I still tend to also have a web browser open often in a GNOME session, though, so notifications are very useful to me. For a while I used Irssi with a simple plugin script that calls notify-send to create popup notifications. However, I hadn’t used it since the GNOME 2.30-2.32 days, and I found this script had developed drawbacks as it aged against the new GNOME 3 environment.

For example, the notifications would fill up the notification tray over the course of the day. Clearing them required an action for each individual notification, which was tedious to say the least. Also, the --timeout argument to notify-send seemed to no longer work for me to make the notification leave the notice area after a specific length of time.

What I really wanted was a solution that would act more like many of the other native GNOME applications. Appointment notifications or email in Evolution, for instance, “stack” in the notification area into a single icon, with a number that tells you how many notices have been received. Thankfully a few GNOME folks — Marina, Matthias, and Ray — kindly gave me some advice on solutions.

First, there’s a hint called transient for notifications that lets them evaporate from the notification area after a specific time. (You can find the full notification spec here if you want to dig a little deeper; I found it really educational.) This was a step forward because it kept the notices from piling up in the notification area ad infinitum. For instance:

notify-send --hint transient:1 'subject' 'message'

Unfortunately, just using transient meant I’d likely miss some notices if I was away when they came in. I wouldn’t know someone was looking for me unless I switched to my Irssi window to look — which is precisely the thing that notifications should prevent. Nevertheless, it’s a really useful hint, so file that away for later reference.

Never fear though, because again the GNOME folks passed on some good advice. The stacking effect is handled automatically by GNOME Shell if the notifications are issued from the same PID. Aye, there’s the rub! The Irssi plugin I was using made this impossible, because it called the notify-send executable for each message, meaning a new process for each instance. What I really needed was a single process listening on the session D-Bus that could kick off a notification.

So what I came up with can be found here. If you want to just test the listener, maybe because you don’t use Irssi, try this command with the listener running:

dbus-send --session /org/irssi/Irssi org.irssi.Irssi.IrssiNotify string:'subject' string:'message'

The listener is just a dead-simple (or maybe I should say brain-dead, given the quality of code) Python script. I put it in ~/bin with the executable bit set on, added it to my list of applications that launch with my GNOME session using gnome-session-properties, and added the new notify Perl plugin for Irssi to my ~/.irssi/scripts/ folder, with a symlink from ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun/ so it starts whenever I run Irssi. The stacking of notifications makes them very easy to clear with one user action — aaah, much better!

Future thoughts:

• One flaw with this method (I’m sure there are many!) is you’ll get notifications even if you’re actively looking at or talking in the IRC channel where a message comes in. It’s easy to add logic to alter the behavior based on that, but what complicates matters considerably would be trying to make this script understand when Irssi was in the active screen window — or when the screen was the foreground window in GNOME.
• It might not be kosher for me to have used org.irssi.Irssi as a service name in D-Bus. After all, this isn’t official or part of the Irssi project at all. But as I understand it, you could use whatever name you liked, as long as you weren’t trying to claim a service name already in use.
• You could make this work system-wide by packaging a real .service file for D-Bus along with the Irssi script.
• When we were discussing the technical issues above, Ray told me he was actually looking for something similar. With any luck, he’ll find something annoying in my stupid solution he can’t live with, and he’ll add some magic GNOME-ishness to make it awesome. See what I did there?

I found a particularly wonderful section among a wealth of other wonderful text. In fact, I probably could have opened the book at random and found something just as quotable and insightful. But this piece struck a sympathetic nerve, probably because one of my pet issues is treating each other with kindness. This excerpt is from the chapter called “Good Manners Matter” by the amazing Rich Bowen, and I’ll reproduce it here, thanks to the author’s and editors’ enlightened use of the CC BY-SA 3.0 license:

I had been doing technical support, particularly on mailing lists, for about two years, when I first started attending technical conferences. Those first few years were a lot of fun. Idiots would come onto a mailing list, and ask a stupid question that a thousand other losers had asked before them. If they had taken even two minutes to just look, they would have found all the places the question had been answered before. But they were too lazy and dumb to do that.

Then I attended a conference, and discovered a few things.

First, I discovered that the people asking these questions were people. They were not merely a block of monospaced black text on a white background. They were individuals. They had kids. They had hobbies. They knew so much more than I did about a whole range of things. I met brilliant people for whom the technology was a tool to accomplish something non-technical. They wanted to share their recipes with other chefs. They wanted to help children in west Africa learn how to read. They were passionate about wine, and wanted to learn more. They were, in short, smarter than I am, and my arrogance was the only thing between them and further success.

