Do I need to do the “Jerry Maguire” thing?

Earlier this week I did an interview with Sean Michael Kerner, of InternetNews.com, on my background with Fedora and the coming release of Fedora 9. As is often the case, not everything can get included in every interview, but if you think there are some really important things you have yet to hear about in any of the previous interviews here, here, or here, as always I’m all ears.

One of the things I’ve tried to consistently point out in interviews lately is the way that Fedora exposes everything it does. All our infrastructure, our website code, our build systems, our feature tracking, our statistics gathering, EVERYTHING — is developed in the open and anyone can use it at any time. These projects all provide a great basis for reaching out to other open source communities — so we can develop interest in innovations together. We continue to encourage Linux communities to participate in metrics efforts such as Smolt, maps, and usage statistics, for example.

If you’re interested in pointing out Fedora features or better messaging about Fedora in general, we’d like you to participate in the Fedora Marketing subproject, which is deep into figuring out how to promote the usage and support of Fedora worldwide.

We want to hear even more about how Fedora is enabling everyone from desktop users to artists to developers to do what they like, with the innovations that you always find in each release. We want to empower our ambassadors and community leaders to talk about and show off the amazing work being done by Fedora contributors, in the open, and in concert with upstream communities. And as always, we further the mission of open source by BEING open source!

Fedora: The future, first!

How the mighty have fallen, Two.

I am Frields, Attender of Meetings: Look upon my schedule, ye mighty, and despair!

The Great White North.

I was very pleased and excited to be able to give a Board “stamp of approval” over the weekend to the new Fedora EMEA group. It’s a collection of very dedicated and energetic Fedora Ambassadors working in concert in Europe to promote Fedora and expand our presence there. Max Spevack will be acting as a liaison to this group as part of his Community Architecture team duties.

The word “duties” makes it sound like it’s a lot of work to be saddled with, but I happen to know that Max is really excited about the opportunity, and he’s going to do a phenomenal job helping Fedora EMEA and the other contributors in the region realize their potential as a community.

After putting Eleya on a plane — or rather, sending her off to the plane — on Sunday following our house-hunting trip, I showed up, bags in hand, at spot’s house, where I’m staying for most of the week until I head back home Thursday night. This morning spot’s wife graciously drove me to the Keatings’ house, from which I walked with Jesse to catch the bus to Red Hat’s Westford office. (A relative heat wave in Boston today, with a 25 F morning and a high of 46 F.)

Once I found (and successfully operated) the coffee machine, I holed up and worked in a more or less spare cube. Its supposed owner is apparently very committed to either portability or an ultra-Spartan decor, since the cube contained a total flair consisting of a torn piece of paper, an old multisync monitor, and two small UPS units.

I caught up (mostly) with email and IRC logs for the portion of the day I didn’t spend on the phone or in meetings, but I also was able to spend some good quality time with my new manager this evening. Dinner with spot and his wife followed — sushi, yum! Then I retired like a hermit to finish some emails started before I left the office. Now it’s time to crash.

Untethered.

So I had a host of things I wanted to blog about, but I’ve run out of time for the night. My wife and I are traveling up to New England tomorrow to house hunt through the weekend, so I’ll likely not be very visible or reachable (except briefly one or two nights) until Monday morning.

Until then, whatever you do, DO NOT feed my ego by reading this. More than once.

Quick kudos.

Our Fedora Infrastructure Project folks have been called out as a shining example of Puppet usage. Go read the interview with James Turnbull over at the On Ruby blog for more information about Puppet and why it rocks. Our Infrastructure team is naturally community based, and works together to keep humming our many online assets like buildsystems, web sites, databases, wiki, SCMs, and hosted projects. (I probably missed a bunch of them, but doesn’t it just make you proud?)

You don’t have to wait for a special day, hug your Fedora sysadmin today!

No rest for the wicked, #17.

