Below are the most recent 17 friends' journal entries.

Sunday, July 5th, 2009
spevack	6:12p	the coming week Monday: Normal work day. Tuesday: Short work day & concert in Amsterdam. Wednesday: Normal work day and dinner with a group of Dutch Fedora contributors, as well as Luca Foppiano and Andreas Thienemann, who have both recently moved to the Netherlands. Thursday: Travel to Nantes for RMLL and to see several of the Fedora France guys, arriving in the afternoon. I'll be bringing tshirts and stickers with me. Friday: Giving a talk and spending the day with the French team. Saturday: Travel back to Amsterdam in the afternoon. Sunday: Do something fun. (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 4th, 2009
spevack	11:51p	a dutch 4th of july It just so happened that today was the Red Hat Netherlands summer party, at the home of the Head Honcho for the region. A beautiful day, a great barbeque, fun people, a swimming pool, and an awesome DJ who played a combination of American and Dutch vinyl records, all from the 80s, and also played an accordian. Good times! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
zaitcev	11:37a	LittleBSD To my great surprise, LittleBSD is actually a cosplay cafe (via). But I'm pretty sure they did in fact ripped of Chuck and the name is not a coincidence. Behold the screencap: (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
spevack	11:37p	tour de france 2009 I've been a big fan of the Tour de France ever since I watched the American Greg LeMond win by 8 seconds in 1989. I was 9 years old. For some reason, that sports moment really captured my imagination, and I've been an avid fan ever since. I remember when it was reduced to a 30 minute highlight show on ESPN, half of which was spent on filler and only 10 minutes of racing was shown. Then Lance Amstrong blew up, and the TV coverage in the USA improved. Lance's comeback from cancer was a phenomenal story, especially for someone like me who had been a fan of the sport before it became cool to walk around with those yellow bracelets. For years, I'd watch every mountain stage holding my breath, hoping that Lance would never crack, and continue to win. I'd record them during the day, avoid the internet at work, and watch when I got home. I'd skip classes in college to sit in my dorm room and watch the most important stages. Year after year, Lance never cracked -- 7 times in a row he won the race, and it was great. I had my Red Hat interview during the climactic mountain stages of the 2004 Tour, and I remember being motivated by Lance winning 3 stages in a row to also do my best under pressure and get the job that I wanted. I know that sounds silly, but it demonstrates that I was inspired by his athletic feats in my own life. The years since then have seen him continue to be dogged by performance-enhancing-drugs questions, and also seen him make some questionable decisions in his personal life. Now he's un-retired, and riding in the Tour again this year, and I can't get excited about it. I think it's a terrible mistake. I don't think he'll be able to win, and he has nothing to gain and only his legacy to tarnish. He's not riding as the leader of his team, and he altered his training regimen this year compared to all the years that he won, and he missed training time due to a broken collerbone. I hope I'm wrong, and that he pulls off a miracle, shocks the world, and wins one last time. But I'm skeptical. The whole thing is just setting up poorly. If he wins, and if he never fails a drug test, then it's a great story, I suppose. But if he loses, I'd rather that he just stayed retired. It's hard to put a finger on it, but I liked Lance Armstrong a lot better 6 years ago than I do today. I'm not rooting against him -- I still hope he wins -- but leading up to the start of the Tour, my main thought is "I wish he simply wasn't in it." (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
