Tag Archives: fedora

Tell me why I don’t like Mondays…

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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!

Fedora Board Elections Underway

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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!

All things in moderation

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The temperatures in the Boston area have returned to a much more normal (and thus, moderate) level which has been kind of nice. The rides into campus in the morning have even almost had a little bit of a chill to them. But not enough to matter once I get moving. It's also been impressive the number of people I've seen commuting via bike. This has been touched on in a couple of the biking blogs that I read, but the effects of the gas prices really does seem to be getting more people out on bikes. Especially in this area, that's a very reasonable thing to do. The weather tends to be pretty reasonable from mid-spring to fall (at least) and there's a pretty good amount of bike lanes as well as dedicated bike paths. And even where there's not either of those, drivers here are somewhat conditioned to be used to people on bikes — I actually think that drivers are more considerate to people on bikes in the Boston area than they are to other cars.

But, that said, it's still worth being careful. Just because you're on a dedicated bike path or in a bike lane doesn't mean that there aren't things to watch out for. On a bike path, watch the crossings of roadways and be sure to observe stop signs and traffic signals. In a bike lane, also watch (and obey) stop signs and traffic signals. And in addition, watch out for people getting out of cars. If you can stay out of the door zone, you're better off, but the bike lane is likely to put you right there. So get used to looking through the rear windows or mirrors of cars to see if someone looks like they're going to get out.

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The week has continued to be pretty good. I had System Dynamics yesterday which continued to be interesting and engaging. I picked up the book today and started reading some of it and it does seem like a good text on the subject. Hopefully my opinion will hold, especially given the cost of it. Systems Engineering was this morning and seemed a bit repetitive between the last class and the reading. I should have a pretty good group for the project, though, so that should be good.

I've also managed to get in some riding the past couple of days. Yesterday, I went out with Kate and joined the NEBC folks on their Wednesday night hill ride. And they weren't kidding about the hills. Was fun, though, and I want to try to incorporate some of the route into my routine as getting some more climbing practice can't possibly hurt. Today, I joined the MIT cycling team on the ICIC (Intercollegiate Ice Cream) ride — they go out with some of the Harvard folks to an ice cream store at a very moderate and social pace. Nice people on both rides, drastically different types of rides, though :)

Also been trying to clean up some yum bugs and finish getting my way to Bugzilla Zero. Down to one bug, but unfortunately, it's a bit of a doozie. But, will keep trying and hopefully come up with something effective. But now, I think it's time to do some reading and then head to bed.

A week of livecd-tools hacking

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In addition to spending a bit of time on my presentation for the Red Hat Summit on the state of the livecd tools and some of the surround stuff, I've also taken the time to go through and take care of some outstanding bugs and feature requests. Some of them were boring things for corner cases, but there are a couple of them that are a bit more interesting

The first is an addition to the persistence support which we added in Fedora 9. Instead of just keeping a snapshot (via dm-snapshot) of the changes to your filesystem in an overlay, you can now also set up something to be used as /home. By default, this will be a file on the same USB key that you put the Live OS on, but you can also specify to use a partition by uuid, label or device name. So you could potentially even have the /home located on a hard drive in your system and just always boot the OS off of USB. Also, due to a lot of the concerns around security and losing laptops or hard drives, etc, I've made it so that the default for the persistent /home is that it be encrypted with dm-crypt. This way, if you lose your USB key, your data at least won't be compromised. Watch for this as we start to do Fedora 10 images

The second is more targeted at a specific class of hardware. As you might have noticed, there are a growing number of Linux users who are choosing to run Linux on top of the current Intel-based Apple hardware. One of the features in Fedora 9 is native support for booting these machines directly from EFI rather than going through the “legacy” BIOS mode. (Side note — this is often referred to as Boot Camp, but while the BIOS mode was added at the same time as Boot Camp's release, the BIOS mode was purely made possible by firmware changes and Boot Camp is the OS X app used for resizing your OS X install partition). The second piece is that these Intel based Macs do actually have support in their firmware for booting off of USB… the trick is that they can only do so via EFI and not via the legacy BIOS. So, I decided to make the changes necessary so that you can create a Live USB stick which boots on the Intel Macs. Unfortunately, it has a couple of limitations that aren't present in the general case.

