The sigh of relief heard round the world.

Those folks unlucky enough to keep me in their bookmarks and RSS readers will be happy to know I will not make a foolish, half-hearted, and unbearably sophomoric attempt to blog the Oscars again this year. Please, enjoy the starlets in slinky dresses and overwrought dance numbers. Go Marty!

So much bile, so little time.

I was a little surprised to read about the lengths to which people will go to be jerks to virtual strangers. I’ve tried both OpenBSD and Gentoo and didn’t find either to my liking. But hey, to each his own. I’m happy to see both these free software projects succeeding on their own terms; it never occurs to me to feel like Fedora is superior to either of them just because I prefer it. Wow, I bet I could write a whole series on blowhardism in the FOSS community!

Jeff Spaleta wrote a great post to fedora-devel-list, more or less about this very topic, that I really enjoyed reading. Maybe we should make that part of our FAQ…. In the meantime, in case folks haven’t read it, you really should pick up a copy of Karl Fogel’s book Producing Open Source Software, and pretty much read it cover-to-cover, with the possible exception of the technical bits you know. There’s some simple but insightful comments throughout on the social side of FOSS, and even someone who’s been around these here parts a whlie can benefit from them, if only as a reminder or reinforcement.

How the mighty have fallen.

ESR announced his own obsolescence this week on fedora-devel-list, and I’m sure by the time I post this blog entry, the weight of all the bits wasted on hand-wringing and arguing over his self-important announcement will have collapsed to form a virtual neutron star. I for one found it funny, because in true blowhard style, the reasons for leaving had nothing to do with the larger philosophy of Fedora (despite protestation to the contrary), and everything to do with a combination of social and technical ineptitude.

Now, the technical ineptitude accusation is something I’d never lob at any user who hadn’t spouted as many claims of superiority as ESR. Users are cool: they’re the reason we hack, whether it’s on code, art, docs, or whatever. I’m just a lowly docs writer, and as a user, I’ve encountered horkage like that several times, too. Which naturally implies that I’ve broken things in all sorts of similar, or even worse, manners. (And I can admit that to you, my sweet Internet. Because you’ll never tell a soul!)

I’ve usually been able to fix these problems over the years, some of which go beyond even the mild breakage ESR encountered from forcibly removing important (and requisite) system libraries. But I didn’t fix these problems without getting help and education the first time, though — see the difference? Um, right, I thought not. I asked someone for advice and help. Yes, a descent to the plane of mere mortality may, in fact, be required, however painful an option that might seem. Despite my harsh words here, though, all is forgiven. Seriously: the next time you break Fedora, let me know if I can help you figure out how to fix it. Happy to help. And unlike the Internet, I won’t tell a soul.

Unfortunately, like a lot of blowhards I’ve met — some geeks, some not — ESR doesn’t seem predisposed to ask for any help for vexing issues. To do so, after all, might expose the fact that there’s a technical issue he can’t solve by himself with relative ease, or might require him to subjugate his ego for the temporary purpose of gaining some useful knowledge. There’s nothing wrong with some healthy egotism, as long as it doesn’t interfere with your ability to deal with reality. In this case, “reality” is the practically foregone conclusion that any problem is likely to be more solvable with a few additional knowledgeable individuals helping.

I personally live by the tenet that if something goes wrong, the chief culprit is often my own error. (I’ve hit up many a FUDCon attendee, list subscriber, and IRC participant to increase my storehouse of clue.) It’s not about selling yourself short or being too self-deprecating; assuming that you know everything you need to know is a good way to ensure you’ll never discover the contrary. Might I suggest, then, a teaspoon of humility to go with that heady draught of godhead?

But I digress. As the thread wound on, it became increasingly clear that the broken bits were mainly due to PEBCAK, and not to fundamental flaws in Fedora. Interestingly also not at fault are governance and policy issues. Strangely absent from the list of proximate causes, as well, was Fedora’s failure to trick out our distribution with phat closed-source bling. What? Might this mistake have been prevented, or at least remedied, by a quick note to the appropriate list or other resource? Whatever, I do what I want!

Instead, we were treated to our annual re-enactment of “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” wherein we are sternly reprimanded, “You [Fedorans] are stupid! Stupid, stupid, STUPID!” And better yet, a press release! “Self-proclaimed King of the Geeks toasts /lib, points finger at FOSS! Film at 11!” Pity ESR couldn’t live up to his own standards.

Slung in a hammock.

We’re the only ones left and we’re flat on our backs
Taking the rest of the day off…

Yes, it’s a wonderful day to get some work done at home. I got up at a pretty reasonable time, exercised, then picked up some coffee (thank you O SuperWife!), got my email under control and did a little IRC to get my brain in gear as well. I think today I’m going to get some work done on a couple side projects I’ve had cooking for a while. Much depends on whether my children can abide by the morning cease-fire. The accords have not gone well.

This was a strange weekend of long-term future pondering, looking at where my life’s been and where it’s heading. Will there be more to this story later? We’ll see…. Regardless, my wife is giving me her fullest support and that makes all the difference between trepidation and enthusiasm.

You find it don’t add up
To much when you’re wrapped in a blanket of stars
With the one you love

_{– Neil Finn, “Rest of the Day Off”}

Snow day.

Home from work today, since the ice coating all the roads caused our office to stay closed. I finished shoveling the driveway and the sidewalk of all the heavy, wet snow and ice, and now the wind is a blustery, battering background noise throughout the house. But the cockles of my heart are warmed by a kind (if somewhat error-prone) letter I got today in the mail from Richmond International Airport, reading in part:

Thank you for your complementary [sic] words about Richmond International Airport’s free WiFI service. I bet you didn’t know that RIC was one of the first airports in the U.S. to offer this service for its travelers?

