Posting a blog before it is ready

I started a blog post about trying to improve Customer Support yesterday, thought I had hit Save and instead pressed Publish. As the post was mostly a set of notes for trying to explain a complex problem... it didn't make much sense. Sorry about that.

FUDCon Day -2->1

So I have been at FUDcon the last couple of days, but forgetting to blog as much as I should about things.

Day -2
I had flown in the day before from New Mexico to South Carolina. Nearly didn't as we found that Denver was on a multi hour delay and I would miss my connecting flights somewhere along the way. However SouthWest flight attendants found me an alternative route with 2 plane changes which I made and got to South Carolina. The last 10 minutes were fun as I was watching the clouds outside and seeing a lot of weird colours. However there were no bumps and it looked like the pilot was an ace as he got us down between tornadoes or something. My Dad picked me up and I got to spend my night in the house I grew up in while it rained and howled outside.

Day -1
Woke up to blue skies and low winds, so worked on a couple of things from the house until my Dad said "Are you leaving or not.." Forgot about the 2 hour time difference that my computer wasn't showing me. So we loaded up the car with lots of old equipment that had run Linux back in the day (really one of the boxes was the alternative build box from Red Hat Linux 4.2) Dad and I then went up the back roads from SC and got onto the Interstates without having to drive through Charlotte or some other congested areas.. We got into Blacksburg around 4 o'clock and found the hotel. It is a very nice hotel so we had a steak dinner and sat around talking with various other Fedorans that evening. Got a large hug from Maria 'tatica' which I got a ribbing from my dad on. I can never tell when he is joking still.

Day 0
The weather changed overnight and it got very very cold and windy. Found the conference area, checked in and realized that the dinner from last night had worn out. Bought a bunch of egg mcmuffins from McDonalds and shared them out to people around the meetings. Then sat in on a long meeting with the rest of Fedora Infrastructure about how to make workflows work. It took a while for everyone to get their various says out but I think in the end we have a better idea of what we want to do next week. Went back to the hotel to get the car and some grub, but crashed in a chair and found out it was 3pm. Went back and talked with some more people then met up with Valdis Kletnieks and Russ Herrold after 10+ years of knowing each of them. Had a good dinner with them but Russ's foot was killing him from the weather changes and I needed to fix a bunch of scripts for Dennis. Dad and I brought in the ancient hardware and got lots of ooohs and awes from people  who had not been born when the scsi array had been built. Got started working on the maps when I found that my quiet spot ended up with a lot of Red Hat old-timers.. spent the evening talking and never getting to the items. Went to bed around midnight

Day 1
Slept in a lot later than I expected due to setting the alarm clock for 7pm and not 7am. Went over to the meetings and sat in the end of a couple of barcamps. Talked with Greg dk for a short while but lunch started getting served so I ended up letting him do that (I don't know I guess food is important to people.) Spent some time with Pam Chestek and found out my Dad and her went to competing High Schools. Spent the afternoon working on some scripts and being reminded by Dennis that I needed to fix the maps. The raspberry pi demonstration was full up so I decided to walk dad back to the hotel so we could find some headache medicine for him. He ended up sleeping and I realized I needed to blog about all this. People are headed to FUDpub and such so I will continue in another blog in a bit.

Wednesday/Thursday 2011-12-14

Woke up in the morning, on the wrong side of the bed. Tried to feel better but drank coffee instead.

Brainstormed with the rest of the IT crew on how to deploy community systems (as in fedoraproject.org/community and NOT fedoracommunity.org) and then started building a special box for it. However after a lot of fights with my own syntax skills I got a preliminary version proxy working. Now its up to the real programmers to do their part :).

My Opinions on Voting

I usually don't blog politics, but since it comes up with my opinions on Fedora lack of voters and some other items... I figured I should just go ahead and do it. Today I received a couple of emails from relatives and such trying to explain how bad the US budget is, and why it should be explained easier as that of a family. One set went to blame the politicians, another set blamed the special interests (tax and spend liberals, cut and spend conservatives). In the end, they both neglected to point out who the real culprits are.. the absentee landlord of the United States, the voter.

Look at the following revenue amounts.

1. Tax Revenue:    $2,170,000,000,000
2. Fed Budget:     $3,820,000,000,000
3. New Debt:       $1,650,000,000,000
4. National Debt: $14,271,000,000,000 

Now some people will cut off the zeros and then compare it to a family budget... or some will go on long screeds blaming the politicians or special interest groups. That misses the important part of democracy. In the end, the politicians are a proxy. They may be influenced by "monied" interests but the special interest they are mostly interested in is the voters who every 2-6 years say whether or not they will get to serve again.

To make this fair, let us change out the regular blamees to the people who actually are supposed to be responsible whether they like it or not.

1. Amount majority of US Voters Want to be taxed.
2. Amount majority of US Voters Want to spend.
3. Amount they are happy to borrow.
4. Amount the taxpayers has to pay back plus a lot of interest we didn't calculate.

