Catching the last of the low December sun’s afternoon heat out in the back 1/20th, I just finished casting a ballot for the Fedora Project Board elections. Some elections are spit-easy to vote in, and some are difficult.
This Board election stirs several feelings in me. One is the pain of sorting through a list of friends and fine associates to pick which of them gets the one thing you know they are all good enough for and more than deserving of.
Another is a bit of awe. Whilst I sit on the Project Board, it is as an appointed member, thanks to Red Hat. It is a great honor that Red Hat asked me to do this job, one I probably would have run for anyway. I understand why Matt Domsch is running again. Regardless of the honor of appointment, I find it pales in comparison to the fact of being elected. It’s a pretty awesome responsibility, speaking for the community. I don’t feel any less responsible being appointed, it is just a different feeling to the mandate.
Finally, relief. Another task completed and whisked off the list.
In his great answer the secret to Red Hat’s success, Donald Rosenberg really, really, really understands the balance of Red Hat, Fedora, and CentOS. (digg that article if you dug it.)
What made me bounce in my seat was this insight:
… Red Hat … did not abandon the little people. Instead, they found their way into a distributed and open source brand-extension plan. The other two brands, Fedora and CentOS, are not Red Hat owned.
My first thought was, “But Red Hat does own the Fedora brand?” Then I listened to myself and remembered what I’ve been learning. It is the community around a brand that owns it. Red Hat has the copyright and a trademark that it enforces, but in the case of Fedora that enforcement is specifically for supporting the freedom loving community around the brand.
That’s when I realized Donald’s article really does provide a concise and modern picture of this tribe: Red Hat + Fedora + CentOS.
Happy Birthday, CentOS.
Have you ever thought that Fedora could use better leadership and direction? Or you like what you see and you want more of it?
Been expressing your opinions and might have enough others who would vote for you?
Nominate yourself for the Fedora Project Board, the elections are underway and voting opens this week.
BTW, I heard a rumor that the Board’s page on the wiki is very boring. We need pictures of the members! A slick CSS. Wiggly moustaches like mricon.
Now, I don’t think anyone would get elected on the strength of their ideas to make the Board’s page better, but it can’t hurt to put it in as a plank for your platform.
(Catching up with this post, since I started it but didn’t complete it when we got back from Sutter’s Fort.)
We returned to the 21st century on Wednesday 28 December, driving back with both girls and their good friend Mikaela. We stayed overnight on Monday at a homeschoolmate’s brother-in-law’s house in Sacramento. Thanks, Dylan! With you and your three, we made 21 souls in the house that night; 22 if you count the dog, and some there certainly would have.
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Tonight I’m lining up these pages for some science video fun to watch with my girls. We’re looking for cool experiments to be inspired to try. Also, Malakai asked to see an old favorite we used to call “The Packet Movie” when she was three and four.
In a few hours I’m leaving with my daughters for a California History class trip to Sutter’s Fort, in old town Sacramento.
The entire class are dressing in period costumes and acting as docents for the various exhibits all throughout the day on Tuesday. I’ll be playing “Owen Sumner”, who came to Sutter’s Fort in 1843 with his wife, daughter Lizzie, and other children as part of the Hasting’s party. Malakai is portraying Lizzie Sumner, and Saskia is playing a made-up sister of Lizzie’s. Our main revision of the history of this family is removing a few possible years from Lizzie’s age to be more comfortable to Malakai, who also doesn’t want to be too near to Lizzie’s marriage to George Davis.
After we close the fort to the public tomorrow afternoon, the class is staying for an old fashioned overnight in the fort. I’ll be taking a little bit of watch duty and helping keep the fire going all night, just as was done 164 years ago.
Massive props to John Poelstra and FESCo for the creation and stewardship of the Fedora feature process.
As a documenter, this initiative was pretty important to me. I wanted to see that our release overview/summary and full release notes actually talked about features that mattered and were real. Too often we found out about a cool new feature after the notes were frozen, or that a feature was dropped and the notes documenting it never updated.
The Fedora 8 release cycle was like a breath of fresh air in comparison. We knew early on what were the likely contenders for features, and content was committed with plenty of time to make the summaries and notes.
Now that Fedora 9 is on the table, John has announced the updates to the feature process. Ongoing every week in FESCo is a review and acceptance process for features. This all is being nicely tied into a release schedule.
On the documentation side, we’re going to produce and maintain one, single release overview. This release overview is to live in Docs/Beats/OverView and get reused for the Releases/9/ReleaseSummary and other PR/marketing purposes.
I highly appreciated all the points raised within this self-referential template:
http://shunn.com/format/story.html
In this digital world, we often forget why there are conventions for dead paper that are different than for computer screens.
Seam developer and fellow Red Hatter Pete Muir has posted about his adventures with getting Seam running on Fedora 8:
http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/SeamOnOpenJDK
Best thing about his adventure? Pete ran a “highly unscientific test” and found out that IcedTea outperformed other JDKs:
This piqued my interest, so I did a highly unscientific test and installed the Sun JDK 1.5.0_14 and the Sun JDK 1.6.0_03, and (using Seam and the example compiled by JDK 1.5) took a look at how long the server takes to start.
I found that using JDK 5 to boot the server it took 32s, using JDK 6 it took 25s and using Iced Tea (JDK 7) 21s — definitely going in the right directions! I then compiled Seam and the example using Iced Tea, and (running JBoss AS using Iced Tea) got a startup time around 19-20s.
Of course, this no match for a real performance test, but I found it interesting.
We’ve gotten pretty good at community written release notes. A few more silly bugs for Fedora 8 than before (and my bad for not helping to make them better — this is the first release since FC4 where I didn’t edit the entire release notes before they went over for translation), but really nothing to worry about.
On top of that, our Installation Guide is getting better every release. We also have a renewed effort on the Fedora Administration Guide and Desktop User Guide. I’m confident we’ll see those published on docs.fedoraproject.org before the year’s end.
So what am I so concerned about? What is stalled?
Well, it’s mainly me that is stalled … More…