MadRhetoric

Jack is Going, Going, Going...Gone!

2009-07-27T19:36:00.002-04:00

Hey Everyone,

I think I told most people that I wanted to tell privately so it's time to tell the list and out myself to the public. August 14th will be my last day at Red Hat and of temporary daily direct involvement in the Fedora project.

In 1997 I got my first taste of Linux, Red Hat Linux 4.2, to be exact. It was in the basement lab of the university that I was doing research at during the second half of my freshman year in high school. It was at that point the most fun and challenging thing I had ever done, struggling to get the kernel to work with the crappy Matrox (I think) video card that was the only spare piece of anything in that lab. I aimlessly wandered down that path I had no idea that jumping down the rabbit hole would lead to the 12 most pleasantly wondrous and amazing years of my life.

Over the last 12 years this love affair has grown stronger and I have had the unbelievable good fortune to travel the world, see amazing places, explore amazing ideas, meet and work with some of the planet's greatest, smartest and most passionate people and play my part to help turn Linux, Open Source, Red Hat, Fedora and the concepts of free open and democratic commons of content and technology from relatively unknowns into the great revolution of our age. I have spent the better part of the last 6 years working for Red Hat on Fedora and Fedora-related projects in directed efforts to improve both the state and awareness of those things I mentioned. Red Hat has been a warm home and family to me and I am as much glad as I am in awe of how ferociously dedicated we have been to our noble principles of freedom and truth, while having accomplished, ascertained and executed and what I have been able to imbibe, about so many diverse concepts, over these last few years. What niche and facet have we not touched? What direction or device have we not influenced? What proclivity have we not affected? For this, I am proud.

Fedora has been my brother since the day it was conceived. The more energy and time I invested into Fedora, to help it grow and mature, the more it paid me back by proving to be the best platform for innovation, and letting me be involved in that cause. Starting a community is no small order and keeping it going all these years take passion on the part of those willing to undertake the task. We have learned what it means to be a community, to live, breathe, eat and be true to community. To provide, so that others can have, to build so that others can build upon and to be selfless so that we can embrace others and more importantly so that others can embrace us, virtual strangers, and feel welcome. It has been my distinct pleasure to work with every single precious member of the Fedora community, from all over the world to help build a very deep and intimate relationship with the concept of community. We have accomplished such great feats, arising from a turbulent and tumultuous genesis and virtually transformed and flipped the world and the hearts and minds of people in a few short years. We have become the paramount archetype of community. How many have communities emulated and continue to emulate our success? How many have our ideas spawned? How many have been lucky to be as true and real as we have? For this, I am grateful.

The best part has been the people. I can't count on 100 sets of hands the number and names of all the wonderful people that have affected me. When I was on the Fedora University Tour, my speech was called "Crash: How a Billion Little Collisions Defines Everything," and it was about how working in a community and in real life, we are the sum total of the people we interact with. I don't think one can find a better metaphor and if I stick to my axiom then I can truly consider myself rich. Every person I met and spent time with in the office, at a meeting, show, conference or elsewhere, and online has helped shape my character, both personal and professional, for the better. As a lover of people I am both thankful for the interactions we have had and excited for what the future holds. I owe thanks to many, like I said, even 100 hands can't count, but I will try and pay homage to some of my closest, dearest and most influential friends over the last few years.

First and foremost, Tom "Spot" Callaway, for urging me to get involved way back when things started and helping me score a gig at Red Hat.

Greg DeKoenigsberg, for being a friend, a mentor and a visionary; if I can say one thing about Greg it's that he "gets it" when no one else does, he can put it in words, and above all else, he's real.

Max Spevack, because I can write a whole book of reasons to thank Max, who has been a dear friend, a true buddy, a team player and a team leader.

Karsten Wade, for being the most chillin guy you will ever find, and for being my west coast trade show and conference booth buddy.

Jim Gleason, for being first a friend for 9+ years of NYLUG and then a mentor and being someone who cares.
Michael Tiemann, for being a genius, for always giving me something to think about and someone to look up to.
John Flanagan, for being my first manager at Red Hat, always commenting on my hats and being an all around great guy and Jeff Needle, for being the guy who would let me wander into his cubicle and talk about nothing for hours on end.
Mo Duffy, for being the best artist and designer in the world. Go Kitty Go!
The original Red Hat QA team, Ed Rousseau, Bill Peck, Marty, John Poelstra, John Lockhart and Zack Cerza for letting me encroach on their cube area and steal one when I was an intern.

Jesse Keating, for being awesome, for being the workhorse upon much of which the foundations of Fedora are built, and for being a cool guy who I spoke to for almost 2 years online and helped me with everything before I ever got a chance to meet him and buy him a drink.

Luke Macken, my brother and friend, for all those games of Star Wars pinball on the 3rd floor and for being the most uber hacker the world has ever seen.

Arlinton Bourne, for being a true friend throughout college and following my advice to join Red Hat, where the hood at?

Paul Frields, for being a great leader and a real sweetheart while still secretly being 007.
Yaakov Nemoy, for being my intern and not complaining and for being a friend who will always listen to my crazy ideas.
Arjun Roy and Mohammed Morsi and James Leddy, for being great interns as well and for accepting offers to come to Red Hat as well. Mo, who knew real Red Hatters wear Orange?
Bill Nottingham, because I like him.
Moshe Bar, for being my international hangout buddy, a great entrepreneur and being an all around great human being.
The Red Hat Anaconda team including Jeremy Katz and Peter Jones, the Desktop team including Ray Strode and Dan Williams, Fedora kernel team (a.k.a. Dave Jones), the Fedora Ambassadors, the Fedora Infrastructure team including Mike McGrath, Dennis Gilmore and Toshio Kuratomi, anyone who was ever been on the Fedora board including Rex Dieter, and Matt Domsch, anyone who ever volunteered to help at an event or show, everyone in the Westford office, everyone in the NYC office.
The Fedora Marketing team including Steven Moix, David Nalley, Bob Jensen, Jon Stanley, Rahul Sundaram, John Rose, Larry Cafeiro, Clint Savage and anyone else I'm forgetting...we done good, real good.
To the next generation of leaders in Fedora, Mel Chua, Ricky Zhou, Ian Weller and crew. It's been a pleasure getting to know and working with you, and it gives me pride to know that we have attracted a fine crew to pass the torch on to. The future is in good hands--kick some butt!
Last and certainly not least, to Matthew Szulik, a true lion, who believed in us and led us finely as a teacher and friend and Jim Whitehurst, who keeps the flame alive, the train running (although he used to run an airline) and still making time for the little guys in between calling the shots. You have both exemplified leadership and hold a sacred and hallowed place in my mind and heart. We could have only gotten this far because we stood on the shoulders of giants.

Thanks everyone for an amazing time and ride. As I move on to other ventures, I wish everyone blessing and success and hope to keep in touch. I can be reached via email jack@jackfoundation.com, Freenode IRC as themayor, and various and sundry social networks.

Fedora Marketing TNG: Project FooBar

2009-06-22T16:05:00.002-04:00

Just wanted to keep people posted as to what's going on in Marketing and the outcome of my trip to Westford last week. As many of you know, I've been thinking about what the next steps we need to take in Fedora Marketing should be. I feel that we have come along way in terms of improving process and that we can go even further while also putting a fresh spin on things. For some time there has been discussion of a "Fedora Magazine" concept; this goes back a couple of years. I really liked the idea and it sort of stuck in my mind all these years and I was thinking we can centralize things around that format. I had a few rough ideas for kickstarting this, but mainly my motivations were to solidify policies and process for what content Marketing creates, who we create it for, the content creation schedule, and how we distribute it.

Last week, I went up to Westford to and I met with Mo and Mel and Stephen Smoogen who was in the house for a visit. We ran through a bunch of ideas and goals for Marketing's future and the idea of a Fedora journal/magazine type setup. The results can be found here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing/Project_FooBar. Mo came up with the name, lol.

There are 5 main goals that we are striving for as you can read on the wiki page. Centralization of Content, well scheduled, recurring and prepared content, design which is consistent with the philosophy of the Design team, standardized "official" feeds for distribution of different forms of content, mechanisms for localization and sharing the media with press or on social news sites.

Feel free to read the wiki page and add/edit, etc. I would like to know what people think of this type of format, and I know people will have many question so I would like those to be voiced now so that we can answer them and make sure we are working to build something that is useful for the community with input from the community.

By the way, here is a screenshot:

Fedora 11 and Ext4: The Straight Bits

2009-06-08T12:52:00.003-04:00

Let's face it--We're addicted! To files that is. More importantly, we are addicted to the massively large and ever increasing storage devices upon which we store those files. Make no mistake though, like any addiction, storing content comes at a cost and usually those costs are paid at the filesystem level. We all want more space and we all want better performance when it comes to disk I/O and a junkie's wishlist never ends.

Fedora 11, when released tomorrow, will be the first distribution to boast the inclusion of ext4, the latest incarnation in the extended file system family, as default. Ext4 brings with it support for larger filesystems, larger single file size and many improvements in almost every imaginable facet. Join me for an interview with Eric Sandeen, renown file system hacker, Red Hat Engineer and Fedora Contributor as he takes on a little trip down Filesystem Alley and explains what filesystems are, where did they come from, why should we care and why they along with Fedora 11 are prepping to take over the WOOOOORLD!

1. Please give is a quick self-introduction and how you got started working on Fedora/Red Hat and filesystems.

I was an electrical engineer by education & career years ago, but in the course of that work I started fiddling with Linux - Red Hat Linux (5?) was actually the first distro I ever used. I worked at SGI for about 6 years on the XFS filesystem, and then moved to Red Hat to work on ext3, ext4, XFS, and other filesystem related bits. I feel lucky to be able to have turned a fun hobby into a paid gig. :)

2. Practically, what is a filesystem and why should the average user care about what filesystem they are using?

A filesystem is the detailed format of how the operating system stores data on disk, and how it manages reading and writing of that data. The filesystem's job, first and foremost, is to keep the user's data intact and accessible, but beyond that, extra features and speed on certain workloads may influence a user's choice of which filesystem to use.

3. Can you give us a brief history on filesystems in Linux? What have been the major milestones?

Linux started out with a very simple filesystem, the Minix filesystem. This was replaced with the "ext" filesystem around 1992. Ext2 showed up around 1993, and the later ext* filesystems been developed from that basic lineage. Around 2000-2001, there was a bit of an explosion of new journaling filesystems for Linux, including ext3, xfs, jfs, and reiserfs. Of those, I'd say that ext3, ext4, and XFS have remained in most active development to this day.

Ext4 development was started about 3 years ago to address scalability & functional limitations of ext3, working on top of the ext3 codebase. Some of the basic features came from work that ClusterFS and Bull had done for Lustre, and other development has happened on top of that. It's been a joint effort by several entities upstream, and we've all worked together to make a good filesystem.

4. In Fedora 4, the default filesystem will be ext4. Fedora 11 will be the first distro to offer ext4 as the default FS. Why is that significant?

I think Fedora has always taken pride in helping to develop new features for Linux, and pushing them as part of the distribution to get these features out to a user base. It's always a bit of a balancing act, because new software inherently has bugs, and users expect any distribution to work well, of course.

The open development process of Fedora has allowed early adopters to test & provide bug reports and feedback on ext4, and the end result, I think, is that we have a very solid ext4 codebase for F11. It was a little rough in the beginning but thanks to all the testers, and the hard work by all the upstream ext4 developers, I feel confident that we're in good shape.

5. What limitations was ext4 developed to overcome and what benefits can we expect to see? There are also new features like the addition of extents and pre-allocation. These specific features are a big win over previous filesystems. Can you tell us more?

One of the primary limitations of ext3, and motivators for ext4, was the relatively small maximum file size (2T) and filesystem size (16T). The allocator in ext3 wasn't particularly efficient either, and the direct/indirect block layout scheme caused some performance bottlenecks.

The ext4 on-disk format allows for up to 1EB filesystems with 4k blocks, although due to user space tool limitations we're still at a 16T maximum filesystem size. Work is currently underway to address this.

Ext4 also has a new allocator, called "mballoc" which can be much more efficient than ext3's old block at a time allocator.

One of the other real bottlenecks to scalability is how well a very large filesystem can be checked and repaired, and modifications to ext4's metadata layout have yielded some very impressive speedups in e2fsck's check times.

Features like extents and delayed allocation have honestly been around for a very long time on other Linux filesystems like XFS, and ext4 implemented these features in part based on that proven track record. Together these features can help give us very efficient allocation patterns.

One other thing that the extent format brings us is much faster deletion of large files compared to ext3 - something which anyone who has had to enable the "slow delete" feature of MythTV may appreciate.

Extents also allow filesystems like ext4 to efficiently track preallocated disk space, allowing applications which use preallocation calls to get more efficient allocation. The transmission bittorrent client and the libvirt tools are a couple of packages in Fedora which make use of this.

6. Fedora has been using LVM and other volume management layers for a while. In fact, Fedora helped pioneer technologies like LVM. How does ext4 play well with these? How does it facilitate use of those technologies?

To be honest, there's a lot more work to be done in this area. One of the things which has just recently been addressed upstream is LVM's ability to pass write barriers from the filesystem down to the underlying block device. Write barriers prevent write reordering by the drive. They have a bit of a performance hit, but they're needed to ensure a journaling filesystem's consistency whenever power is lost to a disk with a volatile write cache. Until very recently, LVM didn't pass these barrier requests down at all; this now works upstream for simple LVM volumes, and work is ongoing in this area.

The other area where filesystems and volume managers really need to communicate is in the geometry of the aggregate block device - ideally the filesystem wants to know about the stripe unit and stripe width of a raid5 device, for example, so that it can do efficient, well-aligned allocation and IOs. The XFS userspace utilities are able to extract this information from software raid devices and use it at mkfs time, and honestly this is something that needs to be added to e2fsprogs as well. Again, there is more work going on upstream to address this issue.

7. What are your thoughts on the future of filesystems? What do you think are the features that we should be focusing on? Are we working on pioneering any of these efforts in Fedora?

One of the big pushes is for more active protection of the user's data via checksumming at all levels, as well as management features, such as better ability to use multiple devices for a filesystem. In Linux, a lot of this type of work is being done in the new BtrFS filesystem.

Fedora 11 is a pretty exciting release for filesystems overall, because it also includes an early preview of BtrFS. Josef Bacik, one of our filesystem developers, has been putting a lot of effort into BtrFS upstream. Adventurous users who want to try out BtrFS can do so in F11, and even install the distro onto it by booting the installer with a "secret" boot argument - "icantbelieveitsnotbtr". This is a very early preview, and isn't yet suitable for more than testing for most users, but early testing and bug reporting will be very useful.

8. Do you like any other filesystems that are being used/developed, such as ZFS, which seems to be a big fan favorite and others like BtrFS, Tux3?

ZFS has a lot of nice advertised features, but it's not really available for Linux primarily due to license issues - and I'm not sure the userspace fuse implementation is optimal, but I may be biased as a kernel filesystem developer! BtrFS shows a lot of promise, and Chris Mason and his crew have been developing it at an amazing pace, in my opinion. BtrFS is a pretty fundamental re-thinking of what a Linux filesystem should be.

I can only keep so much in my brain at once, and so have not really kept up with Tux3. The other filesystem that I still think is interesting is XFS, because it has the scalability and feature set that ext4 is striving for in a mature, well-tested (though pretty complex...) code base. Of course, like anything else, it has its strengths and weaknesses. It's also a pretty different beast administratively compared to what people are used to with ext2 and ext3.

9. What is your day to day development cycle look like? Surely, work continues on ext4, but what else are you working on? What do you spend your free time doing?

I do a fair amount of work on ext4 and XFS on a daily basis, and a lot of my time is taken addressing various Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux user & customer bugs. I maintain a few other filesystem-related tools for Fedora and RHEL as well, including e2fsprogs, xfsprogs, xfsdump, blktrace, fio, ffsb, fs_mark, seekwatcher.... this keeps me plenty busy!

I've recently been working on making the xfs regression test suite filesystem-agnostic so that other filesystems can use this basic framework for regression testing; it's been hugely useful for XFS development. We have about 30 tests running on other filesystems now.

There are many other bits and pieces that compete for attention every day, so there's a lot of juggling of priorities. Any filesystem corruption bugs or oopses usually rise to the top.

Free time? I have a family and a 2 kids, so there's not a lot of that! I bike and swim when I can, and to be honest some of my free time is spent.... hacking filesystems. I guess it's in my blood.

10. How are you planning to celebrate the Fedora 11 release tomorrow?

Hm, I'll probably be working on what needs to be done for F12. :)

Fedora 11 Tour

2009-06-08T10:40:00.002-04:00

Anxious for Fedora 11. Can't wait until tomorrow to get your hands on it? Well you can take a sneak preview of what's coming by visiting the Fedora 11 Tour page. On it you'll find an overview of Fedora 11, the Fedora 11 screenshot tour, links to the various pieces of Fedora multimedia we've produced and of course information how and where to download Fedora 11 from starting tomorrow at 10am Eastern.

Fedora 11: Raise thy Mighty... Finger?

2009-06-03T10:26:00.004-04:00

Authentication is an aspect of computing which many take for granted. What's all the fuss? you think. Username, password and that's that. In the following Q&A session with Bastien Nocera, long time Fedora Contributor and Desktop Renaissance Man, we discover that when it comes to authentication, there is more than meets the finger!

With fingerprint and other biometric authentication options gaining more popularity, its time to get more creative regarding their use. Many laptops have had built-in fingerprint readers for upwards of two years now and Fedora 11, thanks to Bastien and crew, does a solid job of making that option a viable one for Linux desktop user. How did we make this happen for Fedora 11? Will your Fedora laptop one day be able to authenticate you on the web using your finger? Will we ever get GNOME keyring to unlock using a fingerprint? What will Bastien work on next? All this and more if you keep reading below!

1. Can you please give us a quick self introduction and how you got started in Fedora.

Hey, I'm Bastien Nocera, I work for Red Hat, and I've been a GNOME contributor for 10 years. I started using Fedora when I joined Red Hat in 2002, and I've been hooked since :)

2. For at least a couple of years now, many laptop models have had built-in fingerprint readers. They never seemed to work well under Linux, despite various bits and pieces of drivers being out there. Can you tell us more about how this feature came about in Fedora 11? [note: PAM is the pluggable authentication system used on Linux machines to authenticate users. D-Bus is a message bus system, a simple way for applications to talk to one another.]

I've had a Dell laptop with the omnipresent Thomson fingerprint reader for a couple of years, and I was looking at how I could use it, and make it work out-of-the-box in Fedora. At that time, as far as I remember, the only options were the proprietary Upek bits, and thinkfinger, which was a very PAM specific solution.

Around that time, Daniel Drake mentioned that he was working on ‘libfprint’, a library to fold the support of different fingerprint readers, with different capabilities, into one supported API, for his BSc in Computer Science.

I got in at about that point. Daniel and I already had a pretty good idea on how we should be architect support for the fingerprint readers, and Daniel wrote a first pass at the ‘fprintd’ D-Bus daemon to present it at his final year project presentation.

When Daniel presented his project, he put all his code up, and I started working on the D-Bus daemon, cleaning up the API, and implementing various front-ends on top of it.

3. In order to accomplish a lot of this some significant modifications were necessary to other parts of the distro, i.e. DBus, PAM and authentication dialogs. Can you talk to us a little about what type of work needed to be done to get all the pieces to work together.

