As many of you may know, I've been happily working at Tummy.com for many years. It's almost always been fun and all the folks I have worked with have been great co-workers as well as friends. I'm going to miss working with them, and I am sure they will continue to be awesome. :) Starting in April, I will be moving on to a new challenge: I have accepted the position of Fedora Infrastructure Lead. :) It was not an easy decision to make, but I am really looking forward to helping out Fedora full time. There's lots and lots of things to do and improve, but also some pretty big shoes to fill. I still intend to be active in all the places in Fedora that I already am, as well as local groups like the Boulder Linux users group and boulder hacking society. Looking forward to the next few months!

Just a heads up that there will be a Fedora Xfce test day tomorrow! See: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-02-17_Xfce for more information and instructions. It should be pretty easy to download a live image and test it out for us. Help make Xfce 4.8 in Fedora 15 great!

There has recently been a bit of noise in the Fedora community around the general "feel" and direction of the community. Some folks are unhappy with some things and are voicing their displeasure. I thought I would collect a few links I found of note recently and my thoughts in general on this. First, go off and read Spots excellent post if you haven't already: February 1 Next up, the bugzilla folks had a very nice post about their community and growing it: Open Source Community, Simplified So, from these we can note a few things:

• If you run into a problem, try and propose a solution. If you don't have enough info to propose a solution, how about gathering information for others to allow them to look for solution? Something? Anything?
• Be kind and appreciative, avoid negative. Toward that end, I am going to try and praise people who propose or implement fixes or solutions and not worry as much about the people who are not.
• Removing barriers is a good thing. I'd like to see more parts of Fedora have "easyfix" lists or other things that can get people easily involved.

Now to get to the subject of this post: I think Carrots are much better than Sticks. Surely in open source communities. A reward for fixing/doing something (even if it's only a "great job") is much better and more productive than a "I hate this" or a "I don't like the way things are going here". Enough of the negative (stick) and people will stop listening to you or leave, but with more positive (carrot) others, including yourself will get more done and have a more fun time of things. So, if you find yourself trying to get something done in Fedora and can't get there due to too many people waving sticks at you, feel free to drop me a line and I will try and assist you into reaching for and grabbing that carrot (or at least pointing you in the right direction).

My old laptop is a thinkpad t42p. It's a bit slow these days, and only 32bit, but otherwise it's still a fine laptop. My Girlfriend has been using it as her full time machine for a few years now. As it has several times in the past, the fan berings started to die again recently. Not sure if it's that they get a lot of use, or are substandard or what, but I have had to replace the fan/heatsink assembly in this laptop about 3 times now over the years. ;( This time sadly was different. I ordered a new one, got it in just fine and decided that yesterday was the day to finally replace it. (The laptop was sounding really quite bad as the old fan would spin up, down, up, down, sputter, quit, start again, etc). I expected to take about 30min or so and would have the new fan in place. Disassembly was easy and very much like I recall from the last time I did this. Remove the keyboard, remove the housing around the touchpad/fingerprint reader, and there is the fan/heatsink. 3 screws and it should just pull right out. Not this time. The pink heatsink pad over the GPU would not come off , no matter how hard I tried. List of items tried:

• Plastic wedge
• small screwdriver.
• Scraping all black residue off
• Floss (I could use the floss as a saw, but unfortunately, it wasn't strong enough to get very far)

Finally I took apart more of the machine so I could remove the other end of it (normally it comes off the GPU first and slides out that side), and pried with the entire rest of the heatsink. Still no luck. So, I took a small screwdriver and a hammer and (trying to be careful) chiseled at it from each side. Finally, I got it to move on one side, stuck a screwdriver into that and chiseled with another some more. Finally that did it and the gpu was free. About 2 minutes later the laptop was reassembled and working normally. I guess the lesson to learn here is that you should replace these things more often so the thermal pad does not degrade into a mass of glue. :)

