The Status Whoa

I've waited for this day for too long! Finally, I was able to buy a copy of Garden State on DVD. This has got to be one of the best films of all time. At least to me it is. It leaves me speechless after every viewing. It truly is Whoa! I highly urge everyone to see this movie at least once. After that, it'll be your favorite movie as well. Also, has anyone noticed how many good movies came out today? Why where these not released earlier for the holidays?

Earthquake Warning Missed

We all know that seismological activity happens in bunches and because of that I am curious as to why this article, entitled "Penguins Escape Huge Earthquake" got absolutely zero media attention. It would only seem logical that some seismological research facility got readings of the P-wave activity and could therefore have at least speculated about another massive quake hitting just a day later. Although, it is entirely possible that the horizontal waves coupled with the fact that everyone was getting ready for xmas on Friday could have delayed the discovery of this data. Why doesn't any media outlet give this story (or at least this lead) the time of day it deserves?

He Shoots for Tsunami Aid... Rejected!

The trusty ole Beeb had a story today entitled "Sri Lanka Rejects Israel Rescuers." I just wanted to make a few points about the situation in the article. First of all, I'm not even going to look at the religious conflict that is hinted at in the article, since that one liner is somewhat intended to stir some controversy. Instead I want to focus on the line about this being an issue with the Sri Lankan military and their disdain towards foreign soldiers helping them. Ok, I understand not wanting foreign soldiers on your soil, even though they are there to help, that's a somewhat valid argument and concern. It makes the country look weak to its constituents, etc. etc., but how much weaker can you look? You just got rolled over by a tsunami.

Secondly, to know anything about Israel would mean knowing that any Israeli who is even slightly skilled has had some form of training via the military. That's just the way the country works. Over half the country is considered, in some status or another, a soldier. That's what happens when military service is mandatory. That's where these people get their skills. Therefore, in order to send in relief workers, doctors and aides they would need to send "soldiers." I just don't know how much "soldier" these soldiers really were. It's entirely possible that a 45 year old pediatrician be classified as a soldier.

My point in all this is that Sri Lanka is hurting, and I understand the philosophy of trying to stay aloof during trying times, but at some point you need to start being realistic. You are literally drowning and someone is sticking out their hand to you, don't be stubborn. Again this is all assuming that this does in fact stem from a military concern. If the decision to refused aid does end up being religiously rooted, well then that's just plain stupid!

**This is not meant to ridicule or mock any persons or places. I have nothing against the countries affected by the earthquake and it's aftermath. It is just me trying to rationalize a decision made by a sovereign state, and analyzing foreign relations dynamics. Did they really have pride on their minds or is there more to this story than meets the eye?**

Check , Check - צ'ק צ'ק

אם זה עובד... אז סבבה. Just checking if the utf works. I think it actually might based on what Roozbeh told me. This would be the awesomest thing ever, since I can now post in Hebrew and Arabic and everything else. That would open up a Pandora's Box of possibilities! I apologize in advance but it had to be done. Don't you love Monday?

I Want My RSS

I'm trying to get feedburner to transform my blogger atom feed to rss, so that sane newsreaders and syndicators can syndicate. For some reason the feedburner smartfeed thing doesn't like to work with some services and fedorapoeple chockes on my blog and makes the site look nasty. Hopefully, this works and I can also get a Flickr account to start adding photos. Here goes nothing. And if I mess up something don't get pissed at me. Please?

UPDATE: It Works!! I figured out what was causing the problem and set my feedburner to rss 2.0 and then had it re-publish my blog index. Yay!

Marketing Open Source

Arjen Lentz, of MySQL AB, wrote a great article entitled "What Makes a Good Product," in which he talks about marketing Open Source and Free software. Arjen makes some good points, including that most developers neglect to promote their project or product, falsely assuming that it is so good that it will promote itself. A must read for anyone interested in promoting Open Source projects or anyone interested in marketing in general.

Who Makes These Names?

I've been playing with Zope and Plone since midweek trying to see if the combination is worthy enough of powering fedoraproject.org. In a word: SWEET. They are both written in Python, which is always a plus and Plone is quite powerful and has some nice features, such as workflow control, document security, and an ACL system. It's also very paranoid when it comes to the outside facing content and thats a good thing. This might be just what we've been looking for. The only downside, is that being written in Python it is rather slow unless you tweak it a little, and there are many tweaks, one of them being using an RDBMS as the backend for all the data. Also, Zope and Plone are nowhere to be found in extras, for one reason or another, unbeknownst to myself. Any volunteers?

