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Another busy day today. Started out with Systems Engineering in the morning and Professor Dan Frey talking about the Design of Experiments. Another session where I can easily see where in a physical engineering field, it would have a lot of relevance and could be easily applied. Software, still, not so much. Maybe if you're doing human factors/user interface you could take advantage of some pieces of it but I'm not entirely convinced. And if you're doing things at a lower-level, then almost certainly not. When you're designing a software system at that level, you don't really have knobs and levers to adjust and then see how they change some sort of outcome -- instead, your design is focused on functional requirements and just meeting those requirements. And then adjusting as the requirements inevitably change.
Later in the day, I had my final-for-now FESCo meeting. As some may have noticed, I have decided not to run for FESCo this time around. There are a variety of reasons why this is the case and it's really not worth going into all of them. One thing that will be nice will be having one less meeting a week to need to attend. Although I'll probably still chime in frequently enough from the cheap seats.
After that, it was off for a trip to the dentist. Biked there, got there right on time and then got to wait half an hour for the dentist. *sigh* Eventually got things taken care of and was on my way, if a bit later than I had intended.
Then, this evening, we had another SDM Connect event. I tried to organize it more in the fashion that Alyson had started things off in last year -- very informal and low-key. And so I asked the inimitable Yoav Shapira to come and talk about his startup/entrepreneur experience and what helped (and didn't help) from his time at SDM. As usual, he gave lots of good information and insight and it was good to see him again. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and I think that the format kind of "clicked" with people to some extent. Or so I'm hoping. A few people had some ideas about future speakers and I told them to let me know and hopefully we can get SDM Connect to happen again on a more regular basis.
Then, home and now it's time to head to bed. Tomorrow, I'm getting FIOS installed... hopefully they've figured out cable cards (as I'm still quite happy with the Series3 Tivo) by this point and it'll be painless. But, I'm going into it expecting basically the worst given that it's a telecom company. We'll see how it goes.
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Lots of things to update on, so it's probably just easiest to do a list-style update ala my good friend SPAM
- System dynamics continues to be a great class. I can actually see myself using it some to try to justify my intuition on what the outcome of changes will be and then maybe have more effective arguments against (or for) various things. Also the Beer Game was a lot of fun last week. To be fair, some of it is supply chain-y, but that just seems like it's because it's the easy examples, not because of any inherent flaw in the modeling approach.
- SDM business trip is next week. Will be good to see folks again. Will likely be a busy week though. I should actually look at what is planned
- Kara's sister's wedding was on Saturday so we went down for that. Was nice although I was tired by the end of the evening.
- Then on Sunday, Kara and I stood in line for iPhones. Line wasn't too bad but we then had extra time due to the first phone they opened for me had a bad screen. And they were good about just taking care of right away, no questions asked.
Yes, by getting an iPhone, I'm somewhat of a sellout. But it's a pretty nice phone. Although i've crashed Safari a couple of times. But having a web browser that's actually sane for, say, browsing the web is good and HSDPA is the upgrade I had hoped over edge. And realistically, it's not like the Blackberry is more open, or Symbian (although it may someday be) and Android is a farce of openness at present. I'll save my Android rant for another day, though.
- Took last week easy on the bike to let my injuries recover. But everything's feeling pretty good and the healing seems to be coming along pretty well. This weekend is the Seacoast Safari
- Need to figure out a good vacation for the break between summer classes and the fall semester
- Err, I had more to say, but I've forgotten it now. Suffice it to say that I'm sure it was interesting and would have been incredibly enlightening.
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| 2008-07-15 12:23 |
| Support me riding in this year's Seacoast Safari |
| Public |
| cycling, life |
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This year, I am again riding in the Seacoast Safari to help raise money to support the Cycstic Fibrosis Foundation in their efforts. Cystic fibrosis is a devastating genetic disease that affects children and young adults. Advances continue to be made in finding a cure, but your help is needed now—more than ever—to help keep up the momentum of this life-saving research. Too many young lives depend on this vital research to let it go unfunded!
