Random Thoughts of Jon

Fedora Talk troubleshooting page complete

2009-10-31T19:53:00.002-04:00

I think I've finished putting the finishing touches on the Fedora Talk troubleshooting page - the last change I made was pretty simple, just to include a link at the bottom to IRC for more help, and remove the "under construction" notice at the top of the page. You can see the new version (with some other changes, notably, Paul Frields made a new page on setting up a generic client - i.e. a hardphone) here. Let me know if anything more needs work!

Fedora Talk FAD: Alarm clock fail

2009-10-25T10:09:00.003-04:00

When I woke up this morning, I kept on hitting snooze on the alarm clock in the hotel room (the bad habit that I'm in on any other day, which is why I set my alarm clock for 30 minutes before I have to be up). Or at least I think I do. When I finally get up, I stretch my legs, get ready to check some mail as normal, and get ready to hop in the shower. According to the alarm clock in the hotel room, all of this is occurring an hour before Paul is supposed to come pick us up. --- Cue ringing cell phone --- "Oh, hi Paul! , oh %#!@, the alarm clock in the hotel room is an hour off! I'll be down in a few minutes" I have not a clue how this happened, when I went to bed I think that the alarm clock was correct. Oh well......

Fedora Talk FAD: Day 1+2

2009-10-24T17:24:00.004-04:00

The last two days of my life have been some of the most pro I've spent the last two days at Business Playce, a local coworking establishment in Fredericksburg, VA with Paul Frields, John Poelstra, Ian Weller, Jared Smith, and Jeff Ollie. We also had several remote attendees, including Mike McGrath, Clint Savage, Bruno Wolff, and Darren VanBuren. I arrived in Fredericksburg on Thursday afternoon, when Paul Frields picked me up at the Amtrak station and took me to check in at the brand new Hilton Garden Inn, where the front desk clerk actually knew what Fedora was, though he's using Arch at the moment :). After checking in at the hotel, Paul took me back to his house where I meet SupaWife and his two really cute kids. After we had dinner, we played some Beatles Rock Band with his daughter. While I'm absolutely no good at Rock Band, it was great fun nonetheless. After that, we went to pick up Ian, Jeff and John at the also very new-looking Richmond airport which Paul can't keep saying great things about. On to the work end of it, it was an incredibly productive few days, some of the most productive time that I've spent in my time in Fedora in fact. Some highlights:

Conference recording now works in a pre-beta type of setup - an admin has to use scripts on the command line of the Asterisk box in order to start the recording, but it won't be that way for long, because.....
A mockup exists of a Fedora Community app to do all of this in a self-service fashion!
The talk.fedoraproject.org website has gotten pretty much a complete overhaul. This will be going live very soon, for now, you can see it here.
All of the admin, facilitator, and user use cases that we had on the wiki prior to the FAD were either marked as complete, meaning there was documentation of how to do them, they technically worked, and people should now be able to use them, or there are tickets filed that are assigned to specific people.

Specifically to a few people at the FAD:

We taught John Poelstra how to use git (even though he kept wanting to refer to it as CVS!)
I learned how to hack on Fedora's websites - it really isn't that hard, trust me!
Jared brought his "telco in a box", which we would have been lost without.
A special shout out goes to the owner of Business Playce, Paul Delagrange, who was extremely accommodating in letting us 1) use a larger room than we had originally reserved, and 2) allowing us to come in on Saturday when the place is normally closed.

Throughout the time, we organized into 45 minute - 1 hour sprints, where we all had a specific set of tasks to accomplish. Whatever could be accomplished in that time was considered as "done' - there was no going back to it if it couldn't be accomplished. This provided several benefits, the most notable of which is breaking the work up into small manageable chunks rather than one huge project, and providing the feeling that we accomplished something during each hour, and being able to look back on the time that we spent and qualitatively saying that we accomplished X number of things. We found that this worked incredibly well in the morning, however, towards the afternoon it seemed to have broken down, probably because of the external distraction of the FESCo meeting which took Paul and I very much away from our happy place, and it was sort of difficult to regain momentum after that, but it eventually did happen. On Friday night, Jared Smith took us out to dinner, compliments of Digium, in exchange for doing a case study on Fedora Talk (thanks Digium!). We went out to Capital Ale House, a good restaurant/bar in downtown Fredericksburg. On Saturday, we modified the methodology to allow us an hour between checkins instead of 45 minutes, and with no distractions, it seemed to work much better. On Saturday night, SupaWife cooked us an excellent dinner once again, which was very well received by everyone, and as I write this, John, Ian and Paul are playing Rock Band and doing pretty darn well!

More Josh Woodward - new album "Breadcrumbs"

2009-10-18T23:27:00.003-04:00

Well, Josh Woodward has done it again and put out a great new album, Breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs has something for everyone on every end of the musical spectrum, from hard rock to really soft guitar work, with some songs building up from one end of the spectrum to the other (Private Hurricane comes to mind immediately, and is what I'm listening to as I write this).

Josh's music runs the range in general, as well - from folk/country, to poppy, to hard rock. His lyrics are equally varied - he's an excellent lyricist. I figured that I wouldn't review this album until I'd listened to it all the way through about 10 times, because the music grows on you and you notice things that you hadn't noticed before. I'm just about there, so here goes :)

As most of my readers know, I'm really heavily into the free software community, and that's more recently been extended into free culture. This brings me to the next great point - all of this music is free (as in both beer and speech), and Josh has licensed Breadcrumbs (and relicensed all of his previous work) under CC-BY (Creative Commons Attribution, meaning basically that you can use the music for anything you like, you simply have to give him credit - in the free software world, a "permissive" license - such as BSD). This is a change from his previous license of CC-BY-SA, which meant that any work that was derived from his music had to be shared under the same license (in the free software world, we call this a "strong copyleft" license -the most well known example being the GNU GPL). From his website on the relicensing:

Want to use and abuse my tunes?

Go nuts! You're welcome to use my music, free of charge for your projects. This includes movies, ads, podcasts, YouTube videos, karaoke, background music for your grandma's 90th birthday celebration, anything. There's no problem using them for commercial purposes. You can use them as is - instrumental or regular, or you can hack them apart to use in your songs or projects.

What's the catch? Just one: you need to provide attribution. A simple mention of my name and the song title in the credits, with a bonus if you give my website URL. If for some reason this isn't practical, it's possible to arrange a paid license for my music through Jamendo.

If you do use my music, I'd love to hear about it! Drop me a line so I can take a look. It's always fun to see.

I've read another review of the album on another blog, and I had never thought of this before, but it's so accurate that I don't know why not. A WONDERFUL entry point into the world of Josh's music is his album Crawford Street. It is quite possibly one of the best albums ever made by a human :). It contains songs on absolutely every topic imaginable. I'll include brief comments on each of the songs in the list below. I feel that I'm obligated to list the songs on Crawford Street in the order of my liking of them, however, such a listing doesn't do justice to the songs on either of these albums, in fact, on Breadcrumbs, the numberings for pretty much everything beyond the top 4 should be 5. A lower "score" does not indicate that I didn't like the song, simply thatI liked some better than others - but EVERYTHING is great and deserving of a great review!

1) Big Disco Ball - a sentimental tale of romance amidst urban decay

2) The Spirit World - an excellent song about religious fundamentalism and tolerance at the same time

3) Sundown - a great little tune about the lack of progress in small towns in America

4) Hey Ruth - a song about overhearing domestic violence and falling in love with the battered woman.

5) Fight the Sea - a song about starting over with your life

6) Can't Take Our Love Away - a song about prejudices in small-town America

7) Shower Scene - an actor is dissatisfied with the way that his career has progressed to this point, and is yearning for something better

8) Twelve Monkeys - a beautiful song about animal rights, from the perspective of monkeys in a zoo.

9) Swimming to Cambodia - a great little song about depression

10) The Pawnbroker's Stepdaughter - a song about taking advantage of people

11) Thanks for Coming - the American dream being won for one person and lost for another, catching up at a reunion

12) Frannie - a ballad of a couple in old age

13) Swimming to Cambodia

14) Waiting Takes Time - a song about ending a long standing relationship

But don't let the preceding review of Crawford Street diminish this album whatsoever, it's just as good if not better. Here's the same list of the 11 songs on that album:

1) Private Hurricane - a song about succumbing to failure

2) Border Blaster - a WONDERFUL song about immigration - not pretentious, and not preachy, but gets the point across very well

3) Under the Stairs - a very dark song, that's all I'll say :)

4) Grey Snow - a great song about secrets

5) Overthrown - a great tune about becoming irrelevant

6) I'm Not Dreaming - a song that about PTSD

7) Swansong - ending a relationship

8) 20/20 - reflections on the past and what could have been

9) Stars Collide - a song about withheld emotion in a relationship

10) The Voices - a great tune about hearing voices in your head

11) Once Tomorrow - a song about getting older and life passing you by with the demands of day-to-day life

Both albums are absolutely incredible pieces of work, and the world is a greater place for having these albums released in to the greater commons rather than locked up behind a major record label that criminalizes the sharing of music. If you like these albums, though, I'd strongly encourage you to buy them! Josh offers both physical CD's and FLAC downloads, whichever you'd prefer.

CPOSC, Day -1

2009-10-16T00:11:00.002-04:00

CPOSC is finally coming together, the remaining items that I was waiting on came in today! Now I've got vertical banners, a banner for the table, and all the swag that I need (media, shirts, pens, stickers, and buttons!). I've packed it all into one monsterous suitcase that it looks like I could fit enough stuff for an entire year in it. I'm sure to look weird at the hotel tomorrow night, checking in for one night with such a large amount of stuff :) Our booth will look awesome, thanks to these wonderful vertical banners (which goes well with Harrisburg University's rules that you can't hang anything on the wall), even though I'm apparently more than a little dense and had difficulty figuring out how to setup the vertical banners (which once you get it, you smack yourself on the head for being such an idiot :D) Pictures of the booth will come when it's assembled.

Busy times ahead!

2009-10-03T00:22:00.004-04:00

Well, my Fedora and ancillary events schedule is getting really full really quick, and it all starts next week! Next Thursday there's an event called RHCE Loopback being held in the great city that I live in, NYC :). It's practically on my doorstep (OK, so it's about 25 blocks south and a few blocks east of where I live :D), so how could I possibly pass up the opportunity? There's going to be some good cloud-related talk there, as well as just general networking, etc. from what I understand. Then the following week it's off to Harrisburg, PA for CPOSC 2009. This is a small Linux conference that Fedora has had a presence at since it's inception last year, and I'm happy to take the 3 hour train ride to Harrisburg for it. This year, it's a block away from the Amtrak station. WIN! Then the following week, I'm heading out for a FAD around Fedora Talk Oct 22-25, with two full days (Fri-Sat) reserved for hacking. Our intent there is to get all of the outstanding F-Talk tickets closed out, and bring some exciting new capabilities to the platform (conference call recording and live event streaming, namely). We'd also like to have instructions to get various softphones set up to work with F-Talk, and possibly some automated configuration scripts, etc.

Creative Commons spotlight: Josh Woodward

2009-09-15T21:08:00.003-04:00

I can't get this song out of my head. I'm a lefty and I love it, because when I broke my right shoulder and had no use of my right arm for ~8 weeks, I was still functional. But Josh apparently hates me, which is sad, because I love his music :D.

RCN customer service rocks

2009-09-06T18:21:00.003-04:00

As you may know, I moved at the beginning of June. My cable and Internet are now provided by RCN (and I'm one of the few with a choice between Time Warner and RCN). When I signed up, I told them that I wanted an HD DVR, what I wound up getting was the lousiest excuse for a DVR they could come up with (some Motorola garbage). I finally gave in yesterday and decided I'd get a TiVo with some extra money I'm getting. So I called RCN, and after talking to sales, they transferred me to tech support, which I though was weird, so I hung up from that death-queue, called back, got put in the same death queue, thought I'd being wound up transferred someplace else. Well I was surprised when that wasn't the case, they knew exactly what I needed, and set up an installation appointment for TODAY. I thought that was unheard of, getting an appointment with the cable company in about 24 hours, on a Sunday of a holiday weekend no less. I was impressed. But it gets better! My installation appointment was from 2-5 today. I get a call around 11:30. "You home now, mind if I do this installation a little early?" Now THAT'S unheard of - an early installation that went off without a hitch. I've found that most people just whine and moan when things go wrong with their various service providers. I figured I'd give a shout out when things went incredibly right for a change :)

Where have I been?

2009-09-06T18:15:00.002-04:00

Well, I've not posted here in awhile (OK, so I posted a few days back about EPEL). So where does all of my inane commentary about life in general go to? Where can you keep up with me minute by minute if you so desire? Why Twitter of course! (yes, I know about identi.ca, my ping.fm profile which I sometimes use for posting posts there too for those refusing to use proprietary services). Next up, a post about a positive experience that I had today....stay tuned :).

EPEL is now for the masses!

