Jeremy’s Thoughts

About this time last week, I came to the realization that I had a ton of pending work to get done. Luckily, I'm now starting to feel more like I'm on track and not behind. But it was less than fun, so I'm definitely going to try to be better about staying on top of things, especially the system architecture “opportunity sets” for the rest of the semester. Otherwise, classes are going good. Given the amount of time getting sucked up, I decided to not actually be a listener for the Software Systems Engineering course, which is too bad. But this way, I should have some time to just to a few more random talks around MIT. Which is probably going to be more interesting and helpful.

On other fronts, the Fedora on OLPC and Sugar on Fedora efforts are picking up steam a bit. Hopefully we'll have some more useful milestones for both in the next week or so. But due to work there, I haven't had much time to spend on getting a SIG for other smaller form factor machines (including netbooks, the XO and more) underway. Luckily, Peter Robinson has volunteered on fedora-devel-list to help get this off the ground, so hopefully we can get that going to.

Never a dull day…

Fedora, Livejournal Imports, MIT SDM fedora, sdm

One thing that I've told myself I'm going to try to take more advantage of than I did in the spring is some of the other things that MIT has to offer. This includes trying to make a point of going to some random lectures on random topics (… that seem interesting) but also doing some riding with the MIT cycling club/team. I went on a few of the Intercollegiate Ice Cream rides over the summer and the people seemed nice enough. So I went to the first meeting of the semester on Monday and decided that I am going to do some collegiate racing for MIT in the spring. I figure that a) it's a good chance to get some more riding in b) a good chance to meet some more people from different parts of MIT than I usually interact with as an SDM-er and c) the MIT racing team is good. Very very good. As in, nationals champion good.

Anyway, the first skills clinic of the year was held yesterday so I went down for it. Not a lot of mileage put in, but a good workout. And lots of good work. The MIT team is coached by Nicole Freedman and it's pretty obvious even after one skills clinic that one thing that has helped the team succeed is a good coach. The first skills clinic was a lot of fun — some things to help focus on relaxing (somewhat ironic, yes), some skills drills and then some “getting comfortable riding really really close to someone”. The latter culminated in a fun game of Death Bike. Yes, Death Bike is as much fun as it sounds and I'll have to be sure not to miss the first skills clinic next year so that I can do it again Looking forward to the future clinics as I think they'll be very helpful to me in getting to be a better rider and racer.

Today brought rain and quite a bit of it, so I didn't get out for a ride and have instead spent the day working either on stuff for work or on stuff for school. While I would have liked to have gotten a ride in, at least I can be glad that I was productive and thus feel better if I take some time for a ride on a day with better weather

Cycling, Livejournal Imports, MIT SDM cycling, mitcycling, racing, sdm

One week of classes is now complete so I figure it's about time to put up my first impressions of what I'm taking.

The first sort of general impression is that after a pretty busy summer semester I'm not really ready for things to be picking back up for the fall yet. I realized on Thursday that I've been a bit lax ingetting together groups for classes this semester and this also put off starting on some assignments. The first of which are all due this week. But got that under control and have spent some time this weekend to get back on track and will hopefully be done doing so with some concerted effort today. As for the specific classes I'm taking three for credit – two of the required and core classes for the SDM program and one elective

The first of the required classes is Systems Program Management. The course, as with a number of the ESD courses is taught by a few faculty members. Overall it looks like it should be okay and the professors definitely seem to be good. My one complaint thus far is that there is a non trivial amount of repeating, albeit at a less in-depth level, of the materials presented in System Dynamics. If it is seen as important enough to be covered either the course should be required or the sequencing adjusted a bit so that the intro material gets covered in SPM and then the SD class could spend more time on deeper aspects of the material.

The second of the required classes I'm taking is System Architecture. Crawley seems a bit less antagonistic than in January, at least thus far. And an attempt is being made to help make this more relevant to software — we'll see how it goes.

The elective I'm taking is the Sloan Business Law course (15.616). I'm actually enjoying this quite a bit and think that it's going to be a very useful course. We're starting out with a bit of whirldwind tour through some of the basics of tort law, some regulation and criminal law, and contracts. Then, a vast majority of the rest of the course is taken up by guest lectures from practicing experts in a variety of legal fields. The readings have thus far been relevant and a reasonable length. And the professor is also very engaged and clearly wants to help drive some understanding of the material.

In addition to those three, I'm intending to be a listener (MIT-speak for auditing) for the new Software Systems Engineering course which is being run as a trial this fall. The big picture overview of the class made it seem like there's an attempt being made to bring in a lot of the big system-specific pieces for the software world. It should at the very least be interesting to give some feedback on the various pieces and hopefully help make the SDM program a bit better for software people in future years.

