I’m in my apartment in Raleigh. It’s not the best apartment in the world (indeed, it has been described as a “student ghetto” – but the bathroom works now, really!) but it’s cheap and it’s a place to live and it’s got internet and I’m not usually here in any case. I’m in my bedroom with the door open and the AC off, with a half-eaten bag of shrimp chips in front of my keyboard and a pile of dishes to be washed beside me on the desk. A guitar book is open on the floor beside me; on the other side, also on the floor, my keys and wallet and a t-shirt lie in a pile. Housekeeping: not one of my priorities.

I’ve got a whiteboard (1/3rd of a giant sheet of melamine paneling from Home Depot – less than $11 for 3 big whiteboards!) leaning against the drawers with an October/November schedule and a partial to-do list on it. I’ve been cranking through that list all day. Then this afternoon I stopped, put on some 70’s music, and rummaged around the kitchen throwing things into and out of the fridge while I cranked out some gumbo (on the stove now, waiting for the rice to cook) and started defrosting tofu for a curry I’ll make probably this weekend when I finish eating the wok o’ gumbo. Until recently, I was sprawled out on the couch with a pot of spaghetti in one arm and a fork in the other hand, and I’m still going back to that pot and shoveling another forkful of spaghetti and tomato sauce into my mouth whenever I realize I’m hungry.

I also munch shrimp chips. Once in a while I leap up and walk to the kitchen and stir the gumbo so the bottom doesn’t scorch. In the meantime, I’m booking tons of travel for the fall – Cape Town, Rochester, Arlington, and more.

Ah, gumbo is done. I now have a giant wok o’ gumbo sitting on the stove. It’s not particularly elegant; frozen gumbo mix, canned tomatoes, rice, broth, seasonings all boiled in a formerly-nonstick wok that now requires oil and constant stirring not to burn things. The gumbo is spicy (of course it is; I cooked it, so I quadrupled the amount of cayenne pepper called for).

Wait, I’m not hungry any more. Put pasta pot in fridge, close chips, drink water (I am dehydrated). Tired, but not sleepy yet; even though I do have a sleep debt I’ve been catching up with, it’s barely 7:30pm and I know I won’t be able to sleep if I try to do so now. A giant to-do list stares me in the face, but I don’t have the ability to tell what’s important on it at the moment. What I need right now is motion. What I need to do right now is unpack the car.

Longer-term: I need to meet people here I can hang out and talk with – more than the few I already know from work. Or… dancing. Yes, dancing. Looks like there’s blues on Friday and swing on Saturday and Sunday here; good to know

Aha. I think I have enough of a backtrace on my brain now to know what to do next. Also, I found my cell phone charger! Braindumps… they’re sometimes good ideas.

I ran into Mike Esser on the way to my car this afternoon and he told me about his trip to Utah to film the Open High School. Max turned around several times during the day and just commented on things and I heard them. There were bananas in the snack room! My desk has a keyboard tray! People walk by and wave!

Oh. And editors? They’re awesome. Bascha Harris took my opensource.com article on POSSE and did things to it, and the tiny tweaks make all the writing so much better (and grammatically correct). I’ve never had a real editor before. My writing will probably dramatically improve since I’m now writing an article for opensource.com at least every two weeks.

I sound more excited and less exhausted than I feel right now, to be honest – trying to write the stuff I’d like to think about in order to stay somewhat focused. Tomorrow I’m going to start by working from my apartment, without being on IRC and such, in order to stay focused and crank out some big things (POSSE-related) that need to get done before I catch up on all the little stuff (which is what I did most of today; I feel like I’ve gotten a sense of things again now).

I write in order to regain my equilibrium.

The thesis we came up with over lunch is that the open source way, at its core, is two things that are really the same thing: (1) How to avoid being forked, and (2) how to fork a project properly.

The primary thing that makes a project ‘open’ is “is it forkable?” This goes into all the things the current book is already enumerating: is it licensed in a way that makes it permissible to fork? is the stuff that needs forking available so people can find it and fork it? and so on. The existing content in the book is, in a sense, “things you should do in order to ratchet up the number of points of your doing-it-right/no-fork! meter.” That last point was inspired by Spot’s failmeter, and the question of what the equivalent list is for non-software projects is still an open question.

For instance, public infrastructure… what does it mean to “fork,” say, a library? In the US, public libraries are commonplace and usually of high-enough quality that citizens are content enough not to fork it. In other countries, this system isn’t adequate, so private citizens have grouped together to make their own libraries and to share notes with each other on how best to “compile your own library,” so to speak. I think about Stian Haklev’s study of government-supported and independent reading gardens (libraries) in Indonesia as an interesting look at a system that has a lot of parallels to free software.

Or to take another example: homeschooling as a fork of the public education system. Karl pointed out that public schools take a variety of stances to this sort of “forking,” and that one of the friendliest things a public school could do is to make their offerings modular so that homeschooled students could, for instance, play on the sports team and take a pottery class but study math and Russian literature and history and so forth on their own. Modularity (and reusability) is also something we value in code in the FOSS world.

