Do the numbers yourself from “The Fedora Project & JBoss.org” page, but here is my quick dump from what I’ve seen so far:
The standard Fedora presentation is to show:
I’m going to give a variation of that at CommunityOne in a few weeks, and be prepared to answer questions on those topics plus others in the “Operating System Community Panel.” However …
… and so I am going to include/emphasize:
Let me know if you have any other ideas of what I should add. When I get a first pass at a revised presentation up, I’ll publish and post and all that.
Pardon this off-topic post (for my Fedora category, anyway), but a large body of might-be Verizon text message users are reading this, and I’m interested in finding out if my situation is unique, typical, or endemic.
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:
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.”
As per my earlier Twitter:
We found the last place w baby chicks of and 4 girls are on the go. Mo Blog Later.
… which was written on the go, while I was on a last house errand after we strapped my two-year-old neighbor in the back with my six-year-old and her eight-year-old friend. In the way back of the Volvo wagon was my ten-year-old, in the backward facing jump seat. Four girls and me in search of the last feed and seed store with baby chicks.
Apparently a subtly growing trend of city folk getting a few egg layers for the backyard has turned into a “chick rush” this year. We were all set to go at the beginning of April, in fact, we were gearing up for a bike ride to the feed store to choose our chicks, when my wise wife thought to call the store to assure the chicks had indeed arrived.
“They’ve sold out?” she said. “In two hours?!?”
We called a few near-by feed stores, and the story was the same. There had been a run on the chicks, with everyone selling out in record time, except for one store that was far away (car trip required). We confirmed that a near-by store would have twenty varieties of baby chicks on Thursday of this week, 17 April. We planned to head up there about 9 to 9:30 in the morning. When we couldn’t make that time window, we decided to skip that morning and check the next morning to see what was left. We called Friday morning and they had sold out in the first hour of Thursday, with a line of people outside of the store since 7:30, half an hour before the feed store opened. *smacks head*
Determined to not let this stop us, and also to keep our neighbor from rightly telling us we should have gone with the boring old layers from the few weeks before, my wife diligently called all the feed stores, chatting with a few proprietors. Store after store had the same story as the first one. A big, county-wide run on baby chicks. Everyone had at least a two week wait until they thought they could get more, and even some of them had heard from hatcheries that they were out and back-ordered. (This urban poultry thing is beginning to feel like a zeitgeist.)
Finally, one feed store, literally at the furthest end of the county, had three varieties left and enough to satisfy us. Myself and the four-girl team began pulling ourselves together for the journey.
The first challenge came when we realized we would need to put one of the girls in the jump seat in the back, and everyone wanted a turn. That’s fine, but we had three girls wanting and only two legs to the trip. The girls kept coming at the problem by trying to negotiate who should give-up a ride in favor of the other two girls. Well, to be fair, this was my two daughters, the sisters, doing that negotiation. Their friend, it turns out, wasn’t really happy with the options; she wanted to keep things fair and equal. I helped them see how. We figured that we had a sixty mile round trip, so I set the trip meter and at the 20 mile mark (or thereabouts) we stopped so two girls could switch. The one who was in the back at that point also climbed in the back for the return trip. At the 10 mile mark back from the feed store, we swapped the third girl in to the rear for the last 20 miles. Sadly, this was my seven-next-Saturday daughter who got lonely in the way back and wished she were in the middle with the bigger girls. Tamara-who-is-two was blissful about the whole thing, happy to be along on a big girl adventure.
At the feed store, “Aromas Feed & Ranch Supply”, we discovered that in the intervening hours, one entire variety had been purchased. We ran into a woman we know from here in Santa Cruz, she was picking up three of that variety. I promptly forgot that variety’s name, since I wasn’t getting any. We then got to choose out our mini-flock, picking thirteen total from amongst the buff Orpingtons and Araucanas. Ironically, this one feed store, which happens to be a hundred meters over the line in to Monterey County, had these chicks for the last couple of weeks. At two weeks old already, they are double the size of newly hatched chicks, and flapping and flying around. The girls don’t realized they missed the super-fuzzy, super-small stage. We’ll likely have to get more in a few years, so they’ll enjoy that stage then.
Last night we hooked up the heat lamp over the box, loaded in food and water, and set all this up in our neighbor’s house. Both families are sharing the flock across the two properties, and they don’t have a live-in cat the way we do.