Livejournal Imports, MIT SDM sdm

We've started to have our first glimpse of fall here in New England as the temperatures started to drop yesterday. And this means the start of the time of layering and digging out all of my cooler weather gear for commuting. I'm interested to see how long my Keen Commuter sandals are effective when worn with wool socks. Actually, a lot of my wardrobe this time of year starts to bring in wool — it's a great fabric to keep you warm when it's cooler in the mornings and evenings but at the same time, it doesn't have to be overbearingly warm in the middle of the day. So I think that my Earth, Wind and Rider wool jerseys are going to start seeing quite a bit of use again.

Cycling, Livejournal Imports cycling

As I mentioned before, one thing that I've been spending some time on is getting a “stock” Fedora to run on the OLPC XO hardware. Obviously there's not a CD drive, but there is a USB port and there is also an SD card slot. Which given the support in our live images for running off of such things, there seemed to be a bit of an obvious matchup.

There's just one (large-ish) problem. The XO is a Geode, so an i586 processor with cmov. So the stock i686 kernel on the live images definitely doesn't boot there. Unfortunately, neither does the i586 kernel. I'm working on tracking down what the relevant configuration difference is so that it can be fixed — interestingly enough, if you don't load an initrd, a Fedora i586 kernel can boot fine. So there's definitely something a little odd going on. If you have experience in debugging early boot of an XO and have any tips, leave a comment or catch me on IRC or send me mail

So, instead I've done a modified version of the main OLPC kernel with the help of sdziallas that includes squashfs and also turns on things like dm-snapshot which we need for live images.

That plus a pretty straight-forward image config and we can build a live image that boots into the GNOME desktop on the XO off of either an SD card or a USB stick. There are definitely still things to be fixed, though. To try to help some of that, I've created a tracking bug that can be used by those who have an XO and try running a Fedora live image on it.

Do you have an XO and are interested in trying it out? If so, first be sure that you have a developer key for your system. Then, you can download an image based on today's rawhide (debranded) from here. I've basically tested that it boots, logs in to the desktop and associates to my access point. Then gpk-update-icon fires up and we run out of memory for things. If you kill it quick enough, then you can fire up firefox and slowly do a little bit of other stuff.

Some things that are continuing to be worked on:

• Having somewhere to swap would help a lot
• Using the SD card/USB stick for your persistence instead of eating up valuable RAM
• Persistent /home on the internal NAND (jffs2)
• Looking at high memory usage things and helping to make them better
• Fixing the standard kernel so that we can boot it on the XO
• And if we do the last one then we can boot the standard live images, any of them, on the XO

Any help appreciated! Any bugs you find, please be sure to make them block the tracker so that we can keep up with them accordingly.

As for the questions about what the end goal is here — ultimately, I'd like to have any Fedora spin working on the XO just like it works on lots of other hardware. For Fedora 10, this may be a stretch (although I'm going to land any small changes that can be identified in that timeframe even though it's not a feature and we're at feature/beta freeze). But for Fedora 11, it should certainly be doable.

Fedora, Livejournal Imports fedora, olpc

Classes started back up on Thursdsay. This semester is likely going to be pretty busy. I'm taking three classes and probably being a listener for another. I'm definitely going to be taking System Project Management and the second part of System Architecture. These are both SDM core classes and so I figure I should go ahead and take them this fall as this will leave me a lot more flexibility for next fall. And although there has been plenty of complaining about System Architecture in the past from some notable people, some changes are being made to the course to help keep it more relevant, eg, for software and so I'm keeping an open mind. The other class I'm signed up for is the Sloan Business Law course — after a day, it looks like this should be a good overview of all things law-y and a number of interesting guest lectures. Personally, I might have preferred a little bit more on intellectural property than the syllabus shows, but at the same time, I'm a bit of an edge case there

The class that I'm likely going to be a listener for is the trial run of Software Systems Engineering. One of the required classes in the SDM program has been a Systems Engineering course and there continues to be a (pretty significant) struggle in how to make that work for software people. And in fact, I was not a big fan of the class at all over the summer (perhaps and understatement). As part of the curriculum revamp currently in progress, the option of a Software Systems Engineering class instead of the “normal” one is being provided and it's being run for the first time this fall. Since I don't really need the credit but still think that feedback on the course is important, I'm thinking about being a listener for it. But, TBD for real after the class meets for the first time tomorrow.

Then, ended up having a great weekend. Friday after class, I met up with Kara so that we could look for her a new bike. She has a hybrid, which, while nice enough, is difficult to go longer distances on and she's been getting out on the weekends and riding. So, we looked and ended up finding a nice bike at a nice price at Quad. Then, we ended up having dinner at home, watching some tv and generally relaxing.