spevack	11:34p	fudcon berlin postmortem I've been to many FUDCons, but I've never really attended a FUDCon. By that, I mean to say that my presence at every FUDCon has been as that of the organizer/coordinator, and as such I've never really been able to do more than just poke my head into various sessions and take the general pulse of the event. Now that I'm home following FUDCon Berlin, I wanted to take a few moments to share some thoughts about the event. * Meeting new people is great. Tristan Santore attended his first FUDCon, and really stepped up to help out over the course of a few days, which was much appreciated. Similarly, it was great to meet John J. McDonough and his son, John P. McDonough, who made the trip all the way from Michigan to Berlin. * It's always nice to re-form bonds with folks who we communicate with often on email, but don't see face to face all that much. Having a chance to do two podcasts with Paul Frields was lots of fun, and seeing a bunch of the Fedora Engineering crew (Spot, Jesse, and Mo) was also great. * I thought that the general attendance for FUDCon was fine, and in line with past events. It felt smaller because of our giant building, but based on signups, shirts given out, and foot traffic coming from LinuxTag, I'd say we had somewhere between 175-200 people attending the event, and a good core of people at all times. * Jeroen's "Infrastructure Track" had excellent attendance, and I was pleased to see that our German talks were also well-attendeed. I know that some people were bothered by the fact that we did talks in German, but that was a conscious decision based on our location and our desire to not forget the "U" (Users) in FUDCon. * Nicu takes wonderful photos, and I'm so grateful that he was present once again to chronicle our event. * The FUDPub social event seemed to go well -- we had at least 150 people there, and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, even if the pizzas were slow in arriving. The restaurant had ample warning, but I guess they can only start cooking so far in advance! * Hackfests on Sunday were really good, but Friday's hackfests were very disappointing to me. Spot reiterated a previous point that it's a bad idea to sandwich the hackfests around the presentation day, and he's probably right. If I organize another FUDCon, the BarCamp day will be first. * My thanks to our LinuxTag and FUDCon organizing team for all their hard work in making this joint event happen. I would like to hear feedback from people about whether or not they would like next year's EMEA FUDCon to be standalone, or joined to another event. Last year, the feedback was "join it to another event" but then I heard a lot of complaining at FUDCon that there were too many distractions from LinuxTag. * Any other feedback -- both good and bad -- please leave in the comments. We can't improve if we don't know what you liked or didn't like. We need both positive and negative feedback! Thanks. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
zaitcev	1:01p	GIMP and the value of standard window controls The individual who came up with the current "toolband" UI for GIMP should be made to use it on a netbook, while an eagle pecks on his liver. For crying out loud I'm having trouble placing windows on a 1440x900 screen. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
katzj	12:01p	Repeating the cycle, time to kill rhpl Continuing on the historical vein, once upon a time there was a package included in Red Hat Linux called pythonlib. One of the things I helped do was to finish killing it off. We went along and then a few releases later, wanted to share some python code again. Thus was born rhpl – the Red Hat Python Library. It started out simply enough — some wrappers for translation stuff and one or two other little things. And then it began to grow, as these things do over time. Some of the things made sense, some less so. Over time, pieces have moved around into other things (including rhpxl — the Red Hat Python Xconfig library) Fast-forward to today and it’s a bit of a mess with things contributed by various people and used in one config tool (or two) and barely maintained. Also a lot of the things being wrapped have gotten a lot better in the python standard library. The gettext module is leaps and bounds better than the one from python 1.5 and also the subprocess module is awesome for spawning processes. Therefore, I think it’s time to continue the cycle and kill off rhpl for Fedora 12. I’m starting to make patches and file them for packages using rhpl to transition them over. Help much appreciated from anyone that wants to join in. For the rhpl.translate -> gettext case, you generally want to replace the import of _ and N_ from rhpl.translate with something like import gettext _ = lambda x: gettext.ldgettext(domain, x) N_ = lambda x: x Comments
Monday, June 29th, 2009