What other parallels can you think of? Does this framing of “how can a project in $discipline become more forkable” help think about doing things the open source way beyond the software realm?

Now for Colin’s questions…

How do things normally go up on Fedora Infastructure?

#fedora-admin. That’s why I was trying to point you there. :) Really, just catch me on IRC sometime and we’ll get your questions answered there in realtime.

Do you need someone to maintain the new installation?

Probably. :)

If so, what qualifications does that person need? How can we become/find that person?

How Fedora Infrastructure works in a nutshell: if you want something (say, Etherpad) deployed in production, it has to first move through publictest (“you’ve got root on this random box, experiment and break things and configure until you think you’ve got it right”) and staging (“now that you think you know what you’re doing, write us out detailed instructions on exactly how to replicate your setup, and we’ll see if your instructions can be automated”). Once it’s verified that you’ve got things in a state where they can be automatically and stably deployed, then you go into production, which is the “hurrah! it’s launched!” state that you’re looking for.

So the first step is getting access to publictest machines so you can play around. For this, you’ll want to get formally started with the Infrastructure team, as they are the ones who can grant access. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/GettingStarted is their getting-started page; you want to get sponsored, so you’ll want to read http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/GettingSponsored, and the FIG (Fedora Infrastructure Group) you want is sysadmin-test, http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/FIGs#sysadmin-test.

Once you get access to the sysadmin-test group, you should have root privileges on all of Fedora’s publictest machines; an admin in the #fedora-admin channel can tell you more about that. The next step after that is filling out an RFR (Request For Resources) as described in https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/RFR and you’ll soon have root access to whatever sort of environment you need to set up things.

I think that’s it, but I’m going to blog this introduction to Planet Fedora to make sure I’m not steering you wrong, and also because the text may be useful for others getting started with the Infra team.

But Sam turned to Bywater, and so came back up the Hill, as day was ending once more. And he went on, and there was yellow light, and fire within… He drew a deep breath. “Well, I’m back,” he said. –Last lines of The Lord of the Rings, Chapter ‘The Grey Havens’.

It’s hard to imagine unless you’ve read the books (or seen the films), but that’s the best thought-picture I can paint at the moment. I’m feeling surprisingly well-rested and… good. Very good. The tiredness is a temporary local thing that comes from having driven down from Boston in 36 hours, and I’m actually paying heed to it right now and going to sleep extremely early. More coherence when I wake up.

I’ll start replying to emails tomorrow.

We spent most of our time on the next big urgent milestone: getting testable Sugar 0.90 images out the door for upstream Sugar QA. This isn’t an official SoaS release, but since SoaS is an easy way to get an instance of Sugar up and running, it’s great for testing, and since we’re going to include the 0.90 release of Sugar anyway, Simon has asked us to include it in our test builds by a certain date so it can be used to test the Sugar environment itself. By “certain date,” I mean that the 0.90 Beta release is this Wednesday; here’s what has to happen preferably before then. (For the Fedora folks in the audience, SoaS is a Fedora Spin.)

1. Simon updates the sugar, sugar-toolkit, sugar-datastore, sugar-presence-service, sugar-artwork, telepathy-gabble and telepathy-salut packages in Fedora to the correct code versions.
2. Mel gets 3 people to test these packages and give them karma in Fedora’s system, which will put them in the stable repositories. I’ll be writing instructions on how to do this shortly.
3. Simon or Peter or someone takes the next daily build and makes sure it boots, then announces the test image.

What this means for you, o reader: if you run Fedora (or can run Fedora in a VM, or can follow written instructions on how to do exactly this), you (yes, you!) can help us with 0.90 testing this week. We’re going to have instructions for this coming out once the code is ready to be tested; it should take less than 2 hours (hopefully less than 1) to do your setup and testing from start to finish, and you won’t need any prior experience. We’ll be using the same test setup for Sugar in the future, too.

The catch is that because we’re under intense time pressure to meet release deadlines, the time between when we can say “we’re ready! We need help!” and when we need the testing finished by is going to be VERY short. So this is a heads-up letting folks know this call is going to be coming.

Stay tuned for more QA news in Sugar land! (dun dun DUNN!)

This blog post written under more sleep deprivation than is probably good for me. I’m going to go to bed now so I’ll be more useful in the morning.

It’s not like this is the first time that’s happened; I sometimes don’t even need the time shift to get my sleep patterns into this state. It’s terribly annoying every time it does, though, because I keep on waiting for the other shoe to drop: sure, I feel great now, but at some point, I’m going to hit a wall. I was actually looking forward to crashing, because while I was in China I did feel increasingly tired, but no – as soon as I started for the airport, adrenaline rush!!! and I just haven’t really calmed down since, except for tiny occasional moments that I’ve mostly shaken off right away.

