Flying the coop.

My UTOSC Day 3 post is yet to come (later tonight or tomorrow). But I wanted to note in the meantime that this is a holiday weekend in the USA, so some folks might be a little harder to reach than usual. I’ll be flying back to Virginia tomorrow, but I’m going to be mostly out for the Monday holiday, and also out on Tuesday as well. Feel free to email me — I’ll probably check in at some point during that time.

The thing I’m excited about? Our master bathroom at home is finally back to fully functional, and I will, at long last, shower in my own bathroom, rather than using the one in the basement, for the first time in two and a half months. Why yes, I am a PARTY ANIMAL, how could you tell?

UTOSC, Day 2.

Friday was another fantastic day at the conference. Started the day with a true homestyle breakfast at Cracker Barrel with my friend Jared Smith and his friend Trevor. Then it was off to the conference to show off more Fedora and OLPC.

I taught a session in the morning on “Fedora Remix,” showing off tools like pungi and the livecd-tools. Things went really well except for a brief glitch caused by my not having removed some prior work by-products before running pungi. The audience was forgiving and really appreciated the fact that Fedora makes absolutely everything we do 100% re-consumable, reusable and redistributable.

Later in the day I had a chance to talk to a few very interesting people. This gave me the idea for a new spin in Fedora that might prove to be very popular in the long run for Fedora 11. I need to talk to a few more people to see how possible the end state is, and how we can best accomplish it. But it could end up a highly compelling offering.

Of course I got to work the booth all day again, and didn’t get to see any sessions, but the payment for that was awesome, including a lot of people turned on to Fedora and Sugar, a few hopefully as developers. I also scored some sweet T-shirts including the Banshee shirt that is by far the best of show in my opinion.

I did get to see two great keynotes, one by the author of “Schlock Mercenary,” Howard Tayler. His quotes on making grizzly bear soup were priceless and memorable for people who are looking to have someone tell them how to succeed in the open source community. The other was by Novell community manager Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, and really shows how he and the OpenSuSE community are quickly learning from the iteration of other communities like Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and so on.

In the evening we went to Tucanos, a Brazilian restaurant (read: “Death By Meat”) that had superb caipirinhas. (The garlic sirloin tips were also fantastic, as well as the grilled pineapple.) The UTOS folks once again outdid themselves and everyone had a wonderful time. By the time I got back to the hotel I was dead tired, but I stayed up long enough to update Clint’s XO machine to the latest stable build 711. This ended up fixing some of the sharing problems we had at the booth that day, which would help since Saturday was set up at UTOSC as Family Day.

More on that later!

UTOSC, Day 0-1.

Despite his incredibly busy schedule organizing stuff, Clint “herlo” Savage picked me up at the airport on Wednesday night, and summarily whisked us off to the Fiddler’s Elbow. We proceeded to tuck into a fantastic barbecue dinner with the rest of the UTOSC staff and presenters, complete with sweet corn and cobbler (more blueberries than in the Michael DeHaan version, to be honest).

I had time to hang out with a few of the Novell guys including one-man army of community management Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier. We discussed among other things our desire to get a mini-summit for RPM hackers together in the Czech Republic at one or both of Fedora’s and Novell’s developer events next month.

UPDATE: Since he just let the cat out of the bag at his keynote, we also discussed his “Dairy Council” idea for jointly marketing Linux. Just as Zima marketed their product by presenting it as an alternative to beer, Linux might also be marketed as an alternative to Windows, but only if we abandon for purposes of the campaign the idea of driving people to any one distro over another. Certainly an idea worth discussing and thinking about. Fedora Marketing — discuss!

After a too-brief and fitful sleep, I gave up and got up early to work on some email and brush up my keynote a bit (as noted previously, the Spevack method works!). The affable John Mizell came and picked me up at the hotel and we headed over to Salt Lake Community College to set up the booth. All our kit had arrived as promised and setup was a cinch. We had a couple XOs courtesy of OLPC, Red Hat, and Clint, which as always attracted every passing soul. They’re irresistible!

I spent the day telling people about Fedora — our mission, our philosophy, and some of the projects we have been and will be involved with. OLPC definitely fits into this picture, as you can see, which is why we love showing off these units at our booths.