Saturday morning, woke up to go riding and the weather looked less than ideal. So, got some more sleep and woke up to the sun shining. But so it goes. Ended up taking an easy day with some more errand running. Then, headed over to Yoav's birthday party at which a fun time was had. Lots of cool people, interesting conversation, good food and everything else that makes for a good party. Thanks to Yoav and his wife for having us.

Sunday morning, woke up and the sun was shining and so headed out on a ride. Ended up going to the Hills of Haavvaahhhddd, which was actually a very nice ride. Ended up with about 60 miles at a little over 19 which seemed pretty good given both the wind and the hills. I do want to try to get in another time at Wells Ave before Jamestown, but if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. Then, it was over to and 's place for games, food and fun.

So, all in all, a good week and weekend.

Cycling, Life, Livejournal Imports, MIT SDM cycling, life, sdm

This weekend was a long (3 day) holiday weekend in the US and since classes start back up this week, I mostly spent the weekend away from a computer.

Started things out on Friday evening by (finally) getting around to getting a haircut and a few other errands. Then Kara and I grabbed dinner, came home and then caught up on some things recorded on the TiVo. Including the rest of the Daily Show's “live” coverage of the DNC. We were suitably amused.

Saturday morning, woke up to the surprise of wet roads. But since it wasn't actively raining, went out on the Quad ride anyway and had a quite nice ride. Came home, had a quick lunch, cleaned the bike and then we headed over to some friends' house for a bit. Played Race for the Galaxy for a while which was quite a bit of fun actually. Then, we headed to Za! for dinner with some other friends as well. Ended up seeing and as they were having dinner there as well.

Sunday, again woke up and went on the Quad ride. Kara also headed out. Another good ride and then spent a good chunk of time at the bike shop. Ended up helping a few people with various things and then eventually headed home. Then, we headed over to another friend's house for an end of summer barbeque. Matthew is also from NC (randomly — he's one of the other people I ride with) and was previously a chef — so, he made pulled pork. It was quite good, as was the sausage which he made. Lots of people, only some of whom I even had a chance to meet and to be honest ended up spending a lot of time talking with people that I already knew. Headed home before it got to be too terribly late and got some more good sleep.

This morning, I again woke up and headed down for a bike ride, though a significantly different route today than the normal Quad ride. We ended up with a group of six of us and set a good pace for the entire ride. Then, grocery shopping as we were really starting to run low on a lot of our sort of staple foods. And then, again, dinner with friends.

All in all, a very good weekend. And this week starts back the full grind of work and school. I'm currently thinking of just sitting in on the first day or two of a few of my options as far as classes are concerned so that I can really decide which seems like the best fit. And also, hopefully making some more Fedora on XO progress. But more on that tomorrow or so — reading and then sleep time now.

Cycling, Life, Livejournal Imports cycling, life

Things have quieted down on the livecd-tools front — it is mostly to a point where it's pretty stable and works fairly well. Also, I did not run for election to either the Board or FESCo this time around. Instead, I've tried to free up my time a bit so that I can spend more time looking into some “new and different” things, while still managing to spend most of my time on Fedora.

And after some time looking, it's mostly ending up being spending time helping to get Fedora working better on various “small” form-factor x86 machines. I sent out a message to fedora-devel-list about two weeks ago now seeing who else was interested and got a bit of a gamut of responses. Some were right along the lines of what I'm thinking with things such as Netbooks, UMPCs, MIDs and the XO. Others were more things like the OpenMoko. And while the latter is perhaps interesting to Fedora in the longer-term, it's not really a space that we're well equipped to work in at present.

So basically, I'm hoping to spend time in the lead-up to Fedora 10 helping to make Fedora work as well as possible on some of this hardware. Luckily, a lot of the drivers for these devices have made it into Linus's tree for 2.6.27, so this will be a lot less painful than it would have been previously.

I'm also spending some time with the OLPC people to help reconcile some of the forks which have occurred. I've spent some time over the past couple of days helping to get a live image which is bootable using the stock livecd-creator and booting into the “normal” Fedora environment. I also started a little while ago on helping to get more Sugar activities packaged up so that they can be built and installed as normal packages within Fedora.

Now, how are these things related you might ask? Well, longer term, I think that it could make a lot of sense to have a spin of Fedora available which is better suited for some of these smaller form-factor, internet always available devices. The idea being that with the resolutions in question, you may well not want to be running a stock GNOME or KDE. Instead, something like Sugar really is nicer, although there are definitely rough edges on Sugar right now. So maybe these new emerging form-factor devices can give a good additional place for Sugar to be deployed and used. And more people using Sugar means more people writing Sugar activities which means more things for the kids But, that's likely Fedora 11 before it becomes a reality.

