FUDCon, Day 2 and 3.

Sorry this comes late. I took a couple of days off after the Goodwill Tour o’ Doom to unwind with family and my blogging suffered as a result. FUDCon Day 2 was our BarCamp, which we organized the evening of Day 1. Day 3 was a continuation of some hackfests from Day 1, along with a couple additional sessions.

• One of the hallmarks of FUDCon is the BarCamp segment and this FUDCon definitely didn’t disappoint. We had a great variety of talks on Day 2, from Ambassador development and equipment, to a UI design clinic, to getting started hacking on wireless, to an array of system administration topics. It was a great variety and there was practically no way you could show up and not find something to appeal to you for most or all of the day.
• I didn’t see many talks myself, between working on organization, having one-on-one conversations with some of the attendees, and just helping Max make sure everything was ship-shape for the other folks there.
• I did get to hold a session based on my little PulseCaster app. Unfortunately there weren’t many attendees, but the upshot was that I got a private design clinic with Mairin Duffy. She helped me find some excellent ways to improve the interface for the next version, which I’ll probably work on later this weekend if I have time. I did get some interest from a couple of the podcasting folks who were around, including the Linux Outlaws, who now have a show available in which they interviewed me and Max.
• Max has already written some of the post mortem stuff we talked about at the event, so it’s worth checking out that post if you haven’t done so already.
• Sometimes you simply can’t please all the people all the time. We seem to get conflicting feedback at every event about how the next event should go, and those changes inevitably lead to many people asking for the event to be planned the way it went originally. While that can be frustrating from the organizers’ standpoint, it’s very important to us to keep those channels open and always try to be improving these events, while realizing that it’s impossible to have one perfect event for everyone.
• When traveling, always make sure you leave a venue with every personal item you carried in. ‘Nuff said.
• The photos from the event are incredible, especially the one that led to the FUDCon Berlin 2009 poster. Thank you to Nicu Buculei and many others who did such a wonderful job showing how much fun and friendship we have in the Fedora community. (Hmm, maybe the fifth foundation is actually “Fun”!)
• Day 3 was a little light, but one of the highlights was Chitlesh Goorah’s talk on the Fedora Electronics Lab, where a number of attendees gathered in the main hall to hear about the revolutionary inroads he’s been making with the EDA and manufacturing business community, showing off the wide expanse of open source tools available in Fedora.
• I think the best part of FUDCon for me was seeing and catching up in person with Max, with whom I talk fairly regularly but don’t get a chance to see often since he moved to Europe. Great job on FUDCon, my friend!

I flew home Monday (with another slightly-too-long layover in the hell of Heathrow) exhausted but very, very happy with the state of the European community and the excellent work being done by so many Fedorans there. Many thanks to Gerold Kassube, Joerg Simon, Fabian Affolter, Jens Kuehnel, Jeroen van Meeuwen, Christoph Wickert, Thomas Woerner, and so many others for making this a fantastic event. Also special thanks to the Red Hat security team, including Mark Cox, Josh Bressers, Murray McAllister, and many more, for making a roosting place at FUDCon, and also for making themselves available for our community to ask questions and discuss issues.

There was a lot of talk about where to hold the next FUDCon EMEA — I think most people agree that we should do somewhere other than Berlin, to spread the FUDCon joy around the continent, just as we are going to try to do with the North American FUDCon later this year by having it somewhere other than Boston. Wherever we hold it, I am certain we’ll be graced with some of the brightest, most energetic, and friendliest FOSS lovers from around the globe. Thanks to all of you, for making our community such an amazing place to work and play every day.

FUDCon BarCamp presenters, heads up.

If you did a BarCamp presentation at the FUDCon Berlin 2009, I’d really love it if you’d do the following:

1. License your slide deck with a CC BY-SA license.
2. Upload a copy of your slide deck to the wiki.
3. On the BarCamp schedule on the wiki, make a link from the title of your presentation to the uploaded slide deck (I use the “Media:” link).

Note that the CC BY-SA license means that your material can be used and remixed by others, just like Fedora itself. I used it for my keynote slides, as I do for all my Fedora slide decks. Share the love (and the data)!

FUDCon Day 1.

Lots of great conversations went on for Day 1, as others have written. Security team collaborating with release engineering, wireless hackers collaborating with each other, and lots of new people finding their way around to meet with other contributors as well. The hackfest started a little timidly, which surprised me seeing how many great engineering minds were here from various locations. But ultimately everything came together very well, culminating in an awesome BarCamp/unconference scramble at the end of the day.