Here's my somewhat tardy report on day 3 at Fudcon 2011: Tempe. I meant to write it up sooner, but travel and recovery from travel and catching up at work have made me quite busy the last few days. ;) Monday, the final day of Fudcon came early as usual. :) I had a nice breakfast in the hotel and chatted with serveral Fedora folks, then headed off to the Venue. We were in the student union building with a number of rooms on the second floor. We did a bit of waiting on various people, and setting up laptops and work areas, then started back in on the Fedora Governance hackfest. We didn't get too far into that before I slipped out to meet up with Jesse Keating and other Rel-Eng folks to go over processes on restarting signing servers and other updates tasks. I slipped back into the Governance talk after that, but it wasn't long until we decided to just break for lunch and see about presenting what we had so far as a 'Here is what we have now, how can we make it better' type document. Lunch was Pizza in the food court. Man was it busy there, we had a search for a table to accomodate our group. In true Fedora community, some of us got a table, someone stepped up to order and get drinks and Jared ordered and brought us pizzas. Move conversation over lunch on Governance, Infrastructure and other Fedora topics. Unfortunately, my plane was due out later that afternoon and so right after lunch I went and said goodbye to folks and headed back to the hotel to catch the shuttle. My flight ended up being delayed by poor weather in Denver, but I did manage to make it in about an hour or so late. Then, due to bad roads, I caught the bus back to the park and ride near my house where my Girlfriend was waiting for me. As nice as fudcon was, it was also good to be home. :) I have noticed a flurry of activity in the last few days from some folks, which is great to see. Gather ideas and energy at Fudcon and then move on to conquer the world. ;) I'd like to thank Robin and Jared and all the other folks that helped organize this Fudcon, it's a daunting task, but very much appreciated.

Another full day here at Fudcon. Fudpub was great fun, but left me with not much sleep by the time sunday morning rolled around. Still, I made it over to the venue right around time to snag a bagel and coffee and head into the my first session of the day: 10 fun yum tips and application streams. Lots of good info there, but I mostly already knew all of it. :) Was still nice to see the questions and some ah-ha's from people around the yum tips. Next I spent an hour in the IP law presentation. Again lots of good background info of things that Open source tech types need. I skipped out on this to go to spot's "Next big thing in Fedora Infrastructure". Lots of interesting pitches. I voted for almost all of them, they would all be great. We will see which ones show up soon. For lunch I went to a 5 guys burger nearby with Rex Dieter and Stephen Parrish. Good burger and good conversation. After lunch was a bunch of lightning talks. Again interesting items. Mel's presentation on The Dreyfus Model was fun and entertaining. I was impressed how far the eclipse plugin for dealing with Fedora packages had gotten. It should be nice for new contributors. Seth's idea of a jabber server to track peoples day to day events was interesting as well. Right around the time of the lightning talks, the Xfce folks released 4.8.1 versions of several components. I got those all updated in rawhide, as well as a new version of midori (0.3.0). Also, more excitingly, the nasty anoying Terminal bug that caused it to eat cpu and grow in memory got fixed. I pushed a patch into the rawhide version that fixes it for me, so all you folks who switched to other Terminals can go back to using Xfce's Terminal again. After those, everyone split up into hackfests. I ended up going with a group of people working on governance in Fedora. Should we revamp how things are setup, or at least clarify what each of the various parts work with and report to. We did degress a few times, but then we managed to get some good progress toward the end. Hopefully we can work more on that tomorrow and see if we can have something we can ask folks for feedback on by the end of Fudcon. After that session, I just wandered back to the hotel and grabbed some quick food. Going to try and get some good rest for tomorrow. Up tomorrow: Would be nice to finish the Fedora Governance stuff, would be great to work on EPEL wiki pages too, before having to head to the airport and head back to Colorado just in time for a snowstorm. ;(

Today started way too early (after going to sleep late). Breakfast was in the hotel food area. I had a nice chat with Dave Malcolm about python and packages and so forth, then off to the main event. Lots of folks in the main opening talk. Lots and lots of barcamp pitches. Max wearing not one, but _two_ silly hats. A nice "state of Fedora" from Jared. Then over to the barcamp area where I had a nice chat with jlaska about AutoQA. I wish we had a better way to get people involved there, but it's hard. I suggested a few new tests and suggested it might be easier to get folks interested once some of the tests are actually active. Then LUNCH! A nice sandwitch while chatting with more folks. After lunch was the "Furture of Fedora" and "Reducing Bureaucracy" combined talk. Jared showed the Board's list of 15 items and discussion was raised on serveral of the items and related topics. I'm not sure how much concrete was really accomplished, as people seemed more interested in specific tactics to accomplish or meet the goal, rather than the list of goals themselves. Hopefully the Board will narrow things down and we can focus on trying to meet 1-3 specific goals soon. Next in the same room was the excellent Mike Mcgrath talking about a new cloud setup project which he could demo, but not name. ;) There was much discussion of cloud issues and cloud computing and how Fedora could fit into this new world. Lots of things to think about, but all the tech seems so new and blazing it's own trail. Finally I headed to another room for the "Future of spins" talk. Jared led things with a description of where we are and a bit of history, then if we still think spins are a good idea and what for, and finally only in the last few minutes leading to discussion of solutions. I think there was agreement that the spins wrangler or lead or czar or whatever should have the ability to deny spins for failing a variety of participation in maintaining and building and supporting their spin. Christoph said he would be willing to be that person, but he's already very busy, so I hold out some hope we could find someone else interested in the process to manage things. I'm wondering if we need some completely new setup. Have a list of criteria for entry into the spins-kickstarts package, additional criteria if you wish to have your spin composed by rel-eng, and if we shouldn't have the non-desktop spins on a different release schedule from the desktop ones. Lots of things still to be determined here, so hopefully we can hash something out before the end of this fudcon. The afternoon of sessions ended with some more talking (and listening) to folks in the hall. Lots of good info and amusing stories. Now it's almost time to head out for FudPub, which should be a great time as always.

