Protected: WIP

Against the morning’s white.

Election extensions.

As seen here on the fedora-advisory-board list:

Although Mike McGrath and the Infrastructure team don’t expect the server relocation to affect our upcoming elections, we want to make sure the community’s ability to vote is not unnecessarily affected given the timing.

The original voting period was December 8-15, and the infrastructure move is occurring over the weekend of the 12th:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-December/msg00000.html

https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/1845

I talked this morning with Mike, John Rose, and Nigel Jones, and here’s the plan we arrived at:

• The voting period will start on December 5 instead of December 8. This ensures that, no matter what unforeseen circumstances occur, there will be a full weekend of uninterrupted voting time available to all community members. All townhalls will be finished by that point, since none are planned for FUDCon at this time.
• Although Mike and the Infrastructure team believe they can keep the elections open throughout the move, in the event of any substantial outage (8 hours or more), we will extend the end of voting by an additional day. For any additional day of outage, we’ll extend the end of voting by another additional day. Again, we aren’t expecting to have to do this, but it’s better for us to have a plan ahead of time. If there is no outage, voting will end on December 15 as originally planned.
• Nigel is preparing a change to the elections app that will allow a logged in user to check the accuracy of a previously recorded vote. This will give an additional measure of confidence in the election system, even in the event of a brief outage. If any user detects a problem, they can report it via IRC, email to the infrastructure list, or a Trac ticket.

We’ll be putting announcements out elsewhere as well — but as Darren noted, there’s nothing wrong with getting your vote in early!

Nominally back on the air.

I got the bare minimum of service back online, including my weblog, from a catastrophic HDD failure yesterday. That really threw a monkey wrench into my workday, I’m sorry to say! But thanks to a couple wonderful people including James Laska and Aristeu Rozanski, I’m back in business. Over the next week I guess I’ll see if I can’t use the opportunity to wangle this into a better overall server setup during my scant free time.

Because it wasn’t until the server died that I realized its backups were not ending up where I thought they were (yikes!), I have to reconstruct some of my old posts. Thankfully, a little Python and Google’s cache will probably suffice, although unless the lazyweb surprises me with something that doesn’t require as much work on my part, I’ll probably end up losing a few months’ worth of comments, which is sad because they were often very enjoyable to read. Please don’t take it personally if you see yours is gone — lost, but not forgotten!

I hope our contributors at the various FADs this weekend are enjoying themselves, and I’m looking forward to the FAD in Raleigh in a week or so. That will be the start of an incredibly packed month. After I return from four days in Raleigh, I’ll be home for about a day and a half; then heading to SELF in Clemson, SC over a weekend; then home again for a couple days until I go to Open Source Bridge in Portland, OR for about four and a half days; then a redeye back home, where I’ll be home for a day and a half before jetting out to Berlin for over a week, for LinuxTag and FUDCon Berlin 2009.

Whew! By the time I’m home more or less for good, it will be June 29th and the month will have disappeared like a summer storm. July and August should be much less travel, thankfully. It’s only through the saintly patience of SupaWife that I can hope to come out of June 2009 alive and with all my various appendages intact.

The road to redemption.

The Wii Fit is a great way to unwind. That is all.

And yes, I ran out of microblogging credit for the day.

The fizzy and the still.

For a few minutes it seemed like much of the world — as seen from my little vantage point in the intartubez — stood still, as the U.S. inaugurated its 44th President in customary, non-violent, and celebratory fashion. There was an enormous crowd, a stirring speech and call to action, a warm blessing and a day to remember. The inauguration of Barack Obama was momentous and at times heart-warming: a great day as with all Inaugural Days, the peaceful transition of power and the eagerness of the entire public to see what changes the new administration brings.

Today is for celebrating; tomorrow is the day to put away the sensational headlines, the sneering, the rejoicing, and the gushing. Tomorrow we put our shoulders to the wheel and PUSH. That is what the President has called on us to do, and that is where we must prove, rather than proclaim, the words “Yes We Can.” When we look back on this day years from now, let us not have squandered its significance on petty power squabbles or the pointing of fingers. Let us take the opportunity we have today to reaffirm the promise of this great nation.

