First, SJC is undergoing pretty serious construction. No, really, the first first was the rental car bus waiting for a long time before getting underway … at each stop. Don’t they run an additional bus or two during peak hours? Actually, the real first first was the car rental agency not having the usual person with a remote check-in. I had to hit the counter, which caused me to miss the bus arriving just then. And on it went. (Truly the first FAIL was my thinking I could get here the usual “about an hour ahead of the flight.”)

Traffic getting to the terminals was extra busy. When I got my feet on the ground, I hit the speed and ran for my boarding pass. First bad sign, I missed the window for the flight already and had to take a stand-by on the next flight. But if I can get to the gate in time …

So I boogie, trying not to bang people along the way, round the curve … and, WOW, the security line is long … and longer … and curves down to the baggage pick-up carousel … and around the room … and right up to me. Hmm, maybe I really am not going to make this flight?

But things did move at some pace, there was still 10 minutes to the flight and a chance to get on board when I got my “line 5″ direction and headed down that path … right behind the clueless traveler. “Oh, I have to get my own bins.” Bad sign. Shoes take a long time to remove. Needs another bin. Heads to the metal detector, whoops!, didn’t bring the boarding pass, it’s still in the handbag. By the time I got through and was waiting for my stuff, I wasn’t surprised when the joking-and-joshing with fellow TSAers x-ray reader had to pass my backpack through again. Why not, what’s another minute at this point? Um … everything?

As it happened, I got to the gate at about two minutes to the launch hour, but the doors were closed, and here I sit. At least the wireless is free now at SJC, thanks folks.

“Security was extra bad today,” says the guy next to me who just missed his flight to Seattle. He seems to know what he’s talking about.

I admit that I’m pretty pretty bummed out, if you couldn’t tell.  I was trying to save some travel dollars by not doing another hotel overnight, figuring I could get a same-day flight without any problem. Then the OSL trip, scheduled to start before Noon, removed much cushion for travel error. Even with my original flight, I still had to make good time to the Portland MAX light rail, figure it all out, and get on no later than the 8:10 train. With a 7:40 landing, but no checked luggage. It was doable, but a tight schedule that required no mess ups. Currently it is up in the air if we should move the schedule to accommodate me, much depends on if I actually get on this flight. Jack says he’ll be at the terminal to pick me up, so I just have to let them know if I make the flight or not.

Oh, good, that’s a nice sign. The clueless traveler who was in front of me in the security line has just sat across from me in the next aisle. Nothing like a little salt to make the wound feel fresh.

Every single subProject and SIG should have a beat writer.

If you do not, then you have no one committed to telling the world about your great feature, project, process, or whatever. If you want to be under the radar, fine, go ahead. But if anyone is relying upon your technology or efforts, then you owe it to the community to do your documentation.

Not having a beat writer is like a Linux distribution not contributing to the Linux kernel.

In the last release cycle, the features process was a very important and useful way that content about features made it in to the release notes and marketing materials. Here’s a funny story about that:

At the 2008 Red Hat Summit, Jeremy Katz was giving a talk about the Fedora live media feature. In that talk, he mentioned that he wasn’t perfectly satisfied with the state of data persistence in a live USB image at the time of Fedora 9’s release. Thus, he was a little concerned that the feature was highlighted and central to the documentation and marketing content. I sat in the audience and thought, “Ha! Teach you to mark a feature as 100% when it’s really not.”

When we wrote up release notes and marketing material for Fedora 9, we drew directly from the appropriate sections in each feature page. If a feature sponsor puts a note in such as, “Persistence rocks but still has some bugs in these areas …”, you can be 100% sure the release notes and marketing materials are going to reflect that.

The moral here is to own the content that is most important to you so that it says what you mean it to say.

1. You write content here.
2. We edit the heck out of it.
3. For Alpha and Beta releases, we make a one-page here.
4. For RC to final, we take all that writing and editing to make up one set of rump-bumping release notes.

People, please! You know something already that should be in the Fedora 10 release notes, now is the time to post it. Not sure what to write or what to do with it? Use one of the six ways to submit a release note.

Aside from the Fedora work, I’ll also be wearing my reporter’s hat for Red Hat Magazine and Dev Fu. Looking for stories, videos, and all the interesting bits I can find.