Just a quick report (I need to get a little sleep before sessions start tomorrow) on Fudcon day -1. ;) I had a reasonably nice flight and travel through the airport. The security guard checking tickets asked me both "Whats the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?" and "whats the answer to life the universe and everything?". He seemed to be at the end of his shift and very merry. On the flight they gave us all hot chocolate chip cookies, which was a nice touch. ;) After a nice lunch with my sister on arriving (at a place called "Carlsbad Tavern"), I got to the hotel and checked in. The hospitality suite was in full swing and I munched on pizza and beer (courtesy of opensource.com, who are celebrating their 1st anniversary!). After that I had many many conversations with various folks, ending with a long chat with Adam Williamson and Peter Robenson (and others). Good stuff. Tomorrow things start bright and early, so time to catch a few winks. ;)

Just heading to the airport for a day of travel, then late lunch with my sister in Tempe, then to the fudcon hotel/party central.
Looking forward to seeing lots of fedora folk.

I use IRC a LOT. Most/all IRC Clients can send what are called "private messages" (or PM's). There are a few cases where PM's could possibly be acceptable:

• You have something that NEEDS to be private (account info, phone number, etc). You should ask yourself however if a unencrypted IRC session is the right place to send that info. Perhaps a phone call, a scp to a secure server, or a gpg encrypted email would be better?
• It's something you need to impart to JUST that one person. A friendly jibe or conversation with someone you know well perhaps, or a quick note from someone that they are running late or are going to do something for you.

That said, there are a number of cases where they are NOT a good idea (especially in support channels):

• The person you are PMing might be busy, so you get no answer, but many others in a common channel may know the answer to your question.
• The person you are PMing might give you a incorrect or incomplete answer, which other people in a common channel could correct or expand on.
• Other people in a common channel cannot learn from your question or any answers you get. Perhaps they too were interested in doing that? Perhaps they have a related question that comes from that one? It's good for everyone to ask questions in a common channel.
• It doesn't scale. You can't always ask a person your questions directly. Sometimes people are on vacation or busy and you will not get answers. If 100 people try and ask one person privately each question most IRC clients would go crazy with tabs and trying to keep track of those seperate conversations.
• Some people provide support for things for a living. If you are directly PMing them shouldn't you pay for private support?
• IRC is somewhat transitory. Unless someone has setup a bouncer (znc, bip, dircproxy) and set it to record private messages, they can easily be lost (just reboot without checking all of them and many clients won't show them on restart of the app). So, if you PM someone the message may well not get through anyhow.

Finally there are some modes of interest (on freenode at least):

• /umode +R - This will prevent people who are unidentified with freenode services from sending you private messages.
• /umode +g - This will prevent you from receiving private messages from anyone not on a session-defined whitelist. The content of the whitelist can be controlled using the /accept command. When a user not on the whitelist attempts to contact you, you will receive a notice informing you of the fact and you can then use /accept user to speak to them. Users can be removed from the whitelist using /accept -user. Finally, /accept * will print the whitelist.
• Other clients or IRC bouncers may have ways to log/ignore/etc private messages. See your clients docs.

In some channels/areas it's polite to ask before PMing: "Hey, foo, mind if I PM you my phone number?" or "Hey foo, can I PM?". So, next time you are in a community channel and want to PM someone, do consider the above before doing so, odds are it would be much better to just ask in the main community channel than PM some particular person.