Last push toward the finish line.

All in all, the last two weeks have been tremendously busy for me, and I’m looking forward to getting a little free time next weekend…

Travel

Business meeting in Seattle all last week. Terrible travel day on the way out, with flight delay after flight delay. I hate traveling from Washington-Dulles airport, which is why I tried Richmond International to begin with. (I’m seriously thinking of moving my ticket to the Red Hat Summit to Reagan National.)

Fedora

Release notes have been really wearying this time for some reason — I think it’s the toolchain work needed for this cycle, along with two pushes of content pretty close together. The last push of POT/PO files for the Fedora release notes went out tonight, so our translators can hopefully have at it. I suppose at the Summit I’ll end up touching base with some of the Fedora crew and find out where I can improve my processes and the Docs toolchain.

Music

Several rehearsals and a gig scheduled over the next week have me feeling a bit stretched. What with work and my travel last week, I’m behind on charting some songs for tomorrow morning’s rehearsal. Hopefully the long drive will give me time to bone up on what I’ve missed by listening to the CD.

Kids

Had a great time with the kids today. While the wife was in DC at a fiber arts and crafts exhibition at one of the many museums, I took the kids to the somewhat less culturally charged — but more accessible to the under-25 set — elementary school carnival. Many moons were bounced upon, many slides were conquered, many choo-choo trains were ridden, and many sugary snacks were consumed. Afterward, we returned home and many children were tranked with high-potency elephant darts and anchored by heavy objects. Seriously though, it was a lot of fun and the kids were full of joy. A nice way to spend the first day back from a week away!

Unless by “good” you mean “mercilessly coldhearted.”

So, iwlwifi is being not berry berry good to me on my ThinkPad T60p. Add to this the yuckiness that kills the kernel if I tax the wired e1000 adapter, and voila! A recipe for me having to avoid running Rawhide for testing.

I don’t have a surplus of machines around, just the workstation my wife and daughter use, the laptop I use, and an old machine running my public services that needs to stay happy at all costs. So if it doesn’t work on my laptop, I don’t get to use it. I’m a bit sad right now, because I was really hoping to take Rawhide on the road with me next week on a business trip. If neither my wired nor my wireless networking work, I’m pretty much back to FC6 for now.

‘Fessing up and throwing down.

Last night I was supposed to be at rehearsal with Leah. Did you catch the word “supposed”? That’s good, it’s important, since I never actually showed up. Yes, for the first time in — maybe thirteen years? — I missed a band rehearsal, this time for no other reason than I had moved my appointments to my Google Calendar, and completely forgot to turn on the notifications.

All day long yesterday, I had this weird feeling, like there was a meeting I was supposed to be at, but couldn’t place it. And since I’m usually at such meetings with coworkers, and no one went anywhere, I realized eventually that wasn’t it. Then I got home and felt like I was missing a Fedora deadline, maybe. Also negative.

Note that at no time did I actually check my shiny new Google Calendar. Which makes it roughly 100% less effective when you don’t turn on any of the automatic geegaws.

Sat down to dinner with the family, and partway through, my cell phone rings. Sure enough, it’s Leah, and immediately I knew what I’d forgotten. Far too late, of course, to drive the 60+ miles to rehearsal. So that’s my sob story, smack my wrists and call me a bum.

On the plus side, today I took off from work, dropped the kids off at Grandma’s, and took Eleya to see Grindhouse. And it was fantastic, in a really awful, lurid way. Or maybe it was lurid in a really fantastic way, I’m not sure. In any case, it totally measured up to my expectations, and then some. I was really floored by how Tarantino’s feature, “Death Proof,” really succeeded on the level that matters for trhillers — caring about the protagonists — and not just once, but twice. (I can’t explain more without giving away details unnecessarily; just see it, as long as you have a strong constitution as far as movies go.)

Gearing up for the ‘sploit-o-rama.

Film

Eleya and I have been wanting to go see Grindhouse, but our weekends are generally getting pretty booked up at this point. So I figured, what better way could there be to get some quality time than to call up da Moms and get her to sit the kids? After all, my daughter is off school for spring break this week.

But it turns out that Mom’s only day free is tomorrow, despite my telling her repeatedly that the kids were really hoping for later in the week, so they can, I don’t know, keep up with their Pilates classes and lunch at Elaine’s or something. Right, Mom TOTALLY not buying it. But it is a Tarantino/Rodriguez double feature… Hm.

One call to the boss later, and I’m free! On a TUESDAY! To go TO THE MOVIES!!! Oh yeah, bring on the popcorn, baby. And I can’t be too uppity about the scheduling — after all, my mom raised me on a steady diet of B- to Z-grade movies when I was a kid.

Does anyone else remember the 4:00 movie they used to show on Channel 7 when we (meaning those of us over 35 but not yet officially Over the Hill) were kids? Creepy, crappy stuff like the Karen Black Trilogy of Terror and The Devil’s Rain (other than Star Trek, my favorite role from the pre-corpulent William Shatner).

My hope is that this movie will remind me of those Channel 7 exploitation films, only, you know, amped up on a case of Rockstar.

Music

Mugshot makes it a lot harder to hide that I’ve been enjoying an advance copy of the new NIN record, which hits stores in about a week. It’s the best since 1994′s The Downward Spiral, in my opinion. I can’t wait to see more of the art project that’s springing up around this.

Back in the swing.

As usually happens when we near some deadline for releasables, I’ve been wielding a heavy axe in Docs CVS. I get very antsy about the state of our build tools for some reason, and start making what I hope are improvements. Made one fairly glaring mistake about dealing with XML general entities — which are useful creatures distinct from character entities — and I’m contemplating a more interesting solution in which we deal with entities on a locale-by-locale basis.

Locales where the language declines nouns or other parts of speech served by entities we would otherwise use would be served up their parsed counterparts. Entities like &FED; would be served up as “Fedora” so translators could translate the content like any other. In Slavic languages, for example, this can be rather important. In other languages such as Greek or Chinese, the word is left alone and the translator transcribes &FED; literally.

For words like “Fedora,” use of entities may sound like overkill, but for writers it is an absolute necessity. If I am writing a document all about a program like ethereal, I would usually make a general entity &ETH; which corresponded to the name “ethereal”, and then set a further entity &ETHAPP; which corresponded to “<application>&ETH;</application>”, and use them throughout my document.

Now when ethereal becomes wireshark six months later, I can simply change the entity content. And if my document is translated into 15 additional languages, none of the translators who transcribe entities directly need to lift a finger; I simply rebuild and republish.

Brr, getting colder…

The Fedora Documentation Project will be more or less “freezing” the release notes on the wiki tomorrow at 2359 UTC (7:59 pm US/Eastern) to bring in release notes content for translation for Fedora 7 test4. If you have changes to report that are relevant for Fedora 7 — and we suspect there is a LOT that you’ve not yet reported — please get it onto the wiki before then!

If you are looking for other ways to contribute content, you’ll find many ways to do that here.