Category Archives: Open Source

WordPress Browser Cache Clearing

Posted on February 22, 2012 by | 4 Comments

I have no technical backing for this suggestion except that I’ve seen it work on two different operating systems with the Google Chrome web browser.

Accessing my self-hosted WordPress blog to add posts and do site maintenance, page loads were taking FOREVER.  The media uploader was hanging too.  I thought it was a plugin hogging resources so I disabled a bunch of them and it still didn’t really help.

Finally I cleared the browser cache and cookies and now everything is back to normal speed.

Ideas anyone?  I’m running plugins only provided by wordpress.org and the latest  version of WordPress and everything else.

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Posted in Fedora, Open Source, Productivity

Try Out OpenShift Today

Posted on May 4, 2011 by | 1 Comment

I couldn’t be prouder of today’s OpenShift (PAAS–Platform as a Service) cloud announcement by Red Hat. It’s not often that you get to be project manager on a release this big or exciting. It was a massive team effort involving many smart and driven people at Red Hat and it was inspiring to work along side them.

If you’re looking for a free place to host your unmodified PHP, Ruby, or Python application, look no further than OpenShift Express.  See the OpenShift site for for more information about Express and the other offerings.

This is the culmination of one of the roles I assumed after transitioning from Fedora in November 2010.  Another project I took on will also soon release in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1. It is an elegant, comprehensive certificate based system for managing your Red Hat subscriptions that goes beyond the existing Red Hat Network. This project was also particularly interesting and challenging since it involved a number of groups inside Red Hat I haven’t worked with before.

Speaking of Fedora, I hear they are on track for shipping Fedora 15 on May 24, 2011! I’ve enjoyed being obliviously unaware of the trials and travails of this release cycle while appreciating the very polished and stable Fedora 15 beta release. I wasn’t too sure I would like GNOME 3 after what I’d heard about the laptop power experience, but I do like it. I most miss the ability to see multiple time zones under the calendar and also find the calendar dim and hard to read at a glance.  For now they are minor inconveniences.

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Posted in Fedora, Linux, Open Source, Productivity, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Open Source Scheduling and Project Management Tools

Posted on December 22, 2010 by | 14 Comments

I receive occasional queries for good open source project management and scheduling tools.  As you probably know by now, our scheduling tool of choice for Fedora is TaskJuggler.  TaskJuggler provides a great benefit to Fedora in its flexibility as a reporting tool and is a key driver behind the weekly schedule reminders.

Here is a list (in no particular order) of open source project management tools I’ve come across or have heard suggested by others.  I can’t really attest to any of these being better than others, but hopefully it narrows down an initial Google search.

What others would you add to this list?

Image by mandiberg via flickr used under a Creative Commons license.

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Posted in Fedora, Open Source, Productivity

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Community At Community Conferences

Posted on November 17, 2010 by | 4 Comments

I attended WordCamp Portland 2010, a conference about blogging and WordPress. There were two sessions tracks and an unconference track.  At a couple of the session times, none of the track offerings looked interesting, but I picked one anyway.  Without fail I learned something new, interesting, and useful.  The conference was super well-organized, the food was great, and the people were friendly.

This is more of a meta post on the event and not a recap of what I learned or which sessions I liked best.

I was surprised by how diverse the audience was.  It ranged from people steeped in WordPress who do it for a living, to people interested in blogging who don’t have a blog.  There was all manner of note taking devices–more paper and pen than I expected and a strong showing of iPads.

There were also a lot of MacBooks, including the one I recently purchased. Now I understand the Apple hardware at open source conference phenomenon others have written about.  The MacBook did what I needed it to do without any monkeying around.   From 9 AM to 5:30 PM the MacBook Pro ran flawlessly and on one charge–I didn’t plug it in all day nor does it require a massive battery hanging off the back like other notebooks.  Suspend and resume did actually that, multiple times, and without a hitch–not something I can currently say about my Dell Notebook running Fedora.

Sometimes I wonder if conferences like this could have a larger sense of community at the conference itself–a greater sense of connectedness.  A lot of people, including myself, appeared to have come on their own and knew very few of the other attendees.  Some people looked really lonely and bored, particularly during the breaks as they fiddled their phones, surfed the web, or stared out into space.  At times it felt like a gathering of individual islands scattered around the room. To be clear, this is not a WordCamp problem or the result of anything that the organizers of this event failed to do. I’ve seen it at many events, including Fedora‘s.

