Short of emailing fedora-announce, I thought a quick blog would help catch a few people who had been trying to get in touch with me this week. I have been deep in the bowels of an evil influenza. And not just me, but my wife, and one of my poor daughters caught at home with us because she still hovered around 100F into the middle of the week. The other daughter had this flu last week. This is the second of the major flus going around that we’ve all caught since I got over the first one just days before JBoss World. Three weeks of sick is the suck.
My fever hasn’t broken yet, but it’s been steadily down over the days. My wife’s mom came flying up from SoCal in her cape and supertights with Ginger the Wonderdog last night to help out. Actually, just a cool Winnebago View (on a Dodge Ram 3500 body with a Mercedes diesel, for the RV geeks out there.) This will help a lot even though we are keeping her out of the house. She can help with the girls and going to the outside world for stuffs. I’ve been doing the cooking and cleaning whilst sick because the flu took my wife down harder than me and caused a (relatively) minor Crohns flare-up.
Still have some timely house things to stumble through today, such as guiding our friend/neighbor who is digging the massive trench for the asparagus roots that unfortunately picked the middle of this week to arrive from the garden supply house. In two years when we have a massive asparagus bed, I’ll be quite happy; right now it’s just a chore I’m too sick to do and too crucial to ignore.
Over this weekend I’ll be catching up on email; doing the few absolutely crucial and already late things I had to do this week; trying to relax some. Here’s hoping it’s sunny, nice, and peaceful for all of us.
One way … tell it like it is. Make it your mission. Be funny and poignant when you write about it:
http://exitcondition.alrubinger.com/2008/01/15/wanna-do-my-homework/
I just started reading Andrew Lee Rubinger’s blog, or maybe he just began blogging? Not sure, but he has a polished, funny, irreverent, and clean writing style. In particular, I appreciate his thematic connections between other parts of life and the funny pool of sweat, blood, and tears that is open source software. Write on!
(He’s also a JBoss guy working on the Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 3.0 project.)
Today’s photo probably has it’s own name, but I dub it “Chill Out”:
First, some caveats:
- Popularity is measured by how many Fedora account system (FAS) members are in the FAS group
- Overarching groups such as ‘cla_done’ and ‘cla_fedora’ don’t count, since nearly every member has one of those
- The count here is done today (2008-02-15 2030 UTC); I mirrored a current snapshot here; note that the links on that page won’t work unless you have the needed ACLs; the original page may not otherwise be visible to you.
Currently pulling a solid fourth position with 267 members, the Fedora Localization Project (FLP) is well on its way to taking the top mark. With the moving of all translation activities from i18n.redhat.com (elvis) this week, some portion of the 2300+ accounts on elvis are going to need to move to get an FAS account and continue translating. It won’t take quite 20% of those remaining people making new FAS accounts to push ‘cvsl10n’ over the top. (17.5% as of this moment.) Naturally, we are targeting a lot more than 20%.
The next more populated projects are Fedora Ambassadors (313), Fedora Extras (589), and Fedora Bugs (672). Arguably, only Ambassadors is a true sub-project at this point. I’m not sure how the Extras category is still used; is that the group used to give access to CVS for non-@redhat.com package maintainers? If so, that is not a sub-project per se, but I think is an equitable group for counting popularity.
Note that all this growth has been in the last nine months. There wasn’t even a ‘cvsl10n’ group at this time last year. Contrast that with ‘cvsdocs’ that has 130 members after four+ years, and ‘cvsextras’ 589 in about the same time period.
The ‘fedorabugs’ group is (AIUI) made of users that cuts across all other groups, in that it is the mechanism to give rights to change the state of Fedora bugs, such as setting to “CLOSED” or “NEEDINFO”. I don’t count that as a sub-project, although it might be fair at some point in the future to think of all such people as part of the Fedora Bug Zappers (triage) group.
The title of this post is a “how to”, and I expect you may be looking for that golden information. Honestly, I don’t think there is anything new under the sun happening here. Let me break it down thusly:
- Pick something that really needs to get done that semi- and non-technical users can excel at
- Figure out why they cannot do that thing easily
- Find and/or write some very smart tools that make doing that thing easier than it is currently
- Work really hard and openly to get people to migrate into/use the Fedora instance that does that thing that needs to get done
This is what Fedora L10n is doing. This is what the Fedora Bug Zappers team is doing. I think that Paul Frields has something like this in mind for enabling contributions from all willing Fedora users. I’d really like to see this pattern more evident in Fedora Documentation.