2009-08-13T23:22:00.001-04:00

Do you run Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, or Scientific Linux? Do you require FOSS software that's not included in your distribution? Then Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) just may be what you're looking for. EPEL is a SIG in Fedora, where various Fedora packages are rebuilt for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and it's various derivative distributions. Compatibility with those derivative distribution is an explicit goal, so if something doesn't work on a particular derived distribution such as CentOS, then by all means file a bug! There are some rules as to what software there is, however. For instance, we won't replace any package that comes with the distribution. One of the complaints that we frequently get is that the world of RHEL is very old and outdated - EPEL will do nothing to assist there, we will simply add on to the existing distribution with what we can. If a package requires something newer than comes with the version of RHEL that we are targeting, then we cannot ship that piece of software. It's better to have less software than to break existing systems in new and exciting ways :). With some exciting recent changes, Fedora contributors can now contribute to EPEL easier than ever before! Thanks to some new capabilities in koji, the Fedora buildsystem, we can now build EPEL packages right from within the familiar interface of koji. Updates are issued via bodhi, so again, the same workflow that you use for Fedora is now available for EPEL, rather than some arcane buildsystem called plague (working with it made you want to get rid of it like the plague!) That's all well and good from the contributor side, what does this mean for users of EPEL? Simple - due to the new changes, hopefully more contributors will be interested in EPEL, and therefore the range of software available will grow wider and more varied. If an enterprise is packaging free software for their internal use, why not share that work with others in order to avoid having them go through the same effort? Also, by compliance to the Fedora packaging guidelines, you're ensured high quality packaging of that software that you consume, rather than haphazard packaging by unknown people. Moreover, the burden of maintenance is shared with an entire community of people, rather than simply being confined to a single person in a single organization.

2009-03-18T21:24:00.001-04:00

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

SCaLE + FAD

2009-02-23T00:10:00.002-05:00

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

2009-02-01T01:22:00.002-05:00

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

2009-01-31T16:30:00.001-05:00

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.

2009-01-31T15:26:00.003-05:00

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.

2009-01-07T21:50:00.005-05:00

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

2009-01-05T10:08:00.003-05:00

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

2008-12-24T00:22:00.002-05:00

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!

Corporate Card Fail

2008-12-19T01:14:00.002-05:00

Well, I'd had some payment issues on my corporate card since I'm horrible about filing expense reports (even though our card make it exceptionally easy to file reports). I attempted to pay for a cab ride on my card - explicitly to make it easy to file an expense report for it) and it was declined. I thought that I had taken care of this with our finance department and the corporate card provider, JPMorgan Chase. Apparently not, since my card was declined and I called them at the number on the back of the card and was transferred to the (closed) collections department when I entered my card number. We'll see what they have to say when they call me back, I know for a fact that I have no balance - I ate those expenses out of my pocket :(

CAS - Core Analysis System

2008-12-15T22:40:00.002-05:00

I've recently been informed about CAS, the core analysis system. This is an effort by Red Hat to open source the automated analysis platform for kernel cores that is used by their internal support teams, and get it out in the hands of the community. I've successfully gotten it to analyze a core, but it's not quite production ready yet :). It's really simple to install from source (which is currently the preferred method, and involves making an RPM of it). So far, I've only done local node analysis (i.e. copying the core to the CAS server), however it supports gathering cores from remote machines, as well as farming work out via func to remote machines if the current machine is not capable of handling the analysis - i.e. the machine is i686 but the core is from an x86_64 machine. There is a mailing list you can join for feedback!

Hello Lazyweb: Web page load times?

2008-12-15T00:54:00.002-05:00

So I have a problem. One of my customers at $DAYJOB has some serious issues with web page load times occasionally, from a user perspective (i.e. the time that it takes all elements of the page to be downloaded and rendered in a browser). As a hosting provider, I'm only interested in the performance of my servers. Generally what I'll do is use wget to get the page and send it to /dev/null to see if I'm having a problem. This is great for proving that I do or do not have an issue, but what I want to see is some command line way to tell the aggregrate load times for all elements on a page, and a breakdown of the individual elements, in order to act more as a partner in identifying the issue rather than simply saying "not me, go talk to someone else!" :) Surely wget can do this (I think) but a trip through the manpage doesn't immediately reveal anything. A recursive run (wget -r -l 0 or 1) doesn't seem to do it. Is there either something I'm missing or some other utility that will let me do this?

mkdir(1) and the -p option

2008-11-23T19:33:00.002-05:00

So I joined the upstream coreutils mailing list a few weeks back, because mkdir -p -m wasn't producing the desired results. I searched my almighty friend Google and couldn't come up with anything, so I assumed it was a bug and reported it upstream. Well, as it turns out, it's not a bug, it's a requirement of the POSIX standard. But I couldn't find anything on Google about it, so I figured I'd post here so the someone may find it, since the same question was asked on the mailing list last week. Basically, when you create directories with -p -m , only the last element has the desired mode. This is due to the above referenced standard, which states that the behavior of -p is to create the parent directories as defined by the current umask, adding write and execute permissions for the owner if he would not get them per the current umask, and finally to create the final directory with the specified mode. Stupid standard, in my opinion, but hey, it's laid out right there in black and white. Above my pay grade to change it :)

Throwing my name in

2008-11-12T20:44:00.003-05:00

Well, a few days ago I threw my name in for re-election on FESCo, but I had a bit of a dilemma to contend with. Should I or should I not run for the Fedora Board at the same time? I solved that today, and decided that I would. There are a number of other very qualified candidates running for the Board, and it's an honor to join them in this election. Each candidate brings a unique perspective to the position, and I figured that I'd highlight a few below, and then mention a few of my own Dimitris Glezos leads our translation team. Via a team of hundreds or thousands of (mostly) volunteer translators, Fedora gets translated into many different languages for use around the world. This extends the reach of Fedora (and FOSS in general) to folks whose native language is not English. I count around 90 languages on translate.fedoraproject.org. As someone who speaks only English, I can't even imagine how difficult that task is :) Michael DeHaan is the primary upstream maintainer (I guess you could call him that) of func and cobbler, however he is more of a community enabler than a dictator. Michael is one of few people that I've met that truly understands the open source development model, and the fact that you need BOTH community and corporate contributions in order for a project to be viable as a true upstream project. Through "Community EKG", we can see that some projects are doing better at that than others. Which brings me to what my unique qualifications are. As someone who has a vested career interest in FOSS (I've been a Linux sysadmin for about 10 years now), however is not a developer, what I see my role as is three things:

An advocate of Fedora and FOSS in general
Someone who removes obstatcles for all contributors
A person to get more users into being contributors (both as developers and in the many non-development roles that Fedora has to offer)

For my "hard" qualifications, I'm a current member of FESCo, and I lead the bug triage effort in Fedora, along with John Poelstra. I maintain a few packages. and co-maintain a few in EPEL. I will be taking part in the "town-hall" style meetings, and I invite people to email me privately with any questions. I am also available on Fedora Talk, at extension 5102788 or sip:jstanley@fedoraproject.org. If I don't know what's causing pain, I can't do anything about it :).

Got my XO

2008-11-10T21:56:00.002-05:00

So, I finally got my XO today, and am typing this on it, trying to get the feel of it, so if there are more typos than normal here, that's why :). I applied for a devkey first thing out of the box, since that takes 24 hours to process. Then I upgraded it to build 767 (no, it has nothing to do with airplanes) which is much better. The one weird thing that I notice is that the little menu bar at the top in Blogger is all garbled for some reason...time to look for/file a bug on that I guess (on the OLPC tracker since I'm running Sugar right now). I bought two SD cards to use for Fedora testing - the standard 4GB one and a 16GB one (both SanDisk Extreme III). Why the huge one? If I need to get profiling or crash information off, it's incredibly helpful to have debuginfo, and I'll be able to spin a LiveCD with debuginfo and throw it on the large card. That's about all I've got for now, more to come as it develops!

Halloween - some thoughts

2008-11-01T04:22:00.002-04:00

Halloween is supposed to be a time of ghouls and ghosts and in general good times. While I for the most part had a good time this halloween, going to Spitzer's corner (a great beer bar) with my friend Dan, and then heading over to the venerable Burp Castle, where I met my friend Sean and his girlfriend Katherine, it's after that which became truly memorable, and not in a good way. After spending some time at the castle, we decided to head off to a little place called 1 and 1, which is a place at (you guessed it) the intersection of First Street and First Ave. All my friends presented their ID's to the bouncer at the door and promptly gained admittance. I presented my ID at the door, and was flatly denied admittance, with no reason given. I can only presume that the reason was that my ID was from the great state of New Jersey, which is commonly viewed as a second class citizen in New York. We're just there to cause problems and deny the experience to "true" New Yorkers. Well, needless to say, I didn't put up any type of fight with the bouncer (anyone who knows me knows that I'm not that type of person), however, I promptly called over my friend who had just gotten in the door. The bouncer explained that there was "no negotiation" which wasn't a problem for me or Sean. Except that there is negotiation in situations like this. The negotiation of the mighty dollar. In times like this, you would think that bars would welcome customers with six-figure salaries that had money to spend there (after all, I'd just happily paid a tab in excess of $100 for me and Dan at Spitzer's Corner). Apparently not this one. Since they didn't welcome me, they didn't welcome my friends either. Their loss, mine and my friend's gain. "One and One", you've just lost a customer for life. And entirely likely, the several others that were with me as well. I'm none the worse off for it, I have money that I may not have otherwise, that could have belonged to you. I encourage everyone else reading this to likewise refrain from patronizing this establishment. How does this relate to open source in any way? Well, from 1st and 1st, I walked to 9th and 6th (without event, mind you), and waited for the PATH train to take me back to "scumbag New Jersey", I had to get on the train taking me to midtown, since the downtown one was apparently too full. Now, there was this person that got on the train that was dressed in a penguin costume. I asked if it had anything to do with Linux, and he said that I was the second person to ask that tonight! He said that while he himself didn't run Linux, some of his friends did. How I wish I would have had a LiveCD with me tonight! It would have all been worth it.

New toys are cool

2008-10-17T19:56:00.003-04:00

So I ordered a new toy: a Grandstream GXP-2000 VoIP phone to use with Fedora Talk. After a little bit of consternation, I got it to work! So here's the settings that I used in case someone else is interested: SIP Server: fedoraproject.org SIP User ID: jstanley (my FAS account name) Authenticate User ID: jstanley Password: (the password that I set in FAS on the VoIP option) Use DNS SRV records: yes NAT Traversal (STUN): yes Then in the advanced settings I set the STUN server to stun.ekiga.net, setup syslog since I was having issues (which wasn't incredibly helpful), and that's about it! You can reach me at extension 5102788 on Fedora Talk, which has a PSTN gateway at (919) 424-0063 or a few others that you can find on the Fedora Talk webpage!

Finally home from OLF

2008-10-13T17:41:00.002-04:00

Well, I sure did have an interesting travel day today. I signed up for Flight Status Notifications from AA for my flight today, and checked my Blackberry when I was about ready to leave for the gate to find that my flight was delayed (from 11:10 to noon, not a big deal). Then I thought to look at my crackberry again, and found that the flight had cancelled...arrggghh. Called AA reservations, and they had automatically rebooked me on some crazy route going through Chicago. I figured that was the best they could do, and resigned myself to waiting 5 hours beyond my original flight time in the airport. I went up to the AA lady at a gate (not my original gate, they'd taken care of everybody at the original time of the flight that I didn't show up at the gate for since it was delayed, right?). Shew as like "where have you been, we took care of everyone from that flight earlier...", I explained that because of the delay, I hadn't bothered to even check further on it til I was to head for my gate, and found that it was cancelled. Anyhow, the lady was real nice, and booked me on a USAirways Express flight from CMH to LGA, which worked out nicely. I got on the plane, and the flight attendant told me that in order to get a Coke, it'd cost me $2. I didn't think that this was a great deal of money, but I figured that for $2, I'd get a 20oz bottle, not the 12oz can. How wrong I was! Had to have been the most expensive Coke I've ever had! It was good though. Moral of the story: 1) Show up on time for your flight, even if you know it's late. 2) Never buy a Coke on USAirways again, unless you like being ripped off.

Pictures from Ohio Linux Fest

2008-10-12T23:13:00.002-04:00

Sorry I didn't do two things: 1) Post these earlier 2) Take more pictures Anyhow, you can find 21 pictures that I took at OLF, some good, some bad, some indifferent here. :)

Ohio Linux Fest and FADNA recap

2008-10-12T13:35:00.002-04:00

Well, FADNA just wrapped up, but I'm staying here til Monday. There were like 13 of us at the first ever FADNA, a great turnout! At Ohio Linux Fest, I worked with Clint Savage and Brian Powell in order to make a script for a USB creation station that will automatically create a USB stick when you insert a key into the machine via a udev rule. Clint formatted his external hard drive with JFS (arrrggghhh!), and I didn't have the right JFS userspace tools on my F9 laptop, so I couldn't use it. Good thing that I had the foresight to buy a 320GB external drive prior to OLF and rsync my local mirror to it, so that I could install the JFS tools :). Also because of having a mirror with me, I was able to spin an updated iso for the creation station with updates as of when I sync'ed to it. The image unfortunately came out a bit oversized for a CD, by about 7MB. Not a big deal, since it was intended for use on USB. However, a gentleman did come up who had a machine that wouldn't work with F9 GA (he had one of the Samsung drives that had a / in the serial number), so I had to burn the respin to a DVD for him, and he was incredibly happy that we could do that! After we got the USB creation station working (minus the udev rule), we went in to the booth, I made a few USB sticks throughout the day. Work on the udev rule and automagically creating them will be undertaken soon, so what we'll have is a remix that will Just Work(TM) Today at FADNA, we discussed the expectations of Fedora ambassadors, the new-founded mentorship project, and various marketing items, such as the making of the Event Box and the Ambassador Kit, and what components will go in there. There's a hackfest that's planned for FUDCon in Boston in January in order to actually assemble an Ambassador Kit (we want to have the specs for the ambassador kit prior to Boston, so that we can actually focus on design and assembly there). All in all, this was a VERY fun and productive weekend for me, well worth the trip out to Ohio!

