Well, I just upgraded to two things - first Google Voice, which rocks, and now ping.fm which also rocks.

SCaLE + FAD

So today was the last day of SCaLE, which started on Friday with our Fedora Activity Day, and concluded today. I'm sitting in my hotel room at the Westin LAX, since my flight out is on Monday.

On Friday, we had our first Fedora Activity Day (FAD). We got three fonts packaged, two new packagers, and got some great work done. Karsten has some blog posts either planned or already done about FAD, so I won't spend too much time on that here so as not to steal Karsten's thunder :)

The folks at SCaLE put together a great show (I'd especially like to thank Gareth Greenaway for his tireless help), however, I only got to go to two talks the entire time - one was the Fedora Remix talk, a wonderful talk put on by Clint Savage - I was the local heckler in that talk, answering questions that Clint couldn't, for example. The talk was absolutely wonderful, and I hope that Clint enjoyed my heckling :)

The other talk that I went to was Rob Tiller's most excellent talk on the state of software patents in light of the recent Bilski decision, and it was quite enlightening what that decision MAY mean for software patents in the US. Let's not throw all the patents out the window and celebrate just yet, though - the court very specifically declined to review software patents in the case (see footnote on page 25) - mainly because of the fact that the case before them was in no way about software, but rather a business process, which was not restricted to being carried out via computer. They leave the interpretation of the applicability of the Bilski test to software to later cases. Red Hat filed an amicus brief in this case, which is quite enlightening to read.

Other than that, I was manning the Fedora booth and walking around the exhibit floor spreading the good word about Fedora. I went to a few booths that may of be interest in relation to $DAYJOB, namely Splunk and Hyperic. Had a great talk and demo with the Hyperic guys.

Until I think of more.....

EasyPay MetroCard

So I got my EasyPay Xpress Metrocard today. This supposedly refills my Metrocard balance when it gets low (low being defined as $30 - not so low, IMO).

So this thing costs $40 in trips to get (plus the 15% bonus, so $46 in trips, actually). When the thing reaches a $30 balance, they put an additional $40 on the card (so $46 in trips, until they eliminate the pay-per-ride bonus, and then who knows what they'll do?). Seems a little high of a minimum balance to me.

I would expect for such an investment, for this thing to be some sort of more durable Metrocard than the standard one. Not so much - I just got a standard Metrocard, with the automatic refill stuff printed on the back (warning me to under no circumstances use it in a vending machine or at a station booth) instead of some subway safety message in a language that I may or may not understand (sometimes they're printed in English, and sometimes in Spanish).

Since I plan to go to JFK in the next month, and this new-fangled automatic refill Metrocard doesn't work there for some (probably political) reason, I'm happy that I still have my standard (almost indistinguishable) Metrocard on hand.

I forgot in my previous post

It seems that lots of folks are using Twitter. So you can follow me on Twitter now, jds2001 :). But I just tried to update via SMS and it didn't work.....wonder why.

I fail.

So I was supposed to write some blog posts about my time at FUDCon. Fail. I'd like to write any sort of blog post at all. Fail.

Well, it's time to get off the failboat. So let's get some late FUDCon enthusiasm here (and some early FAD enthusiasm).

So at FUDCon, I had an absolutely wonderful time - at the Friday hackfest, I worked with Jeroen van Meeuwen on the spins process, and then went to work with James Laska on lab-in-a-box. We both learned a lot about Cobbler in the process!

On Saturday, I gave two "talks" - one was the FESCo meeting that occurred while at FUDCon, in which a lively debate about the intents and implementation of the 'provenpackager' group in FAS occurred. The other one was about the future of the Fedora mailing lists, which was just myself, Dennis Gilmore, and Kevin Fenzi talking about it. The outcome of that discussion was that we'll be moving all fedora-* lists from Red Hat infrastructure to Fedora infrastructure, as well as any other lists that would like to migrate.

On Sunday, I worked with Dave Malcolm on rpmgrok deployment, which is a really cool web application for discovering very interesting things about RPM files - for example, in a single .so, you'll be able to see it's exported symbols, other consumers of those symbols, etc. Really cool stuff.

As for the getting pre-excited part, I'm headed down to LA in about three weeks for SCaLE. There's a Fedora Activity Day planned in conjunction as well, on Friday. A Fedora Activity Day is a sprint of interested Fedora people getting together for a day or two to concentrate on an item or two of interest to Fedora.

The focus for this FAD is two-fold - first, finishing up the User's Guide and getting it into shape, and second, packaging of fonts. I have some font packages that I have to convert to the new guidelines, so this will be a great time for me!

Anyone that in, or can get to, the Westin at LAX is encouraged to do so to accomplish these important tasks!

So I guess I'm important. Or something.

It seems that I'm now the new chair of FESCo. Yay! Or something. I only hope I can do half as good as the marvellous Brian Pepple.

Thanks for being the chair for so long, Brian!

Back to work

So I'm back to work after several days of blissfully forgetting about the existence of Windows (which I'm required to use on my $DAYJOB laptop). I come back, and within 20 minutes (at least 5 of were spent rebooting since the machine was in a weird state it gets in sometimes with the Contivity client), I come upon this marvelous example of fail. What exactly is the problem here? I'm still scratching my head at how spectacular this error message is. This is not doctored in any way, came straight from Outlook 2003:

I've been quite remiss lately

My appearance on Planet Fedora and Planet NYLUG has been missing as of late, just due to lack of time.

However, just wanted to drop a quick note that I'm still alive and kicking, and that for Fedora bug reporters that are not able to change the version of their bug from 8 to whatever version it's now applicable in, I've created a mechanism here to do so. Just click to file a new ticket, and fill in the bug number and what version you'd like to change it to.

Anyone with rights to change bugs can view the report of what needs to be changed here if you'd like something to do!