What can I say, it’s early.

In response to this meme:

1 firefox window
7 firefox tabs
1 evolution window
2 evolution message compose windows
1 tomboy note
1 xchat-gnome window, 26 channels

This little piggy stayed home.

Did you know that the Fedora Marketing team has spawned a lot of great ideas lately?

And did you further know that much of the great press we got came directly from the work of the Marketeers?

The Marketing group has been reinvigorated lately by teamwork between some of our longtime community members and some fresh new contributors that you’ll hear more about in this blog (and others) later. In the meantime, you can find some of the interesting output from the group in the Fedora 9 talking points, and one of the works in progress is the marketing plan. You can also find an excellent new press section here. Got more than an idea — like a plan of action and the willingness to do it? Then join us and make it happen!

Two letters too many.

Credit where due: Karsten Wade blogged about this in his usual prophetic fashion about a week ago.

One of the problems with remixing Creative Commons (CC) licensed material that includes a Non-Commercial (NC) clause is that it can hurt downstream community members. People might have the mistaken impression that there is something noble in using NC, to keep people from profiting unfairly from one’s work. But letting people remix your work and then profit from it is certainly a noble goal, and rewards people who want to share their work as well.

Out of habit, I had produced a presenatation a couple of months back as CC BY-NC-SA. But imagine a Fedora project member who wanted to use it for a speaking appearance for which she was getting remunerated — even if just for room and board. The NC clause could conceivably make this foul play. There are too many instances where NC can injure the ones with whom you share to have it be useful for an open source project like Fedora.

Only today did I get my fair dose of karma, when I wanted to use a specific remix that included some CC BY-NC-SA material. My thought processes went something like this: “Great, we’ll use this for some Fedora schwag, and give most of it away. If there are leftovers we can sell them through this other channel over here so we don’t throw money and resources away… Oh wait. Curse you, NC!” I’m not going to say that NC makes CC totally useless, but I’m having a hard time seeing how it could ever be useful in the Fedora Project — not because it prevents Fedora selling things based on our assets, but because it’s another unpredictable set of shackles on an as-yet-unseen use case.

Evie’s story corner, No. 1.

EDITOR’S NOTE: No spelling, punctuation, or other content changes have been made from the author’s original work.

The Hero, by Evelyn (age 7)

Once upon a time, when Nature was wild beyond rights, there was a young man who took a dare to go into the woods alone for 30 days. Yes, it was a terrible dare to take in those days, but he took it, never knowing what dangers and adventures he would face. So when the day came for departure, he went into the woods with a smile on his face. The people were far too busy worrying to notice his waving hand dissapear into the woods. Yes, he stayed there for the 30 days, he encountered many dangers, like the abyss, the vultures, and the crocodile. And there were his adventures. There was the shark adventure, the turtle adventure, and the ghost adventure. At the end of the 30 days, he was famous. He was known worldwide. Known as “The Most Famous Man In The World,” people came from far and wide just to hear the story. And he told the story to everyone.

THE END.

You need nerves of steel.

What the realtors call “foot traffic” — visitors to our house, presumably with purchasing intent — has picked up significantly in the past few weeks. In the last two weeks, we’ve had about a half-dozen visits. The feedback from the agents, where they tell you everything about your house that sucks so you can feel ashamed every time someone new comes by, has actually been extremely positive. Most of the agents don’t have anything to say except, “Beautiful house!”, which makes me wonder why none of their clients seem willing to actually follow through with an actual offer.

To make matters a little more tense, the house we really like in New Hampshire, and which has been on the market for quite a while now, just dropped its price significantly, increasing the pressure for us to sell if we actually want to buy that one in particular. This part of the process is somewhat like playing chicken, and everyone just stepped on the gas pedal a little harder. I almost wish we hadn’t seen that house back in February, which would lower my stress level somewhat.

If you know anyone looking for a house in Virginia (commuting to DC from here is not a big deal), you’ll let me know, right?

After last week’s release I took the weekend mostly off from sitting in front of the computer. I finished a book (The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldemann), played some music, picked up a few new threads, got a shave and a haircut (two bits!), and tried not to retreat to the office in the face of deadly cute wielded by my two rugrats.