Please help me meet my fund-raising goal by sponsoring me. Your generous gift will be used efficiently and effectively—nearly 90 cents of every dollar of revenue raised is available for investment in vital CF programs to support research, care and education. And, it's tax-deductible. The research being done by the CF Foundation is both important and making great strides -- not too long ago, the average life expectancy of a child with CF was 20. But today, one of the people that I regularly ride with has CF and yet he continues to ride on (strong!) in this as well as a couple of other events, including most recently a trip across the Canadian Rockies by bike.
The Seacoast Safari ride is a two-day ride up along the coasts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. Each day is 75 (or so) miles of coastal scenery. The ride was beautiful last year and I'm looking forward to doing it again.
Making a donation is easy and secure! Just click on the link below to make a donation to my fund-raising page where your donation will be credited to my fund-raising efforts. Any amount you can donate will be greatly appreciated!
Donating is such a simple and effective way for you to show your support for this important cause. Together, we can make a difference in the lives of those with CF. Once again, thank you for supporting the mission of the CF Foundation!
If you'd like to help, you can easily donate online at http://www.cff.org/LWC/JeremyKatz7945
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| 2008-07-13 23:58 |
| Weekend |
| Public |
 tired |
| life |
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Was going to do a post, but too tired. So sleep now. Post later. Can I have a vacation yet?
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| 2008-07-09 00:09 |
| And by popular demand... a plymouth screencast |
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| fedora |
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And by popular (by which, I mean one person) demand, a screencast of plymouth on the live cd.
ScreencastCurrently using vesafb to get the pretty graphics instead of modesetting. And there's something slowing down livecd boots the past couple of days, but I haven't gotten around to looking at what it is. But it lets you see the basic idea.
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| 2008-07-08 12:03 |
| Graphical Boot and Live Images |
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| fedora |
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One of the goals for Fedora 10 is to replace the aging rhgb that has been used for graphical boot since Red Hat Linux 8.0. rhgb is implemented using an X server which started in rc.sysinit relatively early during the boot process and then some feedback is provided to the user. With some of the improvements underway for Fedora 10 we should hopefully have kernel modesetting in place at least for some drivers which will let us set a native resolution graphical mode as opposed to requiring either text-mode, an X driver + server or the use of a framebuffer.
Given this, enter plymouth -- a new graphical boot implementation which will be taking advantage of that infrastructure. And since we don't need the X server or anything that's really complicated, we can even include plymouth in the initrd and provide that nice graphical experience earlier in the boot process. The bits landed for the regular initrd a couple of weeks ago and I finally got around to looking at integrating things for the live initrds the end of last week and finished it up yesterday. So now, we should have the new graphical booting hotness for livecds as well. And once the kernel modesetting pieces land in rawhide (I'm looking at you krh :-), that should be easily hooked up also making things quite nice in time for the Fedora 10 alpha.
Now on to the next thing on my todo list...
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| 2008-07-07 09:13 |
| Rest of the weekend |
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| cycling, life |
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In addition to my racing fun yesterday, had a pretty good and full weekend. My parents were up and so on Thursday after class, I headed down to South Station to meet them. We grabbed lunch and then headed back to Arlington. From there, my dad and I headed down to the bike shop so that we could pick up a bike for him to ride on Friday. Thursday evening, we went down to Tanjore for dinner and mostly avoided getting soaked. Given the rain and everyone being kind of tired, we decided not to go down and watch the Pops rehearse and instead just headed back to the house and watched Michael Clayton
Friday morning, woke up and went out with my dad in the drizzle on the Quad ride. He did pretty well and we got in a nice 40 mile ride. By the time we got to Starbuck's at the end, the rain had stopped and it looked like it was going to be a nice day. Go figure. Then, headed down to Braintree and met up with Kara's parents for dinner. We then ended up going and watching the Get Smart movie. I was somewhat unsure how it would be as the reviews were somewhat mixed, but I really enjoyed it as did everyone else. I watched Get Smart a lot on Nick at Nite as I was growing up and so it was enjoyable a lot of the things that they pulled in. It was also good that they modernized it and tried to give some backstory. And I also thought that Steve Carrell made a really good Maxwell Smart and put his own little bits on the part rather than just trying to imitate Don Adams.