The resulting BarCamp schedule is on the wiki for your enjoyment. I’m actually doing a talk myself on my new PulseCaster project. We’ll see how many show up to sink their teeth into hacking a simple tool that can be used to really jack up the human factor in contributor-focused communities like Fedora. That’s much easier accomplished in groups where less time is spent working on the really hard problems — because it’s easy to dismiss the plumbing underneath, the same way that people tend to be dismissive about those who fix the plumbing in their home. It’s a poor way to deal with fellow humans, and something I’d like to have a part in solving, even if it’s just a small part.

Things for me to remember (thus far) when I look back on this FUDCon:

* We need a dev-room at the FUDCon location that’s appropriate for boisterous conversation.
* Mo’ schwag, mo’ betta.
* Something need not be perfect to be truly great.
* I am in fact capable of staying within my allotted speaker time by planning ahead.
* A community photo should be a must at every event. Only half of our attendees made our photo, and it’s still frickin’ brilliant. When I look at it, it makes me smile, and I think you did too.

LinuxTag and FUDCon 2009, part 1.

Wednesday was the beginning of LinuxTag and as always the efficiency of our Ambassador contingent was plain to see. The booth was in fantastic shape, with plenty of “Four Foundations” decorations and also a projector to show off slides that offered excellent Fedora messages and data about the upcoming FUDCon event. There were also new, free-standing, vertical banners using the “Four Foundations” logos that look simply superb.

I hung around the booth a little from time to time, but as we found last year, having too many staff in the booth is an impediment to actually talking to passersby about Fedora, so I used the time to talk with people like Joe Brockmeier from openSUSE, our own LinuxTag/FUDCon master organizer Gerold Kassube, and of course did some catching up with Max. I also met a number of contributors in person, such as Nicu Buculei, who are much renowned in the community but with whom I’d never had the chance to be face to face. This is actually one of my favorite things about FUDCon — the way it brings people together with social bonds that are stronger than what can be forged over email or IRC.

Max and I recorded a podcast interview with the Linux Outlaws, which you should be able to catch soon on their feed. We had a great time doing our typical tandem routine as Abbott and Costello, talking about Fedora features and about how our community has come together for the FUDCon event. I shared an interesting lunch of fresh cooked gnocchi and some strawberries (shoutz Mo!) with Spot and Joe Brockmeier, where we talked about some of the current misinformation flying around about Mono, as well as cows. (Ahem.)

I managed to find a few minutes to work on some of my slides, and also to talk with the folks at Vanager about their VPS solution that offers many Fedora releases, including Fedora 11. At some point, someone (Gerold?) convinced me that even a married guy is allowed to pick up a girl now and then.

Yesterday I spent some time in the morning doing more slides and email, but then cut loose to help Max with some of the assembly of FUDCon materials. We went over the logistics for the next day and I helped with some of the signage and other odds and ends as I could. We also did another great — well, we sure enjoyed ourselves — interview with Radio Tux. Some of my favorite moments from the broadcast:

* Max pointing out that Fedora is not about promoting the brand of one person. Any of our awesome Ambassadors at the show could have given the exact same interview and done just as well. We have innumerable rock stars in our community and the point of scaling that community is to turn the spotlight off the one or the few, and onto the many.
* Realizing that it’s more fun to give several points of view when talking about cool technical features, especially when their impact is wide or complex.
* Doing a tandem voice-over intro in which Max and I introduced ourselves and proclaimed, “Wir machen Fedora, und wir lieben Radio-Tux!” We’re so hammy it’s a wonder we don’t wear pineapple rings.

Later, returning to the FUDCon space, and in a fit of total abandon, I decided to exercise my minimal artistic skills by gussying up the schedule board. The results weren’t bad, and I had fun contributing something other than talking-head antics to the proceedings. Hopefully people get a kick out of them today while they’re attending FUDCon day 1. More on that in my next post!

Nochat on.

If you’ve tried to reach me via IRC this week and failed, it’s because I haven’t been on Freenode for chat for several days. Sorry about the absence — even as I’ve been participating here at LinuxTag and prepare for FUDCon, there is still a massive amount of work that continues to require doing inside Red Hat and across the Fedora Project, that simply prevents me from paying equal attention to all modes of communication. If you tried to chat with me and got no response, now you know why, and hopefully will forgive my non-responsiveness. I will probably be much more present starting next week when I get back to work after a couple much needed days of R&R.