What do you have in mind to try this process on?
You may wonder why I don’t use, “Elvis has left the building.” Because he ain’t left, he’s still hanging around, causing a smell in some datacenter in Brisbane, AU.
Now, now, I shouldn’t be unkind to this workhorse that has been the upstream for so many Red Hat projects over the years. But now that the new, young hosting buck is in the house, Elvis can retire and sip Mai-Tai’s all day in his satin Bahamian jumpsuit.
What is happening is simply that we’re doing a final push to get all modules migrated from elvis to a VCS hosted by the Fedora Project, coming to conclusion this Monday 18 February. Once all modules are within Fedora, we can more easily connect them to Transifex.
Dimitris said something important earlier today that I want to highlight:
We can’t replace a proven (monolithic) system with a highly scalable, distributed one, nor build a new localization platform or community overnight. But we *can* work on it given enough time and bug reports.
So remember kids — collaboration includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. If you haven’t replied to many emails we’ve sent you, the time to do it is now. If you are a translator or developer and have any problems with the migration or Transifex, either let us know or file a bug report.
Open communication and honesty are cornerstones of the open source methodology. In case anyone forgot. 🙂
About out the door to JBoss World, where I’ll be doing developer community work as the editor of Dev Fu, meaning lots of video and podcasts and audio capture and talking and hackathons and meeting and friend-making and even a party.
One goal for me is to see how the JBoss.org community aspects of this are, compared against recent FUDCon fun. I’ll be sure to report back. 🙂
It’s long hassled me that Emacs doesn’t support word count by default. This morning I got tired of using wc to count words and did a little search via Google. Right at the top of the list is DJ Delorie’s “Programming in Emacs Lisp”. This page teaches how to create this function, with a bug-free complete code chunk for use in your ~/.emacs file:
;;; First version; has bugs!
(defun count-words-region (beginning end)
"Print number of words in the region.
Words are defined as at least one word-constituent
character followed by at least one character that
is not a word-constituent. The buffer's syntax
table determines which characters these are."
(interactive "r")
(message "Counting words in region ... ")
;;; 1. Set up appropriate conditions.
(save-excursion
(goto-char beginning)
(let ((count 0))
;;; 2. Run the while loop.
(while (< (point) end)
(re-search-forward "\\w+\\W*")
(setq count (1+ count)))
;;; 3. Send a message to the user.
(cond ((zerop count)
(message
"The region does NOT have any words."))
((= 1 count)
(message
"The region has 1 word."))
(t
(message
"The region has %d words." count))))))
Do a quick byte-compile-file to make your ~/.emacs.elc file, restart Emacs, you are ready to count.
After a comment made by Josh Boyer on the fedora-advisory-board, I was prompted to make a blog post, “WTF is the Fedora Project Board“. This morning I was looking through my blog archives on LiveJournal when I discovered that I actually started this series with a post there, “Understanding the difference between the Fedora Board and FESCo“. The irony is, in that entry, I quoted the same Josh as a reference in explaining wtf the Board is:
< jwb> … board says “we need to put Fedora on cell phones”. FESCo goes and oversees the adaptation required for that
So … I wonder what has happened since then? Why is it no longer clear what purpose the Board has in Fedora? One obvious thing is that the Board hasn’t done the best job in being noisy and making what it does obvious. This is partly do to the fact that all of the Board members are doers in other parts of the Project, and that is where the noise and reporting goes on. Hopefully my recent post helps explain how difference:that works.
Still, there is an obvious requirement on the Board to go above and beyond in terms of making noise about what it does. I’d reckon most of Board members were unaware that perception about the Board was unchanged or confused. Mainly I think we work in such murky waters where success is not measured by our noise level pointing back at the Board but at our noise level pointing at whatever murky problem we are trying to clear up and bring into the light. When you read a Board member weighing in on a problem with a note of authority, leadership, and decisiveness in their tone, you could be watching the Board in action. Maybe.
Folks, help make sure that the Board is doing what you expect by watching our various outputs from here onward. Tak in the usual place. If conversations on f-a-b, minutes, and blog posts don’t make it clearer to you, send a runner with a torch up the mountainside, along the perilous path, and to the mouth of the cave. Knock on the big rock twice, whistle once, and wait patiently. We may be meditating.
Just noticed this triple-recursive Linux-centric humor when catching up on my Fedora Weekly News:
AVC:Denied {trolling} For PID=666 Comm={SELinuxRemove}
Kudos to the development beat writer, Oisin Feeley, who is really on top of his game. Huzzah!