It was pretty fun getting to use some new technology. We fixed some bugs in ‘libfprint,’ re-did the public API, added developer documentation, added PolicyKit integration, added a PAM module, and wrote a nice UI for all that in the GNOME control-center.

We were pretty much done, and then Ray Strode added support to GDM to get multiple PAM stacks. This meant that the user could choose between logging in with a password, or using the fingerprint reader.

4. What are some of the issues that remain to be worked on if any?

Most of the remaining problems fall slightly outside the scope of this project. ‘libusb1’ needs a bit of reworking to handle devices appearing and disappearing more gracefully. ‘libfprint’ needs bug fixes for existing drivers and more drivers (never-ending story). Finally, we need PAM to die die die (or add multiple PAM stacks support to more front-ends).

5. Where do you see the future of this going? Do you expect that we will one day down the line see encrypted filesystems which require biometric authentication to decrypt? How about extending this capability to authentication on the web?

Hehe. The architecture is there to support those, although security concerns will possibly override that. We're still thinking of ways to integrate LDAP authentication, and get the PAM module to unlock the GNOME keyring for us.

6. You are well known as a long time and very involved Fedora contributor. What are some of the other projects you worked on for this release?

I worked on the (oh-so-controversial) volume control, updated Bluetooth management tools, and wrote/updated a driver for Wacom Bluetooth tablets.

But work has already started for Fedora 12. With Dan Williams, we already added Bluetooth PAN support to NetworkManager, and we're working on the front-end bits now. I'd like to do some more work on my old flames, Totem and Rhythmbox.

I also have a drawer full of Bluetooth devices that I need to work on. I'm half-way done adding Geolocation to Firefox, for Linux platforms, using GeoClue. Hopefully I'll be able to finish that and work on some more devices.

7. What are you going to do to celebrate the release of Fedora 11?

Probably raise my glass to it, and getting cracking on Fedora 12!

Add This

2009-06-01T16:01:00.004-04:00

I recently added something new to my blog and feed which seems very useful to me and I figured I would share it. I used to have a bunch of buttons to help people submit stories to different social news sites like digg, link aggregators like delicio.us and or to save bookmark them online or other similar services. This took up a lot of space under each post and barely ever worked correctly. Certain links would always end up missing and it would never render right.

Today, I added an "addthis" bar to the bottom of each post. You can see it down below. See it? Its really handy and really cool and when you click on it it will open new overlay or page and let you select where you want this post to go, whether its email, print or sites like digg, facebook, newsvine, technorati, etc. Its pretty cool I suggest everyone give it a try to help simplifying you blog and feed management.

Fedora 11 Podcast Series #5 - Presto with Jonathan Dieter

2009-06-01T13:42:00.002-04:00

Presto! Wow, what just happened? Was that a magic trick? Well there is no magic trick here today, but what we do have is the latest in the Fedora 11 Podcast Series, an Interview with Fedora Contributor Jonathan Dieter on one of the coolest new features on Fedora 11 - presto! Presto allows you to use deltarpms to download only binary ‘diffs’ from whatever packages you already have on your system. For example, if only one file in a released update was change, all you would be downloading would be that one changed file as opposed to the whole new RPM. Starting in Fedora 11 you can use presto and the yum-presto plugin to enable this functionality when downloading updates.

Presto with Jonathan Dieter [7.2MB Ogg Vorbis]

Remember when I said no magic was involved? We actually did have to use some magic to record this podcast because Jon lives far far away--in Lebanon! Using some of that good ole’ Fedora voodoo we were able to get Jon’s thoughts on Presto, how it and deltarpms work, how this idea came to be and what working in and being a Fedora contributor has meant and continues to mean to him and just a little bit about what’s goin' on in Lebanon. Just another example of how great people all around the world come together to build a project, a community and a home called Fedora.

Fedora 11: Virtual(ization) Reality

2009-05-26T10:22:00.007-04:00

Cutting edge virtualization technology has always been one of Fedora's strong suits and Fedora 11 looks to continue that trend. In an interview with Daniel P. Berrange, Red Hat Virt Team Engineer and Fedora Virtualization guru, we talk about the many key upgrades to virt technology in F11 focusing on areas of usability, performance and security. Fedora 11 will premiere the latest in secure and powerful virtualization technology available to users and developers. With so much to look forward to Fedora 11, it's sure to make your virtualization dreams a reality.

1. Please introduce yourself, and tell us about your work in virtualization and how you got started.

I'm one of the lead developers for the libvirt project and am actively involved in many related areas of open source development (qemu/kvm, xen, gtk-vnc, virt-manager, to name but a few). I also co-maintain many of these packages in Fedora and RHEL, along with many others in Red Hat's virtualization team.

More than three years ago (shortly after transferring into Red Hat's Engineering team, from consulting services) I was working on the OLPC project. We needed a way to easily test the OS images we were building without needing real hardware. As a proof of concept, I hacked up a simple GTK application to run images them under QEMU. At around the same time Daniel Veillard had started the libvirt project and there was a desire for a desktop application to manage Xen using libvirt. So I switched over to the virtualization team, wrote virt-manager for Fedora 6, and my involvement in all areas of open source virtualization grew from there.

2. Many people view the work being done on virtualization as a feature set of major importance and significance. Can you give us a brief overview of some of the changes we can expect to see in Fedora 11?

The open source virtualization development effort is so large now, that it is useful to discuss each stream in turn.

At the lowest layer is obviously the Linux kernel and KVM/QEMU. There has been a major acceleration of development in QEMU and push to merge KVM into the official QEMU source repository. There's ever continuing work on performance, stability, scalability and reliability in KVM. PCI device passthrough is one new feature we're highlighting for Fedora 11. The return of Xen Dom0 was not to be, as the Dom0 paravirt_ops merge with the upstream Linux kernel is still an ongoing process.

At the middle layer is libvirt, providing a consistent management API across different virtualization technologies. New features in libvirt, since F10, include PCI device passthrough for Xen and KVM, the sVirt security driver using SELinux to protect KVM guests from each other, thread safety of all libvirt APIs, improved scalability, reliability and debugging for the libvirtd daemon and support for SCSI HBAs and copy-on-write volumes in the storage management APIs.

The top layer covers end user tools such as virt-install and virt-manager. virt-manager is undergoing a significant (and ongoing) overhaul of its user interface. The first improvements arriving for Fedora 11 are in the guest installation process and storage management capabilities. As guest installation is first task most users try, ensuring this is simple and reliable is key to making a good first impression. Guest desktop interaction is another historical pain point which has been a focus for improvements in Fedora 11.

With every release we also try to make a significant step forward in security of the virtualization stack. In Fedora 11 the focus has been on SELinux to protect guests from each other and SASL to authenticate VNC users.

3. There have been some large changes in virt-manager and libvirt, which are at the core of the user experience when it comes to virtualization. Can you talk to us more about those?

The guest installation process and desktop interaction are the most critical areas for making a good first impression. In the virt-manager re-design the wizard used for installing new guests has been streamlined, cutting out three redundant steps. Where possible, it will automatically detect the type of operating system being installed and choose the best configuration options to optimize for this OS, no longer requiring the user to figure this out for themselves.

The installation process now directly utilizes the libvirt storage management APIs to allow easy creation of files in a variety of formats (raw, qcow2, vmdk, etc), allocation of new local disk partitions or LVM volumes and access to LUNs exported by iSCSI targets. This is particularly useful when remotely managing virtualization hosts, allowing regular administrator tasks to be performed from the virt-manager UI without resorting to command line SSH sessions.

The mouse pointer has been a constant source of trouble for virtualization management applications. Getting the guest mouse pointer to track the host pointer is essentially impossible with the standard emulated PS/2 mouse. The solution is to provide a pointer device that supports absolute motion events, instead of relative events that the PS/2 mouse provides. For KVM and Xen, this means adding a USB tablet device, but historically Xorg has not been able to automatically configure this correctly. This is resolved with Fedora 11 guests, finally providing a guest pointer that moves in perfect sync with the host, not requiring the pointer to be confined to the guest window.

Users with non-US layout keyboards have also had a hard time getting their guests to support input of accented/special characters. The VNC protocol has now been extended to allow the hardware keycodes to be passed directly from the VNC client to the guest OS without any intermediate translation step. This should allow the guest OS complete control over the keyboard layout mapping, without a need for any special settings on the host.

The final piece of work was to increase the guest desktop resolution. The real Cirrus video card that QEMU emulates would never have done more than 800x600, but there are tricks that can be done in a virtual world. Thus a simple change to the Xorg cirrus driver allows it to detect that it is using a Cirrus card emulated by QEMU and increase the guest desktop resolution to 1024x768. Still not great by today's standards, but better than before. Longer term plans involve replacing the cirrus driver in QEMU with something more virtualization friendly.

4. Also, as people should note, there has been a lot of work done surrounding KVM and getting that well integrated into Fedora. How has that work been going, and has anything significant been done in that area in this release?

Fedora was the first major Linux distribution to integrate KVM back in the Fedora 7 release. It became the default virtualization technology in Fedora 9, when it became clear we could no longer maintain the separate Xen host kernel until it was merged in the upstream Linux kernel. The great benefit of KVM from an distro integration point of view, is that it is there by default in all new Linux kernels. All that was required in Fedora was to turn on the module build and make sure the modules are always loaded when compatible CPUs are found. libvirt and virt-manager have also both supported KVM since it was first added to Fedora. Thus there hasn't been a need for much additional integration work for KVM. The focus has simply been on improving features available to KVM users via libvirt and virt-manager.

5. Glauber Costa has also done significant work merging KVM and QEMU. Can you explain to us what QEMU is, and why the choice was made to merge it with QEMU? How that is of benefit to the user base?

Earlier Fedora releases have suffered from the divergence of QEMU and KVM code bases. Upstream QEMU has had releases almost 1 year apart, while KVM has been releasing at least once a month, if not more, using snapshots of the QEMU source repository. Thus the features available in QEMU were far behind those available in KVM even though they both shared the same fundamental code base and upstream development stream. It also doubled the work package maintainers had to do for security and bug fixes.

Since Fedora 10 though, the upstream QEMU community has accelerated its release schedule significantly and many of the KVM features have been merged back into the main QEMU code base. Thus we judged that the time was right to attempt to ship a single package containing both QEMU and KVM built from a single code base. For users this means that parity of features between QEMU and KVM, while the reduced burden on our Fedora package maintainers, ensures more timely security and bug fixes. Glauber also took the opportunity to split out all the virtual BIOS files and ROMs from QEMU into separate packages and ensure all are fully built from source using appropriate upstream source releases.

6. Virtualization and security are discussed hand in hand these days, and as the ability to create and use virtualized machines expands there are many security risks involved. Can you speak a bit to the work that was done to improve security both at the kernel and user levels?

In each Fedora release we try to make at least one significant step forward in the security of our virtualization technology. In Fedora 8, libvirt gained support for secure remote management using TLS for encryption and x509 client certificates for authentication, while GTK-VNC, QEMU, KVM and Xen were also all extended to add a VNC extension for TLS encryption providing a secure remote desktop. In Fedora 9 libvirt was further extended to support SASL enabling secure remote management with Kerberos for authentication and PolicyKit for local desktop authentication. Fedora 9 and 10 also increased use of SELinux to protect the host operating system from a compromised or malicious QEMU/KVM process.

The latter still did not provide any protection between guests, so one compromised QEMU process would still potentially be able to compromise another on the same host. Thus James Morris started work on a project known as sVirt, the first results of which are appearing in Fedora 11. The focus has been to provide isolation between guests running on a single host. libvirt directly integrates with SELinux to ensure every QEMU process it launches runs within a dedicated security context, only able to access its own assigned disk images. This protection is enabled by default on all Fedora 11 hosts using libvirt for management. As well as the security benefits, the end user experiance is improved because libvirt will automatically manage SELinux labelling for all guest disks, eliminating a major source of bug reports from previous Fedora releases.

7. These features have all evolved over time in previous Fedora releases and Fedora, as a distribution, has always been a leader in the virtualization realm. Let's talk a bit now about the actual process of developing these features. How many of the improvements and enhancements to virtualization have come about as a direct result of the work done previously? Also, what does the future look like?

Virtualization technology in Fedora is reaping the benefit of very active upstream projects and the significant developer resources of Red Hat's Virtualization Engineering team. The combination of these provide great opportunities for new features to have their debut in Fedora releases.

The ideas for new features come from many sources, some from Fedora end-user experiences and consequent bug reports, some magically arrive on cue from upstream projects, while others are things that look to be important for future RHEL releases. With the PCI device passthrough feature in F11, the core support was all already done by the upstream KVM community. This is a important feature for future RHEL, so Red Hat put resources into a F11 feature to add support to libvirt for PCI passthrough with KVM and Xen and then expose this in virt-manager.

The feature aiming to improve the guest desktop interaction was a result of the persistent stream of bug reports from Fedora users. We had been considering ways to address this over course of several Fedora releases, but it was not until Fedora 11 that all the pieces of the solution finally came together from the various upstream projects.

The security improvements in virtualization have a different origin. Very few end users ever file explicit bug reports asking for the addition of more authentication / encryption features or to use more SELinux. If anything users ask for ability to more easily turn off existing security features. This is a case where the user is not always right. They do want more security, but they just don't know it yet!

As a developer it is necessary to be very proactive with security improvements. This can be particularly challenging work because the solutions often involve working across multiple upstream communities.

Take the VNC SASL authentication feature in Fedora 11 as an example. The first step was to write a specification for a new VNC security extension, have it reviewed and get a code for it allocated by RealVNC. Work on QEMU was required to implement the server side. Work on GTK-VNC was needed for client side. For management tools, work on libvirt was required to get the new security type enabled for guests it launches and finally virt-manager was extended such that it knows how to login. That's five different projects involved for one feature. This is only practical by having a close working relationship with all the upstream communities and carefully coordinating the work there so it all arrives in time for the next Fedora release.

For the future we're happy that libvirt gained support for managing VirtualBox recently and likely to soon have a driver for the Open Nebular cloud management project. Expect more advancements in sVirt, allowing for tighter controls on what a virtual machine can do, for example, ability to restrict network access of guests. libvirt will also gain the ability to manage host network configuration in Fedora 12, removing the need to manually configure bridge devices. Container based virt may make a more formal appearance in Fedora 12 as the native Linux container (LXC) support improves in the kernel and libvirt. The overhaul of the virt-manager user interface also continues.

8. Working on virtualization must be awfully time consuming and involved. Do you enjoy it? What do you do to get away from the pressures of hacking?

Working on open source virtualization technology is a great experience because it is a really interesting and challenging field, having plenty of talented developers to work with and learn from. There is plenty of work still to be done at all levels of the stack from kernel/hypervisor right through to end user applications and not nearly enough time to do it all. I'm fortunate to be able to spread my work between upstream projects, the Fedora community and RHEL releases and maintenance.

As for free time? What free time? :-) I try to find time for a photography, with 4 out of my 5 cameras still using film, rather than digital.

The Sound of Fedora 11

2009-05-21T10:06:00.003-04:00

An Interview on Fedora 11's enhanced Audio Control with Lennart Poettering

Where would we be without sound? It's the most primitive of communication methods, and yet it has spawned so much technology around it. Whether you're a musician, a DJ, riding a bus to work, or even just stuck in a cubicle listening to the radio somewhere, sound has become an integral part of your daily experiences. When Fedora 11 lands, along with it will land a number of enhancements to the sound subsystem, including unified volume control, per stream and per device monitoring, and proper Bluetooth audio support. I recently caught up with Lennart Poettering, Red Hat Desktop Team Engineer and resident audio guru. Here's what he had to say about the upcoming improvements and what the future holds:

1. Please introduce yourself and give us a brief intro to how you started working on the upcoming audio improvement in F11.

I am Lennart Poettering and have been working for Red Hat in the Desktop Group for two years now this month. I live in Berlin, Germany.

PA has been part of Fedora since F8. Since then we used to ship two volume control appications: the GNOME volume control and a PA (Pulse Audio) specific tool (pavucontrol). The latter was mostly a showcase what can be done with PA and I wrote it mostly as a demo, not because I thought it was any good as an UI.

Of course having these two volume control UIs in Fedora was a situation that badly needed fixing. Especially since both UIs exposed too many unnecessary options: the GNOME volume control exposed a lot of low-level hardware-specific features that only a tiny minority of people actually really understood, and the PA volume control exposed a lot of low-level software features that a slightly larger minority of people only actually really understood.

Now during the last year we reached a point were the feature set of PA for volume controls became very complete (with such things as arbitrary meta data on every stream/device, per-stream and per-device monitoring, hardware volume range extension, "flat" volumes and lots of other stuff) and Jon McCann with help from Bastien Nocera finally took up the work to
fix the UI situation.

They basically designed the new UI from scratch with input from usability experts. It implements many of the features the old pavucontrol tool did, but in a much nicer, streamlined way. Also it integrates sound theme/event sound control with general audio configuraton and volume control in a single UI tool.

2. Can you give us some background on the upcoming changes to the audio subsystem in the Fedora 11 Release?

If you want to know more about the Volume Control, I'd just refer to the Feature page:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/VolumeControl

We moved PA 0.9.15 into F11, a nice overview over the new features you can find here:

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/oh-nine-fifteen.html

However that overview is a bit out-of-date. There are quite a few additional features that went into 0.9.15, most prominently full Bluetooth Audio support: Together with Bastien Nocera and the BlueZ guys I worked to make Bluetooth audio easily accessible -- the bluetooth applet now exposes an easy dialog that allows you to pair and activate a bluetooth headset. After that is done it will automatically appear in PulseAudio. If you need to reactivate it later, you can do that with a simple click in the applet menu. It works surprisingly well. It even works fine for lip-sync video. Which is kind of magic, given that Bluetooth Audio doesn't actually offer any timing interfaces, so syncing up audio with video is not really possible. I spent a lot of time to make sure it does work nonetheless, and it seems to work on the majority of headphones although I cannot say for sure if it does for all of them.

3. Where did the ideas to change all this stuff come from? Didn't audio always work in Fedora?

Depends what you mean by 'work'. Sure, basic audio output worked. But in many ways what we had on Linux was not comparable to what MacOS or Windows supported. And it still isn't in many ways. However in other ways we have now surpassed those competitors.

A lot of the changes we introduced with PA are not directly visible to the user. For example the so called 'glitch-free' logic in PA is very important for a modern audio stack, however the normal user will never notice it -- except maybe because when we introduced it initially a lot of driver bugs got exposed that people were not aware of before because that driver functionality (usually timing related) was not really depended on by any application. In fact even now many of the older drivers expose broken timing that makes usage with PA not as much fun as it could be.

A more detailed explanation of this 'glitch-free' logic you may find here:

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/pulse-glitch-free.html

Both Windows Vista and MacOS X have similar g-f logic in their audio stacks, however with PA we brought it to the next step. For example, we implemented this logic in a zero-copy fashion and with arbitrary sample types. This allows us to pass PCM data through our pipelines without ever having to copy/convert it unless we really have to.

So yes, as you might have noticed I spend a lot of time to get low-level internals right. And I like to speak about it, even though most people are not aware of all those technical details and how awesome this all is. ;-) That said, this stuff isn't perfect yet and could need more improvements.