LinuxTag starts tomorrow!

Sorry I’ve been away from the blog for a bit. Open Source Bridge was totally hectic and I failed to get a report out in time. I’ll try to remedy that later this week with a summary of what happened there, because it really was a great conference for practitioners in open source, and very different from the equally successful Southeast Linux Fest which I attended the weekend before.

But on to the present — I’m here in Berlin and tomorrow LinuxTag begins, bringing with it thousands of free software fans, advocates, developers, and contributors. Max has already written about the magnificent booth being set up by Fedora Ambassadors for the festivities, and I plan to be there as much as possible myself. From what I understand, some space was made in our booth schedule where a willing volunteer could help out — this is me raising my hand!

On Friday we start the big FUDCon event which should be fantastic. There will be a huge assemblage of Fedora contributors, mostly from the EU but from a few other places as well. I am very much looking forward to hearing the talks, and reporting on the many cool hackfests that will happen at this event. I believe we will have session tracks in both German and English and I hope many of the LinuxTag visitors will attend to assuage their curiosity about how the Fedora community works, and how our work might be important or compelling to them as FOSS participants.

Today, Jesse Keating and I fought off our jet lag by exercising — essentially walking as much of Berlin as we could manage before our feet cried for mercy. Before the day was up we visited Potsdamer Platz, Checkpoint Charlie, the Holocaust Memorial, and the Brandenburger Tor, among others. Thanks to my failed sense of direction, we missed out on seeing the Schloss Charlottenburg, a beautiful palace designed after that at Versailles, but thanks to all the other cool stuff we saw I think he forgave me. Lest anyone thinnk we just goofed off all day, when we got back to the hotel I caught up on a bunch of email; had a three-hour meeting with Max, Gerold, Fabian, and Jeroen; had another hour or so meeting with Max; and proceeded to work on even more email and other tasks for the next several hours, on top of this post.

Yikes! Conferences are busy. But they are absolutely fantastic because I get to catch up with good friends from around the globe who are doing awesome work as contributors in Fedora and to free software in general. You guys are inspiring and I look forward to seeing you at LinuxTag and FUDCon, and having a beverage with you at the FUDPub event.

Board results.

The Fedora Board election results and the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee election results have been posted. Thank you to all those who voted, and to all those who ran for election. I’d like to welcome Dennis Gilmore and Tom ’spot’ Callaway back to the Board, and also a special welcome to “Marvelous” Mike McGrath as our new member.

The results of the Fedora 12 release name election will be announced on Saturday as part of my keynote at FUDCon Berlin 2009.

Credit due.

I didn’t realize until very recently that our yum-presto plugin and DeltaRPM leverage a good bit of work done over in the openSUSE community — and that work is AWESOME. If you check out one of our recent podcasts for Fedora 11, you’ll hear Jon Dieter talking about this feature and the work he did to enable DeltaRPMs in Fedora. The fact that open source made it possible for us to bring this openSUSE work to our community is a true testament to the power of sharing.

Recently I had another reminder of how cool it is to work in free software — while working on my PulseCaster project, I was in serious need of some Python bindings for PulseAudio. Unfortunately, they don’t exist as such in the upstream code, but the Python “ctypes” module allows you to wrap any arbitrary C library, as long as you’re willing to spend the time defining for Python the appropriate functions’ expectations for memory structures. I found a project in which someone had done this work for PulseAudio sinks — but I needed sources. Well, it turned out to be no problem, because by reading the other code and comparing it to the generous PulseAudio developer documentation (produced by Doxygen), I was able to create that code myself — and then send it back to the other project!

The feeling of both having my work cut in half (or more), and then being able to share my work back with someone else for their benefit, felt so good. It made me recallthat underlying all this talk about Distro X or Distro Y is the fundamental goodness of sharing code from one developer to another. Superb!

So thanks, openSUSE, for the DeltaRPM goodness. We are making good use of it here in Fedora too, and we appreciate your contribution to our distribution — our users just know they’re having a better experience, and we’re happy to share that love too.

If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.

Some important statistics from the first week of Fedora 11 release:

• Over 140 Terabytes of Fedora 11 shipped via BitTorrent.
• Approximately 200,000 direct downloads from unique IP addresses. (Incidentally, there were over 600,000 requests but some IP addresses requested more than one download.)
• Over 1,000,000 1,200,000 visits to our web and wiki site in just seven days.

