Tornado hits Nashville!

OK, not really. But maybe a tornado of information about the state and future of a lot of Red Hat initiatives, including Fedora. Max has already blogged about the afternoon’s Fedora BoF, after which Chris Blizzard gave a great presentation about OLPC. It was fascinating to hear about the myriad unusual concerns that continue to go into this project to support the mission of providing affordable computing hardware to developing nations. Although you may see a FC5 desktop in the latest prototype photos, don’t be misled. The platform for OLPC is of course Linux-based but the software that will run on it is much more child-centered, and highly targeted toward young people’s learning processes.

Jesse Keating and John Flanagan just gave a friendly and gentle introduction to the process of building a distribution. John mentioned again a point from this morning’s keynotes about the constantly growing mindshare of Fedora. Did you know Intel is using Fedora for their in-house development work? Jesse also touched on the fact that the build process is under heavy development to leverage the various yum-based tools into a full-fledged build process.

I am very excited to get some docs work done tonight, once I catch up with milady and crew. I have been on and off IRC and email today as wireless and my attention span allow — too much time playing with Mugshot this afternoon. Hopefully there will be some more pub action this evening. DocBook XML goes well with beer. Mmm, beer.

Summit Day 0.

We had a wonderful and stress-free drive from Knoxville today, but before we got on I-40, we took a side trip to Oak Ridge and the Children’s Museum, which is a converted elementary school chock full of hands-on exhibits and activities for young people. The kids had fun learning about everything from microscopy to textile making at the turn of the century to trains to ornithology. Well worth stopping at if you have little ones and need a diversion for several hours.

The hotel resort is enormous, almost like a small town in itself. If you’ve ever driven by it on I-40, I can now confirm that it is even bigger than it looks from the outside. (This actually works out great with the kids, since by the time they get wherever we’re going, they’re too pooped to get crazy.) There’s even a “Pub District” where I hung out last night with Bill Nottingham, Jesse Keating, Andrew Overholt, Karsten Wade, and Jonathan Blandford. They stopped serving suds at 11 — or did they? — so I was left wondering if they had been “subsidized” to make sure we would all make it to the next morning’s keynotes.

No worries though — I am really looking forward to hearing CEO Matthew Szulik, Richard Wirt from Intel, and Cory Doctorow from the EFF. Time to go grab some breakfast, especially coffee. Mmm, coffee.

Hey Josh — holy deja vu Batman, I just got one of these RAZR V3 phones too! They are super-sweet. I already put a picture of my daughter in the wallpaper and made it so when my wife calls me, it plays the “Ironside” music that was in Kill Bill Vol. 1 whenever the Bride sighted her next victim-to-be.

Prepping for the odyssey.

Tomorrow at oh-dark-thirty we’re getting on the road with the kids to head to Nashville — me for the Red Hat Summit and the rest of the family for fun and frolicking, including visiting relatives. It was a nice birthday gift to be able to give my wife, and I hope to get some extra Fedora work done while there, between catching as many presentations, labs, and keynotes as possible. I really enjoyed watching them last year as Ogg Theora videos, this year I get to experience them live.

Of course SuperWife is freaking out in a packing frenzy, but that is her job. Mine is to drive until I can’t see straight. In the alternate universe where we switch roles (and I have an Evil Goatee), half of our clothes arrive too wrinkled to wear and the other half are left sitting in the laundry machine at home, and we just barely make it to the closing keynote with divorce papers drafted. But! We’re! Not! STRESSED!!!

(gibbering laughter fades away…)

Giving up the high ground.

The typically erudite and well-informed Captain’s Quarters has the latest on what looks to be a terrible atrocity in Haditha. That numerous Pentagon sources are leaking the story could be a terrible indication of what is to come. The backlash could be reminiscent of those from My Lai.

Heavenly.

Last night Eleya and I stayed up rather late last night to watch something I’d been looking forward to for some time — Ridley Scott’s new 194-minute cut of Kingdom of Heaven. It comes in a monstrous four-disc set that includes the movie on two discs, and supplements on the other two.

