Drawing to a close.The blog’s been pretty quiet for the last week because I took some time to just relax, spend time with family and friends, and enjoy the company’s holiday shutdown period. This has been a very eventful year for me and my family, including my moving from the public to the private sector to take a job with Red Hat, many travels (including my first trip to Germany!), family events including death and birth, and helping my mom through some tough times recuperating from her back surgery, not to mention the financial and political tumult that affected everyone over the course of the year, two big releases for the Fedora Project, and all the work that went thereto. But all in all, 2008 has actually been quite a memorable year for me, and I’m looking forward to what 2009 will bring. Right off the bat, I’ll get to see old and new Fedora friends at our FUDCon in Boston in about a week or so. It will be a fantastic event and I’m very much looking forward to participating in it, after all the planning! There’s something very fulfilling about seeing people come together at these events to renew bonds, to create new and exciting features, and to further break down barriers to free software contribution. There’s no doubt in my mind that, now more than ever, Fedora is the epicenter of progress in FOSS, and that progress is powered by our entire community working together with our multitudinous upstream partners. Software freedom and community don’t come free of cost; they’re endeavors built on the hard work and tenacity of hundreds of thousands of FOSS contributors. The work of those contributors calls for gratitude and respect, and they continue to be my focus in Fedora. When I get together with contributors at FUDCon, it’s always a good reminder to me that words must be backed up by deeds. Pledges to community and freedom too easily ring hollow without the accompanying march of progress through contribution. I’m constantly heartened by the enthusiasm shown by our community members at these events for making real progress in FOSS, with constant dedication to the spirit of openness that free software provides and demands. I’ll do my best this year to meet that enthusiasm with my own, to respect your hard work with more of the same, and to help you keep creating and promoting “freedom, friends, features, first.” Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing as you ring in the New Year, I hope 2009 brings you and your loved ones success, fulfillment, and happiness. Now let’s break out the good bubbly! |
Like the throb of an anthill.This bug, it make me sad. |
Linux on film.This is a very cool news item, although I’m wondering how the result is ever to see air time without some money behind it. I’d love to see some of the creative minds in Fedora get involved — but I think the result should be distribution-agnostic if it’s to be worth anything. Hopefully other community leaders will agree with me. |
The tallies are in.Election results for the Fedora Project Board, the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, and the Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee are all announced this morning. Bill Nottingham and Matt Domsch have been elected to the two open seats on the Board. Josh Boyer, Dan Horák, Jarod Wilson, and Jon Stanley have been elected to the open seats on FESCo. Max Spevack, Joerg Simon, Francesco Ugolini, Thomas Canniot, Rodrigo Padula, David Nalley, and Susmit Shannigrahi have been elected to the open seats on FAMSCo. In particular, I think it’s wonderful that all the major regions of the world are represented in the election results for FAMSCo. Congratulations to all those elected, and thank you to all those who ran and voted. Special thanks also to Matt Domsch for his assistance in organizing the town hall candidate meetings, and Nigel Jones for setting up and running the election process. |
Soon a myth no more.The new work that Bastien Nocera is doing on fingerprint scanner support in Fedora is totally awesome. Now, a few months ago this wouldn’t have been that big an impact on me personally, but my laptop suddenly changed unexpectedly. Remember my suicidal Dell laptop? Well, the fine folks at Dell told me that it would be 1-3 weeks before I got a new one — but delivered a replacement in only 4 days. They had told me they would be building an exact duplicate of the unit that was originally ordered, which accounted for the delay. But instead, I got what amounted to an enormous upgrade (with one small exception).
The only downside was my Intel GMA 945 had become an nVidia GeForce 8400M GS. I guess I can live with it, but it’s a pity that now I can’t stand in front of an audience and do anything 3D related with 100% out of the box Fedora software. Everything on the laptop is working fine with Fedora 10 right now, of course. Thanks to all you kernel, X, webcam, and other hardware driver folks for that. It’s nice to be running an OS where I was literally up and working out of the box in 20 minutes, including all the latest security updates. I do wish the Dell folks had asked me before pulling the switcheroo on me, but honestly I know that the customer service people felt they were going above and beyond, despite what the rep on the phone told me in my initial call. So I don’t see this as a bad reflection on them. Makes me wish video hardware was more modular, but at least now I’ll get a chance to try Bastien’s new fingerprint work! |
On the other hand, my original purchase at least was in support of a vendor with a pretty good record of working with FOSS communities.
