Archive for March, 2010
I miss my guitar – I haven’t been able to make music for two weeks and have almost three more to go. And songs keep getting stuck in my head going “you could figure out how to play this, if you had an instrument with you.”
Don’t stop this train
Don’t for a minute change the place you’re in
–”Stop This Train,” John Mayer (one of my recent earworms)
I wonder if there’s a piano room on Allegheny’s campus somewhere. There must be; they have a music program. I wonder if I can get to it, and I wonder if anyone would mind. And I think I’ve learned my lesson about extended travel: bring an instrument, somehow.
There’s been a bunch of POSSE and Sugar Labs stuff coming down the pipeline that I’ve been remiss at uploading; I’m going down for a quick nap (starting at 3:30am onwards, I was pretty much unable to sleep tonight), and then exploding as much of it onto the wikis and lists and blogosphere as I can. Release early, release often… sometimes I have to struggle to do that too.
Monday, March 22nd, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
It is a sunny day. There were pancakes (blueberry), and scrambled eggs with mushrooms and onions, and bacon. And butter, and real maple syrup. And it was Matthew’s first birthday, so he crawled around the kitchen pulling eyeglasses off the faces of whoever was holding him. He is still tiny, and makes amused noises when we turn on and off the lights over the dining table.
The peculiar idea of voluntarily becoming unconscious for a short period of time in the middle of the day has been suggested to me after this rather large and satisfying breakfast. That, too, sounds like a good idea.
I’m going to take a nap, and then I’m going to… wake up, enjoy the sunshine, walk about before it starts to rain this afternoon – and then do some work, and work on projects, and get my life in order for when I come back to Boston for the longest time yet (a little over a month, whoa!) – not necessarily in that order.
Mmm. Sunday mornings. (Uh, ignore the pictures. I was trying to find the recording version that I liked.) That’s a song I’ve been trying to come up with a satisfactory arrangement for lately – the bass solo in the middle is a nice line, and I think I may be able to pull off the percussion with a cajon if I can find one to borrow. It’s just about the perfect song for a lazy weekend. (Except… I hope this weekend I’ll be able to catch up on the work I’m behind on. This is actually going rather well.)
Sunday, March 21st, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
I am very, very mildly lactose intolerant. This usually doesn’t matter – I don’t even think about at restaurants and such – because the food I like to eat tends to contain very little uncooked dairy. I drink soy milk instead of cow’s milk, for instance – I grew up with it and so prefer it – and one glass of cow’s milk is generally all right with my digestive system.
However, Meadville… has fresh milk. Whole milk. With chocolate in it. Served in glass bottles. Freshly obtained from free-range, no-antibiotics cows from a meadow right nearby. It’s thick and creamy and sweet and tastes like a milkshake, if milkshakes were light and infused with sunshine. And the first time I encountered it (today) I intended to stop with one small cup, and ended up drinking 3 glasses in quick succession. And I usually don’t even like cow’s milk.
I’ve been spending the last few hours alternately cleaning up the Marketing FAD page and clutching my stomach and groaning a bit, but it was so worth it. I want more. And I think I’ll go get some lactose tablets the next time I go into town.
In other news, Meadville has wonderful food.
Sunday, March 21st, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
During the Marketing FAD, one thing that came up was “boy, the Red Hat video team is awesome. I wish we had a team like that in Fedora.” Especially when ideas like this come up.
19:12 < rbergeron> but there’s also no like… “if you want to organize a fudcon and you’ve never attended… here’s what to REALLY expect / want”
19:13 < ke4qqq> mchua wrote a sop for that
19:13 < mchua> It’s like the Apple commercial. “There’s a SOP for that.”
19:13 < ke4qqq> mchua: we should do a commercial like that!!!!!
19:15 < mchua> ke4qqq: “Want to learn how to get a press kit out for your FOSS project? Make a remix for your college? Run a conference using only free and open tools? There’s a SOP for that.“
19:15 < ke4qqq> mchua: yes – we need to run with that
Anyone feel like filming? ;-)
Saturday, March 20th, 2010 | fedora | No Comments »
I’ve written about this before, but a relatively reliable clock for when I really ought to go to bed is when my body’s ability to self-regulate its temperature diminishes and I start getting visibly cold. I’m not sure how or why it happens, but it’s one of the things that forces me out of hyperfocus to go “oh yeah, I should reach for a jacket!” at which point I sometimes realize how tired I am, and sometimes obey it.
Right now is one of those times, as I am beginning to shiver. Good night.
