Doubling up.

So having been around the merry go round a few times, I might as well confess that I’ve embraced my share of basically harmless vices. Booze? Check. As in, check my liquor cabinet for the good stuff. Loud rock’n'roll? DUH. Did I tell you about my big Lyle Lovett hair that I grew out for the surf-punk power pop band I was in and the number of ladies’ undergarments that have ended up on the headstock of my bass over the years? (Worn by actual ladies, in case you were uncertain.) And yes, I have two kids, so… OK, let’s leave that one alone. But somehow for over forty years I managed to dodge the sin of them evil cards.

I’ve even been to Las Vegas a couple times, usually for business conferences. Stayed on the Strip, took in the shows, had the prime rib, saw the art collection in the Bellagio. But as for gambling? Never went past blowing $20 in sucker money on nickel slots. I just didn’t understand the lure of throwing money after a game of mainly chance. (Still don’t.) Pretty much the only card games I’d played were Uno and gin rummy. Certainly nothing like blackjack.

Or poker.

Then came the Southeast Linux Fest, where Max and Greg decided my personal corruption cap was one feather short and introduced me to Texas Hold’em. Well, that’s one way to tell the story. Another way to tell it is that Robyn goaded me into playing because she knows an easy mark when she sees one. Yet another way to tell it is that I hung out at the table watching until curiosity got the better of me. So I sat down and learned that there’s more than a little bit of strategy involved in poker. I also learned that I had a LOT to learn.

I took a beating in both games I played, but it was well worth the entertainment — in fact, it cost me less per hour than a good movie. I got to hang out with friends and get schooled in some of the most elementary poker lessons you might have learned in high school (depending on who you hung out with in high school). I even discovered that some of those things actually fell neatly in line with common sense for living. Such as:

• Don’t fold when you can check. (I put it a little differently in this status post.)
• If you can’t spot the sucker at the table, rest assured it’s you.
• You sometimes have to risk a lot to win a lot.

So when I came home from SELF, I did a couple things. First I had a nice dinner with my family. Then I ordered three things from Amazon: two books by Phil Gordon, who strikes me as a fairly level headed and straight arrow kind of poker player; and a set of poker chips. I started to educate myself a little about the game — the terminology, the basic strategies, and also how much fun it is to play.

I even started casting a net with my DVR for poker tournaments on TV, to see how some of the great players do their thing. I’ve been watching the repeats of the 2010 World Series of Poker over the last week or so, and the 2011 WSOP is going on right now which I’m taping too. I think I’ve found a sporting event I actually enjoy watching at home. No Super Bowls or Stanley Cups for me, thanks, but I really get riled up by championship poker on TV. Who knew?

At night after I finish work, I might take twenty or thirty minutes to play online a little, although I simply won’t play for real money on sites, not just because I have better things to do with my money, but also (and especially) because many of them seem to be joined at the hip with crooks. Sorry, ALLEGED crooks. When your money’s not on the line, though, you don’t play as carefully, and that means the game as a whole suffers somewhat. According to most experts, though, you can go from rank novice to mediocre amateur through the experience of playing online even in no-money games such as those found on Facebook or a lot of smartphone marketplaces.

By the way, did you know you can download and install a free software Texas Hold’em app called PokerTH in Fedora? (See, there was a tie-in to Fedora waiting somewhere in this rum-sodden den of iniquity.) The computer engine is pretty awful, an opinion I’m basing purely on the fact that I beat it regularly. I hear that Wilson Software makes one of the best simulation/training programs on the market, although of course it’s only for proprietary operating systems. PokerTH does make it possible to get together with friends and have a network game, though, which is pretty cool. And there is an online server run by the project that has hundreds of games going on at a time too. I sometimes try those out although they tend to favor very fast play which puts novices at a great disadvantage! But still, it’s an experience.