When I returned from that first conference, I saw the users mailing list in an entirely different light. These were no longer idiots asking stupid questions. These were people who needed just a little bit of my help so that they could get a task done, but, for the most part, their passions were not technology. Technology was just a tool. So if they did not spend hours reading last year’s mailing list archives, and chose instead to ask the question afresh, that was understandable.

And, surely, if on any given day it is irritating to have to help them, the polite thing to do is to step back and let someone else handle the question, rather than telling them what an imbecile they are. And, too, to remember all of the times I have had to ask the stupid questions.

Well said, Rich. Any of us helping users or newcomers to any endeavor, whether it’s Fedora, some other FOSS project, or a volunteer organization in your town, can learn from Rich’s experience above, assuming that we haven’t already lived it ourselves. Any user can be the contributor of tomorrow. It pays real dividends to extend them a helping hand.

I do highly recommend you check out Open Advice at the website. It’s chock full of insight, anecdotes, and lessons about the powerful, transformational, and exciting journey of free and open source software. The book is a free download, but you can also purchase a copy from Lulu (and, according to the site, from Amazon soon).

• Spot’s talk on making Fedora packaging easier — featured not just what could be a replacement for the current pkgdb, but also a cool new app called Tagger that makes improving package search part of an achievement/trophy oriented game, for maximum  fun
• Katello — a next generation system environment management platform that helps manage content and deployment
• Pam Chestek’s session on the new draft of Fedora trademark guidelines — with extra tweaks to make guidance clearer for publishers, hosting providers, cloud, and spins/remixes
• Chris Tyler’s talk on Raspberry Pi — which was packed! A great update on this affordable ARM hardware for hacking, and what’s needed from the Fedora community to take it to the next level
• OpenShift — Mike McGrath showed off the latest capabilities of OpenShift, a PaaS (platform as a service) offering by Red Hat that makes it dead-simple to for developers to get an entire OS and framework operational in the cloud in just a couple of minutes

Overall, this year’s BarCamp was one of the best in terms of depth of technical content. It also had an excellent spread in terms of technical complexity — meaning there was plenty for new hackers to sink their teeth into, as well as stuff that appealed to more experienced folks. We had the usual assortment of great speakers from all around the community and they all delivered impressive presentations. You should be seeing a lot of these on blogs through the Fedora Planet with downloadable content. (If you delivered a presentation, make sure you make it available widely!)

Saturday evening was the world-famous FUDPub. I was only around for a little while — since I was still trying to shake off the illness that had been dogging me since the middle of the week, I didn’t want to make things worse on my immune system by celebrating too much. Plus, it started to snow while we were enjoying the food, drink, bowling, and billiards, so I wanted to move my car back to the hotel before the roads got too dangerous. (Virginia is not known for its rapid and rational response to adverse weather conditions.) Later in the evening we gathered for poker at the “mezzanine” level of the hotel’s conference center. A few people played well into the wee hours but I headed to bed about 1:00am.

Unfortunately, the medication I took caused me to oversleep a bit, but I still managed to get over to day 3 of FUDCon by 9:00am. Once there, I got together with Peter Borsa, Pascal Calarco, and Maria ‘tatica’ Leandro to talk Insight, our Drupal installation, which the team is trying to branch out into new and useful functions. Jared Smith and Robyn Bergeron also stopped by to give some input on our calendar project. We took notes throughout the session on Gobby, and will post them on the wiki shortly along with some additional context and plans. I feel like the Insight project is starting to take on a little more life, with a designer involved and some solid ideas about functionality that will help the project.

For instance, we discussed the events calendar being able to automatically notify event owners or FAmSCo about milestones or other necessary activity, to promote better communication and awareness. A content management system makes it possible to build some fairly robust workflows around information — making the system not just another place to deposit information, but a facilitator in the process. The team has yet to figure out exactly how this should look but thankfully Maria is on the case and will help figure this out over the next few weeks. My day job is making it harder for me to lead this team, but the other members are committed to working on some exciting new features, and I’ll continue to find ways to contribute, and wherever possible remove roadblocks and continue to scale out access, privileges, and empowerment to the rest of the team.

By this time, it was close to noon. I started saying goodbyes to various people, and made sure I had picked up as many riders as I could to drop off at the airport on the way out. I ended up taking Máirín Duffy to the airport, as well as Jared’s son with me (since they live within a half hour of me). It was good to finally get home at about dinnertime. My daughter was hosting a sleepover with a friend so it was pretty boisterous at our house, but nice to see my family again.

