Single Point of Failure

http://digg.com/linux_unix/Fedora_9_Sulphur_Released

Every little bit helps!

Ah, the smell of the salty air; the crystal clear sky over a beautiful skyline; the busses quietly humming by on their electric powered motors; Starbucks on just about every corner; Seattle, I have arrived.

I love this city, I really do. The people, the scenes, the ocean, the sushi, I just can't get enough of it. I spent a couple days getting back together with my friends from the area; developers, system builders, IT admins, etc... We talk shop, family, weather, and take in a Mariners game at the wonderful Safeco Field. I'm reluctant to leave, but trek north we must for Linux Fest Northwest.

In Bellingham we arrive, somewhat late at night. Driving through the downtown area we spot a large banner hanging across the street advertising the Fest. Times have certainly changed. It's certainly fun to see the influx of geeks mesh with the biker bars and the college crowd. At the hotel you can tell it's fest time. Lobby filled with geeks: laptops, ham radios, smarmy t-shirts abound; excited conversations about kernels and desktops, and rpms, and debs, and who's going to win Alpha Geek this year. Snickering comments about whether or not the hotel wireless will withstand the abuse a hotel full of Linux geeks can throw at it, and a bemused rueful grin is the only answer one gets from the hotel staff (turns out that the hotel internet is pretty unusable by the time we arrive, but there is open wireless somewhere near that still works!).

A few hours later, after having scrambled to finish up my presentation slides, I collapse into sleep. Very excited about the next morning, dreading the early wake up time though. Of course I wake up an hour before the alarm is set, but that gives me time to write this down. Shower, quick hotel breakfast, a few last minute discussions with fellow Festies and we're off to the show!

Day 1

Lots of excited people filing into the college. Booths mostly setup, last minute scrambles and fixes that always happen. Almost double the exhibitor space this year, a welcome surprise. The usual suspects are in place, Novell, Google, Ubuntu, hey look, a Mandriva! Many booths are using Fedora on their display systems, hooray!

I attend a talk from a friend who is now a Google employee. This is a talk about network protocols and the various evil things folks can do along those protocols. Many people seemed surprised at how many vectors there are to attack and will certainly be thinking twice about what protocols they use.

From there I go to another talk, this one on Grease Monkey. Fascinating stuff, however it really showed that one would have to know javascript pretty well to take full advantage of it.

Next up is my first talk, A sneak peek at Fedora 9. Ustream has a video, and slides are here. This talk went great. I got to showcase a lot of really cool features in Fedora 9, as well as give out USB keys pre-loaded with almost Fedora 9. As soon as the audience caught on to the fact that asking questions got you a USB key I started getting a lot more questions. Not just your typical mp3 questions (which in fact wasn't asked at all!) but more interesting ones, like what is IPA and what about the Certificate Server and things like that. The audience was nice and engaged and seemed reluctant for the talk to end which is always a good sign.

I get dragged into the "Alpha Geek" competition where I do horribly, no surprise there. It was still incredibly fun especially since there were a few Fedora questions which seemed a little unfair given me being a competitor.

The after party was as after parties are, but with a twist. This one had a fair number of ways to damage one's self. Brews, pizza, loud music, oh and lots of electricity generating devices. What fun! The party was set in American Museum of Radio and Electricity. Lots of fantastic old devices to look at and play with plus lots of open source consumers/creators with loosened tongues and stories to tell.

After a few hours, the crew I hang out with migrated to our traditional haunt during the fest. A Greek restaurant/bar that just happens to be within stumbling distance of our hotel. Alas they ran out of Grey Goose rather early. Rehashing of the days events, reminisces of years gone by, and lots of jokes and innuendos thrown about. A few friends stop by to share a drink and a story and before you know it the bar is closing and it's time to capture some sleep before the next day begins.

Day 2

A quick blast through Starbucks and we're on our way to the final day of LFNW. I've got a talk in the first time slot, "Fedora Distribution Toolbox" (Video, Slides). Here I get to show off all the cool tools and services that Fedora has created, fostered, adopted, etc.. over the past few years to make our distribution happen completely on opensource software. There were fewer attendees for this talk, partly because they were aware that the talk would be available as a video later where some other talks wouldn't (also, they knew I had no more USB keys to give away). I still got a good number of questions, particularly around koji, transifex, and MirrorManager. A number of people after the talk informed me that they were much more inclined to bring their software into Fedora and work with Fedora as a distribution mechanism after hearing about all the tools we create and the ideals we hold dear. There were a number of other people who were interested in taking our tools and using them for their own needs. I think I'll give this talk more often as it seems to be an enlightening one.

