ikhyarNet

FUDCon Toronto Trip Report

December 9th, 2009

FUDCon Toronto 2009 is over and I’m on the way home.

I Attended some good barcamp sessions:

Cloud Computing + Fedora and Amazon EC2
Fedora, Zikula and Fedora Insight
Can’t we all just get along? – Sysadmin & Developer Panel
Designing UI mockups in Inkscape
MediaWiki syntax for non-experts

My favorite session was the Inkscape session by Máirín Duffy (aka “Mo”). It was packed with information and gave me just the right level of detail to get started with Inkscape (an open source replacement for Adobe Illustrator). I was thinking of asking her to do a session like this, but she already had it planned.

I also worked on several wiki pages to help better record our existing release processes.

The biggest monster of them all was finalizing the Release Criteria pages. I had been playing around with different ideas and drafts since the beginning of Fedora 12. It was really great to launch the pages publicly a few weeks back, collect feedback and tune them for use in Fedora 13. They have changed a lot since my first ideas, but what matters most to me is that we have a larger framework now and support for doing it. Thanks to Bill Nottingham, Tim Burke, James Laska, and Adam Williamson for suffering through all the details and making the pages much better during most of the first hackfest day. And another big thanks to Adam for circulating the pages to lots of other people and mailing lists for feedback.

For the past few months I’ve also been doodling on some ways to better document our release processes–how to complete specific tasks and how we make decisions. This is important for running smoother releases and getting more people involved. So far it has been difficult to know where to start or how to represent things. Part of what helped me get started was the posts I did on mind mapping. The release criteria came out of the same effort. A few weeks ago I was excited to watch a Bugzappers meeting where they followed the housekeeping SOP I painstakingly created a couple of releases ago for creating tracker bugs. This is a victory because now the process has scaled beyond just me. The same thing could work in Release Engineering.

I went through all of the release engineering tickets for Fedora 12 to create a starting list of all the tickets that need to be created during a full release cycle. I reviewed and tuned the list with Jesse Keating and am also requesting feedback on the release engineering list. This has all the makings of some great ”wiki-fication” by linking to more detailed pages explaining each task combined with automating the ticket creation process.

During Fedora 12 I found that there was no clear documentation explaining how we decided when we are “done” and the release is “ready.” The new release criteria pages talk to the “done” part. A new “Go/No-Go” meeting SOP explains the process to bless a public release (Alpha, Beta, or Final) as “Gold.” James and Jesse looked over the first version. Next I’ll be sending it out to the lists to get more feedback.

In the scheduling department, I met with Marketing, Quality Assurance, and Release Engineering to perform a detail review of the team schedules I’ve drafted for Fedora 13. Mel, James, and Jesse gave me lots of feedback and changes for the next revision.

I also had a lot of hall way conversations with people about different aspects of Fedora and things I’m helping to move forward in Fedora. Many of the things I got done were made easier by having so many people from different places in the same room at the same time.

At past FUDCons I’ve usually left during part of the last day. It was fun to go back to the hotel, have a little down time, and meet up again with people at the hotel for “Hack and Snack.” Best of all Mo took some pictures for me and created my first ever (and very fantastic) hackergotchi. I can only dream of being able to use the gimp (an open source replacement to Adobe Photoshop) as effectively some day. Thanks again Mo!

Posted in Fedora

Posted in Fedora | Comments Off

Bought a Acer Aspire One

December 9th, 2009

With a little help from my friends (Andreas Thiennemann in particular), I managed to get my hands on a piece of equipment I was planning on buying anyway; a netbook.

Here in Canada though, these things are particularly cheap.

Next on the list of things to do is:

Never boot anything but a superior version of the greatest Operating System on a piece of equipment as cool as a netbook. The first thing that Acer will attempt to boot is a Windows Vista based eRecovery Suite in order for you to install Windows XP Home. I rest my case.
Download Fedora 12.
Check the list of things you need to know before trying all kinds of things to make the foo work. In my case, I found this page very useful. For one, it helped me boot Fedora ;-)

Posted in Aspire One, Fedora, weee | Comments Off

Sexy: Ruby 1.9.1 for Fedora 12 and Rawhide

December 9th, 2009

I finally managed to come up with a bunch of proper patches that give us Ruby 1.9.1 packages again, the way we want them to be after our little HackFest at FUDCon in Toronto. At first, they would succeed in rpmbuild, but not in mock or koji, but after all I got them to build in mock. Assuming they will then build in koji too, I'm submitting a couple of scratch builds now in the background as the Internet in the Hotel isn't all that fast, and after the builds have finished we may have some packages to play around with ;-)

Posted in Fedora, Ruby 1.9.1 | Comments Off

unshare(1)

December 9th, 2009

The unshare(1) is a new command line interface to unshare Linux syscall and allows a program to run with some parts of the process execution context unshared from parent. This new command is available in util-linux-ng 2.17 (thanks to Mikhail Gusarov who is author of the command).