In April 2003, RIC began offering free WiFI service when there were only a handful of other airports around the country offering WiFi to travelers. At RIC, we continue to be committed to maintaining a WiFi network as a courtesy convenience to the Virginia traveling public.

Also enclosed was a courtesy daily parking pass for my next trip, good through the end of 2007.

I have to admit, I didn’t know the part about the free wifi since 2003. But I recently tried using RIC instead of driving up to DCA because the traffic is easier — especially since I am usually leaving during morning hours. I can get a lot of nonstop flights from there, many more than I would have thought possible. But I’ve been so pleased with RIC’s free wifi that I don’t think I’ll ever use DCA (or — shudder — IAD) again, if I can avoid it.

Since I have an almost socially-debilitating neurosis about being on time to the airport, this lets me relax, surf, catch up on Fedora email, or IRC. And yes, RIC is a wonderful Netizen that doesn’t do any evil port blocking that I’ve been able to discern. SSH, Web, SVN, and all sorts of other goodies seem to work just fine.

So a BIG shout out to my buddies at RIC, including Joe Stevens, who sent me the letter, and their President and CEO, Jon E. Mathiasen, for knowing how to treat customers right. If you’re in the DC area as far south as Stafford or Fredericksburg, or even a westerly point like Culpeper or Orange, I encourage you to try out RIC.

Release Notes opened further.

For a while now in the Docs Project, we’ve used the concept of “beats” to separate the voluminous release notes into easily wrangled chunks. “Beat” is a term that originated in both journalism and law enforcement — and has since been used in other fields as well. A newspaperman would cover a beat such as local politics or traffic, and similarly a policeman would have a regular beat that consisted of a certain section of town, say, between 40th and 52nd Streets in midtown. Release notes contributors cover beats such as the Anaconda installer, the kernel, or virtualization.

We still have assigned beats for some areas, but these assignments are neither carved in stone, nor exclusive. The beat pages are open so the whole community can contribute.

There are all sorts of different ways to tag content for the release notes, but the easiest way by far is to simply edit the affected beat page on the wiki. You can also use Bugzilla, a CVS commit keyword, or email. The Fedora release notes are chock full of content and — we think this isn’t really boasting or puffery — some of the finest community-produced documentation in all of Linux. Be a part of it!

The tail that wags the dog.

Somehow in the last few days, my Liferea program ate the OPML file that lists all the feeds it aggregates. I think I have a backup, but the disk is at my office. So with some quick thinking, some useful little Fedora utilities, and a modicum of organizational sense, I was able to reconstruct everything. (I even made a few slight improvements to suit the reading habits I’ve developed.)

To do this, I used xmlstarlet to pull out the value of the feedSource element from each of the active feeds in my Liferea cache — inexplicably left behind in the swathe of destruction — and write them to a file. Then I installed Dogtail, and proceeded to fight tooth and nail with GNOME AT (assistive technologies), which for some odd reasons hangs my GNOME session when I log in. (If anyone has a tip on that part, please let me know — AT is required for Dogtail.) If I killed the at-spi-registry process my session could proceed fairly normally. Yeah, it’s a mystery to me.

I used Dogtail to record myself adding a feed, and then I edited the resulting Python script to automate adding all the feeds in my results file from above. Then I could simply set up folders, and edit the OPML file by hand to organize the feeds. I had to breeze over the feeds to make sure I hadn’t missed anything really important in the last few days, but all in all, time well spent.

Not approved for general audiences.

Eleya and I watched the fantastic documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated last night, a scathing indictment of the corrupt and ultimately inscrutable MPAA component that is responsible for providing audience-appropriate ratings in the “voluntary” US system. I don’t want to rehash how that works here, since there are plenty of places you can read about it — much more enjoyable to rent this film and see how one independent filmmaker uncovers who’s really rating our movies, and on what basis.

There are loads of independent filmmakers interviewed as part of the documentary, and their comments are occasionally funny and incisive. My wife and I thought the clever title animations really set the tone for the rest of the film and we chuckled out loud often. The film’s final revelations had us both wide-eyed and laughing at both the director’s chutzpah and that of the MPAA.

Highly recommended!

A new frontier?

This seems like an opportune time to point out that free and open source software is a great way to escape persecution at the behest of megalomaniacal corporations from another country.

Status report.

Taking a hint from Seth, I thought I should talk about things I worked on this weekend:

• New self-documenting example tutorial, including templates that a new writer can simply copy to start their own document
• Upgrades to the Documentation Guide, which we are going to continue slicing and dicing over the next few days in tandem
• Learned more about the release engineering process from Jesse’s talk and associated conversations
• Board business, including taking the brunt of Jeremy’s merciless abuse (ouch)

I also got some great ideas from Luke Macken for ways we could make notifications work better, including allowing the user to jot a quick one-off response to a channel without having to focus the IRC app and page through channels to input; and a way to capture notifications into Tomboy. We also agreed that Tomboy needs to be ported to Python so we can keep the wonderfulness of the app but not need Mono in the stack. Now keep in mind almost none of this is within my extremely limited ninja powers, but you have to start somewhere, and a good idea beats most starts in my book.

Things I would like to do more of at the next FUDCon:

• Participation in packaging and other general release stuff
• F2f time with individuals whose work I admire, for learning purposes
• Moderation at FUDPub (heh)

Thanks to everyone who spent a few minutes with me planting cool ideas, the folks who showed up for my “Sexy Docs Tools” talk, the people who had a drink with me at the pub (yes, there were many of these), and everyone I managed to meet for the first time — y’all rock.