I got some time to talk to some other Novell folks like Stephen Shaw, who’s working not just on Mono but also on some great new accessibility features. I have to admit — sorry Stephen, please forgive me — that fully half of what he said went completely over my head, but I know it had something to do with moving messages away from Bonobo and toward D-Bus. (Well, not everyone can be an ace developer.) Stephen’s wife Emily was one of the organizers for the UTOSC show, and just seems to have an immense talent for making everything seem easy.

We had a couple cancellations from would-be booth workers, so I ended up spending most of my time working there, but it was a great way to talk to a fantastic crowd of passers-by about how open source works and how they can get involved. That also was the focus of my keynote on Thursday night, in which I tried to springboard off UTOSC’s “How To” theme and talk about “How to Change the World.”

The conference has had over 500 registrants, which is more than double its attendance last year. The Utah Open Source Foundation and the various volunteer and user groups in this area have done a simply tremendous job on all the planning, organization, and execution. I, for one, won’t be surprised when UTOSC quickly becomes one of the defining FOSS community shows for the entire USA.

I’ll try to catch up tonight on Day 2.

Baby, if I could.

NOTE: Posting this a little late since I didn’t get to my hotel until crash time.

As I write this, I’m about 40,000 feet over Ian Weller’s house in Kansas, on my way to Utah for UTOSC 2008. My keynote is more or less ready — knowing me, less, but I very much enjoy extemporizing and thinking on my feet for speeches. Note this is not at all saying my audience enjoys it, but I really do try my best. But if it’s a subject I’m very passionate about like free software, I can work up a pretty good head of steam.

The theme for UTOSC 2008 is “How To,” so I figured I’d try to include some facet of that theme in part of my keynote. I decided to go for something subtle and low-key, and ended up with “How to Change the World.” Ahem. Well, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, and all that. I remember Max telling me many times that he would routinely rewrite his whole keynote right before giving it, so I fully expect UTOSC mastermind and Fedora Ambassador extraordinaire Clint Savage to inform me at dinner tonight that the audience will be expecting many more monkeys (drum-a-drum-drum**).

While the first leg of my flight through Cincinnati was excruciatingly cramped, the second was an improvement — aisle seat in a 3-seat exit row, with the middle unoccupied. If only it hadn’t had those stupid solid partitions between the seats. I ended up seated right across the aisle from a very pleasant young man, who was a BYU CS undergrad, and who asked me right after we got situated, “So I saw your shirt — do you work for Red Hat?” Wardrobe FTW (“Spacewalk Hacker” T-shirt to be exact).

I’ve been away from email since about 11:00 this morning and am jonesing a little, to tell the truth. I’m sure that once the airlines figure out a wireless scheme for air travel, they’ll charge an arm and a leg for it. Ah well, time to go spend some time on one of the git-based projects I have sitting around on my disk waiting for spare time and love.

_{** Parental reading list joke; ignore if you are fairly confident you have no children.}

Things I learned this weekend.

Ruthless email triage frees the mind and the schedule, not to mention exorcises violent demons of the spirit.

Replacing the hard drive in an iPod with flash media is the best way to test nerves of steel, next to the “Operation” game. Or actual surgery for that matter, only not as likely to require malpractice insurance.

The only thing worse than having gastrointestinal flu is having a dog with gastrointestinal flu.

Many journalists can’t tell the difference between “affects” and “effects.” Since language is supposed to be their stock in trade, that should tell you something about the state of journalism.

The importance of 3 ounce containers cannot be overstated.

Neither can having a manager who makes a good foxhole buddy.

The silver lining.

The obvious.

Obviously many of you know now how I spent my last week, since it wasn’t blogging. It’s been said many times already, and can’t be overstated, that our Fedora Infrastructure team has proved their mettle by basically razing and rebuilding the skeleton of our project over the course of a week or so. I also want to take a moment to recognize the folks in Red Hat’s IT Security with whom we’re collaborating as well — exceptional folks whose best work naturally results in absolutely no notice whatsoever. Thanks guys, you rock.

Something cool.

This looks fascinating and exciting to me — collaboration across tools and systems using D-Bus and telepathy. It would be nice to see some sort of XML “exploder/imploder” that would allow OpenOffice.org documents to benefit from this approach too. (I’ve often wondered why, with the open formats we champion, that hasn’t been done yet.) But hey, even text files would be a big step forward. Good luck with this Alban, it looks like a superb idea and long overdue.

Traveling.

Wednesday I’ll be traveling to Utah for UTOSC, to which I’m really looking forward. I’m sure my family feels like I’ve basically been away as it is, but some travel is probably just what I need to get back on the larger track of the Fedora Project and out of the crisis response mode.

