Archive for February, 2010
I have noticed that a good number of my favorite poems evoke a certain sense of… not quite wanderlust, but the quiet little lifting of your soul that happens when you soar free through a wide, wide, ever-widening universe, somehow happy to be lonely at that moment. Some pieces of this stick so deeply in me that I’ve memorized them (unintentionally).
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
– from “An Irish Airman Forsees His Death,” by William Butler Yeats
This is the sort of stuff that comes to mind when I find myself watching the sun come up from an air mattress next to a luggage of spilled clothes. It’s a good life – one that can’t last forever, but… well, I’ll love it while I can.
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.
– from “Sea Fever,” by John Masefield
All right. I gotta sleep – I get to go see Mark’s lab today, which I am quite excited about. It’s been so long since I was around active mechanical prototypes. As much as I love software, sometimes I do itch to get my hands on something solid.
Saturday, February 27th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
In a little less than 2 hours, the Marketing Team refactored the self-introduction portion of its Join process to be (we hope) more newcomer-friendly. We did this by applying Mad Libs. For science. *little trumpet fanfare!* Actually, we don’t know if it’ll work, or if it actually is an improvement – that’s why we’d love thoughts and feedback.
Basically, the idea is that this…
- Full legal name (as you use it is fine)
- City, Country; you may use your timezone if you have a compelling reason not to specify your city or country
- Profession or Student status
- Company, School, or other affiliation
- Your goals in the Fedora Project
…can be made a lot friendlier to newcomers looking for a template email by reformatting it as something like this:
Hi, my name is _________________ and I live in _______________ (location or timezone). My Fedora Account System (FAS) username is __________, and my IRC nick is __________. (OR: I am new to IRC and would like help getting started!)
How this happened: Robyn found an article on how alternative form formats increase sign-ups; this hit IRC and the Marketing list in quick suggestion, whereupon Justin said that “we could also make an introduction madlib, because I don’t know about everyone else but I felt really uneasy about mine.” A few minutes later, Robyn, Justin, Nelson, and I were editing away in Etherpad – the video of edits is fun to watch as people hop in and things start to snowball (look at the bottom of the document the entire time). Afterwards, I tried rewriting my self-introduction with the new template, and found that I did like the Mad Libs version better, but I’m not the best judge on whether something’s actually helpful to new Marketing contributors at this point. ;-)
The revised introduction template, mid-revision. I’m yellow, Justin is green, Robyn is pink, and Nelson isn’t here yet.
If you have a moment, take a look at the old, bulleted-list version, compare it to the new, Mad Libs version, and let us know what you think.
Saturday, February 27th, 2010 | fedora | No Comments »
I spent last night at the World’s Championship Bar-B-Que Contest walking through a giant carnival and over 300 tents full of BBQ-making competitors and live music (the musicians apparently competing for who could be the loudest). Those of you who’ve seen me gleefully consume BBQ in Raleigh can imagine how happy I was about this. Those of you who actually clicked on the link might go “wait, but that’s in Houston. And you live in Boston.”
Yeah.
So let me back up a little bit. A few days ago, I got this text message from Mark Penner, an old college buddy. This is the guy who used to match my crazy bedtimes in college – we regularly took 3:14am “pi time” pancake breaks from homework. (Then he’d proceed to sleep ’till noon the next day while I woke up and went back to the lab as the sun rose.) Anyway. Back in college, Mark was both blunt and surprising, which is probably why we became good friends. He is still blunt and surprising.
“Hey, I need to know ASAP if you can visit me in Houston next Thurs (and into the weekend). I’ll pay plane.”
My response was something to the effect of: WTF?
“What do you need to know? You get to be my date for world class BBQ & millionaires Thursday afternoon and maybe the rodeo Friday (that’s flexible).”
And so it was that very, very late on Wednesday night I stepped out of the Houston airport and was lifted off the ground in a giant bear hug from Mark. (He’s a big guy.) Then we went off to get… pancakes. What else? Then we debated all the way to his apartment, where I took out my laptop and went back to work. (What else?)
Thursday evening: reminded by Mark that it’s time to put away my computer and dress for the occasion, I grumble at putting on slacks and a blazer but am somewhat mollified when we improvise me some jewelry from buckyballs magnetic building spheres. And then we drive. I notice Texas has a lot of highways.
