A big part of researching and teaching about the open source way is being able to tell illustrative stories to bring home the reasons why you want to implement the principles. So the handbook has a chapter devoted to that, “Great stories to tell“. I’d like to keep doing more there.

One idea is to have a regular (twice-a-month) audiocast discussion about current events in the world and look at them with the lens of the open source way.

Ideally these would be stories beyond software and technology. There is so much transparency going on in the world, so many open collaborations, and so many stories of people doing things “just like they do in open source software.” That is what opensource.com is filled with.

So I need a partner, and some occasional guests.

A partner who can:

• Get on the mic with me a few times a month to discuss extemporaneously about current events and the open source way.
• Bely the extemporaneous nature by doing a bit of preparation with me – picking show topics, preparing links.
• Be willing to do the entire project the open source way – from tooling to how we make decisions for the show. The open source way doesn’t mean we give up control, but we do increase transparency to full.
• Grow the show with me and others’ help, including a point in the (near?) future where we do the initial recording live while engaging with a live audience.

Guests who can:

• Bring an informed opinion, backed up by facts, on the subject of applying the open source way to a domain of expertise or interest.
• Have stories to tell that go beyond just techology.
• Be willing to work on the show in the open source way, too.

Are you that person? Know of the right person?

About me, if you don’t know me:

• I can be very, very loquacious.
• I can be funny, but am (as is typical) much funnier with certain people than others. Being funny together for the show would be just awesome.
• I tend to talk too fast especially when I get passionate, but I’m a fairly good listener.
• I have a secret desire to be on the air.

After using this combination for a while (running ‘offlineimap’ in ‘screen’, with ‘mutt’ running in one or more ‘screen’ windows), I ran in to some problems with ‘offlineimap’ when it was run continuously.  I could set the sync interval in the configuration just fine, but inevitably a few things happened.  It would be syncing, using CPU, memory, and bandwidth when I had other ideas for how to use those resources.  It would be in between a scheduled sync when I wanted to check for an email just sent, causing me to quit and restart it.  It would occasionally suck up all my memory, requiring a kill and restart (that was probably an older, buggier version?)  It also didn’t like it if I suspended the laptop or lost network during a sync, which seemed to be the main trigger for the memory-sucking-error.

Finally, Paul suggested to me that I try just running it manually when I wanted to get my email.  This was part of a larger discussion on how to not let email run your life.  If you know the email is constantly being refreshed, it’s easy to “just go see if there is something new”, thereby procrastinating on what you are really supposed to be doing.  By making mail poll/sync a manual task, I could eliminate most of the first problems, and fresh messages were always just moments away.  (If I’m anxious to get an email NOW, I’m usually interested in the main inbox, since my email is filtered server-side.)

All that leads me to this very simple ‘bash’ script that runs ‘offlineimap’ one time, and before exiting puts a nice visible timestamp on the console for me.  I find this really helpful to let me know when I last ran ‘offlineimap’.  Sometimes it shows me it’s only been twenty minutes, and my checking email is a sign to me that I am procrastinating.  Other times it shows me that I haven’t checked since last night!

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/offlineimap -o;
echo "****************************"
echo "vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv"
/bin/date
echo "^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"
echo "****************************"

That is such a simple script that I don’t think it warrants copyright, but just in case I am wrong, consider it under the GPL v3+ (yes, I trust the FSF with improvements to the GPL more than I trust that GPL v3 is so perfect that it never needs improving.)

For ‘mutt’ goodness, check out Paul’s configuration directory for his ‘mutt’ wrapper script (which I use), as well as his ‘mutt’ and ‘offlineimap’ configuration files (which I also modified to use.)  You might notice that Paul has contributed a ton more to my ‘offlineimap’/'mutt’ experience than the reverse, but I try.

1. Slice the flower end (paper pointy tip) of nine or more large yellow onions.  Peel onions, leaving root end attached.
2. Hold root end in an off-hand pinched together fingertip, then slice from the flat end to make onion rings approximately 0.25 inch/0.5 cm thick.  Slicing this way cuts across the grain, making juice-release and sugar-absorption easier.
3. Fill a five quart/four liter heavy-bottomed pot with the onions, flat and layered on each other.  If you have room, you can add the other dry ingredients at this point.
4. Add 0.25 cup of water to the pan to keep the bottom onions from scorching  during initial heating.
5. Turn the pan on very low, just enough to turn the added water to steam, which helps the onions release their juices.
6. Cover the pan, keep the heat low, and check infrequently.  Use a large spoon to lift and turn the onions until enough juices are released that the onions are covered in juice.
7. Add 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon and five cinnamon sticks; you may also add other sweet/savory spices, such as a few cloves, a few star anise, a few pieces of fresh or dried ginger, ten whole allspice berries, and so forth.  Add 0.5 teaspoon of salt.  Be light on this, the point is not to make it overly spicy, just provide more background support.
8. Use a vegetable peeler to remove the orange part of an orange, leaving all the white pith behind.  Cut the peel in to two-inch/four-centimeter long pieces and add to boiling onions.
9. Juice four oranges, removing the seeds and large pulp pieces.  Add to the boiling onions.
10. Add three cups of evaporated cane juice such as turbinado (succanat or similar is OK, be careful not to use brown sugar or similar unless you can deal with the strong molasses flavor via spicing) to the boiling onions.  Other sweeteners could be substituted, but may leave a runnier consistency unless a proper caramelization is created  in the final juice reduction.
11. Cook uncovered for two or more hours, reducing and concentrating the juices.  Turn the onions infrequently.
12. When the juice is low enough to make the onions at danger of scorching or caramelizing the onion fibers, remove from heat.  Put onions in to colander and drain, then add the drained juice back to the pan and continue reducing over medium-low heat.
13. Reduce, stirring more closer to the end, until a thick syrup, several minutes after the last wisps of steam have risen.  You want it to caramelize slightly (very soft ball stage?), but watch carefully for scorching.
14. Add in any remaining juices that have drained from the onions, reducing to a thick syrup.
15. Add syrup back to onion mixture, and carefully mix with one or two soup spoons until even consistency.
16. Resulting marmalade should be very thick with no apparent wateriness. Put in clean jars and refrigerate. Eat soon!