Yesterday I eschewed my normal practice of waking up at high noon to be bathed and fed peeled grapes by adoring odalisques, and rose instead at the coral-tinged onset of dawn to hit the road once again in service to the Linux community. Not as a speaker today, mind, but to ferry Asterisk author extraordinaire and Fedora contributor Jared Smith to his oratory engagement at a Red Hat-hosted NoVaLUG TechSession.

Enough of the purple prose. Jared did a great job on his presentation, and I’m kind of jazzed to get an Asterisk setup on my laptop that I can tinker with. It’s really fun to see the true spirit of open source and I got to meet Shawn Wells, a Federal solutions architect who works with an old friend of mine from my previous life. We had a good time at lunch discussing our experiences as recent Red Hat immigrants, the excellent merits of the CentOS community enterprise distribution, the future of Red Hat High, and the overall rocking-ness of freeIPA, which should land in Fedora 9.

Today I actually managed to get some real sleep and need to make up for all the household things I didn’t get done yesterday. I’m going to take a break from email and IRC for a few hours and see what I can knock out.

Making ends meet.

I’m going to start this post with a plug, but it’s worthy, I swear.

Since some good friends of mine are watching our kids next weekend while my wife and I escape travel up to Massachusetts and New Hampshire to house hunt, I thought it’s only fair to plug a bit for them. Read the rest of this entry »

Friends, Romans, countrymen.

Here’s a couple recent tidbits of great tidings for the Fedora community:

Jeffrey Tadlock and Fabian Affolter, both Fedora Ambassadors, developed a superb one-sheet showing growth in the Ambassadors program. They’ve also put together a page on the wiki to do future tracking of these metrics. It’s amazing to see how fast the community can react and make things happen. It seems like the conversation about metrics in Ambassador-land had just begun and already we have some actual statistics to show. Superb!

Also, last night on IRC, the Fedora Documentation Project had a great meeting with some folks from the Red Hat Documentation team. They were introducing their new publican package, which is a soup-to-nuts DocBook creation system that has been used in-house for a couple of years. One unique feature of publican is its ability to integrate in the distribution without the need for tinkering with CVS repositories, since it’s simply an RPM package like any other, with a dead-simple create_book command, for instance.

A package has been approved and is in Fedora’s development “Rawhide” repository, and hopefully you’ll see it in Fedora 8′s repositories soon as well. The Docs team is currently running it through some tests to see what will be required to make a transition to using it for our CVS-stored documents. This sort of teamwork is what open source development is all about; thanks to Jeff Fearn and the other Red Hat Documentation team members who made this happen.

FUDCon Survey

After FUDCon F9, we set up a survey to collect information on why people did or didn’t attend, and what made them decide the way they did. Unfortunately, the idea to do this came up after the conference had closed, and there was very little time to get the survey out there before people’s impressions of the event faded.

The results are available here, but we have the ability to get different breakdowns of the data if any community member has a special interest. Send your requests to the fedora-advisory-board list and we’ll add them to the roster.

Note that we can’t change any of the questions, or for that matter “fix” the answers. I’m not naming any names, Mr. Kucinich.

_{See how this pointless political name-dropping cancels out my previous reference to a Republican presidential candidate? That just smacks of inclusiveness, doesn’t it? And nutmeg.}

I thought I told you never to call me here.

Currently I’m working as a remote employee, until we get our real estate sorted out and move up to New England. It’s a very new experience for me, since I’ve always worked in an office ever since I graduated from college/university in 1991. Working as a remote employee, though, has its benefits:

• I can basically start work right after a shower, dressing, and some coffee.
• Lunch feels free, even if it really isn’t. At least it’s cheaper, and there are usually real plates and silverware. And sometimes cookies.
• It was very rare that people ever came into my space at the office and hugged me unexpectedly. And it was probably better that way.
• Two words: LAVA LAMP.

On the other hand, there are drawbacks, too:

• When the walls rumble and shake, it’s no longer artillery, it’s a four-year-old.
• Now I sit next to the laundry machines. In the basement. If they move me again, I’m going to burn down the building.
• John McCain, this is the THIRD TIME you’ve called me today. Stop, already.