“Wait. Is this the BBQ?”
“Yes.”
“How big is this?”
“Very big. It’s the world championship.”
“The…”
“I told you this!”
“You did not!”
“I said ‘world class BBQ!’”
“I thought you meant ‘really good BBQ’ – I thought we were going to someone’s backyard! This is awesome!“
And indeed it was. The ribs were juicy and spicy, and smoky all the way through. There was some weird sort of sausage with rice stuffed into the middle, and chicken wings just about falling off the bone. Mark’s coworkers (his company had sponsored a team and was having a party in that team’s tent, which was why I’d been invited) drank whiskey and puffed cigars – I’d never seen someone smoking a cigar before. Bands played, carnival rides spun, we got little fried donuts and fried oreos and walked around…
…and this is why I was not at Sweet Molasses when the Ballad of Buddy Guy went down.
Saturday, February 27th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Because sometimes my friends are ridiculous: Gui and Jenn are getting married, and…
They started thinking, and Gui had a crazy idea. He was dreaming big, and asked Jenn “what if we dreamed the biggest we could dream, and got the legendary Bluesman Buddy Guy to sing for our dance after the wedding?” She looked at him, incredulous – he just graduated from college and she works in theater. There’s no way in hell they could afford it, and she said so.
He looked back and grinned, and said “It’s true, but damn if we shouldn’t just go ahead and ask!”
And thus this video, where he asks Buddy Guy in a song.
The ending lyrics: (Gui got Jenn’s ring size by measuring her finger with a caliper while she was sleeping.)
Well she don’t wear much jewelry
And she ain’t got no rings
I had to get myself a ruler
Measure her finger as she sleeps
Oh come on!
Oh baby please marry me
Oh we’ll tie the knot with a dance
And have us a juke joint Blues wedding
Well she told me yes
By screaming her reply
We started talkin wedding singers
I said lets get Buddy Guy!
She said what now?
Boy what the hell you on?
I said you don’t know till you ask
And baby I don’t dream small
Well hear us Buddy Guy
We await your reply
Could you please just take a minute
To help us keep the Blues alive
Well come on!
All we need’s a little news
Oh won’t you help us, Buddy Guy
We got these too-poor-for-a-Blues-singer Blues
Well, I think we always knew this was going to be one heck of an epic wedding.
Saturday, February 27th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Melanie did a short update-video shoot with Lynne May on Tuesday night – it was done very late at night, and I love how Lynne May goes from exhausted to animated as she talks about the deployment. (The video becomes most interesting to me about 2 minutes in.) I livetranscribed – full transcript, as best as I can render it, posted below.
Transcript: Lynne May, 1st grade teacher
I’m testing – I’m going through the Sugar Activities to see what would be interesting for the kids.
I’m thinking how to introduce to unit to the children… talking about how communities – the general idea the kids have is that in communities, people get together, they work together, they agree on things, they have peace and love and they show respect.
We’re going to focus first on neighborhoods, the communities where they live. They actually have the homework of thinking about what they see in their neighborhood, so they have to figure out where they live, what neighborhoods they belong to, and what is their street where they live. I asked them to do some visualization of their neighborhood and they got to tell about what they saw on their way to school this morning from their house.
What? (Mel, from the side: You were talking at dinner about how they were really excited…) So I saw this neighborhood, and I said that we would study two other neighborhoods, I said our school community, which is the community where you work, so they’re ok with that, and then I said the third is an open source community called Sugar Labs. And I wrote “Sugar Labs,” and they said “Sugar? Labs?” And I forgot what one kid said, but I said “oh, lab, it’s like a laboratory.”
And I gave a very generic description of open source community – it’s where people who take time from their lives to develop software, applications, for other people to use for free, and then I referenced the DS and the games they have that they have to buy and pay money for. And I said the open source community people believe that there should be some things that should be available to anybody in this world for free. I think it’s like “huh?”
And that’s when I said “remember when my niece Mel, and…” and then they said “SEBASTIAN!” And then I said “Uh huh.” And (as kids:) “Oh! Oh!” And then they got really excited. (As teacher:) “We will not start right away!”
