Der erste Tag war ausgezeichnet.Why are all these posts named the same thing? Because “ausgezeichnet” is my favorite word in German. That and “gemuetlichkeit.” After an extremely late night with the Ambassadors, Max and I get up with far too little sleep. Some strong coffee in the hotel breakfast room helps quite a bit though, and we make our way back to the Messe, this time to the correct station with a much shorter walk. Gerold and the crew have made us excellent little magnetic name tags we can attach to our brand-new polos without poking holes in them. The booth looks great, and blue-shirted Ambassadors are soon milling about helping visitors by answering questions, giving technical advice, and just being generally friendly and welcoming. In the morning we run into Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier from the OpenSuSE project, who tells us some interesting things about Zypper, another packaging product they’re using with PackageKit. (It turns out there’s a libzypp backend for PackageKit!) He also tells us that OpenSuSE is investing some energy into Smolt, the hardware inventory system that we use in Fedora. I hope to find him later today or tomorrow to talk about some joint work on a MediaWiki based i18n/l10n system that will interface with Transifex — should be an easy sell since OpenSuSE also uses MediaWiki. Max and I sit in a couple talks (on OLPC and OpenMoko) before repairing to the developer center, a large room where people can sit and hack or (in our cases) answer a lot of email and talk with some of the Fedora folks here about plans for the summer and upcoming events. Yaakov is here and, having just started his internship this week, is very eagerly planning for how to spend the next few months. I can’t help but think how lucky we are to have brilliant and energetic people like him everywhere in Fedora — I’ll leave it to him to talk more about what he’s up to as the summer goes on. I have a couple phone calls with some Red Hat folks during the afternoon, and unfortunately that, my mountain of email, and my photo-tastic blog from yesterday keep me from getting around to all the booths. Fortunately, there are three whole days left for me to make rounds. I do get to stop by the Zope Corporation where, along with a beer, I score a good conversation with Christian, a developer there, about our experiences with Zope and Plone and how they see the future of web app deployments. That evening Gerold has made reservations for everyone at a charming restaurant underneath the train station at Savignyplatz. I follow his lead and order the rumpsteak with chanterelle sauce, which is quite good. After dinner my jet lag and the less than satisfactory sleep from the night before is finally catching up with me. Max, Thomas Woerner, and I bid everyone goodnight and trudge back to the hotel to crash. More to come on LinuxTag Day 2, later! |
F9 goes gold.No, we’re not re-releasing. But sometime in the last few hours, Fedora 9 shipped its 100,000th BitTorrent download! That’s in addition to over 235,000 direct downloads we’ve seen through the web proxy logs. Over a third of a million digital copies of Fedora 9 media out in a little over two weeks, and I think it’s safe to say that many of those copies are themselves being copied and making their way into the hands of additional future contributors. |
Another step forward.Quite some time ago, most of the people who run all the giant Fedora website steampunk machinery decided that it was high time we migrate to a wiki that better suits our needs. After some requirement gathering and research, MediaWiki became the clear winner for us for a number of reasons. And a couple of days ago, thanks to the exceptional efforts of people like Ian Weller, Ricky Zhou, Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams, Mike McGrath, and a host of representatives from the various subprojects of Fedora, our new wiki went live! I’ve just had time to visit a few pages in the past couple of days, around other LinuxTag activities. Of course there are a small number of rough edges, but they are pretty much all expected thanks to all the testing these folks did, and none we can’t take care of easily. All these folks worked hard on learning how the application works, getting the wiki to look like the rest of our sites, hacking on scripts to migrate data from our old moin wiki, testing repeatedly and tirelessly, massaging content to get it ready for the move, keeping the whole community informed, and then watching over the actual conversion process. The results to me are a huge success, and I think everyone is looking forward to having a very scalable and responsive site where we can reorganize our community assistance and documentation efforts. In support of the new wiki, Karsten Wade and the Documentation team will be stepping up efforts to “garden” the wiki, pruning out dead material, editing for clarity, and acting as a resource for all the teams and community groups using the wiki. In fact, there will probably be additional documentation produced faster by refocusing efforts on this new engine and inviting other Fedora members to join in and help. And the best part is, now that you can create a new Fedora account so much more easily, AND because that account now integrates seamlessly with the MediaWiki instance, people can join Fedora and immediately start contributing knowledge and help to their fellow project members. Another barrier lowered substantially through teamwork and community. Bravo to everyone who helped! Aside to the concerned.The recent casualty of the “220V demon” was just a crummy old $5 power strip. It was very late, and I was not thinking clearly when I popped an adapter on it and tried plugging it in. There wasn’t much magic smoke to escape, just enough though. Whee! |