All in all, it was a great FUDCon. I could have done without the illness the first few days, but I managed to pull through, doing a good portion of what I intended at the event. To everyone who was there, I hope you had a fantastic time and were able to really use the event as a jumpstart for collaborations of your own. Now, make sure you spread the word on what you’re doing, and carry some of that energy and ingenuity into our discussion lists and other venues! I hope everyone has or had safe travels home and we’ll see each other soon online.

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!

We checked in at the Inn, and saw a number of Fedora folks already there, including Spot, Robyn, Kevin Fenzi, and Peter Borsa who flew in from Hungary! I also ran into Red Hat genii Phil Knirsch and Karsten Hopp, in from Germany. I had dinner with Dan Walsh, Bill Nottingham and Eric Paris at a typical collegiate hole in the wall nearby called “Top o’ the Stairs.” It was very nostalgic, between the good barbecue, “unassuming” decor, and beer in plastic cups. Great company and a good time. My navigational skills proved barely adequate to get us back to the hotel but we did make it without disaster, fortunately.

I said hi to many other Fedorans at the hotel when we returned, and since I wanted to get some sleep to conserve health before FUDCon started today, I turned in a little early. (Well, early being relative; I stayed up until midnight catching up with work email and a couple other tasks.)

We’ve started the day on a great (albeit incredibly cold!) note, with temperatures around 25 F here in Blacksburg but a very warm and hospitable environment in McBryde Hall at Virginia Tech. I’m currently sitting in an early session regarding secondary arches with Phil, Karsten, some IBM guys, Garrett Holmstrom, and a smattering of other Red Hat and Fedora folks.

Later today, assuming my voice holds out, which is not a given, I’ll be blundering my way through a session on Drupal internals. Also, I’m going to drop by a “try my keyboard” session that Toshio Kuratomi put together. I brought my new Das Keyboard Model S Silent with me, so it will be one of the models available to try. Looking forward to a great FUDCon!

I get to drive to this particular event, because it happened to end up only about 4.5 hours drive from where I live. That suits me fine, because I got a new car (warning: Flash) I can’t wait to take on its first long trip. Weather should be fair for this time of year, I hear. I also got some new vanity plates that will touch the hearts of Linux geeks, but probably elicit only head scratching from others. However, this post is about more than my car, as much as I like that topic!

I wanted to say a couple things about what I’m planning to do at FUDCon. First, I plan to spend some time with the Fedora Insight crew on Friday night and on Sunday morning. I want to see the feature sets the amazing Peter Borsa has been working on, and hopefully we can make some progress on streamlining deployment so other people can help. We’ll also be working on Sunday with a designer (cross fingers!) to design an interface for a project/events calendar. Unfortunately, I’m leaving Sunday afternoon to get home that night, but I will try to provide a ride out of town to the airport for anyone whose schedule matches up.

By the way, you may want to check out the travel planning page if you need to arrange rides.

The other thing I’m planning is an open workshop on Saturday on Drupal internals. I still haven’t decided whether this is best done as a workshop vs. BarCamp. I’m interested to know how many people really would show up — which means it might be good for me to pitch this at BarCamp. If there’s very little interest, I can spend the day learning instead of blowing hot air. But if it turns out people are interested, I have some books and materials I’m bringing with me that I can recommend too. As usual, I will be taking on the role of “person with meager skills who managed to scramble onto the first plateau with help, and wants to pass it on.” (It worked for PyGTK, maybe it will work here too!) Thankfully Peter will be on hand, and I trust he won’t let me get away with horrible errors.

There’s an enormous list of proposed hackfests and workshops on the wiki page. That’s fantastic, and it means we’re going to have a very content-rich conference as usual. I also see the General Schedule on the wiki is quite bare. I believe the organizers are encouraging talk owners to try to schedule in advance — at least when it comes to the hackfests and workshops. My understanding is that these form an outgrowth of the BarCamp — essentially widening the schedule for Saturday. That means there will be a lot to choose from, so I hope everyone brings not just their thinking caps but also their voices and appropriate input devices to participate. UPDATE: Robyn has a great FUDCon blog post on scheduling. Go read it. Now.

I’m looking forward to seeing a bunch of my Fedora friends there, and of course celebrate at the ever-entertaining FUDPub event. Remember, though, that Sunday starts early, so don’t go overboard! The statute of limitations has expired on my one FUDCon event that was a little too entertaining, so I’m allowed to revert to schoolmarm mode now. But seriously, there’s so much to do and see at FUDCon that I’m sure people will put the priority on content and collaboration as always.

Hope I see you there!

Usually I’d have a much better entry for my first post of 2012, but I was really pressed for time. I’ll try and do better next post. Until then, you’ll have to just say hello to my beefy friend.