But then they… because I told their parents [about the SoaS pilot] in their [weekly classroom] newsletter and apparently some parents told their kids, so one kid, yesterday, Monday, when we got back from break, said “Are we going to work on the computer?” I said “Yes, aaand…” And then today he said “My mom said we’re gonna work on Sugar.” And then he said “My dad said we’re gonna have Sugar on a Stick.” So I said “What does that mean, Sugar on a Stick?” (As kid:) “Sugar on a Stick!” (As teacher, joking:) “You mean to say… something sweet, on a stick?” All he knows is that he’s got to be excited about Sugar on a Stick. He was quite excited about it.
But I think they are excited about it. So… So we’ll see. They might start saying “Oh, Lynne May, you said we’re going to have Sugar on a Stick! Where is it? Where is it?” By… tomorrow, they might say that. I’ll ask them to be patient.
(Melanie, behind the camera: So you’re actually going to start introducing it next week?) I will see if I can start introducing it on Friday. Or… yeah, maybe on Friday, or if not earlier, Thursday, to begin to. But it will be great to be introduce it when they have the computer, right? And I don’t think we are that ready yet to have the computers in the classroom. I mean me and the kids. Because first week back from break, I have to get them back on the routine. After being away for a week. You know, they sort of get excited like it’s the first week of school.
Anyway. So some of the things I’ve been thinking about is a [paper] journal that they would have a… when they will upload blog entries for, when they’re thinking about bug reports, that they would write there. (Melanie, from behind the camera: Battery runs out in 1 minute 30 seconds.) That’s ok, I won’t go on too long. So I’m working on tweaking on what it should look like. I have a prototype, I will see if that works.
That’s it for now. I’m pretty sleepy. (Melanie, holding the camera: That’s ok, thank you.) Bye.
Thursday, February 25th, 2010 | soas, sugar | No Comments »
A quick one done for my bandmates, because they stared at me blankly when I played the song in German. Many liberties have been taken with this translation in order to keep the rhyme and verse structure (thanks to Ginneh for showing me how to figure out what it was, and for doing half the chorus) and there are definitely awkward bits that don’t quite work, but it is at least marginally acceptable for a band of native English speakers to be able to sing and play.
This is probably best read after taking a look at the original lyrics with direct translation, and then listening to the music while reading. Also, as usual, patches welcome. When I needed to pick between the literal translation, making lyrics non-awkward to sing, and capturing the general feeling of the song, I went for non-awkwardness first, feeling second, and literal translation last, which explains the lines like “The road went by so fast” or “I’m sure that you’ll be fine,” which are totally not in the original song.
Good Times – Juli
Did you believe, did you have hope
That I would call your name
I hear you cry, I hear you pray
That things could be the same
Where is the time, where is the sea
It’s gone
It’s gone now, you ask me
Why can’t we keep the flame
The nights have come, the days go by
the landscape twists and turns
You walk on fragments of the sky
don’t seem to feel the burn
Where is the light, where is your star
It’s gone
It’s gone now, you ask me
When will you ever learn
The world is changing
Everything’s changing
It all is changing
Good times pass, this wasn’t meant to last
The road went by so fast
remember
Yours and mine, it was an awesome time
I’m sure that you’ll be fine
I’m moving on
I’m moving on
I’m moving on
You want to leave, you want to go
you want me back again
We’re breathing in, we’re breathing out
and nothing’s different then
Where is the night, where is the way
How far
How far now, you ask me
have we gone hand in hand
The world is changing
Everything’s changing
It all is changing
Good times pass, this wasn’t meant to last
The road went by so fast
remember
Yours and mine, it was an awesome time
I’m sure that you’ll be fine
I’m moving on
Yours and mine, it was an awesome time
I’m sure that you’ll be fine
I’m moving on
The lights have gone out, you look up at your star
The hands of the clock have to be where they are
And nothing and no one can change you this far
Because you know that while it lasted…
While it lasted…
Good times pass, this wasn’t meant to last
The road went by so fast
remember
Yours and mine, it was an awesome time
I’m sure that you’ll be fine
I’m moving on
Yours and mine, it was an awesome time
I’m sure that you’ll be fine
I’m moving on
Thursday, February 25th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
This won’t be particularly coherent, but I felt compelled to get these thought-fragments down somehow. It makes me feel more… personlike, to think like this.