Friday, March 19th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
If they have subtitles, I should probably watch these two movies someday, back to back, as Ebert did. They’re about education, and they sound… as if watching them will make you feel as if you’ve been punched in the gut, but sometimes that’s a good reminder of the reality of the world you’re working to change.
“A Small Act” centers on the life story of Chris Mburu, who as a small boy living in a mud house in a Kenyan village had his primary and secondary education paid for by a Swedish woman. This cost her $15 a month. They had never met. He went on to the University of Nairobi, graduated from Harvard Law School, and is today a United Nations Human Rights Commissioner.
“Waiting for Superman” studies the failing American educational system. Oh, yes, it is failing. We spend more money per student than any other nation in the world, but the test scores of our students have fallen from near the top to near the bottom among developed nations. Our scientific and medical institutions employ so many Asians for a clear reason: They must be recruited. There are not enough qualified American students.
Both films are powerful. Seen together, they are devastating. They both end in the same way, with a competition among young students to allow them to continue their education.
Greg borrowed a copy of Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities (about the brokenness of school systems) a few weeks ago; when I saw him in Raleigh he returned it, explaining that he’d stopped reading because it was depressing and gave no answer on how to effect change other than “more money here, please.” I thought about that for a while. Books that just go on about how things suck, about the gloom and doom, without a call-to-action… yeah, that’s probably suboptimal. Yeah, it’s maybe less immediately productive.
But you need to see and be aware of the problem before you can keep your eyes open for solutions. Just because a problem is unsolvable with your current toolset doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have it puttering somewhere in the back so you can hold it up against new tools you come across. And reading books like Kozol’s does do something for me; it makes me aware – at times painfully aware – of the privilege I do have. And I am reminded to be thankful, and to not take it for granted, and to use my opportunities as best I can, and to try and get as many other people as I can to have even more chances than I did, which sometimes also (belatedly) opens up those same doors to me and anybody else.
It’s why I teach – because I want to make the kind of world I’d like to learn in.
Thursday, March 18th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
Posting backlog from yesterday when I was mostly in offline places like airplanes, uploading work from the same.
Now that the FAD is over and I’ve got my list of wrap-up action (which I’m supposed to finish before I land back in Pittsburgh), it’s time for me to figure out what I haven’t been doing for the past two weeks. And catch up. A lot.
First and foremost on my mind is POSSE – this summer’s POSSEs need to be opened up to registration, and the Big Announcement sent out. I am sorely overdue on this; it should have gone out at least a week ago, if not more. POSSEs are going to happen and they are going to be spectacular, and the surrounding materials need to reflect the (high) level of confidence my brain has on this. (One of my weaknesses: I am extremely comfortable with improvisation, but sometimes fail to register that other people need to be reassured that we are prepared to improvise.) As such, POSSE is the only thing I’m working on between now and the weekend. (Well, okay. There’s one exception; I will spend one hour in tomorrow’s Marketing meeting – which Robyn Bergeron is running – and one hour after that doing whatever small tasks need to be done to clean up, but that is all.)
So that’s it for work. I’ll worry about other work stuff… later. Next week. Yeah. Including that email backlog. Um.
I also need to do my taxes – which take more trouble, in my opinion, than my actual average income for the year 2009 warrants. This happened for 2008 as well; working in 3 states and living in 2 brings… complications. Last year it took me about 16 hours to go through all the paperwork and figure out I owed the state of Illinois something like $19. That was… fun. This year I hope to get through that process more efficiently, but I’m blocking on my H2 (or whatever that form’s called) from OLPC for the… 9 days in 2009 a bunch of us were still employees for. Massachusetts also has this lovely thing wherein you have to prove that you had health insurance coverage at all times, so I get to juggle papers from OLPC, OLPC-COBRA, and Red Hat – again, not bad, but just… I don’t know how to do this stuff, it’s my second time through it, there are so many rules and I’m just blindly following them and trying to understand the process… this is the one time of the year that I wish my life were more stable. Randomness brings paperwork with it sometimes. (2010, I think, will be much simpler… maybe. So long as I don’t actually become a student until spring of 2011, everything should be all normal, right? I’ll have the same status and legal address for a whole year, right? Right?)
So that… is the weekend after whenever the last bit of paperwork arrives. Whee. (And now is when I remind myself that yes, I actually do want to learn about this “finance” thing, because… it’s… good to learn, so I can understand this stuff that I don’t like, so I can minimize it as much as possible while still being responsible about it. Blah.)
