In response to John Poelstra’s recent post on Knowing Vs Doing:

I personally really like the “Knowing” side of things. I absorb a scary amount of things every day from the net. I read mailing lists, I am on a dizzing array of IRC channels, I read bugs people post about or refer to, I have a ton of RSS feeds and blogs, facebook feeds, etc. That said, I think it’s a balance for each of us, and sometimes it’s self correcting. If you find yourself slogging through posts on a mailing list, and it continues to be that way over time, you are more likely to just unsubscribe. If you find the traffic on an IRC channel holds little interest over time you are likely to /part it.

I think the best way to handle the overload is to ask yourself at the end of the day when you’re heading off to bed: What things did I get lots out of today? What things were wasting my time/interest? Perhaps if over time you keep thinking a particular thing was not interesting/useful, drop it, or switch to just ’skimming’ it for people you know who interest you.

Also it is possible to change a information channel some of the time, at least talking about the Open Source world. If you find a IRC channel for example doesn’t have topics that interest you and you thought it would, then bring up those topics. Start others talking about them and joining the channel. Perhaps you can make the information more of interest and more containing a signal that not only interests you, but others.

We all have only so many hours in the day and so much we can absorb. Follow the things that provide you value. If you need information from a channel that doesn’t, perhaps ask someone who does follow it to summarize to you whats going on in there.

Finally got around to some brewing again. Made a Scottish ale batch tonight.

I know some folks pointed this out a while back, but I only now just got around to watching it.

It’s 55min, but well worth it. See if you don’t recognize some types of people they mention from your mailing lists, irc, or other open source interaction.

Just thought I would note a few things about the Fedora nightly live composes I have been doing for a while:

1. They aren’t really ‘nightly’. I guess they should be ‘daily’. I start them composing as soon as the rawhide (or now, the Fedora 13 branched) tree finishes composing and lands. F13 branched has been landing around 11am-noon MST (18-19UTC).
2. They are currently composing from the F13 branched tree. This is the tree that will become F13. They do NOT use the updates-testing repo. Only the base repo. Updates-testing items are things that need to be tested and promoted to the base repo.
3. When all of them compose, it usually takes between 8-12 hours to compose. This is 13 “spins”: aos broffice.org design-suite desktop education electronic-lab games kde lxde security soas xfce, in both i686 and x86_64 versions. This means that they all usually get synced over late in the evening here (8pm-9pm MST).
4. They can be found, along with the script I use to make them at: http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/nightly-composes/
5. None of them have composed for the last few days due to anaconda having a broken dependency with a python-urlgrabber update that has not yet been moved to the base repo.
6. If you need a particular one in a hurry on some day, ping me on irc and I can often sync over just that one spin as soon as it’s done.
7. If you would like to see something more from these, drop me an email, comment or hit me on IRC.

Some folks have noted recently that none of their Fedora updates have ever gotten any karma (either positive or negative) in the updates system. The default settings have a requirement of +3 karma to move an update from testing to stable and -3 to unpush the update entirely (This of course can be changed by the mainainer).

I run my laptop here with updates-testing installed, and while it’s true I almost never add positive karma to an update, I have very actively added negative karma to get a broken update unpushed. Some examples:

http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F12/FEDORA-2009-13159 was a ppp update that was pushed out of sync with NetworkManager, causing my EVDO card to stop connecting.

http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F12/FEDORA-2009-12432 was a dracut update that caused my encrypted root laptop to no longer boot.

http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F12/FEDORA-2010-0685 was a nss update that had a setting that caused my fedora-cert to get wiped out when I tried to get a new one, so I couldn’t do any builds.

There are others. On the other side of the coin, according to ‘yum –disablerepo updates-testing list extras | grep updates-testing | wc -l’ I have 191 packages from updates-testing installed. There’s no way, given the time I have that I could look at each of those updates and add positive karma. Clearly more automation, less updates, or more testers are needed in order to provide positive karma, but even the chance to add negative is useful.

I finally got around today to editing the introduction to virtulization page on the Fedora wiki:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Getting_started_with_virtualization

I had been pointing users to this for a while, and it was in bad need of a cleanup. Fedora has not supported Xen Dom0 (host) since Fedora 8, yet the above page was listing all kinds of xen info, very much confusing people new to Fedora and virt. There was also a long section on losetup and kpartx to edit guest disks, but we have guestfish now. Many of the libvirt defaults (like a default URI if you are talking to a local libvirt) had changed, making commands easier. Some tools like virt-viewer were not even listed.

So, I took a chainsaw to it and cleaned it up. If any Fedora using, libvirt savvy folks have a chance, please do go over this page again and clean up anything I missed or messed up on. I think Fedora is a great virt platform, but we need to have easy to follow docs to point our users at.

Perhaps people could consider doing one wiki edit a week… if everyone pitched in we would have the wiki cleaned up in no time.

