I mentioned that I use my laptop as my main machine, so I thought I would share a few observations on it. I got a lenovo yoga 2 pro a bit over a year ago now. There were a few hiccups at first, but they all were sorted out a while back and now pretty much everything works fine out of the box. The resolution is awesome (and works nicely with gnome3, a bit less nicely with Xfce, but still ok), secure boot just works fine, it's fast, easy to type on, and in general a good laptop. I'm in no hurry to replace it (I bought an extended warentee from lenovo, so it's still covered for a few more years). It's really very similar to macbook airs that people rave about, except that battery life isn't as good on the yoga but the yoga has a higher resolution display and is in general a more open platform to run Linux on. Lenovo did just come out with the newer version: the Yoga 3 pro. It's lighter and slimmer yet and has an amusing power connector that can also be another usb port. If someone wants to buy me one I'd be happy to test it out and review how well Fedora runs on it. ;)

I have had a samsung galaxy S3 phone for a while now. The very first thing I did when I got it was unlock it and upgrade the OS on it to cyanogenmod. Aside from avoiding all my carriers junk apps that couldn't be deleted (nascar racing? really?), it let me do easy full backups of the phone, upgrade on the much better cyanogenmod schedule and in general be happier running a somewhat freeer operating system. Everything was running along fine until a few weeks ago. I upgraded to the CM11.0 M11 release. This is a "milestone" release, expected to be stable for people and they will accept bug reports on issues found in them. I did the upgrade, everything looked great. Then, I noticed that when away from the house or places where I had wifi (which is happily a somewhat small number of places), my phone wasn't getting data services. It would just never connect right to my carrier. :( Digging around on the net I found the problem: My carrier had upgraded both the bootloader and the modem firmware in a Over the Air update to their stock firmware (which of course I didn't get, since I wasn't running their firmware). Normally these kinds of updates are just the modem firmware and you can easily get a updater that updates your phone. However, in this case the vendor had also pushed a bootloader update that was required for the modem updater to work. :( So, the "solution" suggested by most folks was to flash back to the vendor firmware and then update from there. I tried this, but sadly, the orig firmware I had was so old it wouldn't upgrade. Then I tried using various stock firmware from around the net. Sadly, I couldn't get those to boot, they would just black screen and I would have to go back and reflash another firmware. The next suggestion was to use a odin 'one-click' (firmware+modem+bootloader+everything in one mysterious exe). For samsung devices there's a windows application called odin that can be used to flash base firmware on the devices. It's windows only. It's very much not open source (my understanding is that it was/is an internal samsung tool that leaked to the net, it was never released by them even as closed source). Happily there is a completely open source, reverse engineered application called heimdall for linux that does much the same as odin. Unhappily it's very lightly documented, and cannot simply load odin "one click" exe's that all the folks on the various forums talk about when reflashing things. ;( After monkeying around with it for an afternoon, I finally got it to flash the bootloader and modem on my phone. Then, reloaded cyanogenmod and got mobile data! So, lessons here:

• Telcos continue to suck. I am going to get an unlocked phone next time to avoid this drama.
• Cyanogenmod is great, but it's a bit sad that they don't let people know about this issue (there is a closed jira ticket saying "bummer, nothing we can do")
• I wish heimdall would grow a way to read and use the odin one-click stuff, that would make it much easier to flash without having to unpack things and figure out which specific file to load into which specific PIT slot. ;(
• I wish there were phones where the modem/bootloader/everything is 100% free.

For uncountable years now I have been using a laptop as my main machine to get my work done. I thought I would share a few reasons why this has always worked well for me. Not being tied to a desk is great. I actually don't even have a desk at my house (nor have I for a long long time). I do most of my work from a comfortable chair with the laptop in my lap. I can (and do) however move up to my "machine room" with my servers easily, or coffee shops, or pubs, or hotels or anywhere really. I think not sitting in a desk chair in front of a desk has really helped my back over the years. Laptops don't tend to have as much memory or resources as desktops, but then desktops don't have as much as servers and almost all my work is done on remote servers. Need a vm? Sure, I could make one on my laptop, but why not make a cloud instance thats much faster and won't impact my laptop at all. With the cloud and remote resources you really can offload as much computing as you like to remote servers: anything from making your laptop into just a terminal and browser device to running lots of things locally. It's your choice. I personally like to keep things running locally such that I could disconnect from the net and still be able to read and reply to email/rss, so I keep my mail and rss locally. Laptops are handy for when you are doing other things as well. For example, I will often have my laptop out on my lap, but be mostly watching a movie or watching a video game played by my girlfriend. If you were using a desktop it would be more difficult to have it in a space such that you could do other things or pay attention to other devices. Noise, space, power are also factors. My laptop is very very quiet. You have to work to get it to spin up fans. It takes up little space and power. In the event of a power outage it has a built in UPS/battery.

I've been working from home as a sysadmin for a very long time. Over the years I have developed some Habbits. Things I try and do every day, a routine if you will. Especially with sysadmin work it's served me well to make sure things get done and the most important tasks are dealt with. Your millage may vary widely. The things I do when I sit down in the morning with my first cup of coffee, roughly in order:

