Skip to content

Urban farm fall slide

30-Oct-09

Yeah, we’re a bit busy around here and all of my writing juice has been dry of late.  Part of this has been doing a serious effort with homeschooling for the girls this year.  They did a sample of regular day school at the start of September, decided with us that the family is happier as part of our AFE community, and I made good on my pledge to actually takeover the *schooling for the girls.

Mainly this has been organizing time and getting the girls places on schedule.  Doing all the gap filling, with Debbie doing some, too.  Teacher meetings and various obligations.  Mobile broadband and a flexible schedule are my savior here.  Even then, I ended up taking about 25% of my time over three weeks as PTO (paid time off), which is the abbreviation for “vacation”.  Things are finally humming a bit more, weathering the shifts around us, and I am able to put my nose to other grindstones.

As we move in to the fall at the urban farm, we’re finding ourselves taking the hard 2-year look at what we’ve done, what we planned to do, and where we think we can do.  It’s pretty clear that farming 50’x50′ (15mx15m) can only make a handful of cash, perhaps 20% of the mortgage if we really work the angles.  Downtown restaurants, even in times of flush cash and customers, can’t support a micro-intensive urban farm that charges 4x what other local organic providers do.  It comes down to the amount earnable per square foot, and how much that square foot costs us.

So we’re looking for other ideas and trying to turn our bruised-apple experience in to some applesauce.  The value of house sales dropping like a rock around here hasn’t helped; even traditionally expensive Santa Cruz is down in the market.  It makes the whole business-side of the equation hard to evaluate.

In the end, whatever we can do to foster community and create sustainability in our lives here is a good thing.  Lessons learned along the way are digested, composted, and turned in to something new.

Filed in Homeschool, Sustainable Living, Urban Farm | | Comments Off

Shelf space – you can’t make it up as you go

12-Sep-09

Today I had an exchange via Twitter with my friend Sean, who reminded me about a point we’ve previously discussed face-to-face, “… #opensource #FAIL meter http://bit.ly/nBcYz too Linux-centric – doesn’t apply to Java, Web or Ajax …”  My point back was, “… It applies if you want to deploy on #Linux … don’t #h8 your sysadmin, use existing standards v. making them up each time!”

I want to expand on that a bit, particularly around packaging, because my super-smart developer friends are correct about Java/Ruby/Python/PHP/et al packaging being great and sufficient … but only within their own realm. It really does fall apart as soon as you want to move outside of that realm to the shared world.

If you think of a Linux distribution as a grocery store, that’s a fair analogy.  People grow food at a farm (upstream projects), it is packaged and shipped to the store (RPM, DEB, FHS-compliant TGZ), and consumers come to the store to get the tasty food.  (It’s an incomplete analogy, because the open source consumers may also be the farmers, and the store is more like a farmer’s market in some ways, but let’s just call it imperfect and move on.)  Some people shop in the Fedora store because they like how we arrange the packaging on the shelves, and some people prefer the Slackware store for the same reason.

The grocery stores have come up with some standard ways to deal with food products.  We do it slightly differently depending on our own experience and customer-base.  Most food is packaged for shipment in boxes that are variations on the cube.  Even the apples that are stacked in a pyramid in a bin arrive at the store in an apple box.

These cube shapes are chosen because they:

  • Stack tightly for shipping.
  • Can be made of lightweight, inexpensive cardboard that can hold much more weight than you would think.
  • Are of the right size that an able employee can move them around the store while still being stackable on a pallet.
  • The packaging can be recycled and turned in to more cardboard.

Inside of the shipping boxes are often more boxes (except, for example, apples and beach balls, which come in a big box but are presented to consumers in really big bins.)  These boxes are made for the shelf to display and attract consumers.  Thus:

  • They are polished and pretty.
  • They stand up on precious shelf space; when a manufacturer pays to get a more prominent location on premium shelf space, the manufacturer wants to maximize the value of the effort/money spent.
  • The package tell customers what the food is for, what is in it, what others think about it, when it expires — built-in advertising and information.
  • The boxed packages fit nicely in the shopping cart, grocery bags, and on the shelves at home.
  • Good packages conform to standards that make them reusable in the home and recyclable in to future packaging.

So along comes a new company, let’s call it Java.  And another company, let’s call it PHP.  Java, well, they’ve got this great modular idea so their packaging can fit on any shelf while using minimum shelf space.  The packages are triangular, they stack really nicely, using this cool new tool to strap them together.