Notice, I don't put in voters in the bottom. People who don't vote and most non-citizens in this country pay taxes so they get stuck with the bill whether or not they vote.


If you are outraged about the amount spent versus the amount taxed.. you need to do the following:

1. Register to Vote.
2. Research the candidates who will either up the amount taxed, lower the amount spent, or a combination of the two.
3. When the election occurs, vote for the candidate that fits your needs best. Remember always that there is no perfect candidate, you will have to make do with what you can get.
4. Watch whoever gets elected and ask why they voted for this or that. Keep them on their toes. People who know that they are watched are psychologically more likely to be honest and dependable. They are also more likely to follow the social norms of the people watching them. Most politicians get in trouble because the only people watching them are other politicians.
5. If you don't like how things occurred, vote for someone else the next time.
6. Talk to your neighbours and find out why they don't vote. Get them to register and vote too. They don't have to vote for the person you voted for, but they need to watch the elected just the same as you.
7. Keep at it. It took 20+ years to dig this whole, it will take 20+ years to dig out of it.

If you aren't registering to vote, you have lost any right to be taken seriously.

You can sit in a park, you can show up at the IRS office with bags of tea at the IRS office, or you can email me pithy statements about how horrible everyone else is, but you have given up your most important voice.. and the only one I will give credence to, the vote.

[PS Take the above as my opinion and my default answer when you email, blog, facepoke, etc about the dire straights of a nation. In my limited and very biased view, the above can be used for most nations.. the amount that people will happily borrow because they want it and don't want to save for it will always be larger than it should be. I don't have much sympathy for a bond market that doesn't take that into account in the interest rates and fees they initially charge.]

Monday/Tuesday 2011-12-13

Ok the weekend was a blast playing Minecraft with my kid. My wife says we sound like a bunch of dwarves and should beware. I then play Gimli quotes on Youtube for fun.


Monday

• Email not as bad as last couple of weeks
• Worked on pass phrase tool.
• Worked with Seth on known_hosts item
• Worked with Kevin with collab change
• Spend the evening going over password entropy and to see if we can run a password checker against our old passwords. [Mainly to get an idea of how many weak ones there were so we can be better informed in the future.]

Tuesday

• Work inside of RH on DNS nameservices. Find out that our registrar doesn't do IPv6 yet. WHEEE
• Weekly phone call with RHIT.
• Remove old collab servers.
• serverbeach03 goes whacky when trying to decommission it.
• Wrote a HOWTO on travelling to the colo.
• Dealt with zones we knew nothing about.. it would seem there are quite a few hanging out there that showed up after top level registrar was updated.
• Rebuilt smtp-mm03
• Sync'd over data to archives for F14.

Friday 2011-12-10

Spent the evening with kid playing mindcraft. Was told by kid that I couldn't take a sick day for him and me and play today... "Dad I don't want to go to truancy court." Sigh.. ok well then off to work it is

Talked with some people on Google+ about running email oneself versus using a service. I used to have all my email go to my private SMTP server where I could filter spam, ham, lamb, etc however I wanted. At some point in 2000 I just got burned out by it. I think it was because it was my day job and that pretty much made any problem at home more work versus fun. Oh well.. I can take Parental Computing for a while longer.

Discovered the Piano Guys this week. They have some seriously cool music they make per day. I really love Cellos (though I find the Viola de Gamba for some reason nicer to my ear [And yes that is a joke on multi layers].)

Wondered if Santa Claus would get me a computer... looked at the one system76. Santa says I have not been good enough this year for that though.

Wednesday/Thursday 2011-12-07-> 2011-12-08

Spent most of Wednesday tracking down issues with ipv6 and Linux network bridges. Somehow, somewhere we finally stomped it out... but I will admit that by the end of it I was tired and using a hammer to put in screws... One of the following fixed it:

1. Different kernel
2. Removing an ipv6 address from the bridge or its parent ethernet port.
3. Some changes in guest network drivers
4. 2 pints of Marble Red Imperial Ale. [Ok I don't drink, but I really really wanted to after the mysterious "it works, but no new ips are allowed.. now it doesn't work.. now it does." ]
5. Magic pixie dust (it takes 8 pixies to make an ounce of dust.. and man are those things hard to catch.)

A lot of email was dealt with during the day. And then I made the fatal mistake at 10pm of putting stuff in the bin without thinking about what i had selected.

Thursday morning and afternoon was dealing with the fact that 2 weeks of email had been deleted and I needed to figure out which ones I really cared about. Wheee. Thankfully I hadn't emptied the bin but there was still a lot of emails that needed to be sorted out from all the stuff I had deleted earlier. 

And then I got a ring of the doorbell. And there was a box on the doorstep. And the box had another box in it, and that box had this

and all my cares went away. Now to see how much it would cost for us to make say 20 of these for Fedora for next release.

Worked to move a DNS server from one colocation to another. Found out that the IPs couldn't be routed as easily as first claimed. Moving to plan A. (Plan B was doing this after we were told they could reroute at the border.) Then spent the day looking at what would be needed for updating our server at internetx01 to rhel6.