But it's not all just in the low-level details. Also on higher levels we got inspired by how our competitors do things. For example the new "flat" volume logic was pioneered in Vista, and we have now adopted a similar logic in PA. It's a great way to reduce the complexities of volume control by 'merging' a few of the sliders in the pipeline. It thus solves the "So which slider is now causing my volume to be too low?" a bit. But also here, there's more work to be done.

It's not all just getting inspired by our competitors. There are a lot of genuinely new features in PA that none of them have (at least to my knowledge). For example, in PA we have 'spatial' event sounds. I.e. if an event sound sound is triggered by a mouse click/dialog at the left side of the screen the sound is generated more from the left speakers, and similar for the right side. This is of course mostly a toy. But I think a useful one ;-) .

Listing all the fancy features PA has would certainly be a bit too much for this interview. So I'll leave it with this... ;-)

Generally, we get inspiration from everywhere. And sure, as long as the most basic music playback was enough for you audio did always work in Fedora. But OTOH, when we started with the integration of all of these new audio features into Fedora two years ago the audio stack was still at a point of what was modern in the 90's. With the new features of the new volume control and PA we are working on bringing Linux audio to what is modern today.

4. Can you also give us a comparison of our new audio framework in reference to other audio frameworks and audio subsystem models that are out there?

There are many frameworks out there. On Free Software systems PA doesn't really have any competitor. Some people think that JACK is one, but it actually is not. JACK is clearly focussed on audio production and not very useful on the desktop otherwise. For example, it is strictly designed to provide very low-latency at the price of power consumption. This is the right thing to do for audio production but not on the general desktop. Logic like 'glitch-free' (see above) makes a lot of sense for the usual desktop audio since it allows flexible adjusting of the latency to what is needed. If used properly it can be used to decrease the interrupt rate to 1/s, while still allowing instant reaction to user input. Since most PCs these days are laptops theses kind of power consumption related features are very important.

One of the current weaker points of Audio on Linux is that we have this clear separation of JACK for audio production and PA for desktop/embedded. Other operating systems have managed to make this a bit smoother by having a single stack for both. This however actually has both advantages and disadvantages.

To improve the situation for now we focussed on making PA and JACK cooperate better. In F11 when JACK needs low-level access to an audio device it will tell PA so and PA will comply and release the device.

This should make switching between the two sound systems easier though of course this is no perfect solution. Given the lack of manpower further integration is unlikely to happen anytime soon -- though both the JACK guys and I seem not generally opposed to something like that.

Now, if you compare our audio stacks with those of the big other operating systems (Windows and MacOSX), then besides the fact that they usually integrate desktop audio and audio production better than we do (as mentioned) there are many things we are better in and many they are better in. We certainly have more flexibility: i.e. depending on your application you can access audio on a lot of different levels: you can access ALSA directly if you need very low-level control, or via PA for desktop level control. You have APIs like GStreamer for media streaming and so on.

This flexibility however translates to more complexity in many ways, and a hodgepodge of API styles. (OTOH Apple's CoreAudio actually isn't as streamlined as many MacOS proponents like us to think.) The documentation for our APIs is usually much worse then theirs. We really need some improvements in that area. Featurewise, PA usually has better networking related features then those counterparts. But there's a lot of features they have right now we lack.

Other Unixes, such as FreeBSD and OpenSolaris are still stuck with OSS (Open Sound System) audio. In F11 we finally switched OSS off by default (though you can still reenable it via some minor hackery). OSS was the predecessor of ALSA. Thankfully it is now fully obsolete on Linux. OSS is mostly a design from the early nineties. It has received only minor updating since then. It is no way comparable to what we now have on Linux or even what MacOS or Windows provide. (Although is has some very vocal fans which like to write me hate mails because I say things like this)

5. This work all started in earlier releases dating all the way to even Fedora 8, if I am correct. How has all this stuff progressed and evolved from then? What was done in previous releases that enabled building upon for this release?

Fedora 8 was the first release where we integrated PA. In Fedora 9 we stabilized PA support. In F10 we integrated the 'glitch-free' logic which turned out to be quite a bumpy ride given that it exposed a lot of timing related driver bugs. In F11 g-f has now been made more robust and most of the more modern audio drivers should now be fixed. Also we have now started to push PA support more into the UI, like with this new volume control.

6. What are the plans for the future, if any, in this particular space in the distro?

I am working on multiple things for F12. Firstly there will be a couple of more low-level changes to PA. The core will be made more threaded. Right now, we run most things in one 'main' thread and do low-level audio I/O in one thread for each audio card. My plan for F12 is to split that one 'main' thread up into as many threads as possible. This should make PA more robust for a couple of operations, and make latencies more reliable.

Then, I am working on considerably beefing up PA's usage of the low-level hardware volume controls. For example, many cards have seperate low-level volume sliders for "Speaker", "Master", "PCM" (and more) that are in the line from the PCM data we stream to the speakers. PA currently exposes only one of those sliders (usually "Master"). My plan is to 'multiply' those sliders and create a single 'product' virtual slider from them that has a better granularity and a larger range. This rework will also introduce input/output switching and probably more.

What has already landed in PA's git repository is support for UPnP A/V. When used in conjunction with Zeeshan Ali's Rygel UPnP MediaServer implementation this allows streaming any application's audio to a any UPnP MediaRenderer (including PS3/Xboxes and all those 'Internet Radio' devices). This is actually pretty neat. Later on we hope to make PA a Media Renderer as as well as a MediaServer. This nicely compliments our current Apple RAOP support.

And there's a lot of other things planned. We'll see how much of that will be ready for F12. I don't like to talk too much about upcoming features and planned code if I don't have anything to show yet, so I'll leave it at this.

And then there's always a little project of mine that is called 'libsydney' that is intended to be a portable, modern and friendly PCM API. During the last months I focussed more on PA itself though.

7. Do you feel that work like this helps enhance the desktop experience on Linux in general and strengthens the cause of the Linux Desktop, or is it more all in day's work?

I think that PA is the way forward for audio on the Linux desktop. It may have its deficiencies -- but everything has. We still have some way to go, but I believe that a modern audio layer is really important for the Linux Desktop to succeed.

And no, it doesn't feel at all in a day's work. It always is a great feeling to see how PA got incorporated into so many distributions and how it is now used by so many people. I am pretty sure that only if you hack on Linux software you get this in this ways.

8. Speaking of all in a days work, what are things do you usually work on? What do you most enjoy doing outside of work.

Red Hat basically hired me to help improving audio on Linux. So that's what I am doing during work.

Outside of work spend my time with photopgraphy. And I am trying my best to travel to interesting places as much as I can and my time off allows.

Thank you Lennart for an excellent interview, ideas and insight. We look forward to hearing more from you. Get it--hearing more, he works on sound, okay I give up.

Fedora 11 Podcast Series #4 - KMS with Adam Jackson a.k.a. Ajax

2009-05-19T10:08:00.001-04:00

For the fourth podcast in our Fedora 11 podcast series, we turn to the magic that is our display system. One of the coolest new features in Fedora 11 is the ability to do kernel based mode setting for the display. Kernel mode setting allows the kernel to set certain parameters for the display and moves this functionality out of the X server itself and out of user space. This enables cool things such as quicker graphical boot up and fancier eye candy. For more information I caught up with Fedora X and diaplay guru Adam Jackson. Adam is a lifer on the X scene and knows more about displays than you, I and probably he himself want to know.

Kernel Mode Setting with Adam Jackson

In the interview, Adam talks about the hidden underbelly of Linux and X graphics and displays and how previous version of Fedora may, or may not have been able to trigger seizures. Adam also expands the possible inclusion of a kernel crash screen of death (yes it comes with flaming eyes), how collaborating with other distros and upstreams has helped him achieve great things and how that helps others, and finally, about the upcoming Boston area concert calendar.

Fedora 11 Podcast Series #3 - General Overview of F11 with Tom 'Spot' Callaway

2009-05-18T11:14:00.000-04:00

Continuing on in our series of Fedora 11 podcasts, we present an interview of the series with Tom 'Spot' Callaway. In case you don't know Spot, he's been making Fedora happen since before Fedora was called Fedora. Spot is a Red Hat Engineer, the Fedora Engineering Manager, and of course an active and knowledgeable community member. With keen insights and an eagle-eye view of the Fedora release process, the community, and our history and roadmap, you can be sure that any chat with Spot is worth your while.

Fedora 11 General Overview and Insights with Tom Spot Callaway

In the interview, Spot covers much ground, with everything from features in the upcoming release such as 20 Second Startup and Kernel Mode Setting to the future Fedora artists movement. Spot also talks about the importance and benefit of Fedora's upstream oriented developer process, the recent enhancements to Fedora's QA process, and the addition of members to the Fedora QA team. Finally Spot takes a nostalgic trip down Memory Lane, with a discussion of the long history behind Fedora, what he thinks Fedora as a community has to offer contributors, and why Fedora is the very best place to be.

The Countdown to Fedora 11 Begins!

2009-05-12T09:59:00.004-04:00

Fedora 11 is less than two weeks away. The excitement is in the air and we all can't wait to see the product of more than a few long months of hard work. It's prime time to start talking about what users can expect to see, highlight new features and describe some of the enhancements that we can all look forward too. As part of a series of podcast and print interviews, Today, I would like to present the first podcast in the Fedora 11 Podcast series, an interview with long time Fedora contributor and Fedora Release Engineer Jesse Keating. The audio can be found here:

"Fedora 11 General Overview with Fedora Release Engineer Jesse Keating"

In the interview, Jesse talks to us about the achievement milestone of putting together 11 releases, the process of planning and putting together a Fedora release, how it was done for F11 and also some of the tools, which he helped create which are used to put together the Fedora distribution. He talks about Pungi and Revisor which are tools used to compose the Fedora tree and create a custom remix or re-spin, respectively. He also talks about some of the changes which have taken place under the hood to enable Fedora's new faster and improved boot up. Jesse takes us on a whirlwind tour of some of the greatest enhancements we can look forward to in F11, including changes to PackageKit and a new upstream version of RPM, the new default ext4 filesystem, enhanced fingerprint support for authentication and what we can look forward to in the future releases of Fedora.

The Full Fedora 11 Feature list can be found at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/FeatureList and you can look forward to more in depth coverage of some of those features and of the upcoming release in the days to come. Fedora 11 is sure to prove a highly innovative and technologically advanced release.

Fedora 11. Get ready. There's reason to be excited!

Duke Nukem Forever. Never?

2009-05-07T14:17:00.004-04:00

In a rather sad bit of news I was just pointed at this: Report: Duke Nukem Developer Shuts Down.

You heard it right, 3D Realms is going, going, gone. This is very troubling as I have friends who have been checking the 3D Realms website every day for the last 10 years waiting on any little tidbit of information. Yes, I am aware that it is sad that I just said that, but its the truth.

I am unsure of exactly what IP agreements are in place regarding everything surrounding the game, whatever of it does exist. Regardless, I will use this is an opportunity to call on 3D Realms to open up the source code to the game and let the people work on finishing it. They can retain the rights and all that good stuff, but for heaven's sake, don't let the Duke die!

As the Duke would say, "It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and 3D Realms is all out of gum."

Do it. Do it.

Louder Now

2009-04-03T17:18:00.002-04:00

Ah, another successful week! I was really glad and proud that we made it through the beta without too much fuss. We hit all the goals we set for the Fedora Marketing team on time and on schedule with relative ease. Otherwise, I was pretty annoyed that for some reason my feed dropped of Planet for a couple of days and I ended up talking to myself when I thought I was broadcasting. I ended up having to track down people separately and make sure they were taking care of things, but everyone was at the top of their game.

We cleaned up some wiki stuff the early part of the week in prep for the beta, and I went through a couple more pages just to make sure everything was all good after last weeks tightening up. One of the posts I put up while I was off planet was to remind people on the News Distribution Network to get on their ponies and start emailing their group of people. One thing that we need to talk about with the Translations team is about preempting the rush with translating stuff, and those meetings are going to be taking place next week.

Now though, its time we step into high gear. Although there are less small tasks, we have the few big ones in the run up to release left. They are also pretty cool projects which are also a lot of fun and if anyone is interested in helping out you can always join the fed0ra-marketing list or find us on irc.

First and foremost, on fp.o site, you should be seeing a banner similar to this rolling around:

This is for the Fedora Picture Book which the Marketing team is working on. I couldn't figure out how to make that a link, so I'll put it here. If you have any pictures and want to be in the book or know someone who does, click it now--TIME IS RUNNING OUT!

Next up, this coming Tuesday is the deadline for submitting your slogan ideas for F11. If you have something good, make sure you visit here and add it. We will be discussing the submission at the marketing meeting on Tuesday and hope to decide on something so that it can be forwarded to the art team, etc.

We have also started work on a Press Kit. Not just a one time thing, but something which is professional, classy and can be updated for each release. It aggregates a bit of the various pieces of information on the wiki and makes them look nice and presentable. Steven Moix has been working on press kit content in French while others of us are just working on layout and other ideas in general. You can take a look at a preview here. The content is just nonsense pasted in from various pages on the wiki, but its more for general idea. Hopefully we can use what Steven and the guys come up with and just translate it to any language we want, stick it in the template and voila!

Otherwise, myself and Yannik have started working on the Faces of Fedora campaign again, and we have a list of people who we'll be contacting to submit stuff as we work on guidelines for general submission from everyone.

Overall, good times, and I am very proud of all the great work everyone on the team is doing. If there was ever a fun place in the project to get involved this is it!

Fedora: Fixing Bugs Before Other Distros Even See Them, Since 2003

2009-04-02T12:49:00.003-04:00

I was quite amused to see this, thanks to Bob who brought it to my attention via Jef. I don't even know if I want to say anything about this because it speaks for itself, but I will say that it definitely made me chuckle when I read it.

http://gquigs.blogspot.com/2009/03/fedora-beta-released.html

I wasn't aware that the target audience for Fedora Betas was the Ubuntu Community. Dammit! I need to go update all the marketing stuff now. ;)

Fedora 11 Beta

2009-03-31T11:40:00.002-04:00

Fedora 11 Beta was just released minutes ago, you can get your copy fresh here: http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease.

This is prime time for the marketing time. If you have any tasks that are due for beta, Today would be the day to make sure those are wrapped up. We are going to take a look at those today and start looking forward to the GA release.

Also, if you are part of the News Distribution Network, please make sure that you have the beta announcement translated and try and contact press from the contact list and point them to the announcement, to other relevant information and figure out how you can help them spread the news!

{Insert Slogan Here}

2009-03-20T16:57:00.002-04:00

Fedora 11 is right around the corner!! This week during the beta readiness meeting, mizmo mentioned that we were still missing slogan, or tag line, for the upcoming release. Seeing as this has marketing's name all over it, I figured we should start working on this. There were a few funny suggestions, but I ask you in earnest, what do you think our upcoming release slogan should be?

I set up a wiki page here with some keywords, which I hope people will continue to add to and I hope that from there we can begin to add some spices to the soup and come up with something great.

Show us what you got...

HAPPY 15th BIRTHDAY LINUX

2009-03-13T18:06:00.000-04:00

Title says it all...

TWiFM: This Week in Fedora Marketing 2009.03.13

2009-03-13T17:53:00.002-04:00

This week in Fedora Marketing is brought to you by the letters P and R and the number 7. All that aside, this week was fairly quiet. I had to miss the meeting on Tuesday, and that was unfortunate because we actually discussed something very new and cool and important. As per the discussions over the last two weeks we have developed a list of features which are central to the upcoming release to which we would like to devote in depth coverage. The list can be found here. If anyone is interested in picking up the couple of remaining features that would be a great help. It basically entails interviewing the feature developer and putting it up on a wiki space and document the feature visually if its relevant.

Also, pending Ian's announcement, we are literally on the cusp of opening up submission for pictures for the picture book. Hope to be able to update on that real soon now.

TWiFM: This Week in Fedora Marketing

2009-03-06T16:39:00.002-05:00

Marketing is moving forward very quickly and making lots of good progress. The first notable item to advertise this week is that the marketing meetings have shifted time, to 21.00 UTC, in #fedora-mktg. This ended being the most convenient time for a large group of people to congregate so after discussion on the list we decided to move things to then. More information on the Marketing meetings, including logs can be found here.

Next, on the Fedora Picture Book front, things are moving quickly. Thank to Ian Weller there is a wealth of information on the wiki page. Most importantly is that if you want to be involved, go to the page, download, sign and send the release form to the proper place. We should start accepting photo submissions as early as next week, so hurry and get a move on if you want your pics to get approved in time for the book.

Also, everything else on the *NEW* Schedule is going as planned. If anyone sees anything that should be on there that isn't please let me know and add it! A huge thanks to Steven Moix for taking care of everything related to the new news distribution network. We have a hefty list of publications and press people now linked off that page so that we can easily keep track of who we contacted and spoke to.

I've personally been working on wrangling feature owners that want to be involved with the press push for the release. If you own something cool and want to make sure it gets well publicized for the release and I haven't spoke to you yet, please drop me an email. I'm also hoping to have the talking points completed for this Tuesday's meeting now that the feature freeze is done.

There was also a very interesting discussion at the tail end of last weeks meeting regarding a great idea that Gerold Kassube had for establishing a new format for marketing and just distributing information in general, revolving around the four foundations. If you're interested read the log, but more on that to come...

This Week and Next in Fedora Marketing

2009-02-27T14:37:00.001-05:00

Fedora Marketing is getting back into good shape. We've been working hard over the past couple of weeks and this week was no different. I'll get into it things in a bit, but the most important change that people need to know about right away is that our new meeting time for Fedora Marketing Meetings is Tuesdays at 21.00 UTC. If you are available then, please join us, we would love to have as many people as possible active!

Otherwise, over the past week, we spent alot of time pruning and cleaning up our wiki space. The home page, https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing , is much cleaner now, and there is less old junk laying around. A big thanks goes out to Steven Moix for spearheading that effort.

Speaking of Steven Moix, he is responsible for setting up the new News Distribution Network. I volunteered to take care of English language stuff and we have a couple of other languages covered, but if you want in on the action and want to get your local langauge in on the mix, please go to that page and sign up and let us know on the list!

Also, significant improvements were made with regard to marketing's workflow and the issues I discussed last week. We've adopted a new release based schedule which can be found here, which lets us lay out tasks according to where we are in the cycle and clearly see who is responsible and accountable for them. There are still elements missing from this schedule, so if you feel as though something was left out, please go ahead and add it. I still have a couple of things to add myself. This template is going to be copied for each release and the version for the current F11 release cycle lives here.

We've also made some progress on the Fedora Picture Book. We finally have a release form and you can download it and find more instructions at the link above. I think we are going to start moving forward on this pretty rapidly in the coming weeks.

All in all a good week, lots more stuff to do over the weekend, adding tasks, figuring out a place to put pictures to be uploaded, assigning tasks, etc. Should be fun, hope you'll help. We've got a good thing going...

The NEW Fedora Marketing

2009-02-20T16:03:00.002-05:00

Over the last few weeks we have been working to rejuvenate Fedora Marketing. A tremendous job, was and continues to be done by the folks on the team, in all areas and I just wanted to write a little about everything so that those not following closely could at least get the bigger picture of what's going on and also, maybe attract anyone else who might be interested.