On several occasions I made a point of sitting down at a table of people or next to someone and introducing myself.  We didn’t have incredible conversations each time, but occasionally we did.  I met a couple of really interesting people I plan to stay in contact with.  Most times I think this was because I took the initiative.

I also fully respect that not everyone attending a conference wants to meet new people or has come looking to make lots of new friends.

I’m wondering, what could we do to make it easier and less awkward to get to know the people around us and build more connectedness between the attendees?  I’m not suggesting name tags, cheesy corporate ice breakers or trust falls.

Have you had the same experience?  What are your thoughts?

Image by manu_le_manu via flickr used under a Creative Commons license.

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Posted in Fedora, Open Source, Portland

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You're Doing It Wrong

Posted on August 10, 2010 by | 18 Comments

I’m tired of the judgment and self-righteousness I see in the open source community.  I’m tired of seeing it inside my company.  The in-your-face, public shaming techniques to get others to change their behavior don’t work.  Have the recent or previous public attacks on Canonical really changed their approach or caused them to do any real soul searching?  If you were attacked the same way would you?

I grew up around religious circles that prided themselves in degrees of religious purity.  They measured (judged and looked down on) others based on their own self-defined behavior codes.  In some open source circles we have the behavior code of “the best and most right and pure way to do open source software.” It gets taken a step further which is, “there is only one right and pure way to do software and if you are a believer in the right and pure way to do software there are no justifiable reasons for behavior that might contradict those beliefs.”

Perhaps there really is a “best way” to do software development, but telling me there is no excuse for buying an iPhone if I’m a fan of open source really rubs me the wrong way.  It doesn’t encourage me to want to see things differently.  If you know what kind of cell phone I have, you know I don’t have a horse in this race.  People claiming to have the answers for everyone rarely do.

Yes, I’m a fan of open source. Yes, I wrote this post on a Mac. Yes, there are more than two colors in the rainbow.

One of the key aims of the Fedora Project is creating and and shipping a Linux distribution using only free and open source software.  This is a value that Fedora has stated as important to itself.  It makes me cringe when I hear people in Fedora lament that other projects are “doing it wrong” or “not as free as we are.”  Maybe they aren’t.  Maybe that is not one of their stated goals or highest values.  Maybe there are other reasons that aren’t widely known.  There may be long term benefits from the approach Fedora has taken, but I don’t see what is accomplished by saying everyone has to approach open source software Fedora’s way.

I’ve had similar experiences with people passionate about global warming, sustainability, eating local, and organic food.  People with an attitude of “you’re doing it wrong because you do not shop or live like us” do not make me want to embrace their ideas or thoughtfully consider them.  It pushes me away.  I’ll embrace and believe something because it has become true for me not because I’ve been shamed or judged into thinking it is something I must do. I really like the way Donald Miller pushes this idea further in his article I’d Rather Be Hated than Loved with Conditions.

My views on sustainability and food are shifting.  Partly as a result of spending lots of time with new friends where acceptance doesn’t feel conditional.  They are a great source of information on these topics and explain their views well, but that is where it ends.  They don’t try to coerce me into thinking or believing their way and there’s no subtle undertone of pity or arrogance when I don’t.  This freedom (one of Fedora’s core values too) to make up my own mind is refreshing.  It also increases the possibility that I might embraces their position.

I think Donald Miller is onto something when he talks about loving other people, particularly in the way he describes Jesus doing so.  I know it sounds weird in the context of open source software development–some of you probably think I’ve already lost my marbles–to say we should “love each other,” and yet I think it could have more lasting benefits for everyone.  Isn’t that one of the tenants of open source software–to benefit everyone?

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Posted in Fedora, Open Source

Monty Python Does The Fedora Development List

Posted on April 28, 2010 by | 3 Comments

I can’t watch the sketch below without thinking about some of the Fedora mailing list threads that make me want to poke one of my eyes out.  If you listen closely I think they might be talking about package updates in Fedora ;-) .

YouTube Preview Image

I found this sketch while researching thoughts on blog comments. I was struck by Chris DiBona’s 2010 Linux Collaboration Summit talk (about 7 minutes in) where he suggests simply banning trolls from your mailing list to re-route their rants to other non-project locations.