My grandmother’s shoes are waterproof. Or rather, I should say the sneakers I am now wearing, which came from my grandmother, are more waterproof than my other, older pair of shoes, which I had worn down so hard the rubber sole had cracked – fine in the dry summer, but when I walked through anything wet, it would wick and seep up through the sole, soaking my feet in cold water.
I spent most of the snowy portion of the Events FAD in Raleigh padding around the hotel in dry socks while the wet socks and wet shoes dried over the heater, only pulling on my shoes to go outside for meals, then beelining for the heater in my room when we got back to swap out the wet shoes and socks for dry socks. Rochester and Toronto were similarly cold and wet. I finally decided I was being an idiot – “oh, but these shoes are still good!” was clearly no longer the case – and swapped out for Guama’s shoes, a sturdy white pair.
The sneakers were supposed to be hers, I think, but she never wore them and I’m just about the same size, so she sent them in a box of clothes for the kids; I got the sneakers and an embroidered apron that’s almost too nice to cook with. (Besides, I don’t wear an apron when I cook; the clothes I wear are meant to be spattered with mud, grass, tomatoes – and washed.)
Guama’s shoes, my mother’s blouse. The purple pajamas Guama sewed for me when I was little, and which have since been passed down the line of cousins, ending with Audrey, who is 17 years younger than I am and who has recently outgrown them. A luggage from Lak-ee (my 6th aunt on my mom’s side, June). A shirt from Ama (“mother of my father”) and a shirt from Ema (“sister of the mother of my father”). Mom saving her old laptop for Ama, me passing down photography and math books to my cousin Melanie when she starts getting interested in things. Little bits of cloth and thought and love passed across the ocean and across the continent and down through time to children we have not seen grown up, who we only know in fleeting and outdated snapshots of reunions when he still had braces and she was not yet as tall as her mom.
We look at the emailed pictures of preschoolers we’ve never seen; we send clothes and hope they fit, hope a hand-me-down can somehow hold the memories of multiple little girls climbing on sinks to brush their teeth, complaining that they’re not yet sleepy, growing up until the sleeves reach halfway past their wrists, watching with bemusement as the next little one fits a little bit too small into the pants at first. We put sneakers in a box and don’t know whether the person on the other end will sigh and put them in a closet, or whether she will wear them every day until they’re scuffed with sidewalk marks and comfortable and part of her – a part of her that came from you.
This is one way I know my family – by the boxes that they send, by the luggages full of toothpaste and seasoning and dietary fiber and Pepto-Bismol I haul to them when I visit, and by the same luggage stuffed with dried mangoes, Mama Sita mixes, jars of nata de coco, pouches of Mang Tomas, and paper-wrapped tablets of tsokolate on the way home. Long-distance love, highly asynchronous. And I wonder if, many years from now, I’ll be packing sneakers into a box to send to my cousins’ children somewhere across the world, and whether they will fit.
Thursday, February 25th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
When I was a little kid, I wouldn’t eat. Never finished meals, protested against second helpings, hid leftovers in the fridge. So when I went to high school, my growth spurt hit me like a two-ton truck – I don’t remember when the appetite started, but I do remember standing in the cafeteria line for my 5th lunch one day and suddenly realizing wow, I need a lot of calories now.
14-year-old Mel was hungry all the time. Unfortunately, this coincided with living at a school with a cafeteria that was… well, when you get your scrambled eggs in cubes, and you can pick them up and squeeze the water out of them, then put them on the soggy eggy-water pile and watch them suck it up again like squelchy pale yellow sponges, you can see why we were not particularly thrilled. (In their defense, it was a public school, and they did have to feed a horde of hungry teenagers 3 meals a day, so the budget for quality only went so far.)
There was a grocery store across the street – Eagle – that you could sign out to walk to. Eagle had such useful things as 2-liter bottles of Mountain Dew that were occasionally on sale, and 10-packs of Kit Kat bars, and on one memorable night I broke a multi-day fast by consuming 2 of each (yes, this was a bad idea), then proceeded to go up on stage for improv theatre night. I had been so absorbed in working that I hadn’t noticed that I hadn’t eaten since Wednesday until a teacher kicked me out of the machine shop with the order to go find some food. This is around the same time when I discovered that large amounts of caffeine made for fascinating heart rate test results in gym class.