Primarily, the focus of what has been going on is a restructuring of how marketing goes about establishing goals and splitting them up into tasks and then the time-frames for completing those tasks. Marketing has always been busy, except that some times, due to the nature of how tasks were assigned or randomly picked up, it was unclear what people what were working on what tasks lead to confusion. Additionally, there was up until the last few week a perceived fissure between marketing and the rest of Fedora. This was really more due to lack of communication than anything else, so we have been trying to address that problem as well.

After much discussion on IRC and on the list, we were able to identify three main barriers to efficiency and growth:

* First, we could adopt a better workflow, one which prioritizes tasks and puts them on some sort of schedule. The nature of Fedora is cyclical; a release-based cycle, we should try to align ourselves with that.

* Second, if things will be more fine grained with a new workflow, we can easily assign and clearly define who is responsible for what. Prior to this, many tasks were left by the way side because others were afraid of taking them and stepping on someone else's toes.

* Third, and most importantly, Marketing is a "sort of" function of 3 groups, Ambassadors, Docs and Art. We don't really communicate well with anyone in those groups. That being said, there are many tasks which cross over and can be worked on cooperatively. If only we had meetings scheduled, we would be able to identify those opportunities, and lighten the workload for everyone and be more efficient at completing it.

The proposed solution is to incorporate all these elements into a new process, with a new workflow for the team, which is schedule based. The insipiration for this was really drawn from the good work that John Poelstra does with his release schedules. That can be found here. Over the last 2-3 meetings of the Marketing team we have been working to put together a template schedule which we can use for every release and then use the template to put something together for each release. Right now, you can find the template here. We are still working on adding things to it, and please feel free to do so, if you can think of anything which we missed. Once all these core tasks are set in place, we can add to that all the other cool, non-release based things that we do, like the Fedora Picture Book.

What's up next and what you can do:

* Continue to add things to the schedule. This is vital, as over the next few releases we will be adhering strictly to this cycle.

* Cleaning up the Marketing space on the wiki. We should have a meeting about this at some point next week, but until then myself and a few others, and hopefully yet more volunteers will emerge to help us do this. All you wiki-masters out there, get your knives out...

* Start coming to the marketing meetings! The team relies on the energy and collaboration of the whole community and if you believe you can contribute some time, marketing is probably the most fun and easiest way to do that. Currently, we are trying to establish a new meeting time to accomodate more people. If you would like to start attending, please go to this page, and add your name to the list.

We are going to get marketing back on a more efficient track and get more heads in the mix to brainstorm cooler projects in the future. Are you in?

Get Started in KVM

2009-01-19T09:44:00.002-05:00

I've recently had some good chats with the Qumranet guys, specifically revolving around community engagement and how to integrate more Fedora community members. A number of community members, both red hat and non, have been expressing alot of interest in this stuff for the last few month.

The KVM guys gave me some general guidelines, and I threw something together on the wiki here. If anyone has some time to devote to triage, that could probably be the biggest help right now and also if anyone wants to start hacking KVM and would like a mentor, the Qumranet guys are more than happy to oblige. Email me and I can hook you up with someone.

Otherwise, I hope that wiki page holds some useful info and serves as a central point of information exchange and that people will add stuff as we go, especially when SPICE and SolidICE are opened up to the world.

Fudcon Under Ice

2009-01-11T08:55:00.002-05:00

FUDCon + Boston + January = Blizzard!

Woke up to close to a foot of fresh snowfall, car is buried, very cold!

Anyway, so far FUDCon has been great, despite the fact that I am severely jet-lagged. On Friday, spent most of the day with Clint, David, Ian and Karsten in 395 putting working on the AmbassadorKits, some marketing stuff and just general chit chat. Walked around some, caught some random people and tried to make sure people were taking pictures for the Fedora Picture Book we are working on and spoke to Colby very briefly early on to make sure we get testimonials for the video thingy.

Looking forward to Today, just need to manage to get the car out from under the ice!

Jealous that I'm Here Instead

2008-12-14T09:00:00.003-05:00

He's done it again.

I just want to take this opportunity to point out that I am very, very, very, very, extremely, extremely jealous of one Mr. Jesse Keating.

That is all....

Update: P.S. No fair on stealing my lyrics-as-a-blog-post-subject thing either! I'm still jealous.

The Kids Are Alright

2008-12-14T06:52:00.002-05:00

In a world of growing economic uncertainty, I'm glad to see that some people still have the ingenuity to creatively re-purpose the familiar...

The Feel Good Drag

2008-10-31T13:41:00.001-04:00

In our game, you can usually quantify success by observing not only your own growth, but also what affects you are having on the greater community and those around you. Judging by that, I'm glad to report that one of my favorite open source projects, Magento, are well on their way to achieving success--if they haven't achieved it already.

Since their 0.6 release which is not too long ago, they've already reached 500,000 downloads. Their user community is also over 44,000 strong and they have over 60, thats right 60, translations. It is a true testament to the Magento team and their philosophy and dedication to the community model and to Open Source.

As if that doesn't suffice, others in the eCommerce space have begun to open source their offerings as they feel the heat from Magento. Oxid, a very popular German eCommerce software producer recently announced Oxid eShop is going open with eShop Community Edition. (Link is in German)

I stand by what I said months ago, Magento is killing it.

UPDATE: As I write someone showed me that Matt Asay posted about this as well on his Open Road blog.

Plymouth

2008-10-31T13:37:00.002-04:00

Here's a link to a really great write up that the guys over at Phoronix did about Plymouth. Just remember, when you see it making its way to other distros, you saw it here first!

Jack

I'd Rather Be With an Animal, Part 1

2008-10-23T22:46:00.002-04:00

My life is very adventurous. It seems that every time I go away something HAS to happen. I arrived at FSOSS earlier today and as you probably guessed, something happened. Stay tuned after the jump, because it really is quite an interesting and, even I have to admit, funny, story.

A quick summary of day 1 of the symposium first. Got in, got to Seneca, Got there right in time to see Greg moderating his panel. I've been mostly involved in the Teaching OSS @ FSOSS track, and pretty much spent all day in that room. What came out of it were some really good ideas. One particular idea which struck me the most were the alternative models for engaging the academic community. Specifically, one which came up quite a bit today and one which I mentioned before to a few people, is getting academic schools other than CS/CE, mainly business and law interested in Open Source. Personally, I think its a great idea, particularly since from a research perspective, there maybe more practical implications for a Business major or a Law major surrounding Open Source, than there might be coming from CS/CE.

At 2:00 was our big parlor meeting type thing revolving around finally putting together all the disparate pieces in order to get re-focus our energies surrounding Open Source in Education and advancing the cause. Our big idea was that we need some neutral, third-party space in which we can begin to coalesce and join up in a unified voice. The first steps, we agreed, was getting up a list of current institutions and individuals who are already doing Open Source education well so that we stop reinventing the wheel and create a pool which we can draw from. Some sort of consortium was thought to be the best idea and we are starting slowly but surely. For now, anyone who is doing any open source in academia related stuff would do themselves well by checking this site and maybe adding to it: http://tinyurl.com/tos-group

After we disbanded, the real fun happened when I wanted to track everyone down again when they went to dinner. On second thought, I'll post up the story in the morning because I'm tired and want to go to bed. Just know for now that it doesn't involve anything getting broken and is sort of a Twilight Zone meets Jurrasic Park type of tale.

Okay, really tired, going to sleep. To be continued...

Linux Foundation's End User Collaboration Summit

2008-10-13T17:29:00.002-04:00

Just got back from the EUCS. It was pretty cool and I got to meet a whole lot of interesting people. The point of the EUCS was to bring together developers and community managers with end users to get some conversation started and analyze the present to come up with some cool stuff for the future.

The day started off with Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation's Executive Director MCing some panels and talks by a few people including Red Hat's own Paul Cormier. Also, Anthony Williams, author of Wikinomics gave a keynote. He is one smart dude.

There were many cool sessions in a variety of different areas, including virtualization, power management, desktop-y stuff and mobile linux and I got to talk to some interesting people about a few pretty cool topics. Lots of people from Japan were there too, which was cool. All in all a cool day, although I tried to find education interested people and there werent many. I even tried to start an education break away session and no people came. Not that this was the right venue, but hey!, it was worth a try.

Jack

Looking for an MIT Student/Fedora Rep!

2008-08-15T17:12:00.003-04:00

If anyone reading this is an MIT student and is interested in doing some awesome Fedora-related stuff on campus and with faculty, please let me know! Details to those who respond...

Fedora at LinuxWorld SF

2008-08-01T01:43:00.002-04:00

Fellow Fedorans,

Please join the Fedora Project at next week's LinuxWorld Conference and Expo taking place in the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Ca. The show floor will be open Tues-Thu from 9:30am until 4pm. Additionally, we will have a Fedora BoF on Wednesday the 6th at 5:30pm. Please stop by the booth in the .org pavilion.

I will be recording video testimonials, so please bring a smile!

Rock the Vote

2008-07-22T14:31:00.001-04:00

Just got done with voting for the F10 release name. I don't know how hot I am on the range voting, but we'll see. What are you waiting for?? Vote for the Fedora 10 Release name NOW!

Fedora on the Final Frontier

2008-02-28T03:00:00.008-05:00

There has been a long standing rumor regarding NASA running Fedora which all of us in the Fedora community have been always intrigued by. Is it true? What are they doing with it there? Why don't they run RHEL. Fortunately enough, a couple of weeks ago, I got to experience NASA behind the scenes, first hand, and hang out with the coolest members of the Fedora community, and find out the answer to these questions and lots more.

A big "THANK YOU" goes out to Jim Dumoulin and the guys from the NASA Telescience Lab.

Needless to say this was possibly one of the most awesomest days of my life. Let's go to the tape:

This is where it all began. Usually it takes 24-48 hours to get security clearance. Of course I got hooked up in only 4 on my drive down from Jacksonville, not including a 45 minute delay once I arrived due to a windows server running the badge printing machines being down. I was quite glad to have passed security clearance. The Feds ain't got nothin' on me. Whew!

{Photo of Security ID had to be removed at NASA's Request}
Security Clearance. Sweet!!

Everything started at the famous Operations and Checkout building where they do many many NASA-y things. Seeing as that I didn't get a good picture of the whole building I should mention that the building is HUGE and it serves many functions. Primarily, they process horizontal payloads going to space, whether on the Shuttle or some other rocket/rlv. The building also houses a lot of technology related infrastructure, which we will get into in a bit. Most importantly, or most cool I should say, this is where the Astronauts live while at Kennedy Space Center:

Under lock and key.

Below are a few miscellaneous photos of stuff around the Ops and Checkout building:

STS-112 was in space while I was there, so this banner was put up before they departed to show support.

This is the famous door where the Astronauts exit to load onto the bus to the shuttle. The bar you see on top is where all the TV cameras are usually mounted.

Astronaut Parking Only. Oddly enough, despite my vehement protest that I am a space cadet, they refused to let me park here. Maybe someday...

Now on to the good stuff.
Fedora at NASA: It Does Exist!

A video distribution and streaming system. You'll see the server shortly.

Okay, so as it turns out, NASA is using Fedora and RHEL. A Lot! I was taken into the data center of the Telescience Lab, and got to see some machines. This is but a fraction of whats going on. I was happy to find out that Fedora is being used to help shuffle the above video streams around. You can get to the server here. Most of this stuff is what ends up on NASA TV.

A video feed coming off the server, this was live footage of one of the spacewalks. It gets distributed from here to a few places, including Mission Control in Houston and of course NASA TV.

These servers run a few things at the lab, including video distribution, data processing, and web serving. Wanna know what its running?

RHEL.

Shadowman lurking in the dark corners of NASA.

This is an SGI supercomputer, 512 processors, more RAM than I can remember, running IRIX which does data analysis. Telescience provides telemetry data to Launch Control, and its all sourced from here. Nothing to do with Fedora, but still cool for geekdom at large. THIS has a fat pipe.

These systems were most likely built by Fedora release engineer Jesse Keating while he was working for Pogo Linux. These run Fedora. When they had to analyze the data and photos from the Columbia crash, NASA would move data from permanent storage onto these servers for analysis. Jesse told me about this and I was very skeptical, so I asked and it turns out to be very true. I was very proud to know, and we should all be very proud, that our community is making software that is helping make the future of space exploration safer.

If it ain't broke, don't upgrade it, right? Actually one of the guys in the lab told me they are in the process of upgrading to Fedora 8 and playing with 9 alpha.

This is a blade server running Fedora which runs NASA's countdown server. So what is this server you ask? So the actual time source for the launch countdown is the atomic clock but there are a few sources at NASA which sync to it and each other to provide launch services. This is one of them. Actually this is THE public facing countdown time source. If you click that main Telescience Lab link all the way above, this server is where alot of those links on that page land. They also have a page for ELV/RLV countdowns as well.

This is Jim, the director of the Telescience lab, at the command console in the lab.

This is me at the original command console desk from the Apollo era. That black and white photo shows everyone huddled around it back in the day.

This is the famous Shuttle assembly and prep building where they turn the Shuttle vertical and connect it to the rockets and put it on the transporter.

The Shuttle transporter. This things was as large as a city. It was actually headed out to the launchpad which as Jim explained was odd since we were in the middle of a bad weather warning and there was lightning and no apparent reason for this beast to be heading in that direction.

A pic of the transporters cab as we drove by.

This is a picture of the same building from the side showing Launch Control (the small building there). Those tracks are the from the transporter.

The countdown clock from a distance.

Launchpad B. Unfortunately, due to the lightning, we were unable to get any closer. I hope one day I get to go back and take some more pictures off the launchpad.

This is me on the inside of the door where the Astronauts come out to load onto the bus to the Shuttle. Many a great person have stood in this spot. I claimed it in the name of Fedora and was quickly then asked politely asked to leave the building. Just Kidding!

Reality hit when I saw this. See that text that says "You are Here?" Well if you've ever seen a Red Hat video, many of them end with that, and it sent a chill down my spine to see it there with in the same font nonetheless. It got me thinking about our community and how as people, we really imitate the vast mechanics of space and our universe. As a community, each interaction is like another collision of asteroids, another chance for something to take root. Another chance for a planet to come to life.

I've been involved in Fedora since Day -1 (RHL and RHLP). Looking back at everything that we've gone through and where we are now continues to amaze me, but above all else, the members of our community and their passion, their persistence and insistence on making those collisions gain momentum truly inspires me. Considering everything we have been through, success and strife, triumphs and tribulations, promises we made and followed through on, promises we made that fell through, how much we have learned and how much everyone in the community has gained as a result, being able to walk into a place like NASA with an open armed welcome, makes me damn proud to be part of this.

Look what we have done, but more importantly, look what we've enabled! That's been our goal all along and I think we have done it well. Some people have been to space, we enable others to go to space. We are the platform that dreams are built on. Not just our own dreams, but the dreams of all humanity.

Next time I see "You are Here" I think I can take a little more pride in answering, "Yes, yes I am." I for one am proud to call our planet, the Fedora Planet, my planet and my community.

Florida Linux Show Wrap Up

2008-02-18T00:46:00.009-05:00

Last Monday I had the pleasure of attending the Florida Linux Show at the University of Central Florida. The show was sponsored by Red Hat and as such we had both a Red Hat and a Fedora booth. Coming into it, I knew it would be smallish show, being that SCALE had just ended but I really wanted to get a feel for what was going on there and really get a chance to meet some of the community members down there as its not an area we often get to. A special thanks goes out to Kyle Gonzalez for really playing a huge part in coordinating everything. Everyone who attended got a Fedora 8 LiveCD in the goodie bag and many many more CDs and DVDs were given out.

Everything went smoothly, we had a great booth setup with Red Hat along the back wall next to the entrance and Fedora in prime time right at the entrance. The show had, I would guess close to 400 people in and out over the course of the day and the talks seemed really cool, although I didn't get to go anyway because I was manning the booth.

I was very surprised to see the everyone that approached us was very enthusiastic and we had barely anyone come over and give us the usual "you suck because of this and that." Mostly, people came over to tell us thank you for the great work we have been doing, especially with Fedora 8 and all the great artwork recently, to play with OLPC and to check out the Fedora 9 Alpha. I was surprised that so many people were interested in the Alpha, given that it was our first time doing it, but it just proves that our philosophy of getting code into peoples hands as early as possible is really what people want.

I'll go through the show with some pictures and let everyone make their own impressions, but my overall impressions were that this is going to become a very large and very good community oriented conference much like there were in the good old days, because the guys organizing the show really want to keep the focus on the software projects and communities around them as well as packing the show with a good pack of speakers. It's nice to see that things like that are becoming the norm again.

Some guys checking out the F9 Alpha and trying to do some disaster recovery.

This dude came ready in his Red Hat gear to check out the OLPC.

Myself and Kyle hanging out in the booth.

The pristine booth setup!

More Fedora Fans. Yes!!

A nice message someone left us. I couldn't agree more!

Fire in the Attic, Proof of the Prize

2008-01-18T10:02:00.000-05:00

Lyric from the song: Anna Molly
By: Incubus
From the Album: Light Grenades

I like it when good things happen. Especially when those good things are related to Open Source and Open Standards, so I have to give a few shoutouts this morning. One blog post at a time. People are giving us reasons to be proud.

First up today: AOL

That's right! AOL might no longer be the laughing stock of everyone who has owned a computer since the 80's. Seriously though, AOL has the potential to be the world's largest identity providers. They have over 63 Million user accounts and have been working on implementing OpenID. I actually did my first OpenID login using AOL as a provider when I had to
log into Oreilly's site for OSCON 2008 to submit my abstract for the call for papers. It was really neat and it worked flawlessly. I give AOL a lot of respect for working on this and will gladly use them as my provider from now on. Unless Fedora ever becomes a provider that is. You can find more info about AOL and their OpenID efforts here.

Now in case that wasn't exciting enough for you, the bombshell came this morning. AIM is going Jabber! I was absolutely delighted when I read this. AOL is making positive steps to finally move on and up from their decade long commitment to being as proprietary as possible and pissing of numerous people to actually opening up, embracing the age of open standards and trying to regain some mind share and build community. AOL must have hired the right hackers along the way...

This along with the MySQL deal this week serves as a tremendous validation of the open source/open standards model to those who don't know any better. We're winning!

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mahatma Gandhi

But I didn't need to just say that, because we've known all along! It's just a matter of time.

I Seem to Recognize Your Face...

2008-01-16T13:39:00.000-05:00

Lyric from the song: Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town
By: Pearl Jam
From the Album: Vs

I should be doing work right now, but somehow I ended up managing to add my blog as being imported as part of my Facebook notes. This means that if you have chosen to validate our acquaintance via Facebook you will now be harassed on your home page every time I put up a new post. Consider this a test...

Chicken Nuggets: 88 Happy Lessons I Learned in the Cafeteria

2008-01-15T20:21:00.000-05:00

When I decide to write a book about my life, the subject line will be the title. Doesn't that sound weird? Chicken Nuggets? Chicken Nuggets taught me a lot about life. Let me give you the background story and then give you the top lessons (no not all 88) I took away from chicken nuggets.

When I was in 6th grade, at least I think 6th grade, one day me and one of my good friends decided that we were going to have a pig out during lunch at school--a good old fashioned keep going until your body is so full there is room for your soul eating contest. To our utter delight, that day they were serving chicken nuggets. We loved chicken nuggets.