Now granted, none of that has really made me a better player yet. And lest anyone worry, this is a fairly minor obsession for me which centers on exploring the strategy of a game that I totally missed out on in my 20s and 30s. So I’m only inching forward in progress — instead of getting beat all the time, I get beat most of the time.

Still, you have to start somewhere — even when it comes to picking up a new vice.

* By the way, it will be interesting to see if anyone is able to send a substantive comment to this post without it getting flagged by the spam filter.

SELF 2011 day 1.

Max posted a good summary of SELF day 0 that included our dinner and confab last night, and since we’re in agreement there’s no need for me to belabor his points. The upcoming release cycle will be an opportunity for community leaders throughout Fedora to renew their commitment to regular communication, transparency, and visibility at all levels. So on to SELF day 1:

Today was Cloud day here at the Southeast Linux Fest, and I know a couple of Fedorans here made it to some of those sessions. However, I ended up getting together with Max, Robyn, Jared, Eric ‘sparks’ Christensen, and a couple other people to talk about finance and events. One of the important topics was how we can make sure sponsorship requests and other financial matters for FUDCon events are handled quickly, efficiently, and fairly, while still maintaining a strict bottom line.

You’ll see some of the work captured on the EtherPad for the meeting, and links to some wiki tweaks made, here. I know Jared and Max will be posting more information about that session, and since I had to leave in the middle of the session for a conference call, I don’t want to jumble up or misstate the proceedings. Nevertheless, I was happy to see this dialogue happening in a candid and open way (besides the EtherPad and wiki work, our room was open to anyone who wanted to stop by and listen or participate).

I also had a chance to listen in on a little documentation brainstorming that Jared and Eric were doing after lunch. I spent my remaining time going over my slide deck and making some last minute tweaks for maximum goodness. As it happened, I had a very healthy turnout for my session on PyGObject (that slide deck is CC BY 3.0, by the way), good questions and feedback from the audience members, and even a number of very gracious compliments from attendees.

I love doing these educational “fill in the gap” sessions designed for the beginner-to-almost-intermediate audience. I believe lots of people out there are like me — somewhat skilled in simple sysadmin tasks but haven’t been able to make the leap to writing their own applications because of the learning curve. They just need a helping hand to explain the necessary missing pieces in a friendly and non-threatening way.

A gentleman talked to me after my session about “backing up into the right answers” as a learning experience, when you have no other alternative. That’s certainly a good way to explain how I learned GUI programming with PyGTK and PyGObject! But I’d rather help other people avoid awkwardly driving around backward and save them the time it took me to wrap my head around the basic concepts, and get them into 2nd, 3rd, or 4th gear (moving forward, not backward!) faster than me. We agreed that we both had plenty of occasions when we could have used that sort of tutelage, and I hope my session bridged the gap for some of the attendees.

After my session, I had a couple brief chats with attendees and other folks, and then suddenly it was time for the speaker dinner, which was delicious. I briefly wished I had a nice cigar to follow that excellent steak they served us, but decided to head upstairs to write a blog post instead so I could meet my self-imposed regiment of one per day. Now I’m going to go join the rest of our SELF folks at the pre-party and unwind.

And hey, if I’m lucky I might be able to watch Robyn spank the tar out of Greg and Max at poker again.

SELF day whatever.

Yesterday was a big road travel day. Contrary to my usual performance, I got a slightly later start than I intended in leaving home. But nevertheless Jared and I made it to Raleigh in plenty of time for Max and me to pick up the now-infamous SpeVan and return to Red Hat for our Fedora 15 release party. We had a great turnout there; unfortunately that meant all the cupcakes were gone before I could snag one! Probably better for me in the long run though, especially considering that we stopped at Bojangles on the way out of town.

Max was a real trooper taking the driving duty from Raleigh to Spartanburg. The trip took us through pretty bad gridlock at Charlotte, as well as a couple of thunderstorms. I’m sure it was especially distracting to hear the commotion from us boisterous passengers, especially given the increasing devilry toward the rear of the van. Nevertheless, Max made sure we all got to Spartanburg safely, and we touched down in time to say hi to Leslie Hawthorne and catch a wave of very well dressed partygoers at the hotel.

