special hybrid seeds sent to them through Jordan. TAM analyzed soil samples and worked out how and what to plant. Said he had an E7 from Belton, TX (just down the road from Ft. Hood) who was almost single-handedly rebuilding the ag industry in the Baghdad area. 14. Said he could hire hundreds of Iraqis daily for $7 to $10 a day to work on sewer, electric, water projects, etc. but that the contracting rules from CONUS applied so he had to have $500,000 insurance policies in place in case the workers got hurt. Not kidding. The CONUS peacetime regs slowed everything down, even if they could eventually get waivers for the regs. There was more, lots more, but the idea is that you haven’t heard any of this from anyone, at least I hadn’t and I pay more attention than most. Great stuff. We should be proud. Said the Cav troops said it was ALL worth it on Jan. 30 when they saw how the Iraqis handled election day. Made them very proud of their service and what they had accomplished. |