I ate, in the span of 20 minutes, 88 chicken nuggets. I was the champ. It felt good. Even our principal who was all the while disgusted, was at the same time extremely impressed by the feat. If there was ever anything to take pride in at that time in our lives, it was knowing that the kid who can eat the most nuggets was in your school, your friend, your enemy, your pupil, the kid you threw stuff at it in class and the one you pushed at recess. Nothing mattered though, because for a glorious few precious moments, I felt the world stop turning, and someone was truly happy.

After that there are different accounts as to what happened, some of which include me throwing up, which I vehemently deny, although it is possible.

Anyway, what lesson could a person take away from a Chicken Nugget? Here are a few:

Lesson 1: Everything is covered in layers, often layers that no cares about, looks can be deceiving and the best stuff is always on the inside.

Lesson 2: Kids are stupid, and will always do stupid things, but if we could hold on to the happiness of our youth forever, maybe we would reconsider and realize that maybe kids aren't so stupid after all. They're just happy.

Lesson 3: Anything you can fit 10 of in your mouth at once probably shouldn't be in there in the first place.

Lesson 4: Don't throw up next to people. People are easily disgusted and will never forgive you for throwing up on their shoes.

Lesson 5: This is the most important one. In my life, I absolutely must build a time machine to go back to those times. Times were simpler then, we did whatever the hell we wanted and we were truly happy. Go back to those times, just to sit and take in the happiness. Go back to those times... Even if only for a minute, go back to those times...

Godspeed to All You're After

2008-01-12T21:05:00.000-05:00

Lyric from the song: Godspeed
By: Anberlin
From the Album: Cities

Is it just me or does anyone else feel like a piece of them just died? I surely do.

Back in the day, when I was a mere speck of nothingness on the Open Source map, one name everyone knew was Havoc Pennington. Not only because it was only the coolest name every but because the guy was one of the greatest hackers of our time. In secret, I had always dreamed of meeting the man behind the mailing list posts and then one day I did and it turned out that not only was all the hype true, it wasn't enough.

Havoc is one of the greatest people I have ever had the privilege of meeting and working with. A great mind, a genius hacker and most importantly an all around good guy.

Havoc, you are a pioneer and visionary, your daily presence will be missed. Godspeed to
all you're after...

I Am The Manager!

2008-01-12T19:00:00.000-05:00

The following is a statement which Max was supposed read on Saturday morning at FUDCon when he announces changes to Fedora leadership. It was triggered to auto post and thankfully it didn't because I don't think Max ended up reading it. Anyway, this is what I would have said had I been there for the announcements and asked to speak.

Good morning friends. When I call you friends, I truly mean that and it is to you that I owe this great honor. I started off doing little more than carrying boxes in and out of conferences, and saying Fedora and Red Hat until people were about to puke; the lowest of the low in the community. And, I am proud to NOT be here today as one of it's newly appointed leaders, your Fedora Community Manager. I cannot say that I made it here without the help of each and every one of you and while working with you throughout the past years, since before
Fedora even existed, I feel as though we have become true friends.

If anything, my words today are a message of commitment. If you understand the true value of Fedora as a technology platform, as a community and as a vehicle for social change, and are willing commit to making our community successful, then I guarantee you 1000% in return.
I will measure my success much like any parents do their child's, by gauging your health, well being, activity and strength, and by the same token you should measure your success by mine as a leader. Most importantly, like in any relationship, we must nurture each other's growth.

It would also be unfair to not acknowledge and thank Red Hat's new CEO, Jim Whitehurst, who could have flown home this weekend to see his wife and kids, and yet decided to come here and geek it up with us. This demonstrates true appreciation of the value of the community and Jim on behalf of our community I warmly welcome you as our newest member. Jim has a lot of vision and truly believes in Fedora and we owe it to him, and every other member of the community, who could easily invest their time elsewhere, and chooses to invest it here, nothing more than 100%.

We will not fail. We cannot fail.

Finally, I would like to say that over the years we have hit some bumpy spots and have always persevered and I will be working with each and everyone of you to ensure that we fill those potholes. Alongside that, there are an interesting number of new initiatives that you will hear
about in the coming weeks which will prove interesting to many of you. Some of those initiatives might or might not even be taking place this weekend. Wink, Wink. I eagerly await your feedback. My email is jaa {at} redhat.com my phone is xxx-xxx-xxxx, (I wasn't about to post my phone number on the internet) don't call too early, but call often!

So a little bit of tweaking, a lot of growing and 100% commitment. We owe it to each and every one of us, in this room, and not. From here on out, we got each other's back...

Cheers! to a brighter future...

I won't let you give up on a miracle, 'cause it might save you...

2008-01-10T13:51:00.000-05:00

Lyric from the song: Miracle
By: Paramore
From the album: Riot!

Its bittersweet and ironic how sometimes in life the people who we hope will save us end up being the ones who need the most saving. Its often painful to admit and some people, for fear of coming to some stark realizations, will fight with all their might to prevent themselves from accepting this profound truth.

One thing I can proudly say I've been blessed with, above all else, is the opportunity to go all around the world and meet some of this planet's greatest people. Some rich, some living in utter poverty, some Ph.D.s and some who never made it out of grade school. Some in the farthest reaches of Earth and some right in my own backyard.

Once in a while, you happen upon a truly great person and as much as you realize their potential, they are unwilling to even begin to attempt to reach it. And no matter how much you push them, they push back doubly as hard and in the end of the day all you are left with is a tremendous wasted potential. Some people let the past hold them back and so they struggle with themselves; some more passively than others. As much as they want something or realize something would be good for them, they subconsciously can't live with that and they keep themselves closed up tightly and stuck in some impenetrable psychological bubble. That fills me with great sadness.

People have no idea what it is I do. They know it has something to do with computers, some Linux thing perhaps, but more than that, they have no clue. Some people get downright confused by it. My parents, after showing them the Linux Format article, are even more confused than before about what I do. Its quite funny, because in reality it has nothing to do with computers. It has everything to do with people and helping each and every person reach their maximal potential. Technology is just the means I guess.

So from now on when someone asks me what I do I'm gonna start saying, that is my mission, to make sure that each and every person sees their potential and to help them realize it and reach it. It's not faith if you use your eyes.

I tried to save you. I might have failed, but I'm not gonna give up on a miracle because it might save you. When this memory fades, I'm gonna make sure its replaced with chances taken and hope embraced. I hope I told you...

The Problem with Internationalization

2008-01-09T21:32:00.000-05:00

http://www.bash.org/?400459

Too damn funny....

Manhattan Calling

2007-09-20T11:54:00.000-04:00

Our world is falling apart at the seams but I take solace in the fact that in a mere 6 years there will be full cell service in the stations of the NYC subway, as announced today.

I wonder how the MTA will mess this up though. It only took 5 years to come up with the plan and then another 2 years to debate it. I take it there might be 45 minute delays getting calls through on Monday mornings because of there being "a red signal in front of us" or "due to an earlier incident" of which we will never be told the truth. Either that or they will decide to charge an auxiliary fare for those passengers carrying cell phones and then hike the fair each year claiming they need more money to maintain the stations now that the radiation from the cell spots is corroding the tracks. You know it will be something crazy. They can't do anything right. Ever. Period.

Cursed Missed Opportunities

2007-09-18T02:15:00.000-04:00

Zimbra just got bought out by Yahoo. For $350 million. We could have had them for like 10 million back in the day, but no one listens to Jack.

What I hate the most about this is that it is clearly in response to Google and obviously a tremendous waste of some pretty good software. It had so much potential, its really heartbreaking. The motivations for the acquisition is really what hearts the most man--it's just a parry. I wonder what the future of the Open Source edition looks like now? I'm sure as Yahoo tries to enterprise it up and all it will slowly but surely start sucking exponentially.

Goodnight and Go

2007-09-17T11:41:00.000-04:00

This is not my weekly update as promised, but two comments that I have to fire off real quick. First, yes, I finally got Facebook. I hate these social networking sites so damned much, but they are sure as hell a ton of fun. Why did I finally cave? Mainly its because I wanted to do some application stuff and you need an account for that, but otherwise, I don't know, I guess it is better than myspace and I guess I owe it to Mark anyway. So it's been cool finding friends on there that I haven't seen in like a decade and all the college buddies and all that. I'm a friendly person, so this works out well. Find me and add me if you feel the need to validate our acquaintance/friendship/relationship.

Second, regarding Chris' post about my comments regarding the car, when you're going 120 it only feels like 40. When you get up in the 150 range, it starts to feel like 50. God knows I would never do something so stupid as to take a picture while driving at any speed greater than 50! If you don't believe me about that though, I can pick you up on my way down from Nashua and you can experience this phenomenon first hand. All you need to do is make sure to get Boston PD to close off a stretch of highway for us. Alternatively, I can just run people over.

Finally, today is Jono Bacon's birthday. Now I know that those guys get a lot of crap from us sometimes, but in the realm of community builders and people bringer-togethers, Jono is a legend. Let's all wish him a great year and all the desires of his heart! Happy Birthday man.

A real weekly update coming tomorrow, since there is a lot of action going on today.

So Much to Say

2007-09-10T00:38:00.000-04:00

Another summer has come and gone and the world is still spinning, silently but surely. That's kind of odd, I went away for a weeks and was almost certain that the earth would stand still. ;) Anyway, Jack is back, more relaxed, more committed than ever, more vigilant and now with a ruthless new machine, of which I will post pictures when it gets off the boat; and there is tons that needs doing. I'll post up an agenda later this week. and then updates on those tasks as they occur.

I've also made a commitment to myself to post at least one entry a week from now on until the foreseeable future. The reasons are twofold, first and foremost I would like to start keeping a decent record of my own comings an goings on in a public, searchable fashion. Second, I already do a ton of writing and most of it is kept privately in various journals and I want to start digitizing all that and so I might as well start posting the new stuff up here. And I think in the near future there will be a good reason for me to start blogging more often.

For now, the one thing I really need to focus on is my foundation which I chartered right before I left for Europe. I'll explain it a bit more detail in a later post, but the gist of the mission is to promote the use and re-mixing of free/open technology, open content, art and education to enrich the lives of people around the world and to help animate the creative spirit which is present within each and every single person. It's a new social revolution! That sounds like a lot of do-gooder fluff really for now, but believe me I already have two projects, working with awesome people, some quite famous, which are close to kickoff which will give the foundation some real perspective.

I've done a write up on what I hope the foundation will be able to accomplish and I need to post that up at some point, when I feel it is sufficiently edited. Also, I've been writing a really awesome essay entitled "Crash" which talks about my new general philosophy on life and works in my experiences as a member of the Open Source community for more than 10 years now. I'll post pieces of that as well periodically, but I am going to hold on on posting the whole rough draft for now, until the very famous person who I hope will edit it gets back to me. It might take a while, but DAMN, its a good story, I can't believe I wrote it.

That's it for now. I'm hungry and tired and I have a nice grilled mushroom with my name on it.

Behind a Counter in a Small Town

2007-08-18T20:10:00.000-04:00

I fell in love with her. I fell in love with her hard and fast. I fell in love with her from the second I laid eyes on here. I fell in love with her in the middle of Austria. I fell in love with a city called Vienna.

What a place!

I Just Want to Scream, Hellooooooo

2007-08-09T21:57:00.000-04:00

The expo is over. Another one bites the dust. A full wrap up report/media/pictures is soon to come. Right now though, Karsten just dropped me off at the hotel and what can I say, for the first time ever I feel very homesick. Some people know why, but I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I know I'm coming back home to an empty house for a day and then I'm jetting away for another 2 weeks.

With all this in mind though, a tremendous amount of work got done this week in the background masked by all the good press and the seemingly never-ending line waiting to speak to us. There is a ton of news to come soon, I promise. As for now, even through all the loneliness, I have an odd feeling of infinite hope and I take away a renewed commitment. A renewed commitment to many many things. We'll see whether that ends up being good or bad.

756

2007-08-08T02:16:00.000-04:00

I was there. Section 121, Row 28, Seat 8. It was surreal, after the two prior at bats, we all knew it was coming. The stadium exploded and strangers were slapping each other five and giving each other hugs. I almost fell on top of Dave I was so excited. Good, bad, controversial for sure, whatever it was, I was there as a witness to history.

It's My Blooooood

2007-08-06T19:07:00.000-04:00

Someone just asked me if I did have to chose a lyric for the last post what would it have been? It's my blood. Courtesy of Pearl Jam of their second album Vs. Track #7. Enjoy.

To Infinity and Beyond

2007-08-06T18:44:00.000-04:00

I know some of my blog reading faithful will be shocked. I've deviated from my standard of titling posts after alterna-rock lyrics. What is this dude thinking? Well listen up, its with good reason.

Today, I'm at LinuxWorld in San Francisco and I've just wrapped up a set of press interviews along with our very good friends from the Creative Commons. Whats the skinny you ask? I'll tell you, but only because I like you. Today we have announced (link to press release) the first step in what is a long term partnership between Fedora and he Creative Commons. That first step is the CC LiveContent Distribution (available off the Fedora torrent site), built on Fedora, available to all.

The story is as follows. After we broke our backs getting Fedora 7 and all the little bits and pieces in place to let people remix it out the door, we were wondering who would come knocking at our door. That's the beauty of the culture in which we operate, you never known from whence innovation will come, all you can do release something that will hopefully be useful to someone and marvel at the results of what they come back to you with. Anyway, luckily enough Creative Commons had been fishing around for a while for a platform upon which they could build a distribution that will be used to proliferate and educate people about Open Content. They had already been looking at using Fedora for this and then I met Jon Philips, and the rest as they say, is history.

Around a month and a half ago we sat down and defined what needed to be done, why, and how we were going to go about doing it. The result is CC LiveContent v1.0 (direct torrent link), a Fedora-based live-cd distro jam packed with educational material about CC, CC licensed content and a set of applications with which you can manipulate that content. Remix your OS, your content. As I'm known for saying, it's all good in the hood. Don't just sit there, make something, dammit!

I am personally proud to be standing here. One reason is because I have been busting my ass to make sure this happens. (Well not really, the credit really goes to Tim Vollmer and Scott Shawcroft of CC, but I tried!) The second reason is that with the release of Fedora 7 and the opening up of our build process and tools such as pungi and revisor, we have really tried to position Fedora as more than just a Linux distro and the reason we have been encouraging the masses to "Remix" their fedora is that we have tried and pushed over the past 3 years to transform Fedora into a true platform for innovation.

That innovation occurs on a number of levels, there is of course the technical excellence which we always strive to live up to and which we are well-known for. Then there is innovation in other areas which need a viable platform through which to deliver their message to the masses. There is also innovation in unexplored areas that we will only find out when we afford the community the ability to go about and explore those themselves. We have positioned Fedora to act as a platform for whatever it is you are interested in and to that effect, we have done well.

Obviously, as members of the open source community, one of the causes which we are passionate about is Open Content and as such we are proud to partner with Creative Commons who have, for the same reasons described above, chosen Fedora to server as the basis for their LiveConent Distribution.

The purpose of the LiveContent Distribution is to act as as tool and an enabler to both educate people about what Creative Commons is and does, and to provide them the tools and a selection of content with which they can begin to explore the remix culture and how endless the possibilities really are when a culture of collaboration is fostered, not detested.

Clearly not everyone understands computer software, so trying to reach out to people about freedom, democracy and rights at a software level alone would be a huge fallacy.

Open Software, Open Content, Free Culture and the hope for a better tomorrow side-by-side, forging a brighter future for tomorrow's programmers AND artists, children, educators, creators and consumers, society in general.

Code or content, pick whichever one you want to explore; they are both there on one handy disc.

That being said, there are many people who deserve thanks. First and foremost, Max Spevack, for being the greatest leader Fedora has ever had and a true champion of everything we believe in. Max busts his ass all day every day through thick and thin to make sure this machine keeps on rolling. Greg DeKeonigsberg, for well, being Greg and constantly reminding us that thinking is a good thing and to always push the boundary. The Fedora Board and the Fedora crew within Red Hat who really have thankless jobs and yet give it their all on a daily basis. The Fedora community who won't ever stop harassing us to fix whats broken and make things even better for them all the time and especially those who contribute back, we all owe you thanks. Jesse for pungi. Jon, Jeroen and Bob and the Fedora Unity folks for spearheading the Revisor project. The NYC interns, Mo, Yankee, Arjun, Hunter, Ben, James and Bobby for doing some awesome work over this summer and who still aren't sure that I don't work for Creative Commons, I hope you guys can stay part of the Fedora family. The Red Hat PR team who so gracefully handled all of the press stuff for this, including Caroline, Kerri and Leigh. Last but not least, I think a huge thank you of the largest proportions needs to go out to Matthew Szulik, who really works himself to the bone every day trying to run a company which can at the same time be public, profitable, accountable and yet so righteous and benevolent and who affords Fedora the freedoms with which it operates. The whole concept of Fedora was such a radical idea and here we are years later still going strong and it is only due to the dedication, persistence and wisdom of great people. For giving of yourselves to make this life just a little better for ourselves and others. For that, thanks.

OSCON Wrap-Up

2007-08-06T16:14:00.000-04:00

This got backlogged due to all of the stuff I had to deal with before I up and disappear for close to month, but here it finally is.

OSCON, in a word, kicked ass. Okay, so two words. Aside from the fact that my luggage was lost for most of the time I was there, people were really impressed with our booth setup and with our commitment to the community. Let me explain.

We went in figuring that we would get railed due to the fact a large majority of people there would be there for Ubuntu live as well. I thought that at least every other person would walk up to us and say "Ive Switched." In fact, what we got was the exact opposite. We even got Ubuntu users AND developers coming up to us and tell us that we are doing some really cool stuff in Fedora. Boy, if they could only see the future!

A large number of people were visibly distraught at the fact that they paid $700 bucks for Ubuntu live and then Ubuntu didn't have an OSCON booth and not a single CD was there to be had. Naturally, they thought that Fedora would be the best place to vent this anger. After speaking to many of them, it seems as though they couldn't care less which distro they were running, they cared more about having someone at these shows representing their "clan" and someone they can vent their frustrations and delights at. Us being there worked well in this case.

I cannot begin to tell you how many people were so extremely enthusiastic about our little PS3 demo. People were walking up to us left and right asking us, "Hey is that Fedora on the PS3? That's wicked Cool!" I know, thats why I thought we should be showing that off. We even had a couple of IBM developers walk by us and tell us, "All of the cool innovation happens in Fedora anyway." Thats a direct quote.

That quote sums it up pretty efficiently and we heard alot of that stuff especially after Dave Jones' "Why Userspace Sucks" talk. It was really nice to have people acknowledge what we've been saying all along--we are the ones driving innovation forward.

Also, and this goes without saying, the OLPC was a massive draw. Everyone was really interesting in finally seeing the machines which will lead us to the promised land and did we ever deliver! We had non stop action around the thing. Education people, software people, government people, social movement people, a group of economists and we even had a monk come by and give us a benediction and thank us for contributing to such an awesome project.

We have some video footage which will go up somewhere once we have it in our hands. Other than that, I think that OSCON was the proper venue to re-invigorate the troops and to prove to everyone that not only will we not stop, but we are pushing forward even more quickly, with some pretty interesting initiatives and with a renewed commitment to our community showing that the Fedora 7 milestone wasn't the end of anything, it was simply the beginning of all the awesomeness to come.