The season of giving is upon us.Pre-registration extended!First, I wanted to let everyone know that the hotel has extended the reservation period until December 26th for the special FUDCon rate, so we have also extended our pre-registration another week as well. Please sign up if you haven’t — FUDCon is free and open to anyone to attend. OLPC love.If you’ve been around the Fedora Project for any length of time at all, you know we have a very soft spot in our hearts for the One Laptop per Child project. Now, that stands to reason, since the OLPC XO uses Fedora as its operating system of choice to put learning tools in the hands of children everywhere. Heck, for those intrepid hackers out there, you can even get Fedora 10 for the OLPC XO. What? You don’t have an XO? Well get thee hence to Amazon and giveth one, getteth one! But beyond all that, like the folks behind OLPC, we believe that change requires action, and those actions speak louder than words. Our FUDCon events are all about action, where large groups of Fedora contributors, the people who are building tomorrow’s free software today, gather together to push the envelope and plan for the future. We’re very pleased that OLPC luminaries will be joining us for this FUDCon. We’ll have opportunities to figure out how Fedora’s infrastructure and processes can better serve communities like OLPC, and also how they can benefit from our community development model. And as if that strengthening of ties weren’t enough, OLPC has also agreed to fund our FUDPub event for Saturday night. FUDPub is a great way for everyone to unwind after cramming their heads full of knowledge and collaboration from the BarCamp event that day. So essentially, the lovely folks at OLPC will be covering dinner and one beverage for each pre-registrant who cares to attend the festivities at Flat Top Johnny’s from 6:00pm to 10:00pm. We’ll have some reserved pool tables for people to play shark, and it should be a pretty fun time. Thank you to the kind folks like Ed McNierney for making this happen. |
FUDCon update.FUDCon F11 is rolling mightily along, with a whole mess o’ new names up on the wiki this week. I also notice that many people are signing up for hackfests and BarCamp sessions, which is wonderful. This is always my favorite time in the preparation stages — when people really start to take stock of what they can discuss and hammer on at FUDCon, figure out what kinds of bold new plans we can make as a project and as a distribution, and start spreading the discussions out into the community for vigorous action. Every FUDCon, we in the Fedora Project try to extend invitations to people who we see making a difference in the community regularly, bringing them to where they can get face-to-face with their peers, friends, mentors, and pupils for the ultimate in high-bandwidth exchange. The Fedora budget pays for these folks to come in so that they can help drive innovation at FUDCon and throughout this development cycle toward Fedora 11, set to be released at the end of May 2009. What we ask in return is that they use that opportunity to take charge of a hackfest, and/or run a BarCamp session, to spread knowledge and skills out into the community where they can take root and grow. Also, these folks are asked to post updates to their weblogs and other information channels to help keep the part of our community not in attendance informed about what’s going on at FUDCon. < p>In Fedora, as in the tradition of other great centers of hackerdom like NASA, we tend to go for low-cost, high-impact methods for effective community and communication. Thanks to the work of Chris Tyler, Clint ‘herlo’ Savage, and other volunteers, we are aiming to have live audio and video feeds and recordings from FUDCon. I have to admit I’m not quite sure how this is all going to come together logistically, but I have a lot of faith in the ingenuity and capabilities of the folks putting the AV together. I’m more of a dabbler, so I’ll likely just stay out of the way so as not to trip over anything fragile. Hats off to you guys for making this happen! As a final note, my thoughts are with my homeys in the Westford, MA area who have been suffering through power outages, frozen pipes, no heat, no light, and (ZOMG!) no Intartubez since last week’s ice storm. Apparently, additional inclement weather is headed their way at the latter part of this week. Hang in there guys! |
We’ll change all that’s gone before.Well, the accolades for our infrastructure team continue to pour in. On the heels of last month’s report of their superb uptime stats, I just found that November brought an all-time high for monthly visitors to fedoraproject.org. This is part of our general statistics page, where we openly and transparently show metrics that are of interest to our community. Great work, team! I think that Ian should remember who holds the purse strings for his travel to FUDCon. It sure would be a shame to leave a man behind cleaning the kitchen slops at the hotel! Ha! Ha! KIDDING! |
Eking it out.Setting up this FUDCon has been an exercise in hair-pulling. With only about $15K to work with, it’s also been an exercise in corner-cutting. I have the option of blowing away the “refreshments” part of the FUDCon budget — the money that would pay for drinks and snacks during the hackfest days — to bring a couple more contributors to the event. This wouldn’t affect FUDPub, which is still on for Saturday night, Jan. 10th, and which is where we’ll cover dinner and possibly a beverage for each pre-registrant. My personal feeling is that people are probably not showing up for the snacks. It’s helpful, though, to have them at the site because then people can easily stay and work even the need for water, caffeine, or a nosh strikes. If someone is hacking at the Tang Center, how easy is it to find sodas and snacks when s/he gets the urge? Because if the answer to that is “relatively easy,” I’d really like to fund a couple more people to come for the event. |
