Like quality, only with people.Note: This is a bastardization (and cleanup) of a post I made yesterday to the fedora-marketing-list. I think it’s actually very applicable to EVERYONE in the Fedora project, especially if you deal with users. It is *absolutely vital* that all of us be on the same page for how to deal with journalists and other media people. Presenting a consistent, positive, and thoughtful message about Fedora is our Number One priority on this team and on this list. |
Localization prevails.Congratulations to the first Fedora L10n Steering Committee (FLSCo). It’s nice to see so many hard-working translators, whose names I’ve seen many times in various source code commits email, stepping up to lead Fedora’s Localization efforts. These folks really do prove our reputation of meritocracy — they put their money where their mouths are every day. Thanks to them and the whole l10n community for helping make Fedora useful for people around the world. |
Bumping into the world around you.Definition of a good host: Someone who sits on the couch with you at night when you’re visiting town, and lets you be antisocial and work. This week I’m down in Raleigh at Red Hat HQ working on the marketing, messages, and mayhem (mama mia, I love alliteration) for the coming of Sulphur. Coming into a Red Hat office is its own special brand of excitement. If coming to work for Red Hat is like jumping a fast-moving train, then coming to work at a Red Hat office is like catching that streaking caboose, and then working your way up through each car juggling angry, wet cats and bumping into passengers. These chance collisions, though, lead to great conversations, which lead to fast-flying ideas, which lead to great “a-ha!” moments, and often a workable plan of action. I spent some time with Kara, who’s helping Fedora leverage Red Hat’s excellent press channels, to set up a timeline for press work that needs to be completed inside Red Hat. We’ll also be talking on the fedora-marketing-list about how we can work in harmony with that timeline, refining our message of innovation and community involvement. We also worked on bubbling up some entries from my recent call for stories. The big winner seems to be recent Planet Fedora immigrant Tim Niemueller and his team of soccer-playing robots, the Allemaniacs. They’re a real success story by any measure, not just because of their two back-to-back world championships in the RoboCup competition, but also because they used their team’s needs as a way to get involved and give back to open source in Fedora. Not only are the robots powered by Fedora, but the humans are Fedora-equipped as well, and they have contributed back to the wellspring by adding and maintaining packages for the benefit of robots (and humans) everywhere. Keep an eye out for more about Tim and the Allemaniacs in the future! In other news about robots, everyone apparently has a Roomba except for me. My wife seems to be TCB in that area, and I think everyone should give her a little sympathy this week, because she cleaned the whole house top to bottom in my absence (while overseeing every other operational concern in the household) to get ready for a real estate brokers’ open house which they canceled at the LAST. POSSIBLE. MINUTE. Yet another clue that there is no bigger scam in the country than the idea that you need a real estate agent. |
Road dogging, No. 13.I’m heading out on the road, this time down to Red Hat HQ in Raleigh. I’ll be working with our marketing and community architecture folks on some Fedora 9 release related stuff. It’s all the same to you, dear invisible friends, because my disembodied voice will be seen in all the usual places on the intarwebz. My everlasting thanks go out to Alex, who is putting me up again for the week so I can save our Fedora budget money for more important things. (Inflatable beds can be REALLY comfortable. I’m not kidding.) Spent this weekend doing a little work on the F9 Installation Guide, and playing some music, the latter of which I haven’t had time to do much of over the last month. I briefly considered bringing a guitar with me to Raleigh but it would probably be either (1) a waste of luggage space, or (2) too distracting. Time to hit the highway! |