Oh, the cool strapping-together tool isn’t freely available?  I have to get a set of tools for each store to strap your special boxes to my shelves?  And that tool isn’t open source?

Sorry, that doesn’t fit on my shelf and I’m not going to retool my entire operation for your “unique” needs you think you have when you could have just iteratively built on top of what works already, but you are welcome to sell your stuff out front with the Girl Scouts.  There is always room out there, and many businesses get their start that way.

Now, PHP has these cool sphere packages.  They are easy to put together by anyone around their custom package-contents, and they move down the pipeline pretty quickly compared to good old square packaging.  While they don’t sit well on the store shelves, well, we can just add more bins for them, right?

Sure, until the whole store is nothing but balls and bins and balls bouncing from bins.  Staff are running around trying to get everything to stack right, no one can read a label because it’s often turned upside down on the sphere, and you can barely tell what are the old balls and what are the new, better, faster, more secure balls.

For a Linux distro to work, hundreds of pieces of software have to work together.  They do such a good job that you can make a following selling cookies in front of the store.  But if you really want to be big/useful to your users/something more than appears a few times a year, it is really helpful if you can be in a package that fits on the shelves and in the lives of your consumers.

Once you accept the idea of packaging, relying upon system libraries, making something that can actually be buildable from source and is truly redistributable, and do it successfully for one Linux distro, then you are 80% of the way there.  Adding another UNIX-like OS to your packaging is easier.  All of this won’t make it easier to deploy on non-UNIX-like OSes, but it also won’t make it harder.

Filed in Fedora, FLOSS, Linux, Open Source | | Comments (3) »

Subtle circles of oppression

05-Sep-09

One of the tricks (or facts?) of oppression is that those who are oppressed most often turn on each other rather than the person or symbol of the oppression.  When the youngest in a family has received abuse or even just ‘rules’ shuttled down from the parents, that youngest turns to the family dog or a doll to take the oppression out on.

Years ago, I was in an airport in Texas watching a young brother and sister play with a doll.  “Are you sassing yore Momma?” the boy asked the doll.  “If yore sassing yore Momma, I’m gonna whup you!”  Hmm … wonder where that came from?

This week we went through a delayed child-to-school mourning when my daughters decided to try out “regular” school, what I call “day school”.  Actually, we went through this break-the-family-apart problem when our oldest was off in “real” Kindergarten.  We healed it over the years, and it hit my wife again this week when the girls were gone.  (They are back, and that is an ongoing situation I’ll write about later.)

The typical reaction is, they’ll get over it, you’ll get over it, it’s natural, don’t worry, it’ll all be fine soon.  During this week, my wife has been reading the Facebook statuses of a friend who’s daughter started Kindergarten this week.  This friend is profoundly sad and trying to justify/live through the feeling.  When all of society is pushing you in a direction, providing the oppressive force, the reaction is to turn against ourselves.  And to turn against those who dare to defy the oppression.  Perhaps this is an evolved response that helps glue society together?  Whatever it is from, it sucks.

One day when I was driving my oldest to Kindergarten, she said to me, “Dad, I know why we send kids to school.”  “Why is that honey?” I asked.  “So they can get used to being away from their family.”

It was in that moment, whether I knew it then or not, that I realized what was happening.  She was absolutely right.  The whole structure of prematurely ripping the family in to “at school” and “at work” is designed to benefit the society as a whole at the expense of the family.  And are we even sure this is the best way to get the benefit for society?  Scientific evidence says, “Nope, we aren’t sure.”

For most of history, kids were kept close to home until they reached a more natural place of separation.  Even leaving to be an apprentice at age 12 is much more natural than spending all day in school at age 5.  At age 12, most kids are physically and emotionally ready for that bigger world where they control their own destiny.

This week I started reading another Dad’s blog, ‘Steely Dad’, who has a great post about the reaction he has received in deciding to homeschool his children.  My first thought was, “These women are furthering the oppression without realizing they are doing it.”

The more I think on it, the more I reckon that the circle of oppression is an evolved response that helps hold tribes together.  A single or group of leaders cannot stay in control of a larger group without the consensus and active help of that larger group, including censuring and oppressing others in the group for the (perceived) group benefit.  Tribes that couldn’t appropriately turn on/reject individuals for the benefit of the tribe would soon die out, self-selecting their genes in to oblivion.