I didn't make it to any further talks that day, I was too busy chatting 1 on 1 with various attendees who had further questions about Fedora or about some software they were writing and would like to get into Fedora. Before I knew it time had come for me to run the Fedora Birds of a Feather. I saw a lot of familiar faces, those that had been in my previous two talks, but a number of new faces as well. The BOF started off a little slow with people a little shy about asking questions but the conversations did finally get rolling. After the 3rd or so question related to my previous talks somebody had the bright idea to quickly run through the presentations again for those that might have missed it. Lightening round begin! I blew through the presentations pretty quickly and still got a few questions along the way. Once again we were way over time but people seemed reluctant to leave. Finally we had to usher them out as the campus was closing and my ride was leaving.

Exhausted I fell into the back of my friend's car. Satisfied with yet another great LFNW trip and sad that I was leaving the area in a few days and leaving my friends behind. This show has always been one of my favorites. It's very "grass roots"; free admission, word of mouth advertising for the most part, planned in open meetings, and very welcoming of speakers and exhibitors. I will continue to go for as long as the show exists and I can get funding to make the trek. The timing of the show makes it a great target to show off Fedora's next release and to talk about whatever seemed important for that release cycle. If anybody lives in the greater northwest area of the US I would highly recommend making the trip to see this show.

I have safely made it back to the Emerald City. Jarod picked me up from the airport and we quickly made it over to Sushi Land, thus accomplishing one of my goals. Later in the evening we met up with more friends to take in a Mariners game. A few of the friends had never experienced street dogs with cream cheese so we had to get some. Another goal done. While a bit chilly the game was great fun, including the garlic fries (yes, another goal).

I also scheduled an appointment for my next tattoo, my son's hand print on the inside of my wrist. It will ne done Tuesday.

Tomorrow I will be writing more of my presentations for Linux Fest Northwest as well as meeting up with more friends. So much to do and so little time here to do it.

More to come later, but jetlag is claiming me now.

So lets say I've got a python program that I've gotten to a point where the debugger comes up (pdb). Now this frame isn't really interesting, the interesting thing happened a few frames up, so I go up; up; up a few times. Now I'm where the fun happens. There is a function, lets call it findIsoImages(). I can run that function from the (pdb) prompt, and it gives me something I'm not quite expecting. So I'd really like to get into that function and trace through it. You'd think pdb would give you the facility to trace through anything you're calling right? Sadly, I can't find a way, and I seem to have initially stumped #python on freenode (yes I tried pdb.run and pdb.runcall to no avail)

So lazyweb, any clever ideas here? Do I really have to resort to editing the file in question and dropping a set_trace() in it?

If you're going to quote me in a story, it would probably be best to either link to the email in which I said things, or directly to the blog entry in which I said them. Linking just to my blog will likely get you interesting results.

Hi CNET readers!

Want to give the releng team a hand? Great! I've got a fun task for you!

In our ramp up to release Fedora 9, many Fedora 9 blocker bugs have been recently closed. The tracker for these bugs is at
here However since we're in a freeze mode, there is no guarantee that "CLOSED->RAWHIDE" actually means that a package build made it into rawhide. What we're looking for is somebody to trace through the blocker bugs that have been closed since April 8th and make sure that there:

A) a package build with the fix and
B) that build (or a later one) has been tagged with f9-final in koji.

For anything that doesn't meet one of those two requirements, either re-open the bug and state such in the bug, or mail rel-eng@fedoraproject.org with the details.

Your help will be much appreciated.

P.S. Coordinating somewhere like fedora-devel-list or on irc in #fedora-devel might be useful to prevent multiple people from doing the same work.

Spring has finally hit Baaaahhhstan. Tonight I went for a bike ride into Lexington and back with a couple friends. It was very nice out and I think I will make a regular thing of it. I just hope the weather is nice in Seattle next week but more on that later.

After some minor delays (like all rawhide flights grounded for a few
days of repair...), the Fedora Project is proud to announce the release
of Fedora 9 Preview!

This is a Preview release, it is fairly close to what the final product
will be like. This is the most critical release for the Fedora
community to use and test and report bugs on. This is the last major
public release before the final GOLD Fedora 9 release on May 13th (we
hope).

For this Preview release, we will be doing a staged offering. The first
stage, available now, will be via bittorrent. The second stage, which
should be available early next week, will be via our world wide
mirroring system, and will include jigdo.

Live images, KDE Live images, CDs and DVD options are available.
http://torrent.fedoraproject.org has a section marked "F9-Preview".

Please use bugzilla to report any problems you find (after making sure
that somebody else hasn't already reported the issues).

Thanks again for all the great testing work that the greater community
does throughout our development cycle! You make Fedora possible. You
are Fedora!

Following the meme on Planet Fedora:

[jkeating@lumos ~]$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
131 cd
110 sudo
107 ls
72 vim
69 git
62 ssh
39 koji
36 rsync
36 make
28 rm

[jkeating@reducto ~]$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
257 screen
181 sudo
143 ls
87 cd
29 rm
23 koji
20 mock
19 for
18 lftp
16 scp

For the folks that were not at the WPI Install Fest, now is your time to pick up the Fedora 9 Beta.