Did I break your concentration?

I’m still getting used to my new iPhone but I have managed to get a bunch of freebie applications installed on it. That was an adventure in itself, thanks to the fact that one needs an iTunes account just to get free stuff. And you can’t sign up for an account straight from your iPhone, at least as far as I could discern. Design FAIL, and unexpected from a firm that prides itself on such things.

I had to dig out an old Windows XP disc to install a virtual guest machine on my laptop’s Fedora 10 system, just to install iTunes and make an account with the intention of only downloading free (as in beer) stuff. I suppose that will be amusing to people who hate the iPhone and/or Apple already. I’m pretty sure this is a casualty of the need for DRM on their revenue generating service… I just found it to be really off-putting from a usability standpoint.

Still love the phone though, I gotta admit. I’ve had a crap phone for so many years that it’s nice to finally have something with a usable interface. Something from which I can, for instance, write this blog entry!

This. Is. STAFFORD!

I can’t believe a week without a decent blog entry. I am so sorry, my sweet Intartubez. Never again with the forsaking, I swear it! Now that I have been firmly ensconced back in my lair for half a fortnight, let me catch you up on my life, here and now.

Last week I was in Westford, MA for a managerial catch-up at da Hat. It was a wonderful and magical experience, full of wonder and delight. No, really! Let me give you the brief run-down, since a lot of it is mostly boring… I want the community to know that I do it all for you, brothers and sisters:

Sunday: I had no idea before this trip that JetBlue was a verb, but oh did I find out today. For me, it was a 6-hour delay, 3 spent on the tarmac waiting to take off. One day there will be wifi on planes and this won’t be such a big deal. Got into Boston at 10:30pm instead of 4:45pm. Get my rental car and burn rubber for Westford. Only it’s a Chevy Cobalt and burning rubber really consists of me holding a stick with acorns tied to it in front of the hood so the team of five scrawny squirrels runs faster.

Monday to Friday:LOTS OF MEETINGS. There’s really no reason to treat all these days separately, because it’s all just a huge blur of circumnavigating the brief blank spots in my calendar. Meetings with friends. Meetings with managers. Meetings with people I only know from video screens. Trying to make sure that Fedora is treating everyone, including people inside Red Hat, as full-fledge members of a community trying to build the best damn Linux technologies on the planet. Mostly succeed. Also trying to make sure that people in Red Hat are doing their best to engage the community and drive awareness of the huge amount of very cool work going on in-house, and the dedication in this company for free and open source software. Again, mostly succeed. Also, trying to put together a team lunch. Mostly FAIL, until Friday when things work out better and we all enjoy some good Indian food and a mango pudding that reigns supreme. Somehow I manage to miss spending much time with our awesome Anaconda team, for which I am ashamed. Friday night, travel home and miraculously am not JetBlued (check it out, Mo!). In fact, flight gets in early.

The week was an enormous success in part because this time around, rather than crashing with a friend (in particular, both spot and lxmaier have put me up, or should I say put up with me, in the past), I got an actual hotel just a few miles from the office. This meant I could continue my normal practice of getting up at 6:00am and arriving in the office by 7:00am. I try never to waste Red Hat’s money, and in this case, their outlay for a hotel room for me each night translated directly into 4 hours of extra work, before you count the work I did at the hotel itself. So basically, I got my normal 12-hour day in, and could make up for my relatively glacial pace, compared to my co-workers, through the benefit of sheer hours.

Weekend: A blur, but other than some catch-up email on Saturday I manage to avoid the computer for a little while. I drive up to Reston to rehearse with a friend’s 80s cover band, which is very diverting. We have a new female lead singer who rocks hard, and I have a great time although I wish we’d all learned more tunes. It works out OK because some people have to blow early.

Back to the present.