zaitcev	10:41a	Rebuilding VLC in Rawhide It looks like I have to rebuild VLC for F12 Rawhide, since it's holding up yum update and its dependencies are too expansive to be worked around with --skip-broken. I kept hoping that Nicolas would do his duty but apparently it was in wain, while everything is being built, even Pidgin. The downside of this is that I have better things to do than compensating for an AWOL maintainer, but an upside exists too. It's past due that I learned all the fancy tools Fedora grew over the years, such as Mock. Also, if I somehow work this into Koji, fruits of my labour will be available to everyone. UPDATE: It turns out I need to be a registered developer at RPMfusion before I can use the tools, so I just built it from an src.rpm, and so I'm in posession of vlc-core-1.0.0-0.11rc3.fc12.x86_64.rpm. It was a rather painless process, and remember that Gentoo users do it every day before breakfast. (Comment on this)
Friday, June 26th, 2009
katzj	11:21p	Stress, sickness, productivity The summer semester has been a bit stressful so far — supply chain taking six to nine hours a week just for class has left me with little time to think or breathe, but luckily that ends next week.  As a result, I think my body decided it had had enough and didn’t really fight off whatever the summer flu going around is.  So to add to the busy factor, I was pretty worn down and sick for a few days this week. Today, I finally started feeling back to myself and got a lot of productive stuff done. Finally caught up with a lot of bug stuff, got around to updating the machine that I host everything on past Fedora 9 (!), and even sat down tonight to wrap the handlebars on my CAAD9 with new bar tape. Hadn’t done a bar wrapping job before and I think that it came out okay. There are definitely places it could be better and I learned a few things as I went to use next time, but it seems like it’ll work just fine. And as an added bonus, I’m now fairly comfortable that I can do it myself and not have to always get it done at the bike shop. Looking forward to getting out tomorrow for a ride — I only commuted one day this week and other than that, it’s been a week since I’ve been on the bike. Longer than I’d choose usually, but I also know when not to push with getting back on the bike to avoid staying sicker longer. Comments
spevack	3:06p	fudcon berlin, day 1 afternoon We inch closer to the BarCamp pitches which close the day, but things are going pretty well. The Wireless Summit and Security Team are having nice hackfests. The Sugar/OLPC guys are holed up somewhere getting work done, and a pretty steady stream of people have wandered over to FUDCon from LinuxTag. All talks have been well-attended, including "How to Join Fedora" in German, an update on Linux wireless in English, and concurrent RPM Packaging sessions in both German and English. As always, I wish for a larger audience, but things are going pretty well, especially for the "hackfest" day of FUDCon. (Comment on this)
spevack	11:44a	fudcon berlin, day 1 instant feedback We're about two hours in to day 1 of FUDCon Berlin, and here are some thoughts: Good: * Jan Wildeboer's presentation: brilliant as always. * Jeroen van Meeuwen's talk about Puppet in the Infrastructure Track. The room had about 50 people in it, and the energy carried over into Francesco Crippa's talk about Func & Symbolic. * Fabian Affolter's talk about Fedora 11, which has a nice crowd and great looking content (it's in German). * The FUDCon building, the decorations, and the organizational team. Bad: * People who commit to giving talks, and then don't show up, without any word to anyone about it. * People who complain when we hold standalone FUDCons ("we don't like to travel to an event only for FUDCon") and then also complain when we co-locate FUDCon at another event ("we don't like having FUDCon with another event, because it's too distracting"). Maybe we should just abandon FUDCons altogether for Fedora Activity Days. * People who sign up for one size tshirt, and then take a different size tshirt, thus messing up our inventory. * People who sign up for hackfests, and then don't show up for them. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
zaitcev	12:02p	Multi-process Firefox Even if Google Chrome goes nowhere, it has done its duty by lighting the fire under the Mozilla's butt (as mentioned previously). Remember how Classpath forced Sun to open Java? Yep. Thank you, evil Google overlords. (Comment on this)
spevack	5:45p	linuxtag booth & fudcon FUDCon Berlin starts at 10AM on Friday. Come a bit early to get your tshirt! In my opinion, the goals of our LinuxTag booth on Friday and Saturday are simple: (1) Have a small, rotating staff to keep it going. (2) Broadcast the FUDCon schedule on the projector. (3) Try to get every single person who stops by to come to the Marshall Haus. (Comment on this)