Ohio Linux Fest, Day 0

2008-10-10T15:48:00.002-04:00

Well, I arrived safely from NYC, and I'm now checked into the Holiday Inn Express in Grove City where we're having FADNA, and several other folks are staying I believe. I've never been to Columbus before, and found the airport rather nice - however, the signs at the airport are eerily the same as they are at LGA - same font, color scheme, etc. I think that for both of those airports, someone just called up Generic Airport Express and said "one large airport, please!" :) Seriously I liked CMH better than LGA, but probably because LGA is in the middle of a massive renovation project at the moment. In concourse C of LGA there's not even a bar where one can sit down (I've flown AA out of LGA before, but never from concourse C, which is a different security checkpoint, so you can't even use the stuff on concourse D...arrrggghhh!) Anyhow, enough airport talk, how's what I came here for? Brian Pepple picked me up right on time at CMH, we grabbed a quick bite to eat to hold us over til dinner, and then went back to the airport to pick up Paul Frields.dropped Paul off at his hotel, and then drove me down to Grove City, which brings me to where I am now :) More to come later, after the pre-party at Brewer's - hopefully they have good microbrew, with a name like that! :)

Hi-ho! Hi-ho! It's off to Ohio we go!

2008-10-04T19:18:00.002-04:00

OK, maybe my comedy isn't so good, but I just made late reservations to be at Ohio Linux Fest next weekend! I look forward to seeing a lot of folks there. The main reason that I'm going, however, is for the first FAD North America! Should be a good productive time. The only bad part was that the only semi-reasonable cost flight that I could get back was Monday morning. Oh well, got plenty of vacation days to burn!

Google Turning Ten, Fedora Five

2008-09-27T20:41:00.002-04:00

Well, I haven't posted something about Fedora's fifth anninversary yet. I'm being assaulted with media about Google turning ten. Let me share my thoughts on this after more than a few beers, a couple Long Island Iced Tea's, and a nice coffee at the local Starbucks in Hoboken (where I'm writing this) So Google's tenth anniversary - good for them. I think they have long departed from their moto of "do no evil" however. They have filed for patents on various things (which I should have better commented on at the time of publication) about things like a datacenter on an island (for which their is previous evidence of prior art, be it public or private) , a fee-free system of mobile communications, which the wireless providers here in the states have already implemented, or a variety of other things which are either not "novel", or other companies have already implemented. I personally don't feel that any of this represnets patentable ideas. Maybe I'll take this space, that being said, to tell you of what I think of patents in general. Software patents are evil. End all, be all, that's all I have to say on the topic - there's nothing unique about what they have developed. Instead, where patents should be applied is hardware and pharmaceuticals. I firmly believe that companies like Pfzier have invested millions or billions into the drugs that they market. Intel has invested millions into R&D of the products that they produce. So has AMD. I don't believe that those investments should be rendered useless. Instead, I think that those investments should be rewarded, as does probably any reasonable person. However, 2+2=4. No human could deny that. However, that's exactly what the people and firms that attempt to acquire software patents represent as original, creative thinking. A whole bunch of hogwash if you me. While not exactly the concept of 2+2, obvious concepts have certaintly been patented. This MUST st0p.

Software Freedom Day NYC 2008

2008-09-21T21:55:00.003-04:00

Yesterday was Software Freedom Day, and I attended the celebration hosted by the Lime Group here in NYC. Also sponsoring the event was the Software Freedom Law Center. Thanks! I went wearing my lovely new Fedora Ambassador shirt, and got lots of comments that folks loved the shirt, talked a little about Fedora with them, and I think did a fairly good job representing Fedora there. One of the most interesting conversations that I had was with a gentleman from the New York City Office of Emergency Management, talking about an open source application within the city government, called Sahana. This application was initially developed after the Asian tsunami of 2004 to aid in disaster relief and coordination. The city has modified the software to aid not in post-disaster relief, but rather pre-disaster preparedness. NYC is the city that is third-most at risk in the country for a catastrophic hurricane (after New Orleans and Miami). In the event of a hurricane, the city has 500 shelters designated, where 68,000 trained city workers would have to go in order to handle about 605,000 evacuees, and attend to their basic needs. This system helps to make sure that occurs, track the evacuees from the time that they enter the shelter to when they leave, and related functions. Upstream Sahana has a demo instance at demo.sahana.lk The conversation also brought up the point of interoperability. Other agencies use proprietary software, sometimes multitudes of different packages, all of which have incompatible data formats. NYC is responsible for operating the shelters for 7 days - 2 days before a storm and 5 days after. After that, another agency comes in and takes over. The records for the evacuees, which already exist in an open electronic format in Sahana, cannot be consumed by the other agency. The records must be transferred ON PAPER. This is an excellent example of where interoperability is key, and propietary systems have hindered it. It's really a sad state of affairs. Then there were the speeches that came from the sponsors, Eben Moglen of SLFC made a very interesting comment that I have to quote here: "In the words of Gandhi, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Insert a step between then they fight you and then you win - you get a holiday" :) Happy belated Software Freedom Day everybody!

New NYC-local Fedora mailing list

2008-09-18T17:47:00.002-04:00

Well, the New York Linux Meetup got really tired of the infrastructure provided by Meetup for their mailing list, so we've started our own, and since I'm hosting it via Mailman, I can set up however many lists that I want, obviously. So I decided that it would be good to have a local Fedora list. What's the advantage of a local list rather than say fedora-list? Simple - you can go out and have a coffee, beer, or whatever with the folks on this list, and build real-life relationships with folks. The list page is here, if you're local to the NYC metro (and even if you're not), feel free to sign up for the list and introduce yourself!

Quiet here too

2008-09-13T21:07:00.003-04:00

I was reading Planet Fedora tonight, saw Josh's post, and realized that I hadn't blogged about anything Fedora-related for quite awhile. Not that there has been nothing going on, just that I haven't been inclined to blog about it since I, as Josh, have either said everything that I wanted to on the lists or IRC. I do really want to apologize for not being as involved day-to-day as I'd like to be, some of you know that $DAYJOB has been particularly demanding of me, the good news is that those demands are beginning to lighten as I transition some of my responsibilities in the project to other folks. This weekend is the first time in awhile that I've had to concentrate on Fedora, and it just so happens to coincide with beta freeze! This is good from a QA perspective, it means that I get to pound on frozen bits for a bit. I've already filed several bugs this weekend on stuff. Right now, I'm attempting an install of the entire distribution. I'll provide some interesting (to me) stats after that finishes, probably in a few hours. There are 3 packages that I've had to exclude due to file conflicts, not bad! I really wish that anaconda would have a 'Select All' box in the optional package selection dialog, my thumb is sore! For example, there are 222 packages in the 'Games' comps group, only 5 of which are marked default. That's a lot of clicking!

Windows == massive fail.

2008-09-10T18:59:00.003-04:00

As if we didn't already know this, Windows is the biggest example of fail known to man. Let me elaborate a little bit. $DAYJOB requires that I use Windows on my work-issued laptop (and the VPN software doesn't work so hot on current Linux distros), so I'm kind of stuck with using it. I have rebooted this machine 3 times TODAY. Two times, I ran into the dreaded 'Interface not ready' errors in the Nortel Contivity client - in the client stats, transmit and receive bytes don't increment, but this counter does - no idea what it means, but I've found the only recourse is to reboot the machine - no idea why that happens. Sometimes it doesn't happen for days, sometimes it occurs multiple times per day with no rhyme or reason. The other time, I installed Project 2003 SP3. Since I don't have Project 2007 and received a file created by it, it helpfully directed me to a webpage that told me that I need to install SP3 in order to view the file. Did that, and it prompted me to reboot. Why do I have to reboot for a simple application patch installation???? I feel that I've spent more time today rebooting (and writing this post complaining about it) than doing actual, productive work. Thus, I conclude that Windows is epic fail.

Awww, not Premier Black

2008-09-04T11:04:00.002-04:00

Apparently the last post was, as I suspected, an email marketing campaign that was supposed to be targeted to the suckers^Wpeople that spend a large amount of their income at Worst^WBest Buy. Best Buy can't even get their e-mail lists straight, they're so incompetent. Don't expect any higher level of competence if you actually venture into one of their stores. You better know exactly what you're looking for. With all this said, I still think they should do something for the inconvenience that we all experienced by receiving that mail, free shipping sounds good!

Woohoo! I'm "Premier Black"

2008-09-03T17:41:00.002-04:00

I'm not sure what it means, but I got a e-mail from Best Buy today saying that I was one of their "most elite" customers, so I get more stuff from the Reward Zones program. I supposedly get stuff like 'Point Banking', free shipping on bestbuy.com, some weird concierge service that I'm not sure what it is. I unfortunately can't see what this means, since going to myrewardzone.com, it gives me a 'SERVER TOO BUSY' error. Geez, sounds like a marketing campaign that got out of control to me....

Doing good....

2008-08-13T22:51:00.002-04:00

Well, I just had my 6 week post-op doctors appointment today - where she removed all activity restrictions! Of course, that doesn't mean I'm well again - just that I can do more, and don't have to go around wearing a stupid sling! My arm is still obviously very weak from not using it for two months. We start active range of motion and strengthening in therapy tomorrow, which is likely to be very painful, so she gave me Vicodin to take prior to therapy. Wish me luck!

MDU Communications fail.

2008-08-04T18:12:00.003-04:00

Well, the big day came today - the day when I was to get hooked up to the DirecTV MFH2 system in my building. Note that I said "was to". They called me this morning and said "can the tech come early?" I told them they absolutely can come whenever they want to. So about 30 minutes later the guy shows up. He fiddles around with my setup for a little while, comes and goes, calls lots of people, and finally says "well, there seems to be a problem and the lead tech is going to have to come, he'll be here in about an hour or two. I've got some more to do in the building, so I'll come back before I leave and if he hasn't come I'll hook you back up to the old system so you have something". Well, it's now 6PM. I've not seen any sign of any tech, either this new "lead tech" or the original one who promised to come back by. So I called up and they said that "since the tech couldn't come today, they'll be following up with you either today or tomorrow to schedule another time". So now I'm in worse shape than I was this morning, with NO working DirecTV service, and not a single clue of when I'm going to get service of any variety working again. What ever happened to customer service?

DirecTV hotness

2008-07-27T13:33:00.002-04:00

Well, as some of you might know I live in a high-rise apartment building in the NYC metro area, I got fairly psyched when I checked my mail today, and had a letter from MDU Communications in there - they actually operate the DirecTV system in my building. The letter told me that they have finished installing a MFH2 system. This is some really cool stuff, it means that I'll be able to get all of the HD channels that are offered by DirecTV. The technology used here is also really amazing. They've found a way to deliver programmng to up to 8 receivers in the apartment - the nifty device that does this is called the SWM-8 (single wire multiswitch). This little gem is installed where the dish and other electronics are, not in my unit - previously to get HD programming, I've got four satellite feeds coming into my unit and a multiswitch in a locked box inside my closet. Now they're gonna yank out that multiswitch, replace the four wires with one, and a few splitters.

Elected to FESCo

2008-07-22T09:08:00.002-04:00

Well, I seem to have been elected to FESCo for a single-release term. I intend to serve the community well in this vital role. representing the triage and larger QA communities within Fedora, as well as be very active in the feature process for this release. Along with the territory comes thing such as resolving disputes, oversight of the various SIG's, etc.

I am psyched!

