Máirín put up a series of posts that not only give great visual thoughts, but are some powerfully good ideas on providing something a community can really gain from using. I’m not going to try summarizing, I just encourage you to read at least these two:

• 16 Brainstorm Ideas For Mailman’s Web Interface

• 16 More Brainstorm Ideas For Mailman’s Web Interface

… and go ahead and read 7,750 pixels of mailing list thread, which came first anyway.

One thing that really struck me about these ideas is that many of the features that rely upon posting history can be run against an existing archive of messages. That means upgrading Mailman to features like these means quickly gaining a view in to the history of your mailing list that is a sizeable part of the richness of the new features. All the ideas that rely upon keywords in posts, previous posting history and frequency and topics covered, all the reputation ideas, all that would be seeded with as many months or years of archives a mailing list has. That’s really cool!

I really look forward to seeing some of these kind of changes in Mailman. I’m a big fan of Mailman on the straight mailing list management side. But over the years I’ve seen the wider and wider divide between the users who prefer web forums and those who prefer mailing lists (many of whom are contributors who want to interact with other users, but not on a web forum.) These ideas could provide a great stitching of that divide, without forcing a big change on either party.

I registered this domain years ago as a community project identity for getting free expo passes to LinuxWorld. It was just an idea for a domain name that came to my head at the moment of registration, as a crossover of my interests in free and open software and cooking.

So I am kicking off this idea, with myself as Chef de Cuisine, and inviting folks who are involved in free/open source software and who like to cook to be on the planet. All these folks need to do is provide me with a feed link. For example, when I write for something to appear on the Linuxchefs planet, I’ll use the tag ‘linuxchefs’ for the post, and it will automatically appear on the Linuxchefs planet.

Interested? Drop me an email.

In the end, I did what I should have done in the first place – turned over the de-cracking to DreamHost’s team. They cleaned out all the evil, and I’ve been busy changing passwords, reinstalling from fresh code, and so forth.

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!