Eleya and I watched Hitchcock’s 1942 flick Saboteur last night. I didn’t think much of the actors but the story wasn’t bad. The screenplay was authored in part by Dorothy Parker, but from what I could hear, it could have used a little more of her touch. Despite the strikes against it, the movie turned out to be quite good and really tense in spots. I also finished watching Gangs of New York, which Eleya picked up a few weeks ago on super-huge sale somewhere. I’d seen it a few years ago, but was reminded how excellent it was in every respect. And the closing shot of the modern New York skyline in 2001 retained every bit of its power and melancholy.

OK, break’s over — onward!

I’m sorry, did I break your concentration?

I was tickled by this new notification format for updates that fix security errata:

That’s one of the uses for the metadata that packagers can enter into Bodhi when entering updates into the testing repository (and later, the stable one). PackageKit also gives you icons that let you know whether a particular update is for a bug fix, security errata, or simply rolling up new upstream code. Enjoy!

FUDCon hotel registration.

To remind everyone about FUDCon hotel registration — please visit the following link for hotel reservations:

FUDCon F10 Hotels

The link at that page will guarantee you the lowest rate at the hotel. If you make reservations at the Summit hotels outside this link, that will probably not happen. (These hotels are usually about twice as much as the rate for which we’re getting them.) Red Hat also gets credit for that room on its tally, which helps the event staff.

For those people looking to share a room (or any crash space), here’s what I suggest:

1. Mark the wiki page’s attendee list, under “Comments,” saying you either “will share,” or “need to share.”
2. Look on the list and see if you can find someone who has marked the opposite comment.
3. Offer to share, or ask if you can share, a room or other space.
4. Once you have an agreement, mark the “Comments” again to say you’re “sharing with [person's name]“.

Think of this as the BarCamp methodology applied to lodging.

_{UPDATE: Note to self — talking about links not as good as providing them.}

New addition.

I was very pleased to make this announcement on Tuesday night: Harald Hoyer has been selected by Red Hat to fill one of the appointed seats opening on the Fedora Board.

The Board and I are very excited to have someone from Red Hat’s Stuttgart office representing the European Red Hat and Fedora community. Harald’s pages talk more about his very extensive technical background, but I’m sure you’ll be hearing more from him shortly about his outlook for the next twelve months as a Board member.

I’ve since found out that Harald is going to be at LinuxTag next week, so I’m looking forward to meeting him in person then. Welcome to the Board, Harald!

As the message also states, Karsten Wade is staying on for another release to even out the elections. Red Hat will announce its final appointment after the elections end, so we can balance the skills and backgrounds on the Board properly. In the long run that means decisions are made after consideration from many points of view across the entire Fedora community, and better representation for all the constituents.

Nominations continue until as late as the 12th of June — if you’re interested in running for a Board seat, please fill out the Nominations page, and hit the campaign trail! (It is the season, after all.)

Won’t you [buy my] home, Bill Bailey?

Seriously, my wife is really tired of keeping this place spotless.

import realestate

myHouse = realestate.House(mlsNumber)
myHouse.sell()

Hey, it worked in xkcd.

And helping the elderly across the street is good, too.

Spot on, Greg. We want all package maintainers to relate with the upstream providers, because that extends the work we do in Fedora to all Linux providers and consumers equally. Besides the fact that this is just good FOSS citizenship, it also contributes to fixing a huge meta-problem across the Linux landscape — that users can have vastly different experiences using different Linux distributions, beyond the paint jobs. When code works in one place and doesn’t in another, it’s too often due to maintainers either (a) not sharing fixes back with the FOSS ecosystem, or (b) carrying patches that upstream won’t take because they are deficient. Either case is ultimately a lose for both users and developers.

That having been said, the difference in the ramifications of a bad patch to something like a desktop applet that shows you a happy face, and something like glibc or the OpenSSL libraries, is a pretty fair gap. We should protect one — or at least be concerned about one — more than the other. I’m not sure it’s as simple as applying a formula, but it could be that there’s a core of system libraries in which any non-upstreamed patches are going to be subjected to much more rigorous review before they’re used.

And in all cases, we should prefer, by a wide margin, getting those patches upstreamed. Our experience in Fedora over the years shows that carrying these patches only as temporary backports works well, not just in maintaining a strong relationship with upstream providers, but also in gauging the health of the upstream community.