2008-07-21T18:41:00.003-04:00

Well, I started physical therapy last Friday. Over the weekend, I kicked my own ass doing all of the exercises that the therapist had me doing. Today, I went back for my second appointment, and something that had caused me significant pain on Friday - stretching my arm out to my side as far as I could - was almost effortless. She then had me extend my arm out in front of me as far as I could, and I was able to fully extend my arm, something that she said no one had ever been able to do their first time! Again, this was without much effort or pain. Followed by some pully exercises, and I could definitely feel it stretching, but not to the point of pain. All in all a great day, and I can't wait to see my doctor next week to get some of the activity restrictions lifted hopefully. Sometimes it's the little victories in life that make you feel the best :)

Post-post FUDCon and surgery update

2008-07-04T23:32:00.002-04:00

Well, I realized that I didn't do a post-FUDCon post (I suck), and figured that I'd provide an update on where my shoulder surgery saga is at. First for the surgery part - I got out of all my bandages and off the ice machine this morning, and have felt good throughout the day. I've been feeling so good that I think I'm going to discontinue the narcotic pain relief come Monday after a call to my doctor (just to make sure that they're not working better than I think they are :) ). I'm now a free man! For the FUDCon part, I was a Summit attendee as well. I was the fairly easy one to spot, my arm was in a sling (technically a Velpeau immobilizer) the whole time and I was in a great deal of pain (somewhat managed by Percocet). I have to give very heartfelt thanks to Paul Frields, without whom I don't know what I would have done (likely stayed in my hotel room in agonizing pain from trying to do basic things). Paul was originally supposed to stay with me for one night so that he could do some pre-FUDCon planning since I was going to the Summit and arriving Tuesday night. After he helped me out so much on Wednesday morning, I asked if he would mind staying with me throughout the week - without hesitation he did, and helped me through in my time of need. Thanks Paul! Hacked for a few hours on Thursday on Testopia, and several hours in the afternoon on Friday was a very productive discussion around Spacewalk (and me stepping out several times trying to call surgeons, that didn't go so well). The good news is that by Saturday, the pain had magically disappeared, and everything was in order for the FUDCon BarCamp day :) Started the day by giving a bug triage talk, which was well-attended. However, a Spacewalk talk was in that same timeslot, and while I consider myself good at many things, being in two places at once is not one of them. Sorry guys. Then I went on to Jeremy Katz's informative talk on git. Really a good source control system, and I look forward to working with it more (after all, Spacewalk is in a git repo :) ). Had a nice talk over lunch with James Laska over the where snake could go. Talked about templating, and learned about the Python templating that snake can do. Really cool stuff. After that it was into FUNC, which shows promise as a replacement for OSAD in Spacewalk. The one sticky point right now is that the overlord connects to the minion, rather than the other way around, which could cause problems in some security models. A lot of promise, though. Then there was the other talk that I was a part of, the one on Testopia. We're going to be using it as a proof-of-concept for Fedora 10, with a recommendation on usage for general releases to come after it, depending on how things work out for F10. Any questions on Testopia feel free to contact me, Dave Malcolm, Will Woods, or Jesse Keating. Wrapping up the day was a talk on the most awesome Cobbler, which will be replacing the provisioning functionality within Spacewalk in the foreseeable future! Hooray for single-purpose tools that can be integrated in order to perform much more complex tasks (aka "Voltronic Software" - thanks Michael DeHaan, that's a great term!) Then there was Paul's state of Fedora speech, and then of course FUDPub. All in all a really good day, and very productive.

Done with surgery :)

2008-07-02T10:50:00.002-04:00

I'm feeling MUCH better than I expected I would post-operatively. I can't say enough good things about the EBIce Cold Therapy system they gave me - it's da bomb! Better than an ice pack, there's nothing that I have to do to get nice, cool skin, except be hooked up to it! It consists of the cool part, a hose, a cooler (looks like a picnic cooler), and the temperature control and power supply. What sucks is that I can't get it on by myself - I can't reach the hose hookup that's attached to my body. Oh well....

American medical system fail.

2008-06-30T14:05:00.002-04:00

Well, I'm having surgery tomorrow - so I asked the doctor's office if I could get the prescriptions that I'll need for pain today since I live by myself, and it would be easier for me to get them filled while I'm still feeling like a human being. "Sure, just come by the office. They're narcotics, so we can't call them in". Why not? I realize the need to control distribution of drugs that are frequently abused (such as what they gave me), but I don't see how me going all the way to the doctor's office (which is pretty far out of my way), picking up little slips of paper, and then presenting those slips of paper to a pharmacist achieves that goal any better than this Utopian system: Doctor prescribes medication, via a secure website (or some other electronic means), accessible to all pharmacies in the state (or country, for that matter). Pharmacy gets prescription , verifies my ID, fills the prescription, and I go on my way. No pointless trips to the doctor's office, no little slips of paper to lose/be stolen/whatever, and all in all a better experience for the patient. Instead of being an affair that takes 2 hours out of my day, it could take the 30 minutes that it took for the prescriptions to actually be filled. OK, I'm done complaining. Hopefully I'll be out of commission no more than a few days from this surgery.

State of the Fedora Board

2008-06-27T21:02:00.002-04:00

Well, as you know, I ran for the Fedora board and was not elected. That's OK, I didn't really expect to be, and I'm quite happy with the results of the election and the state of the Board. However, the results and the ending composition of the Board has sparked a great thread on fedora-advisory-board that I felt obliged to respond to. As some of you know, I broke my arm immediately before Summit/FUDCon (and went anyway), so my pace of blogging/replying to e-mail has been a little less than what it perhaps should be in these circumstances. I'm going to try and make that up here, responding to some of the topics that have been brought up. 1. Request for voter representation by employer statistics I think that this is utter hogwash, wanting to know how many votes were @redhat.com vs. those that weren't. To me, there really is no distinction. Take folks like Jesse Keating, Mike McGrath, or Seth Vidal for example (two of whom were elected to the Board this cycle). Red Hat hired those people, FROM THE COMMUNITY, in order to enable them to do more great work on Fedora - not to further some corporate interest. There are also people that Red Hat hired long before Fedora existed - take Tom Callaway. He's been a Red Hat employee since the dark ages I think, but I don't view him as any less of a community member or leader than Jesse, Mike, Seth, or anyone else. We also have community leaders such as Máirín Duffy, who leads the art team. She also happens to work for Red Hat, however, Fedora is not her primary responsibility - she works on the RHN Satellite team. Is she less of a community member or leader than anyone else? I don't think so. 2. Red Hat's commitment to the community I don't see anything in Fedora right now that in any way brings into question Red Hat's commitment to the community in my mind. They just paid a rather large amount of money (and do so every ~6 months) to put on FUDCon, for example. There's nothing that states that as a requirement, in fact, I'd be willing to venture that it was a pretty hard sell inside of Red Hat to start doing these. 3. Voter Turnout I have to agree that with a turnout of 250 out of 4069 possible voters, that there is something broken with this system. If you are reading this and did not vote, I'd really like to know why not. If you do not understand the importance of what the Fedora Board does, it's not a bunch of guys in suits that gather in a room and smoke cigars, it's a REAL, ACTUAL decision making body that has been empowered to decide the future of Fedora in various ways. Even though most of the Board's meetings and communication happen behind closed doors, there's no secret about what the board does, generally (except when it comes to matters that they can't discuss - legal matters for instance). I don't think that the lack of turnout (at least to this degree) expresses that the community is content with the status quo. I believe that we are missing large segments of the community in the electorate, and need to find a way to reach out to them and encourage them to vote. I think that's all I have to say for now. I am going to continue with what I ran for the Board on (the recruitment and retention of non-traditional contributors to Fedora). I'm going to need all the help that I can in finding these folks, though :). Congrats to those who are on the Board, I know that you will serve us well. To Dennis, Josh, and JonRob, everything that you do for Fedora is appreciated, and you are no less leaders in this community than you were before these elections.

Didn't break my shoulder

2008-06-25T21:16:00.003-04:00

I broke my arm instead, at the joint of the shoulder :). In official sounding medical terms, I have a "right proximal humerus fracture, avulsion greater tuberosity fragment". Unfortunately, this means surgery to put the bone fragment back where it belongs, and rejigger (yes, that's a technical term :) ) the muscles of the rotator cuff. I'll never have full range of motion in my right arm again, but most of it will return. Surgery next Tuesday, which is outpatient. No idea when I can be back online after that - hopefully no more than a few days. After that comes physical therapy in order to regain range of motion. I'm doing exercises now to keep the muscles loose, too.

AA fail

2008-06-22T16:57:00.002-04:00

I'm travelling back home from Boston today. I've just been deplaned from the airplane in Boston, not having gone anywhere. I had forgotten to create a flight status notification on aa.com, so I went to go do it, and found that my flight was listed "In transit", having departed at 3:43. That sounds about like the time that we pushed back from the gate the first time. Well I figured I'd still try and create the notification, but it tells me that I'm trying to do it for a flight that's already taken off. I'M SITTING RIGHT HERE IN THE %@#@ AIRPORT, it's not gone anywhere! Massive fail. Maybe I'll get to JFK sometime tonight,

Project Spacewalk is live!

2008-06-22T01:33:00.001-04:00

I'm happy to report that the code of RHN Satellite has been open-sourced, under the name Spacewalk. For those unfamiliar with Satellite, this is a huge addition to the pool of available opensource management software. It provides management, provisioning, and monitoring for both Linux and Solaris platforms. It is immediately available in both source and binary forms, with a yum repository being available at https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/HowToInstall, while the source is available as a git repo at http://spacewalk.redhat.com/repository.html First, let's take a brief look at the features of the project. First and foremost is software inventory and management. Through the use of software "channels", you control what package are available to which clients. You can use this functionality to move software between development, QA, and production, for example, and not have to have multiple copies of the software in various yum repositories if that is how you've managed software up to this point. Another advantage of using a management tool such as Spacewalk instead of various yum repos is that you have a centralized view of packages that are on a given system, and an easy way to get systems that are out of compliance easily up to date, without even logging in to the host. Have you ever needed to compare the package sets of two systems, perhaps because one was behaving eratically and the other one was working fine, and you couldn't tell the differences between the two systems? Spacewalk makes it trivial to compare AND reconcile differences between two systems with the click of a button. Tired of deploying configuration files by hand to multitudes of machines? Through the use of configuration channels, that's no longer something that you need to spend your time doing. Unlike some configuration tools, both global configurations may be specified, which are applied to any system subscribed to the channel, as well as local overrides to those configuration files at the individual system level. All of the items listed above can either be scheduled for execution as soon as the machine checks in with Spacewalk, or at some arbitrary time in the future. The architecture is that of a 'pull' - the end systems run a daemon that periodically checks in with the Spacewalk server. Also available is functionality, enabled via a Jabber server, to schedule actions for more precise time-based execution. Most of the functions of Spacewalk that can apply to more than one system can be executed via the System Set Manager (SSM) in order to have the same change applied to a set of systems at the same time. Some of the short term goals for Spacewalk include the integration of Cobbler to replace the existing provisioning functionality and migration of the backend database to something open source. Some longer term goals include integration of Func (possibly to replace/supplement OSAD), and possibly using Puppet for the configuration management functionality. A very short term goal is to get Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL manageable within the same organization - there are currently some technical limitations to this happening. In the meantime, however, these are manageable in separate organizations. The opening of the Satellite codebase allows the usage of Spacewalk, and the downstream RHN Satellite product, as an integration platform for best-of-breed open source management technologies, rather than having to grow all of the functionality internally within Satellite itself. It also allows users of the commercial product a lot of input into the direction of where the product goes, and if a feature is a priority for them, they are free to implement it themselves upstream!

Broke my shoulder

2008-06-21T22:34:00.002-04:00

Well, I fell and broke my shoulder on Monday, went to Boston for FUDCon and the Summit on Tuesday. Going back to NJ tomorrow, where I get to deal with finding an orthopaedic surgeon. I'm likely to venture into NYC for this, since I don't really think that there's viable medical care in Jersey City (at least at Jesey City Medical Center) after reading what I've read online. I'll call my primary (who's in NYC) on Monday and see if I can get a referral to an orthopaedic that can see me sooner rather than later. More to come on this saga as it develops.

H&M Powerhouse finally getting the attention it deserves

2008-06-15T19:00:00.003-04:00

I just read this at the Hudson Reporter (thanks Google News for ever-increasing features that gets me locally relevant news!) which says that the Jersey City Council agreed to a proposal to spend $600,000 to relocate a power substation required in order to redevelop the historic H&M Powerhouse that provided power to the H&M Railroad, the predecessor to the current PATH system. The Powerhouse is currently an eyesore that I walk past every day on my way to work: The structure was completed in 1908, but operated until only 1929. It's been abandoned since, though the Port Authority does maintain a smaller substation on the property. The plan is to redevelop it. The developer that has been selected is David Cordish, who has lots of experience in revitalizing old structures, in particular powerhouses. He successfully redeveloped Baltimore's Inner Harbor Powerhouse into a Barnes and Noble and ESPNZone. They are also developing Ballpark Village in St. Louis. This project is designed to link the Jersey City waterfront with the rest of downtown Jersey City by creating the Powerhouse Arts District. This will be a 11-block mixed-use community, with residential, restaurants, and cultural attractions. All of this is being developed right on my doorstep. An exciting time to be a Jersey City resident. This should also hopefully resolve some discontinuity with the powerhouse and it's surroundings:

Concert in Review: R.E.M - Jones Beach Theater

2008-06-15T02:37:00.003-04:00

Well, I just got back from the R.E.M. concert at Jones Beach Theater. Make that the most memorable concert of my life. Yes, the music was great, but it's what happened before that made this concert unique. First off, the theater got struck by lightning before R.E.M. could even come on the stage, forcing the evacuation of the theater. The show got rescheduled for 10PM, and by around 9:50 they were letting people back to their seats. Though the major part of the storm had passed, there was still a quite steady rain throughout the whole show. I had lost my umbrella and had nothing else, so I wound up getting absolutely soaked, until soemone handed my umbrella back to me (come to think of it, I don't think it was actually mine - though it was the same model and color). Michael started with "Welcome to R.E.M. Survivor 2008!", and burst into Credence Clearwaters's "Have You Ever Seen The Rain". Following that, "So. Central Rain", then a song I can't for the life of me remember (again, relating to rain). Then on to the normal set, starting with "Living Well Is The Best Revenge". Some of the highlights of the evening were a mostly acoustic version of "Let Me In", a great (supposedly unrehearsed) "It's The End Of The World As We Know It", and of course all of the stuff from the new album - highlights including "Hollow Man" and "Man Sized Wreath" The peformance through the whole thing was absolutely spectacular. You might think that a band getting to their age couldn't tour anymore - think again. These guys sounded GREAT! I would have loved to see these guys at MSG instead of (or maybe in addition to) Jones Beach, but alas, I'll be at the Summit and FUDCon in Boston on Thursday when they play at MSG. Transportation to Jones Beach was easy and relatively fast - PATH to Penn Station, LIRR to Freehold and on to the N88 bus to take me to Jones Beach. The buses were waiting at the LIRR station, and right outside at the end of the concert - no worries there. UPDATE: Apparently I got the original artist wrong on "Have You Ever Seen The Rain". That error has been corrected.