First, let me just say that the overall visual impact of this film is far greater than any of Scott’s recent work, including the exceptional films Gladiator and Black Hawk Down. Virtually every single shot in the film is glowing with masterful and painterly composition. Every location, every set is a design marvel, filled to the brim with thick sensual detail. The photography was so striking and moving, I couldn’t stop seeing some of the scenes in my head after waking up this morning.

The acting is also brilliant without exception. Orlando Bloom has no problem carrying this weighty epic about a young blacksmith swept up into the boiling political cauldron that is twelfth-century Jerusalem, and Liam Neeson provides his customary measure of grace and poise. The story is as big, if not bigger, than Gladiator, and tackles the weighty issues of what it means to be good, in a time when people were regularly engaged in killing each other over their own cultural definitions thereof. The dialogue never got laughable or anachronistic, which is one of my pet peeves in modern epics.

I’m not sure what kept the original theatrical version from being very popular, but I’m sure it had something to do with the excision of 45+ minutes of character development which makes this film at once so enormous and yet so intimate. It’s truly one of Scott’s best films and I hope it finds its audience in this new and (from what I hear) greatly improved edition.

The handomely appointed four-disc set includes the movie on two discs, with multiple commentaries by Scott, cast, and crew, and a gigantic treasure trove of supplements on two additional discs. Do yourself a favor and buy it today. Most highly recommended.

The gift that keeps on giving.

So you would like to shoot some support to Fedora, but you don’t know how to do it? Did you know you can purchase (for peanuts, no less) a full DVD distribution of the latest and greatest Fedora Core 5 release? And here’s the kicker — when you purchase this DVD, at what’s already a very low price, you are not just buying Fedora for yourself, but you are ensuring that someone else can get it also. You could be sending the gift of Linux and Fedora to an IT worker in a developing nation, or to a schoolteacher in a rural area, or who knows where — maybe in a place where broadband and CD/DVD burners or media aren’t easy to come by.

This Sponsored Media initiative is a great way to show your support for the project if you don’t have time to give but you’ve got an extra few dollars burning a hole in your pocket. People are always asking Fedora Project folks, “Can I donate money to Fedora like I do to, say, the Free Software Foundation?” Well, here’s the answer. When you give this gift, who knows how many people you’re helping? These discs are physical items that can be passed from person to person, used and reused.

Simply click on one of the vendor links on the Sponsored Media page, and connect to one of the supercool companies that is helping further this project. Order your DVD or CD set there, and not only do you get a set, but one will go to the next needy entity in the queue. Heck, you can even give both the sets away if you want!

So give the gift of freedom — give Fedora today!

Addendum: Be sure to digg this story to get it some hang time.

Amerika, Pt. 37.

This from Massachusetts, left-leaning stronghold of the USA? What happened to freedom of expression, to lawful and peaceful protest? I know I’m late to this particular piece of news, that’s nothing new. I’m kind of like that “inside Hollywood” reporter from The Onion in that way. But this really got my blood boiling. Fascism is an insidious evil that has never been constrained to one party or the other.

I wish I had the peace of mind to be more insightful. Right now I’m just too angry.

Toothless people.

Today I had the next in a seemingly endless series of dental appointments guiding me through the wonderful world of “root canal therapy,” as it is called these days, which you have to admit sounds much better than “sucking the bloody nerve pulp out of your rotten, decayed molar, squirting it full of cement goo, and topping it off with a pimpin’ gold crown.” Today was Step Three, the temporary crown, which you can think of as the “rebound tooth.” You see, after you heap one too many abuses on the tooth with which you were going to spend the rest of your life, that tooth eventually gives up, packs its bags, and goes its merry way. Then you’re left with only the worry that you will spend the rest of your life without that tooth. Often you find solace with a temporary partner, Rebound Tooth. (There are all kinds of tongue and saliva jokes I am totally avoiding because at heart I am, above all else, a gentleman who speaketh not such things.) Eventually you give hapless Rebound Tooth the heave-ho in favor of a more permanent partner. This is where the pimpin’ gold comes in, because why not trade up for a tooth with independent means? Plus, as a bonus, in case of global Islamic jihad, you can always get yourself some quick spending cash to hop an emergency flight to New Zealand. Al-Qaeda isn’t interested in New Zealand; they probably think it’s full of talking carnivorous trees and hermaphroditic elves, when in fact it’s full of huge, “might as well be carnivorous” bugs and hermaphroditic fruit.