  1. If you have one of the newer 64-bit capable Macs, you must use the 64-bit OS. We don't currently support booting the 32-bit OS from the 64-bit EFI
  2. Creating the USB key is currently a destructive process. One of the things about EFI is that it mandates the use of GPT for your partition table. And your USB key certainly came with an msdos partition table. I want to try to see if there's anything clever I can do, but I suspect this is just the way it rolls.
  3. Right now, you'll have to use a livecd created with git livecd-tools and it won't work with the Fedora 9 live images. But I should be able to put something into the livecd-iso-to-disk script to at least make this okay, I just haven't had the time today

Update

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The spring semester ended and since then, I've been spending time in the office and also trying to get some time in for relaxing. Overall, the spring semester was good. The classes I was taking for the most part were very applicable and I can even see some of the value of ERBA, although I also can think of some ways that the class could have been better and more applicable for people. Everything else was very good, though. The couple of weeks of break have been nice too, although I'm looking forward to classes spinning back up for the summer. Given that there are basically four classes offered over the summer and I have two summers to take them, I'm just going to take two classes over the summer and then return to the more full load in the fall. But my summer classes are going to be Systems Engineering and System Dynamics. The former is a class that continues to be in flux as SDM tries to find the right mix of things for the class to really work; more changes are in store for this year, so I'm trying to keep a positive approach to the course. System Dynamics is a class I'm really looking forward to — I sat in on a day of it last summer and thought that the material seemed very useful. And with things I've learned during the spring, I'm looking forward to it even more.

As far as other things going on, I think I'll resort to list form

  • Been working on cleaning up my outstanding bug list. There were a number of outstanding pirut RFEs and with the move to PackageKit, I've just been closing those out. Also, spent some time cleaning up livecd-creator bugs and have got that down to just a small number of RFEs that I think we should be able to get taken care of for Fedora 10.
  • The rest of Bike Week was good… got in some good biking and also went to the Redbones Bike Week party which was a good time as usual. Even if I didn't win anything in the raffles. Hrmph.
  • Been biking quite a bit as the weather has gotten substantially nicer. Been shooting to get between 200 and 250 miles a week over the past couple of weeks and have largely been succeeding. Doing some commuting to the office helps there
  • Raced at the Lake Auburn Road Race this past weekend in the 4/5 field. The course was nice, but I ended up off the back of the pack partway through the first lap due to some accordioning and not being as comfortable going down the hills at 40 mph on wet roads in a large pack. Decided against time trialing in cold rain so didn't finish. But, I learned from it and have some ideas on how to get some improvements over the rest of the season
  • Watching as gas gets ever closer to $4/gallon… more and more glad that I bike as much as I do, but looking at what other trips I can switch over. Also, need to stop by the hardware store so I can get some p-clamps and put the other rack on Kara's bike
  • Mario Kart Wii is fun.

Now to see if I can finish up my presentation for the Red Hat Summit today as well as finishing closing out a few of the aforementioned livecd-creator RFEs.

Woo!

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And with that, a couple of huge weights are lifted off my shoulder. Let's recap or those playing along at home…

Just one class tomorrow and I have a few weeks of “just” work before summer classes start up. It looks like I'm taking Systems Engineering and System Dynamics over the summer. Hopefully with the two classes, the workload won't be too high so that I can manage to get in plenty of riding ;-) Of course, if I bike on the days I come into the office like I did today, that'll help substantially with my overall mileage.

Not dead yet!

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Just really, really busy. Between the end of the semester and chugging towards the Fedora 9 release, haven't had a chance to write much. Highlights in bulleted form…

  • Birthday was good. Had some people over for a game night and I think everyone had a pretty good time
  • Prototype for our product in PDD is finished and it looks really nice. It's cool to have an idea and then see it realized in a physical form. Something you don't really get in the software world
  • Tech Strategy continues to be good… I want to write up summaries of some of the classes, but just haven't gotten there. Maybe I'll do a whirlwind pass through them late next week
  • Summer schedule is out… I think I'm going to take Systems Engineering and System Dynamics this summer, leaving the finance/accounting and supply chain classes for next summer
  • Fall schedule is also out… pretty much have to take System Architecture and Systems Project Management then. But also have room for at least one other class, just need to decide what. On the plus side, lots of good options to choose from
  • Fedora 9 is shaping up quite nicely — only the last minute “oh no!” types of things cropping up now. Feeling a little bit more confident today about getting the release out “on time”
  • Big presentation for PDD on Friday, big paper for Tech Strategy the first of next week… lots to do, not a lot of time
  • Warm enough that I'm not letting rain stop me from biking… realized that I didn't take the T to class at all during April. I did let the rain stop me from racing, though
  • Just another week and a half and things get a lot better…

Busy, busy, week

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As really seems to be the norm, this week is also falling into the nice and busy category.

Had the ERBA quiz on Wednesday and didn't think it was bad at all — fair in terms of what was asked and if you paid attention to the review session, you had a very good idea of what was coming. Tech Strategy I felt less prepared for than I typically do just because I hadn't had much time to really read and digest the case. We were looking at Adobe and while I had familiarity with a lot of the events covered, that familiarity just didn't run as deeply as some of the other things we've covered. PDD was a pretty interesting class too, even with a guest lecturer — the speaker was the professor's husband who has a lot of experience in coming up with product ideas and selling them either to companies or through a company he's working for at the time. His experience had largely been in children's toys, but it was still pretty fascinating to hear the stories he had as well as some of the processes and lessons learned.