Sad and Happy...

Well, first of all I am sad because I today realized that I lost about 200 of my CD's. I got a flat on the highway and in my haste and hurry to get out the spare tire, I unloaded the trunk and then left my CD's on the side of the road. The CD I will miss the most is my Thornley "Come Again" CD and of course all the Pearl Jam stuff I lost, although I liked all those CD's and most of them were new bands. Then again, I only have myself to blame.

I am however happy that LinuxWorld and FedoraCon are taking shape. LinuxWorld is pretty much all in the books, I sent the showguide info to IDG today, which is the last of the necessary paperwork they need from us. We were also invited for candidacy into the Product Excellence Awards. FedoraCon is also starting to come together, most likely on Thursday Feb. 17th P.M. and then all day Friday the 18th at MIT. None of those are set in stone.

The plan for FedoraCon is as follows, which was discussed with myself and Colin. First, get some ballpark figures as to how many people will be coming. Second, allocate space. Third, start planning the show based on the agenda put together by the advisory board that comes together. The more people we have, the more tracks we can hope to have. Hopefully, the first numbers will start coming in tomorrow.

P.S. If anyone is traveling on the I-81 south between Syracuse and Nedrow and spots 2 bottles of washer fluid and large bag with CD's please contact me. :p Thanks.

LinuxWorld and FedoraCon

Ok, here's the deal. So earlier today I had a teleconference with gregdek and crew regarding the LinuxWorld plans and a possible FedoraCon. As it stands now, we have a Fedora Booth at LinuxWorld (.org pavilion booth #7) and we will have DVD/CDs and maybe some other schwag to throw around. Systems will be provided by Pogo Linux as usual with RH providing signage and the other goodness. The only thing left to do is to formalize our marketing strategy for the show and figure out what schwag is doable as handouts. Additionally, it would be nice to know who (developers) plan on showing up. Some are confirmed, the rest are up in the air and there may even be a few surprises. Either way, LinuxWorld should go off without a hitch.

After that, we discussed the possibility of FedoraCon, which we initially planned on having somewhere in the Hynes Center, and now are considering MIT. Personally, I like the MIT plan because it allows us to put together a more formal set of events and ensures that we wont get anyone there that gets there by mistake- meaning that it will be more of a developer forum will dev issues and project issues discussed as opposed to the BoF which is supposed to be more user oriented. Starting tomorrow, I'll start asking people who intends on coming. The more of a hard number we have, the better, because that will allow us to put together something like a dinner.

Dates of Interest:
LinuxWorld, Feb 14-17 2005, and the Fedora BoF is on Thursday the 16th from 5:15 - 6:45. Ideally, the BoF would end at 6:00 or 6:15 which would allow us to have any FedoraCon event(s) starting at 6:30 or 7:00.

FedoraCon, tentaively Feb 16 and 17. The 16th at 6:30-whenever and the 17th sometime after LinuxWorld is over. This might, and probably will change as people decide what they want to do. We need to avoid certain conflicts such as the RH dinner and whatnot else. Another thing to take into consideration is the fact that some people who fly in might require a Saturday night stay, so maybe Saturday is a viable day for FedoraCon as well. It sure sounds better.

One Protocol to Rule them All...

So I've been poking around the Samba development tree for one of my proposed projects here at the university. The aim is to create a lightweight version of the protocol to be used with these "information sharing" small robots. These things are basically little critters that need to store info and share it with each other when one requests it. All of that isn't my job, so I don't get too involved with it. Anyway, while playing around with it, I realized that Samba 4 is going to kick major ass. Seriously, the roadmap calls for complete and total SMB/CIFS compatability, implementing features even Microsoft hasn't yet. They also plan on integrating LDAP and KRB right in the mix. Samba 4 will be in one word... "WHOA!"

LinuxWorld Confirmed!

Ok, so I faxed them the application and got an ACK back from them on the phone. It's Going Down(tm)... Just wanted to let everyone know that its go time.

LinuxWorld Preparations

Sshhhhhh... Fedora has again been invited to exhibit in the .Org Pavilion at LinuxWorld Boston 2005. All the fun paperwork should be done soon and then I will be able to talk more about it. This time around should be lots of fun and we will also be having another BoF and such. Mmm, I can already taste those KK donuts.
Other than that, thank heavens this semester is coming to a close. I feel like I've been in a hole for the past 4 months. Its gonna be nice to be on break and have a chance to code something other than the retarded things I have to do here. I have a few ideas for some nice projects that might actually come to fruition this time around. Thats news for now... ttyl.