Die Rundfahrt war ausgezeichnet.My Tuesday in Berlin. This is the long blog post that precedes the next really long blog post about my Wednesday in Berlin. Setting the dogs a-barkin’.After a fairly decent night’s sleep, I got up at 0700 to search out some Fruehstueck (breakfast). There was a cozy shop just across the street from the hotel with some truly wonderful coffee and a chocolate croissant that hit the spot just right. I found the stand for the Berlino Rundgang bus and managed to buy the 20-euro “all day” ticket without speaking English. However, the young lady at the stand had me figured out after she gave me directions on where to meet the bus. “Would you rather I speak English?” she asked with a smile. I replied, “Let me see how well I did. Cross the street, and catch any bus at the stop where there’s one standing now?” |
Der Flug war ausgezeichnet.These posts may be a little behind realtime… this covers my Sunday/Monday journey. Leg the First.I manage not to forget anything vitally important, like my passport, or my wallet, or how to negotiate Sunday afternoon on the I-495 Beltway. (I don’t travel around up in “true” Northern Virginia as much as I used to.) I arrive in plenty of time at the airport, and board an enormous Boeing 777, a plane so big that an actual flight seems unlikely. Maybe we’ll just taxi onto a pontoon boat and have that count as a delay. But no, the jet does in fact take to the sky, and during the next eight hours, I manage to catch about two or three hours of sleep divided up into numerous catnaps. These are unfortunately punctuated by short but ferocious bouts of severe turbulence that cause me to wonder whether the plane’s incredible size does anything to offset the turbulence, in which case I’m glad we’re on this one, or whether it exacerbates the problem, in which case I’m glad I’ve dutifully memorized the location of the nearest exit. During one of these episodes several of the passengers shout involuntarily, and everyone around them tries to look stoic. I usually cope by pretending I’m back on one of my parent’s powerboats, at nine or ten years old, holed up in the front cabin as we make our way back across choppy seas on the Potomac. It’s a lot less unpleasant than thinking about the seven miles of empty air beneath the bucking jumbo jet. All histrionics aside, we finally arrive at Frankfurt safe and sound. The plane can’t be accommodated at an attached gate, so all the passengers disembark onto the tarmac and a bus takes us to the arrivals area. A very kind information desk attendant tells me that I can go through passport control upstairs, since my bags are (presumably) on their way to Berlin without my needing to clear customs. This makes me wish I had booked the earlier connecting flight, despite repeated warnings from friends that if I left less than a two-hour layover I was asking for trouble. Nevertheless, better safe than sorry I suppose — maybe it’s a slow time at Frankfurt on Monday at lunchtime. I have plenty of time before my flight, so after about a half-hour of negotiating repeated passport control areas and the Escherian route to the A gates, I find a DeutscheBank ATM and finally get my hands on some real currency. I also find a stand selling warm focaccia sandwiches, which seems like a good way to reset my internal clock. Recent studies are indicating that resetting your eating cycle during intercontinental travel is as important as resynchronizing your sleep cycle. I stop at a convenience market and pick up the cheapest thing I can find — a Kit-Kat bar — so I’ll have some change in my pocket for the Express X9 bus when I get to TXL this afternoon. All in all, I’m feeling pretty competent for someone who’s never been to the European continent before. I’ve been to the UK a few times, but the difficulty factor is considerably lower there, what with no language barrier. To be fair though, every single person I’ve come in contact with here has spoken passable (to excellent) English, and most of the important signage is bilingual. I therefore settle on a constant low-level undercurrent of guilt in every personal exchange, feeling I should be doing a better job in the native language. For now my attempts are limited to pronouncing proper names correctly (I hope), and concluding with a bashful “danke.” Writing this narrative keeps me awake while I wait for the plane to Berlin, but my body is still fighting with the idea that I’ve been up all night and it’s 8:30 in the morning. I’m going to close up now and wait for boarding, and maybe a small nap. Leg the Second.This part of the journey was relatively simple, and after landing in Berlin, the only mistake I make is in exiting the airport early. I think I’m following the sings to “Zoll” (customs) but instead, I’m exiting to the ticket counters. Then it’s a short walk to the actual customs desk where I have to basically wait a half hour for my bag to go unclaimed and be ported over to this desk for storage. Thankfully, everyone is extremely