But we aren’t hunting wooly mammoths or surviving an ice age (yet), so many evolved responses need to be checked.  I could list forever evolved responses that are no longer appropriate, and hopefully we’ll eventually evolve beyond them.  One way is to call out oppression when it occurs, instead of joining fellow oppressed in putting down those we most need to support, in the hour they need it the most.

Filed in Community, Homeschool | Tagged | Comments (1) »

Celebrating spousal abuse

30-Aug-09

Last night I finished watching ‘McLintock!‘ on YouTube, a later-career (1963) John Wayne film about a cattle baron with a feisty wife.  It’s also a celebration of spouse abuse.  One character, near the end of the movie trying to convince Wayne that it’s time to give his wife a good spanking, “My father said, when raising your voice stops working, you have to raise your hand.”  Guess what happens next! “My father would be proud of you!”

The gist of the movie is, GW McLintock (Wayne) is a tough but fair minded cattle baron in a US territory in the 1890s.  The relationship with the Comanche is interesting; McLintock is a former Indian fighter who speaks for the Comanche in a kangaroo court, and secretly supports their choice to die fighting instead of in prison.  The ranchers are at odds with the farmer settlers, who are looking for land to farm at 6000 feet above sea level (good luck.)

McLintock’s wife, Katie (Maureen O’Hara), is also tough, not fair, and rules her family with an iron parasol.  She has also separated from GW because of something she won’t talk about; she has moved out and comes back in the movie to help welcome home their daughter.

Said daughter falls in love with a young farmer, who happens to be a star pugilist who had to drop out of Purdue when his father died so he could help on the homestead.  Their love blossoms over fighting and, yes, when he spanks her for encouraging her father to shoot him, it’s clear love is in the air.

So the end is GW chasing Katie all over town, as she losses more and more clothing, until he finally catches her and spanks her in front of the whole town.  They he jumps in his carriage and leaves.  “Oh, no you don’t,” Katie cries, and suddenly able to run as fast as a horse in her heels (when she couldn’t outrun a Wayne-stride-through-town), she jumps on the back of the carriage.  Closing scene follows, with them embracing as silhouettes in the window.

Oh, did I mention, this is a comedy?

It is odd to watch a move like this, and both admire the slightly more respectful (for a cowboy movie) view of the Comanche situation in the 1890s.   Meanwhile, all the women in the film are just looking for the right strong man to tame them, break them like a wild horse.  Not even as an overtone — mother and daughter have multiple scenes where they slam a door or stalk off mad after being mistreated, then giving a sly sidelong glance and half smile at the abuser (husband, young beau.)

The sooner we erase these stereotypes from our cultures, the better the future will be.

Filed in Family, History | | Comments Off

OpenSource World as predicted

19-Aug-09

I was a bit melancholy last week when OpenSourceWorld was happening in San Francisco.  I have barely missed this event since I had my mind cracked open in 2001.  But I stood firmly by my boycott of the event.  If they were going to act ashamed of and stupid about the open source projects and community members that make the show possible, then they could do it without my help.

Looks like Jono had a similar reaction, seeing it up close last week, as he reports in Linux Pro Magazine:

Like many shows, an area is provided in which non-profit, volunteer-led upstream open source projects can exhibit for either free or a nominal fee. The .org area at the event was disappointingly pushed right out of the way of the exhibition to the back of the room, in a separate room with no line of sight to the other exhibitors. In this room, the open source projects were provided with a run-of-the-mill circular table and chairs. I found this a frankly embarrassing and degrading nod toward open source projects. Many of these projects form the backbone on which an event such as this can prosper, and event manager IDG needs to afford them more respect than was rustled up for this show. I was not alone in this view either; a large number of exhibitors not only were disappointed that the .org projects were shoved to the back of the venue but were keen that their commercial exhibits be in line of sight with the .orgs to promote more cross-pollination and discussion. Come on IDG, you can do better than this.

Glad now that I saved myself the time wasted and did something actually useful for the free and open source software world that week.  To all friends old, new, and not yet met, I’ll catch you next time … at one of the nice regional events that do a really great job.

Filed in Events, FLOSS, Marketing, Open Source | | Comments (3) »

Let me say it again: Get off our freedoms!

17-Aug-09

Chris Dawson, I understand you are concerned about your school system being sued by the RIAA in your post, “Let me say it again: Stop sharing music!” But spreading nonsensical fear and misinformation isn’t the way to do it.

It seems an odd choice to restrict academic openness and freedom for the sake of bad actions by bad actors or the support of old business models that need to evolve.  It also seems odd to use such strong words about sharing, which is usually a good thing in any context.  Sharing is not the same thing as stealing, which you wouldn’t know from Chris:

File sharing is bad.