I’ve also realized that my budgeting and financial forecasting will be simplified if I sit down and actually write out a monthly calendar of bill-paying – what’s due when, from credit card to automatic retirement account(s) depositing to regular car maintenance to my cell phone to automatic non-retirement savings to… I mean, this is stuff that’s already in my head, I remember the dates manually with the help of email reminders, it’s all working, it just takes a lot of time that could be automated out. So sitting down and figuring that out and… dunno, maybe actually finding budgeting software and evaluating it and seeing which one is the most scriptable (I need something stupidly simple, GNUcash has too many features) and setting up some autocron to remind me “hey, I just entered this auto-scheduled transaction for your linode account and it’s this much and you have that much left and YAY YOU’RE SAVING!” is… probably a weekend day worth taking at some point.
And honestly, I need to get rid of stuff. I’m not sure if I could fit everything I own into my car any more. Actually, scratch that; I’ve got a keyboard, which takes up something like 4 bins and a luggage worth of space. Nope, I can’t do that any more. Need to get rid of stuff. But even then, I’m getting a motorcycle – so I suppose the goal is “except for the keyboard and the motorcycle, everything I own should fit into my car.” No sense in carrying around things you don’t need. No sense in owning and maintaining them, either. Best give them to someone else who can appreciate them more.
On that note – who wants books?
Then there are small side projects of the engineering sort that I would like to do, but which I haven’t started because I’m worried that I can’t contain them to start and stop in one weekend – that I would keep hacking on it past the end-date and my life will be consumed and – I mean, I’ve gotten into this mode before, I’ve had times where I could not stop engineering and wrote control code in C for… probably something like 50 consecutive hours except for short bathroom and food-fetching breaks, looking up days later to realize I hadn’t slept or had a proper meal in that entire time. (I was 17 then and far more able to ignore… um… everything.)
I mean, I was happy! Flow state! The project worked! It was wonderful – and I’m also positive that every time I do this, I probably shave several days off my lifespan by utterly wrecking my physical self and not giving it any time to recover. And I used to do this on a regular (for a while, it was even a weekly) basis. I’m better at this than I was when I was 15 and slept 5 days a week most weeks. A few years later when I was in college, it wasn’t unusual for me to go to bed at 7am because I was in WHEE HACKING mode, then wake up and go to an 8am class, then do it again the next day. I have dramatically improved, but only compared to an ABSOLUTELY AWFUL BAR. Hyperfocus can be dangerous when there’s nobody to snap me out of it, so I often just don’t let myself get started. For similar reasons, I don’t go on Facebook or play World of Warcraft or purchase a gaming console. And for similar reasons, I live with people; hearing the background noise of the rhythm of their lives helps me remember that I ought to set mine occasionally.
I definitely see why my parents are more than mildly concerned about what’s going to happen to me absent some sort of stabilizing force.
I hope I will get to hang out with Olin people this weekend. Katie says there is a dance on Friday that I want to make, and Matt and Bonnie are going flying, and I haven’t seen the folks from Kristen’s apartment at all except for failing the Olin challenge walking back from CMU last week with Bonnie and running into Aasted and Dellin for a few minutes. I also want to run around Meadville and explore the town I’ll be spending the next few weeks in.
I’m still learning about the things I’m good at and the things I’m not so good at. I’ve learned that, as a catalyst, I only function in the presence of a reagent – which means I’m great in meetings and classrooms where I’ve got to get other people rolling, but not quite so good at large amounts of solo complex advance planning for said meetings/classrooms. I think what I’m best at is getting other people into flow state – that’s what I can get into flow state on, myself.
Which is funny, because the moments of hyperfocus I described would usually be characterized as solo-hacking, but… that wasn’t the case. I’d go for 50-hour stretches because I’d be the constant presence in the lab while other people drifted in and out – even if it was an individual project or if they weren’t on the project team, I’d be calling them over and going “oh, what do you think of this?” and “do you know anything about that?” And the long stretches in the middle of the night I did spend alone were decompression times for me to gather and respond to all the input from these other people. So I suppose that engineering has always been a social activity for me.
Braindump feels like it’s run out now. Time to work.
Thursday, March 18th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 2 Comments »
Dear lazyweb,
There are small side projects of the engineering sort that I would like to see done. I can sit down with people and be a “customer” and help them spec out what needs to happen, and test afterwards and give continuous feedback and sometimes pitch in on the work, but I don’t have the bandwidth to drive the doing of this stuff myself.
- Package transcriber and get people to start using it to subtitle videos – especially if we’re going to have more media coming.