(I’ve noticed that every time a bunch of Fedora people gather at an event, we attract formal wear. Sometimes, as in Berlin a couple years ago, this gives some of our younger, single contributors a chance to chat up someone of the appropriate sex. At other events, we simply marvel at the fact that our scruffy group doesn’t get thrown out of whatever establishment is home to this chaotic mixing of the classes. Last night was apparently some sort of debutante ball, which I seem to recall happened at SELF 2010 also.)

Max and Jared and I were able to catch a quick (and, thank goodness, light) sushi dinner across the street. Then we returned and joined the crowd to unwind with a drink on the outside patio, after which Robyn proceeded to take all of Max and Greg’s money in an extended round of poker. Especially painful for the boys, I’m sure, were the two Hail Mary plays (can you use a football metaphor for poker?) that saw Robyn first snatch survival from the gaping maw of certain doom, and then a half hour later go all-in on a prayer for a straight that actually came true. I half expected to see the word “FATALITY!” hanging in the air like in that Scott Pilgrim movie. As the man sang, You got to know when to hold ‘em…

This morning we’ll be getting together to throw around some ideas for tuning FUDCon to ensure that the communitization of the event continues to trend in a positive way, and hopefully I’ll get a chance to go over my talk a bit more before this afternoon. Even though some of the material is similar to a talk I’ve given before, I like to feel prepared.

Travel plans June 9-12.

Tomorrow morning, starting early, I’m driving myself and Jared down to Raleigh, North Carolina. When we arrive we’ll pick up Max, turn right around and head for the RDU airport to pick up the big passenger van we’ve rented for a group trip to Spartanburg, SC for the Southeast Linux Fest this weekend. (Remember, there’s still time to register and attend — it’s free, but you’ll find that the Supporter package price of $65 is well worth the price!)

Once we pick up the van, it’s back to Red Hat HQ where we have a Fedora release party-type event scheduled. Once we wrap that up, we’ll all board the “FUDVan” for Spartanburg. We should arrive there by dinnertime, at which point, once we sort out and handle any other high priority obligations, Jared, Max and I will vanish for a little while to have an FPL confab over dinner.

Friday starts SELF 2011, and we’re all very much looking forward to it. If any of you are in attendance, I hope you’ll feel free to stop by my talk, which is about PyGObject for beginners. The schedule is a bit hard to read, but I believe my talk is around 3:30pm in Drupal Room A.

Ten days to SELF 2011.

This weekend included a Monday holiday for people in the USA. Unfortunately, my enjoyment of said holiday was interrupted by coming down with some sort of sinus bug on Friday, which wiped about half of my weekend. On Monday, though, I finished some retouches on my presentation for the upcoming Southeast Linux Fest 2011, where I’ll be talking with people about “Graduating to GUI: PyGObject for Beginners.” This is an update to a talk I gave last year on PyGTK, incorporating information about what’s changed from a beginner’s perspective.

SELF ’11 registration is still open, and although you can register for free, there’s a very inexpensive $65 supporter package which I highly recommend if you’ve got the cash. You’ll easily get your money’s worth and more out of all the great talks and networking opportunities there, and help make it possible for the incredible volunteer staff to continue to make SELF run smoothly. (You also get some neat freebies.) After the hotel ran out of rooms very quickly in the reserved SELF block, I hear the staff got an additional block of rooms set up. I’m not sure if those are all gone yet, but if you haven’t registered already, you should do it now.

SELF is a great event, and I am really looking forward to this year’s edition. An addition I love is an OpenSchedule app available for Android phones that lets me work out the talks I want to see, and add them to my personal calendar. Really nice work, SELF staff. (Note to self/SELF: I wonder if this is FOSS that we could use at a future FUDCon?) There are also a bunch of special events happening alongside SELF that you can also register for, like a DrupalCamp and a day on how to build stuff in the cloud — phenomenal. Check out the SELF registration page for more information.