Best for me, even though I have to come out of my introvert shell to talk with people, I’m going to make sure I’m paired up with one of the nutty extroverts when we talk with ISVs, and I do not have a presentation to prepare for (yay!). Also, the travel is nicely short, no full day used to get there; it should be about 4.5 hours from my house door to meeting up with Jack and Greg at the hotel for the trip to OSU.

Though tempted to grab them anyway for an undreamed-up art project, I wisely continued on my way empty handed.

Looking at the i386 package download list I see “nearly 3000″ in el5 (2657 exactly), and “nearly 1500″ in el4 (1447, that is.)

As it happens, when we did that Join page, we were thinking along very similar lines as to what Luke is looking for now, but being a designer and a content writer trying to get something done, we left the computation up to the joiner. That is, we gave them a list of projects and what skillsets were useful there, and left the figuring out where to go next to the individual joining. Crude, but a step forward. It’s great that the mental work we did back then can help inform a workflow tool now.

Luke is writing that computational part now, to take a skillset from the joiner and compare it with a list of projects and tasks within those projects. I think the best order to proceed is:

1. Create a new workflow that captures skills, puts them in a database
2. Use the current information we have in the Join page as a basis for the second part of that comparison
3. Begin ASAP to use the intersection of those two sets to give back to joiners a specific list of active projects (not yet tasks), with a [details] and [join communications] link.
   1. Details goes to the [[ProjectName/Join]] page on the wiki
   2. Join communications goes, right now, to [[ProjectName/Join#Communications]]
4. When we have a programmatically generated list of tasks ranked by community voting/karma, insert that into the decision tree as another set to find an intersection with
   1. Find a way to get a meaningful union of the sets of projects and tasks, then use that to intersect with the skills set?

This gets us changes within a few weeks that can make a real difference, while also kicking off a skills database that we can use continuously thereafter.

What website idea is complete without a diagram? Even better, it was scratched out on hotel notepaper while sitting at a pub later the same night as the discussion with Luke. This first pass compresses out the details of the decision matrix at the end:

If you have notes or slides from those sessions, please post them and create one or more links from the final schedule:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConF10#Final_Session_Schedule

This is my first jetBlue flight, going fine so far. Oakland International (OAK) was the usual big airport experience. Big parts “under construction” with new services “coming soon”, please “pardon our dust.” I guess it’s all being funded with profits from the wireless network. Boingo service is the vendor of choice at OAK, and it would have been a pricey $4 per hour for me. I might consider $1 per hour, although free makes more sense. Heck, I’d arrive earlier for flights and buy more from their various stores if I could get some work done. While they are at it, how about a few more AC power outlets? Instead I took a nap so I would be alert for the flight.

All lands that flies well, and we hit BOS right on time, with a tailwind making up for the late departure. Although it took another hour to get to the hotel, I enjoyed taking the T instead of a taxi, as I had always previously done. Apparently I picked a great night to not wear my “I {heart} LA” shirt (fact: I do not really have one.) The Boston Celtics were about to hit the boards against the LA Lakers in game 6 of the NBA championship. The T was awash with green t-shirts and other Celtics wear. Myself? I couldn’t care less, I’m from Northern California (Golden State Warriors is the team there, if one cares), and I just didn’t want to get caught under the feet of a town of sad mad Bostonians.

Once here, I settled in to the room with a great southern view — the full moon was out and in the center of my room’s picture window. Then I took a long walk around the city, found a Pizzeria Uno to satisfy dinner, and settled in for the night. Big day on Wednesday, need what sleep I can eek. (This was finished the next morning, polished, and posted.)

A few minutes ago, Lucky, so named because she lost her rearward facing toe sometime in her first two weeks of life, boldly jumped on to my laptop, then to the top of the LCD. It folded flat (wide open) under her weight, and she flapped down. I had to deflect her a second time a minute later, and since then she has just eyed me a few times with that yellow gaze.

Watching them pick at then choose to skip over spiders and such, I am reminded of all the history of these animals, mammals, insects, and the various speculative stories I’ve read over the years. I can imagine being a miniature being with this cold gaze eying me as food. I can imagine that right now, because I think that is what Lucky is doing with her yellow eye.