spevack	12:32p	fudcon berlin preparations FUDCon Berlin preparations are in full-swing. If there's any of the Fedora crew at LinuxTag who are looking for a few tasks to help out, feel free to drop by the Marshall Haus and you can pick from a list of things that need doing. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
spevack	11:06a	linuxtag & fudcon berlin scheduling notes Wednesday 12:00 PM -- I have a little talk in the "forum" that is directly across from the Fedora booth. Wednesday 6:00 PM -- A meeting (open to all) of the Fedora EMEA non-profit organization. Thursday -- A general day at LinuxTag. Anyone who is looking for something to do is welcome to help me get the Marshall Haus set up for FUDCon on Friday. The LinuxNacht social event is on Thursday night. Friday 10:00 AM -- Intro to FUDCon, and the beginning of our scheduled talks in the Marshall Haus. Tom Callaway will also lead the brief hackfest intro, and people will get to work. Friday 5:00 PM -- BarCamp pitches! This is when the schedule for Saturday will be determined, and everyone should be there! It will happen in the main area of the Marshall Haus. Following this, we will head to the FUDPub social event. Saturday 10:00 AM -- Our start time, for the most important day of FUDCon. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
spevack	11:25p	linuxtag 2009 (day 0) and fudcon berlin (day -2) Tomorrow is the first official day of LinuxTag 2009. Here's how I spent my day today: * I started the morning with a nice breakfast at our hotel, and then rode with Joerg Simon and Thomas Woerner to Red Hat's Berlin office, where we picked up signage and tshirts for FUDCon Berlin, as well as three demo laptops (thanks Dell!) and somewhere around 3,000 Fedora 11 CDs and DVDs. * We made our way back to the hotel and dropped off the stuff that we don't need until FUDCon on Friday, and I had a chance to meet John McDonough, who made the trek all the way from Michigan for this week's gathering. * Sandro Mathys, Gerold Kassube, Thomas, Fabian Affolter, and I went over to Messe Berlin and built up our booth for Wednesday - Saturday. It's smaller than last year, but that's a strategic decision because we're putting most of our focus on FUDCon (which is in its own building), and we hope to drive a lot of people from the booth to FUDCon, as opposed to having 100% of their interactions with Fedora take place at the booth. We're also making excellent use of a projector and a giant wall to enhance the Fedora experience. I'm sure there will be pictures tomorrow. Things look pretty good over at Messe Berlin. The building that FUDCon will be in is used on Tuesday and Wednesday, but we peeked in and it looks like the setup will be great for us. Gerold and I made a trip back in April to check it out as well, but this is the first time we've seen it with all its furniture and set up for conference mode. There are a bunch of FUDCon signs all over the place that Messe Berlin created for us. I'm sure that mizmo will be disappointed to see that the font isn't quite right, but they still point people in the right direction. * I bumped into Joe Brockmeier, who was setting up the openSUSE booth, and had a nice chat with him. * I'm giving a talk on Fedora Electronics Lab on Friday, on behalf of Chitlesh who will not be arriving until late Friday night. He and I spoke on the phone and planned out our strategy for the talk. He walked me through his slide deck, and I suggested some places where I could say useful things, even though I don't know much about electrical engineering (having not done any of it since college). * I had a three-hour dinner meeting with Gerold, Fabian, Jeroen van Meeuwen, and Paul Frields, in which we discussed a few issues that impact the non-profit group that the Ambassadors have set up here in EMEA to support the mission of the Fedora Project. * After dinner, I chatted a bit more with Paul and Jesse Keating, and then triaged a bit of Red Hat email and wrote this blog post. See you all tomorrow. Highlights include a little talk by me at noon (an introduction to FUDCon for the general LinuxTag audience), as well as a general membership meeting for the Fedora EMEA non-profit group from 6-8pm. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
spevack	9:31a	internet sharing in berlin Greg plugged into the wired network in our room (not free -- we tried to negotiate that in for free, but failed), and then set up wireless network sharing, which is enabling me to get on the network as well. Just a small tip that folks might want to try. Most of my day will be spent getting stuff from Red Hat Berlin, and then helping with the booth organization and setup over at the fairgrounds. (Comment on this)