- Do a melkjug sprint (old maintainers Luke Tucker and Josh Bronson have stopped working on it, sadly – it’s a recent abandonment mostly due to lack of time and $dayjob stuff) to clean the code and fix some bugs and get it in (maybe?) packagable-and-deployable-for-Fedora state. I think this could be a great tool for news filtering. See streetsblog for a working example – play around with the sliders on the right. Ryan was looking at the dependencies to figure out how terrible it would be to package, and I’ve been peeking into the code to see how hard the bugs might be to fix.
- Make a FAS-scrapin’, dashboard-makin’, research-enablin’ python library. I’ve blogged twice about this, once as a library and once as a library (the same one) that enables dashboard creation. Slowly – very, very slowly – momentum has started to build – thank you to Luke and Toshio, Ian, Diana, Michael, and everyone who’s kept on nudging this a little bit at a time.
Now, here’s my question: these are things that are clearly not critical-path to the release of Fedora-the-distribution, but these could be rather helpful if they worked. Where do these go?
- Summer of Code project ideas?
- Engineering Services queue?
- Planet? Obviously I thought the answer to this question was “yes.” ;-)
- Somewhere else?
Thursday, March 18th, 2010 | fedora | 1 Comment »
Or so I hypothesize. David Wiley and his students have come up with a lovely “waterfall” visualization of student work-time correlated with their final grade. (I’m not sure if the code is open source yet, but I’ve asked about that in a comment, and I certainly hope so.)
My guess, based on the years I’ve spent as a TA in college engineering classes (and far too much time grading first-year math and physics problem sets): anything that can be done to reduce one’s evaluation workload is extremely tempting to a teacher. And maybe there’s a better word for this, but the one I know for “things that let you quickly monitor how somebody or something’s doing” is a dashboard.
The intent of this is not to automate grading, but to let teachers draw on a richer pool of data on which to base your evaluations by making that pool of data easier to access and manipulate to draw your own conclusions. Show me all the patches a student has made this term; how many were accepted? Show me her blog posts. Are they thoughtful and articulate? Show me his mailing list conversations, his IRC logs – is he teaching others and being constructive? Show me their wiki edits. Show me a visualization of their code. Show me, show me, show me.
I don’t know what this would look like; I think it would be different for each class and for each teacher. I would be fascinated to see what teachers and professors would do if we made better APIs to help them mine the data sources of the open source projects their students are working in.
Bonus: this makes life easier for researchers studying open source participation and teaching and learning in open source communities. Actually, an initial prototype (8 lines of quickly-written and deliberately horrid python written in the hopes that it would make another programmer twitch enough to pick it up and do it properly) of something like this was inspired by Diana Martin, an anthropology grad student
For instance, some Python-esque examples for a variant of this I could imagine for Fedora-specific services:
import fedorascraper
# returns a list of strings containing the last 10 edits ianweller made on Fedora's mediawiki instance
fedorascraper.mediawiki.lastedits(10, 'ianweller')
# returns the number of Planet posts rrix wrote since Jan 4 of 2010
fedorascraper.planet.num_posts_since('2010-01-04','rrix')
That way I can start looking for interesting correlations and asking questions like…
- Do people who maintain packages tend to post a lot on mailing lists right after a release?
- Of the people who have posted at least 3 times to design-list in the past 2 months, who maintains the most packages?
- These two students seem to build off each other’s work a lot – when did they start having a lot of back-and-forth conversations on IRC, and has this increased over time, and is it steady-state?
Interesting cross-correlation questions like that should be Easy To Ask. Easy enough that they can be assigned for homework questions like this – imagine students doing this not just for US Census data, but Fedora data, or data from – well, any open source project you might implement this sort of thing for.
Teachers: would this be useful? What sorts of tools and libraries would make it easier for you to grade student work in open source – or what do you already use for it – and what lessons can we learn from this in terms of making a “open source community health” dashboard?
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 | fedora, teaching open source | 3 Comments »
One of the highlights of last week when everyone (where by “everyone” I mean “Max, Greg, and Sebastian”) was in town was a trip out to Cabots’ to get their legendary Pru Frappe to go. It’s 12 scoops of ice cream in a frappe (milkshake), and it… comes in a bucket.
We drank it in the Olin parking lot (lot C) on the trunk of my car because we had a meeting and there was no good way to drink a bucket of milkshake otherwise. Here’s me and Greg attacking the frappe at the outset:
And me and Sebastian. I didn’t stop drinking long enough to take a picture of the two of them myself. It’s somewhere around halfway consumed at this point.
The joke (from the previous night’s dinner with the three of us + Max) was that the (fictional) “Culinary Institute of Le Noms” should hold a “24 hours of Le Noms” competition where the goal is to consume as much food (by weight) as possible in a 24-hour timespan. So the next day when we drove past an actual cooking school…
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 2 Comments »