So anyway, Step Three followed — enough weeks afterward to allow me to mercifully forget the pain involved — the original Step One, “Surprise! You Need a Root Canal!” and the only slightly more popular but infinitely more expensive Step Two, also known as “Pulp Extraction” (not directed by Quentin Tarantino). I also like to think of Step Two as “I Paid My Endodontist $1,000 And All I Got Was This Dead Piece of Bone Where My Tooth Was.” (And why’d it hurt that night? I mean, they took out all the nerves, for Pete’s sake.)

In all seriousness, the previous two steps were not as painful, probably owing to the fact that until now, no one shoved my gumline up to my nasal sinuses using bailing wire, lower arm strength, and a very expensive itty-bitty tooth wrench labeled “Decimator 6000 GX.” This theater of pain was necessary in Step Three, though, to make sure that the previously mentioned pimpin’ gold permanent crown would fit seamlessly on my existing tooth — or rather, what would be left of my existing tooth after the dentist “shaped” it into a foundation. In between the movements of the Dremel Symphony in AAAGGH! Minor, the dental technician rang a bell, and a voluptuous bikini-clad Hawaiian Tropic girl walked around the room with signs like “Round 3.” OK, there was no bikini babe; this was just my way of blithely escaping from this little Marathon Man tableaux during the second movement (presto allegretto).

I also got not one, but two gooey helpings of purple dental form material, used to create a cast of my “before” and “after” molar for purposes of creating the long-awaited pimpin’ gold permanent crown. Now, since it’s purple, and since it goes into your mouth, you would think that it would be charmingly and pleasantly grape-flavored, right? Right? WRONG! Unless you mean, grapes grown from vines springing from the rotten plaque between the molars of Satan. So I’m wondering, why make this stuff purple? Why not make it a more appropriately expectation-setting color, like the grey of a dessicated corpse, or whatever color you call kebab meat?

But boy, does that stuff set up well. So well that as the dentist was prepping my little tooth nub, he looked over at the waiting mold and exclaimed, “Hey, that stuff is setting up already!”, and instantaneously jammed it over my teeth in an attempt to save $3.95 off his out-of-pocket costs for the $1,000 crown procedure and, by avoiding the middle-man, pass that savings on to his bank account. So well did it set up, mind you, that I thought, when it came time to take the molding out, they were simply going to save me the time and hassle of any further visits, ever, by taking all my other, non-root canal therapied teeth with it. Vodka and lowfat ice cream must be good for teeth, though, since all of them reported in as surviving the attempted uprooting. Of course, they reported in by screaming, “Oh God, make it STOP!” through their perfectly intact and functioning nerve endings.

Unfortunately, the premature smack-ulation of hideous purple goo onto my little Lego-nub tooth didn’t work out. So I got to do another three rounds with the Decimator and bailing wire, and once again the process was noticeably bereft of curvy beach-bunny seductresses. On the other hand, I did get to experience the unbridled joy that came along with another mouthful of horrible, anti-grape flavored plaster-of-Hell. Mercifully, this one took, the dentist was able to make me a temporary cap, and I’m counting down the days ’til I can get rid of Rebound Tooth and settle down with a molar with money, someone who can treat my gumline in the manner to which it has become accustomed.

Andy’s is dandy.

After getting in a little before 3:00 a.m., I slept like a log. Eleya took the kids to the playground while I was passed out this morning, so with the total silence and all, I ended up sleeping until the unconscionable hour of 11:00. It strikes me as interesting that spending all night drinking, swearing, and carousing with friends would be completely unacceptable to my wife, whereas it’s perfectly all right with her since I did it on stage and got paid. Ah, my old friend, the Wheel of Commerce! Thanks for keeping Saturday night safe for scoundrels.

I am trying to get motivated to do some work on Fedora this weekend but I keep getting sidetracked. I’m feeling a bit like Bilbo these days, “like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.” I think the trip to the Red Hat Summit in Nashville at the end of the month will give me a little relief from the daily grind, plus (hopefully) a nice little motivational goose.