After countless books, still something to say.

Christopher Negus has turned out yet another very useful book, Fedora Linux Toolbox, which concentrates on command line skills. I met Chris a couple FUDCons ago, in awe of his reputation as an authorial powerhouse. Turns out he’s also one heckuva guy and a real Friend of Fedora, even though we really work him hard with our six-month release cycle.

You can read my review over at Red Hat Magazine. In short: Highly recommended!

Another day, another disaster.

Dell’s MediaDirect killed my hard disk today, in the sense that “killed” means “overwrote a big swath of space including part of the LVM PV.” AGAIN.

I can definitely say at this point that it has something to do with booting a Live image off the optical drive. The last time this happened, I had booted off the Fedora 8 Desktop Live CD, and this time it was the Electronics Lab Live CD. (Note that I am decidedly NOT blaming the Live images in anyway; this seems like some sort of nefarious Dell BIOS issue.)

After shutting down the Live image properly, and restarting the system, I was greeted once again by my arch-nemesis, the Dell MediaDirect splash screen, at which point my stomach plummeted to somewhere around the second floor of my building. Just what I needed with two days left in the office!

Fortunately I’d recently moved all the mail I wanted to hold onto into my GMail folders via IMAP, so my email’s perfectly safe. Unfortunately I lost my growing “To Do” list. Ah well, at least there wasn’t much on there I don’t have elsewhere. Board Supermegawhipmeister John Poelstra will probably remind me of the rest, likely with the business end of a cat o’nine tails.

In good news, foremost rocks, and I found RTM.

And I rhyme “either” with “miser,” too.

Aside to aspell: When one opens up talks with a second party, it’s a dialogue. That is, in fact, a correct spelling in US English, and the abomination dialog is reserved for computery people who don’t have time for niceties like spelling, and typing two extra letters.

Community architects.

Note: Post was delayed to a ridiculous point by house painting, sorry if it’s stale.

Yesterday Max posted some details about how recent Red Hat personnel actions affect Fedora, undeniably for the better.

Because of the amazing work done over the past year by each and every Fedora community contributor, the creation of a Community Architecture team has become a reality. You’ll be hearing a lot more about this team’s progress in the next few weeks.

I’m grateful that, amid all this expert politicking and organizational redesign, Max has been more than generous with his time and advice. He’s sort of like a Fedora ex-President who still takes your phone calls while he’s taking swings out on the links. Except with Max, it’s table tennis. (I have yet to find out what happens when his temper gets the best of him in heated games, like McEnroe.)

This is a very telling part of Max’s email:

There is a lot of overlap in Fedora in terms of roles, responsibilities, etc. We are interested more than anything in simply GETTING STUFF DONE. Within Red Hat, the people who are paid to spend their days on Fedora are all catalysts and community builders. But while Fedora itself has a relatively loose organizational structure, Red Hat is a company, and people all have to be slotted somewhere.

The people who work 100% on Fedora are not the gatekeepers — we don’t want or need to be “authority figures” on the work that people are doing. It is about ACCOUNTABILITY rather than RESPONSIBILITY.

We don’t do everything ourselves, but we are accountable for making sure that certain things get done. The Fedora Way dictates that we do this by being transparent, open, and building communities around different tasks.

Fedora is all about stepping up to the plate, and doing what needs to be done. You will see a lot more of Greg, Jack, and Max’s new team building work over the next several months. I hope people will be interested in joining up with the other Marketing folks, to work on projects like the new Messaging Guide and upcoming FUDCon events.

Less tambourine, more applause.

As Max said, congratulations are in order. This announcement is GREAT for Fedora.

Besides his rapier-sharp wit, his keen eye for detail, his unmatched follow-through ability, his wicked sense of humor, his superb people skills, his stentorian speaking voice, and his Perl mastery, spot’s also got (from what I hear) a comfortable spare bedroom available for a few days next month when I’ll be in Westford.

Did I pass the audition?

_{Confidential to RIG: Please let me know what your brother says.}

Followed immediately by a rousing number from the choir.