On Saturday, we took a day trip up to Vermont to visit the Ben and Jerry's factory as well as a few other things. Vermont was pretty and the Ben and Jerry's tour was cool I guess. But lots and lots of driving. I'd like to go back to Vermont, though, to spend some more time. Seems like it could be pretty relaxing and also have some good biking ;-) When we got home, spent some time watching the end of the first stage of the Tour de France.
Yesterday, my parents headed back home and I raced. After the race, came home and made some lunch and then watched the second stage of the Tour. Spent the evening between catching up on some email for work and getting started on the System Dynamics assignment for the week.
All in all, a good weekend. The next few weeks are pretty busy for me, but busy in a good way.
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| 2008-07-06 15:44 |
| Slip and slide |
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| ow |
| cycling |
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Raced this morning in the Wells Ave C race. After sitting in the car a good chunk of the day yesterday, my legs needed some stretching, but I felt pretty warmed up by the time we lined up on the line. We had 4 Quad riders in the group -- myself, Matthew, Jim Smith and Kenton. There were also two guys from the MIT team that I knew were pretty strong. The initial strategy that Matthew, Kenton and I had was to try to get to where on the last lap, they could give me a lead-out for the sprint.
The race started out relatively sedately -- the first lap was only about 22 mph but it looked like there were a few pretty strong riders within the pack. I made it a point to again stay up in the front third and decided that I'd stick with the MIT guys for a bit. By the 4th lap, things were heating up significantly and we had a very quick lap. I was working hard, but managing to stay in the front part of the pack. The preems began to be called and had the usual impact that they have at Wells -- they broke things up briefly, but then things would slow down afterwards and there'd be a regroup. About halfway through, I wasn't sure how much more I had and so I sat back a bit more and tried to recover while remaining near the front of group which was up to about 24 mph at this point. I also continued to look for the rest of the team so that we could try to get organized, but the pace wasn't entirely conducive to the others getting up to the front.
With three laps to go, there was an attack by some of the stronger riders and to avoid them getting away entirely, I tried to hang on. And, for the most part, I did. Unfortunately, the remaining three laps continued at the high 26-27 mph pace. Coming around the back side of the course on the last lap, one of the other teams launched an attack sending one guy off the front and leaving another guy back to block a bit. This was more successful than usual in the C race since the front group had been riding a reasonable pace line for a couple of laps. Eventually got around him and sprinted hard, but got swallowed by the front of the chase group with about 50-100 yards to go. Placement ended up being about 10th of the 40 or so people out today and had an average over the entire race of 24.9. So not too bad, but could have been better. I need to get a better feel for when to actually jump for my sprint at the end of a race -- I do well on the normal club ride, but part of that is that I know the route very very well. So it's just a matter of being able to apply that to different situations. Also, working on how to better get everyone else into position so that we can work together at the end rather than being spread throughout the field would be good as well.
Unfortunately, after going over the finish line, I hit something on the road and my bike went skidding out from under me, leaving me with some nice road rash to remember today's race by. Nothing major, but it's definitely something that I'm feeling now and will likely continue to feel over the next few days. So I'll probably try to take it a little easy so that I can heal and then, in two weeks, I'll be doing the Seacoast Safari charity ride for cystic fybrosis. And then, I think my next race is likely to be the circuit race in Norwell on the 27th, assuming I can talk a sufficient number of Quad riders into going. Having a hill on the course should be good for changing things up :-)
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With the 4th being tomorrow, this is something of a short week for most people in the US. For me, my parents are coming up to visit, so mine is even a little shorter. While they're up, we're going to try to get out and do some different things. For one thing, we're going to try to catch part of the rehearsal by the Boston Pops later on this evening rather than fighting the full crowds for the real deal tomorrow. Then, tomorrow, we're going to try to avoid crowds -- I'm going to take my dad out on a bike ride with the Quad folks and then we're hoping to watch the Get Smart movie later in the day. Then, Saturday we're headed to Vermont for the Ben and Jerry's factory and a few other things. Then, they fly back on Sunday and I'm intending to race at Wells Ave. So it should be a pretty good weekend.
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Got out and had a couple of nice, fast rides this weekend. Saturday was a double dinosaur for a metric century and then about fifty miles yesterday. And I'm doing pretty well at getting my speed up while still being able to do some sprinting from there. Should help a bit when racing. My original plan for the weekend had been to do the Wells Ave training race on Sunday, but it ended up being cancelled for various reasons. But, the intense training rides were a good substitute. And then hopefully I'll get down to Wells Ave this Sunday instead.
