you know you’re in the big time

When you’re in the independently weekly in the research triangle area.

All Hail the man behind the shadow! Greg DeKoenigsberg!

see, this is what all the cool bugs do

Not quite a haiku but close.

making other arrangements

This is worth reading, if only as a reality-check on your own habits.

if by culture you mean fat people.

FudCON and the hackfests this weekend were fantastic. I was skeptical about the barcamp format at first but it appears to have worked out just great. I made a short list of things I have to play with as a result of what I heard or read this weekend:

• xen live migration
• libvirt
• pull-from-git and build a kernel in a single command
• smolt work:
  • better hardare.Hardware abstraction layer
  • separation of public/non-unique and private/unique data
  • smoon (smolt satellite)

I’m fairly pleased when a number of issues I’ve been dealing with have been tackled by other folks. Now I can just jump on their solutions or enhance them and work from there.

The yum hackfest days went far better than I thought they could have. We had a number of high priority issues and we knocked out all of them. We’ve gotten some very preliminary tests done and it looks great. Here’s what we did:

• made createrepo able to generate the sqlite db’s on the repository side
• made yum look for those first and grab them instead of the xml (in some very simple and non-definitive tests this affords a 28% speedup versus parsing the xml into dbs)
• brought in dlutter’s patches to make yum use the database backend a bit more intelligently and significantly speeds up package-name matching operations (yum install, erase, update with pkgs specified)
• grabbed the header-less-dep-solve mechanism from anaconda and put it in place for some early testing. It is NOT ready for regular use yet (for example, erasure deps don’t work, you know, at all) but we should be able to get it brushed up and happy before T2, I hope.
• media handling is implemented in yum in some fairly simple code from Jeremy.

What was most amazing was how much we were able to sit down and just do. I hope to put a yum 3.1.2 in the next couple of days to find out how much we broke in the process of speeding things up. Additionally, I got to speak with David Lutterkort and David Malcolm about enhancing our ability to know that yum hasn’t regressed from release to release. Dmalcolm is working on some specs for  unittests/test harness for yum.

Other results from this weekend:

I got to meet: Mike Mcgrath, Denis Gilmore, Toshio Kuratomi, Bob Jensen, Jef Spaleta, Thomas Vander-Stichele, Thorsten Leehumis, David Lutterkort, David Malcolm, Brad Smith, James Bowes and Rahul.  It was great to meet everyone in person and talk to them about what they’re doing and maybe what I can do that can help make them more possible.

The issue was raised at the board meeting and the board dinner that we may want to have a hackfest after every Fedora Test1 release. There is a little bit of a lull at that point and it’s helpful to get everyone in a room for a while to solve the issues we have (some technical, some personal)

I have to agree with the assessments of many other folks on fedora people and #fedora-fudcon. This was the best fudcon so far. A lot of momentum and we were able to keep it up throughout the weekend.

Now, if we can just keep the trips to the emergency room to a bare minimum. 🙂

boggled

This happened in boston on Wednesday.

Gist of the story: Adult swim was running a bizarre ad campaign for aqua-team hunger force. The ad group doing it setup some video displays to come on at the same time and display an image from the show. This caused panic and all sorts of problems as bomb squads ran off to check them out when people responded badly.

Now a couple of things that people aren’t saying, so far, which bothers me:

1. this is what happens when some advertising guy wants to get people’s attention. No one is noting that if the guy actually had malicious intent we would be in a state of red alert country-wide and pretty much everything would be shut down. These things went up in a number of places all over the city and no one noticed until they were turned on. Can you imagine what this would have been like if they had not been just video displays? If they had been bombs? The damage? The chaos? Why aren’t we assessing:

a. how this could happen?

b. if it can happen and there’s nothing we can do then what’s the point of all of these civil-liberties-restricting laws and policies?

2. Is it sad or just obvious that we’re living in such a state of fear that people get panicked b/c they see a new device plugged in where it wasn’t before? Does it mean we’re more alert than we used to be or does it just mean we’re paranoid?

I hope Bruce Schneier writes about this.

It seems like if the various actual bad guys out there wanted to hurt us they could just stage a series of these things all over the country using ad agencies as their unwitting accomplices. Just to prove to us that we CAN be gotten to, that we’re not actually any safer for all the censorship, war and civil-liberty-destruction that we’ve perpetrated on the world.

This also happened on Wednesday, apparently. Amazingly, Obama made the most profound statement I’ve ever heard a politician say:

“He called me,” Obama said. “I told him it wasn’t necessary. We have got more important things to worry about. We have got Iraq. We have got health care. We have got energy. This is low on the list.”

That’s right folks, we might just have a democratic candidate for president who has a sense of perspective.

I think John Edwards also has a sense of what actually matters as opposed to the host of bullshit things that in which people get bogged down. The next couple of years should be intriguing to follow.

fudcon boston

Heading up to boston tomorrow evening, weather permitting. I am looking forward to finally meet all the board members that I talk with almost every week on the phone but have never met in person.

And if all goes well (which, of course, it rarely does) Saturday and Sunday will be devoted to putting a number of heavy prone-to-breaking-things features into yum for Fedora 7.

Hope to see everyone there!