Kevin's musings

It was a very nice day out today. All the pups enjoyed their walk.

I’d like to take a few minutes to remind people of something that I think they all know, but might have not had in the front of their mind recently:

Different types of communication have different amounts of information bandwidth.

• If you are talking in person, face to face with someone, you have a lot of bandwith. You can hear the tone in their voice, see if they are smiling or frowning. Hear if they are yelling. See if they are slouching or waving their hands a lot. See if they blink, look away or frown at you. You can get a lot of information from an in person conversation, and most of us have been doing it all our lives, so we pick up on subtle cues without thinking about it.
• If you are talking to someone on the phone you have less bandwith. You can now not use any of the visual ques. You can still however listen to tone of voice, volume and laughing/crying/sobbing. Most of us have spent time on the phone and pick up on these clues pretty easily as well.
• If you are exchanging emails with a list or persons, you now have even less bandwith. You can use things like or and you do have time to think and be more deliberate with what words you use (if you choose to), but you have no tone of voice or visual clues. Just the words.
• Finally, if you are communicating with someone via irc or other IM/chat you have even less bandwith. Here people are expecting you to just blurt out your thoughts without much editing or consideration (unlike email). You have no sight or sound to help you, as well as no time to carefully consider your response.

To quote the freenode channel guidelines:

Look for the best in people. If you assume people have no self-control, they’ll confirm your belief. If you look for personal responsibility, and ask for personal responsibility, most people will respond well.

Set a good example. Be what you want other people to be. If you want them to be calm, be calm. If you want them to be courteous and friendly, be courteous and friendy. The habitual behavior of people on a channel is the most powerful influence on newbies arriving on the channel.

Often over in the #fedora IRC channel, we have people who come in with some issue or problem who only spend a minute or two gathering information on it before asking: “Should I just re-install?”. Sometimes they mean re-installing the application/package, and sometimes they mean just reinstalling the entire OS! I fear this is a ingraned reaction from the closed source software world where there is really sometimes no way to tell what the application/os is doing and returning it to a clean state is the only choice. Thats not (usually) how things work in the open source world though.

1. First ask yourself: Did this thing work before? It doesn’t now? What changed? Check /var/log/yum.log or other history and find out exactly what changed. Did you change a setting? Did you upgrade a package? You can think look for how to revert that specific thing that caused the problem. No need to re-install.
2. Do you have reason to think the package or application was messed up somehow on your disk? ie, do you have disk problems, or did you run a script as root that might have messed up binaries? Sure, then a ‘yum reinstall package’ might be in order.
3. Does the problem/issue occur with another newly created user? If not, then that points to a user specific setting. Reinstalling the package won’t do any good, because the setting is tied to your user. Instead look for what that setting is or how to revert it.
4. Is the problem/issue causing you to not be able to boot? Instead of re-installing, look to a rescue media. You can often fix the issue by booting ‘linux rescue’. No need for a re-install.

About the only time you should absolutely re-install your OS is when your machine has been compromised. Otherwise, it’s a lot better to fix the real issue, no only because it’s often easier, but because you will learn something in the process!