Don’t throw in the towel quite yet.

I was rather harshly greeted over my morning coffee with the outright ugliness to which Maírín alluded and on which Smooge commented. However self-congratulatory or snobbish it might seem, I thought it was worth pointing out that I don’t think I’ve ever met a Fedora person personally who struck me as the kind of troglodyte one sees posting comments in the referenced LWN articles.

Now, it’s possible I’m misinformed because I haven’t polled anyone on their attitudes toward women in FOSS, but the abrasiveness factor of Fedorans I’ve met is pretty low. Nonetheless, it’s very easy to simply cry, “That’s not us; just those bad people over there!” and not accept that it’s the responsibility of every geek to participate — not just by posting “not me” blog entries, but by calling out the trolls when you see them.

I think that’s a bad sign, though, because if that makes Fedora special, then what does it say about FOSS in general that we’re (we == all of FOSS) so cavalier about excluding ~50% of the world’s population from getting involved in a blanket fashion? It’s a pretty sad statement that it’s so easy for anyone to decry bigotry based on race or nationality, and then in the next breath go on to indict the intelligence of women.

As my children get a little older, and my son (the younger child) joins his sister attending full-time school, I’ve more often daydreamed about how cool it would be for my wife — possessor of an incredible intellect — to get involved in FOSS. I rarely think about this dark side to the FOSS community, though — the one that fosters (or, at best, condones) outright hostility and rudeness in the guise of intellectual (ha!) honesty, as an ego crutch, or just as a way for one to constantly and ostentatiously demonstrate one’s intelligence. Is it really worth her time to wade through that crap to get involved? Will this situation be any better when my daughter, now in the first grade, hits high school or college?

Every time someone doesn’t get involved because they wisely shy away from purposeless hostility, it’s a loss to our community. Oh yeah, remember that word people are always throwing around, community? Keep it in mind the next time you hear the conversation devolving into bigotry or pointless rudeness, and make a stand. Community means participation, and we can’t afford to insouciantly dismiss or denigrate it. If we’re doing a good job at exceeding the general FOSS population in that regard, let’s keep it up; where we’re lagging, let’s pinpoint the causes and fix them wherever possible.

Dropping the knowledge.

Bart and I had a conversation on IRC today where we wondered how we could get more training to new Fedora contributors. He brought up the idea of a Training SIG and then we discussed (and played around with) moodle, which is a complete Web-based courseware system. When combined with other available internet resources, this might be an interesting way to train new contributors for a subproject.

It’s probably not as useful for projects like packaging where the rules (and thus the backing training) can turn on a dime, but it’s great for basic skills platform wide. What we probably don’t want to do is duplicate the huge amount of UNIX/Linux courseware that’s out there, but it might be interesting to exchange content in moodle from the Docs Project. Finished guides could become the narrative basis for courseware. An interesting idea that I need to think about more in the coming days. I know Bart will be doing the same.

The nice thing for me personally is that this ties in a lot of my skill sets (teaching, Linux, and writing). There’s a lot on my plate right now with a release looming and docs to finish, but this could be a nice way to start the F9 cycle.

The blind leading the blind.

Whenever one is helping someone with a Linux problem, one cannot overstate the importance of checking the “easy” things first. What we think of as “easy” is very rarely so for the Linux beginner, and it’s also vital to never hold an oversight against him or her.

We had a LUG member who had for some time been asking some very intelligent questions about how to find a good Linux-compatible wireless adapter add-on for his laptop. While trying to help him with an unrelated issue, I happened to run /sbin/lspci and discovered he had a Broadcom 4318 card in the machine already, which he hadn’t known about! Obviously this was less than ideal but far from a disaster, and certainly had we bothered to ask the right questions off the bat, we could have saved him a significant amount of wifi-lessness.

