DevConf.cz event, day 2.

After I cleaned up and ate a light breakfast at the hotel, I strolled back to the university building for the second day of the 2013 DevConf.cz event. In case you didn’t see them, here are my reports on part 1 and part 2 of the first day.

One thing I didn’t point out yesterday: I only saw most of one track. There were actually three complete tracks going on, several workshop rooms, and a couple of hacking labs. This is a really big conference: I hear there are almost 550 people here from around the world! Here’s what I saw and did today:

• Thomas Woerner presented his work on firewalld, the new dynamic firewall system. He talked not just about the problems firewalld solves but also some of the future capabilities. These include a rich language to adjust many pieces of the firewall in harmony when configuring. A lockdown mode is also planned that allows administrators to enforce policy and whitelist specific applications.
• Thomas Graf presented on Open vSwitch, a multilayer, distributed switching system that supports full automation and extensibility for routing network traffic. Open vSwitch is a smart approach to a hard problem: getting packets somewhere when you have multiple routes available and may not know enough to decide which to take. I’m not a routing expert so I will probably need to go back and revisit the slides to
• Lennart Poettering, Kay Sievers, and Harald Hoyer presented to an incredibly packed room (of course!) on “What Are We Breaking Today?”. Predictable network interface names were first on the roadmap. It sounds like this will succeed biosdevname (although it will not override it, i.e. people running biosdevname will not be affected). They also talked about gummiboot and the boot loader spec, which allows system owners to bypass the complex use of grub2 and instead drop simple configuration files into place to generate boot loader configuration. Another problem they try to solve: Newer systems when POSTing (UEFI, presumably) don’t initialize USB to save time, so systems with USB keyboards can’t choose from multiboot options. So they are trying to make it possible, even down to a user space component, to choose persistent or one-time multiboot options before rebooting. Next up was kernel D-Bus, which was a very fascinating and energetic discussion. It sounds like Kay and Lennart are working in the kernel community on both the coding side and the politics side to succeed. This is potentially a very powerful development. Finally, they talked about systemd in the user session, to give some of the same benefits to the session as have been given to the system boot. Think about it: we take about a second to boot the kernel, about a second to start the initrd, and then maybe 8-10 seconds or more to start a GNOME session! All this is leading toward an even bigger and vital topic: applications, app images, and app sandboxes. However, this is subject to design and not something Lennart & co. are looking at deeply on their own. As they said, Linux can be the world’s best and most-used general purpose OS, and the way to do this isn’t to slow down, because the other OS makers won’t.
• During the short break, I made a mad dash around the reception hall looking for anyone with hand lotion. Despite the wet weather, the heat in all the indoor locations has dried my hands to the point they’re starting to crack and bleed in places. (Yuck!) And of course I left my lotion at home, so it was comical trying to find someone with lotion. Thankfully the nice ladies at the reception desk, who barely spoke any English, eventually understood and helped me out!
• Fittingly, after the break Bryn Reeves did a retroactive look back at “What Were We Breaking Then?”. The talk was a light and humorous reminder that change is difficult, and the fundamental conflict between needing to evolve and increase competition, and people’s natural resistance to change isn’t likely to disappear. for instance, remember going from libc-5.3 (“Blecch, Red Hat ships an ancient libc”) to glibc-2.0 (“Blecch, Red Hat ships a bleeding edge libc”)?
• Dan Walsh then gave a talk on security for Linux containers. There are currently three different methods for this. The first is namespaces; Dan apparently created the first container method on RHEL back in RHEL 5, using pam_namespace. The second is the SELinux sandbox, which is available in RHEL 6. There is a third, new capability called systemd-nspawn that also allows you to containerize up to and including running a whole OS inside your host’s OS.
• Lennart Poettering returned to explain the systemd journal and its capabilities. The journal provides features for structure, indexing, security, reliability, standards compliance, localization, and many others. Lennart spent time explaining use cases motivating each capability of the journal, and it was quite compelling. It was not without controversy, but it seemed like the entire audience was quite impressed with the demonstrations that Lennart gave for the journalctl utility.
• I made a patch for an easily fixed problem Lennart encountered in his demo and attached it to this bug.
• There was a talk on rsyslog message normalization and parsing. I admit I zoned out for part of this talk, but mainly because I was hot to work out the above patch! Also I realized I totally missed lunch, so I went to find sustenance, even in the form of a hot dog from the vendor downstairs.
• I found out within 10 minutes after sending in my patch on the concerned bug, I had become a systemd contributor!
• I hung around with NetworkManager guru Dan Williams for a bit and we talked about fun overseas with phones.
• Open source super-guru Dan Allen did an amazing talk on Awestruct, a framework for HTML that lets you trivially create beautiful web sites out of content you can manage and deploy directly in git. This concept is very similar to what the Fedora Project is doing with templates for their site. Awestruct reduces the complexity by an order of magnitude, though, and eliminates the compile/build process.
• I sat in another session of short talks. Marek Grác talked to us about his work in working with virtual guests, specifically shutting them down. The talk title, “How to Turn Off Your Computer,” was immediately attention grabbing!