polite and understanding, which tells me I’m not the first person to whom this has happened. I finally reach the hotel and, although I really want to collapse at the end of what’s basically been a 24-hour day with practically no sleep, I need food more. So I requisition some help from a nice young desk clerk — who I swear, honey, is not a lovely young blonde named Heidi. Well, at least the “Heidi” part; at least, I didn’t ask her name. She directs me to the Savignyplatz just up the Knesebeckkstrasse from the hotel, and there I find an enormous grab bag of eateries of every conceivable national origin. Leg the Third, unfortunately not a hollow one.I settle on the Zwoelf Apostel (12 Apostles), where I have not only some wonderful thick bread with a superb cream of spinach soup with pine nuts, followed by their petto di pollo, chicken breast with a side of spicy ratatouille. Once a couple Berliner pilsners are figured in to round it out, I’m lucky to be able to roll back to the hotel, but this is all part of my plan for a sound sleep! Tuesday I have a master plan to accomplish some sightseeing before I have to meet Max and Jeroen to head over to the fairgrounds. Coming tomorrow-ish… Tuesday, In Which Our Intrepid Hero Gets His Dogs a-Barkin’ Along With a Metric Boatload of Digital Photography. |
“Look kids, it’s the ring strabe.”The last time I used my German language skills regularly was about twenty years ago in college. I was good enough at it to read “die unendliche Geschichte” in the original German in high school, and only had to take a single semester in college to fulfill my graduation requirements. Since then, though, I haven’t used it at all, and like any unused muscle group, my German has atrophied to the point of uselessness. I can manage easy things like “Es tut mir leid,” but that’s about all I remember. So when I get on a plane for Germany a few hours from now, it will be with enormous excitement, tempered with a bit of regret that I couldn’t do better than be Just Another Dumb American Abroad. So for my German friends I will soon be meeting: Bitte entschuldigen Sie meine Scheitern zu sprechen gut Deutsch zu Ihnen, während ich in Ihrem Land. (And yes, I had to resort to Google for part of that. *sigh*) |
Lightning strikes FUDCon?Luke Macken, Fedora hacker extraordinaire, made an interesting suggestion to me the other day: How about having lightning talks like at PyCon 2008? I think it’s a great idea. We could hold a number of talks in five-minute slots for some length of time on Thursday night, after the hackfest is over — say, starting at 6:00 p.m. The topics can be, well, really anything, although it would be awesome if most of the talks were Linux or Fedora related. I’ve updated the FUDCon wiki page to add the talks to the Thursday proceedings. I’d encourage people to sign up if they way, but it’s not required that you be on the list to give a talk. But being on the list is a great way to advertise your talk to FUDCon and Summit attendees! By the way, we have sent out our sponsorship information to people whom we can fund for travel and attendance. Everyone else who’s attending should be making their hotel reservations using the reservation link on the wiki page. Remember to indicate whether or not you need to, or plan to, room with someone — or can offer space for someone in any way. |
Where frugality happens.With gas prices at record highs (and no end in sight), there is quite a lot to be said for being a remote employee working out of a home office. At my previous job, I commuted back and forth about 27 miles each way daily — very short for a Washington, DC area commute. that’s roughly two gallons of gas a day, or ten a week, which currently would easily top $150 a month. It’s hard to enjoy the savings though, because currently my wife and I are being ultra-careful about expenditures as we prepare for the things we haven’t prepared for, as it were, with moving (eventually) to New England. Speaking of which, big thanks are due to my management at Red Hat, and John Poelstra, for helping me make the most of my remote status in the meantime. This job has made me — a non-sysadmin guy, so unfamiliar with that particular landscape — a big believer in telecommuting. |
Never could have got this far.I have other blog entries I need to make, but I feel driven to tell the Fedora community a Nice Thing About Max. Max sent me home from Raleigh a few weeks ago with a bunch of toys for my kids. (Long story, but let’s just say no one should ever try to compete with Max’s Star Wars action figure collection.) It was a week or so before my kids had actually been well-behaved for enough consecutive time to actually get their gifts. Once they got them, of course I tasked Evie with writing a thank-you note to Max for the gifts. A week later, an envelope showed up in our mailbox from Max at Red Hat, addressed to my kids. Inside were a couple of Fedora stickers and a note for Evie and Ethan, telling them how he always loved Star Wars when he was a kid, too. He also thanked them for letting me come visit him in Raleigh to help him with all the work there was to do. So there you go, another tale of one of FOSS’s truly class acts. Bravo Mr. Spevack! |
What can I say, it’s early.In response to this meme: 1 firefox window 7 firefox tabs 1 evolution window 2 evolution message compose windows 1 tomboy note 1 xchat-gnome window, 26 channels |