Wellness.

In the midst of everything else, I found out my mom has to have some neck surgery next week — on Wednesday of course, while I’ll be on a plane to Utah — and our dog apparently is suffering from a gastrointestinal flu. So that should give you an idea of why I basically took the weekend off from the computer other than this, and some email triage. We soldier on!

To the victor go the spoils.

Now it’s finally official: a Fedora Scholarship. A while back, we started talking about ways to identify and cultivate young contributors to Fedora. We are starting to see more and more young people taking the opportunity to be full participants in the open source world. As part of our mission to develop a culture of contribution in FOSS and not just consumption, we want to identify and reward those individuals.

One way we can do this is through the incentive of scholarship funds. This year we started the Fedora Scholarship to lead that effort. The inaugural winner, Ricky Zhou, is someone that many people may know from his exceptional work on our websites and infrastructure. Ricky came seemingly out of nowhere, overnight, and impressed everyone on the team immediately with his energy, enthusiasm, positive attitude, skill, and teamwork. I can’t think of a better person to exemplify the Fedora ideals.

Ricky is starting at Carnegie Mellon University this week, and we’re very proud of him. He starts as a freshman with a great track record of FOSS contribution already under his belt, and we know he’s going to delight and impress his peers and professors alike. Best of luck, Ricky!

The curse of four eyes.

Last week my daughter, who’s seven, went for a regular eye check up. As a result, yesterday we went to order her first pair of prescription eyeglasses. Two, actually — we assume she’ll lose one, since she doesn’t have to wear them for reading.

The optometrist told my wife, “Oh, her eyes look just like Paul’s.” And all I could say to Evie when I heard that was, “Oh gosh, honey, I’m so sorry.”

No more Gloomy Gus.

So the week’s had you down? Yeah, me too. Just so you know how much I love you, though, I think you should sit down for a couple minutes and watch this. You’ll feel way better.

FUDCon F11 in Boston.

I’m starting to make some plans for the next Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon), to celebrate our 10th release and to jump-start development for Fedora 11. I have a couple self-imposed priorities to observe in putting together the schedule.

The conference needs to happen soon after the release of Fedora 10. That’s currently scheduled for October 28, 2008. However, we often slip for a week or two for technical considerations, which might mean November 4 or 11. A major US holiday falls on November 27, and therefore quite a number of people may be unavailable the weekend before (21-23) or after (28-30). Therefore an early December conference makes more sense.

Scheduling on December 5-7 seems like the best weekend overall. The following weekend, December 12-14, is also a possibility, but that may be getting too close to the December holidays like Christmas. Why not January? Take a look at the draft Fedora 11 schedule for a hint.

I’ve started a wiki page for all the logistics. It currently says December 5-7, but note that that date can change if we want it to. We really do need to have it nailed down in a couple of weeks though, so the logistical efforts can truly ramp up. Please leave a comment in the signup area (the last field of the table) if you have strong feelings about the scheduling either way.

We will probably not be doing this at Boston University due to the timing. The BU folks have been nothing but superb in helping us with past FUDCons, but they simply can’t help this time around. So we have several options to consider:

• Hold the FUDCon events in hotel meeting space. Network connectivity could vary widely and eliminate a lot of otherwise decent hotels. Likely very convenient for evening food and libations. Not too expensive (maybe free) if we fill 50+ rooms at a hotel a few miles outside the city.
• Hold the FUDCon events at a different university. Good network connectivity, probably. Requires a relationship with the school. Timing might be untenable due to end-of-term exams. Likely free, but might cause higher hotel costs to be close to the school, since most are in the city.
• Hold FUDCon at the Red Hat offices in Westford. Excellent network connectivity, assuming the IT staff makes a segregated, unsecured wireless available (as in RDU back in January). Free. Might be some logistical issues on Friday, such as facility security and access, fitting a large number of hackers into open conference rooms, and not causing a nightmare for a business operation in progress.

Why are we doing this in the Boston area again? The fact that the Red Hat Summit 2008 was in Boston obscures this a bit. The plans I made with Community Architecture back in February were to alternate our locations. The summer North American FUDCon would be held wherever the Summit happens, and the winter North American FUDCon would happen in the Boston area. In both cases, it’s to minimize costs — so we can spend more during the rest of the year on other events in NA and around the globe.