Come Party With Fedora

2007-08-02T00:24:00.000-04:00

Hey all you geeks in the valley or those making your way to LinuxWorld Expo SF! This is an open invitation to come on down and experience Fedora like you've never experienced it before. Heck, come experience open source, open content, free culture and lots of giveaways the way you never have before.

As part our booth goings on at LinuxWorld, we have a very special set up. I can't give it away, but you should know that you'll be stepping into the hottest party north of L.A.!!! We'll be asking you why you love Fedora, how you love Fedora, enabling people to create great open content, talking smack about the future of freedom as it applies to geekdom at large, showcasing some amazing hardware and software, and giving away tons of great stuff.

Oh yeah, did I mention the Live DJs, Fedora Kool Aid and free downloadable music?

It only gets better from there.

Plus, you'll get details about the Fedora BoF happening Wednesday night and very special after party and get together.

See you in SF August 7-9 2007 for the party of your open source, open content, geeked-out-to-the-max-and-loving-it life!

If There Was a Reason, It Was You

2007-08-01T23:26:00.000-04:00

You know who you are....

Don't even think about reachin' me,
I won't be home.
Don't even think about stoppin' by,
Don't think of me at all.
I did, what I had to do
If there was a reason, it was you...

Don't even think about gettin' inside,
Voices in my head, voices.
I've got scratches, all over my arms,
One for each day, since I fell apart.
I did, what I had to do,
If there was a reason, it was you...

Footsteps in the hall, it was you,
Pictures on my chest, it was you,
It was you...

I did, what I had to do,
And if there was a reason,
There wasn't no reason,
And if, there's something you'd like to do,
Just let me continue, to blame you...

Footsteps in the hall, it was you.
Pictures on my chest, it was you.

The Guise of a Sheep in a Storm

2007-07-19T23:26:00.000-04:00

I couldn't help but notice how Novell ripped off FUDCon and how Ryan Paul over at Arstechnica calls it "An Experiment in Innovation."

Can I get some truth please? Just this once!?

How about calling it like it is--the less than inventive efforts of a company severely lagging behind, and now severely hated in the community, trying to catch up with everyone else who are blazing a trail and leaving them in the dust.

Truth Delivered Daily.

The Novocaine You Pump in Your Cheek

2007-07-17T11:54:00.000-04:00

It's quite interesting reading Jonathan Schwartz's blog. Frankly, the fact that he "gets it" is quite refreshing; there aren't too many of those folks around anymore, especially not as his level. Reading his latest post made me want to comment on something which seems kinds of backwards to me and has pissed me off in the recent past.

What's up with companies setting up "Direct" blogs, similar to what Dell has done, through which they communicate directly with customers? Where's the magic? What's the message there exactly? Before blogs we never really ever needed to listen to you guys, but now through the magic of the internets we thought it might be a good idea? Many companies hail this particular setup as a great achievement and, call me stupid, I just don't see it as that.

Wake up!!! You have been foolish not to listen to your customers in the past and just assume you know what was good for them and what they wanted was whatever was on your menu that particular quarter. A blog alone is not going to help until you admit that you've sinned, repented and decided that from now on, not only will you let customers post stuff to a blog for you to read, you will actually read it, listen and adjust accordingly.

I just love how good we've gotten at extolling the virtues of mediocrity.

Another Death by Misadventure

2007-06-14T11:36:00.000-04:00

Everyone knows how much I love Linspire, the most useless entity on the face of the planet and now home to Fedora-defector Eric Raymond. So it should come as no surprise that I was less than pleased when I woke up this morning to see this: Linspire signs Patent Deal with Microsoft. They're dropping like flies, boys!

In reality I couldn't be happier that this happened. If we end up having to be the sole defenders of freedom, than so be it. I'm more than willing to line up and take my place amongst the righteous ones in history.

I just can't wait until Click n' Crap is available for every distro so that it infects all the stupid people who will doubtlessly run to use it. It's going to be rather unfortunate for those who are none the wiser though.

If I had the strength I would set up a boycott Linspire sight. I just don't have the time or the energy. Anyone else want to be part of the dismantling of a useless company? Let me know, I'll be glad to help.

God Bless Solid State

2007-05-27T12:36:00.000-04:00

AWESOME!!! The pictures of the which I thought were lost forever along with my laptop turned up on one of my spare SD cards that I had stored away. I was so happy to find them, I'm freakin' ecstatic. The lesson that I learned from this is to buy more SD cards, the larger the better and just put stuff on them never delete them. When I run out of space, I can just run out and buy more SD. I figure its much better for backup purposes to use something solid state than a hard drive or raid array.

I don't know for some reason I find this the act of leaving stuff on SD more therapeutic than just backing up to a real disk.

OLPC on 60 Minutes this Sunday!!!!!

2007-05-18T18:43:00.000-04:00

Congrats to everyone on the OLPC team and FOSS Community. This Sunday we hit the big time!

WATCH IT!!!

I Just Can't Catch A Break

2007-05-16T21:51:00.000-04:00

Posting from my phone. Just got back to my car. Out of the 100 cars on the block someone decided to pick mine to break into and steal my laptop, TomTom and police badge. The laptop was going to be replaced soon anyway, and it sucks about the very expensive TomTom, but when my friend found out his family badge was stolen he flipped his lid. I'm in a really bad situation.

At this point I really need to re-evaluate my life. Just when I started to get some semblance of normalcy back, this hits me. Needless to say I'm in very very very low spirits right now. I'm seriously considering dropping off the radar for a long while and trying to make sense of things.

Peace.

Run the Presses

2007-05-04T17:14:00.000-04:00

I think after all the awesome work we have done, we should be working equally as hard to make sure our good news makes the press.

So, Digg it.

Fedora Merges Core and Extras

We can now honestly say we are now, completely and 100%, by community, for community and of community.

Thanks to all who made it possible.

I'm Fine, Thank You

2007-03-16T12:34:00.000-04:00

I believe things got way out of proportion before and I've taken down my last post for now. Thank you to everyone who helped me and gave me information. I was just looking for someone who was familiar with Fluoroquinolone poisoning who could give me some more information. There has been a mass of misinformation going around and I want to put the rumors to rest.

1. I am okay and will be fine. I suffered a bad reaction to a drug, no more, no less.

2. I did not have a heart attack, not by any means. I said I had a really rapid heart beat, thats it.

3. I do not have fluoride poisoning, I was wrong about that. I got that info from a nurse who suspected thats what I had, but as it turns out, thats not what I have.

4. I know people love to blow things waaaaaaay out of proportion, so please stop doing it. Everything is under control.

5. I found what I am looking for, so you can all stop emailing me/IMing and calling me.

6. Educate yourself about Fluoroquinlone antibotics so that you don't get yourself into a situation you don't want to be in.

7. Thanks to everyone who sent me relevant and useful info.

Condolence

2007-03-16T10:31:00.000-04:00

I just wanted to send a shout out to Roozbeh to give him some support, given what he is going through. I also lost my grandfather a little more than a year ago and I was very close to him as well, I know what you're going through. Hang in there.

I Can't Can't Wait, Until You've See See Seen

2007-03-01T20:54:00.000-05:00

I am proud as hell to be writing this post. Ladies and Gentlemen, it is my unbelievable pleasure to introduce to you the new undisputed champions of Punk, the band which has single handedly brought the rock crown back to New York City where it belongs--our good friends Bayside.

They are quickly rising to the top and it's no surprise. Never since the days of the Ramones has a guitar's every riff smacked you like taking an elbow to the face in the pit. Layered with deeply entertaining and thoughtful lyrics, grooving baselines, killer drums and vocals harmonies so sticky you'll swear they were covered in honey, it is some of the best punk since Green Day first hit the scene.

New York is mighty proud of our boys. Anthony, Jack, Nick and Chris, it was nice seeing you guys again earlier in the week. Keep on rockin' and take over the world! We'll be waiting for you when you get back.

Lay Down Your Arms

2007-02-20T22:00:00.000-05:00

I need to get something off my chest. Recently, I feel as though there has been too much distro bashing going on. I admit my guilt in having participated wholeheartedly. I have also come to a realization that it has been, thus far, relentless, childish, foolish and immature. Consequently, it has proven contrary to the spirit of the greater community and clearly not productive.

We are all (well, mostly) reasonable people just looking out for the community and for each other. A difference of opinion shouldn't constitute a declaration of war. More importantly, we all have the same long term goals.

Don't get me wrong, I will still be the first to call out any iniquity on the part of anyone. I can never turn down a good fight--its just not my nature. However, I think that everyone needs to act more diplomatically, myself included, and pursue more savory discussion in an effort to create and coact better policy and solutions.

We need to work better together as a community, have more open dialogue and work in a concerted effort to disenfranchise the real enemies here. Unforgivable are the actions which desperate entities such as Novell take. Likewise, Microsoft is also clearly in our sights. Do I even need to mention SCO?

Sun on the other hand seems to have turned a new leaf. I don't think any of us views them as the bad guy any more. The same goes for IBM. Adobe seems to be opening their clamshell slowly. We really need to get on them. Ubuntu, by all accounts has been a run away success and has done much to forward the cause. Given they have all had some missteps, but then again, who hasn't. It just goes to show you how far competent management can take an organization.

The olive branch has been extended. Onward to victory.

Riddled with Metaphors

2007-02-20T17:14:00.000-05:00

I would like to take a moment here to thank Novell for providing me with countless hours of priceless comedy. No matter how insanely terrible the weather outside might be, and no matter how crappy my day might be going, I can always look forward to getting an awesome laugh out of the latest story about the Microsoft/Novell deal.

I still don't understand how some people are so easily fooled. Look at what Novell's good friend Steve Ballmer said today.

"I would not anticipate that we make a huge additional revenue stream from our Novell deal, but I do think it clearly establishes that open source is not free, and open source will have to respect the intellectual-property rights of others, just as any other competitor will."

So thanks for selling not only yourselves out, but everyone else, as well. We live in an age where the senselessness of one person or group is amplified and causes a definite domino effect.

To me, the above says that two things. First, Novell might as well fold up today, they're done. Second, the higher ups at Microsoft believe that the only way they can effectively compete with Open Source is via litigation. That's sad news because I know that there are smarter people at Microsoft who understand exactly how Open Source dramatically changes the value proposition for the customer, and are trying to reform that corrupt culture. Who knows, they might one day be successful. After all:

First they ignore you; Then they laugh at you; Then they fight you; Then you win.

Speak the Truth or Make Your Peace Another Way

2007-02-11T22:39:00.000-05:00

I feel like I have to respond to the bigillion emails I received over the weekend with regard to my prior post. I am assuming that I owe most of the traffic to Matt Asay quoting me in his InfoWorld blog. Matt is one of that rare breed of people who bring delight with every word they write. If you're not reading him, you should be.

First, to make this blatantly, unequivocally and unmistakably clear--I do not hate neither Mark Shuttleworth nor Ubuntu. We should all be jealous. Mark is a stand up guy. After all, how many people do you know that have invested $10 Million in a true Linux company? I am also very appreciative of all the great work he has done with Canonical/Ubuntu, penetrating into markets which would have otherwise never heard the word Linux. I also have interminable admiration for his awesome humanitarianism. After all, is that not what we fight for day in and day out? To create a culture which values both physical and intellectual freedom and transparency so that future generations can have a freer existence?

Second, with regards to what I said last time, I meant every word of it, although I will admit it was said, somewhat, in the heat of the moment. I will however further explain the context within which I wrote it. I couldn't believe what I read because I believe that what they are doing is such a bad idea. Ubuntu is choosing to act pre-emptively, by providing users a means to access software, which although they might know they want, they don't understand why it is so bad for them to have. The fact that they want it so badly proves the point exactly; it's like an illegal drug.

Now I'm not saying that the users are idiots, which they are clearly not, but what I am saying is that if you are going to target the mainstream desktop and the whole wide world user base which comes along with it, odds are that people are going to be none-the-wiser. The same thing happened to us with fossil fuels and look at the sorry state we are in now, trying with all our wonderous ability to break its suffocating grip.

I believe that education about these social issues (and yes they are as much social issues as anything else), prior to opening these potentially hazardous channels is the only way to solve this problem. Like Matt Asay said in his blog, pragmatism needs to be balanced with advocacy. If we don't educate people then we are opening doors for the same travesties we suffer with to occur over and over and in other parts of the world as well. That being said, I view this as one whole big marketing mess, and while I do believe that the letter of the announcement was written in good faith, (providing value to the user base) it certainly violated the spirit of the values of the Open Source community.

On a final note, Linspire claims that they are going to unify packaging in the Linux world. They also claim the Click-N-Run source is open and available. I spent about two hour earlier today looking through various Linspire sites, wikis, and software repositories and was unable to find the code. Also, I think I sort of figured out they were saying was that the Click-N-Run plugin is Open Source but that the web service backend is not. I am dying for a member of the Linspire community to prove me wrong on this and point me the place where they offer the CNR code. And as for their claims that they will be the end all and be all of Linux package management, well, as they say in Missouri
--SHOW ME!

P.S. I am in no way affiliated with the state of Missouri, either officially, unofficially or clandestinely. I had a friend who was a reporter there once, but he's moved on. In fact the St. Louis Cardinals of Missouri defeated my Mets in the NLDS this year. Boy did that suck. ;)

Have a Drink! They're Buying!

2007-02-08T17:07:00.000-05:00

It's mighty funny how things come full circle, often out of the blue. I got back from FUDCon on Sunday and started digging through my collection of CDs and records, trying to organize everything since it was a terrible, hopeless mess. I happened to come upon a CD which I hadn't listened to for a while--Pearl Jam's Binaural. I used to think it wasn't that good for some reason, but then again I hold them to really high standards. Anyway, a review of a 7 year old album isn't the point of the story here.

FUDCon was great. Everything worked out well, we got tons of work done and things were looking up. The community was solid, stronger than ever and I was high on life and confident that we were making inroads, positive progress, in our battle for freedom and liberty. I was so happy and my outlook so positive that even in the frozen New York air I felt like was on a beach somewhere in the Bahamas perhaps. Then I read this and this. Oh crap! What the hell is this nonsense?

I would like to point out one very important part of this press release.

"Beginning with Ubuntu 7.04, Ubuntu users will be able to use CNR to access commercial programs and proprietary drivers with one click of the mouse. In subsequent releases CNR technology will be integrated to provide an even better desktop user experience for getting commercial software."

[Que sound of needle coming off record]

The timing of this was impeccable. Right as I was listening to Binaural, track 9, Grievance. I instantly began to think this song was a message from God or Shadow Man; no one else could have timed this better. Let me explain. It all goes along so well with the lyrics of the song.

Progress laced with ramifications; freedom's Big Blur.

Mark Shuttleworth claims that Ubuntu is "Linux for Human Beings" and that they are going to be the entity which is going to be the pioneer of Linux on the desktop, coming in with guns blazing and driving Microsoft out of Dodge. Yet, the only thing I've seen from Ubuntu is crap, crap, proprietary crap and now, CNR--so more crap essentially. Ubuntu being "Linux for Human Beings" is at this point the same as saying "The Flu is for Human Beings". Hey, we will even ship you up to 5 copies of "The Flu" for free through our proprietary online application.

While some of us in the community are fighting for liberation, fighting to prove that we have a substantial enough user base to warrant the opening of drivers, fighting to be free, apparently the folks over at Canonical and Linspire couldn't care less. They're more than willing to force the poison apple down people's throats. Hey, is the tree too high for you to grab that poison? Why here's a ladder! It's named Ubuntu.

Progress simply cannot be laced with ramifications. It's all or none in this battle. Canonical and Linspire are perpetrating the biggest blur of freedom. In this fight, you are either pure of heart or not. There is no middle ground.

For every tool they lend us a loss of independence.

This line of the songs is clearly talking about CNR and Launchpad. If you're going to be open, be open and enable openness. Don't introduce "solutions" into the community which are going to put people in shackles and then drag them into a hell. A proprietary hell. I just want to call out Eric Raymond here for encouraging this kind of rubbish specifically. Are we so freaking desperate to have Linux win the desktop war that we are willing to compromise our values in order to succeed? To Mark Shuttleworth, Kevin Carmony and Eric Raymond the answer is apparently, yes. Yes we are.

This is why people like Richard Stallman and our very own Max Spevack are heroes. Sure, one of them might be conceived as a little crazy (I'm talking about Max there) but at least they know what is right and are unwilling to compromise the integrity of our community. While RMS actively advocates from freedom, people like Max are doing things to facilitate and further the cause, like collecting stats about our user base and shifting the burden of proof onto the hardware and software vendors. That, my friends, is the right combination, not the mixing of closed and open software. People like Mark Shuttleworth on the other hand might have their hearts in the right place, but they're drinking the wrong cocktail.

I pledge my grievance to the flag, cause you don't give blood then take it back again. Oh we're all deserving something more.

You heard that? You don't give blood then take it back again.

P.S. I mentioned the other two 8 times, so I need to make up for it. Fedora, Fedora, Fedora, Fedora, Fedora, Fedora, Fedora, Fedora, Fedora. Fedora will set you free.

N800 Envy

2007-02-06T17:51:00.001-05:00

All these people posting rave reviews of the N800 is making me jealous. Someone send me a code. Please? Pretty Please?

Send me a code or the kitten gets it.

Rudy

2007-02-05T23:53:00.000-05:00

I was completely oblivious to the news today that Rudy Giuliani had officially announced his candidacy for president until someone sent me an email a little while ago. I must say that I am strongly inclined to vote for him, should he win the Republican nomination. Before anyone goes and freaks out, let me explain why I think he would be an excellent president. Only a true New Yorker could describe to you what a phenom Rudy truly is.

Rudy Giuliani is a true political centrist. The man has courage and conviction. Never have I ever seen another politician in my life who was so purely interested in making life better for people. His political ideology and decisions are based on solid logic and good common sense. He doesn't jump to conclusions, he exhibits thought and practices due diligence.

How do I know this? A proven track record. Giuliani is pro-stem cell research, civil unions, social programs and all the other progressive ideas our country seems to want. He doesn't consider them progressive though, he considers them necessary for the betterment of peoples' condition. Giuliani doesn't focus on "right and wrong" as so many Republicans foolishly do, he focuses on "good and bad." The man is a true centrist and a true fighter for the rights people.

When I was growing up, New York City was a terrible shit hole. The physical condition of the city was terrible, graffiti covered almost every square inch, the city agencies ran like crap, there was rampant crime to the point where people were scared to walk around the streets past rush hours. Poverty was everywhere, in every neighborhood, drugs and guns flowed freely on the streets and everyone in the city felt like we were on the verge of the apocalypse. Rudy Giuliani came in and turned all that around and restored New York to its pinnacle. He reformed social programs and city agencies to ensure that they could deal with the growing poverty rate effectively and basically all but stamped it out in New York. He cleaned up our corrupt ass police force and actually made the streets safe for parents and kids alike. Giuliani rehabilitated the MTA and other critical services which restored life to the city and drastically increased the quality of our lives. He pushed the city council to enact fair, thoughtful and useful legislation. Legislation which encouraged freedom and innovation. He works with all sides and pays service to none. New York was on top again, where it belongs. Then came 9/11.

It is what we do in our most trying of times that defines us. Those with natural character and ability will always triumph over any obstacle. The ignorant will fall by the wayside and true leaders emerge. When we were down late in the game, an unlikely hero, Rudy, got us back in it and back on our feet. We went on to win that game.