Otherwise, a pretty uneventful and low key weekend.
Then, spent today in the office taking care of a few things. Ended up spending a lot of time talking with people about various things and made little progress on my attempt to get us down to one set of keyboard data. I think that the quickest route to actually making this happen is going to be to take the Debian ckbcomp perl script and just pre-run it against the xkeyboard-config data into a package for the "primary" keyboard maps. And then if you want to generate your own for an abnormal case, you can. Eventually it would be nice, though, to get ckbcomp written in C and do the xkb -> console keyboard mapping done at boot-time (or even within loadkeys directly). If it's something you're interested in working on, let me know and I can point you in the right direction.
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| 2008-06-23 16:53 |
| More git support for fedorapeople |
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| fedora |
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One of the things provided for Fedora contributors is access to fedorapeople.org for hosting various web content. One thing that has become somewhat common there is hosting a git repository for someone to take a look from time to time. And since its inception, making this a little bit nicer has been one of the things I've hoped to be able to do.
Now that we have some time from observing the load and feel that the box isn't terribly loaded, I spent some time this afternoon making things a bit nicer for users who want to have a small git repository hosted there. As of right now, this should be considered beta (at best) and it may go away based on some trial time. Also, if you are hosting something more substantial with a number of contributors, I strongly suggest using fedorahosted instead. With those disclaimers out of the way, here's the basics for using it.
- Create a public_git directory in your home directory
- Put your git repository under this directory. Common methods for initially doing this would be rsync or scp of a repository you already have.
- Touch the git-daemon-export-ok file in the repository. This makes it so that others have access to the repository
- You can also set a description for the project by editing the description file in the repository
- Users can clone your repository via something like git clone git://fedorapeople.org/~katzj/isomd5sum.git
- You can see your project listed in gitweb once the project list updates (hourly). Note that this URL may change
And that's all there is to it. The documentation for fedorapeople has been updated with this information as well. Let me know if you run into any problems.
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| 2008-06-22 21:49 |
| A productive Sunday |
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| productive |
| cycling, sdm |
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Unlike many Sundays, today was actually pretty productive. I woke up this morning with the intention of getting in a good ride and I succeeded in doing so. I met up with the Quad crowd down at the shop and went out for a good, relatively high intensity ride. Kept it on the shorter side (45-ish miles), though given all of the other things that were on my plate for the day. After the ride, I picked up some Cytomax quickly at the shop and then headed home. Took a quick shower and then popped over next door for the birthday party for our neighbor's one year old. Talked with people and then bowed out so that I could spend some time working on getting the homework that had piled up done.
This was where I expected to need to spend a lot more time today and really, I'm pretty happy with what the time requirement actually ended up being. The biggest problem with the System Dynamics homework was getting VenSim working. Unfortunately, wine seems to not want to work for some reason now and thus I had to fall back to doing a full machine emulation of Windows 98 (I knew I kept that CD around for something :-). But kvm running Windows 98 seems to hit some bad code paths, so eventually, I ended up using just bare qemu. Which mostly worked, although I still had to deal with a litany of Windows being stupid. But eventually I got things up and running enough that I could install VenSim and do the homework set. Seemed pretty straight-forward and I think that thus far, I "get" what we've covered in the class.
The Systems Engineering homework I had started on some over the past couple of days in short little spurts just gathering my thoughts for the questions. So it was only a small matter of putting everything together to finish that up.
This puts me in a much better place for tomorrow than I expected as I should be able to head into work and get a good day's worth of work in without having to cut out early to finish things up. There will be some final touches to put on things, but it should be reasonable enough to do them instead when I get home rather than having to do them earlier in the day. Now, on to the folding of laundry...
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Today was the last day of FUDCon and as opposed to the past two days of hackfests, today was instead set up as a bar camp style unconference and held at the BU Photonics Center. This was our fourth time at BU, third at the Photonics Center, and as always, the accomodations were perfect for what we needed.
