We're clearly getting closer to time for a release. Lots of things breaking, tensions rising and the like. On the plus side, we're getting a lot fixed. On the downside, there are still a few scary things outstanding :-/
Tag Archives: fedora
Monday, Monday, Monday!
Another busy Monday. Today was a little weird with Tech Strategy being directly after than ERBA rather than after lunch. Was a good class, although less interesting than last week's look at Apple. I just felt less engaged by looking at some of Polaroid's mistakes than some of the other cases that we've looked at. I'm not sure if that's because I spent less time preparing for the class (due to the previously mentioned “trying to do less work over the weekend”) or if it was the specifics or what, but it just didn't grab me as much.
The afternoon was consumed between trying to pay attention to the rel-eng meeting (and largely failing), doing the ERBA problem set that's due on Wednesday and a quick check-in with the faculty for PDD. Then a quick stop to look at panniers at the bike shop on the way home and it was time to dig into the piles of mail, bugzilla and work for the day. Mostly spent the time looking at some really bizarre bugs but finally tracked them down and got some fixes. Hopefully can continue to knock things out over the next few days to help solidify Fedora 9 as much as possible. Unfortunately, getting tablet PCs to work out of the box just didn't happen in time, although I have a good solid start and should be able to finish getting it working for Fedora 10. And it's always good to have a nice list of things to do for the next release before the current one is out the door 
Ghost bugs
Feel like I spent pretty much the entire day just chasing down ghosts. Things that have been reported fleetingly but weren't reproducible. Luckily, was able to reproduce one or two of them so it wasn't entirely frustration. The ones I was able to reproduce were because davej came into the office and brought his eeePC, so I was able to reproduce one or two things that have been reported on the box and actually track down the cause. Of course, the bugs that he had noticed and reported disappeared into the wind when I tried to look at them. Blargh. Very very frustrating.
And interestingly on a related note — after using the eee, I'm actually pretty non-interested in them. Sure, the form factor is nice. But the keyboard is absolutely impossible to use. And after using it for a little bit, I don't even see how it would be that practical for just a travel device for things like mail, etc. The Nokia tablets seem better suited to it and even smaller. Maybe it's just the trying to squish a standard Fedora user experience onto the screen and if apps that were better suited were being used, it would make more sense to me. But, since lots of other people care, hopefully the few remaining little install niggles for them will be worked out in the next couple of days so that the process of using Fedora 9 on one can be pretty straight-forward.
Over the hump…
Unfortunately, the not feeling well persisted beyond Sunday. Woke up on Monday and forced myself to head in for class anyway. It was the first day of Tech Strategy and I didn't really want to miss it — definitely the right call to make. The class is very intense, but interesting. The class is run case style, so plenty of opportunities to chime in and get some different viewpoints. Monday's class was specifically around E-Ink and some of what they faced in their early days. Was interesting to learn some of that history. Also, the class is one of those that is going to be incredibly helpful in building up a way of thinking about things that's consistent and not just arbitrary.
Monday also had a pretty good guest lecture in PDD — we had a guy in from one of the local (video) game companies come in and talk about the design of games. It was an interesting talk from the “well, video games are cool” angle as well as some of the parallels that the game studios have to what we see sometimes. They've gone from pretty small teams to much larger ones and are struggling with some of the questions of how to keep effective communication
It was pretty cool and interesting on some level to see how they struggle with a lot of the same issues of scheduling and releases and also, some of the approaches that are starting to be taken to address that in their world.
Yesterday, I decided not to go in for the thesis seminar and instead spent the day working from my couch. Overall, pretty productive just going through and working on some of the bugs that need fixing for Fedora 9. Nothing ground breaking or that interesting, though. It's to the point where most of what needs doing is just kind of the dredge cleanups. But still, more testing needed! And then file bugs. And thus give us more to do
Later in the day, I headed down to the bike shop to pick up my bike as I had left it there for a tune-up on Sunday. While I was there, I went ahead and made the plunge to pick up some nice wheels. Looking forward to the weekend when I can really give them a good spin. Although it's temping to bike into the office tomorrow on the Merlin rather than taking the bus.
Today, woke up and was feeling pretty much entirely better. So biked in to Cambridge and was in class a good chunk of the day again. Tech Strategy was again interesting, today looking at Lexar. One thing that's becoming very obvious to me is that it's tough to look back at these case studies and try to analyze the decisions which were made and talk about what should or shouldn't have been done while at the same time trying to avoid having your ideas colored by what has come since. In this case, the question of Lexar branching out from their “digital film” products (CF cards and the like) and into USB sticks really doesn't necessarily seem like it would have been a good idea only knowing what they knew — the USB stick wasn't a given and realistically, the main reason they've become as practical as they have is the drastic drop in the prices of flash due to increased demand. Which has been driven quite heavily by Apple and the iPod. It definitely gives me a bit to chew on and think about.
