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Yeah, so I haven't blogged much lately, and I'm really kicking myself for it. So what has been happening? Mainly I've moved to Brisbane (Australia) and after 5 weeks I love the place, and I love working for Red Hat. But that's not all that's happened. For those that follow the Fedora Infrastructure mailing list, I recently got added to the group known as 'sysadmin-main', and as a result have become the first non American member of the core Infrastructure Team, (Eugene was technically the first but he was a temporary appointment). The Fedora Board elections are coming up, and I'm excited (no, I'm not on the ballot, but I kinda wish I was - I should have put my name down when I had a chance). I guess I will have to in 6 months time (oh well). The good news is, I will be blogging a bit more frequently now, so watch out. Tags: board, brisbane, fedora, infrastructure, life, red hat
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This post covers areas that I've already posted to the likes of fedora-advisory-board list, but covers some new topics. The slip of Fedora 11 introduces a rather interesting problem, all of our elections end up scheduled very close to Christmas, this used to be a problem in the past when all elections were held one at a time. Of course, this isn't a problem for us any more, we could technically hold 2000 elections/votes at once without any problems, the new problem is, no one has said "let's do them all at once, what do you think?" Well that's what I'm doing, most of our steering committees look have a "before Release date + x weeks" condition in their clauses for holding elections, with Christmas, this limits us to a 1-2 week period to hold them (if, god forbid, the release doesn't slip again). Now, there is a little bit of work that I need to do ahead of the elections on the voting system, I'm reworking some of the databases in the hope that I can fix many of the issues that we've had behind the scenes, I'm also working on some new features, one of which requested by Jef, "Q&A Election candidates", I've got a fairly good idea of how I'm going to implement this and I might have a prototype ready by this time next week if all goes well. Another feature I plan on adding, is creating a nomination form, so when elections are created ahead of time instead of an hour before, candidates can nominate themselves, or other people, mainly to get rid of the wiki based system, but also to simply the process 10-fold. My request now, is if there is ANY features you'd like to see in the elections software, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE file a request at http://fedorahosted.org/elections I'd sooner know now than just before it all kicks off. Tags: board, elections, fedora, fesco
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So, I can't believe it, Fedora Project is FIVE years old!  Now, I'm the first to confess, I didn't use Fedora when it was first released, and I had stupid reasons for not wanting to (think conspiracy theories etc. To put it in perspective, the first version I used was Fedora Core 2, (just under) three years ago where I studied, I slowly convinced myself to give Fedora a go, and downloaded Fedora Core 6 during a "all you can eat download weekend" my ISP held (the silly thing is, the day before they announced it, I purchased a DVD from Trade-Me (think NZ version of e-bay). I was instantly hooked again! (Up until this point, I was using a combination of Debian and Windows) I then started maintaining a few packages in Fedora and really enjoyed it, alas though, a JOB! Unfortunately because of it, I couldn't contribute any longer, until I became a student again in March, so ~April I returned to contribute again, I just couldn't keep away! It's great to be apart of some of the five great years of Fedora, lets hope I can be around for all of the following five! Tags: fedora, informative, interesting, story
Current Mood:  bouncy
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Fedora 10, the ship recently dubbed Cambridge, is now due to be launched into space this 25th November 2008. This is after several recent delays that have prevented an on schedule release. The latest announcement from Fedora Space Operations is that the official theme will be 'Solar' which can viewed at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/F10Themes/Solar, chosen with overwhelming popularity by the fantastic Fedora Art Team. Fedora 10 'Cambridge' will be the second Fedora Space Mission, after the launching of the Fedora Orbital Laser 5 years ago. --- Start SERIOUS --- Good things take time, and Fedora 10 is one of those things, kudos to the Release Engineering team for their efforts in making F10 Beta as stable as possible, and kudos to the Art Team for honestly choosing the best theme available. --- End SERIOUS --- Tags: art, elections, fedora, fedora 10, funny, kudos
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Yes, that's right, Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi, boo All Blacks, go Wallabies! But seriously, it's nice, sitting out in the sun, drinking a green tea, I'll update more later, but yeah, don't expect me to be in #fedora-* much the next day and a half. Tags: australia, brisbane, fedora, red hat