Read about it here!

Recently the optical drive in my Dell M1330 started acting up. It wouldn't read blank CDs, and it wouldn't read the DVD+RW media it just burned to. Everything else would read the media. So I go through Dell tech support to get a replacement (hint, if you're a Linux user, tell them up front so that you can talk to Linux people there). I also opted out of an onsite visit, I figured I could do the repair myself.

I should have known something was amiss when the box for the optical drive showed up and it was longer than a keyboard box. Upon opening it I found not only a replacement optical drive, but also a replacement plastic bezel thing that houses the power button and some other various touch buttons. Oh boy!

I dug up the Service Manual (thanks Dell for making these available online!) and got to work. It was a bit.. intense. The highlight of the replacement process was once I got everything necessary removed and could finally get to the drive.



Yes, that is my precious laptop in many many pieces.

After getting it all back together, not only did everything work (no missing screws!) but the replacement drive is working out awesome. After all this work though I think I should have gotten the blu-ray drive replacement instead!

For more images of the repair, click here.

My wife and I were discussing tonight, would it be possible to get rid of our car all together?

We've been a one car family for quite a number of years, but even that is more expensive than it should be.  We don't drive that often, but even more importantly, since we live in the "city" (Arlington, MA) the amount of times we drive when we couldn't have used public transit or walked instead is extremely small.  Small enough that zip car would be a fine alternative and not overly expensive given how much we'd be saving on car payments, insurance, excise tax, gas, maint, etc...  Hell, we could probably even rent out our driveway spot to somebody who rides the T, we live so close to Alewife station.

So I ask you lazyweb, has anybody out there made a transition like this?  For an added bonus, we have a 1.5 year old son, so if you have done the move with a child that would be even more interesting to hear about.

I proposed a tutorial for OLS 2008: Creating your own (Fedora) Distribution

This tutorial will cover the tools that Fedora uses to make releases, both the choose your own adventure CD/DVD release and the various Live images. We'll explore some of the underlying technologies and tools and why things are done the way they are. Hopefully at the end of the tutorial people will be confident in making their own "spin" of Fedora, or something based on Fedora. A good time should be had by all.

This will be my first trip to OLS and I'm quite excited. Hope to see you there!

Recently our company has started using Zimbra for shared calendar stuff. As such I have been putting more of my schedule in there as well as on my phone so that other people can see my schedule. Since it's there, I decided to give Evolution another try so that it can see these things too and my clock applet will show things and I may just get notices even if I'm away from my phone.

However I've had a long battle with evolution and it's speed. Particularly opening imap folders and checking for mail. However somebody recently clued me into a (new?) setting that has sped my evolution use up quite a bit. You see, I don't do any client side filtering, all my filtering is done at the server. But Evolution defaults to a work mode that lends itself to local filtering, particularly with imap. It grabs more headers than normal from each message so that it could filter. There is a setting though, under Edit -> Preferences -> Mail Accounts -> (your account here) -> IMAP Headers. Setting the "Basic Headers - (Fastest)" option will speed up new mail tasks. It was quite noticable when I did this, and now evolution is even more useable! I still have other battles with it, and I'll continue to hound the maintainers to get my RFEs accepted and bugs fixed, but for now, I'm an Evolution user once again.

I meant to post this yesterday afternoon, but forgot.

I've just returned from a speaking engagement at Northeastern University here in Boston MA., USA. This was for the ACM students, Association of Computing Machinery.

Even though it was midterms time, we had a good 30 students show up for the talk. I started with a quick history of Linux and GNU and a brief outline of what makes a Linux distribution. I then went on to compare and contrast some of today's popular Linux distributions, going over package management, init systems, governance models, commercial/community aspects, etc... I then went further in detail as to what makes up Fedora, and why I feel that Fedora is a very strong project to contribute to.

After that I did about 30 minutes of question and answer. Many good questions were asked, such as what is RH/Fedora's relationship with CentOS, how do we compete with Ubuntu, what return on RH's investment in Fedora is there, how does the Fedora work make it's way into RHEL, what is RHEL's release model, and a few other things.

All in all I think it was a very good engagement. The students were very knowledgeable and interested. Many expressed interest in getting more information, and potentially interning or otherwise contributing to Fedora. Every student picked up a Live CD of Fedora 8 as well.

I hope to do more things with Northeastern in the future. They have a very cool program and some very neat students (CREW guys, you were awesome!). Linux is slowly making it's way into their infrastructure, mostly led by student efforts.

Reading Jack's blog post about Fedora/RHEL at NASA I was surprised to see a machine or two I quite likely had my hands in many many years ago. Crazy!

In the midst of all the rebuilds going on last week, this happened too.

It's just a recert, the first time I passed it was just after RHL8.0 came out so it had been a while. This is the first step on my goal to get RHCA.