A bunch of Fedora folk will be attending SELF, including FPL Jared Smith, former FPLs Max Spevack, Greg DeKoenigsberg and myself, Robyn Bergeron, Tom ‘spot’ Callaway, Ryan Rix, and more. So do come by and say hello during the event. Hope to see you there!

Who’s up late polishing the blade.

My blogging mojo has been lackluster of late, but that’s because work has been so terribly busy lately. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on putting together a departmental team presentation for the upcoming Red Hat Summit. Wrangling a multi-presenter session isn’t easy and I have a lot of respect for people who are able to do it well.

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of quality time with Inkscape to get the slides into something resembling a coherent theme. In the process I’ve learned a few tricks such as as the optional switches for scaling elements, which let you decide whether or not to also scale properties (such as their gradients or the rounding of corners on rectangles). If I sat around for a few hours with Inkscape just playing around, I don’t think I would have discovered nearly as much. Having a concrete goal — in this case, completing a specific diagram for a specific purpose — really has helped me focus on what I needed to get the job done.

But it hasn’t all been bullet-wrangling and drawing. Plenty of other work all has to keep going on in the meantime. For instance, next week I’m headed to Westford for some meetings in the office, first time back since right before Thanksgiving of last year (jeez, how time flies). Then back home for a week, then the next week I’ll be traveling to Costa Rica to speak at a conference, followed by a short couple of days home and then the Red Hat Summit in Boston.

I’ll also definitely be attending the upcoming Southeast Linux Fest 2011, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. I love that particular conference and have been at both previous years. I expect this one will be just as incredible. If you are in the southeast region of the USA, you really should make it  a point to attend. It’s very inexpensive, and a great way to learn and soak up all the goodness of the free software community from luminaries living almost in your back yard. Come join the fun June 10-12!

I’ve been working with the Fedora Insight team as well. We’re working out some cosmetic changes that will make the site a little easier to navigate as we add further features. We’re also planning some next phase deliverables and as always invite comment, but especially assistance. One of my recent proposals to the team was a change process that will help us manage site development in a collaborative but careful way. I also put up some additional Drupal module packages for review here:

• backup_migrate - We need this one soonest! Can you help?
• admin_menu – This one is just nice to have, but review appreciated!

I also did my part by finishing up the review for Drupal 7, which is in updates-testing now for Fedora 15 and EPEL. Andrea Veri is securing a development host that we can break as needed while we get new features working on Insight. And Robyn Bergeron is working on a SOP that will show Marketing team participants how to promote selected Planet posts for the feed on Insight.

It’s a very exciting (and exhausting) time right now with so much going on, and it’s been a lot of working weekends to try and stay caught up, but the results make me happy. I’ll try to get more and shorter updates coming to this blog over the next month. And I am going to get back to work on PulseCaster as well, as soon as time allows.

SELF 2010 trip report.

One of the hardest parts of being FPL and attending a conference is getting a trip report done while you try to catch up to everything you missed while you were gone! But better late than never, here’s my report from this past weekend’s Southeast LinuxFest (SELF).

Thursday I packed up and headed to SELF v2.0. A short flight from Reagan National landed me in Greenville, which incidentally has one of the most pleasant access roads I’ve seen. The organizers had arranged the conference at the Marriott in Spartanburg which was relatively new and very nice accommodations. Of course most of the staff was busy rushing around making sure everything was ready for the conference on Thursday, but I ran into David Nalley, Dave Yates, Amber Graner, and others who were responsible for making SELF happen. That evening not all the Fedora folks had arrived, but I did get to have dinner with Robyn Bergeron of Fedora Marketing {fame,infamy} and Steven Dake, who works on corosync and high-availability stuff for Red Hat. Turns out Steve is a cigar guy and was kind enough to offer me one, which I gladly accepted. It was a relaxing, cool evening, and the SELF organizers came out and joined us eventually as conversation went into the wee hours.

