Comin’ round the mountain.

On Thursday, I’ll be driving to FUDCon in Blacksburg, VA. FUDCon in North America is an event I look forward to attending annually even though I’m not neck-deep in Fedora as often these days. I used to love going to the international FUDCons as well, and I’m thrilled to see those events being planned in advance on a regular basis.

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!

A fun day… for some hacking.

Over the course of the day, I:

• Tweaked the package complement on my workstation where last night I did an installation of the Fedora 15 pre-release tree
• Identified some weirdness in my local Eclipse environment and got things in better shape for later work
• Got a good start on some user documentation for PulseCaster
• Took my daughter to the skate rink, and managed to skate for at least a little while before realizing I was having a rough time because my kingpin bolts are just way too freakin’ tight
• Figured out how to adjust said kingpin bolts and made a note to take care of that before next week
• Took my son out for some errands and lunch — a nice trip and a good chance to exercise my patience muscles
• As a reward, bought some beer and a couple decent malbecs
• After returning home, cleared out some obsolete packages hanging around in Bodhi and begging for death
• Built and pushed a new update of PulseCaster to fix some bugs
• Built and pushed a refreshed upstream version of xmlstarlet
• Played with the dog
• Came back and turned up a French trance station I got into recently (for some reason, monotonous, non-vocal electronica seems to help me work more efficiently… probably since there are few lyrics to listen to and digest mentally)
• Went through some email to reduce backlog for Monday
• Triaged a crummy gnome-system-monitor bug affecting people with more than 4 CPU cores (like me)
• Had dinner with the family (Eleya made a fabulous corned beef, first timer but it was pretty much perfect!)
• Came back to the desk to find that the superhuman Matthias Clasen had fixed the gnome-system-monitor bug in question, and built and pushed an update out
• Installed said update with many thanks to Matthias, tested, and provided feedback

So of course, my definition of hacking is not nearly what some of my colleagues manage daily. But I feel like attacking some of this stuff on weekends and working on my own GNOME-ish projects are starting to give me a better fundamental understanding of some of the plumbing at work in the desktop. And of course, it gives me a wh0le new appreciation for it as well. I’m now rocking GNOME 3.0 pre-releases on both my main systems here at home, my laptop and my big workstation, and loving it.

I’ve contributed a few bug reports and to a small portion of the GNOME 3.0 user documentation for this release. It was lots of fun and made me feel connected with the release process for something I use every day that will be an intrinsic part of Fedora 15 when it arrives. It’s a great feeling to be just cranking on some little bits to help others, and just as much as ever, I know that if everyone does the same, free software has a future that is even brighter than the (already well-lit) present.

US Labor Day holiday.

Just a note for Fedora friends in other geographic areas — today (Monday 2010-09-06) is a US holiday so chances are a substantial number of US participants will be out doing holiday stuff. Personally, I have some errands to run, some housework to do, and a new dog to play with. I’ll be back online tomorrow per usual.

FUDCon Tempe lodging update.

Here’s some great news regarding lodging for the upcoming FUDCon in Tempe. We’ve secured a much better rate at a competing hotel nearby. The rate is around 60% of what we were originally expecting. That means it just got a lot more affordable for everyone to travel to FUDCon!

We’re still working out the final bits with the hotel so we can make a detailed announcement, which you can expect in the near future. Of course, we continue to encourage anyone who’s interested in helping to join us on the FUDCon planning list.

Reminder: Docs bug sprint tomorrow 2010-03-06.

In case you didn’t remember from Eric Christensen’s earlier post, there will be a Docs sprint tomorrow: 2010-03-06 UTC 1500-2100.  We have a flexible but solid agenda for work, and there will be plenty of opportunities for new contributors to participate. We’ll help people get used to Bugzilla, show you how to locate and work on documentation, and most of all, have fun doing it.

Come meet us at IRC Freenode (irc.freenode.net) at channel #fedora-docs for all the good times. See you tomorrow at the bug stomping!

I’ll be there closer to 1630 UTC, because of my daughter’s skate lessons — looking forward to seeing everyone there.

Musings on the muse.

I’ve been writing so much this week it’s hard to believe my blog’s empty thus far. Surveys, email interview questions, internal stuff for Da Hat — but no blogging!

And of course I’m low on time for tonight, but I wanted to respond to Kevin’s post about what people love to do in Fedora. I have a short list of stuff that I love to do but for which I unfortunately don’t get us much time as in the past.

• Writing and maintaining documentation on the wiki, website, and in formal guides. That’s how I started with Fedora and I still love to do it when I can.
• Bumbling my way through PyGTK to learn more about GUI programming.
• Meeting and talking to Fedora contributors at Fedora events. I wish there was a way for me to clone myself so I could be at more events and do this more often!

Thanks for the reminder that as we think about big-picture items, which people throughout the community ask for, we also should think about the small things as well. Good things come in small packages, including satisfaction from learning something new, or helping someone else out. What’s great about Fedora is there are plenty of ways for small and large scale work to make free software better for everyone.

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 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.