Lesson learned: when helping others, don’t be afraid to be pedantic, as long as you are properly apologetic about it. The opposite fashion (and the greater geek tendency) is to assume knowledge that may not exist, so as not to improperly underestimate one’s audience. However, this tendency discounts the situational aspect in which someone is asking questions precisely because they are looking for that knowledge. Delivering it with authority and humility at the same time is a learned skill.

Picky, picky, picky.

Note to would-be blog stylists out there: Do not hard code font sizes in pixels. Especially tiny ones. Case in point:

Witness the discrepancy between the normal font size (in the dialog’s list box at top) and the blog post text at the bottom (12px according to the CSS, yikes!). Let me also point out that I’m NOT picking on the blog poster, who probably wasn’t even responsible for the style. I guess it will be clear from the aggregator whence it comes, so my smudging won’t matter for some of you readers. Suffice it to say, the poster in question rocks hard and this is no reflection on that.

For the last several years there has been a completely asinine gravitation on the part of designers for smaller and smaller fonts, as a large proportion of computer users becomes older. My eyesight’s pretty bad, but glasses take care of that for me. However, when you factor in a high resolution monitor such as this laptop’s 14.1″ SXGA+ (1400×1050) screen, things can get pretty ugly fast. And when these hard coded font sizes break my desktop app (like this Liferea RSS reader), that’s a really invasive problem.

Getting away from blogs for the moment: the funny things is, I find this a lot on commercial sites, including those that don’t cater exclusively to a young crowd. Let me give their designers (and more importantly, the designers’ managers) a tip: Older people have more money. Well OK, not always, but it’s not bad as a general guideline. Why on earth would you go out of your way to make it harder for people to get your message or buy your product?

O noez, I haz a rant. Time to calm down and drink my coffee.

Random assortment.

Sorry I don’t have time to look up links. Google is your friend; use it.

Fedora.

Got a release notes package put together, only to find out that I broke something stupid that I had originally done right and then subsequently “fixed,” in the way that you might fix a car by, say, hitting it hard with a sledgehammer. Thankfully Bill Nottingham pulled my posterior out of that particular conflagration. Now I need to handle some of the F8 IG draft bugs coming in.

Potatoism.

I’ve watched all this week’s episodes of Ken Burns’ latest doc, “The War,” and it’s not bad in terms of dramatic heft. Unfortunately it’s about a mile wide and six inches deep; I think any documentary trying to tell this particular story in only 14 hours is, by definition, doomed to that kind of coverage. Now I have a respite until the concluding episodes starting Sunday night.

Books.

I’ve done precious little reading this whole summer, although I did finally finish Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” last month. (I usually only get around to reading for 20-30 minutes at bedtime, putting the book aside when I start to nod off.) Right now I’m reading the first volume trade paperback collection of Alan Moore’s “Supreme,” which is an interesting homage to the history of superhero comics in his customary sly, nudge-nudge fashion. Eleya just finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go,” which I’d like to get to as soon as I finish “Supreme.” And if I get too uppity, the third volume of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle is still giving me the finger from the reading room bookshelf, cheeky bastard.

Hoist the red pens.

I’ve put a draft of the Fedora 8 Installation Guide up at my FedoraPeople pages. Please do not link to it, since it is a draft and might evaporate at any time. There is an easy link for bug-filing on my page as well.

And yes, the library came in handy again. Turns out the Virginiana research rooms in the basement have tables conveniently located near AC power, a good wifi signal, and a decided lack of foot traffic and any other distractions.

UPDATED: Oops, can’t believe I fudged the link. Fixed.

Oh yes, I’m ABSOLUTELY going to tase you, bro.

If you want to see the hopped-up, adrenalin-junkie, exploitation-cinema version of a whiny UF journalism student, check out Kurt Russell crying like a little girl at the end of Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino’s contribution to this year’s Grindhouse. Even with 20 or so minutes restored to a film that originally ran a very jaunty 90 minutes or so in the theaters, I wouldn’t say the new DVD adds much in the way of depth. But then again, the story doesn’t need it.