The next day most of the Fedora folks gathered in a conference room to plan and then work on cleaning up various areas on the wiki, particularly the Docs Project contributor and process pages. They’ve gone wild and unweeded for a while and this was a good chance for us to make a fresh start. Ohio LinuxFest core team member Beth Lynn Eicher was on hand as well, and her fresh eyes really helped us find places where we needed to do some serious revamping. Ian Weller and Eric Christensen drove us to write several texts, and we even came up with an idea for a team contact template that will be available soon. We’ll be swapping in the new content and sweeping out the old shortly as well. It was nice to be able to have this “bonus meeting” in addition to the planned activities for Saturday and Sunday. Friday evening there was a nice speakers’ dinner planned by the SELF staff, after which I skipped the party so I could have a nice long jaw with Max Spevack, and so I could be sure to rise early.

On Saturday I spent the morning getting ready for my talk at 10:00 on the Fedora Project and what our four foundations mean in theory and practice. My talk’s available for download under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license, and when the video is available from SELF I’ll post a notice here. My room was pretty full, so I was pleased, especially since it didn’t seem that most people had made it out of bed for an 8:00 start time. I think I gave a solid talk, although I think it wasn’t as humorous as some of the talks I saw or heard about during the day. Reminder to myself: it’s OK not to be so serious when presenting! Meanwhile, our erstwhile Fedora Ambassadors held down an awesome booth:

I saw some other interesting talks such as Ian Weller’s presentation on “datanommer,” Doug Vann’s on Drupal, and Daniel Chen’s on how to help unbreak Linux audio (the answer is not turning off PulseAudio, by the way).

But one of the highlights for me was getting to see a talk by Wietse Venema from IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center. Dr. Venema is famous in one of my previous fields of endeavor for a seminal textbook, which I brought and had him sign. He was a nice guy, and he even joined us at the lunch table later.

And I was gifted with a remarkably great-smelling bag of chocolate cappuccino from Klaatu of Hacker Public Radio (among other outlets), to which I hope everyone is listening. In the afternoon along with all the other Fedora folks I attended Max’s excellent keynote. I had the privilege of doing the keynote last year and it was nice to see another well-known Fedora personality tapped for this year’s closing remarks. I think Max really took advantage of the keynote to talk about open source issues in general, and how it could be leveraged by people in their business, making the talk about more than simply Fedora. It was incredibly enjoyable and Max spoke passionately, as he always does.

I have a great photo that happened to catch Max at a moment when his face has a look that’s completely out of context to the presentation, which I’m saving for a caption contest later on. A couple amazing things happened after the keynote. First, Ben Williams, one of our Fedora Ambassadors, won not only a brand-new Nexus One phone by random drawing, but also a raffle for a decked-out Pogo Linux workstation, the winning ticket for which he purchased at the last minute after already having bought five others. What a stroke of luck! Just as amusing was this prize, won by Jon “maddog” Hall — good to see he might have the chance to be important in software one day:

We stayed around to attend maddog’s BoF session on Project Caua. Then while everyone else was prepared to start partying, a few of us including Max and Michael DeHaan slipped off to a marvelous Thai restaurant, where I had a duck panang that was just about perfect and we all had a good time trolling, and being trolled by, our boisterous waiter. We returned to the hall to catch the end of nerdcore rap group Dual Core’s set, and have a brew or two. Once again, it was important not to stay up too late because Sunday was starting at 8:00 again.

Or maybe that was 9:00? Well, that’s when the first real session of DrupalCamp began anyway. I was only able to attend a couple talks which were very much introductory. Since I’d already read about, installed and played around with Drupal they weren’t too helpful for me personally, and the advanced talks were beyond my experience. But I got to meet a few people who were doing Drupal and make some contacts that might come in handy in the future for Fedora teamwork.