R.E.M. Concert

2008-06-14T21:41:00.000-04:00

R.E.M. Concert

Well, I went to the REM concert at Jones Beach tonight - kinda. They say the shows happen rain or shine, but woth the weather as it is now, it is unsafe for anyone to be outdoors. The immediate storm seems to have passed, but when there's lightning within 20 yards of the venue, well that's a different story. They're mopping off the stage from the biblical but short storm and are hoping to reschedule for 10PM. We'll see how that goes.

The elections have begun!

2008-06-12T20:14:00.002-04:00

Well, the elections for the Fedora Board have officially begun. If you have signed the Fedora CLA, then you can vote! I'm on the ballot, so I'd encourage you to vote for me :) My Fedora related qualifications are many and varied, from being the lead of the bug triage project, to doing tons of QA work, am a package maintainer, and do various odd jobs around as needed :). My personal qualifications are that I'm a very dedicated individual, and can think outside of the box to solve any problem that I might be presented with. In the event of a dispute, I can come up with a solution that's amenable to both parties most of the time. In Fedora, sometimes tough decisions have to be made, and I'm prepared to make them - this isn't about politics or an ill-conceived popularity contest, rather, making the best decision that can be made given the information that we have is paramount. More of my qualifications are outlined at the wiki page detailing my nomination, and I am of course receptive to any questions that voters may have. Feel free to email me directly, or post to some mailing list that I frequent (Paul suggested fedora-advisory-board, which I do frequent and would be a great place to get the take of all of the candidates on any given issue). I possess no notable superpowers, however, for a superguy like myself, I don't think that's a problem! I'll work on it, though, I promise!

Well call me a liar

2008-06-10T15:41:00.002-04:00

No sooner do I brag that PATH service is reliable than this e-mail greets me in my inbox. Meh, and I have to go to the city tonight. Good thing I was planning on using the WTC station anyway, it'll just be super-crowded at rush-hour when I need to use it :/ This same thing happened just over a month ago - can't they learn that fires are bad? :) PATH service between 33rd Street and the Journal Square and Hoboken stations will be suspended in both directions throughout this evening due to power cable damage caused by a track fire between the Christopher and 9th Street stations. PATH stations at 33rd Street, 23rd Street, 14th Street, 9th Street and Christopher Street stations will be closed this evening. PATH will operate regular service on its Newark to World Trade Center and Hoboken to World Trade Center lines, and also will operate between Journal Square and Hoboken stations. NJ Transit will cross-honor PATH tickets on its trains and buses at Penn Station New York and Penn Station Newark. PATH passengers also can use the New York City subway system to pick up PATH service at the World Trade Center Station.

+1

2008-06-10T11:34:00.001-04:00

+1 to Dave's post :) Also, for the love of all that is holy, PLEASE don't advertise your hosting service on your blog. You know who you are. kthxbye

Fedora release party and infrastructure discussion tonight!

2008-06-10T08:48:00.002-04:00

If you're in the NYC area, I'm going to be giving a talk/discussion this evening at Think Coffee (the one on Mercer, around W 4th and Mercer) about the Fedora distribution compose tools and Fedora infrastructure, and holding the (better late than never) NYC Fedora 9 release party. So if you're around show up! We'll be in the downstairs meeting area. For bonus points, RSVP here.

Train travel in the Northeast - the real story :)

2008-06-09T20:40:00.003-04:00

Well, Seth is all over train travel again, complaining that there's not viable train service along the east coast. News flash! Around 2001, Amtrak introduced the Acela Express. This is the closest thing that the US has to a bullet train, and is the only way to travel in the Northeast Corridor (from Washington DC to Boston) from my point of view - it's cheaper, better, and faster than an airplane all said. That's for regional transportation. For local transportation, the New York City Subway is simply unbeatable. Reliable, safe (even at 3AM), and running 24/7, there's no other practical way to get around the city. While I live in Jersey City and have to take the PATH to get in to the city, it may as well just be an extension of the subway system (it takes different fares and is run by a different organization), running 24/7, safe, and reliable. I don't own a car, and for regional travel, rail is the way to go. So with all this, am I going to Boston via train for the Summit and FUDCon? Nope, via air because of stupid Amtrak service disruptions due to the replacement of a bridge apparently. Note that my opinion probably differs strongly from Seth's, since he's down in Raleigh and I'm actually in the civilized world (/me ducks :) ). Seriously, about two-thirds of the nations rail passengers live in NYC.

Testopia installation!

2008-06-07T21:42:00.002-04:00

It's been a few days since I've posted anything here, so I hope that this still works on Planet Fedora :). I created the right file, but haven't posted here since the config change. Anyway, I tried (and failed) to install Testopia today using our first cut at a package. So I figured that I'd install from upstream (the entire stack, Bugzilla and Testopia), and I'm happy to report that I now have a working installation. Next comes working with Dave to get the RPM in order (he seems to have that under control), and next, figuring out what in the world to do with this thing. The user interface looks really nice! My installation is available at http://i.am.jds2001.org/bugzilla/. Have fun!

My accomplishment today

2008-05-25T00:59:00.002-04:00

I triaged all of the bugs against the 'upstart' component in Fedora today. Managed to close 30% of them (OK, so that sounds better than it really is - 3 out of 10 :) ). All of this took me under an hour to do, and that included actually testing some of them via a new install of F9. In other news, I'm working on a presentation for how to do this stuff that will be presented at FUDCon Boston. Hopefully we can get some new contributors with great documentation! This really isn't some magic science, it's really simple stuff!

New wiki deployment on Tuesday!

2008-05-24T00:39:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday, May 27th, Fedora will be moving to MediaWiki at long last! A predeployment is up here. There will be no such thing anymore as a wikiname, EditGroup, or anything of the sort in Fedora, and the signup process for an FAS account has already been streamlined to a click-through CLA instead of GPG signatures and the like. A few people deserve special mention in this effort:

Paul Frields, Our fearless leader. Under his leadership, the GPG signing requirement of the CLA was lifted. This was a major barrier to entry to Fedora, that is now gone.
Mike McGrath, team lead of the Infrastructure project - Mike has done a great job of nurturing the actual scripts that are doing the transition from Moin to MediaWiki, converting the markup and such.
Máirín Duffy - She did a lot of the CSS and stylistic work that went into the new template
Ian Weller - Ian did a ton of work on the template, problems with conversions (there were a ton of these). Without his wealth of MediaWiki knowledge, this would not be the success that we anticipate it to be. Ian has also written several MediaWiki plugins just for this deployment!
Ricky Zhou - Ricky has done a lot of great work on FAS2 (the replacement to the old Fedora Account System). His latest work directly related to this deployment was the FAS OpenID provider, which he's putting the finishing touches on as I type this :). This will be in beta for this deployment, eventually it will be required, however.

There were also a lot of other people involved in this. I really think that this was a great example of how a cross-functional group can come together and make something enormous happen in a relatively small period of time - we've only been working on this in earnest for about 2 months. Great work everyone! (and after Tuesday, we'll just be sitting back on the beach drinking our Mai-Tais - NOT! :) )

Finally got it

2008-05-20T21:54:00.002-04:00

Well, I finally got my new Thinkpad. UPS shipping is really fast! I've had a few issues thus far, but certainly no showstoppers. The biggest issue was that, as I expected from what I'd heard after I bought it, compiz performance is not to be found on this machine. Hopefully there will be a newer update to xorg-x11-drv-intel to fix this sometime in the future. But in the end, who really needs eye candy? Other than that, it just worked like a charm right out of the box. All of the function keys work (suspend, brightness, even battery status), even the little LED light on top of the monitor turns on and off on command (which, despite it's detractors that I've read online, does actually provide some benefit in low-light situations). Smolt profile here. It's a fun little toy!

Red Hat Bugzilla 3.2 beta1 up!

2008-05-20T21:31:00.002-04:00

I'll spare you the complete announcement, but Red Hat Bugzilla 3.2 Beta 1 is now available for testing in a test instance here. Email is disabled in this instance, so feel free to make any changes that you want, test how your workflow works, and other stuff. The user interface has undergone a major overhaul, and I really like the new interface as compared to the old one. Let's see how everyone else likes it!

My Thinkpad finally shipped

2008-05-19T08:33:00.001-04:00

Well, got an email from Lenovo yesterday informing me that my Thnkpad R61 had shipped. Now I can hardly wait for it! I've heard through the grapevine that I may have issues with it in F9 due to the Intel GMA965 graphics - I thought that would be a safe bet. Any comments as to what exactly the issues are?

My Greendex score

2008-05-16T12:05:00.002-04:00

Well, I was reading Seth's blog, and decided to take the test myself. My score was a paltry 52, maybe the fact that my household of one has 6 computers (4 of which run 24/7 - they didn't ask anything about that, though) contributed to it. However, I don't own a car, however, but I put the shared ride part at like once a week since I occasionally take taxis (maybe I overrated how much I actually do - I took one last night from the most excellent Hop Devil Grill, but I really can't remember the one prior), I guess that lowers the score. Oh well, I'll count on folks like Seth and Karsten to counter my bad ways :)

Coming soon to a browser near you - a new Fedora wiki!

2008-05-13T21:09:00.005-04:00

As some of you may know by now (or may not), a new wiki is coming to the Fedora project! Our previous wiki, MoinMoin, has been pretty unreliable due to scalability issues. We were the largest deployment of Moin, and it just didn't scale. You may have noticed this in the form of slow response, frequent timeouts, internal server errors, and other assorted bad things. Good news being, we‘ve got a replacement now - we're going to the tried and true, battle tested MediaWiki. There is a conversion script for Moin that was available, and was modified by Mike McGrath to fit our needs. Máirín Duffy anad Ian Weller did all the template work, and I just sat back and made sure everything I was interested in rendered correctly :). Now the time has come for everyone else to see that things have rendered OK. There are a few known issues with this incarnation: 1) The license tag at the bottom says CC-BY-SA, this is not correct, we are not relicensing the content. This will be correct soonish. 2) Where the Art team did banners for various projects, those are replaced by HTML at this point. Those will have to be manual conversions to MediaWiki templates. We can no longer allow embedded HTML in the wiki (it had been on the table for some time to remove the capability, there are inherent security issues in it). Without further ado, you can testdrive the new wiki here. This is going live soon, like 2-3 weeks soon, so get your feedback in!

Oracle fail.

2008-05-13T17:56:00.003-04:00

Well, I'm being forced against my will by a customer at $DAYJOB to install Oracle Enterprise Linux for them. So I downloaded it, installed it at home this evening, just to kick the tires a little bit before installing for real. So I installed it. The first thing I notice is that Anaconda looks a tad shoddy compared to the real deal. For instance, when installing packages, there's a 'Status:' line at the bottom that's always blank. What is it supposed to tell me the status OF? That wasn't present in the real deal IIRC. Next, it installs. I login, and find this:

[jstanley@dhcp-137 ~]$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Enterprise Linux Enterprise Linux Server release 5.1 (Carthage)
[jstanley@dhcp-137 ~]$

For something so 'in your face', I'd expect Oracle to be ashamed of themselves. They just seemed to have replaced 'Red Hat' with 'Enterprise Linux' without regard to whether or not it made any sort of sense. Same throughout the installer, really, except they just replaced Red Hat with nothing. This really seems like quite a shoddy product to me. I've always thought so, and now that I've seen for myself, I KNOW so. Oh, and by the way - this was the 100th post to this blog. What a pitiful thing to waste it on.

Fedora 9 Released!

2008-05-13T10:00:00.002-04:00

Fedora 9 is now officially released! You can get the bits, via BitTorrent or via direct download, at http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora Some of the features that I'm most excited about:

Xorg 1.5
FreeIPA
Anaconda encryption of the root filesystem
Improved NetworkManager
KDE4
Gnome 2.22
Live persistence
New GDM
Preupgrade
Partition resizing via anaconda
Upstart
And perhaps most importantly, Firefox 3!

