Bringing order to chaos and clarity to confusion

Category Software & Technology

Is Doing More Important Than Knowing?

In Tim Ferris’ book The 4-Hour Work Week, he talks about skipping the news circuit–that doing so will add more hours to your day and ultimately doesn’t matter.  He isn’t advocating being uninformed.  He’s advocating using time intentionally for things… Continue Reading →

Irrepairable Failure

As we we think about what “change” means to the future of the Fedora Project, I couldn’t help but think of it in light of Seth Godin’s post, The Reason You are Stuck: The resistance loves committees and it hates… Continue Reading →

Today’s Resonations

I’m trying something new which is to occasionally make a post of five links to articles I’ve read or podcasts I’ve listened to that resonated with me.  Here is the first batch: The U2 Method of High-Impact Writing by Oleg… Continue Reading →

Or You Could Post to a Mailing List

What issues are you passionate about in the Fedora Project?  What are you doing to move these things forward besides talking about them on the Fedora mailing lists? Seth Godin’s excellent post about procrastination and email reminded me of Fedora… Continue Reading →

Protecting Files and Directories With encfs

Sparks had an interesting post about Thunderbird email security. This reminded me of another technique I like which is to run Thunderbird and Firefox from an encrypted directory.  In addition to encrypting the data, Thunderbird and Firefox won’t start without… Continue Reading →

Getting Fedora Out of the If-Then Loop

An increase in the number of people downloading Fedora could also increase the number of new potential contributors. In another refrain of the debate about whether defining a target audience for the default “Fedora Distribution” is a good idea or… Continue Reading →

You Get What You Track

I lost 14 pounds in 2009 because I set a goal and checked in on it a few days each week.  Fedora can benefit in the same way. The topic of weight–amount, gain and loss–is a very personal and sensitive… Continue Reading →

Fedora Talk Powers NFR's Success

We had what I’m calling a min-Fedora Activity Day today for No Frozen Rawhide (NFR).  As announced earlier this week, a few of us met on Fedora Talk and Gobby (two of my favorite Fedora collaboration tools!) to make sure… Continue Reading →

Importing Mailing List Archives to Thunderbird

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… Continue Reading →

Gnome Desktop Full of Files & Directories

Have you ever had the Gnome desktop suddenly show every folder and file in your home directory? Have you ever nuked the ~/Desktop directory (intentionally or not) and wondered later why all of the files and folders in your home… Continue Reading →

The Curse of Knowledge

A few of the goals I set for myself in 2010 were around making the Fedora release processes better known and understood. I’ve made it a personal challenge–I plan to have a pile of URLs and email archive links to… Continue Reading →

Rescuing Lost Web Form Input

One of my favorite, must-have Firefox plug-ins is It’s All Text.  Not only does it make writing long entries in web forms pleasant, it can also save your bacon.  Just today I wrote a long email in Gmail using It’s… Continue Reading →

Fixing Networked Cloned Guests

I’ve been running very minimal server installs under KVM to experiment with different web services.  As a result I rely on /etc/init.d/network to handle networking.  After cloning a guest in virt-manager on Fedora 12, networking does not work on the… Continue Reading →

Is Collaboration Overrated?

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… Continue Reading →

Goals for 2010

Studies have shown that written goals have a higher chance of being met.  I have found this to be true and am being more deliberate about setting them for 2010.  I like the idea of setting goals better than I… Continue Reading →

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