I wondered what others thought about applying that same concept to blog comments.  This lead me to an interesting article in the New York Times called Is this the right room for an argument? which included the hilarious sketch above.

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Posted in Fedora, Open Source

Importing Mailing List Archives to Thunderbird

Posted on February 10, 2010 by | 8 Comments

Have you ever subscribed to a new mailing list and wanted to read all the old posts in your email reader?

Here’s how to do it.  We will use the Fedora Development list mail archive for January 2010 as an example.

1. Navigate to the mail archives by clicking on devel Archives.

2. Download the gzip’d file for January 2010 from the archives page: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/ We’ll start with one month.  You can do multiple months if you like.

3. Click on the link [ Gzip'd Text 773 KB ] and save the file to a place you can remember.

4. Unzip the file.

$ gunzip 2010-January.txt.gz

It becomes:

2010-January.txt

5. Copy the file to Thunderbird’s local storage directory.

$ cp 2010-January.txt ~/.thunderbird/*.default/Mail/Local\ Folders

6. Close Thunderbird and restart it.

7. Scroll the folder list all the way to the bottom until you come to the “Local Folders.”

8. Open “Local Folders” and look for a folder called “January-2010.txt”

9. Now you can read all the messages there or copy them to another location–maybe a folder on your IMAP server.

To import multiple monthly mail archives into one folder unpack each gzip file individually and then cat them all to a single file.  Copy the concatenated file to the same local Thunderbird directory.  Restart Thunderbird and you are in business.  I like to do something like this:

$ gunzip *.gz
$ for i in $(ls *.txt); do cat $i >> full-mail-archive; done
$ cp full-mail-archive ~/.thunderbird/*.default/Mail/Local\ Folders

A list of all Fedora’s mailing lists is at http://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/.  A similar listing of all of Red Hat’s public lists is at http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/

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Posted in Fedora, Open Source, Productivity

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Is Collaboration Overrated?

Posted on January 22, 2010 by | 4 Comments

This quote struck me from an interesting article called World Wide Mush by Jaron Lanier in the Wall Street Journal:

Here’s one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn’t want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don’t get innovation.

If you want to foster creativity and excellence, you have to introduce some boundaries. Teams need some privacy from one another to develop unique approaches to any kind of competition. Scientists need some time in private before publication to get their results in order. Making everything open all the time creates what I call a global mush.

There’s a dominant dogma in the online culture of the moment that collectives make the best stuff, but it hasn’t proven to be true. The most sophisticated, influential and lucrative examples of computer code–like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or Adobe’s Flash–always turn out to be the results of proprietary development. Indeed, the adored iPhone came out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth.

To which I say, “What about the Linux kernel?”  Lanier raises some interesting points and includes some compelling examples, particularly the iPhone, but overall his article feels too “all or nothing”–that all mass collaborations in all settings always turns to mush.

There are a number good aspects to the open model that Lanier has overlooked, particularly the number of hugely successful and widely used open source software programs–all of which by definition, are free.

Lanier’s criteria for the “best stuff” is confusing.  “Sophisticated and influential”–maybe, but “lucrative?” It seems odd to make monetary success part of the criteria when the whole point is making these these programs freely available.

A “design by committee” approach for strategic leadership does turn to mush.  This is why I believe the leadership bodies of the Fedora Project, particularly the Fedora Board and Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), have an obligation to lead and that all of Fedora cannot decide Fedora’s strategic direction together.  These leaders can and should solicit input and ideas from all of the Fedora Project.

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Posted in Linux, Open Source, Productivity

Gobby Makes Meetings Better

Posted on January 4, 2010 by | 4 Comments

At a recent project management class at Portland State University, Tonia McConnell–a great instructor I’ve worked with in other classes–asked me how my meetings were going.  Since my first class with Tonia I’ve used Gobby more deliberately in a lot meetings, particularly with the Fedora Board and schedule reviews.  I’ve also use it for internal meetings at Red Hat.

Tonia asked me to tell the rest of the class about Gobby.  Before explaining Gobby I tried to set the context for my “meeting environment” in Fedora and at Red Hat–how very few of us are in the same physical location and a majority of our meetings happen over the telephone or IRC.  The looks on most people’s faces seemed to indicate that my environment was much different than theirs.