Note that our expert Fedora Infrastructure team made all this traffic almost unnoticeable to people, instead of crushing our servers to their knees. Hopefully Mike McGrath and some of the other team members will post a little bit about how they pull all this off. (Hint, hint!) I know that we use memcached, and that MirrorManager, maintained by Matt Domsch, figures heavily into our ability to get people to the closest Fedora bits when they request a download.

It never ceases to amaze me that our releases don’t seem to cause meltdowns like they used to. I think the Infrastructure team secretly yearns for release days to be more exciting, but it’s ironic that their own success makes that less likely.

SELF, day 1 and 2.

Day 1: Slept really poorly, probably just a result of angst over my keynote, which, in the tradition of fine Fedora Project Leaders of yore, I completely rewrote the night before, finally turning in around 1:30am and waking up about every hour afterward (like clockwork!).

The first day of SELF was great, though — I made it up on time at 6:00am, did a couple of tasks, had breakfast (yay for Southern hotel offerings of protein and waffles), and rode over with Clint “herlo” Savage. The staff welcomed me like a VIP, which was odd but showed what incredible lengths to which they had gone to make the Southeast Linux Fest a first-rate conference. I came up to the exhibit hall and found not only a Fedora booth teeming with Ambassadors, but also a booth for Red Hat (which was a platinum sponsor of the conference as well, woo!).

I attended Zonker’s keynote in the morning, which was very good, but to be honest I didn’t get a chance to see any of the other sessions. But I did hear from attendees that they were, as a rule, very good! Poor Clint had to battle a dying projector for his talk on Fedora Remix but I hear his audience interaction was A-game as always, and many people walked away thinking it was one of the best sessions they attended.

In fact, everything at the conference was excellent, from the organization to the can-do attitude of the staff, to the provision of a real speakers’ lounge, to the gear and schwag. Moreover, we found out the conference had more than broken 500 registrants before the day was out — which is simply fantastic for any community conference, much less one in its first year. I think you can count on many SELFs to come!

My keynote, over which I had wrung my hands quite a bit, turned out fine, I think — capable of improvement, certainly, but quite solid. You’ll get your chance to judge for yourself, because SELF is going to publish all the sessions as CC BY-SA videos online in a few weeks. Freedom and sharing — what an excellent choice for a conference all about Linux and free software!

I want to join the other organizers, all of whom did a great job, in saying a special thank you to David Yates (of Lotta Linux Links podcast fame) for inciting this wonderful event. I had a marvelous time and I hope they will invite me back, even if it’s not for a prestigious keynote spot. I love the fact that my speech wound up the very first SELF. What an honor and a privilege!

There was also a wonderful after-party, with nerdcore rappers Dual Core representin’ (sorry). They were fantastic — I just wish I had their freestyle Fedora rap from the Ohio Linux Fest last year, because I heard it was sick. (That means awesome, from what I understand. Am I hip now?)

Day 2: I turned in pretty early compared to a lot of people, so Day 2 was not as rough on me in the morning. After a good breakfast we headed over to Clemson and held the Fedora Activity Day for the Fedora Docs Team, and I thought it was a smashing success. Jesse Keating had led a sort of “design thinking” setup for the Development FAD last week, and I drew on this a bit for the beginning of the session, for the sole purpose of identifying pain points, seeing what we felt were the most important ones to fix or mitigate, and making proposals for how to address them.

Like the FAD in Raleigh, we also used Fedora Talk to broadcast voice from the meeting room, and IRC Freenode #fad to interact with remote attendees, including Zach Oglesby and John “jjmcd” McDonough. I think they got something out of it, and their input certainly helped us as well. Hopefully I wasn’t too much of a taskmaster but we just enjoy being around each other so much, it’s easy to get off track having fun! In the end, though, we had the right balance of humor, enjoyment, and accomplishment.

The notes, which we composed collaboratively in Gobby, are on the wiki now, so hopefully we’ll be able to move on those starting next week and in the upcoming Docs team meeting. And we also constructed a RPM specfile template for Zikula CMS modules, which should come in handy as we finalize packaging work to get the Fedora CMS off the ground shortly. Great work, everyone!

I’m going to pull my email using offlineimap now, and then it will be time to board the plane shortly. Tomorrow, no rest for me — I have only a day and a half of work until I’m back on another plane for Open Source Bridge in Portland, Oregon!