My first run of this resulted in one and a half quarts of marmalade.

This is a first draft of the recipe, pulled from memory, and done entirely without additional research.  I am certain that the recipe needs fixes, and now we have something to work from.

Hope your 2010 is finishing well, and happy new year/2011 to you and yours.

I read all of PJ’s story (great stuff) of the Groklaw community and the eventual arise of trolls and astroturfers, glanced at the comments (wow, lots), wrote up an appeal to PJ to relicense, and along the way … I read something that reminded me to read the other comments first and not start my own thread if it belongs under another.  So I skimmed all the comments, leaving out all the side discussions about “Google {should,shouldn’t}” and such, and did find one where PJ explained why she would NOT be using a different license than the NC/ND for Groklaw works.  OK, fair enough.

So I wrote this comment, “Thanks, inclusion in The Open Source Way”.

This is my first time commenting on anything on Groklaw, and the reputation has me a bit intimidated. Yet, it was a fun distraction, and now I’ll keep my eye on the discussion for a while to see what else comes from it.  Meanwhile, I used this same content to stub out a page on the TOSW wiki, “Legal the open source way“.  This placeholder gives me a way to find myself again when I sit down to write the chapter, with help from PJ’s article-in-a-glass-box.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Contributor_CVs

It’s an opt-in system to track an individual’s contributions and recommendations from others within the Fedora Project community.  (Naturally, FLOSS for code and content, use it for your own project, etc.)

For recommendations, we can get started today with a simple process.  You leave a comment in a user’s talk page on the wiki, using the ~~~~ signature format plus the page’s history to verify the recommender.

These recommendations can later be pulled in to a semiautomagic system, which would also provide a nicer interface for making a quality recommendation than a wiki page.  (Or not, if the wiki system proves itself.)

That system can pull in all sorts of data of a contributor across the Fedora Project world.  I imagine it as a module of the Fedora account system (FAS).  Count of wiki edits, numbers of contributions to mailing list discussions, code and content touched in SCMs, count of blog posts on planet with tag cloud, IRC help statistics (somehow) … any ways we can pull in and massage data to give a meaningful result.

Run that in to a cool code/tag/collaboration swarm animation alongside a set of personal recommendations from other project members.  This page is something that can help you get in to school programs, get new jobs or promotions, and who knows what other ways that might have meaning in your life.

All of this to add value to contributors, giving them more reason to enjoy what they do around these parts.  It’s also cool to show your non-project friends and family how and why you spend the time you spend on your FLOSS and community pursuits.

Of course, the data is all exportable; you aren’t trapped carrying this CV at a fedoraproject.org domain, nor are you required to use the project’s service.  There are a ton of privacy concerns involved, solving those has to be a first priority.  People will get competitive or try to game the system, to varying degrees. *shrug*

Um, so … anyone want to help build this?

The project is going to run a MediaWiki instance and git+gitweb, maybe with a few plugins, and that’s it to start.  Mailing lists?  Possibly soon.  Other stuff?  Possible one day.  So, room to grow with a relatively simple site.  Not intending for a huge amount of traffic to start, ability to scale should be built in.  Modest data/database needs expected.

The thing is, I’m spoiled by Dreamhost, where I host all my personal projects.  I’m happy enough with them for that.  They use Debian and a (I think) a custom toolbox that us customers use to do a wide range of activities.  I can hit my registrar to register a new domain name, then host it,  load it up with a selection of LAMP software such as MediaWiki and WordPress, and have access via ssh to make web site building easier, all of this within about 30 minutes via the Dreamhost web app.

While I’m fully capable of taking a bare metal box, spinning up RHEL or Fedora, and configuring everything from DNS to LAMP, I don’t want to.  And Red Hat no longer pays me to be a sysadmin.

If you know of something that fits the bill, email me or drop a note in the comments on this post.