Fedora, Livejournal Imports fedora

So when I last left you with a post, it was to note the end of my summer classes and looking forward to at least getting to relax a little bit.

Hah! That mostly certainly didn't happen. Instead, I got thrown into the ultra-fun world of helping to deal with the cleanup for the Fedora infrastructure intrusion. Spent a lot of time reinstalling a lot of servers and doing everything I could do to help get things online as quickly as possible. Not how I intended to spend last week, but you do what needs doing. I will say that the setup for the Fedora Infrastructure is a whole heck of a lot nicer than it used to be. And while editing puppet configs makes my skin crawl, it is pretty effective.

In the middle of that, Kara and I did manage to have some people over now a week and a half ago for a night of games of the carded variety. A good time was had I think by all and the approach of making a theme worked pretty well for avoiding the phenomena of “game of Rock Band” and “everyone else”. So we'll probably have to try to keep going in that vein. Not that there's anything wrong with Rock Band, per se, but it's good to get people interacting in different games as well. We'll probably try to get something else together in a couple of weeks.

Then, over this past weekend, Kara and I headed down to DC for a (very much needed by that point) vacation. Did a lot of sleeping in, touristy things, and eating good food. Which, all in all, was exactly what we were looking for. Went to the Newseum and was actually pretty impressed and see how they can manage to charge for a museum admission and be right next to the Smithsonian. We also hit up some of the exhibits at the Smithsonian, although a different set than the ones I've usually hit in the past.

The only downside of the trip really was that I didn't have a bike with me and so haven't really ridden to speak of in about a week. But that shall be remedied starting tomorrow and I'm pretty certain it's going to involve the round trip commute to the office. Although I should probably be sure to do a few things like plug in the nice light, etc tonight before heading to bed.

This week, I'll hopefully get back on track with what I was hoping to do last week. And maybe get enough done for two weeks in… err.. three days. Seems doubtful, doesn't it? Then a long weekend for Labor Day and then classes start back up. How does that saying go about no rest?

Fedora, Life, Livejournal Imports fedora, life

Or at least, the end of summer classes. Today was the last day of System Dynamics and thus, the end of my summer classes. Looking back, I'm glad that I didn't decide to take three classes over the summer as two was plenty of work. Hopefully between the feedback that's been given about Systems Engineering as well as the addition of a Software Systems Engineering course option (which I'm planning to audit in the fall), some of the problems present in that class will be less problematic in the future. I know that people have complained quite a bit about ERBA in the past, but seriously, ERBA was a much better class.

System Dynamics, on the other hand, really should be a required course for all SDM students. Not necessarily because I think that everyone will use it on a regular basis, but because it provides a very solid foundation on thinking about causes and effects within a system. The exposure has me definitely looking at things with a slightly different light. That said, I think that a lot of the actual modeling is more complicated than you're going to usually have time to do and a lot of actually simulating the models requires either tons of research to get quantitative data or making up numbers. A cool thing that I learned about yesterday is that one of the GSoC projects is actually working on an activity for the OLPC that lets you do System Dynamics modeling. This is very cool and I actually want to sit down and play with it some in the next week or two.

Some other (related) things that I've noticed over the course of the semester that are/were kind of interesting…

• Not having some form of repository to store things and share them really makes collaboration a lot harder.

• Vensim (the modeling software we used for System Dynamics; worked under wine fwiw) could really stand to have some form of built-in source control. Although merging changes with the silly file format might be less than fun
• Google Docs really does work well for working on a document among a group of people. I want to play with the AbiCollab stuff now and see how well it works too. The downside is that to get it to work in a general environment, have to get people to install something. Google Docs just requires them to use their web browser. This is big
• PowerPoint (etc) slides are a terrible way to try to convey any significant amount of information. Our society is substantially worse off for its existence

After class, I headed out on this week's MIT/Harvard ICIC ride. We headed to Jamaica Plain to visit the original JP Licks. Along the way, took a trip through the Arboretum in JP, and got a nice view of the Boston skyline.

Was a nice little ride, although I was regretting not bringing the nice light and the clear lenses as it was getting dark by the time we made it back to Cambridge. But I had them in my bag for the ride home at least. I guess it's getting to where I'll be using them more. And I definitely need to go through and replace the batteries in all of my smaller lights as most of them are starting to get a little dim.

Cycling, Livejournal Imports, MIT SDM cycling, sdm