The morning started off with me swinging by to meet up with ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) jkeating so that we could bike down to BU. Had a nice relatively leisurely ride down and then helped make sure that things were set to begin. As is usual for a barcamp, the number of people interested in pitching a session was high and most of them had high amounts of interest. I pitched both a reprise of my LiveCD talk from the summit as well as a talk to help people get started with git.
After the pitching and arranging of talks, I ended up going to a number over the course of the day. In the first slot, I switched a bit between the Java/Eclipse talks and mmcgrath's talk on a Community Services Infrastructure. Then, it was on to do my git talk. This went pretty well, although I could have easily filled up more time. I tried to get a screencast of it, but was unsuccessful. But I might try to turn some of it into a series of posts for posterity sake. After sandwiches for lunch, I headed to the discussion of requirements for a new SCM system. This is something that I need to try to carve some more time out for as it probably is something that can get us big wins. But I'm not really sure where that time can come from at the moment :-/ In the next slot, I ended up going to the Upstart talk over the TurboGears 2.0 talk and in retrospect, probably should have gone the other way. But so it goes. And finally, I gave my livecd talk quickly and then went to heckle davej a bit :-)
Finally, stickster gave a State of Fedora talk and then it was on to FUDPub where I spent the evening (and longer than I originally intended) hanging out and chatting with folks. Finally, I'm home and pretty much beat. It's been an extremely full 5-ish days and I'm definitely feeling it, both from a lack of sleep as well as the "oh, so much information exchange" perspective. But, it's also been a good few days.
But now, it's time to try to get a little bit of homework done before bed so that hopefully I can get out on a ride in the morning and maybe make substantial progress on finishing up the homework tomorrow. Because Monday brings the beginning of another full week...
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Jim Whitehurst took some time out of his almost certainly busy Summit schedule of talking with press, analysts and customers to actually come and talk with attendees of FUDCon for an hour or so. I took some notes about what he said. Any mistakes are mine and probably don't represent what he said :-)
He started off with some big points.
- Red Hat is following the spirit of GPL and open source, not just the letter of them. This was a reiteration of what he had said in his keynote yesterday.
- An example of this is the recent patent settlement; the settlement protects open source overall
- ODF work over OOXML is pretty public; the Liberation fonts (announced last year) are metric compatible with "other common models"
- Red Hat has built a business model to build a community and work with them and then make the software Enterprise Ready (tm). This is very consistent with open source
- Take Fedora every two years or so and freeze it
- Test it, tune it, performance testing, etc
- Then tell enterprises that Red Hat will support that for 7 years
- Currently, about 15-20% of the value of open source is gotten by the customer
- Iterative innovation
- But the bits are being used in a traditional way. We need to work more to help merge customers into the community. There are some examples where this already has occurred
- NSA work on SELinux
- JP Morgan work on on the M part of MRG
- Anecdote: RHEL has the highest security clearance of any OS by the Russian Defense. Due to SELinux, written by the NSA, ... But since they can see the source, they can audit it and feel comfortable with the code.
- As leaders of open source, Red Hat needs to recognize the power of the community and bringing the rest of Red Hat and the customers into Fedora
- You can't continue to apply old world economics of property to abundance of knowledge and information.