Currently, the unshare(1) command allows to disassociates:

mount namespace
UTS (since kernel 2.6.19, independent hostname and domainname)
IPC namespace (System V message queues, semaphores, and shared memory)
network namespace (since kernel 2.6.24, independent IP stacks, IP routing tables, firewall, ...)

Probably the most attractive is unshared mount namespace (see Mike Hommey's "newns" or pam_namespace).

For example I have two xterms, let's start a new bash with unshared mount namespace in the first session:

Session1:


  # unshare --mount  /bin/bash
  # mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/test
  # grep test /proc/mounts
  /dev/sda1 /mnt/test ext3 rw,relatime,errors=continue,user_xattr,acl,data=ordered 0 0

Session2:


  # grep test /proc/mounts
  # ll /mnt/test
  total 0

... the /mnt/test filesystem is visible in the Session1 only. That's all, pretty simple and pretty useful :-)

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

No Ruby talk on FUDCon today

December 5th, 2009

Only a handful people seemed interested in a FUDCon session on Ruby, Ruby-1.9.1, the Enterprise Edition, packaging foo and so forth, so it's not part of the BarCamp ;(

I'm planning to have the session tomorrow though, just after lunch, in one or the other room, so if you are interested please follow around the guy with the bad haircut wairing a Von Dutch hooded sweater ;-)

Posted in FUDCon, Fedora, ruby | Comments Off

FUDCon starts!

December 5th, 2009

FUDCon starts! ;-)

Posted in FUDCon, Fedora | Comments Off

Marketing to Fedora’s Target Audience

December 4th, 2009

I am thinking of Fedora in light of an article about Billy Mays on Copy Bloggler.

“So how do you know if the product you’re currently selling or developing is great… and easy to sell? According to Billy Mays your product must have these 5 Essential Character Traits:”

1. Solve a problem
2. Have mass appeal
3. Be unique
4. Offer instant gratification
5. Be demonstrable

The Fedora Project is not selling anything. It is all free, but we still want to create a solid product that is wildly successful.

But great salesmanship, contrary to popular opinion, is not about selling ice to Eskimos.

The truth is less flamboyant, and far more reasonable.

Simply put, behind every great salesman is a great product. And Billy Mays understood that better than most.

Because if it’s a great product—it was easy for Billy to sell, using salesmanship techniques he had honed over two decades of selling.

As the Fedora Project continues to define its Target Audience these are great points to think of in terms of how we attract people to the Fedora Project and what it looks like to create a compelling Linux distribution.

Some people people may chafe at the notion of the Fedora Distribution as a “product.” I can understand that, particularly if working on a “product” is associated with strict process, lots of bureaucracy, endless meetings, and the pressure to constantly generate more revenue. Maybe that is one reason some people think defining a target audience for the Fedora distribution is going too far.

Here is how I see these five points applying to Fedora.

Solve a problem–Many people will try Fedora for fun, but if it really solves a problem for them they will stick around. They will also share it with others.

Have mass appeal–Fedora should put its best foot forward among the segment of people that we identify Fedora for. This point may not fit Fedora as well. We maybe not be able to appeal to as many people as a stain remover. The heart of the “Target Audience” discussion is that Fedora cannot be everything to everyone.

Be unique–A lot of Linux distributions look the same. A lot of open source projects have the same goals and structure. What really differentiates Fedora and how can we call that out in a way that corresponds to these other attributes? We may need to differentiate ourselves more than just being the “free-est free” Linux distribution. Especially if our Target Audience does not understand or place a high value on the pureness of Fedora’s free-ness.

Offer instant gratification– If Fedora “just works” people are less likely to abandon it in favor of something else. If it solves a problem they have immediately, in a meaningful way, why would they go somewhere else?

Demonstrable–if we can’t clearly and easily demonstrate that the Fedora Distribution: solves a problem, is appealing, is unique, and gives instant gratification, new users may go somewhere else.

Admittedly, Fedora may not fit in as broad a market as OxiClean, so I’m thinking of these points in the context of our identified target audience. Some of these are a stretch, but they are great questions to ask ourselves if we want Fedora to be great.