However, when the Fedora Project was started, the CVS was internal to Red Hat, and in that environment my username is ‘kwade’.    Somewhere along the way I registered and began using ‘quaid’ so I could have e.g. quaid.fedorapeople.org.  This is important as most people know me as quaid, so send me email to quaid (at) fedoraproject (dot) org, and so forth.  I have maintained both accounts, and in some cases had permissions for a project in one ID and not another, so had to switch around within different Trac instances, etc.  In addition, Fedora Infrastructure guidelines now require people to have a single user account unless there are special circumstances.

As a kind favor, Toshio merged my permissions to various FAS groups in to my ‘quaid’ account, and along with some other jiggling, I am now ‘quaid’ everywhere that matters for Fedora.  If you’ve ever been confused by this in the past, be confused no longer.  From wiki user page to Fedora talk, I am now just ‘quaid’.  Time to order new Fedora business cards!

The main formula is intent + work.

You have to intend to include people who are at a distance and connecting via technology, and you have to do the work to make it happen.

Call to action for this post is: intend to be highly interactive during the FAD and go make it happen. Hint: blogging is not good enough for some of it.

Think about your sessions and how it can help to interact with the rest of us. I recommend a minimum of: live video feed, live audio feed, and IRC, Gobby, and wiki editing projected on the wall. We can also keep a VoIP conference room open, but my instinct is to limit the flow on the incoming voices by subject matter. Beyond that recommendation, a live IRC and wiki-based abd/or Gobby note taking with many laptops in the in-person session is the bare bones, with regular usage of talk.fedoraproject.org.

I’ve been a telecommuting employee for the last eight years, seven of them @redhat.com. It is not always easy nor comfortable. Success begins and ends with proper intent and hard work. Because NA Ambassador activities are close to my interest, I’m going to do what I can to be involved in the Ambassador Day … from afar.

For the last few months I’ve been receiving from one to several incorrectly routed text messages a week. I’ve gone through all the thinking — someone sent them by accident to me, they are spam testing to see if this is a live address, etc. But after multiple interactions with the senders, who in all cases did not mean to send messages such as, “Don’t call im in the shower for a while” and “Does he think yr cute?” In one case, I received more than six misrouted messages from one person over a two day period. In all cases, no one has said the messages did not go to their intended recipient, so I don’ t know if the message was misrouted and lost to the other person, or split and routed to two of us.

Has this ever happened to you? Let me know in the comments of this post if:

• You’ve received misrouted messages
• Someone has sent you a text message that they received a misrouted message from you
• You’ve heard of this problem occurring to other people

Aside from the hassle and potential embarrassment, there is the matter of the cost of the messages. Every time I consider getting on the phone to protest, I consider how much time it will be for me compared to the $0.25 in mistakes. But then I think, if Verizon is doing this across their entire network, they are potentially charging lots of money for misrouted messages. Why, that is starting to sound like a mistake they have no vested interest in fixing. If I can show, even for myself, that this is a wider problem, I’ll call Verizon and start lodging my complaints up the chain.

Remember your empowering mantra when speaking with customer service: “Let me speak with our supervisor, please.”

On more than one occasion, she has found herself in direct contact with “the world’s expert in X.” The practice began twenty years ago when she was diagnosed with Chron’s disease; she lived in Los Angeles, CA, and her parents took her to see “the top doctors.” My wife has carried this philosophy into her other interactions, even where the top expert is Elaine Gottschall, a concerned mother turned scientist and advocate, or another like-minded individual who has scoured the web for all the research.

The web gives access to scientists and case studies in a two-way flow. Not only do scientists find each other and share science more easily, people who can benefit from the science or aid the enquiry are also easier to access. Those individuals are also connecting, sharing information, and connecting through each other back into the scientists. In this recent case, my wife’s enquiries and proving her mettle in various online forums and via direct email has had some interesting results. She is now in contact with other like minded people in similar situations seeking new treatments and cures. She has emailed and talked with the leading world’s expert on a radical-old treatment at the University of Nottingham, UK. One result of her active enquiry has put her in contact with a University of California scientist who is interested in using her as a case study for this treatment. Because she has been learning so much in the process of her enquiries, such that people are always asking what science degree or field she (the art major) trained in, she has an opportunity to both benefit from the treatment and contribute to the study and progress of it.

For scientific enquiry to work, both the science and the scientists must be available. One of the steps in the process of proving a theory is exposing all the aspects of the experiments so that others can duplicate the findings. In this way, findings build upon each other without removing the recognition from the individuals who discovered or worked on key bits. It is in this spirit at MIT where free software thrived before Richard Stallman had dubbed it such.

Just as in other science where you open the findings and how you got there, in FLOSS we provide a compilable application and the source code that gets you there.

In academia or private organizations, when you lock down ideas and people, it produces stagnation and you have to eat the young (new members) to get fresh blood (ideas.) This happens in the proprietary, closed source software world.

Open projects, such as FLOSS, get maximum value from having the top people hanging out in the commons, open to answering questions. Perhaps the process is a bit Socratic and shares kinship with the original Athenian democracy — it provides an open forum to ask questions, discuss, and prove one’s mettle. With the top people, biggest contributors, and biggest idea generators all in the mix with the general population, nothing stops moving long enough to get very stagnate.

In many ways, FLOSS communities are not creating a new methodology as much as practicing a tried and true way of finding, building, and improving on knowledge.