After that, things were opened up to questions and there were plenty :-) Q: What can we do to improve the experience for new people wanting to come into the community? (quaid) A: Need to invest real dollars and work hard to make the lives of developers easier, turn it into a place that developers want to be. Michael Tiemann is talking to customers to try to figure out how to get customers involved in open source more directly. One thing is to evangelize open source principles vs just open source software- Open source is as much about interactions with community as much as just opening the source. (side note -- this is a huge and key point that I've been picking up based on reading various blogs and also from some of the stuff that was talked about in my Tech Strategy class)
Q: Are you talking with C-level execs at companies that are customers to try to help them understand some of the value of open source and helping to get internal innovations to be opened (stahnma) A: Take case studies that we have (M of MRG by JPMC, Electronic Service Bus (ESB) for JBoss written by a Canadian insurance company) and showing the benefits that they gained by actually open sourcing -- lower maintenance costs, improved rate of innovation and improvement. Support is provided by community. Big wins for them. Don't get too transactional during the sales process; we have to make the message clear and convince customers to be a part of the community if we're really going to get things to thrive. Have to get out and help the smaller companies who don't employ a lot of Comp Sci PhDs to get it. C-level execs don't even necessarily know about the RHEL usage within a company, have to raise the awareness. Q: How does Fedora fit into Red Hat's desktop strategy? (notting) A: Red Hat's desktop strategy is horribly misunderstood. Red Hat is, will be, and should be a provider in the Enterprise desktop space. As a business, we make open source accessible to the Enterprise. We need to invest more heavily in the desktop to improve the Enterprise desktop space. We've underinvested to avoid being in the consumer space As for the consumer space and why it doesn't make sense -- there are very few companies successfully sell to both enterprises and consumers. Even Microsoft is just getting into the Enterprise. And for 95% of the world, there is little reason to be paying for a consumer desktop. Average person doesn't really have a need for paying for support. We don't want to exploit open source or our brand -- we could sell lots of copies at $5 a pop. But we're not set up to do support, etc. As a consumer desktop, Fedora is incredible. "Fedora is so much better than RHEL". Fedora has newer hardware support, faster, newer stuff. It's a phenomenal desktop. The ecosystem is important -- you get used to what you're using. Fedora therefore plays a key role in keeping us on desktop for non-enterprises. And the components then flow back into Enterprise desktop and people are comfortable with it. Q: What about OEMs wanting to do Fedora preloads? (jkeating) A: Good idea, the more people we can get using Fedora, the better. But there are questions around what the right place to draw the line for the brand is good. If you have to add a proprietary driver, should they be able to use the Fedora brand? Q: What is RHT doing to get commercial open source companies more involved? (dgilmore) Eg, zimbra won't let people from the outside contribute to it; if you're going to install it, you have to follow guidelines; etc. A: A lot of companies see open source as "cool" right now. Two different versions offered, etc. Not meeting the spirit of open source. When meeting with the CEOs of these companies, advise them as to the spirit and try to help educate. Q: How much do you meet with Shuttleworth or worry about Ubuntu? (wwoods) A: They're big players. Has real issues with their model -- it's self-promoting and the question of meeting the letter vs the spirit of the GPL and open source. We work hard to match the spirit of open source, not just the letter. Would like to meet Mark because he's an interesting character. Q: What's Red Hat and Fedora's role in Free Media? (mizmo) A: We have a limited amount of time for our influence and have things closer to home. But we are supportive of it in general, just limited resources for it. Q: Brought up by press release about Spacewalk being WMV or Realmedia only. A: We should look into that and fix it. Will look into it. Q: Much of open source is individuals scratching an itch. What about patterns of growth for corporations contributing to open source? (sadmac) A: Condor (G in MRG), oVirt, are projects which are things that an individual doesn't generally need. A: (skvidal) Look at moodle, universities working on PeopleSoft replacement, ... So there's some success, but it's a little slow. Q: Are there efforts to find things like that to be replaced? (wwoods) A: No. We don't do a good enough job there. And we're hoping to do better. Factoid: Looking at Enterprise IT spending on software -- it's $200 billion. Of that, $130 billion is not spent on apps or databases. Its spent on infrastructure stuff. Q: Mobile device space. Should Red Hat be doing something in that space? (skvidal) A: Would love to see Fedora targeting the space. Us being involved from community is easy and obvious, but harder to figure out commercial aspect Q: Should we be paying attention to user side of web application development in Fedora? We have lots of TurboGears people. (skvidal) A: Send mail and talk about it more. Q: As a follow-up to trying to get more customers as a part of the community. Are there fears of hijacking if community gets larger? A: You have to have faith in the model. No protection around that explicitly through licensing, etc. Continuing to have real leadership across key areas/projects is one aspect that helps. And really, if you think about it, this would be a great problem to have to worry about. A: (jkeating) Have to provide strong leadership and not leave a vacuum when building a community Q: Any fixes to prioritize during the hackfest? (sadmac) A: Wireless for the eeepc required a binary blob. Can't really think of anything specific otherwise. Sprint wireless card just worked in Fedora 9 with NetworkManager. Q: So you feel the pain of open drives not being available. What do you think of our strategy of not compromising and not shipping the non-open drivers? (warren) A: It's a pain, but our strategy of not compromising has helped to drive change. Need to get nVidia onboard. AMD (ATI) changed because of us. "Stay the course". One of the big differences between us vs Canonical. We're true to open source. Sure, you can make it easy, but you won't change the world just by taking the easy path. Thanks to Jim for taking the time to talk with us and also for being so candid and open on a variety of topics!
