Playing hooky, no. 20.

As some Fedora Project folks already know, this coming Monday is a US holiday, and it's often celebrated with outings or travel, so you might not see some of your fellow Fedorans around that day. (Also, Red Hat is closed for that holiday, and I imagine many of the Red Hat staff will take that day to rest, relax, and recharge.)

I actually have family plans through the weekend starting tomorrow, and I wanted to give the community a heads-up. I hope no matter where you are, holiday or not, you have a wonderful weekend and are enjoying the new release of Fedora. (Go download a copy and pass it on!)

Most hearty congratulations.

Sandro Mathys reports on his blog that he was selected as the 2010 RHCE of the Year for Europe. I'm not surprised to see another active Fedora contributor selected for this honor, like John Rose in 2009 for North America and Jeroen van Meeuwen for Europe and Michael Yingbull for Canada in 2008.

RHCEs take a challenging, practical test to ensure they have a high degree of capability and performance. If you want to do well on that test (or any other for that matter), you practice. RHCEs know as they practice their skills on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, they can develop new skills in emerging technologies on Fedora for use now and in the future. I suspect a lot of RHCEs use RHEL at work and Fedora on their desktop or at home in part for that reason. But more than just developing skills, the Fedora community allows anyone — not just an RHCE — to work with some of the brightest people in free and open source software, and contribute to what they use.

Our community Infrastructure team, for example, has quite a number of RHCE-certified people involved as you might expect. This team that puts exceptional IT service management principles to work every day, providing services for the Fedora community. They also develop frameworks and applications we use, and moreover, they provide them as 100% free and open source software. Anyone can not only use that software, but modify it for their own use and redistribute it as well. There are may other areas in Fedora in which we have RHCEs scattered throughout teams as well.

In each case of the previous RHCE winners from Fedora, someone who's discovered the value of Fedora has also stepped up to bring some knowledge and skill back into the community. Sandro, for instance, a long-time Fedora Ambassador, is heading up the team that will bring the Fedora Users and Developers Conference to Zurich this fall. I'm proud to add Sandro to this growing list of honored community members. Congratulations, sir!

Now with 25% more pontification.

Whoa, looks like opensource.com has posted a Q&A interview with yr. humble narrator. If you've got a few minutes free please check it out — and more importantly, look through the site to find truly and deeply insightful stories about and by other great thought leaders in open source areas. The fact that my woolgathering appears on a site with people like Jim Gilmore, Michael Tiemann, and Jim Whitehurst is a real honor.

Thanks to Jason Hibbets for the fabulous opportunity!

Lucky for everyone.

Today is release day for Fedora 13! Go grab a copy of the latest goodness at the download site. Remember that our Live images can be turned into discs or you can make a Live USB for even more hotness.

If you choose to use BitTorrent to download, please be kind and seed for others.

To all my friends, co-workers, associates, and peeps in the Fedora Project — THANK YOU for the marvelous job you've done on this release and everything that went into it. You're inspirational and have helped Fedora truly rock it.

For those of you looking for release notes, you can find them here at the new Publican-based Documentation site.

By the way, I know many of you readers are setting up release events or parties. Please feel free to blog about them and let us know how they go!

Bike tails, no. 1.

With both of the kids growing quickly, it was high time to get them bigger bikes. I broke a low-weight goal this past week, and although I'm still considerably overweight (that's putting it nicely) I now weigh less than I did four years ago. Perhaps in a euphoric fit, I decided to get myself a bike too.

I haven't had a bike since high school, when I used to use it to get to friends' houses, or the community pool, in the very large subdivision where I lived. It was a large community of a couple thousand lots over maybe a few dozen square miles, so biking to a friend's house might mean a 15-30 minute ride depending on where they lived, and how the roads and hills were laid out between point A and point B. As we got older and got our drivers licenses, bikes became passe and we would pick each other up to do things over a wider geographic area.

So 25 years later, here I was at the store considering getting back into the pedaling business. I didn't want to go drop $500 on a lark, though. First I wanted to find out whether I could still enjoy biking at all. I figured that in a year or two, if I really do enjoy biking, I should be able to look into a better bike at that point. I looked at road bikes and mountain bikes, and decided that given some of our uneven roads in this area, a mountain bike with a suspension would probably work better for me. Even though they're a bit heavier, I also felt — although this may be just psychological — that a mountain bike's sturdier frame and wheels would hold up better under my weight.