Thanks to all the developers, QA, bug triage, art, marketing, websites, documentation, and other numerous groups that made this release happen!

Brief reminder - Bugzilla maintenance activities

2008-05-11T23:33:00.002-04:00

Figured that I would post here what I posted to fedora-devel-announce a few days ago: As mentioned previously in various announcements about the Bugzilla actions that are being undertaken, we will begin phase 2 shortly. Instructions on how to opt-out of these changes are below, as well as links to wiki pages that contain precise information on when the actions will begin, what actions are to be taken, and the queries used to select bugs to act upon. 1) Close all bugs INSUFFICIENT_DATA that are still in NEEDINFO from the "stale rawhide" cleanup (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/F9CleanUp/RunTime#stalephase2). Precautions are being taken to ensure that bugs had activity, however were never taken out of NEEDINFO from the last round of actions are not touched. OPT-OUT: Changing the status to any other than NEEDINFO.will avoid having the bugs touched, 2) Close all bugs in ANY state that are filed against an EOL version (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/F9CleanUp/RunTime#eolphase2) OPT-OUT: Changing the version to '8' or 'rawhide' will avoid us making any changes to this bug. Note that the following two actions are part of the BugZappers release SOP, and are being undertaken independently of the activities above (and will take place for every subsequent release to ensure that Bugzilla remains in good working order and useful to all parties): 3) Rebase all rawhide bugs (except for those that are Package Reviews or RFE's) to Fedora 9. Note that Bugzilla notification mail will be suppressed for this change - i.e. no one will receive mail that this has occurred except for this one. This is in direct response to community feedback that we were spamming them with unnecessary notifications. (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping/Fedora9#frebase) OPT-OUT: If this is an RFE, then add the FutureFeature keyword to the bug, and no action will be taken on it. 4) Post a warning about the impending end-of-life of Fedora 7 in all bugs filed against F7 (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping/Fedora9#f7warning). Paul Frields recently mentioned this, this comment will merely act as a reminder and final warning of this fact. 30 days from the date of this running, all remaining bugs that are opened against Fedora 7 will be CLOSED WONTFIX. No opt-out really applies to this, however, if the bug still applies to a later release, feel free to change the version to the later release and the comment will not be changed If you have many bugs to change as a result of these procedures, feel free to drop by #fedora-qa and we will guide you through changing them all at once. Also note that we have conducted a thorough post-mortem investigation of all the spam that was generated last time, and have identified and repaired the problem. There will be only one notification per bug this time around :). Rest assured the BugZappers are are not doing this on their own and this process has been carefully reviewed the leadership of the Fedora Community. If you believe this process should be changed, like all things in Fedora, feel free to propose patches to the existing process or create a new proposal which can be evaluated and discussed for the Fedora 10 release cycle.

Running for a spot on the Fedora Board

2008-05-11T23:29:00.002-04:00

Well, I declared my candidacy on f-a-b earlier, and just yesterday made it official (I guess) with a post on the wiki. So if you can't think of someone better to select, select me! :) There's a number of reasons to do so that are outlined on the wiki page. If someone can suggest patches for that nomination, that's welcome too.

Ordered a new toy yesterday

2008-05-09T11:41:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, I broke down and ordered a Thinkpad R61. I had originally planned to go with the T61, but I did some research, and found that really the only difference between the two (I got the 14.1" R61) is that the T61 is slightly thinner and lighter (but not by a huge margin). Both have the LCD roll cage (NOTE: the 15.4" R61 does NOT have the LCD roll cage, whereas the 14.1" model does), they're both built like tanks to withstand my abuse, and it's about $150-$200 cheaper than the T61. The total price of the machine after all the discounts was $958.15, not a bad machine for the price. Yes, I know that Centrino 2 is coming out next month. Having the absolute latest and greatest is not really important to me (except in the operating system realm :) ), and I think I''ll really enjoy it and it will last awhile I'm sure. Of course, the included Vista goes bye-bye quickly and gets replaced with F9 :) So here's what I got (note the 5/22/08 over there, that's the estimated ship date :( ):

1	7732CT	CONFIGURED SYSTEM	05/22/08	$958.15	$958.15
	42X5952	SBB INTEL CORE2DUO PROC. T9300
	42V8012	VBB MS WIN VISTA HOME BASIC
	42W7293	SBB MSWINVISTA H-BAS32 US ENG
	42V9324	SBB 14.1WXGA +TFT,W/OCAM
	42X5956	SBB INTLGMA X3100 GM965W/1394
	41W2068	VBB 4GB PC2-5300 667MHZ 2DIMM
	42V8195	SBB KEYBOARD US ENGLISH
	42W7033	SBB ULTRANAV(TRCKP+TOUCHP) +FINGR
	42V8712	SBB 100GB HDD,7200RPM
	42V8718	SBB DVDREC.8XMAXDUAL L.ULT.ENH
	42V8177	SBB INT.WIRE.WIFI/LINK4965AGN
	42V9338	SBB 6 CELL LI-ION BATERRY
	41W1787	SBB CPK NORTH AMERICA
	42W7087	SBB LP,US ENGLISH

I'm bankrupt!

2008-05-08T21:56:00.002-04:00

What you ask? How am I writing on the blog if I'm liquidating all my assets in order to pay off debts? Not that kind of bankrupt, silly! I'm going to declare laundry bankruptcy this weekend. I have nothing but a small stackable washer and dryer in my apartment, so doing all of the laundry that has accumulated that doesn't absolutely have to be done is going to take weeks if I were to undertake the entire endeavor. What, exactly, is a laundry bankruptcy and how does one declare such a thing? Fortunately, there are no costly lawyers involved, nor is your credit tarnished for 7 years. Rather, one feels better immediately after declaring laundry bankruptcy. You know that you're a candidate for laundry bankruptcy when the mountain of laundry in your apartment is taller than you are (no, not really my case, but you get the point). So how does one declare laundry bankruptcy? The procedures may vary slightly, depending on where you live. The gist of it, though, is a trip to the local laundromat. You can either do the laundry yourself there, or, for a fee, they will generally do the laundry for you and you can pick it up later. After all, is doing umpteen loads of laundry really worth my time and effort? I don't really think so. After all this is done, I'll probably have enough clean clothes for a year! :)

Pungi and mock for fun and profit!

2008-05-03T21:12:00.006-04:00

Alright, well maybe not profit, but certainly fun! I had mentioned in a previous post about doing QA for Fedora, and having installation CD and DVD sets available prior to the general release of the distribution. All that Fedora Alpha, Beta, and Preview Release really is are just snapshots of the daily development tree of Fedora, rawhide. Sometimes, it might be useful to have a DVD, similar to what Fedora release engineering would produce, of the current rawhide. Now, I'm going to give a step-by-step of how to do this in 'mock', which is a program that you can use to manage chroot's. Mostly, it's used for building binary RPM's from source RPM's, however, it has grown functionality that make it useful for doing composes recently. There are some things that pungi does that depend upon several things that make it very suitable to be run in a mock chroot. First, the distribution that you are composing and the distribution that you are composing on have to be the same, For instance, if you wish to compose rawhide, you have to be running rawhide (or at least have rawhide userspace). Also, the architecture that you are composing on and the arch that you are composing must be identical (you can't compose i386 on an x86_64 system, for example). Mock allows us to overcome both of these limitations (at least for compatible arches - i.e. x86_64 and i386). A mock chroot can have userspace that is very different from the host system, and so long as the arches are compatible, they can even be of a different arch (i.e. you can run i386 code on x86_64, but not the other way around, obviously). The only thing that we have to do on the system that is going to produce the trees is to install the 'mock' rpm. This is as simple as typing 'yum install mock' at the command line. On my system, I also prefer to have the bash-completion package installed, because mock is 'completable' by that package, and the buildroot names can get kinda long sometimes (or am I just lazy?) :). After this is done, you need to make sure that the user that needs to use mock is in the 'mock' group. This is because being able to use mock is equivalent to having root on the machine in question, since mock is SUID (and has to be), You can accomplish this with 'gpasswd -a jstanley mock' for example. The next thing that we need to do is initialize the chroot. This is very simply done by using 'mock -r (config) --init'. This brings up the question of which mock configuration to use. Mock comes with a number of pre-made configuration files. The ones that you're most likely to want to use 'fedora-rawhide-i386' or 'fedora-rawhide-x86_64'. These files live in /etc/mock, and the -r argument to mock takes them WITHOUT the trailing .cfg extension. If this is your first time running mock for this installroot, it will use yum to install the group 'buildsys-build' into the chroot. After that is done, it will tar up the root, and save it for future use. If you had used this installroot before, it would clean it (i.e. delete everything that was there), untar the root cache, and then run yum update to get items that were changed since the root cache was created. Now we have a chroot with the desired content in it, we can install pungi. Wait a minute, this is in a chroot (and yum is not installed by default in this chroot), so how do I do that? Good thing mock has the '--install' option. So you just execute 'mock -r fedora-rawhide-x86_64 --install pungi', It won't output much at all, but it will install pungi and it's chain of dependencies. Now that we have pungi installed, we're ready to actually use it in the chroot! So let's get a shell in the chroot with 'mock -r --shell', which will give you the following output: [jstanley@rugrat ~]$ mock -r fedora-rawhide-x86_64 --shell INFO: mock.py version 0.9.7 starting... State Changed: init plugins State Changed: start State Changed: lock buildroot mock-chroot> The 'mock-chroot>' is my shell prompt, reminding me that I am in the chroot. From here, we can use pungi. The reference kickstart files that release engineering uses to create the releases are included in the fedora-release package, and can be found in the /usr/share/fedora-release directory. The traditional DVD configuration, which is what you want to use, is called f9-fedora.ks (note that this just landed in the fedora-release package on Friday). One piece of housekeeping that needs to be done at this point in to remove the generated rpm database files. If you are building on your native arch, this isn't strictly necessary but still a good idea. If you are building i386 images on x86_64, not doing this is fatal. mock-chroot> rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db.00* At this point, we can execute the pungi command: mock-chroot> pungi -c /usr/share/fedora-release/f9-fedora.ks --destdir=/compose --nosplitmedia --nosource I'll take you through what these options do: -c - what kickstart file do you want to use to use for this compose --destdir= - where should the compose happen. It's important to note that this is different from where on the non-chroot'ed filesystem you'll find it - remember that we're operating in a chroot here. --nosplitmedia - I do not wish to generate split (CD-sized) media for this compose --nosource - I don't want to gather source code for this compose. Note that you MUST NOT use this option if you plan on distributing the resulting discs. Note that by eliminaiting this option alone, source ISO's will not be created, that's an additional step that I'll mention below. When you enter this command, pungi will go about four phases of operation: - Gather the RPM's and SRPM's as required - Create a yum repo out of those - Run the anaconda 'buildinstall' tool to generate installation images, etc - Create ISO's Using a local mirror and a reasonably fast computer, this will take about 30 minutes. Note that every RPM that would be included on the DVD is downloaded, so having a local mirror REALLY helps here. Not a show-stopper if you don't have one, but it will take longer than 30 minutes :). One word of warning, though - when the compose gets to the point of running buildinstall, it will look like it's hung - this is the longest part of the compose. So if you see something like this and nothing more on your screen, it will finish: Pungi.Pungi:INFO: Running /usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/buildinstall --product Fedora --version 20080503 --release "Fedora 20080503" --bugurl http://bugzilla.redhat.com /compose/20080503/x86_64/os OK, so eventually, you'll see the following (among other things): Pungi.Pungi:INFO: Running /usr/bin/sha1sum Fedora-20080503-x86_64-DVD.iso Pungi.Pungi:INFO: Running /usr/bin/sha1sum Fedora-20080503-x86_64-netinst.iso Pungi.Pungi:INFO: CreateIsos is done. All done! At this point, the DVD and netinst.iso have been created, and are inside of our chroot. To get at the chroot from the non-chroot'ed OS, it's located in /var/lib/mock/fedora-development-$YOURARCH/root - so everything that you did is located there. You can find the completed ISO's in /var/lib/mock/fedora-development-x86_64/root/compose/20080503/x86_64/iso for example. I said earler that source ISO's are not created by default as part of the Create ISO's stage. In order to create the ISO's, you need to run pungi again against the same tree. Here's the syntax for doing that: mock-chroot> pungi -c /usr/share/fedora-release/f9-fedora.ks --destdir=/compose --sourceisos --nosplitmedia Again, eliminate the --nosplitmedia option if you want CD-sized ISO's created as well.

Hello Lazyweb: GUI MySQL "IDE"?

2008-05-02T14:06:00.002-04:00

I want something a GUI in which I can write and run MySQL queries. For anything more than trivial work, the MySQL CLI client just doesn't cut it. A way to check out table structure in a graphical way would be nice, too. I'm not a MySQL expert by any stretch of the imagination, so maybe there's something that I should Just Know About(TM), or is MySQL lacking such a basic tool?