Then, we had the first SDM Connect event of the year. Unlike the ones I attended last year, this one was a bit more formal — we brought in a few people from a private investment group who were actively recruiting to get someone new to join their firm. But instead of a more information conversation, it was tilted more towards being a presentation. Which isn't bad, but lots of slides with lots of words aren't my proverbial cup of tea ;-) We had a good turnout, though, which is good as hopefully it will help to ensure that we can bring in more people effectively through the rest of the year.

Today was a day at the office, but the morning started off with my alarm not having been set. Managed to get up just in time to get ready and make the bus, though, so it wasn't an entire bust. Then, I had been planning on looking at some blockers and also sitting down to do a review of pytrainer since the package got submitted. Of course, I had failed to remember that the materials for prep'ing for the office move were present now, and so instead, I spent the day doing that. My cube is now pretty empty looking as everything is instead in boxes. So, now I've shifted things and hopefully I'll get to what I wanted to from today tomorrow.

After coming home, I headed down to the bike shop for our monthly social event where I hung out and just chatted with people. It sounds like we're going to have a good showing for the race at Blue Hills in a little over a week, so hopefully that will work out well. Also, before I headed down there, Kara gave me my birthday present even though I had said she didn't really need to get me anything. She got me the Garmin Edge 305 which I've been wanting for a while but trying not to buy for myself. It should be pretty sweet for keeping better track of my riding and helping to improve my training. The next trick will be getting it to work nicely in Fedora and seeing if I can figure out what some of the web-based apps are looking for in terms of data so that we can have good support for them ;-)

Long Weekend, Cars, Bikes, and then Catching Up

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Since it was a long weekend from classes, I decided to take yesterday off of work and turn it into a long weekend in general which turned out to be a pretty good thing overall. After spending the day at the office on Friday where I successfully threw out a lot of crap from my desk in preparation for the office move, I came home and then we headed out to dinner with a friend of Kara's. Dinner was good, although for some reason, I couldn't fully get into enjoying it.

Saturday, woke up in the morning and started the day off right with a nice long bike ride. Lots of people were out and a fair number of stronger riders within the group made for a good and spirited ride. Got in about 50 miles and felt like my legs were feeling okay after a few days of not. Then some time at Starbucks and a quick stop at the shop and then headed home. Kara and I then headed out to look a little more at cars since hers has been showing some signs of its age. Then, dinner with friends and eventually home to pack up what I needed to have for the race on Sunday.

Sunday was pretty much consumed by the race and not much else between travel time, food, etc. A good time was (I think at least) had by all. See my last post for the details around it.

Yesterday ended up turning into car day. After doing some additional preparation, we headed out again. And a few hours later, we had signed a chunk of paperwork to purchase a new Prius. Okay, that makes it sound like it was a spur of the moment thing, but really, it was the result of a while worth of looking into our options. The hatchback will be good for when I need/want to carry a bike and it's just me or just me and a passenger and it's also practical from other perspectives. Going for the nav system may not quite have been “practical”, but it's at least fun ;) It's definitely the car to appeal to geeks. After all of that, we came home, had dinner and did some cleaning up around the house. Later in the evening, we finally got around to watching Juno which was fun.

Today, it was back to the grind of school and work. Although to be fair, I did start out Earth Day with a few of my classmates doing a loop up the bike path and back. Was good to get to show some more people what's out and about and the weather really is getting to be perfect. After that was diving back into the piles and piles of mail and bugs awaiting me. Made pretty good progress plowing through them, though. Also studied a bit for the ERBA quiz tomorrow and did some work for Tech Strategy. I'm pretty glad that tomorrow is the last day of ERBA as having one class less should help a bit for my sanity which is good as the continued march towards the Fedora 9 release isn't helping it any ;-) So maybe it'll balance out. Hopefully information on the summer class schedule will get sent in the next few days as I'd really like to figure out what my plan is for the summer.

But now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go relax and then try to get to bed a little early.

Late night hacking is oh such fun…

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Got on a bit of a roll tonight on fixing up some bugs from the Fedora 9 blocker list and so kept going. Haven't had a good productive late night hack sesssion in a while and it felt pretty good. Most of them were little things, but it's always the little bits of polish at the end that help to make a release good. I'm finally starting to feel better about the release as the bugs seem to be on the right trajectory at last and things are shoring up. *knock on wood*

Hopefully a post about today's Tech Strategy discussion (about Danger) tomorrow as it was pretty interesting. But now, bed.