• Check IRC for highlights. Sometimes people ping me about urgent stuff on IRC before filing tickets or other normal processes. This lets me make sure there is nothing I really need to look at asap.
• Check IRC backscroll on some channels. There's some low volume channels that I check backscroll on to see if there was any problems overnight or important things to discuss with my co-workers in other parts of the world who might be heading to sleep soon. Many other channels I don't bother to read back, there's too much volume, or it's seldom important.
• Next it's on to email. I heavily filter my email into particular folders. The first thing I read is the things that have passed all my filters and gotten into my main mailbox. I skim (but don't reply yet) to these to make sure there's nothing I need to go address now.
• Next I skim non main inbox emails. Some of these are lists or more or less important. If I find something here I want to reply to, I use claws-mail's 'mark' feature to mark it, but don't yet reply.
• Along with mail, my RSS feeds are next. I usually skim and catch up on most of it, but mark interesting or longer articles I want to read in more depth or finish later.
• Next it's list moderation. This usually doesn't take too long, just skim subjects and senders and dump the vast majority of it as spam, letting through the legit emails.
• Then on to epylog reports. These come from our main central log server. epylog weeds out all the normal uninteresting stuff and leaves things that might be interesting. Here I can see application tracebacks, kernel oopses, any reboots, failed ssh attempts, sudo runs, etc. These are usually also pretty small and usually there's nothing of particular note.
• Finally on to social media to check g+ and diaspora. I don't follow too many people here, so it usually doesn't take long.
• Now I circle back around and look at the emails I have marked to reply to. Many times someone else already has and I can just remove the mark, sometimes I need more context and I can go re-read the thread or posts around that one before replying. Sometimes rarely I will want to ponder some more and just leave the email marked for the next day.

By processing through all this every day I keep up on things pretty well, and also I am then able to create a TODO list for the day/week based on requests or my seperate todo list, and can be reasonably sure I have put out fires before working on non urgent stuff.

You may not be aware of it, but the claws-mail mail reading application also has a plugin for handling rss feeds: RSSyl. Since I use claws-mail here for my mail it's been natural for me to also use it's rss feed plugin, and it's got some nice advantages

• You can read things the same way you read emails, same style sheet/fonts/etc, no weird themes causing reading issues.
• If you need to forward a rss entry or refer to it, it's as easy as doing so with an email.
• You don't have to run another rss feed application or depend on external services.
• You can decide how many entries you wish to keep around.
• You can decide if you want to load images or other resources not in the post from the net when you read the entry, or not.

In the most recent claws-mail update they re-wrote the plugin and it seems to be able to handle things more nicely and quikly now. It's moved from an odd format to normal claws-mail folders to store entries. If you are a claws-mail user I recommend you take a look at the RSSyl plugin. :)

I read this morning that John Polestra is going to try and do one blog post a day for the entire month of november. I'm not sure I will be able to make it, but I think it might be a good chance for me to write about some of the things I keep meaning to write about about Fedora and Open Source and related topics. I often think about making short blog posts explaining some thing we just did in Fedora Infrastructure, or how things work behind some service we provide, or just vent about the horrible time I had upgrading my android phone recently. :) (Some posts might not appear on Fedora Planet, so if you want to follow them all, subscribe to my blog directly) So, John: Challenge accepted!

This week saw a nasty little bug land in rawhide that hit most everyone: bug 1159117 This was a bug in the ordering of some units in the new systemd-217 release that caused systemd to get into loops and have to drop some things out in order to continue. In most cases it dropped out things like systemd-tmpfiles which are kind of important for a smooth boot. :( Luckily, the systemd folks tracked this down pretty quickly and it's already fixed upstream. Should hopefully be a fixed package out in tomorrow's rawhide. Upstream gnome.org released 3.15.1 (unstable development stream) the other day, and happily it's already in rawhide. No particular regressions of note here. Happy halloween, and remember to not be afraid of the rawhide!

Hey look, another week, another this week in rawhide. Almost like clockwork. ;) I mentioned last week that the rawhide kernels had moved on to 3.18 git snapshots and that I wasn't seeing any problems. Well, I did run into some after that. suspend is completely broken. It's unclear yet if it's kernel or systemd or both to blame. I'm going to try and debug it some this weekend and get a bug report filed. Not a big deal, but kind of anoying if you want to suspend and resume. There's also a anoying grubby bug that dropped into f21/rawhide the other day: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1153410 This will result in a kernel entry that won't boot right. It's easy enough to work around, and expect a fixed rawhide grubby in tomorrow's compose. Gnome 3.14.1 landed in rawhide at the sameish time it was built for f21 updates-testing. Hopefully it will get pushed through the freeze and be in the beta release. It's been pretty smooth so far here in rawhide. Xfce also got a few fixes, in particular the weather plugin had upstreams change API, so weather updates stopped working. Thats fixed up and pushed out to rawhide and all stable releases. Happy rawhiding!

Hey look, a this week in rawhide thats about a week after the last one. ;) A few happenings in rawhide land this week: With the release of the 3.17 kernel, rawhide continues it's march on and starts getting 3.18 snapshots. So far they have been working just fine here, but this is the roughest part of the rawhide kernel cycle, so do make sure and keep a 3.17 kernel around in case you need to boot back and troubleshoot or isolate a bug. There were some lightdm login issues earlier this week, but should be solved now. It's often good to have several display managers installed so you can isolate if a login problem is due to the display manager or something lower in the stack. Otherwise this week rawhide has rolled along. ;)

So it's been a while since I did a this week in rawhide for a variety of reasons: Mostly things have been running along pretty well so not really much to say. Those things that have gone wrong are similar to things I've already talked about in the past. However, there's a few things to talk about this week:

• We have now a plan for signing rawhide, it's just a matter of finishing it up and deploying it. Basically we need to switch koji to land rawhide builds in a pending tag. Then we have a process that sees the builds finish via fedmsg and signs them and then moves them into the normal rawhide tag. This will also be a excellent place to gateway builds for some kind of basic smoke testing if we turn out to want to do that.
• We want someday to get to a point where we do a full test compose every night. This would allow us to see changes that break composes faster and also allow folks to test things easier without waiting for a TC (test compose) to appear.
• A fair amount of developers are following along Fedora 21 branched now, so rawhide is a bit quieter. I will remind maintainers to build in rawhide and branched if you are making changes to make sure they go to both.