PATH Service Shutdown on 33rd Street Line

2008-04-30T23:45:00.002-04:00

Well, there was apparently a small manhole fire just east of the Christopher Street station in Manhattan today. Depending on which news report you believe, it supposedly started underneath a PATH train! All of the passengers were evacuated, and there were no injuries. Anyhow, what does this have to do with me? I take the PATH in order to commute to Manhattan when the job requires it. Today was such a day that I had to work in our lower Manhattan office, nowhere near to where this commotion occurred. However, there was a NYLUG meeting this evening, which happens in midtown. It's easiest (I think) for me to take the PATH from midtown when I'm in midtown. Makes sense. Good thing that I knew the service was shut down ahead of the meeting in midtown, so I knew that was a no-go. Everyone was saying "Wow, we feel really sorry for the folks that live in Jersey, they're gonna have one heck of a commute tonight". Fearing the worst, I took the NYC subway down to the WTC PATH station, and hopped on the train there. I think that they had increased service frequency to that station as much as they could, since there was a train waiting for me at 10PM, and it left shortly thereafter (with the train operator telling everyone that was getting on the train that there were plenty of seats in the rear of the train - problem being everyone needed to be towards the front because of where they were going). The train got quickly underway, and I think that I got into the subway at 9:45PM or something similar, and I got out of my station in NJ at 10:20PM. 35 minutes is not a bad commute for NYC, especially since I took a massive detour from where I was in order to get home. There are people that would kill for that commute, and that's what I get when everything's messed up. So I guess this PATH commuter had some good luck! It's unclear whether or not this will be repaired for the morning rush, so I'm planning to leave a little early since the route that I take is the only one operating between NJ and NY, and I'm expecting more crowding on the already jam-packed train. Good thing the customer meeting wars relocated (for unrelated reasons) from midtown to downtown! :)

Bugzilla cleanup stats

2008-04-20T18:07:00.002-04:00

Well, I figured that I would post some statistics on the Bugzilla cleanup that we undertook a month ago. I'm in the process (hopefully to be done tomorrow) of writing queries to perform phase 2 of this operation: UPDATE - note that because of this, 466 bugs were closed, mostly by the reporter that realized they no longer applied. 2337 have received no response - that's fully 77% that were not actionable due to either MIA reporter or they simply didn't apply anymore. Not a bad exercise.

ASSIGNED	454
CLOSED	466
MODIFIED	28
NEEDINFO	2337
NEW	331
ON_DEV	1
ON_QA	2
RELEASE_PENDING	3
Total	3622

RHEL and VMWare time skew problems

2008-04-20T14:27:00.002-04:00

Well, I've gotten quite the number of questions over the last few days about time skew problems in RHEL4 and VMWare, so figured that I would write this. In RHEL4.7, there will be a kernel feature that allows you to pass 'divider=' on the command line in grub. The number must be a divisor of 1000, and the most common value is 10 (yielding an effective timer interrupt rate of 100Hz). I'm expecting the 4.7 beta to become available Real Soon Now(TM), though I have no information as to when that will occur. In the meantime, this change is available as a hotfix from Red Hat's Global Support Services. What this does is take the kernel tick rate (which defaults to 1000Hz) and divides it by the value of divider, to come up with an effective interrupt rate. You can verify that this is working by: Before making the change, use 'watch --interval=1 cat /proc/interrupts' and you'll notice that the timer interrupt is incrementing by 1000 every second. After you make the change, you you notice with the same command that it is incrementing via 1000/ every second. The vlaue of HZ that is exposed to modules is still 1000, thus not breaking module ABI. This same change is already present in RHEL5.1 today. In recent Fedora's, this is unnecessary due to the advent of the tickless kernel (which is useful for other reasons, including reduced power consumption on laptops). It is likely that RHEL6 will also be based on a tickless kernel.

Yes, the counter went backwards :(

2008-04-18T04:33:00.002-04:00

I've got the F9 counter on my sidebar, and yes, the counter went backwards today :(. The release slipped, mainly due to other slippage within the development cycle, and the fact that we had some major technical difficulties with rawhide this past week, thus forcing time to be focused elsewhere. Have I yet mentioned in this blog that time is a finite resource? But the preview release is now done, and open for business! Testers go forth!

New York Linux Meetup

2008-04-17T15:27:00.002-04:00

Well, there's a LUG-type activity (smaller than NYLUG, and not really in competiton to them, more on that later) in NYC called the NYC Linux meetup which I am involved in. We're the largest Linux meetup in the US, however, we'd like to get the word out that we're around :) We generally meet once a month in person at Think Coffee on Mercer for our regular, topical meeting. This meeting is not really in competition with NYLUG, since what we generally do is more of a roundtable discussion than someone presenting something - try to get everyone involved in the disucssion, rather than a traditional LUG-type presentation The members come from varying backgrounds, being system administrators, developers, embedded systems folks, and all levels of Linux experience are welcome. All distros are also welcomed, but I'm biased towards Fedora, and the organizer is biased towards Ubuntu (I'm trying to convert him...really :) ) I'm planning a Fedora 9 release party with the group, and the organizer is planning an Ubuntu release party (which I will actively boycott :) ). We also have a projects meetup that meets once a month generally, at varying locations (I'm gonna go scope out a new one tonight); Last time, we met at the Humanties and Social Sciences library in midtown Manhattan. We have a channel on freenode, #nylinux as well. If you're in the NYC area, feel free to drop by, we're a great bunch!

Shell history meme

2008-04-12T00:53:00.001-04:00

Well, now that I'm back from St. Louis, I was catching up on Planet. Here's mine: $ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head 252 ls 232 cd 49 cat 38 tail 38 ssh 37 rsync 29 ps 26 sudo 23 vi 17 ll

Some thoughts on bug reports and free and open source software

2008-04-07T22:49:00.004-04:00

Following from experience with the recent Fedora Bugzilla mass-triage, I figured that I would write a few words about the state of bugs in open source projects, and where people's perception can tend to fall short of reality. People assume that because OSS is not hidden within the walls of a particular company, that there are infinite resources to bring to bear on a problem. Instead, just as with propietary software, the resources are finite, the amount of hours in a day are finite, and the fact is that most of these individuals are contributing to an OSS community in their spare time, not being paid to do it full-time. Given these resource limitations, open source projects have to be selective in what bugs they can action. The incoming stream of bugs is literally more than they can handle. In order to handle the workload, they filter ruthlessly. If you file a request to, for example, change the background from green to red, that's unlikely to get as much attention as 'this sets my computer on fire'. I'm not saying that this is good, bad, or indifferent, but simply a fact of life in the open source world. Now that I've made general comments on the state of the FOSS community, lets analyze these with Fedora, with some real metrics. Fedora is a large project, consisting of 6,265 individual components in Bugzilla as of this writing. Most of these components relate directly to a piece of software in Fedora, though a very few are for administrative overhead of the project. As of this writing, there are 590 members of 'cvsextras', the group of people that have commit access to the Fedora package collection. Of these, 293 people have e-mail addresses @redhat.com, the primary sponsor of Fedora. Of those 293, most of them have other responsibilities other than Fedora. Let's make a liberal guesstimate and say that 10% of those 293 work on Fedora full-time. Let's make another liberal estimate, and say that 10% of ALL contributors are paid or somehow able to work on the project full-time, and that all of those contributors put in a 40 hour work-week. Let's also assume that the non-fulltime contributors each put in 3 hours per week. Let us also assume that it takes 30 minutes to deal with a bug (a very low estimate). We'll also assume that all these people do all day long is tend Bugzilla (a ludicrous assumption) So, given that number of contributors, which has grown significantly in the recent past, that means that they own, on average, 10.6 components each. The total number of bugs currently open in Bugzilla is 11,966. Using these assumptions, it would take 5976 man-hours to deal with all of these bugs. That is obviously quite an investment of time. Assuming that we had the 59 people that we assume work on Fedora full-time working 40 hours a week, and the rest of the 531 community members putting in 3 hours, it would still take a week and a half to get through all of this. That is a *huge* investment of time and resources. Thus far, we've been talking entirely hypothetical numbers. and assuming that everyone was qualified to work on all types of bugs. etc. Lets now look into the real world of the kernel. There are currently 1086 open bugs (~10% of the total!) against the kernel. These bugs have 53 assignees. Let's discount 21 of these, since they only have one bug assigned to them, leaving us with 32. Let's take our earlier assumption, that 10% of the assignees work full-time, doing nothing but tending to Bugzilla, and keep to the assumption that every bug takes 30 minutes. This gives us 2.5 weeks just to deal with the kernel! In conclusion, the open source community is very happy for people to report bugs. However, the developers that produce this code are very much inundated with them. What does this mean to you, the bug reporter? That we'd like for you to understand that some bugs slip through the cracks, and simply reporting a bug is not a guarantee that it can be fixed. I'd also like to point to some resources on how to write an effective bug report: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html http://bugzilla.abisource.com/page.cgi?id=bug-writing.html http://www.songbirdnest.com/bugzilla_howto_writeabug

Failure to build from source bugzilla statistics

2008-04-07T14:45:00.003-04:00

Matt Domsch occasionally rebuilds rawhide in mock, in order to catch packages that have bitrot that won't compile any longer. He just recently started mass filing bugs for them, and here's the status of those bugs.

ASSIGNED	11
CLOSED	63
MODIFIED	1
NEW	163
Total	238

Good, but not wonderful. Matt tries really hard to make Fedora a self-hosting distribution, so make sure to get those bugs fixed so the packages can compile! NOTE - the links above, due to bugs in bugzilla's reporting interface, may lead to the desired list, or it could lead to all of the bugs :/

And it's off....

2008-04-03T20:32:00.002-04:00

The mass bugzilla cleanup that we had targeted for F9 has begun, in case anyone was living under a rock today :). Highly unfortunately, folks are getting several e-mails per bug. We have tracked this down with Red Hat Engineering Operations, they are apparently using separate XMLRPC calls to bugzilla to effect each of the three changes that we were doing to each bug. Sorry for the spam. There were three tickets filed with Red Hat Engineering Operations for EOL bugs, "relevant rawhide" bugs, and stale rawhide bugs. Only one of them is partially done being executed. For the remaining tickets, we've requested that e-mail be suppressed for two out of three changes - you'll only receive mail for the actual comment, not the status change or whiteboard change. Once again, sorry for the spam!

Yet another bike update

2008-04-02T15:44:00.003-04:00

Got a call from the bike shop just now, and they told me that they're just going to give me a new bike. So it'll be in tomorrow, and I can pick it up on Friday. Yipee, I can hardly wait!

Bike update

2008-03-30T16:02:00.002-04:00

With my issue with the new bike, I couldn't figure out what to do - so I took it back to the nice folks at the bike shop. Well, they told me that the front fork is defective and requires replacement. It's a warranty repair, so there's no charge, but I'll be without my new bike for about a week. So I'm a little bummed now. Guess I should hit the gym in my building for my exercise in the meantime.

NetworkManager and mobile broadband

2008-03-30T00:24:00.002-04:00

Well, I've got a post on this blog telling how to get the Sierra Wireless Aircard 595U working on Fedora. I opted for the manual method, I'm sure there are others. The good news, is now with the advent of Fedora 9, all that is obsolete! As mentioned in previous posts, I had an outage on my home Internet connection. With mobile broadband support in NetworkManager being a feature of F9, I figured that I should probably test it. So, I just plugged in my card to my Fedora 9 laptop, and up came "Auto CDMA Network Connection" in the NetwokManager menu, selected it, and just like that, I'm on the Internet at Sprint-speed! I encountered a bug, whereby there were three CDMA network connections displayed instead of one. It was actually a hal bug, and Dan Williams had it corrected, a package built, and I had tested this package in perhaps a record 29 minutes!

well got a bike

2008-03-29T19:23:00.003-04:00

Well, I finally broke down and bought a bike today. Spent more than I really wanted to, but alas, you don't pay you don't play :). So I'm the proud new owner of a Raleigh Detour 6.5. I've taken it for about 5-6 miles of riding already (I was going to get home entirely by riding my bike and taking the ferry from the bike shop - but I'm not in good enough shape for that!). I came real close though, I'm really proud of myself - let's just hope I can keep it up. There's a fitness challenge going on at work, whereby if I'm the one that's lost the most body fat over 12 weeks, I win the pot - $300, which pays for about half the bike :). I'm not going to lose - those that know me well know that if I'm going to do something, I'm in all the way :). I really wanted to get in shape, I just needed some motivation, and what's more motivating than $300 in your pocket? Now the problem. I hit a pothole on the way home (on a street that almost looks like an alley it's so narrow and neglected - coming from Weehawken into Hoboken). My handlebars just go whichever way they'd like, and I'm not sure which bolt to tighten to get it all correct again. Someone help!!! And now I know that I'm going to be the sorest man alive tomorrow too... :/ UPDATE: I've put some pics of the bike up at http://picasaweb.google.com/jonstanley/Bike

Finally convinced Verizon it was busted

2008-03-28T02:27:00.002-04:00

So after trying three different computers, using 3 different opearting systems (F9, Mac OS X, and Windows - eww), and not being able to get to the Internet on any of them, Verizon has finally agreed that the problem must be on their side. There's a cheap Netgear switch in between the Ethernet jacks in my apartment and the Verizon managed switch on the floor. Verizon owns this switch, and since that's really all that the problem could be (since their managed switch is fine, according to them), they'll come out and fix whatever the problem might be. I've seen those cheap switches fail in new and mysterious ways, and this is certaintly one of them. They'll be out on Monday between 8-12. In the meantime, I still have my Sprint Aircard 595U. Lovely piece of gadgetry.