Hack, hack, hack, hack
Fedora 9 Beta was released earlier in the week and I've been spending my “Spring Break” buried in code and trying to make sure everything is working well. Way too much to fix, way too little time. It's just been one of these weeks where it feels like everything I touch is broken somehow which is a little less than fun.
Back to it, though…
Spring break is here
A busy, busy week is now behind me and I get some small measure of relaxation. Spring break is here at last. Of course, I have to work next week instead of having the week entirely off, but it should still be quite a bit less hectic. And today just happens to be a holiday for work and I have no classes. So if you don't see me online much today (or over the weekend in general), don't be surprised.
But this was a pretty good week really. Was a little bummed by the weather last weekend leading to me not really getting any riding in, but so it goes. The first part of the week, I took one of the Sloan SIP workshops titled “Leadership Under Fire: Managing Hostility”. This was an interactive session where we got to look into some techniques for dealing with a hostile audience as well as getting to practice them. Which also meant we got to practice being a hostile audience, although I don't think that was the real intent 
It was actually very, very helpful and hopefully I'll be able to actually have some of what was learned sink in rather so that I can use it in the future when in such situations.
Also related to classes, my Product Design and Development group has now narrowed things down to an explicit product concept as opposed to just having a few floating around. We think that it's pretty cool and the people that we've talked with about it also think so. Stay tuned for more information on this as things move onward.
For von Hippel's innovation class, I finished up the second paper last night and now am completely done with that class. Overall, quite enjoyable. I would have liked to have been able to dive a bit deeper into some of the things we talked about rather than remaining at the high level, but part of that is due to the fact that I have a fair bit of familiarity with the subject matter already. For the second half of the semester, I'll instead be taking Tech Strategy which is looking like it is going to be an amazing class, although with a fair bit of work. But I'm still looking forward to that starting up.
Outside of classes, there's been the big push over the past couple of weeks to finish up the beta for Fedora 9. We've now finally done so and it's on its way to the mirrors now. That means that we can sit back and really start adding the polish and final bugfixing to help make Fedora 9 as good as possible. I encourage everyone to at least download the beta live image and try it out on your hardware and file bugs if things don't work. And even more importantly, if you can help fix things, contribute patches
But today is not going to be about any of those things. Today is about relaxing. I think I'm going to take the time to really clean my bikes good, play some video games, maybe waste some time down at the bike shop and just generally unwind.
Weekend
Had a pretty good weekend and even managed to get in a little bit of relaxing (which I'll pay for later, but I needed it). Friday night after meeting with my PDD group, I headed towards home and we got dinner with some friends. Mmmm, thai food. Also sat around for a while just chatting. Then headed our separate ways and Kara and I headed home and played a bit of Rock Band.
Saturday was monsoon day and also the day that Kara and I were going to observe as our anniversary, given our busy school schedules. So we ran some errands, worked on some homework together and then ordered dinner in and watched a rented movie. It was just the low key sort of evening that we both needed.
Yesterday, woke up early and headed out with the Quad folks for a ride in the wind. While windy, it was good to get out again as it'd been way too many weeks since I'd ridden with the group. And similarly, too long since I'd ridden the Merlin. Thus, a very enjoyable ride — only about 35 miles, but that's okay for March. Eventually headed home (after length stops at Starbucks and the shop), tried to work a little and then headed into school to meet with my PDD group again. Which ends up meaning that my total milage for the day was like 50. I think the last time I did a 50 mile day was November, so this morning, my legs were wondering why I was pushing them again as I rode in to school.
But a very good weekend. And now a busy week ahead. It's the SDM business trip, so lots of people on campus and lots of activities, etc. Also, have to finish up my two papers for von Hippel's class, do an ERBA problem set and get ready for the ERBA quiz next week. Oh, and finalize our selection of a product concept for PDD for next week. And on top of that, there's also the Fedora freeze. So, yeah… busy, sporadic availability and seeing just how much can be gotten done over the next 100 hours or so
Who says the mp3 patents aren’t enforced?
One of the common things that has come up about Fedora for as long as Fedora has existed has been “why doesn't Fedora ship mp3 support?”. We've been pretty up-front about the patented status, but often, this is still met by questions about if the patents really matter or are enforced.
Well, for the doubters, see what happened at CeBIT, where there was not just one, but over 50 cases of companies with devices infringing on patents and being busted for it. And apparently, most of those cases were over mp3.