Obviously it was very important for me in this situation to choose a Custom disk layout. I needed to make sure not to inadvertently wipe out the partition where my Fedora mirror material was stored. I carefully selected the appropriate options there.

Then came the hard part — having my station serve its own content to itself. I completed the installation steps up to the package selection. At this point the Anaconda installer only wants to see HTTP/HTTPS or FTP repositories for installation. So what I decided to do was to set up a minimal Apache web server to serve out content already on the hard disk to the installation program. I decided to only do an installation from the base repository for the original release, and then I’d yum update first thing after booting the new installation.

How’d I do that? Using the shell environment Anaconda provides for utility and debugging. If you hit Ctrl+Alt+F2 you can get the virtual console that holds a bash shell. Once there, you can either use rpm2cpio or manual copies to bring in the necessary content, since the installer environment is a highly stripped down Fedora installation. I did it somewhat manually, identifying a couple necessary libraries from apr and apr-util first by running ldd on the httpd binary, then bringing in httpd stuff and testing with the following command line until things worked:

httpd -e debug -X

As a result the package installation took about 3 minutes instead of 45 or more over the Internet connection (and well over an hour if I’d had to move all the mirror data around first).

I wouldn’t recommend this method unless you’re fairly comfortable with running Web servers already. And again, all of this is a highly unusual case where I was putting silly demands on the installer. But hopefully this is a nice illustration of why there’s always another way to skin a cat using Fedora. Or maybe it’s just a “stupid pet trick.” Either way, now that it’s memorialized I may be able to find this info next time I want to try this.

I’ll combine this with the information in a previous post to finish my installation shortly.

UPDATE: The above failed to mention that “essential” includes our entire awesome support organization, who remain on duty for our customers all the time!

The reason I’m posting about this isn’t to say how nice Red Hat is as a company (even though generally it is), or how much I like vacation time (even though I do). Rather, I wanted to make sure the Fedora community is aware that many Red Hat employees will probably take advantage of the holiday closing to visit family or take vacation to places without Internet access. As a result, some people might not be around as much as usual over the holidays. Personally, I’ll be around somewhat this year, because my family lives fairly close by and I have no long-term vacation scheduled. But I do intend to make some shorter, one-day family trips, so it will certainly be a reduced presence from usual.

My goal is for this advance notice to give you some time to figure out if you have any expectations for before the holidays, or work you want to reschedule for afterward instead, or perhaps you want to accomplish some things when fewer people are going to be distracting you! Whatever your goals, I hope the holiday season will bring you some time for them, and that you’ll enjoy 2012 all the more for it.

This week built on variables to teach the concepts of conditionals and loops, using the if and while statements in Python.  It was at this point that I could tell that most of the students had really grasped the concept.  One of our exercises was to follow the logic of a simple counting/printing loop.  The kids seemed to like putting themselves in the role of the computer.

It was also at this point that the kids started to understand the power of booleans (True and False).  We tried a number of additional comparisons to understand cases where conditions evaluated to each.  The emphasis on True and False paid off in the section where we discussed conditionals and loops because we could pay more attention to the actual branching operation, as opposed to getting stuck on figuring out why the branch happened.

This week I also discovered what I think was a good way to increase the idea of collaboration in the class.  Obviously there wasn’t time to check every child’s work at every step of the way.  But I could make things easier and less pressured on the kids by rotating a “look and see” duty around the class.

Since the class was relatively small (only six kids), I could have all of them gather around one person’s console to see the results of a program or exercise.  We could even figure out what went wrong together in some cases.  Hopefully this removed a little of the pressure of having the instructor point out something that was wrong — a friend could point it out and even help fix it.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a last class without some bonus for the kids!  Thanks to the fine people at the Fedora Project, I had stickers, temporary tattoos, and buttons for the kids, which they loved.  They also got to take their Fedora Live USB keys home, which several of them had been waiting for since the first class.

Speaking of keys, I sent home an information sheet for the parents to go with the keys, so they’d understand what was on it, how to use it, and where to find more information and help.  The keys also had two complete electronic books (both CC BY-SA licensed, check them out here and here) included that are specifically aimed at teaching Python to kids, so if the kids want to go further they can.  A couple of the students demonstrated really serious aptitude, so I think chances were good the class ignited the imagination of a future computer genius!

I’ve posted the last lesson (and miscellaneous resources) in my fedorapeople space, and as with previous lessons, it’s all licensed as CC BY-SA 3.0 so it can be reused by others.  I hope you got something out of reading about the class.  I had a great time teaching it and I think the kids enjoyed it too. Thanks again to my employer, Red Hat, for lending me a few hours this month to give back to some kids in my community.