Verizon "Enhanced Communities" sucks

2008-03-27T20:43:00.002-04:00

First, some background. The building that I live in, a luxury high-rise in Jersey City, NJ, has a deal with Verizon Enhanced Communities to provide the residents with Internet service, free of charge. Sounds like a great deal, right? It sorta is. The problem is that the service is only 1.5Mbps, which as you know is quite anemic by today's standards. All of my co-workers have 20-30 meg connections, and I'm stuck back here in the dark ages (I also pay much more than them in rent - something doesn't add up. To be fair, I live in a very nice area and very nice building). Now, I can't get my Internet from anywhere else (no DSL, no cable modem, no FIOS). This stirkes me as more than slightly unfair and monopolistic, but that's for another time. This Internet service had been very reliable, if slow, so I wasn't complaining that loud. Up until tonight. Around 5PM, I noticed that I couldn't get to my GMail. Figuring that it was a Google problem, I dismissed it for a few minutes. Then I tried to get to Bugzilla - no go. eBay, no go. Anything else? Nothing. I've got something of a complex setup at home, so I immediately figure that some part of my infrastructure is busted (my crappy Linksys router occasionally just gives up the ghost for no reason). But everything checks out this time. So I plug my Windows machine directly into the wall. It gets an IP, but doesn't get to the Verizon registration page that it should since it's not a recoginized MAC address - same symptoms as my other PC's. The interesting thing is the exact symptoms. I had a connection to IRC, and that was fine (until a few minutes ago). So long-lived TCP connections appeared to be OK. I simply couldn't establish new ones. I'd get a 3-way handshake sometimes, and then the session would be disconnected. There might have even been some data transmitted (I tried telnetting to 6667 for IRC and get some stuff back before being disconnected). Absolute weirdness. So I call up the neat folks over at Verizon. They tell me that since I have an IP address, the problem is "assuredly" on my side. Now, if I didn't have the simplest setup in the world at that point (a Windows box plugged directly into their Ethernet with a public IP - ewww), I might have been inclined to believe that. They tell me that my computer must be broken, and that I have no clue what I'm talking about, essentially - there must be some firewall or anti-virus on my computer that's blocking me from getting out. I guess it doesn't matter that I have a Sprint EVDO card and can use that on the same computer just fine (in fact, that's how I'm posting this). I'm resigned to the fact that I'll never have functional Internet again. Sigh.

Some folks get it

2008-03-26T19:36:00.003-04:00

There are some folks in NYC that get it. There are also a lot that don't, that make the sign below that I saw on the subway this morning necessary. Fortunately, one of the folks that got it scribbled "Darwin" on the sign. I really don't think that the MTA should bother putting up these things - it's a waste of money, and as the sign mention, if this gentleman were actually to ride on the side of the subway car, it would be Darwin at work. Does the MTA really want these people as customers?

A few new domains

2008-03-26T18:38:00.002-04:00

So I registered a few new domains in the last 24hrs...both for very different purposes :) linux-advocacy.com nyc-beer-lovers.com If anyone wants email at either of these two domains (it's Google's hosted apps), drop me a line. Or not, that's fine too :)

Took the plunge

2008-03-23T16:01:00.002-04:00

Well, I figured if Paul could do it, I could too. :) I've only found one issue so far, my display flickers for no reason - I can't even really describe what it is doing - it's more of an annoyance than actually getting in the way of doing useful things.

Some people shouldn't be seen in public

2008-03-21T20:42:00.002-04:00

Well I am an assistant organizer of the NYC Linux meetup, bringing the goodness of Fedora to the group. Well, after our meeting on Tuesday, we all decided to go out for drinks. We went to a place called "The Peculiar Pub", where the experience was, well peculiar. Not because of anything about the pub, it was in fact quite ordinary. Instead, the patrons were peculiar. There was this lady behind us who was irate at the waitress because they apparently did not have a particular beer. But that's not the best of it. The best comes when two guys in suits that are obviously drunk out of their gord sit at the table previously occupied by the irate lady's party. We heard them talking about Bear Stearns, and we we generally talking about selling things on eBay anyway. So we suggested to sell Bear Stearn's stock on eBay amongst us at our table, since that's about all it's worth at this point. One guy laughed behind us, and a few seconds later, we hear a loud thud. The other guy had FALLEN OFF HIS SEAT. The waitress obviously asked them to leave at that point. Later, the waitress came over and told us that the gentlemen had attempted to pay for the beer with his cell phone - holding it out like it was cash or something! Other insightful things that we learned is that Craigslist is good for exactly two things in NYC (well, maybe more) - finding an apartment or receiving stolen property. That qualifies as the highlight of my week.

NJ Transit == fail

2008-03-21T19:28:00.005-04:00

Well, awhile back I was looking to purchase my monthly pass for the light rail here. Found that I couldn't do it because the vending machine was displaying this: . To paraphrase someone from #rhel (I forget who): Windows == fail Windows NT == epic fail Given this rating system, I'm really not sure what I'd call Vista - biblical fail maybe?

screen ftw

2008-03-14T13:33:00.003-04:00

Well I'm mildly annoyed at this point. Needed a new rawhide ISO since there's a new anaconda that would make nfsiso work. I set pungi to do what it does. It takes awhile (about 90 minutes or so), so I figured that it was a great time to go grab some lunch - another activity that takes about 90 minutes. BTW - the boil of the best IPA in the country is also 90 minutes, being hopped every minute, but I digress..... Well, I come back from lunch, find my session disconnected. (I'm ssh'ed from my work machine to my home machine). Reconnected to the machine see if by some miracle pungi had continued to run, but it had closed up shop along with my session. So now I have it restarted in screen, the best invention on the face of the planet (perhaps better than sliced bread even). OK, I'm done ranting now :)

QA for Beta - install testing

2008-03-13T20:02:00.002-04:00

Well, the Fedora 9 beta is about to be released. With that in mind, we're doing some pretty heavy duty install testing, using all of the methods that are supported by anaconda. Some of these methods require ISO images of the distribution - but we haven't shipped the distro yet, so we don't have ISO images of the latest bits. Kind of a chicken and egg problem, eh? You need to test with ISO's yet they don't exist. What to do about this? One of the things that sets Fedora apart from other commercially backed Linux distributions is a commitment to openness and transparency that goes to the core of the operating system and the processes used to produce it. Anyone can get the tools that they need to build Fedora releases in the comfort of their own home. In this case, that tool is called pungi. Pungi is a fairly simple tool to use. You give it the location of a kickstart file that defines what packages to include, repo definition, etc. Conveniently, such a file comes with the pungi distribution that reflects the default Fedora media. So it's really simple to just go to a terminal and do: pungi -c /usr/share/pungi/rawhide-fedora.ks --destdir=/data --nosplitmedia --nosource It will download the packages from a mirror, build the anaconda install image, and produce the ISO. A little while later, you come back and have the ISO of a DVD sitting there for you, ready for your install testing! Now, the usefulness of this tool is not just limited to building media from a pre-release tree. Say that you had an updates tree that you wanted to include. Just specify that as a repo in the kickstart file, and the updated packages will be automatically included on your install image. Or you have a specific set of packages you want to include on installable media (note that this tool is not for producing live CD's - there's another tool for that), then you can modify the ks file. Since I wanted default media for this purpose, I did not modify the ks file. However, if I were looking for media to actually install from (I do all network installs anyways), I would exclude packages that are on the media that I never use, and include packages that are not on the media that I think should be.

Fedora BugZappers relaunch

2008-03-11T16:14:00.001-04:00

This went out on fedora-announce-list this morning: Building on the recent success of the recent "gcc43 rebuild triage effort", we are pleased to announce the official re-launch of the Fedora Bug Triage Process! Are you frustrated, because you would like to help to Fedora community, but you couldn't write a line of code if your life depended on it? You don't feel qualified to help with the Art project, and you can't translate documentation? Do not despair. Anyone can be a bug triager. No special education or background is required in order to triage bugs. You do not even have to know anything about programming! Bug triagers are the first line of defense for Fedora developers. We strive to make it easy for developers to focus on bugs that are worth their precious time (so that hopefully they will have more time for resolving your bugs :-)). We do this by performing simple tasks like requesting additional information to clarify reported problems and verify that the bug is filed correctly, and verifying the bug is not a duplicate of one already filed. Have you ever reported a bug, but been frustrated because no one responded to it? Have you ever been annoyed by having your bug closed without ever receiving a single reply? Are you looking for a meaningful way to contribute to Fedora that does not require you to be a developer or package maintainer? Do you have a genuine desire to help people? Do you want to learn more about a particular component within Fedora? If so, then the triage team is for you! There are two ways to get started. If you already feel comfortable triaging bugs you can start today by following the instructions at: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/GettingStarted If you'd prefer a little training first, we are in the process of arranging some online training sessions and are waiting for people to specify the time that works best for them. We are planning to conduct sessions at various times that work for people. If you are already a Fedora contributor with wiki edit access, add your name to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Training. If you are do not yet have wiki edit access, here are four different ways to make contact with us: 1) Create a wiki account by following the instructions here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/WikiEditing#Getting_Edit_Access and add your name to the wiki. 2) Subscribe to fedora-test-list@redhat.com at https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-test-list and mention on the list that you are interested in attending a triage training session along with a preferred day and time. 3) Stop by #fedora-qa IRC channel on the Freenode server (irc.freenode.net). Someone is usually around that will be glad to help you get set up. 4) Come to our weekly IRC meeting on #fedora-meeting. Our current meeting schedule is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Meetings To show an example of what Fedora bug triagers do consider a recent project when we made a noticeable impact by triaging bugs for the mass-rebuild of packages using GCC 4.3. Not sure what GCC is? No problem. Suffice it to say that the entire collection of packages compiled with GCC (the C compiler used in Fedora) had to be rebuilt for a new version coming out in Fedora 9. Five hundred forty two individual source packages failed to rebuild automatically for one reason or another. The triage team reduced this to approximately 160 source packages that were true "failure to compile" errors. The other packages had different problems that were unrelated to the compiler. This first sweep by the triage team helped save release engineering and the package maintainers time, by seeing that the bugs got put in the right place. There are lots of opportunities to make a noticeable difference as a bug triager. Come join us!

And it's out there - bug backlog proposal

2008-03-11T00:22:00.003-04:00

Here's the mail that I just sent out to fedora-devel-list and fedora-test-list. Now that this is out for (more) public consumption, love to see what the feedback is. Hear ye, hear ye! There will be a special meeting of the Fedora BugZappers in our usual meeting slot, Wednesday 2008-03-12 17:00UTC in #fedora-meeting on freenode. The purpose of this meeting is to solicit input on proposals for dealing with the current unmanageable backlog of bugs. In the long term, this backlog will cause Fedora irreparable harm, if it has not already. Our most valuable asset, the bug reporter, is feeling left out in the cold. Community triagers feel discouraged by what they see as a insurmountable task, thereby making the problem feed on itself. We have to act, and the time to do it is now. To that end, I am proud to present two proposals, One has to do with dealing with the backlog that we have now, and the other has to do with making sure we never get into this situation again -- ever. We believe that these proposals are the right thing to do, and now is the right time to do them, right before a release. I'd also like to give credit where it's due for these proposals. The primary author of both of them is John Poelstra, without whom many of the things that have been accomplished to date would not have been. In just a few short months, we've gone from having almost nothing formalized to having a formal bug workflow, and having formal plans of dealing with the backlog, both now and in the future. It's important to note that these are PROPOSALS at the current time, and have not been approved in any way. I am expecting, and welcome, impassioned debate on these proposals. In the course of these debates, however, lets be civil with one another - we're allresponsible adults here. If you have comments or concerns about either of the proposals, there's a comments section at the bottom of both of them on the wiki, which I encourage you to use. Also, please come to the meeting and/or reply to this e-mail if you have comments. Please try to back up changes to the proposals with a specific example of where the proposed action is wrong/bad/whatever. Also note that the framework of the proposals is there. The exact text to be found in bugs is still yet to be written, however that will be written in the next week or so. The text of both of the proposals follows. I realize that both this introduction and the proposals themselves are extremely long, but please read them! The wiki versions of these proposals can be found at: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JohnPoelstra/BugzillaExtremeMakeOver

Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA

2008-03-09T20:08:00.001-04:00

Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA

I'm sitting here at Standings, one of my favorite bars in NYC. Today, they had a special tapping of the DFH 120 Minute IPA, which I am drinking as I write this. This is a big IPA, 23% alcohol, 120 IBU's. I've had it in bottles before, but never on draft. The experience of having it on draft is quite different than bottles. In bottles, it tastes really sweet - on tap, none of that sweetness is there - it"s all bitterness and hops, which goes down WAY too easy. I just finished it, the pour was about half a wine glass. I could assuredly have another, I'm not feeling it. I will likely have another later, for now I'm having a Rockies Hazed & Infused :)