FUDCon Blacksburg, Day 1.

Yesterday was a hackfest/workshop day at FUDCon Blacksburg. I spent a little time listening in on secondary arch work going on around Fedora. It sounds like there is a lot of effort going into keeping secondary arches rolling really smoothly through Fedora 17 and beyond. There were some folks from IBM and Red Hat in attendance as well as other interested community members. This workshop went most of the day, but I wasn’t able to attend the whole thing.

I had to prep a short deck for my workshop on Drupal internals, which I managed after lunch. The idea behind this session was to start walking through internals of Drupal modules and the Drupal API. The goal was to convince the attendees that not only is Drupal fairly easy to customize, but you don’t have to be too skilled to start writing a Drupal module.

To reach that goal, we walked through a fairly simple module I wrote that allows Fedora Insight to authenticate users and map roles via the Fedora Account System (FAS). he great thing about the workshop was there were a couple of Drupal professionals in attendance! So as a bonus I got some excellent suggestions about my module as we went through it.

Isn’t that what open source is supposed to be about? Yes, Dear Readers, it is — more eyes on my code, live in a session, meant a bunch of shallower bugs for me to fix. So, needless to say, the workshop went quite well.

I visited the “Try My Keyboard” workshop that Toshio set up, along with the Das Keyboard Silent Professional that I use at home. I tried several there, and one of them was a model based on Cherry MX Blues (like the non-silent Das Keyboard I considered) I really liked. It was fun to try out each unit in a really discriminating way and compare feel in terms of stroke, feedback, and effort.

I then attended the Board session which was a review of 2011 and how to move from the level of very high-level strategic goals to actually fixing some problems in Fedora and improving life for contributors. The consensus seemed to be that the Board members will champion specific fixes themselves — by contributing directly to the solutions. In other words, they’ll roll up their sleeves and get involved, which is always an approach that works well in a community like Fedora.

The only suggestion I offered, which I hope the Board will take to heart, is that as they think about what they want to accomplish for 2012, they should consider how they will know their fix works (measure it in some way). The Board is made up of fantastic individuals and I’m sure they will come up with worthwhile initiatives and bring their formidable skills to bear on helping the community work through them as a team. We’ll be hearing more about this at the beginning of February from what I understand.

Finally, I got together with Red Hat trademark attorney (and my buddy) Pam Chestek, Spot, Jared, and Ian Weller to go through the Fedora trademark guidelines with a fine toothed comb in advance of the session to cover those revisions on Saturday. We were able to tease out a lot of additional bug fixes and extra clarity and it was time well spent.

Unfortunately, by the time we finished, around 7:45pm, I was starting to feel pretty low. I’d been teetering on the edge of a cold (or some sort of bug) for a few days, but I actually became a bit feverish in the evening — feeling cold in rooms that were clearly not, even when I dressed too warmly, and so forth. But there was more to do; no rest for the wicked as they say.

I caught a quick but tasty dinner with Pam, and we enjoyed discussing the adventure of buying a car. I’m sure I was not as chipper as usual and hopefully wasn’t bad company — sorry if I flagged a little, Pam! After that I met briefly with Spot and Robyn to go over logistics for the next morning’s BarCamp and keynote activities. Robyn, being the saint she is, brought me a couple doses of NyQuil. So immediately after that, I headed to my room to burrow under covers and try and sleep off the fever.

Unfortunately, that meant I missed the Fedora Insight hacking I’d suggested for Friday night with Peter Borsa and Pascal Calarco. It was awful to feel so sick I couldn’t take advantage of having a wonderful team of collaborators in one place — especially since Peter was here from overseas. (Fortunately they generously forgave me!) Thankfully, though, I got a full night’s sleep and in the morning I felt better than I had in a couple days, so I could be up early and help get ready for BarCamp.

I’ll post more about the BarCamp and Day 2 tonight or tomorrow!

Robocalls not appreciated.

According to a robocall we received yesterday, our school system has just found out they can automate the process of calling a sizable chunk (if not all) of the schoolchildren’s parents in the county to alert us about “important news.” And the chirpy message from our county superintendent of schools notes that we can expect to hear from them repeatedly in the future. I was less than impressed.

Now, I for one am happy that our school system thinks it’s worth their time (and our money) to keep us informed about current events that impact our kids’ school experience. However, they already provide numerous ways for us to receive this news, including email, websites, RSS feeds, as well as the standard news organizations around town. We take advantage of a number of those already, and it’s very helpful.

For example, I love the fact that on a cold, wintry morning, my wife doesn’t have to tune into the radio and listen to 10 minutes of blather to find out whether schools are closed for icy roads. Since I work from home, I’m up anyway, and I can use my Web browser to consult the local news site or the school web page to find out closing information, and then let her know. (Or she can do the same with her smartphone, without getting out of bed.)