It is easy to forget how unusual my work environment is compared to traditional on-site project managers.  They like refer to my work environment as “virtual” which strikes me kind of funny, because although it isn’t in person, it still exists.  It is true that I don’t:

  • Work in an office
  • See the people I work with face to face every day
  • Work in the same time zone, let alone the same state or country as my co-workers
  • Get paid by the same employer as many of the people I work with

Many of the people in the class work at traditional companies managing projects for organizations ranging from local government, private companies and large publicly traded companies.   Hearing the horror stories of some of these environments was an excellent reminder of how thankful I am for the people I work.

I explained how Gobby has greatly improved the speed at which I can turn around meeting minutes at the conclusion of a meeting.  I particularly enjoyed the strange looks from people who appeared disturbed that I let everyone help with the meeting minutes and consider it beneficial.

Anyone who has taken meeting minutes knows that good minutes often require as much time as the meeting itself and that if you let too much time slip by after the meeting it takes twice as long. In the past it wasn’t unusual for me to take rough notes during a one hour meeting and spend another hour cleaning them up and turning them into something I could post publicly or send to the attendees.

Gobby provides the following benefits:

  • People are more engaged and encouraged to pay better attention
  • Gobby also has a chat window so people can say things without interrupting others.  I’ve seen this be really helpful at some meetings and a distraction at others–too much conversation on other topics was happening in the chat window.
  • Other people can help type notes if you are talking or contributing to the meeting
  • Other people can correct your spelling mistakes or clarify sections that are confusing
  • Everyone is accountable for the meeting minutes because they were present at their creation and have less excuses for coming back later and saying “I didn’t know about that” or “I didn’t agreed with that action item.”
  • At the conclusion of the meeting there is very little work for me to do.

I typically wait 10 or 15 minutes (longer if someone requests more time) after the meeting is over before capturing what is in Gobby and adding it to the wiki and sending another copy out as an email with the URL to the wiki version.

I have also used Gobby with great success where larger groups are gathered in a conference room.  In this environment I have someone project the gobby session on a screen so that others without laptops can see what is being written and suggest changes if necessary.

See the Fedora wiki for more information on using Fedora’s Gobby instance.

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Posted in Fedora, Open Source, Productivity

More FedoraTalk And More Action

Posted on October 21, 2009 by | 1 Comment

The long anticipated Fedora Talk Activity Day starts this Friday. If you have ideas or special needs for Fedora Talk, please update the use cases on the wiki.  See our overall plan for additional details.

We’ve been doing as much planning and organizing in advance as we can so that once we meet in person our time can be focused on implementing. I’ve been to several hackfests and FADs where a majority of the time was spent identifying and detailing things we need to fix in Fedora. While valuable, the implementation of those ideas usually takes several releases (a year or more) and some never quite get done. There are valid reasons for this I suppose, but having seen the pattern repeat itself I wanted this event to be different. My hope is that this FAD will be known for the things we got done and not so much the things we plan to do later.

For the past four weeks we have been planning and brainstorming on the infrastructure mailing list, creating wiki pages, and meeting on IRC. While not as fast as meeting in person, the overall results may be better because we’ve had time for our ideas and plans to ferment.  We got a lot of admin stuff out the way like figuring out what packages we need and what servers need to be rebuilt before we start.  Bruno Wolff also did a great write-up explaining how to setup Asterisk yourself.

One of the best ideas to come out of our planning meetings (thanks to Jeffery Ollie) was creating use cases to capture the needs of FedoraTalk users and administrators. These use cases form a natural link to open infrastructure tickets (RFEs) and documentation explaining how to execute each use case. By the end of the FAD we will have documentation for the use cases that are complete and open tickets for the use cases we intend to address in the future. This was another great discovery. A lot of great ideas from other Fedora events get lost in the sea of wiki pages, blog posts and and follow-up email discussions. Using this method, hopefully everything is in one place with a clear path to the documented implementation or a ticket reminding us we need to address it in the future.

I’m also hoping we can put to to use some things I recently learned about code sprinting at the Open Source Bridge conference–ironically the same place where the idea for the FedoraTalk FAD was born. I’m excited to see what kind of results we get from working in pairs and time boxing mini-sprints to 45 minutes.

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Posted in Fedora, Open Source, Productivity