Helping other Linux people.

While our various Linux sub-communities may snipe and bad mouth each other quite a bit, there is a lot that ties us together. For many of us it is helping others when they are in need.

Ubuntu community member Amber Graner's and family suffered a tragedy earlier this week when their house burnt down. Fellow Ubuntu community member Rikki Kite has set up a ChipIn site to allow them to afford clothing and food until any insurance comes through.

It would be nice if those who can help, do so.

"Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard
battle." -- Ian MacLaren

F15 Elections

F15 elections for FESCO, Fedora Advisory Board and F15 name are either in the voting stage, the nomination stage, or just some other stage.

For names, I voted for Blarney. I like its whimsical nature and the fact that Irish Pandas would be cool for a March 17th release :).

For nominations, I am still a board member (though only appointed) and will just wait til next May's elections.

Due to the fact that we only get 100->200 people out of a possible several thousand, I am still working on a mandatory voting policy. I am trying to figure out how to have "None of the above" as a candidate and make it enforceable :).

Fedora Spin Issues

It would seem that the Fedora Spins SIG is in 'bad shape'. From information posted to the Fedora Advisory Board it is clear that it is running on too few people and too many demands.

I do not believe that having some people volunteer at this time would be beneficial if underlying issues are not first found out and fixed.

1. How are Spins helpful for Fedora project?
2. Does that help match the extra work required?
3. Are Spins more or less helpful than 'Remixes'
4. What kind of skills are required to maintain Spins?
5. how much time is required?

I realize some of the questions may be more provocative than they should be but I am tired.

Customer Review Requested

Robyn writes:

Ryan and I drove up today from that magical place known as Tempe, Arizona, starting a bit after lunch. We met up with Smooge, who was in town to do magical things with servers, and had a good lunch and talk about all sorts of things (infrastructure, vision, and our Epic Waiter Who Talks All Manly and Buttery).

---

It was a good lunch, and the first one where the wait staff asked us to fill out a performance review:

When speaking with your waiter, did you feel

1. Cold like ice
2. Warm like a late spring day
3. Hot and buttery like Fabio himself had come off the hot desert sands riding a black stallion to cart you off to his tent

Was your waiter's eye contact

1. Short and indirect
2. Moderate and business like
3. Long and intense, making you feel that your every whim would be fulfilled with extra chocolate sauce

These sorts of things only seem to happen when you go to lunch with marketing people.

Dear Hardware people

Today I spent a lovely time working on < redacted > hardware today. It takes 1 minute for the initial EFI to get to the point that the < redacted > BIOS screen comes up. It takes another minute for the system to get to the point where I can get a F1,F2,F12 entry. After that the UEFI takes another minute to time out because its looking for DHCP when I told it to boot statically. Then it takes 1 minute to initialize the Broadcom network and LSI controller.

AND THEN THE BLOODY LSI ONLY ACCEPTS CONTROL-C FOR 4 SECONDS before it goes to boot from the disk or PXE.

Please could you make the various hardware faster and make the prompt for making changes to the LSI a bit longer. kthnxbye.

[This rant brought to you by a person who missed the prompt for making changes to the LSI raid containers maybe 9 times because of various things happening while waiting long periods of time. I timed the amount of time it takes for the hardware and its pretty much down to the second 1 minute per step. This is also why server people really don't find boot-time races from upstart/systemd/etc all that relevant.]

Dear American Airlines

If you are going to treat me and my fellow passengers as cattle, please learn to do it from the best: South West. The lines move faster, the seats were more comfortable, and the flight while only having coffee and peanuts was nicer.

1. Please don't charge for luggage because it takes more time to load because everyone then tries to bring it on. And it takes longer to get out because people can't get their overstuffed luggage from the overhead compartments.
2. If you are going to charge for renting a pillow and blanket please have them aboard.
3. Please don't have your attendants shilling deals while we are trying to get into our uncomforable seats. The attendants don't like it when they are told what passengers think about it. (This was not me but I could hear it multiple times ahead of me.)
4. Please make sure the seats are working. Having my seat fall out when I was getting up did not help our confidence.
5. When designing your cattle drives, please use a humane design from Temple Grandin or such.