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.