FudCON NA: Blacksburg, Va

So it looks like the North America FUDcon will be in Blacksburg Virginia, the site of Virginia Tech. It is close to Roanoke and 2 hours away from the place that I am seriously jonesing for, Mitchie Tavern. As a child, my grandfather would drive down from Pennsylvania and sometimes stop by Monticello. But the real reason for going was to have lunch at Mitchie Tavern... mmmmmmmm. I will definitely have to see about driving up one day of FUDcon to eat there.. even if it is 2.5 hours away.

Blacksburg FUDcon info

Long time no blog

Well it has been over a month from my last blog which in internet years usually means I have died and will never blog again. Thankfully I have just been off dealing with lots of little Real Life(TM) issues and just not wanting to blog because I am just really disappointed in Fedora people lately.

[Large section deleted of whinging about Fedora email threads which are the bane of my existence. Why because it wasn't doing anything but being more poorly written soap opera drama. ]


The one lesson I have had to teach myself over and over again is that spending all my time being unhappy about what other people are doing and saying does not make one thing better. Only by DOING does anything change (and to be blunt, emails are not doing anything. Heck even this blog post is not doing anything beyond laying out why I am spending the next year working on things I want to work on versus getting caught up in empty email threads.)

Four things you can do if you don't want to help test a Fedora alpha

1. Figure out what you can positively help out with and just concentrate on that. I have found that in the past this is what I needed to do when I was sure that something was going the wrong way.
2. Sit this release out. If testing isn't what you want to do, then stick with Fedora 14 til 16 comes around and you can help out there. Sometimes taking a vacation from things can make you really aware of what you want to work on and what you don't.
3. Choose or make a different desktop. If Gnome 3 is not what you want to do, there are multiple other desktops to try and work with...
4. Choose or make a different distro. There are multiple ones that may fit your personality and wants better.

Any of these are positive things you can do to make your life and others better.

[Edited to make the title clearer]

Resetting expectations: Fedora Infrastructure Changes

Over many years, I have found that Infrastructure is very much like a rose garden. Roses grow fairly well by themselves, but soon can entangle up with each other into quite a knotted patch (judging from the garden I have left to its own devices for the last 4 years). I have very pretty flowers all spring, summer and fall long, but every now and then you have to do a large amount of pruning or it all falls apart as things age out. The amazing thing with roses is you can prune them down to the bare essentials and in a season they will be producing flowers again.

To continue the analogy, my current job is to be the temporary head gardener while we look for someone who can do the job as well as the last fellow. The garden has grown from having good volunteer gardeners come in and put in various plants. Now sometimes the gardener then has to go somewhere else, and sometimes the plant gets away from them. In either case, we have a bunch of plants that look pretty but are taking too much time in how they are currently planted. And so its time to prune them so that they can either grow anew or something better can be planted in its place.

In order to prune stuff, I have looked at the following:

1. Do we currently have experts inside of the project working on the software to make it better.
2. Is there someone doing this better than we can do on our own using the same criteria we use (FLOSS software, open development, etc).
3. Is keeping it in-house pulling away from core Fedora services and tasks we would like to accomplish.
4. There is nothing wrong with paying others who do great stuff with FLOSS software especially when paying supports those projects.

This came up with a list of items that we have but aren't getting much love, require a lot of work (eg volunteer help has to be supplemented by full-time people), and could be better housed somewhere else:

1. translate.fedoraproject.org. Transifex software is what is used there, and has a very active upstream at transifex.net. Currently the version we are using is considered dead-software and the version we have slowly gotten onto our staging servers is soon to be dead soon. With many other projects already moving their documents to the upstream servers, transifex.net, this looks to be a good candidate to move out of our infrastructure.
2. blogs.fedoraproject.org. The blogging software we are using is Wordpress-MU which again has an active upstream that we are multiple versions behind (Ricky Z spends his time back-porting security fixes). The service also does not get that much use and the blogs there would be better off at WordPress.
3. talk.fedoraproject.org. The asterisk server gets about 8 phone calls a month. It is a very ancient version and it seems a continual effort to keep up with the upstream.
4. zarafa. While housing email and calendering for various sub-projects does have value... it also brings up all kinds of security and compliance issues (compared to dealing with email lists).
5. various mailing lists. There have been a lot of projects with a lot of mailing lists opened. But they haven't taken off and are just waiting for some sort of spam agent to sign up and use us to drop links. This one is easy for us to deal with. We can contact owners and close off lists that aren't in use anymore.
6. cleaning out old system administrators. We have had a lot of good people come into infrastructure and then that cruel mistress, Real Life, has at some point taken them away again. Removing people from system administration groups who have not logged in for 60 days is a way to make sure we lower security risks.

Now usually after a post like this occurs, we get a bunch of volunteers who will say "We can take this over." I am asking people not to do this, because frankly volunteering under pressure usually means leaving when the pressure is gone. We have gone this route several times before, and its not something I think is sustainable.

We will look for volunteers who can replant the services, document them, build out a staging and production service and train OTHER volunteers on them so that any replacement service has a chance of lasting.

Resetting expectations: Fedora Edited Planet Feed

It would seem that somehow people are misunderstanding the intent of the edited planet.

1. It is not replacing the regular planet feed.
2. There is no requirement that a Fedora user HAS to be on the edited feed. I am not.
3. This is not a top-down mandated item but very much bottom up.

A contributor (averi) wanted to know why we didn't have a focused on Fedora feed like other organizations. We don't because no one has stepped up to do so. Averi volunteered to do this and did all the grunt work to set it up.

And in less than a week it has become some sort of conspiracy removing the voice of Fedorans and various other bull.. I am upset and angry and really just tired of it all.

Good night.

Thankyou tatica

If all goes well, then I will have my first hackergotchi. It was taken by the very talented tatica. I am going through her blip tv blogs so I can learn gimp photo editing. Hopefully it will get my lego-video jump started.

Watch Darth McGrath become a true Sith (or an Eminem clone.. not sure which).

FUDcon NA 2011 ... Post thoughts

So my part of FUDcon is over, and I want to thank our hosts at the Arizona State University and our co-ordinators Robyn Bergeron and Ryan Rix. At the end of the talks and meetings I ended up with a lot of lose ends.

1. There were several questions I was asked at my short term lightening talk about the Monday security item. I had to run to another item and did not find them afterwords to discuss better why the reporting method was used and what was told. I apologize and will try to find out who you were to talk later.
2. Somehow I not only left my coat at FUDcon but also the new long-sleeved Mr Hot Dog shirt I had bought from Brand X shirts 20 minutes before.
3. I get cranky a lot more than I should be around people after 3 days of no sleep.