In a world where New York is a microcosm, a melting pot, a mirror of the country, and even of the world, New Yorkers already know--Rudy Giuliani is not only a president, but a king.

Lost and Found

2007-02-05T17:09:00.000-05:00

I just want to report about the awesomeness that is Pam Andrews and Matt Miller at BU. I left my camera in the Computer Lab Room 307 and they helped me track it down and now have it in their posession and it's on its way back to me. Special thanks to Jim Bardin as well.

BU is freaking awesome. I honestly have never seen an institution run as smoothly and as coordinated as the team at BU does. I guess that what happens though when you've got Pam and Matt running the show. My younger brother is applying to colleges right now and BU is one of his top choices. I am most definitely making sure he ends up at BU. This is one relationship worth fostering.

Camera Left in Room 307

2007-02-05T05:00:00.000-05:00

Did anyone who was at the hackfest on Sunday perhaps see or pick up a Canon Powershot S3 IS in a small Samsonite case?

I remember I took my camera out and took a couple of shots and then put it back down, not near my belongings. I forgot it wherever I laid it down and didn't pack it up when we were in the mad rush to leave. I just arrived home and realized it isn't in my bag.

If you have any information please email me at jaboutboul@fedoraproject.org .

Thanks,
Jack

Undercover Agent

2007-02-03T23:11:00.000-05:00

For those who frequently find themselves around a prominent and well wired coffee chain try setting your user agent to this:

User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)
App Name: Microsoft Internet Explorer
App Version: 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)
Platform: Win32

Restart your browser and there should magically appear a link to a Windows Vista Promotion. Enjoy your free wifi until April 30th.

All I Wanna Do Is Zudeo

2006-12-04T13:12:00.000-05:00

I don't usually go out of my way to point out new fancy-shmancy Web 2.0 services, but I stumbled upon something this morning which I felt I had to make known. The good folks over at Azureus have started a new video sharing site, called Zudeo. The kickers here are that there is no flash required to view the videos (YES!!!!!!) and they actually solved the #1 problem with youTube--Zudeo supports HD!!

To my surprise, there wasn't much press coverage of this, except for this Wired story.

Word Up Magazine

2006-11-17T17:00:00.000-05:00

More Novellgate, more Microsoft, more garbage. We all knew what the truth was, and now we have confirmation from the mouth of the ass, err, donkey. Wait, no, it is actually the ass. But I wouldn't dare paraphrase anything as good as this, you can read it yourself right here.

For those who will undoubtedly say your browser doesn't work with links, or that for some reason that link doesn't work, I'll paste the relevant lines below.

"We've had an issue, a problem that we've had to confront, which is because of the way the GPL (General Public License) works, and because open-source Linux does not come from a company -- Linux comes from the community -- the fact that that product uses our patented intellectual property is a problem for our shareholders. We spend $7 billion a year on R&D, our shareholders expect us to protect or license or get economic benefit from our patented innovations. So how do we somehow get the appropriate economic return for our patented innovation, and how do we do interoperability. The truth is, because of the complex licensing around the GPL, we actually didn't want to do one without the other."

"What we agreed, which is true, is we'll continue to try to grow Windows share at the expense of Linux. That's kind of our job. But to the degree that people are going to deploy Linux, we want Suse Linux to have the highest percent share of that, because only a customer who has Suse Linux actually has paid properly for the use of intellectual property from Microsoft. And we took a quota, you could say, to help them sell so much Suse Linux. That's part of the deal."

I don't know what else to say right now. We clearly knew all along that this is what they were getting at. Novell played right into their hands, easily. I would like to ask Ron Hovsepian what it's like to live without a soul. Did you gain the ability to fly? Can you teleport? It must be interesting.

I'm not going to take this sitting down, and surely, nobody else in the Open Source world should take this lightly. It's time to start churning the gears of war. I already have a plan. Are you with me?

Software Learnings for Make Benefit Glorious Open Source

2006-11-13T21:08:00.000-05:00

What a glorious day for Open Source. I don't remember a day as good as this in a long while. My next post is going to include a ton of stuff from the Fedora Summit being held today, so I figured I should get to all the other great news of the day first.

First and Foremost, in what took a back seat in the news today, more than just reaction and raw emotion has started to pour out of the community regarding Novellgate. Today, the Samba Team sent Novell a big Fuck You (Sorry Kids). I'm glad to see projects becoming actively vocal about this and letting Novell know that the GPL and Open Source is not just another whore in their harem of short-term solutions to rectify their long standing history of malfeasance.

Secondly, Sun has finally acted upon their long standing promises of Open Sourcing Java. J2SE, J2ME and yes, even J2EE (read the press release) will now be offered under GPLv2. That's great news all around the table and truly a shot heard 'round the Open Source world. It's even better news for companies offering enterprise Java Application Stacks.

Jonathan Schwartz even got in on some of the Novell bashing fun. Awesome!!! So now, let's give credit where credit is due, Jonathan Schwartz, myself and freedom loving people around the world applaud you. Of course though, in traditional Sun-has-delusions-of-grandeur fashion, they decided to post this on their Open Source Java FAQ site.

"This singular act is the largest contribution ever made to the free software community, and places Sun squarely at the front of the open-source movement - as the single biggest commercial contributor."

Yeah, nice try. I think they make have gotten a little too excited. I really just posted that because I thought spot would get a kick out of reading it.

All in all, today should serve as a validation to all involved or watching the community that we are winning, we are affecting change and we will ultimately succeed in changing the world. It should also serve as a warning to all those skeptics who thought Open Source was and still is going nowhere fast (yes, I'm pointing at you guys at Gartner).

Fedora Summit - Day 1

2006-11-13T16:45:00.000-05:00

I'm not going to go into too much detail since everyone sitting next to me is about to post in heavy detail about all that's going on. We nailed down an agenda concentrating on the key issues, started talking about defining what a Fedora "Platform" should be defined as, and got a good way through before everyone got brain dead. I blame it on the lack of caffeine here. I'll update stuff on this post as the day progresses and as time allows.

UPDATE: A one photo summary of the day's events thus far.

Don't Upset the Kernel Hacker!!

Listen All Of Y'all It's A Sabotage

2006-11-06T13:00:00.000-05:00

Based on Jesse's request for a more eloquent scathing. Directed at all Novell Linux-centric Employees:

[For those who like song]
[To the tune of Beastie Boys' Sabotage]

I Can't Stand It, It Seems They Plan It,
But I'm Gonna Set It Straight, This Novell-Gate.
I Can't Stand Hacking When I'm In Here,
Because Your Commitment to Freedom Ain't So Crystal Clear.
So While You Sit Back And Wonder Why,
I Got This [censored for the kids] Thorn In My Side.
Make No Mistakes, This Is Not A Mirage,
I'm Tellin' All of Y'all It's Sabotage!

[For those who like prose]

I don't know how they do it in other places, but in New York, we throw down. That's right. We're not afraid to issue challenges, question mediocrity, expose improbity and when it comes down to it, just down right fight. The Free and Open Source and Free Culture movements are unabashedly and intensely committed to upholding the noble principles we hold so dear: Freedom, Liberty, Choice, Transparency, Candor, Responsibility and Value. What's more is that we always exhibit constancy of commitment towards those principles. In the battle we fight, perfidiousness is not an option.

So this is my challenge to all the Novell employees who are involved in Free and Open Source software in any way shape or form, from the lowliest hacker to directors, managers, VPs, former Ximian Employees, etc. Now that it is blatantly obvious that your corporation's commitment to these values is nothing more than a brief interlude on an infinitely unsuccessful and fruitless path, and if you yourselves are truly committed to the aforementioned values, pack up and leave. You heard me right--QUIT!

"Dems be big words from a small man," many of you might say. Yes, that might be true; I am a little on the short side. Last time I checked though, the minds and hearts of men are what truly define them. Those words are at least as big as my thoughts. That you're continued commitment to Novell, and this evil indenture, at this point and forever forward, constitutes nothing more than a concordat on your own parts to conspicuously taint the Open Source community, imperil the future of the movement and jeopardize your fellow hackers.

Those who feel threatened by Free and Open Source will always be lurking, waiting and eager to sink their loathsome claws into the next unassuming piece of prey, to attempt to hinder freedom and progress and delay their own inevitable fate. The only way to ensure that your life's work remain salubrious to the Open Source movement is to disassociate yourselves from these entities. You needn't fret about your livelihood either; there are many benevolent entities seeking hackers of your magnitude, which would warmly embrace your arrival.

All legal assurances and PR jabberwocky aside, you know in your hearts what is true and just and prudent and brave. Do it now so that come impending times you won't be unwillingly trapped, fighting for the enemy. You must escape with your conscience and souls while you can.

It Rains on Our Parade

2006-10-20T00:02:00.000-04:00

The Mets were just eliminated from the postseason. I am deeply saddened by this fact. The team with the best record in baseball was just beaten by the team with the least wins coming into the postseason. It's a terrible tragedy and its very fitting and tragic that it was raining throughout most of the game while the Mets were experiencing an offensive drought.

You're not going to win games when you let key opportunities slip through your grip. Teams without good starting pitching will never win, even if those who fill in are successful in that role. Leaving 11 men on base, while your worst pitcher is 1 hitting the other team, is no recipe for success. As good as the Mets bullpen was all season, they gave up the game, but I don't blame them. I don't fault Aaron Heilman for giving up the home run.

The blame is all Willie Randolph's. He has made some horrible mistakes managing the team throughout this series. The most blatant being letting Oliver Perez continue to pitch, although he is bouncing pitches in the dirt, to pitch to Scott Rolen. Thank God for Endy Chavez and his Spiderman like leaping ability. Letting Cliff Floyd swing away in the bottom of the 9th. Also, why let Heilman continue to pitch the 9th when in the same situation he brought in Wagner in Game 2 (a game in which the Mets also had the lead 3 times and gave it up).

All in all it was an excellent, but the bitter taste in Mets' fans mouths will not be washed away quickly.

Revelations

2006-10-18T17:33:00.000-04:00

Here comes the bombshell. After much introspection and after conferring with many hundreds of people, and one in particular just a few hours ago, I have decided that it would be prudent and wise to run for public office. It's the only way that certain goals can realistically be accomplished. I'm not talking about my own selfish, albeit important, goals. Although those would be nice. I am thinking of more noble ideals; which I am not going to spell out right now. I don't want to ascribe to any specific platforms right now--except for one. Things suck and I can, and will, make them better.

If you want more information, please email me. If you have money and would like to see it wisely appropriated (yes you, Mark Shuttleworth,) email me. If you think I'm crazy, email me.

While you won't be seeing me on any ballots on November 7th, 2006, know my friends that the day is not far away. Incumbents watch your backs.

Summer Has Come and Gone

2006-09-12T12:10:00.000-04:00

Okay, so Summer is pretty much officially over here in New York. The last couple of days we've had 60 degree weather with cold winds. It just happened way to fast. Literally in the span of 3 days. Saturday was really nice and then on Sunday I needed to break out the jacket and jeans. Looks like its going be a long cold winter, which sucks. The upside though is that it means much more time indoors, thinking, writing, planning and working on cool things. Especially in a new environment there are many opportunities to exploit. Let's see what develops.

Jack

OSCON Day 0 - Freedom 2.0

2006-07-26T03:03:00.000-04:00

So after 14 hours in the airport, I finally made it to Portland, got some rest, woke up right on time to head into the Conference Center for the O'Reilly Executive Briefing session, starring none other than our own Michael Tiemann. I wouldn't normally write about something like this, except that there was an interesting point made by Tim O'Reilly which was expanded upon by Michael.

A question was posed to the panel about what they thought the next big thing in technology will be? Obvious answers, such as virtualization, VoIP, "the ubiquitous network," faster and flashier toys, came pouring out rapidly. Then with a bit of a pause, Tim O'Reilly offered up an answer. "We seem to be heading towards a Cassandra complex." The unfortunate truth is, we have become so good at "doing tech", we are able to foresee and predict disasters and societal impediments, but we are still slow as ever to act, and sometimes it stems from just disbelief, or more likely just not being brave enough to face the future.

Michael expanded on this by relating a story of how while working with NOAA, they successfully rolled out a new platform which allowed them to track weather changes and patterns for windows as small as five minutes. The severity and likely damages of Hurricane Katrina were predicted two weeks in advance and we still failed miserably on the most important level of the game. A few hours later, irrelatively, Spot mentioned how odd it was to watch on television how the hotel which had just hosted the first Red Hat Summit in New Orleans, where an award was given out for Open Source Crisis Management Software, was being used as a triage center for Katrina victims.

Michael closed the talk by revising his earlier answer. The next big thing in technology will be when we can effectively democratize action based on the information which we have become so adept at processing. This is the true promise of a technologically advanced society.

Dean Raymond von Dran, of the Syracuse University School of Information Management related that many of society's most pressing issues are fundamentally, information problems. Whether it be faulty intelligence in a war or a certain Senator rambling on about the Internet being a series of tubes (I'm sure the intern feeding him information was fired), many of our modern dilemmas exist because of inability or callous reluctance to react to information.

Linux and Open Source have now grown up and matured past the point of arcane popsicle stick and glue black magic and Fantasia-like wizardry concocted with crude tools. Face it. We aren't alternative anymore, we ARE mainstream. The greatest contribution of the movement has been a truly viable and robust platform for processing all the world's information. We are now at a critical juncture where we must step back and face the future. If we cannot grow up and, as Michael said, enable the evolution of societal ripostes to our most critical contexts, what have we really accomplished? Have we really accomplished anything?

Everything seems to be 2.0 these days. We, as a community say we stand for freedom and rights. My dear friends, code for code's sake is fun, but now it's time to work towards Freedom 2.0.

Intending to Burn

2006-07-04T10:43:00.000-04:00

This is primarily a test post, so you can go ahead and ignore it. I wanted to test out the new automatic feed translation that I enabled on my feed. I would prefer to publish in Atom, but of course not every reader (including Planet) likes parsing Atom feeds, so I had resorted to manually doing the Atom -> RSS 2.0 conversion. Theoretically, this should allow automatic detection of the client's capabilities and give it the right version of the feed. If things look messed up to someone, or if your client is choking and/or is spewing garbage please email me and let me know.

Fedora in Israel פדורה בישראל

2006-06-30T09:58:00.000-04:00

Slow rolling clouds exhale warm winds along the picture perfect Eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The water glistens, as if unsullied from creation, and soaring palm trees dot the landscape. The remainder of the scenery, green all over with abundant fruit trees, would seem a bit embellished, as if to indicate you've stumbled upon paradise. For me, it's a pleasant departure from the usual gray, washed out, maneuver your way through the multitude, concrete streets of New York City. So where am I, and what am I doing here?

It is far from a pristine paradise undiscovered by humanity. In fact, just a few meters from the shoreline you will find the same hustle and bustle of New York City and one hell of a falafel, too. A short cab ride through the streets miraculously unveils some of the world's oldest standing structures juxtaposed against a flurry of billboards bearing its newest names: Oracle, Intel, IBM, HP and yes, even Novell has a couple. Quite an amazing and amusing site the first time you see it. In the middle of this desert oasis you will find tech's second coming.

I am on a quest to seek out Fedora community members half a world away. The community needs strengthening and one of our weakest links is in a country which is a tech powerhouse and yet often neglected by geekdom at large--Israel.

That is quite unfortunate though, because there is a tremendous amount of interest and involvement in technology around here--especially around Linux. Somewhere along the last 15 years, Linux became related to business. I'm sure many geeks are still scratching their heads, but the courting is being played out all over again on this side of the globe. Linux runs rampant throughout the university system, so students are introduced to it fairly early. The economy is experiencing a boom similar to the one the U.S. had, although it is more tempered and as a result, businesses are looking to modernize, extended their presences and improve processes. Additionally, startups, in every sector, are abundant and each must look for cost-effective means to break into their respective markets. Many have gravitated towards Linux due to previous exposure and for the obvious advantages it provides. While the people have struggled to build a country, their geeks certainly are not afraid of building a kernel.

Of course the big boys have set up shop as well. Anyone who owns an Intel Centrino laptop must thank Intel's Israel R&D, almost all of the latest microprocessors have been designed here (and named after rivers near the Intel HQ). IBM, whose outlandish, CRT shaped, spherical Petach Tikva HQ has become an icon in the country, has a massive presence here as well. Oracle must be making a killing here; it has bought up the ad space on literally every other billboard throughout the country. Google is coming too. It all stems from a government which is very pro-tech and has passed much legislation to subsidize high tech, in both education and industry. Now I hav come to find the geeks and rally them.

So I have come to seek out members of our Fedora community sporting an essentials-filled backpack, a water canteen, sunscreen and a 103 degree fever (39 degrees in Celsius) which I picked up somewhere along the way. I knew we had a Fedora Ambassador here, Moshe Roffe, whom I have now spoken to on several occasions, but judging by the otherwise initially lukewarm communication efforts with groups around here, I almost drew the conclusion that the Israeli Linux scene was either deep underground or dead, as in BSD. ;)(Come on, I just style="font-style:italic;">had to). I am glad to say I was easily proven wrong.

It is much easier to win a battle when you are on the ground and combat ready and I did what I have been trained to do, "find your friends." So I first emailed Moshe Bar whom I met a while back in New York City. I knew he often hung around these parts. Moshe is a true champion of Open Source, being the founder of some great projects such as OpenMosix and of course co-founding XenSource. Luckily enough, Moshe was in the country and we decided to meet up the next day. After some nice chit chat I got to take a tour of the offices of Moshe's new venture (it's super secret) and talk with some of the guys. The whole office runs on RHEL on the backend with Fedora on the frontend, which is a good sign! We had a nice site down with about 5-6 people from his staff who had many questions about Fedora. The whole RHL -> Fedora progeny, how to get things into extras, the QA process, what other projects we have up our sleeves. It was quite interesting conversation, with much learned on both ends.

Next, I got to stop by Intel and chat with some of the engineers in their Haifa center. The people over at Intel are very smart. I know this because all the engineers have standardized their desktop platform on Fedora. If you are running a Core Duo chip, odds are that it was designed on Fedora Core 2. It was kind of nice to see people who actually Get It(tm). There weren't too many questions. Some people asked me some RHEL5 and Xen questions, and I responded with what I knew and pointed them to where they could get more info. One of the managers there asked me something about Red Hat opening an office in Israel. I told him I will get right to work on it, that it was priority A1. He liked my response and laughed me all the way out the security gates. (Just Kidding).

A couple of days later, I finally coerced someone I know into setting up a visit for me at the IBM HQ here. IBM is all about their services division lately, which has netted them great growth. It was no surprise to learn that more than half the IBM employees here work outside of the office. The visit was real brief, but I got to see some nifty projects they are working on and then went out to eat with a few of the software engineers at the end of the day. IBM's role here has been has been pretty much the same as their role everywhere--design a custom software solution and then convince the customer to deploy it on IBM's hardware and software stack. The engineers work on projects ranging from websphere development, custom solutions development and one guy here even works on code for the cell processor which he is writing for the next version of the Blue Gene supercomputer. Overall, some really cool guys, they all run Linux at home and some do at work as well. Out of the 7 of them I was with, four ran Fedora, one was a die hard Debian fan and the other two ran Ubuntu.