So, after having a pretty productive Fedora day yesterday (I cleaned up EPEL buildroot override tags/closed tickets, caught up on all my mailing lists and such, started in on some package reviews, helped people on IRC, etc) I decided to play around with some new IRC clients today.

I’m a long time xchat user, but I’ve been kind of looking for a replacement for a while. xchat upstream concentrates on their windows version and doesn’t seem to care about the Linux version. Also, they are very very slow to develop/add new features.

So, first I would prefer a GUI client over a terminal one (Although I might look at irssi at some point), and would prefer GTK over QT (I use Xfce, so the GTK libs are already loaded, but I don’t really use any KDE apps day to day, so it would add a good deal of overhead).

First stop was a client that I had heard of from freenode’s recent ircd update. They noted that the new ircd can handle SSL auth in some clients, including: conspire. Conspire is a fork of xchat. It’s pretty similar in a lot of ways, but there has been efforts made to re-write old crufty code (the display model was totally redone). They have also applied some patches that have been linkering unadded to xchat.

PROS:

• uses less memory than xchat
• has neat new plugins like the one that tells you who highlighted you and what they said and what channel, no matter which channel you are currently in.
• faster screen update and text area.

CONS:

• %2 in usercommands doesn’t expand to the second argument to a usercommand.
• pageup/pagedown don’t seem to work right, so I end up having to use the scroll area on my touchpad to scroll back in a channel.
• The only audio notice possible is “beep”. So, I need to load pcspkr and listen to that horrid X beep noise.
• The Biggie: It’s questionable if it’s going to continue as a project, as the main developer has moved on to working on another client.

So, after that I went on to look at quessel. It’s already in Fedora, so it’s easy to install and play with. This is the client that the conspire maintainer moved on to working on. It’s kind of neat that it has a backend and a frontend, so you can run the backend on a connected host and use it like a irc bouncer (ie, bip, dircproxy, ctrlproxy, maui, znc). Sadly however it uses it’s own protocol for that. so you can only connect to it with a quassel frontend.

PROS:

• Looks nice, very configrable.
• Has a nice ‘chat monitor’ window that lets you configure things from any channel you are in that you would always like to see there. (ie, when someone highlights you name or a keyword). It tells you network/channel/nick: and what they said.
• Aliases work fine.
• Active community. Lots of commits and activity upstream.
• sqlite for channel logs. This includes a nice find/search feature so you can search on nick/channel/text, etc. And it shows you context.

CONS:

• QT based and memory hungry. As I was playing with it, it grew pretty large in memory footprint.
• Missing basic things like a way to switch channels from the keyboard. Using the mouse for that would get really old.
• In some ways it’s TOO configurable. You can drag things around, and if you aren’t paying attention not be able to get them to reattach anywhere.
• History in your input area is global, ie anything you type in any channel is in there. Makes it hard to go repeat something if you were talking in another channel for a while.
• sqlite logs means no grep of your logs, you have to use the builtin search.

I think I am going to try quassel out for a few days and see how it looks. If it’s not working out, I think my next step will be irssi, much as I have gotten used to a “pretty gui” IRC client.

There has been lots of discussion on various lists recently about a overall “vision” or “goal” for Fedora. Sometimes that debate has been heated and not all that positive, so I thought I would ask a more positive question:

Just quickly, as the first thing that comes to mind, what is the Fedora related thing you do that you find the most fun?

For me it would have to be helping out someone on #fedora who is willing to provide info and try things and together we discover what the issue is and fix it. It’s just a nice feeling to know that someones machine is back to working as they wish and it was a cooperative activity to get there.

How about everyone else out there? Feel free to answer in comments or post your own blog entry on what you find the most fun. Is it coding? Packaging? QA work? blog posting? Showing off Fedora at a conference? Just general interaction with others in the Fedora community? Chatting on #fedora-social? Helping folks on mailing lists or forums? Getting a new Feature all done in a Fedora release? Translating Fedora software? Seeing something you wrote used by someone you know?

Just thought I would point out for folks who haven’t heard of it that we have a social IRC channel available on freenode.net: #fedora-social.

This channel can get rawkus at times, but can be a nice way to connect with fellow Fedora users and chat about most anything. Share your interests, connect with other Fedora folks, see what others do in their spare time.

Pop in and say “hi” next time you are on freenode.

Just a note to folks out there who help out in, or are helped out by the freenode #fedora channel:

Due to a flood of unregistered spambots on the freenode network, we have had to make the #fedora channel require registration.

If you aren’t registered you will be redirected to #fedora-unregistered where links and notes can help you get registered and rejoin the main #fedora channel for support. Hopefully this will be a temporary measure until freenode migrates to their new shiny ircd in a few weeks. Sorry for the trouble, but it’s pretty easy to register. See you in #fedora!

PS: See http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#userregistration for how to register with freenode.

PPS: Also, if you see a flood of spam links in any freenode channels, please refrain from clicking on them. Currently they will turn your browser into an additional flooder and you will be removed from the network.

PPPS: There is no PPPS.