Ultimately I picked out a Schwinn S25. It's nowhere near the level of bikes some of my cyclist friends probably have, but thus far it seems pretty sturdy and fun to me. I took it out around the neighborhood yesterday with Evie, after checking that the shifters and brakes seemed fairly well adjusted. And it was a lot of fun returning to riding after 25 years away. For the first couple of minutes I was just the tiniest bit shaky on balance, but it all came back very quickly.

I bought a couple accessories to go with it, like a gel padded wrapper for the seat (which by itself looked hard enough to be a torture device for someone my size), a small accessory bag that anchors to the steering and top tubes, and some padded gloves. I also stupidly bought a bottle cage so I could carry some water with me, and it totally doesn't fit the big frame of this bike. OK, I got a little carried away there, so shoot me. I definitely need to figure that out, because having hydration with me will be necessary if I'm going to ride any appreciable distance, or take my bike out to some of hte battlefield trails in the area.

The only problem I found was that although the gel seat wrapper does fine at preventing pressure and numbness on those (ahem) sensitive areas, it didn't do a darn thing for my "sitting bones." And that sucks, because I really want to go riding again today, but I'm still sore from yesterday, and I feel like if I go riding again today, I won't be able to sit down to work tomorrow.

I'm hoping some of my biking friends can recommend more comfortable seating, but unfortunately a lot of them are skinny guys so they may not be that helpful. There's a bike shop in town, although I'm sure it's geared more toward serious cyclists. Is it worth the potential embarrassment for me to visit them and ask about making my posterior a little more comfortable?

Elections are open.

During the next week, Fedora contributors will vote for open seats on both the Fedora Project Board and the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo). The polls are now open for both elections through the Fedora Election System. (Remember to login or you won't see the voting link for an election.) The elections will close on Wednesday, 2010-05-26 at UTC 23:59.

If you aren't familiar with how the system works, check out the Fedora Elections Guide. I also encourage Fedora community members to review the logs from our Town Hall meetings, where the candidates talked openly about their goals and viewpoints. Get informed, and then vote appropriately.

I thanked our election volunteers previously, but I also wanted to say a quick thanks to Mike McGrath and Mark Chappell on the Fedora Infrastructure team, who both ensured that the elections were set up properly and ready for business. Mark is actually working on application upgrades and better usability,which I hope we'll be able to use in the next regular election cycle. It's great to see a contributor jumping in to make a difference and improve the systems we use regularly.

Enough of my yakkin', whaddya say? Let's boogie. Go vote!

Quick links: (Board election)  (FESCo election)

Protected: WIP

Schedule change.

As seen on the official announcement list, the final release of Fedora 13 will be postponed by a one-week slip. As the announcement notes, the blocker bug list is not empty, which means that according to our F13 final release criteria, we slip the release.

It's always disappointing when we don't hit our original target, but these criteria allow us to focus on objective markers to measure our readiness. It was a pleasure sitting in that readiness meeting tonight with some very smart people, because it was focused on the worthy goal of dispassionately measuring our status based on the ruler we've set for ourselves.

I suspect as we go we'll need to tune release criteria in certain areas where we want more detail. Tonight, for intance, we found there was at least one place where the written criteria could be clearer about their intent. There is a retrospective scheduled for QA after the release of Fedora 13, at which we can note some of the discrepancies and tune as needed.

This iterative approach has worked very well for our release schedule, which I'd really like to see us let stand for a few releases, as we consider other changes. Thanks to all of the people who participate in the process — the teams of people working on QA, Release Engineering, Anaconda, kernel, and countless other packages for our release. The collaboration that's gone on this release has been tremendous, and Fedora 13 is shaping up to be spectacular as a result!

The name game, no. 14.

The Fedora 14 name has been announced, and it's Laughlin.

Later this week our other election processes will be moving ahead as well. Paul Mellors and Larry Cafiero will post answers to the candidate questionnaire, and following that, John Rose will help kick off our series of live, IRC town hall meetings where our candidates will answer community questions. The coming elections of people to the Board and FESCo are probably more important than a release code name, so I want to thank our community in advance for their involvement, and especially our volunteers like Paul, John, and Larry for their assistance.

Post-Goddard.

Voting is now open for the Fedora 14 release name. Naming the next release is yet another way that our community is involved in making the future of Fedora. If you're a member of any group in Fedora (beyond completing the CLA), you can vote on this ballot.

To cast your vote for the F14 name, login at the elections site. May the best name win!