What I don’t want is a 5:00am phone call that wakes the whole house, just to tell us schools are running late or closed. Nor do I want to be interrupted at work or dinner to hear that the school board has a public meeting next week. I can find these things out through email, which I read on my schedule, not the school system’s.

You’d think our school system would have learned from this area brouhaha, which got some national media coverage too, if I recall correctly.

Worse, neither the phone call, nor the copy of the same message via email (I told you we use their services already!) had details on whom to contact to opt out. They did provide the general phone number for the entire school superintendent’s office, which in my experience means calling and then being put on hold for some indeterminate length of time while someone is found who can get us removed from their system. No thank you! In this day and age it should be neither difficult, nor unreasonable, to provide an opt-out system that I can reach by email, or a Web page, or (gasp!) via the phone call itself.

So this morning I sent the following inquiry to the administrative assistant for our superintendent, and copied the superintendent, his assistant, and our district’s school board member:

Dear ______,

We’re happy to receive email notices from SCPS, but find automated phone calls intrusive, especially when we already take advantage of other ways to get information from the schools. Since the message below does not give details, can you tell me whom specifically I need to contact to request we not receive automated phone calls?

Commercial services usually provide opt-in measures for these sorts of services. While SCPS may be instituting this service as part of a mandate, or to meet a regulatory requirement, it would still behoove the school system to provide an automated or email-based opt-out solution.

We continue to appreciate the efforts of SCPS staff to keep us informed about important events and news.

(signature)

Hopefully that was cordial enough. We’re not tinfoil hat wearers in my house, we just like picking up the phone when it rings to find someone on the other end who’s (a) breathing, and (b) someone to whom we enjoy talking. What do you think? Am I being unreasonable?

GTD at FUDCon.

The upcoming FUDCon in Tempe will be a rather interesting experience for me, because in a sense I’ll be returning to a role as an individual contributor in Fedora. One of the things I’m looking forward to doing in that role is sitting down with any contributors who are involved in, or interested in, working on our Drupal instance called Insight.

We have a very small group of people — albeit truly wonderful ones — who have been working on the system for a while now:

• Pascal Calarco, as an editor-in-chief of Fedora Weekly News, has been involved for some time because we share a desire to get the Fedora Weekly News published more formally outside the wiki. He’s helped test with content, and started us down the road to using custom Views settings to group FWN issues.
• Peter Borsa came in late last year and has helped with packaging, research, and development efforts. He and I have been making a lot of headway on getting the “Top 10″ modules for Drupal into Fedora, and we expect to be finished with that effort very shortly.
• Jon Ciesla, who owns the core Drupal packages in Fedora, has been of inestimable value in getting us toward a side goal of being able to put parallel installable Drupal instances (i.e. Drupal 6 and Drupal 7) on the next Fedora release and beyond. It’s been a challenge to navigate all the packaging issues but he’s risen to it with gusto; and fortunately Drupal’s excellent (and strict) licensing standards have made things quite a bit easier than they could have been.
• The seemingly omnipresent Robyn Bergeron has helped with testing and with asking questions that made us all think a little harder about what we were doing, and how to make sure other people understood it better.
• Sven Lankes and Volker Fröhlich have helped with packaging issues as well, both on the construction side and the review side, finding issues as we go. Thanks guys!

Although that sounds like a lot of people, every one of them has other things they’re working on, both inside and outside Fedora. As a result, our progress has been slower than any of us would prefer. That’s why I’m looking forward to sitting down with a few people and taking some uninterrupted time to push this project forward.

Not all the people on this list are going to be in Tempe, but that’s why we have IRC and other communication methods. A lot of what we need to do is easily done over the network. Nevertheless, having a few people in a room who are committed to sit still and pay attention to one project at a time will be very valuable.

I’m arriving on Friday afternoon for FUDCon, and leaving on a red-eye flight on Monday night, just after midnight. Since my new job at Red Hat doesn’t revolve as much around attending Fedora community activities, I really want to make the most of my time there. Happily there will be great weather and robust attendance from a lot of fantastic contributors, so that’s not going to be a difficult goal to achieve.

Protected: WIP

Against the morning’s white.

Election extensions.

As seen here on the fedora-advisory-board list:

Although Mike McGrath and the Infrastructure team don’t expect the server relocation to affect our upcoming elections, we want to make sure the community’s ability to vote is not unnecessarily affected given the timing.