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So, my old Toshiba M70 has had a pretty good life, at nearly 3 years old, it's time to look ahead (or so I thought). It's stood up to a fairly mild beating over the time, bumps and bruises on the bus/train, accidential drop here and there and appart from a slight discolouration and part of the headphone socket going missing (the little ring that makes it look nice) it's stood up VERY well. However, it only had a single 1.83GHz Centrino Processor, 1GB RAM (I had put in another 512MB module back in 06) and 80GB HDD. The only annoying thing, was three USB slots, with two of them placed right at the back, between the power and network connections. So I notice a decent-ish deal advertised at a local retailer for a new Toshiba and decide to take Thursday to look at them, I pop into a couple of stores on the way, including where I got my M70. I looked around, avoiding the HP/Compaq stuff, and decide that the Acer's were either too underpowered, overpriced, or just plain UGLY (they look too bulky)! So really, I was only left with Toshiba, a brand that I knew what to expect from, as a result, I made several assumptions, assumptions that I think anyone else would be prepared to make, for instance, I didn't think of how loud the the DVD RW would be, or if the volume control was hardware or software... Now I guess when you think about it, they are stuff you shouldn't care about, but I do, there is nothing worse in my opinion than starting up your laptop on the bus to then hear your laptop blasting out some startup sounds, when thats happened with my old laptop, I'd just turn the knob and it'd effectively mute, because the volume knob was hardware, not software based. I held this as an expectation of the quality from my previous laptop. As for the DVD drive, well I was just stunned, I inserted a data DVD (about 2GB worth of files) and told it to copy them all onto the HDD, I then went to the bathroom, on the way back I could hear this AWFUL noise coming from my laptop. Along comes a once handy little application called the "Toshiba CD/DVD Acoustic Silencer", it's a little Windows app, and my M70 came with it too. The problem is, while on my M70 the new setting was persistent between sessions, and operating systems (even through BIOS resets and reformats), this laptop it isn't, heck the application even says (when you work out how to open the dialog) "ATTENTION: The drive speed will return to Normal Speed if you reboot or resume from standby or hibernation. These settings may also be changed by other applications." in essence "wow what a *$#% load of use this application will do you, but here have it anyway". Of course, I tested this with the Fedora 10 Alpha KDE LiveCD, and sure enough, just needed to add a violin and a drum and you'd have yourself a pretty nice orchestra... NOT. Now naturally, Fedora ran like a star, the only problem was the software volume knob, a right pain. Then I started playing in Windows, there were a couple of apps/games that don't have Linux releases at the moment, plus I thought that if there was anything seriously wrong with it, best to discover it in Windows so they know what your talking about... And then I noticed, the volume knob doesn't even work in Windows at times... that's just crazy. My last oversight was the shell of the laptop, I should have realised when I saw how dirty the White Macbook's looked at JB HIFI when I purchased this laptop, it's a silver keyboard, after two days light use, it already is showing fingerprints etc, and don't get me started about the back of the screen, it's SHINY BLACK, so every little mark, including every attempt to shut the thing shows up from a mile away... There is one redeeming feature, no plugs in the back, but heck, with so many cons and not many pros, is it worth keeping? I think not... Thankfully the store where I got it from has a "if within 7 days your not completely satisfied you can return it...", even Toshiba Tech Support suggested that I make use of it - what does that say (of both Toshiba's care for customers, and reassurance in the quality of the goods). So what will I get it's it place? Well the Dell Studio Laptops look nice and are only about 100NZD more expensive, but with HDMI out and a TV Tuner. It also does look a little bit nicer, with nothing going into the front (a nice touch in my opinion). Oh well, lets see..... Tags: bugs, dell, fedora, laptops, tech, toshiba, unhappy, vista, windows
Current Mood:  aggravated
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Okay, so round one of the wiki improvments are complete! At the request of the documentation team we enabled searching by default on various namespaces, of course, you most likely won't notice it at all. Round 2 of wiki improvements start tomorrow, this is the exciting one. We are trashing the current authentication method IN THE BIN! No more htaccess prompts - YAY! Whats going in it's place? The standard Mediawiki login prompt, it'll still be connected to FAS, it'll just look different. This has several benefits for us, it makes it easier for us to enable features such as the edit API in the future and makes the wiki _a lot_ more standard. Karsten Wade also summed up a topic I've been commenting on too, which would be round three of wiki improvements, that's the migration from our current ACL based system for protecting certain pages (such of Packaging Guidelines and Legal pages), this content really needs to be in a separate CMS. The 10 million dollar question is WHY?, Round 2 will provide speed improvements (I'd estimate a good few ms) and make it look a LOT better. Round 3 (CMS) will provide significant speed improvments however, testing shows the wiki as been on average THREE times faster without the ACL system, than with. 3x is significant, it'll allow more reliable caching of content, so I can't wait. Check out: As a last thought, consider: Is it _really_ ideal that we have to wait 3 times as long to access content because we keep small amounts of documentation that "has to be ACLed"? I think not, it puts too much strain on the server. Whats your opinion? Tags: cms, fedora, informative, mediawiki, wiki
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