As other people have noted, I started my Fedora life as a user of Red Hat Linux back in the day, starting with 4.1 (Vanderbilt?), and became a contributor as soon as I heard about the emergence of Fedora Core 1. And yes, as this implies, I missed a lot of the hubbub around the short-lived “Red Hat Linux Project.” Meh. When I found out there was a Fedora Documentation team, I was ecstatic — two of my favorite things in ONE PLACE — Linux and language fascism!

Did someone wave a magic wand over me and turn me into that magical beast we call a “contributor”? No, I simply looked for some way to get in contact with people who were doing things, fortunately found that way, and they helped me get started. There was nothing special about my joining the Fedora Project, except that I succeeded where we are allowing too many others today to fail. What was special was that I got a helping hand jumping through the initial hoops.

I want that experience for anyone and everyone who installs Fedora, only I don’t want it to be special, an exception to some unwritten rule; I want it to be routine, and as natural as taking someone’s hand.

I’ve talked a few times with some very smart Fedora peeps about the need for us to reach out to users to turn them into contributors. These potential contributors are the next generation of Fedora, they need help crossing these gaps, and that help needs to consist of more than pages full of instructions.

The first gap for a user is getting from “What’s that?” to “I think I’ll try it.” In a perfect world, that should be the hardest gap to cross. It reduces our biggest challenge to one of marketing and word of mouth. If a user downloads and tries Fedora, she’s already made a big commitment of time to us. If getting her to put in that initial time is the hardest part, then by the time she logs in, we’ve won the most difficult batle.

Unfortunately, though, it’s not a perfect world, and the next gap is too big. We need to reduce the size of that next gap, the one that happens between “I’ll try it” and “Now what?”

In trying to reduce it, we need to realize that often “Now what?” doesn’t occur to the user unless we proactively let them know there is, in fact, something further. We want users to see what — or rather, WHO is behind what they’re running on the computer. And that they, too, can be part of that community. But we can’t wait for users to find their way to us. WE have to make the effort!

What do I think such an effort would look like? Well, for starters, it would have a lot to do with My Fedora, a phenomenally cool new integration project led by the amazing and inimitable John Palmieri (J5) (whom I hope some of you got a chance to run into at FUDCon).

I imagine a user-facing piece of some sort that would launch on a user’s first login, helping them fulfill any requirements for joining, such as SSH and GPG key generation. This would tie together into the upcoming FAS2, include all the wee benefits we members enjoy (fedorapeople.org space, branded email, etc.), and most importantly do it as painlessly and effortlessly from the user’s point of view as possible. (And yes, of course there would be a way for skilled or disinterested users to dismiss the helping hand.)

If Fedora is to continue to prosper, to maintain its upward trajectory, it must have a thriving, vibrant community of contributors. The project and each of us who are part of it need to encourage other folks who reach out across that next gap. They should be able to have the same experience of fellowship and purpose that happens at an event like FUDCon, even if they can’t make it there in person.

So while you’re thinking about this idea — and, I hope, liking it — also ask yourself: When someone reached out a hand to me today, did I take it?

Like the Charleston, only more frantic.

It’s time for the release notes dance again — the time that comes but twice a year, give or take seven or eight times, when we ask community members, developers, and package maintainers to step up and inform the public about what you’re doing.

Fedora is all about innovation — and not just in the features, but in the way that we move information and keep the community informed. In Fedora, we don’t cobble things together in a back room and spring them on the world. Instead do all our development in the open where people can see, comment, participate — ANTICIPATE!

We’re not just building or integrating code, we’re building community. And that means showing people what we do, and how easy it is to get involved. Think your work sells itself? Think again. But you don’t have to do it alone — not in the FOSS world.

We have a space for release notes in every new feature page for upcoming Fedora 9 goodies. That space is for you ultrasuave developer types to tell everyone what’s great about your feature. Make us care! Make us brag! Make us drool!

The Docs team will take your writeup, edit and polish it to a high gloss, and make sure that the whole world is diggin’ on it with the Alpha release notes one-sheet. Eventually it will also make its way into the full-length Release Notes.

Let us help you show how you’re using Fedora as a platform to deliver The Future, First.

The real deal.

Today our realtor visited and we signed all the papers to start the process of listing the house. We are well underway with packing and making the house a little more bare, which for some odd reason is supposed to appeal to sellers. I remember clearly looking at homes over a decade ago (when we first bought this house) and feeling very put off by the sterility of many of the new homes, with their plastic-covered carpets and neutral-colored sameness. Nevertheless, our realtor made assurances that told me we’re odd buyers in that respect.