Despite the purposefully thin B-movie plot line, QT manages to pull off twice what a lot of directors can’t do with ten times the budget — making you care about a cast of characters. In this case, said cast is on their way to a deadly run-in with Russell’s Stuntman Mike and his killer Dodge. Laugh-out loud funny, shocking, and culminating in the best car chase since The French Connection. Very highly recommended except maybe for prudes.

For the folks who prefer a quieter setting.

This sounds lame, but it’s been almost two decades since I went to a library for something other than to check out books. Last night I went to our public library early, about an hour before our LUG meeting (which is hosted there). I fired up Rhythmbox, plugged in some earbuds, and started banging away on the keyboard to the strains of John Williams’ “Superman” soundtrack. Forty minutes later I had the beginnings of a new segment in the Fedora Installation Guide covering alternate installation methods for current Linux users, to answer some enhancement requests received over the last months.

I fear that I may need to try my long-suffering wife’s patience by retreating there on Saturday afternoon to see if this was a fluke. Alternately, I suppose I could try buying a small writing desk for the small guest quarters in our basement. The added juice of the library is that despite the foot traffic and the mounds of tempting reading materials, there is very little in the way of easy distraction, provided I plant myself at one of the very visible tables on the main floor.

Too much time on my hands?

Speaking of books, I worked on one since this past winter, and it was released just a few short weeks ago. Since both Max and Shashank outed me, I might as well mention it here — Apress’ volume Beginning Fedora: From Novice to Professional. I served as technical reviewer for the book, and I even got my own little “about me” page right after the authors, which I thought was mighty nice. Shashank was great to work with, and I hope his book does well.

The only downside to working on the book was that all the writing for Apress was done in Microsoft Word. I experimented a bit with using the authored content in Fedora’s OpenOffice.org, and had pretty much no problems with the files, but didn’t pester the publishers about it since they were, in fact, paying me for the hassle. On the other hand, it made me much happier to get back to DocBook, where I didn’t have to waste time working around Word’s psychotic pagination.

Release the hounds. Er, notes.

Over the weekend I pulled the wiki beats, did conversions to XML, and sent out strings to our fearless translators for the Fedora 8 Release Notes. We had some very worthwhile contributions from folks (thank you Messrs. Keating, Overholt, Petersen, and Sundaram) that have gone out for translation for test3.

We don’t expect everything to be translated by then, but certainly you should see many languages finished for the final spins. Anything that doesn’t make it into our last push will be included in a Web and package update later.

Anglocentricity not acceptable.

The Release Notes beats have a great many holes — too many for comfort at this point, as we need to ship them to the L10N project for translation work pronto. A too-high number of our beat writers appear to have disappeared from view, and that leaves the rest of us Docs Project folks up a bit of a creek.

In short, we need your help! We can’t rely on simply updating the wiki at the last minute for Release Notes, since many users around the world depend on our huge assortment of translated languages courtesy of the L10N folks.

Docs Project volunteers like me have to take the wiki pages, convert them to DocBook, and then ship the translatable strings to L10N for translation. A veritable army of volunteer translators then make them ready in as many languages as possible. For F7, that was a dozen. We’d love to top it in F8 but that won’t happen unless the community fills in the raw materials, and fast.

We do a day-and-date Web drop of updated release notes to cover any omissions or late-breaking changes, but the more translations of release notes we can include in the GA release, the better. To wit, the following beats need love:

• Installer
• Kernel (some work done already, thanks Sam Folk-Williams!)
• Java
• Multimedia (codeina? other changes?)

Open ‘er up.

Question for LiveJournal users, especially those on Planet Fedora — why can’t I use my OpenID to write a comment on your blogs?

Today’s kudos go to…

Till Maas, not only for some useful Makefile hacking (demonstrating the “Just Do It” FOSS principle), but also for his help filing some Docs Project bugs that badly need stomping. Good work Till!