The whole adventure illustrates one of the small parts of homeschooling that I love. We were able to pick up and go in the middle of the week for this adventure. In the process, I could squeeze in a math puzzle (how to split the jump seat ride amongst three), geology (always lots of that to observe around here), and sociology and science (farm management, livestock, chicken lifecycle.) The friend, Isabel, who came along was unexpected, but present for the same reason. Her Moms had an NVC event at Cabrillo College, and rather than be bored, Isabel wanted to play with someone. They called us to see if we were available, and an hour+ later Isabel was joining us on the chick adventure. Later in the afternoon, we dropped the chicks back at home, and I took all three of the big girls up to the campus where they all attend a City Schools homeschool program (AFE) for rehearsals of their California history play.
Epic. I’m presuming this is for Red Flag Linux, although I cannot find a matching image to the flag at the end of the video.
When we are at FUDCon we must shoot a video like that for Fedora, but instead parody an epic Fantastic Four scene. Who gets to play Galactus?
On Monday 5 May, I’ll be attending Sun’s CommunityOne, an open and no-cost event for developers. Aside from going for the general interest and relationship to $dayjob, I’ll be giving a talk on Fedora and sitting on an “Operating System Community Panel.” As a bonus, the Community One pass gives access to the pavilion and conference sessions at JavaOne on Tuesday.
From the cool pool of existing presentations, I’ll be cooking up one that focuses on developers — why Fedora is of interest to them as developer/users, and more importantly, why it is of interest as a contributor. You can be sure that OpenJDK 6 in Fedora is going to be a big focus.
After that talk I’ll step in to the panel to answer questions with the other OS presenters from OpenSolaris, OpenSuse, and Ubuntu (kick ass!). That should be fun. I’m not big on in-person confrontation, and hopefully Fedora can take the high-ground as usual, but with people finally getting and making the point about why Fedora’s upstream mantra is best, I hope we get a chance to dive into that. However, I expect it will be all about codecs or something, since developers apparently like to listen to music when they code. 
Let me know if you plan on being at CommunityOne or JavaOne, would love to see or meet Fedora faces.
Super excited that both Michael Stahnke’s talk and my EPEL talk got accepted for the 2008 Red Hat Summit. You may notice that I matched the style of my page to Michael’s. This reflects the EPEL talks that are a duple, that is, two parts made to fit together into a more meaningful whole, such as the yolk and albumen of an egg.
However, of the talks Michael proposed, it was his “Managing Updates and Upgrades” that got in, which is not his EPEL talk. 
Anyway, it will probably be better attended with that topic, just as my talk renamed to “Fedora Packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux” has a higher chance of attracting people than an obscure acronym. Although I still maintain that throwing in “and CentOS” wouldn’t hurt audience size. But it might allow me to lean on some friendly colleagues who work with the ISVs to get ISV partners at my talk. Which would be a bonus. Spread the word!
Still, the original plan of a perfect duple is on the wayside. I’m hoping there is some room for Michael to cover EPEL a wee bit, and make a plug for my talk later for follow up. That leaves me room to cover history, practical items, some nuts and bolts about using EPEL in an enterprise setting, and the business and community aspects of EPEL. If we both can attend the other’s session, we can fuel answers and discussion.
Ready for some classic back scratchin’? (That’s where you scratch my back, and I scratch yours.)
You are in charge of or part of a class in technical writing or documentation. We have an open project with tools, processes, and lots of great content to create and manage. In addition to using community-generated content to create release notes, we also produce an Installation Guide, a User Guide, and others in the works and already published. We want to add in deeper technical content, such as an Administration Guide, a Security Guide, and a seriously updated Development Guide.
Our writers, editors, and mentors are prepared to work with your class. Students get exposed to state of the art technical writing tools (wiki, gobby, DocBook) using the ultra-proven and useful open source writing methodology.
We have so much work to do,instructors could do an entire semester of twenty+ students working on this just to get a nice status quo for future work. Open source technical writing is a fantastic way to get involved in, and learn about, open source projects. Listen to what the Fedora Project Leader has to say about it: “I came to be part of the Fedora community through the Documentation Project.” Word!
Ask the folks at Seneca College how it works for software. In fact, Jack, while you are out there on tour, please talk with anyone who will listen about this idea.
Maybe someone wants to do a Free Skool class on this; I’d show up and help. If I mention the Guerilla Drive-in, will that catch Wes Modes or someone else’s attention who might actually make it happen?
Onward, truly.
It may seem a bit early, and we have a remedy for that feeling, but it really and truly is time to get the last release notes changes in for Fedora 9 GA. You can view and update the source here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Beats
Preview here:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/
If you worry that this is all closing down far from the release (a whole month!), have no fears. We have a process for that, too. We’ll continue taking updates to the wiki to just before Fedora 9 release, then do a web-only update of the latest content.