Posted in Fedora

Posted in Fedora | Comments Off

Addicted to Opining

December 2nd, 2009

Chris Brogan raises some interesting thoughts and questions in his post “Are We Addicted to Giving Our Own Opinions“

The tools we use for social media have empowered us to be steady-flow commentators. Watch Twitter or Facebook during any event, and you’ll see our added commentary rolling along in time with the experience…. In blog comments, on Twitter, all over Facebook, Yelp, YouTube, and several other sites, we’ve been groomed to give our opinion. We spit it out everywhere. We share, rate, criticize, deride, praise, and everything in between.

I’m not sure what to call it. In some contexts it does appear to be an addiction and in others, a sense of entitlement. The sense that, “You’ve said something in public and as a result, I’m entitled to give my opinion and you have an obligation to receive it.” I’m not against the idea of free speech, but I am uncomfortable with the notion that I have an obligation to receive everyone’s opinions.

Several months ago I disabled comments for a post on my blog. I was tired of long email threads on the Fedora mailing lists where the experience was more a battle of who could have the last word and why the previous person’s opinion was wrong versus thoughtful dialog. The “discussion” was less about thoughtfully considering unique points of view and more about “being right.” My post was about a topic that had already been discussed on the Fedora lists. I wasn’t looking for more ideas and feedback.

A few people were annoyed because they couldn’t leave their opinions at my blog. To my knowledge I had not asked for their opinion. I simply wanted to share something from my own site without five people immediately telling me I was wrong. They were free to do that from their own blog using trackbacks, but some thought that was too inconvenient. In some ways I can see that it was if they were approaching my blog with the expectation that it was a place for their opinions too.

I still haven’t made my mind for good on this. Mostly I see my blog as my own little house on the internet where sometimes I invite visitors in and sometimes you get to read what’s posted on the front door. For now I’ve taken a more nuanced approach where I turn on comments for posts where I am looking for feedback and opinions. When I just want to think out loud and give my point of view without having every bit of it critiqued I turn them off. Maybe this is the wrong approach. Maybe there is a better middle ground I haven’t thought of yet.

Brogan concludes by asking,

So the question becomes: if we’ve built all these tools, these comment buttons, these like buttons, these “share and add notes” buttons, how is this impacting our interactions and our communication? Now that we’ve gone from not having a voice to having tools to give our opinion about everything, how does this change us? How does it impact how we interact with people? What does it mean to the larger ecosystem?

My first reaction is that none of this is helping us to be more thoughtful listeners–we aren’t doing ourselves a favor by re-enforcing a behavior that seeks first to talk and then to listen. Perhaps you’ve seen this in a conversation. One person shares something and without missing a beat another person jumps in with their own experience or story without explicitly acknowledging what the other person said. I’m not saying it always has to be that way. Sometimes sharing your own experience is an implicit way of acknowledging and valuing what another person said–and sometimes it is more about taking the mic back for yourself.

I fully realize that the other side of this is that we can learn a lot from each other. I’ve learned a lot from other people’s opinions and way of seeing the world. And a lot of that has happened through comments and long discussion threads. What is most often missing for me is the sense of constructive discussion–where an idea becomes more robust, knowledge increases, and the conversation goes deeper.

Chris Grams wrote an insightful article about the phenomenon of “memo-list” at Red Hat. Memo-list is capable of providing the same level of experience (the highs and the lows) of the Fedora mailing lists. I think his conclusions are a good response to how to use our communication and commenting tools better.

The most important principle is that there are no stupid ideas– all ideas are good (in his post, Gary Hamel says “All ideas compete on equal footing”). If your goal is to use an open forum to get the best ideas, you must generate a lot of ideas. And if you want to get a lot of ideas, people must feel safe to contribute without fear of harsh criticism. If people begin to fear criticism, they will self-edit. No more openness. And a lot less ideas.

The second principle is that when you feel the urge to criticize an idea (hey, we all do…), resist, and instead come up with a better idea and rally people around it. Keep the conversation positive, constructive, and stay focused on creating rather than judging.

Maybe mailing lists are not “social media” in Brogan’s context, but they are definitely places where people give their opinions. The reminder I took from Grams’ post was the importance of being clear about your goal. I suppose social media can have a variety of purposes and some people will use the same medium for different goals.

In the spirit of getting everyone’s opinion I’m asking for yours. Comments are open. Tell me what I’m missing or should thoughtfully consider.

Posted in Fedora, Productivity