The Fedora crew gathered (at the Krispy Kreme where yr. humble narrator stoically refused all manner of tasty fat pills) to sketch out the battle plan for the Fedora Activity Day coming up that afternoon. This FAD, because it was attended by people with a wide variety of skill levels, started with an incredibly fun session where we debunked Fedora myths and exposed Fedora truths (think “dependency hell/yum is slow” or “just disable SELinux”). One of my favorite parts of that hour was when Dan Walsh piped up to say that, from his developer POV, anyone filing a bug against his work was making a substantial contribution that he very much appreciated.

I had to slip off after the first hour because I was giving a two-hour PyGTK talk for beginners. Although it was difficult to cater to the expectations of a variety of skill levels in the audience, the talk seemed to go over well. A few of the more advanced folks were likely a bit bored in the beginning of the talk, and a few of the people with no experience were probably lost near the end, but I think most everyone got something useful out of the talk as a number of people told me afterward. It was a lot of fun presenting on something semi-technical and I expect that the eventual video will be more useful, since people can fast forward through the boring parts, or review the easy stuff while trying things on their own systems. One of the parts I most enjoyed about giving the talk was pointing out that FOSS is global, and that even new developers should keep internationalization and localization in mind when programming so they maximize their audience and their impact.

When I returned to the FAD, the numbers had shrunk somewhat as attendees departed the SELF conference via car or plane for home. But there were still about a dozen people around, and we continued to talk about current projects and ways to get involved in them. One young man named Adam seemed particularly interested in our Infrastructure team and Python web programming (which he does for a living) and I encouraged him to come by a meeting on IRC when he gets a chance.

Finally it was time to bid everyone goodbye. Max, Ian, and Eric and his friend Tim had departed already. I had a few conversations with FAD attendees on the way out, including a very constructive one about Fedora’s freedom principles and the way they apply to things like Adobe’s Flash software. I ran into some of the SELF organizers and again thanked them for their superhuman efforts at making the conference a great success. Then I met up with a couple associates attending SELF at the hotel pub and had a nice quiet dinner to unwind, after which we joined Robyn and Steve on the patio for some great conversation about programming, geek history, chess, music, and life in general. It was a superb way to end the weekend and a fabulous conference.

Monday morning I woke up at about five in the morning to catch my flight home, and took the rest of the day as my substitute weekend. This coming weekend I’ll work on getting the rest of my photos uploaded from the conference, or at least those that were worth a hoot. I want to thank all the Fedora friends who helped make SELF such a great conference, including our Ambassadors who manned the booth, those who signed up to help improve free software, people who shared their thoughts about where we’re doing great and where we could do better, and of course the SELF staff for their many tireless efforts. I’m looking forward to SELF 3.0 already!

FAD @SELF 2010.

You probably already know that the Southeast Linux Fest 2010 is coming up in just a few weeks (June 11-13). The Fedora Project will, of course, be there as well. Last year I was honored to be one of the inaugural event's keynote speakers. Apparently those crazy guys at SELF never learn, because this year I'm doing a couple sessions, one on Fedora and one on PyGTK for beginners! Kidding of course. They are an amazing team of people who put on one of the best inaugural community conferences I have ever seen in 2009. This year promises to be a barn buster as well, from what I hear.

But did you know we're also holding a Fedora Activity Day on Sunday? Both Yr. Humble Narrator and Max Spevack will be there talking about Fedora myths and truths. Our wiki czar, Ian Weller, will be giving a talk on gardening the wiki as well. It's an easy way to help keep Fedora information fresh and plentiful for everyone. Many other fine Fedora friends will be there too, and we plan to cover some keen technical topics like remixing Fedora into Live USB form.

Remember that our activity is free and open to everyone — just like the Fedora community. Hope to see you at SELF 2010!