After all of the above, madly racing around I finally got to spend time working on the Fedora Event Kit. See my email to fedora-ambassadors-list for more info, this post it too long as it is. (We finally got Fedora stationary, too, thanks again to Diana for the awesome work). Also, our local Ambassador, Moshe Roffe, finally stopped by and we got to talk about a few things. We discussed the event we are planning on having here, the general state of Linux affairs here and of course the World Cup. Moshe happens to work for Matrix IT, the official Red Hat reseller in the country, so he has a pretty good sense of the Linux uptake and what really needs to be done in order to gain more widespread Linux adoption. Truth is, no one around here is too fond of Microsoft and most companies would rather not trust their whole infrastructure to them. At least that's the feeling you get when talking to people around here. Hilti, for example, a power tool and construction equipment manufacturer, is constantly dealing with problems with their Windows Server deployment and they recently decided to switch off of Windows and are currently looking at SuSe and Solaris.

A lot of my interaction with the greater Linux community here came when visiting the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Open University. There are a large number of students in the Computer Science and Engineering programs of which a large majority love Linux. There are so many projects being worked on at HUJI and the students were telling me how much of it would not have been possible without Linux. I did the standard Fedora talk twice to two very different groups of people and everyone loved it. Many people came out feeling very energized and enthusiastic, and hopefully we will have some new community members soon.

And so the story continues. I have 10 days left here and plan on making the most of them. We still have to go pick up Fedora DVDs and T-shirts, an event to run and hopefully lots of more meetings. More as it happens. Right now though, I just got word that there is a large rally of Fedora fanatics at the beach. Yeah, I should go check that out. ;)

Technological Nose Picking

2006-06-19T07:25:00.000-04:00

It's called Balloon Sinuplasty and it freaking awesome!! The doctor shoves a tube/needle with a balloon up your nose, all under local anesthesia, so it feels really weird. He then inflates the balloon which expands the sinus cavity and begins to slowly drain the sinus. Yes it sounds nasty and disgusting, and if you get a chance to look at the product, it most certainly is. Other than the "ewwww" factor though, it is an awesome procedure which everyone with sinusitis should be aware of and requesting.

I Feel A Sickness, Coming Over Me...

2006-05-02T12:35:00.000-04:00

... but it's a good one.

Many of you know of my longstanding obsession with the world's greatest band ever--Pearl Jam. Just wanted to announce that their new album, which is appropriately self-titled (i.e. Pearl Jam for all those of you who don't understand) is released as of today May 2nd 2006. The reason I say it is appropriately self-titled, is because it is much like a debut release, with the band getting back to the basics which made them so well accepted in the earlier parts of the 1990s.

This is, in my opinion, and in the opinions of many of the popular review sites, the best Pearl Jam album in 10 years, and the more I listen to it, the more I start to think it is their best ever. Seriously, it's not like previous albums, it's real good.

The maturity of the lyrics make this album well worth the 10 bucks you'll pay; it's not kiddy stuff. The songs are all catchy and the musical arrangements have such uncharacteristic (for PJ at least) depth to them, that you might mistake them for something off a Pink Floyd record. With this album, Pearl Jam renews its reign over the kingdom which is Alt Rock and are well on their way, blazing a path, to the retake throne of Rock and Roll, which is so rightfully theirs.

Diamonds in this Coalmine

2006-04-09T20:59:00.000-04:00

So a good friend of mine just called me in response to my recent blog post and she wasn't too happy with my pessimistic outlook. She also reminded me that I forgot to post about the good news I got on Friday -- NYU has formally agreed to put me another $60,000 in debt. (Get It?!?)

I'm sure once I have a chance to relax and let some time lapse things will be looking better again. So until then, can someone please post a review of FUDCon for all to see. I would do it myself, but I'm too damn tired and don't feel like concentrating enough to write a proper review.

Also, Fedora has been officially invited to the O'reilly Open Source Convention this year. I have all the forms and paperwork ready and have spoken to the coordinator for that, so I'll post up some more info when it's available.

Down In A Hole

2006-04-09T17:19:00.000-04:00

Just got back from Boston. This has ended up being the worst and most expensive trip of my life.

$800 Auto Glass Replacement + $350 Traffic Ticket + $200 Gas = $1350.

I now realize that I could have gone on a weeklong European vacation and saved money. Anyway, somebody must be giving me the evil eye or something because this is just insane. Just when I got over the broken window, and had the weekend to relax, a stupid fucking state trooper pulls me over.

I've learned my lesson though. Time to take a break from travel for a long while. I think I am going to crawl into some hole and disappear for a good long time.

Do The Evolution. Or Not.

2006-03-27T18:44:00.000-05:00

In response to Jesse's recent posts about filing evolution bugs:

Have fun. I myself have filed numerous bugs, especially over this past summer working with Dave Malcolm, and all are yet to be fixed. Wait, scratch that, one was fixed, but that was the one which we included a patch with, and it was a stupid fix anyway. The important things, including the potential to lose mail, don't seem to bother them. I doubt you will get very far using bugzilla reports. Me, I prefer baseball bats and brass knuckles.

Evolution was sucking hardcore and no one cared to fix anything so I switched to Thunderbird. Thunderbird has open bugs about reply-list and guess what, it's actually been fixed already. Chris Aillon is out in California this week and is meeting with some of the moz dudes. So I had him talk to the people responsible, and that bug is fixed and ready to be rolled out in the next update.

Mozilla is actually willing to work with people and invest the time and effort to fix things and I proudly support their efforts.

P.S. Why did we ever abandon Mutt and Pine?

Announcing FUDCon Boston 2006

2006-03-21T11:57:00.000-05:00

Hot on the heels of the release of Fedora Core 5 and the success of previous FUDCon events worldwide, the Fedora Project is proud to announce FUDCon Boston 2006. FUDCon Boston 2006 will offer a wide range of speakers on an even wider range of topics, in three separate tracks, and is sure to have something for everyone.

More Info can be found at:
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConBoston2006

==When==

Friday, 7 April 2006. This is the Friday right after LinuxWorld Conference and Expo.

==What==

FUDCon Boston 2006 is the fifth such event globally and the second to be held in Boston, Mass. USA. FUDCon Boston 2006 will feature an expanded three track lineup which includes a user, developer and applications track. The application track will feature unique individuals and corporations, such as Levanta, MySQL, Pogo Linux and even representatives from the Catalonian Government in Spain, who have
leveraged Fedora for unique purposes and have contributed to the community.

The complete schedule can be found on the wiki and will be updated to reflect any time conflicts speaker may have. Please use it as the definitive timetable for the day's events. Additionally, the wiki will be updated with more detailed speaker, abstract and room info for each specific talk.

==Where==

The Fedora Project is honored to be able to work with Boston University once again to make this FUDCon a reality. The event will be graciously hosted once again by the BU Office of Information Technology, and this year, the BU School of Management gets in on the fun.

Also, as last year, we plan on offering streaming video and audio of all tracks and sessions. This year, these streams will be higher quality than previous attempts, as we think we've gotten it right this time. The streams will be Ogg Theora and should work out of the box for users of Fedora Core 4 and 5. Check the wiki in the coming weeks for links to the streaming content.

==How==

As spaces are limited we urge all those interested to pre-register by emailing fudcon-register@fedoraproject.org . Those who pre-register will have badges available for pickup the day of FUDCon and will receive preference for sessions which may fill up quickly.

==Thanks==

Thanks go out to all who made this possible and have contributed so much to the massive growth and success of the Fedora community. You know who you are.

See you in Boston!!

FUDCon CFP Almost Closed

2006-02-24T13:37:00.000-05:00

The Call for Papers for FUDCon Boston 2006 is drawing to an end. The official deadline is about to lapse, although we will still consider submissions that come in over the next few days and are encouragin. Thanks go to everyone who has submitted abstracts and we look forward to announcing the final lineup and events schedule later next week.

FUDCon Boston 2006 Call for Papers

2006-02-11T21:52:00.000-05:00

I would like to start out by thanking both the community and developers who have helped make Fedora such a huge success on so many different fronts.

Riding on the success of the series of FUDCon events worldwide I am proud to announce that we will be holding FUDCon Boston 2006, taking it back to where it all began. The event will be graciously hosted by Boston University once again with sponsorship from BU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the BU Office of Information Technology, and this year, the BU School of Management. The date for the event is Friday April 7th, the day following the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo.

We are looking for interesting topics and presentations covering a number areas. Talks should be focused on one of the 3 main tracks.

Track 1 - User Track : Topics that deal with the user experience, desktop innovations, etc.
Track 2 - Developer Track : Topics that deal with software development in the Fedora environment.
Track 3 - Application Track : Either topics that deal with applications/uses of Fedora in other Open Source projects or topics that showcase a specific Open Source application.

To be considered for presentation, abstracts should be submitted to fudcon-cfp@fedoraproject.org by no later than Thursday February 23, at 11:59pm. We welcome submission from both developers and community members alike, new and old.

After the review process, notifications will go out on Thursday March 2nd followed by a full schedule for FUDCon Boston 2006 and official announcement on Monday March 6th.

Thanks.

There's No Place Like ~

2006-01-09T00:30:00.000-05:00

Okay, so it's been a struggle getting caught up with everything and finally being able to breathe, but lo and behold, sometime between 11 and 12 today, I accomplished that exact feat. So what now? Well, I've been working on a little project on the side with a few friends for the past month and things have really begun to pick up steam. I might be headed to NYU in the fall to participate in the most awesome ITP Program. Lot's of good stuff coming out of there.

However, don't be fooled. As of Jan 9, I am able to step back into all my Fedora work full force, and I find that awesome. There is much to be done on every front. Marketing is always busy and we are trying to get together another awesome FUDCon and a most special event for the LinuxWorld expo, so look for updates on that. As part of the ambassadors, I am almost done writing my letters to the U.N. and Mayor Bloomberg. I'm looking forward to picking up pieces of the triage stuff as well and maybe getting my hands dirty in a few other things.

It feels good to be able to breathe again.

P.S. Howard Stern's first Sirius Broadcast is Jan 9 as well. I'm looking forward to listening to the first show and seeing what it's like. I got my Sirius Radio last year for other reasons, but I'm sure this will be interesting.

Hiatus

2005-11-20T18:15:00.000-05:00

Where is Jack? While reading my backlog of emails, I've realized that a large number of people have emailed me regarding my whereabouts over the past few months. This is aside from the large number of people who have phoned me.

Well all I have to answer all you people is that most of the time life is good; Unfortunately, recently, life sucks. Therefore, I've been on kind of a computer break. I'm trying to tie up a few loose ends, catch up with some long overdue work and think about some new directions.

Hopefully, the picture will be clearer after Thanksgiving Day, that's the plan at least, and I will be able to return to some type of normalcy. I am hoping to be back up to speed, caught up with everything by 20 December.

See you then.

Is It Wrong to Hate Stupid People?

2005-08-05T09:47:00.000-04:00

In response to this story http://www.cooltechzone.com/index.php? option=content&task=view&id=1645, and its author, this idiot, varun@cooltechzone.com, I would just like to say the following:

This is a prime example of how any turd that can open its mouth can now become a "journalist" in our day in age. This guy is the most clueless motherfucker on the face of the earth. He is clearly severely undereducated, due to his clear lack of understanding, based on some of his comments, such as:

"...I hate Linux. I think it’s the most over rated piece of software ever built and survives simply out of spite and not because it is terribly good at doing something because it is not!"

"In Linux, you have to recompile a kernel if you want to so much as change your modem!"

and the ever conclusive:

"as most of the people developing Linux probably sit at night writing up malicious code for windows!"

Varun, you could clearly benefit from some form of instruction, both in the English language, with regards to grammar and punctuation, as well a course in how to be a real journalist and actually do some factual
research to base your article on.

It is clear and obvious to anyone with even the smallest of brains that you probably have never tried Linux in your life, if you think that it is not good at anything and that you need to recompile the kernel to get a modem working. I doubt you even know what a kernel is.

I really don't even care that you are talking shit about Linux. You just need to realize that if you are going to write articles and expect people to read them that you can't just go running off your mouth. There is something called journalistic integrity and factual basis.

But dude, by all means, If you really want to give Bill Gates a blowjob, just ask him directly and do yourself and the world a favor and spare us from having to waste our time reading your crap. Instead of an "article" just write him a love sonnet next time.

Fedora Bug Day Event - Pick Your Poison - Friday 2005-07-29

2005-07-26T12:09:00.000-04:00

Saddle up the horsies and git yer shotguns kids, its time for a Bug Day!

Who:
The Fedora BugZappers Triage Team, men, women and children alike. More information is available at
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers

When:
Friday 29 July 2005 - Starting at 9AM in your timezone!

What:
The theme for our first bug day will be "Pick Your Poison." Anything in bugzilla is fair game! The goal will be to try and triage as many bugs as possible, close out duplicates as well as linking to upstream bug
trackers. Additionally, we have the special honor of trying to file and close out as many Documentation Bugs as possible.

Where:
Join us on #fedora-bugs on irc.freenode.net and on fedora-triage-list@redhat.com . Bugzilla is at
https://bugzilla.redhat.com .

How:
The following steps are necessary for those interested in participating:

1. Go to http://bugzilla.redhat.com and sign up for an account.

2. Sign up for a Fedora Account using the same Bugzilla name at https://admin.fedora.redhat.com/accounts/ . When setting up your account, click the box to be added to the 'fedorabugs' group. An administrator will then approve your membership.

3. Sign up for membership to the fedora-triage-list at https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-triage-list .

Once you are done and signed up, please send an email to the list with a subject line of "Triage Participant: 2005-07-29" so that we know you plan on participating. This also ensures that you will be entered into the
activity tracker for the day so you can earn a reward. More on that later.

4. Hop on #fedora-bugs on irc.freenode.net on Friday morning and bring lots of ammo!

Why:

To help the project, to help the developers and to earn rewards. Yes you heard right, rewards. There will be awards given out to certain participants at the conclusion of Bug Days. Awards for things such as
most active, most reported, most closed, most marked upstream an so on will be announced within a week and all rewards sent out. Also, sometimes we will have special rewards that we give out just for fun, at
random, because well, we're nice guys and gals.

What are these rewards you ask? Joining us is the only way to find out what's in the treasure chest.

See you on Friday.

Official Launch of the Fedora BugZappers Triage Team

2005-07-20T15:25:00.000-04:00

Want to help out with the Fedora Project, but can't code a lick? Well fear not my dear friends. There are many ways you can help the cause and today I am pleased to announce a brand new way you can help contribute. Join the Fedora BugZappers!

Who are the BugZappers?

The BugZappers, (http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers) are the official triage team of the Fedora Project. The main goal of the team is to triage, or do a first pass, of bugs in Bugzilla and ensure that a number of parameters are satisfactorily met. Basically what that means is that the BugZappers will go through bugs as they come in and try and make sure the bugs are valid (i.e. not a duplicate), sane and contain enough information to be escalated to developers. If you have ever reported a bug and wondered why it took so long to get fixed, well then BugZappers is the right project to join.

Tell Me More!

The BugZappers aim to be the primary line of defense for Fedora Quality Assurance (QA). The BugZappers will begin running Bug Day events, every alternating week, usually on Wednesdays. Bug Day events are when the team gets together to concentrate our focus on certain subsections of the project which need work. Triage should continue on though, and remember kids, "Every day should be a Bug Day!"

So, if you are tired of hearing complaints about things not working, pieces being broken or just plain want to help Fedora be the best dang Fedora it can be, then join the BugZappers team and help the developers make the most of their coding time. It's fun, it's easy, you don't need much experience to start and we are willing to show you the path of the righteous, should you choose to accept this mission.

What's in it for me?

Glad you asked. First of all there is candy. OK, so there is no candy, but there is free stuff. The team is working on some giveaways and run contests during Bug Day events. You also get to work on triaging things that annoy you first, so your problems get fixed sooner; kernel problems anyone? Also, a wise man once said, much fame and fortune come to he who close many bugs. OK, it really wasn't a wise man buy you get the point.

How Do I Join?

Step 1: Sign up for the mailing list at:

http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-triage-list

Step 2: Join us on IRC

We live in #fedora-bugs on Freenode

Step 3: Read/Modify/Enhance the wiki

Our wiki is located at http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers

Additionally, we have more information available on the wiki at:

http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugsReports and http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs.

More content will be added as we get the project off the ground and moving.

Also, be sure to look for our announcement of the first Bug Day event coming soon to an Inbox near you!

Songs for Polar Bears

2005-07-10T14:03:00.000-04:00

Ok so in response to Thomas' last post about needing more music, here is a list of new-ish bands that you might find some interest in. But before I get to them, I would like to first say that I've been thinking for a long time about starting some kind of band of the week thing, where I would talk about or introduce a new band every week, so I might actually get around to doing it now. Lastly, I would like thank Sirius Satellite Radio for not playing shitty music and introducing myself to some of these new and awesome bands. I'm just going to rattle off a list, if anyone wants me to include links, let me know and I will edit accordingly.

1. Snow Patrol - Although they aren't as unknown as some of the other bands to follow, I really dig their sound. Sort of laid back-ish and maybe a little, kind of emo. The lyrics are golden though. They are what's currently in my cd player at the moment.

2. Head Automatica - The lead vocalist is from Staten Island, NY not too far away from me and someone I know grew up down the block from him. He used to be in a band called Glassjaw which was almost like thrash metal, but now he hooked up with this DJ, Dan the Automator and their sound is really unique. Take two parts rock, one part disco add a dash of hipster-ism, and you have Head Automatica. If you pick up their disc, Decadence, I really like the tracks Beating Heart Baby, The Razor and Solid Gold Telephone.

3. Alkaline Trio - Just good plain ole' rock. Their new disc, Crimson, really kicks ass with some great tracks. It starts off really powerfully with the track, Time to Waste, and continues to be a great ride all the way through. I don't think any true rock fan can say anything bad about this disc, its just that good.

4. The Bravery - One of the better UK bands that are up and coming, their self-titled debut disc is pretty good, I like them.

5. Thornley - OK, so some people already know of them, and they've been out for quite a while now. I forgot how I found out about them, but I listened to their debut disc, Come Again, for about 5 months before I moved on, it just rocked so much. Last week I picked up a new copy, since my original one was lost, and rediscovered them again. I really, really like them and as ender can attest, they are excellent live.

That's about it for now. I can't give them all up on the first go round.

Like Eating Glass

2005-06-29T23:51:00.000-04:00

Well, in a follow up to my previous post, I guess if I am going to admonish the bad, I must praise the good as well. So, fortunately, this story posted on news.com is a decent description of the situation and not some sensational scare peace. Joris Evers, should be commended for writing up such a concise and non-FUD spreading piece. Kudos!

People are Stupid, Yet Again

2005-06-29T14:58:00.000-04:00

People, especially so called "journalist" need to learn to calm the fuck down. Earlier today Mauricio points out to me this story about Jon Johansen "hacking" Google Video. For God's sakes, all he did was remove 5 lines of code, which might I add, are freely available , as in open source, on google's code site. To add insult to injury, the google video player is nothing but a bunch of patches to VLC, which Jon works on already anyway. Oooh, an open source hacker modifying his own code! Quick someone call the US Department of Justice and Interpol. This is horse shit.

Ryan Naraine, you my man are truly an idiot and worthy of the title "Connecticut People." This article is nothing less than sensational journalism which should be retracted immediately. People should not be allowed to write misleading stories like this.