In Internet years, I’m dead.

Last night my wife noted — not ruefully, I was grateful to observe — that I’ve been working on Fedora for quite a while now. (“I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve been working, Bob.”) Sure enough, she was right. I found this old rag from a little over four years ago.

Amazing, how time flies.

This morning, for whatever reason, my brain is swimming in ideas about on how I should spend the coming year in Fedora, but it’s too soupy to write at this point. One thing I do know is we have a heavy influx of documentation volunteers right now, and we need to wrangle the extra elbow grease properly. Already we have several community members stepping up to do that job, and we hope to have new guides out in plenty of time for F9 release. I see one of my jobs this coming year as providing better direction as opposed to the more ground-focused work — however tempting that work may be.

Turkey in the brine, turkey in the pan.

Holiday cheer.

Happy Thanksgiving day to you and yours if you’re celebrating this US holiday. I just put our turkey in the oven after its leisurely and customary morning soak in brine. Eleya made a beautiful batch of casseroles, side dishes, and pies. Evie is going to help her make some buttermilk biscuits later this afternoon.

Fedora fun.

Last night I made a quick and dirty Emacs package that uses libXft for anti-aliased font support. I did this for personal use for FC6 and F7, and used my packages throughout both releases without problems. Nevertheless, I built them from a CVS capture of the unicode-xft-2 branch and they could therefore eat your spouse, children, or chihuahua.

Update: Fixed the URL above.

I also did some early trimming (in the Christmas sense) of our Docs toolchain’s help targets, to make it easier for our new CVS users and maintainers to find out how to do useful things. Having a make help ought to be a law! I also sent some additional string patches to the system-config-firewall maintainers via Bugzilla.

Music madness.

Over the past week or so, I got a hold of some pre-production roughs for Laura’s new tunes on which our guitarist has been putting the finishing touches. They sound great and have me really excited, especially since we may be recording a new album starting in March. I believe she’ll have one or two of the demos up on her MySpace page soon.

I also got to see old friend and production mastermind Kevin at his studio the weekend before last, when I sat in on recalls for Leah’s “Volume 2″ EP, the follow up to our previous CD. It was fun catching up with Leah too, since she’s up in Ithaca now working on her PhD at Cornell — we all had a great sushi dinner together as we took a break from the labor of critical listening. You wouldn’t think sitting around with your ears open could be so exhausting, but it’s quite a lot of mental work to be concentrating across a wide spectrum of instrumentation at once. I imagine this is why good conductors are so highly sought after, and why high school band teachers aren’t getting paid enough.

Family fiesta.

Last weekend we had a 60th birthday party for my mother, and struck emotional gold (Ha ha, made you cry!) by giving her a big, framed blow-up of a portrait we had made of all eleven of her grandchildren together. I missed the first part of the party because of work, but managed to get there in time to wolf down some awesome BBQ and watch the gift opening. A good time was had by all!

DVD roundup.

Disturbingly pedestrian pickings this time through. I promise I’ll find something foreign, obscure, and snobby for the next round.

• Transformers: Beautiful cinematography, awesome CGI, but little else to recommend this vapid, emotionless, cardboard wreck of a movie.
• Live Free or Die Hard: Like all the sequels, a lesser film compared to the first in the franchise, but some exceptional action and stunt work — once it gets into gear — and a small part played by Kevin Smith make this a worthy viewing. I was surprised not to see what’s-his-name pull out any Apple gear, though.
• Ratatouille: Enough can’t be said about it, and it holds up to multiple viewings, which is good given the fact that the kids watch it over and over.
• Sopranos, S6 part 2: Finally seeing how everything winds up. Yes, the show may not be what it was in its heyday, but watching acting this good, we’re still captivated.
• Shrek the Third: The jokes and the conceit are starting to wear thin, but the kids will be able to take away a clearer moral, that the courage to do good is what defines heroes, than they could from the meandering, muddled script of the second entry in the series.

All right, enough rambling for one post, but I hadn’t dumped core in over a week, so now I can start thinking about other things instead. Happy Turkey Day!

Where’s my towel?

Richard, this bug was filed quite a while ago. I really wanted to just reply on your blog, but you don’t allow “anonymous” comments.

I don’t use LJ, so I’m not familiar with how they handle comment spam. Is there a capability like the Akismet plugin I use for WordPress? I don’t see more than one or two spam comments every couple of months, and they’re always held in a moderation queue for me rather than posted straightaway.

Who needs a vacation?

I’m so there.

Awoooooooo!

Yes, today is Fedora 8 (“Werewolf”) release day! I’m going to grab some coffee and then get ready to do a couple last minute web publishing tasks for the Web-based Release Notes and Installation Guide. Bugs against the Release Notes would be fine; we’ll be putting out an update in roughly a month, give or take a few days. The Installation Guide schedule is somewhat more fluid.

Congratulations to everyone who worked on all the good stuff, not just in Fedora but in the various upstream projects, of course. I can’t wait to transition a couple last remaining workstations to Fedora 8 once the Gold release happens today.

The delightful dozen.

Twelve years ago today, I married my best friend, and she’s still the one around whom my world revolves. Baby, I love ya!

On the roster for this evening: kids to bed, Daddy out to pick up sushi from the best Japanese place in town, yum.

Confirmed, Houston.

Jon, not only does Cory Doctorow write that well, but you ought to hear him speak, too.

The size of the pie or the size of the lie?

Chris, I was struck by the fact that federal spending went up by a factor of 20, while general inflation rose by only a factor of about 6.4.* Social Security and Medicare spending went up by a factor of close to 50!

Defense spending went up by a factor of about 10, and keeping in mind that this spending includes war funding, that seems like a relatively stable number. If that war is ever to conclude — wait, stop laughing — given its record thus far, under this administration you would probably still not see those expenditures shrink.

Anyone who thinks that business as usual doesn’t doom the US to a financial collapse ought to have his head examined. Maybe we should move to Norway, where at least they’re up front about their socialism, yet generally thrifty at least as far as government spending goes.

Presentation yen.

How to make a bad presentation, from the front lines of the RHGUD conference:

• Fill your slide deck with words. The more, the better. The smaller, the better. Avoid negative space.
• Use color schemes that make your words hard to read, or better yet, invisible in some places. Giving your audience members a puzzle to figure out keeps them from falling asleep.
• The bulk of your presentation should be reading your slides. Unfortunately, you have to assume the majority of your audience is illiterate, but they always come to appreciate it in time.
• Switching fonts from line to line really makes your design pop and your audience go, “Ooooh! Aaaah!”
• The more you quote from famous dead people, the fewer actual ideas you have to worry about. And people love quotes!
• Don’t practice your presentation, which makes it sound too rehearsed and polished. People don’t like slick talks that work too well — they get suspicious.

To be completely fair, these are problems that plague many, MANY presentations. I’ve been guilty of one or two in my time, for sure. But be warned, next time I’m bringing the soft pumpkins left over from Halloween.