Eagle also had discounted just-about-to-be-expired food, so I would sometimes go and get a whole roast chicken with sides for an after-school snack, or N frozen pizzas when there was an N pizzas for X dollars special going on. But cheapest of all was the instant ramen. One package made a snack. A couple packages made a meal. And one day, they were on sale for ten cents each.
I walked back to my room with bags and bags and bags of ramen – a range of flavors, for variety. Chicken, beef, shrimp, creamy chicken, spicy chicken… boy, was I going to eat well! Better than cafeteria food, for sure – and so I decided I was just going to eat my way through all my ramen, because that week’s cafeteria menu was particularly suboptimal.
The first day went well. The second and third days were pretty good. The fourth day I went back across the street for canned soup and and old roast chicken and started adding them into bowls of noodles. Then I started adding frozen vegetables, then eggs.
By the start of the second week, I was trying to drain and then pan-fry ramen in the microwave (this does not work very well). Fettucini Alfredo Ramen was a failure (cheese + milk + ramen) but Ramen Primavera (cream of mushroom + frozen veggies + ramen) was not all that bad. Pad Thai ramen was… an interesting attempt. I learned about different water/noodle ratios, textures at different boiling times, how seasoning packets tasted when combined.
By the 12th day, when I found myself mixing ramen with instant pudding and cinnamon from the cafeteria to make “rice pudding ramen,” I knew it was time to go back to the cafeteria. (Rice pudding ramen, by the way, is awful.) At this point, though, I had managed to feed my teenage self for almost 2 weeks on a budget of less than $7.
“Wow,” my 14-year-old self thought. “That was really cheap! I could eat like that for a long time!”
I did not cook instant ramen again for several years.
Thursday, February 25th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
From Luis Villa’s post on wiki usage in law school classes:
In my experience, wiki writing- whether the goal is inclusion in Wikipedia or not- really should be part of the law school curriculum. It is better than traditional papers for teaching basic research and scholarship, and if done well, can also teach collaboration, editing, and other writing skills. There is still a lot to learn about the ‘done well’ part, but I hope Prof. Goldman and others continue to experiment with it. They’re doing the right thing even if their students don’t realize it yet :)
Worth reading. Also worth reading for engineering students frustrated and befuddled by those annoying “contract” things: what writing a contract feels like, explained in coding metaphors (analogy actually from Alex Macgillivray, but following Luis’s blog is what led me there):
“To put it in computer terms, imagine the contract as a computer program. In each the object is to be able to interpret the words and have that interpretation drive a result. Now imagine that there is no compiler for your program and that you can’t run any tests. All debugging must be done only theoretically and in your head.”
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 | teaching open source | No Comments »
Mostly taken from this email call-for-participation that you may have seen around the mailing lists.
You may recall Robyn’s call for participation on choosing talking points for F13 – verily, thanks to the help of many, they have been chosen, and…here they are! From https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_Talking_Points:
For desktop users and everyone
- Automatic print driver installation
- Automatic installation of language packs
- Redesigned user management interface
- Color management
- NetworkManager improvements include CLI
- Experimental 3D extended to free Nouveau driver
For administrators
- BFO
- Authconfig UI redesign
- Pioneering NSF features
- Zarafa
- Experimenting with btrfs
For developers
- SystemTap static probes
- Easier Python debugging
- Parallel-installable Python 3
- NetBeans 6.8 first IDE to support entire Java 6 EE spec
New Spins
- Moblin Spin
- Sugar on a Stick Spin
- Design Studio Spin
- Security Spin
Now: to finish fleshing them out, we need your help. We’re aiming for a finished product like the Fedora 12 talking points. See the links to feature pages, heavily hyperlinked descriptions, and catchy one-line summaries at the end? That’s what we need for all the F13 talking points. So if you know cool things about a talking point that should be mentioned, good resources on it to link to, or otherwise have something to chip in, please add it to the wiki page; we’ll be cleaning up the final display next week right before the Alpha goes out.
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 | fedora | 2 Comments »