Tomorrow we have a painter coming who will be starting to paint all the long neglected areas in the house, which is most of them. Although the house is in great shape, and we keep it clean, we just never really got around to picking out colors or doing any of that other stuff — except in the kids’ rooms, which are colorful and fun, but not glaring, and will certainly appeal to many young families who look at the place.

I am so looking forward to those evening calls, though, asking us if we can vacate for a while so our realtor can show the house. But it’s all for the best, and now we can travel up to New Hampshire next month to do house hunting with a clear conscience. The current downer is that although we like our neighbors across the street, they are selling their house too, which could make this an interesting few weeks or months.

Apparently, I AM a fortunate son.

As Eleya was cleaning out the bookcase, she found an old “Voyager Tarot” set we bought about 15 years ago. She told me to pull a card and I got this (transcribed from the companion booklet):

X. FORTUNE

Woo-hoo!

The blackamoor bearing the “treasures of Dresden” symbolizes the law of prosperity. You prosper by knowing how to receive the wealth of opportunities that come to you from the cornucopia of the universe.

Yes, it does in fact say “blackamoor.” Hey, I didn’t write it.

Like a wheel, you convert these inputs to outputs. You are opportunistic and entrepreneurial. You are resourceful, able to turn a negative into a positive. You can spin ideas around to see a way.

To seize an opportunity, you must be courageous, a risk-taker like the matador. You need to be optimistic, symbolized by the gold crown.

Quitting the secure doldrums of government for a zippy new private sector job? Check. Moving the whole family 500 miles up the East Coast to a new house? Yeah baby. Throwing myself into a sink or swim situation, trying to deliver a compelling vision of the future and somehow get enough oars in the water paddling in the same general direction to get there? Bring it on.

Like Jupiter, you must think expansively and decide how you can bring available resources together to create synergy. As the dancer on the wheel of fortune, you must be agile, flexible, and alert, always ready to move.

OK, if I danced on the wheel of fortune, I would look more like the Star Wars kid. But otherwise, this is starting to sound pretty good to me…. And like Jupiter, I am jolly, round, and sometimes gassy, and it seems women with unusual names find me irresistible.

You are constantly recycling the wealth of the universe. By giving away what you have created, you allow new opportunities to come in. This turnover creates abundance for yourself and others. You are rewarded for your sharing on all levels of being.

That’s a pretty cool summation of open source and Fedora, don’t you think? Yeah, me too.

These are a few of my favorite things.

The stress of a house move is setting in. Or, to be more exact, the stress of contemplating a house move is setting in, since we may not be moving for a few months yet. That hasn’t stopped Eleya, the Crown Princess of Project Management, from lighting into the job, however.

Eleya’s already started tearing the bookshelves down one literary limb at a time, the packing tape roller buzzsawing through the quiet house. The walls are already denuded, a decade’s worth of photographic memories making way for the brushes of painters not yet hired.

I ran out for an afternoon errand or two, finding out that apparently there’s a very clear boundary dividing the world into two kinds of eyeglasses: one that looks good on me, and the other that can handle my particular prescription at some cost significantly below $800. To console myself, I stopped at the store and picked up the soundtrack to Once, a marvelous gem of a film we watched Thursday night. It’s touching but not melodramatic, sincere but not grating, and full of the joy of making music.

Apparently the savage heart was unsoothed, because I traveled on to (of all places) a shoe store, where I was overjoyed to find a pair of gunsmoke Merrell Orbit Moc slip-ons — the world’s most comfortable shoe — in my size! I settled for black when I bought a pair months ago, after my guitarist had recommended them, which meant we often went onstage with matching shoes. Thank goodness they’re not lime green.

Anyway, that really cured my blue mood; even coming home to the news that getting the house painted and touched up for showing was going to cost us somewhere around $7K didn’t phase me much. So it turns out we’re not hiring that guy anyway for other reasons, and hopefully the other bid will be significantly lower.

Now the lilt and growl of Glen Hansard fills the first floor, and I still can’t believe that some months from now, we’ll be somewhere in New Hampshire thinking about that Virginia house we used to own.