One can almost hear Mr. Mackey, “File sharing is bad, mmkay?”  When he exhorts educators and parents to, “… stop this nonsense in its tracks,” Chris Dawson is parroting the FUD of the music industry.  Panic!  Gloom!  Doom!  Bankruptcy!

Where the rest of us come from, sharing is good.  Stealing may be bad, but so is a system that turns artists against fans.  A system that makes criminals out of the ignorant and well-meaning. A system that takes a simple idea to spur innovation and protect rights (copyright law) and turns it into a 150 year monopoly.

What apparently spurred Chris’ post is a new DOJ statement that millions of dollars in damages are justified for infringing on copyright via downloading stolen works and his concern that would end up with his school system in legal action:

However, the significance of this latest ruling can’t be emphasized enough to students and needs to be enforced vigorously on our networks. Want to download the latest Ubuntu ISO via torrents? Tough. Do it via http.

Some reminders of why freedom is more important than supporting dinosaur business models:

  • Sharing music is not illegal, nor are the technologies to share it.  Many artists are now distributing freely licensed works, such as under the CC licenses.  That plus the inexpensive methods of sharing via torrent network allows the artists to build a community of fans based on sharing.
  • Some legal downloads may only be available as a torrent.  For example, smaller projects or organizations with openly available and licensed content may not be able to pay the bandwidth costs to distribute themselves via HTTP.  Torrent lets the transit bandwidth costs be shared so none suffer, and also serves to reduce bottlenecks across the Internet by distributing load.
  • Restricting new technologies to protect existing businesses puts a damper on innovating and developing new business models.

If he were merely acting in a pragmatic protection of his school system, that is at least a fair and defensible position.  But blocking a technology because it can be used for illegal purposes is attacking a symptom and not anywhere near the problem.  Adopting the language and stance of the monopolistic doesn’t show pragmatism.

Chris, you had a teachable moment here.  You could have told concerned parents who read your blog something other than to fear file sharing and not trust their kids (as you apparently don’t trust your own.)  You could have taught people about this situation, how it fits in to this moment in history, and also how to protect themselves.

Kids understand nuanced arguments.  If they don’t know by now, they’ll soon learn the fallacy of whitewashing “Just Say No” campaigns.    We tell them, “Illegal drugs are bad, mmkay?” while smoking and drinking are legal and a leading cause of death, illness, and ripping families apart.  When you act like they won’t understand a nuanced argument, when you treat teenagers like five-year-olds, they lose respect for you.  They stop listening, which may be why you have to resort to restricting their legal freedoms in order to catch them at illegal activities.

Finally, if you are going to be a voice representing IT and education, it is rather unbalanced to dismiss academic freedom for fear of problematic copyright laws.  Chris seems to understand this in his last line, making it more sad that he couldn’t take a balanced position in his important role:

Perhaps the entertainment industry and copyright law will catch up with the Digital Revolution, but for now people are just being bankrupted.

Filed in Business, Classroom, Education, Fedora, Free Culture, Freedom | Tagged | Comments (1) »

Copyright clarification tools from the ALA

03-Aug-09

Thanks to this dent from the Creative Commons team, I reviewed some tools about copyright and fair use.  The tools cover libraries making reproductions, instructors performing or displaying works, and an overall tool that helps you determine what is or is not in the public domain.  Very useful for instructors who might otherwise be tempted to ignore the problem due to complexity.  Also, these tools reveal how totally complex the situation is.  (Where ‘complex’ means ‘really ugly’.)

Thanks American Library Association (ALA), you rock as always.

(Post updated 2016-08-15 to fix several of the links as librarycopyright.net moved some things around. You can find a full list of their tools at http://librarycopyright.net/resources/ . Hat-tip to Chris who found the broken link & referred me to The Ultimate Guide to Copyright as another reference.)

Filed in Classroom, Fedora, Free Culture | Tagged | Comments (1) »

Alfresco packaging for Fedora

01-Aug-09

Alfresco is one of the applications I’ve heard regular chatter around, “It would be great if it were packaged for Fedora.” In fact, the breakdown of JARs and some of the dependencies for Alfresco was one of the starting actions of the Fedora ISV special interest group.

Do you have any interest in seeing Alfresco packaged for Fedora?  Having it in an EPEL repository for use in Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.5 (& v.4?) would be great …

Do you have any skill and experience at estimating how much work is involved in the packaging effort for Alfresco?