Persistence with live images
One of the things that will be new and shiny and exciting in Fedora 9 beta is going to be the support for having your changes persist over reboots when using your live image off of a USB stick. It's an often requested feature and having it should help make the live images even more useful. Most of the hard work in getting this going was done by Douglas McClendon a few months ago and I've finally gotten around to merging it in. But it could definitely stand to have some good solid testing with the beta just to help ensure that it's as good as it can possibly be for Fedora 9 final.
The way it works is pretty simple. Once you've downloaded your live image, you'll also want to grab the livecd-iso-to-disk script either from the web or out of the LiveOS directory of the image. Then, you'll want to plug in your USB stick. Note: a 1 gig USB stick is the minimum, but if you really want to have some space to work with, you probably want to go for a 2 gig stick. Then, run the script with arguments like the following:
# ./livecd-iso-to-disk.sh –overlay-size-mb 1024 /path/to/iso /dev/partition_of_your_usb_stick
If your USB stick is a 1 gig stick, you'll probably want an overlay size of 256 instead of 1024. Then, reboot with the stick, select to use it as your boot device and you should boot up and be using the file on your USB stick as the persistent store rather than a temporary, in-memory store. Big flashing warning — at this point, it should be considered beta — while we don't think you'll lose data, you could. If you do, please let us know how you did so in bugzilla.
There are still a few little improvements that I'd like to make before Fedora 9's release. One of them involves some better verification when setting up your USB stick. Things like making sure you have enough space, etc. Another is a way to “re-initialize” a USB stick without having to use the ISO again. A third is making it more clear to the user whether or not you're running from a session where your changes will persist or if they'll go away when you reboot. And a final thing is the open question of whether we should install based on the _changes_ or from the pristine live image.
As for the gory details of how it works, the live images have always used dm-snapshot to layer a read/write snapshot on top of the read only filesystem image from the disc. This snapshot has been backed by RAM. We've basically just changed things so that instead you're backed by a file on disk. What's been a little tricky has been some of the questions around shutdown, unmounting things, etc. I haven't been able to hit any problems in my testing, but there definitely were some six months ago. Hopefully they were kernel problems which have been fixed
The other thing that was a little tricky was thinking about using an arbitrary device when booted from the live CD. dmc made the (elegant) leap to thinking “well, if you want persistence, just boot off the device that you're being persistent to”. Sometimes, the obvious answers are the hardest to realize By doing this, we don't have to worry about some of the things of “did you want to use this changeset from your hard drive on this boot”.
Everything hits at once
As is probably typical, it seems that everything wants to happen at the same time. And so it's gotten to be a pretty busy time.
On the school front, classes are definitely up to full-speed now. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is occupying quite a bit of time. ERBA is continuing onward and I am continuing to enjoy doing the problem sets, even if they take some time. Being able to get back into some math, though, is nice and I had actually kind of forgotten how much I enjoy taking problems, getting some equations and just cranking through them. I do sort of wish that the problems had more applicability for me as opposed to being nuclear engineering based. But I can kind of squint and make it work. I'll have to look at some of the other courses available to me, though, and make sure to get some good math-y ones
In PDD, we've moved on and are starting to really get into defining our target userbase as well as some concepts. There's still a lot more to go towards developing a product, but I think that we're going to end up with something that's at least interesting and fun. We've decided to target the market of tea drinkers and (probably more specifically) tea drinkers on the go. After spending a lot of time with users, we're also now to where we have some ideas for products, but I'll keep those under my cap for now. The class is pretty good, though. The material is well-thought on and is definitely applicable across a variety of fields where products are built from our tea drinking type user to software products.
Eric von Hippel's class continues to just be fun. I need to get on the ball, though, and work on the papers as they're due (and the class ends) in a week and a half. I'll be sorry for it to end as I think there's a lot of useful information there. I need to do some more thinking, but I could easily see my thesis coming out of an area that would interest him. Which is a good thing to start on too.
In addition to all of that (it's not enough?), next week is the SDM Spring Business Trip. It'll be good to see the distance folks again even though it really hasn't been that long. The week is pretty jam-packed with things to do, though, so that'll just add to the already high load. One thing that I'm really looking forward to is the session with Lou Gerstner on Thursday because his success with IBM is more than impressive.
And then, there's also the Fedora beta freeze. The added week is a good and a bad thing. It's making it so that I can shore up a few things that would have either only very roughly made it or not made it at all. But at the same time, it puts freeze resolution at the same time as the business trip. Somehow, I suspect I'm not going to be sleeping much over the next week and a half.