This week I spent a lot of time on something very important to me, the trademark guidelines for Fedora. It’s vital that we get this problem solved, because it is — well, if not a blocker, than certainly a speed bump — for all sorts of other things that are interesting to the community. Those things include custom spins, fan sites, business cards, and all sorts of other fascinating applications for Fedora’s infinitely appealing features. And darned if I didn’t make some progress. The way I see it, we want to minimize the difficulty for people to make use of the trademarks — and in a lot of cases, if I have my way, we’ll be removing the need for onerous approvals and making things simple. Specifically, we’ll hopefully have some sort of secondary mark for Fedora-derived spins — this directly empowers people in the appliance space, and IHVs and ISVs that are trying to deliver leading-edge solutions and development kits to their particular audiences.

A couple news articles I saw this week, and the excellent and productive time I spent in Massachusetts last week, prompt me to finish out this catch-up blog with a little stint on my personal soapbox. I’ve been active in the Fedora community for nearly five years, and I’ve never been prouder to be a part of it. If I weren’t working for Red Hat, I would still be hanging out with you guys — albeit more outside my work hours. This community is full of enthusiastic, talented, and ambitious people who know what it means to truly “walk the walk” of free and open source software. This community is made great by the people in it, who believe that Fedora is not just something you use, it’s an expression of ideas, something you believe in — the idea that we all have the power to make a difference in the world, and it starts by taking action, by giving something back. Contribution over consumption, giving over taking, enabling over using. I’m proud to hang my hat in Fedora — the reasons for that are numerous. The vast majority of those reasons are going to read this, and wonder if I’m talking about them. Assume the answer is “yes.” Now go forth and conquer!

“Welcome to the party, pal.”

(Only by happenstance is the title seemingly connected to this entry.)

I know that earlier Luca Foppiano pointed out this story posted on Mark Shuttleworth’s blog. I’m glad to see that Mark is taking seriously the need for any serious Linux distribution — and certainly any that has one eye on the enterprise market — to dedicate their work to upstream communities. I seem to remember saying something to that effect a while back too.

Without a rational upstream policy, distributions relegate developers to an ever-increasing time suck of patches, backports, and bugs that distract from being able to make solid improvements. The only rational upstream policy I can imagine working — without an infinite supply of internal, dedicated developers — is to coordinate bugs with upstream. Fixes then flow out to the entire community, which means that one distribution might have less of an upper hand in things “just working,” but the overall consumer experience gets better, which means the overall market for FOSS has better growth potential.

I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to extrapolate this to the way a distribution behaves with regard to localization/translation, documentation, toolsets… Which is why I’m always very proud to trumpet the way that Fedora does business, with 100% free and open source tools. We’re able to contribute improvements to the upstream providers of any of these areas, and make things better for the entire FOSS community. And those improvements themselves likewise benefit from all the customary advantages that an open process provides.

I’m looking forward to joining you, finally.

I have about a dozen things I need to blog about, but with time right now for only a short blurb, I wanted to point out that I’ll be delivering a keynote session at the Utah Open Source Conference 2008, coming in August to Salt Lake City. I put in an additional talk cleaving more to the “HOWTO” theme of the conference, a tutorial session on using the live image creation tools. This is something Jesse Keating and I did in tandem at the Summit to rather good effect — our vanishingly small audience notwithstanding. (In fairness, they didn’t actually vanish from our talk; out of the grand totaly of only two, I’m betting they knew we’d notice, and didn’t want to hurt our feelings in any case.)

I’m really happy to be visiting Utah again. I was there once about a decade ago, also on business, and ended up doing about a 3+ hour drive from SLC out toward a place called Dinosaur. No kidding. And yes, I believe they actually had real dinosaurs there, in skeletal form at least. It was a superbly picturesque drive, and the weather was absolutely perfect, with clouds coming over the horizon like a slow-motion stampede. It seems a bit silly to have one’s experience of a place be so colored by a long car drive, but it really did make an impression.