The conference was really fantastic, with great content and a lot of good hallway conversations. Combining the conference with an office visit made it even higher value, so I hope I can attend next year.

After the conference day ends, I’m meeting up with a group of buddies to find Koishi, a sushi restaurant Will Foster told me about. It’s supposed to be very good, with a real Japanese chef who gets fish flown in from Slovenia. I think tonight will be low key, since we are back at the Red Hat Czech office in the morning!

(UPDATE: Said chef was apparently not working tonight at the restaurant, so we opted for the quite satisfactory Sushi Ya, and had a wonderful time. Vaclav Tunka was a marvelous guide to some great Czech wines and the suhi was quite good. The butter fish was exceptional and they had a markedly excellent spider roll.)

PulseCaster 0.1.9 is released!

Yup, 0.1.9 has finally made it out the door. Here’s the tarball and the git repo. There are also updated packages coming shortly in Fedora 17, 18, and Rawhide. If you want to help test those to get them out sooner, look here for the package for your Fedora release.

Plus, did you know there’s a Facebook page for PulseCaster? Visit it, like it, and feel the love.

PulseCaster 0.1.9: The gruesome details

I have no witty release name attached to any of the releases, so let’s call this “The One Where We Figured Out How to Give People an Expert Option and Translations, Too.” Some of the secret features you’ll find in this release:

• An expert option
• Translations

OK, I’m being a bit snarky here. Mainly I’m trying to play all nonchalant about how long it actually took me to get around to working on another release. Here’s a better listing of new stuff in 0.1.9:

• PulseCaster now uses GTK+ 3.0.
• PulseCaster also now uses PyGObject and GObject introspection for most stuff. The GStreamer bits are still a bit rough in the gir code. Specifically I found it difficult to get at messages on the bus. I’ll keep working on that, possibly for 0.2.
• There’s now an expert option that writes the recorded streams to two separate files in lossless FLAC format, so you can mix your own recording later. The default mode still writes a single Ogg Vorbis file, which suffices for most people. (The code here’s more than a bit hacky and needs to be cleaned up in 0.2.)
• Using the excellent Transifex service, translations are now part of PulseCaster! Many thanks to the wonderful volunteer translators around the world who contributed translations to the release, and to the Transifex folks for their great service.

Future work

Some of the features on the current roadmap:

• Clean up messy separate-stream code (see above)
• Provide a recording pause button
• Do some volume leveling and/or compression to help recordings sound better
• Provide more helpful information on disk space available/used

As always, you can find the PulseCaster site at http://pulsecaster.org — bugs and enhancement requests are welcome. Input from users helped to drive (eventually!) the work for this release, so a tip of the hat to them for participating!

Using the GNOME Evolution address book with Mutt

For a while I’ve been using the GNOME Evolution address book with Mutt, my favorite email client. I use a script called mutt-eds-query, which consults the default evolution-data-server (EDS) address book to find contacts whose name or email address match a substring. I have a couple thousand contacts still stored in my EDS address book, so it’s really useful for me to be able to consult them. When I type an address in Mutt’s To: field, for example, I give a few letters and then hit Ctrl+T to see a list of completions.

Unfortunately, the script stopped working when I moved to Fedora 18, because the new release contains the newest Evolution and EDS (3.6 versions). The new EDS cleans up a number of deprecated functions and has a more regular interface for querying data sources. Obviously that means the mutt-eds-query needed changing too. I used the extensive GNOME developer documentation to find out what had changed, and updated the script I found on the Mutt wiki.

So I hacked in some changes today. I’m not a born C programmer, so I’m sure there are bad style uses and other stupidities in what I did. Nevertheless, I posted the results alongside the original on the Mutt wiki page. I’ve also put my files up on my Fedora People space. Feel free to grab and try it, and let me know if it helps you. (You’ll need the evolution-data-server development libraries to compile it.)

In the future I’d like to update this script to aggregate and query my GNOME online accounts as well. There’s a very robust set of functions for doing that, and documentation, so if I could just find the spare cycles, I think I could probably make this happen. Alternately, I wonder if that might make a good addition to the folks-tools package?

Not dead yet.

Why has it been so hard to update my blog lately? Probably because my free time has dropped again recently, what with the band getting back together. I’m back to playing with my friends Steve and Rich, for the first time — not counting two spurious shows in 2010 — in over a decade. We spent most of the late ’90s gigging our way from North Carolina to Delaware. Those were great times.

A mutual friend of ours passed away recently, and I was reminded that life is short and making new great times need to be higher on my priority list. So we’re back on the circuit again, and it’s a lot of fun. But until I find a little more free time and something that really moves me to write about, I imagine this blog will be a little more sparse than it has been over the past years.

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!