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Yesterday was the official beginning of the Summit and, per usual, things started off with a few keynotes. Jim Whitehurst, the new CEO of Red Hat, started things off with a bit of affirmation of the Red Hat strategy and the value of open source. The second keynote was by Dr John Halamka about the role of openness within health care which was pretty interesting. After the keynotes, I headed back to the Fedora table to hang out and get ready to do my presentation which had the second slot of the day.
For my presentation, I talked a bit about the work on and with Live CDs within Fedora -- everything from the history to how they work to where things are going. The talk went pretty well, although the room was less full than I thought. If you're going to be at FUDCon, though, I'll probably reprise most of the talk. And I'll be putting up the slides later today once I've fixed a couple of bugs I found in them.
The rest of the day was basically spent at the Fedora table and talking with lots of people about various things. Then, headed over to Fenway for the party there. Where I had basically the same plan which was to talk with lots of people. Finally, headed home and crashed so that I could get more sleep for today and the start of FUDcon proper. But I could still have done with a little bit more ...
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At FUDCon or the Summit and want to try out a talk? There are "Campground Sessions" available for people to give talks and demos as part of the Red Hat Summit. Note that this would be great for doing a first run of a FUDcon presentation you're looking at doing on Saturday. If you're interested, go to the back of the Exhibit Hall and sign up on the whiteboard there. And apparently, if you sign up to do a session tomorrow before 1 PM it will get listed in the little "newspaper" type thing that gets printed.
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After class yesterday, I headed over to the convention center to register for the Summit and see who else was around. Ran into a few people from the Westford office and we went past security to get a jump on registering. Then, I headed over to man the Fedora table until some other folks showed up to help. The table is outside the exhibit hall area right next to the Red Hat Cool Stuff store and we should have someone manning it consistently to put Fedora 9 (with updates as of Monday) onto a USB stick for you. Conveniently all Summit attendees get a 1 gig usb stick when they check-in :)
Anyway, hung out at the table for a while as various Fedora folk started to show up. Also ended up helping the IT guys to get some of the laptops to work better. Then a bunch of us eventually headed to dinner around 9 or 9:30. As has become some sort of sick Fedora in Boston related tradition we ended up eating at the Uno's on Boylston. We left just before the streets exploded with honking horns and many drunk people (the Boston Celtics won the NBA championship last night). Biked home and made it home just before 1.
And now I'm back at the convention center and I made sure things look good with the IT guys. Then breakfast and it's time for day 1's keynotes to begin....
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Tomorrow is the first day of this year's Red Hat Summit. As with previous years, I am speaking. But unlike previous years, this year's summit is in Boston and so I don't have any traveling to do. It's kind of weird. On the one hand, it'll make things easier. On the other, I'll be heading home afterwards and thus will have travel time for things, leading to wanting to leave earlier so that I can at least get a little sleep.
Also making things different is that we're going to be having FUDCon at the same time (well, mostly). Hackfests for FUDcon are Thursday and Friday and then we'll be having a barcamp on Friday. So I'll be wanting to split my time between some of the Summit sessions and FUDCon stuff. And it's also going to be harder to figure out which set of things to do in the evenings.
But now, it's time for System Dynamics. If you're going to be at the Summit or FUDcon, be sure to stop me and say hi!
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| 2008-06-16 12:15 |
| Tell me why I don't like Mondays... |
| Public |
| cycling, fedora |
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Had a nice and overall relaxing weekend. Got in a nice ride on Saturday where we went out towards Westford and Groton and did Lost Lake Rd again. And this time, we didn't get lost on the way back which made it a perfect metric century. And a very very nice one at that... Lost Lake Rd is a lot of fun to bike with some off-camber road surface, lots of little rollers and some turns. I think that route is going to become a pretty common part of my routine as it really is incredibly nice and manages to incorporate some different things. I think I've also figured out a good way to have two stops that can hopefully be short to keep the total ride time down. Then Saturday evening, had a couple of friends over for takeout Thai food and board games. A good time was had by all.