Recall that Fedora Release Engineering specifically recommends, 1.) get your package in JPackage.org, 2.) put it in Fedora, 3.) maintain it in both.  That’s the recommended way to prepare for the future, whatever it holds.

Why am I asking?  I’ll tell you …

Someone with a desire to see Alfresco packaged for their enterprise environment + willingness to invest resources has asked me about this effort.

The first thing I need to deliver is an estimate that lets them know if they should continue pursuing this route or pull back and do an ugly wrapper-package that doesn’t use system libraries and other horrenduous ugliness we don’t want them to suffer under.  You all know how it is …

This is a chance for a few dedicated folks to get together and produce a fine set of packages for a much-desired enterprise CMS.  If you are interested, leave a comment to this post, or contact me via the usual places.

Filed in Business, Enterprise, Fedora, ISV | | Comments (9) »

A swing, a miss, and a homerun – CLS day one

28-Jul-09

A whole first day and whole event full of observations, rich moments, and lots and lots and lots of value.  What else can you expect when you get together 200+ self-identified community organizer types?  People are active, engaged, energetic, enthusiastic, approachable and approaching, and fully responsible.  During the event, and now following, I did my part to take notes and report on the ideas and flows.  You can believe I had my parts to say in various sessions, I listened a lot, and I lead two sessions myself.  Which brings me to my story and baseball analogy for the day. More…

Filed in Community, Events, Fedora, Leadership | | Comments (1) »

Fedora + Zikula = infrastructure of freedom FTW!

16-Jul-09

Today I was inspired to send the below email to fedora-docs-list; more details following the quoted email.

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 10:07:24PM -0400, David Nalley wrote:
> Simon passed me (and I just put up) the fedora specific Zikula modules:
>
> To get the source:
> git clone git://git.fedorahosted.org/git/fedora-zikula.git
>
> Included here is:
> zikula-module-fedora-fasauth
> zikula-module-fedora-theme

F! T! W!

Not to be too cheery in the middle of the field of play, but I’d like
to pause to acknowledge the innovation happening in the middle of the
Docs Team.

We are right now creating a way that other teams can use to interact
with each other to accomplish web interface objectives.  Other Fedora
sub-projects can use the new logistics list[1] for cross-team
collaboration, and follow this model for seeking an appropriate
technical solution.  Who would have thought of the idea, “Let’s give
the technical solution to whichever free software team wants to come
make their solution happen within Fedora”?  Thanks, Toshio!

As many of us have experienced, if this were an engineering
documentation team inside of a company trying to get IT, web design,
and project management to move this quickly on a new front-facing CMS
solution … well, it would either be a start-up and not have the same
enterprise quality legs that we have in the Fedora Project, or it
wouldn’t happen this quickly and gracefully.

Great, great work …

– Karsten

[1] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/logistics

In January of this year the Fedora Docs Team made a decision to use the CMS of whichever free software CMS project was willing to install and support (configure, maintain) directly in Fedora’s infrastructure for our high profile instance of their software.   Just seven months later and we are on target for a production usage in mid-August, just in time for Fedora 12 release cycle needs.

The intervening time included the Zikula team working with Fedora Web and Infrastructure to write new Fedora account system (FAS) and theme modules, package all of Zikula and needed modules for Fedora, and handle upstream coding and licensing issues that arose during the package review process.  In this regard, the Zikula team has been very engaged and really made themselves part of the Fedora community.  The community partnership is very fruitful for both parties.  Fedora gains a great CMS, customized in a repeatable and scalable way, and a new Infrastructure team to manage it.  Zikula is over the hump for packaging in Fedora, which helps their ability to reach new audiences of users, developers, and customers; their software and experience is hopefully better for the interaction.  They should continue to gain in regard from Fedorans for how they have interacted with our contributor community.

The Fedora packaging process is especially important because Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora Documentation have the same goal as Fedora Linux:  it can be used to build itself from source contained wholly within itself; it can be deployed and used identically or derivatively save for the change in Fedora logos/themes by anyone, anywhere, anytime, for any reason (all four freedoms); all of the software used is in Fedora.  In fact, the latter is a requirement of the Infrastructure team.  I appreciate how their high standards help all of the rest of Fedora to achieve the same heights.

100% infrastructure of freedom.  Smells nice, don’t it?

Filed in Community, Documentation, Fedora | | Comments (4) »