The original voting period was December 8-15, and the infrastructure move is occurring over the weekend of the 12th:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-December/msg00000.html

https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/1845

I talked this morning with Mike, John Rose, and Nigel Jones, and here’s the plan we arrived at:

• The voting period will start on December 5 instead of December 8. This ensures that, no matter what unforeseen circumstances occur, there will be a full weekend of uninterrupted voting time available to all community members. All townhalls will be finished by that point, since none are planned for FUDCon at this time.
• Although Mike and the Infrastructure team believe they can keep the elections open throughout the move, in the event of any substantial outage (8 hours or more), we will extend the end of voting by an additional day. For any additional day of outage, we’ll extend the end of voting by another additional day. Again, we aren’t expecting to have to do this, but it’s better for us to have a plan ahead of time. If there is no outage, voting will end on December 15 as originally planned.
• Nigel is preparing a change to the elections app that will allow a logged in user to check the accuracy of a previously recorded vote. This will give an additional measure of confidence in the election system, even in the event of a brief outage. If any user detects a problem, they can report it via IRC, email to the infrastructure list, or a Trac ticket.

We’ll be putting announcements out elsewhere as well — but as Darren noted, there’s nothing wrong with getting your vote in early!

Nominally back on the air.

I got the bare minimum of service back online, including my weblog, from a catastrophic HDD failure yesterday. That really threw a monkey wrench into my workday, I’m sorry to say! But thanks to a couple wonderful people including James Laska and Aristeu Rozanski, I’m back in business. Over the next week I guess I’ll see if I can’t use the opportunity to wangle this into a better overall server setup during my scant free time.

Because it wasn’t until the server died that I realized its backups were not ending up where I thought they were (yikes!), I have to reconstruct some of my old posts. Thankfully, a little Python and Google’s cache will probably suffice, although unless the lazyweb surprises me with something that doesn’t require as much work on my part, I’ll probably end up losing a few months’ worth of comments, which is sad because they were often very enjoyable to read. Please don’t take it personally if you see yours is gone — lost, but not forgotten!

I hope our contributors at the various FADs this weekend are enjoying themselves, and I’m looking forward to the FAD in Raleigh in a week or so. That will be the start of an incredibly packed month. After I return from four days in Raleigh, I’ll be home for about a day and a half; then heading to SELF in Clemson, SC over a weekend; then home again for a couple days until I go to Open Source Bridge in Portland, OR for about four and a half days; then a redeye back home, where I’ll be home for a day and a half before jetting out to Berlin for over a week, for LinuxTag and FUDCon Berlin 2009.

Whew! By the time I’m home more or less for good, it will be June 29th and the month will have disappeared like a summer storm. July and August should be much less travel, thankfully. It’s only through the saintly patience of SupaWife that I can hope to come out of June 2009 alive and with all my various appendages intact.

The road to redemption.

The Wii Fit is a great way to unwind. That is all.

And yes, I ran out of microblogging credit for the day.

The fizzy and the still.

For a few minutes it seemed like much of the world — as seen from my little vantage point in the intartubez — stood still, as the U.S. inaugurated its 44th President in customary, non-violent, and celebratory fashion. There was an enormous crowd, a stirring speech and call to action, a warm blessing and a day to remember. The inauguration of Barack Obama was momentous and at times heart-warming: a great day as with all Inaugural Days, the peaceful transition of power and the eagerness of the entire public to see what changes the new administration brings.

Today is for celebrating; tomorrow is the day to put away the sensational headlines, the sneering, the rejoicing, and the gushing. Tomorrow we put our shoulders to the wheel and PUSH. That is what the President has called on us to do, and that is where we must prove, rather than proclaim, the words “Yes We Can.” When we look back on this day years from now, let us not have squandered its significance on petty power squabbles or the pointing of fingers. Let us take the opportunity we have today to reaffirm the promise of this great nation.

Did I break your concentration?

I’m still getting used to my new iPhone but I have managed to get a bunch of freebie applications installed on it. That was an adventure in itself, thanks to the fact that one needs an iTunes account just to get free stuff. And you can’t sign up for an account straight from your iPhone, at least as far as I could discern. Design FAIL, and unexpected from a firm that prides itself on such things.

I had to dig out an old Windows XP disc to install a virtual guest machine on my laptop’s Fedora 10 system, just to install iTunes and make an account with the intention of only downloading free (as in beer) stuff. I suppose that will be amusing to people who hate the iPhone and/or Apple already. I’m pretty sure this is a casualty of the need for DRM on their revenue generating service… I just found it to be really off-putting from a usability standpoint.

Still love the phone though, I gotta admit. I’ve had a crap phone for so many years that it’s nice to finally have something with a usable interface. Something from which I can, for instance, write this blog entry!