Woke up yesterday morning to a fair bit of rain and so decided to wait until the afternoon to get out and ride. Ended up catching up a bit with mail, etc in the morning as well as doing my reading for Tuesday's class. Then, went out with Kate, Jon and Jim around 2. Kate and I both decided to take our fixed gears out to avoid having to clean them after the ride. We ended up doing 33 miles or so and also got to figure out how to change a flat on the rear wheel of a fixie which was fun. Good ride, though. Then spent a little bit of time yesterday evening playing the new Civilization game on the PS3 as they released a demo -- good fun, I had forgotten just how much fun the Civ titles are.
Today, I have a few little things that are non-work related to accomplish during the day since I'll be at FUDCon and the Red Hat Summit starting basically tomorrow after class and all the way through Saturday. But I'm also hoping today to get a few packages put together so that garmin-sync can be available in Fedora and I might also do the bits so that pytrainer can work with Firefox 3 (and thus Fedora 9) to help move that package review along. Then it's just a matter of combining the two :-) I've also been considering seeing how painful firefox/mozilla plugins are to write and then try to implement the upload plugin as used by Garmin's motionbased site as it's pretty handy for uploading rides. The manual upload at least works now with the garmin-sync created files, though, so it's not too bad. Also, I think it's about time that I sit down and play with TurboGears a bit. But that's a pretty long list, so we'll see what I get to today. For now, it's lunch time!
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| 2008-06-13 11:07 |
| Fedora Board Elections Underway |
| Public |
| fedora |
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The elections for the Fedora board begin today and lasts for a week and a half. And while I would encourage all Fedora contributors to have their voice heard by voting anyway, this is perhaps a more significant election than normal. For one thing, there are substantially more seats up for election this time around than there ever really are -- four. This is due to two big reasons: 1) resetting what has become an off-kilter election cycle (there was only one seat up last time) and 2) adding an additional elected seat. After this election, the Fedora board will be majority elected rather than appointed by Red Hat. This is something which I think is important to keep in mind as you choose whom you vote for both in the sense of "who" as well as the "what does this mean that the Board looks like post-election"
Now I'd like to draw some attention to a couple of candidates in particular. I had considered running for the Board again (I filled an appointed seat for the first year-ish but have not been on the board for the past year), but decided against running so that some of the newer faces and names in the Fedora world that are on the candidate list could have a chance of not being drowned out. So rather than running myself, I figure I'll highlight some of those people.
First up is Jon Stanley. I haven't actually met Jon in person yet as I wasn't able to make it to FUDCon in Raleigh in January, but I'm very much looking forward to doing so at next week's FUDCon. Jon is someone who just kind of popped up out of nowhere and said "I'm going to make bug triaging happen". And that's exactly what he's done. Including recruiting a few other people to help out. This has been invaluable in a few areas and it really shows what just one person can do in Fedora. Therefore, I really look forward to seeing what initiatives he'd drive forward if elected to the Board. He says he has no notable superpowers, but I don't believe it.
Next up on my list is Jonathan Roberts. He's been around the Fedora project for a while, largely in the docs area like our fearless leader as well as the Fedora Marketing work but has been branching out into more areas recently and helping again to just drive things to happening. And it's not the flashy things necessarily, but just the things that need to be done like helping to get the websites team organized and moving. And that's leading to some real progress in making our web presence more consistent as well as more focused on the right audience. Best of all, it's not that he's doing all the work himself -- instead, he's doing things to enable others to do work... just the sort of leadership that is positive and I think what we want from those on the Board.
I suspect that the rest of the names on the candidate list are pretty familiar to most, if not all, of the Fedora audience. The only other thing that I'll note is that the makeup of the Board will strongly influence the direction of the Board's tasks. Especially true in light of recent discussions about what is the role of FESCo and how does that relate to the Board's role. If we want the Board to be taking less of a technical role, then one component of that has to be not filling the Board with the highly technical people. Because people will gravitate to the things which they are familiar and comfortable with.
Okay, enough talking. On with the voting!
Update: One other thing to note -- be sure to hit Submit the second time to actually ensure that your vote is submitted!
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