The best laid plans, No. 41.If you camp on the various announcement lists, you’ve undoubtedly seen this post. Yes, unfortunately we had to slip the release just a bit — two weeks, to be exact, putting our new target at May 13th. This is for a few very good reasons, among which are having a worthwhile Preview Release period. That’s where we really, really need the whole community to help test as much of the release as humanly (or otherwise, we don’t discriminate) possible. To tide you over until the 13th, we do get to proudly present said Preview Release! The Preview Release is so close to Fedora 9 that almost anyone should be able to at least try it. And since we have both installation sets and Live images available, you can help whether or not you want to install the Preview Release to your system’s hard disk. (I’m running it on my main workhorse with no ill effects, and greatly enjoying it!) Thanks to everyone who’s putting in hard work fixing bugs and making Fedora 9 the best release ever. And apologies to all of you who have to clean up the drool for a couple more weeks. |
You must be a felon, ’cause you done stole my heart.(I was going to send this as email, but when the title occurred to me, how could I resist posting?) In reference to Dan Williams’ latest post on the latest NetworkManager improvements: I just wanted to let you know this blog post is superb, and you are MY NEW HERO. Not just because of all the new NetworkManager editing hotness, even thought that’s smoking hot. Not just because of the at-boot goodness of having your networks up earlier, even though that rocks. Not just because of the better VPN support, even though that’s killer too. No, you are my new hero because you called out the crackrock-in-a-candy-wrapper that subtly undermines the whole FOSS spirit. It has never been a better time for Fedora developers — developers EVERYWHERE in FOSS — to talk about “Upstream!” The whole point of FOSS, one of the defining features of the global community of developers, is to share code for the purposes of making it better, more elegant, more secure, and more functional. Brittle downstream crack is damaging to the spirit of true FOSS community. Not only does that strategy result in easily broken code, and unreasonably consume resources for maintenance, but it also limits the peer review and criticism on which FOSS thrives. Doing that in service of non-free bits is just the height of ludicrous. Fedora prides itself on the “Upstream!” mantra because that’s how true community building happens. I spoke to a group of students and FOSS enthusiasts at the University of Maryland LUG last night. Being able to tell stories like this, and talk about what differentiates real community development from nasty used bandaids, is one of the best parts of my job. Thanks for making it that much easier for me. Oh, and thanks for making NM so freakin’ great. |
Road dogging, No. 12.Today I’m hitting the road, first heading to Red Hat’s Tysons Corner office — basically as a jumping-off point for my next destination tonight, the UMLUG (University of Maryland Linux Users Group) in College Park, MD. It should be an interesting talk — I’ve deliberately not gone overboard creating slides because LUGs are exactly the kind of place where you want to do a lot of Q&A, letting people lead the conversation naturally in the directions in which they’re interested. I’ve been doing a bit of smoke-testing here of F9, using the last Rawhide tree from 13 April, and it’s doing pretty well from where I sit. The last few weeks before a release are always full of a lot of concern as intrepid developers-turned-exterminators try to stomp out pernicious bugs, but there’s lots to be delighted about with Fedora 9. Here are some tidbits deserving praise, some of which may not have been trumpeted as much as of yet:
That last item is so important to people spreading Fedora — anyone can create a respin at any time with just a couple of simple commands, incorporating all the latest updates. Doing this on CDs can be a drag because then you have to worry a lot more about whether you’re going to fit everything into the magical 700 MB (or 650 MB, or what have you) limitation. Leave all those worries behind — with pungi and livecd-tools packages, you just edit a kickstart file and create away! In any case, I’d better clear out of here before I’m late for a conference call. |
If’n you ain’t the granddaddy of all liars.While setting up for a new MUA, Mutt, I managed to bork part of my configuration, so most of the mail I sent today never got to its intended |
Deep Thoughts, #361.In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. This jumped out at me today and made me think about Fedora, its contributors, and a conversation I had with Karsten earlier today about a specific spin idea. Stifling ideas… the exact opposite of Fedora. I don’t ever want to be in that business. Can you apply the thought above to an idea you’ve packed away, thinking it wasn’t good enough, only to it come back at you from a different, external direction? Makes you wish you had just come out with it. I’ve heard people express this same regret, and I like the fact that in Fedora we can agree to try often and fail often. You don’t get anywhere innovative by always doing what you know will succeed. |