Writers Block

I promise to write something this weekend about why I haven't been updating this darn thing. Basically, school is off and running again, and now I have a whole new set of bills like car, insurance, rent etc. Also, since I decided to stop drinking coke, I've had this awful mental fart where I can't seem to get anything requiring half a brain done. I will write again in 4 days. Hopefully, the Red Sox will be world champs then.

New Stuff Jitters

The recent activity log is as follows: I haven't had any time to do anything lately because I had to get a new apartment, which I did. Now, this week I am getting a new car. Hopefully, a Passat.
Anyway, the specifix/conary box decided to choke on its hard drive, so that will get fixed when I get into the new apartment. I'm also working on getting the cms stuff from lwn so that we can hack at it a little and use it as a framework for the new fedora community site. That's about it for now. More updates as I can write them.

MySQL 4.x license talks...

Ok, so we've been having an issue with MySQL 4.x inclusion into Fedora. We all know that they changed their licensing to GPL, with a supposed license exclusion for things such as PHP which, for obvious reasons, cannot use the GPL licensing. So for a while this license exclusion has been up on MySQL's website, but still of no use to us, since according to RH legal, (and this makes total sense), if the licensing terms aren't bundled with the source, then technically, the license/exception does not apply to the code. Recently, after much prodding (by many), MySQL decided to bundle the exclusion with the code. This was a good start and we brought up a couple more issues that needed to be dealt with.

During LinuxWorld, I had a nice chat with the ever awesome Brian Aker, MySQL's Director of Architecture. Now, someone must have lit a fire under MySQL's ass because there has been an active discussion, ever since I spoke to Brian. Today, I got the following email from Zak Greant, MySQL's Community Advocate. I hope anyone interested in this gets involved.

From: Zak Greant
To: community@lists.mysql.com
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 16:36:14 -0600
Subject: Clarifying the MySQL Licensing Policy Documents

Greetings All,

As a way to cooperatively work to address some of the licensing
concerns held by members of the MySQL community and the broader Free
Software/Open Source community, we are initiating a community review of
our licensing policy documents.

This means that we are soliciting feedback about issues in the policy
documents that people find inaccurate or unclear. From this feedback we
will work to improve the policy documents.

Please note that we cannot guarantee that we will address or accept all
of the issues raised or suggestions made. The licensing is both complex
and is the cornerstone of our business. Past experience shows that we
must work carefully, incrementally and with community involvement in
this area. As with development of the FLOSS exception though, I hope
that we can reach a compromise that is satisfactory for almost
everyone.

If you wish to participate, the process for doing so is simple.

Review some or all of the following documents:
* http://www.mysql.com/products/licensing/
* http://www.mysql.com/products/licensing/commercial-license.html
* http://www.mysql.com/products/licensing/opensource-license.html
* http://www.mysql.com/products/licensing/faq.html

When you encounter an issue that you find confusing or inaccurate,
please send a note to the MySQL community list or to me personally on
the issue:

Ideally the note will state:
* where the issue is (which document, where in the document)
* what specific aspects of the issue concern you
* the severity of the issue (is it cosmetic, minor or major)
* a suggested fix or set of fixes

You are also welcome to directly file an issue report in the system
that I use for tracking these issues. Visit
http://zak.greant.com:8888/licensing/tktnew to do so.

I would like the discussion to take place on the MySQL community list,
as it is easier to keep track of the issues in a single, low-traffic
setting. I prefer not to Cc the MySQL General list beyond this initial
email, so as to avoid cluttering an already busy mailing list.

An initial list of issues raised by various community members exist at:
* http://zak.greant.com:8888/licensing/tktview?tn=32
* http://zak.greant.com:8888/licensing/tktview?tn=40

I am currently working on new draft policy documents to correct some of
the simple issues and errors, and hope to post it next week for
community review after it goes through internal review.

Cheers!
--
Zak Greant
MySQL AB Community Advocate

Due to bad weather...

Yeah, so I know I promised this whole great thesis on geekdom and life and whatever else. Well, that's not gonna get done today. It's still in heavy draft mode. After getting back I had too many things to do and the weather was so bad today that I barely squeezed in the most important stuff. I thought something important was coming so I ran to the post office as well. Turns out it was a gift hat from Red Hat. Pics tomorrow, as well as the most awesomest blog entry of all time. Till then.

First Post!!

Well, not really. Moving stuff here since advogato sucks, and never seems to be up for more than a day at a time. More to come quite shortly about a multitude of things.