I think the trouble is that adrenaline is also a defense mechanism, and that I’m equally terrible at relaxing. Ah well. It’s 1:30am… let’s try this again.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I  live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I have a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it over to future generations. –George Bernard Shaw

That’s all. I fly back from Shanghai to Raleigh in a few hours, and then my work travel for the summer will be done. Phew.

Me: I would like a haircut! Very short. *points to a male customer who’s getting a short haircut* A haircut like his, very short.
Confused barber: Like hers? *points to a female customer next to the man I’d pointed at*
Me: *points to the man again* Like his, very short, like a man’s haircut.
Barber, still confused: Where are you from?
Me (after several attempts to understand the question): America!
Barber, with dawning look of understanding at my rather non-Chinese behavior: Ahhhhhhh. Maybe a little longer?
Me: Okay.

I’m learning how to get around rapidly, and my (incredibly primitive and rusty) language skills are coming back; too bad I’m only here for one more day. I don’t need to push the “English” button on the subway ticket screens like I did last Saturday; I can sometimes understand what might be on a menu item (“something something duck something noodle soup”), I can take a taxi – asking if it’s available, giving an address (that I’ve written down in Chinese beforehand – I’m not that good), paying, getting a receipt – without speaking English at all. In restaurants, I’ve progressed from point-at-picture-on-menu-and-smile to at least using the proper counting word (“Please get me one bowl… of that stuff! – and a glass of cold water”) and I can stroll into hotels and say “Hello! I already have a room reservation, my name is…” and carry on that conversation in Chinese (how many nights I’m staying, what room number I am, how to get to that room) for the most part.

I’ve been here for five days. I haven’t studied, haven’t cracked open my “Beginner’s Chinese” textbook, haven’t had a teacher… just me and a phrasebook and a dictionary and head-first shamelessness. I love immersion. Best way to learn something is doing it, right? Mmm.

At the airport in Beijing, waiting for my flight to Shanghai, I saw a few non-Chinese (white American, I think, judging from their accent) passengers and had a momentary jolt of wow, foreigners! while simultaneously realizing that I was one also, and that in my normal life I deal almost entirely with people who look like that and not like me. It’s been a while since I was surrounded by people who look like me. Eat like me. (Did I mention that lunch – a bowl of wonton soup – was about 80 cents?) Well… sort of. I didn’t grow up here; these folks aren’t like me, and this isn’t home – except they are, and it is, a little bit, in weird ways.

I am Chinese, even if I’m a lot of other things at the same time. We heap food on each others’ plates with chopsticks and eat pig’s ear without thinking that it’s weird and they cook rice properly and also fish – served whole with the head and skin on, never flipping the fish over while serving it (you lift the bones off to get to the second side of the fish, or the fish is served butterflied open in such a way that you don’t have to flip it in the first place). Slurp noodles. Have decent tea. The last two foods on my list are soup dumplings (hopefully at Din Tai Fun with my aunt and cousin tonight) and rice porridge/congee/zhou/lugaw (I’ll find it somewhere). And… I would like to learn how to live here more, someday. Speak the language more, understand the place more, be able to get around more. I dunno… do any other children of immigrant parents feel the same way? Like you’re missing out on something you should know, like you come from multiple places and no particular place at the same time?

It’s still comforting to get back to my hotel room and work through the night during the US day and talk in colloquial English with my friends and colleagues and have a familiar world I understand available through my computer. And I will be glad to return to America and be able to read street signs and get text messages and navigate stores without a second thought; my friend Becky (who’s off to grad school in Monterey to study French language education this fall) described returning to the US after a year in Russia and France as being marvelously easy – a sudden lifting of the cognitive friction that makes you blink and realize that you weren’t all that used to what you thought you had gotten used to after all. (I know, I’m just here for a week this time, but every time I go to Asia – whether it’s days or weeks or months – the same thing happens. I’m going to get off the plane in Chicago and go “whoa, white people!” for the next few hours.)

I want to come back, and I want to stay longer. And… I need to catch up on a backlog of China trip updates in the next 12 hours; I owe everyone a Beijing report, and then I’ll need to do a Shanghai update probably Saturday morning before I leave, so I don’t carry a China backlog to the States with me (I already have a crazy FOSS+edu backlog). And my parents want me to call everyone we’re related to in China while I’m here (sigh).

It’s weird; I’m here, I’m happy, running around, excited, not-home but surrounded by vague familiarity, wanting to stay here and go back at the same time, overwhelmed but proud of what I’ve been accomplishing, backlogged and on top of things at the same time, scattered in many pieces across multiple timezones (James (in Raleigh) asked me last night – his afternoon – what timezone my body was in, and I replied I didn’t know any more – “…the internet?”) and it’s just… I’ve been jetting from place to place for a long time and barely touching a toe down here and there, I haven’t landed for a long time, been grounded, rested my weight somewhere. Only for the briefest of crash-landings when forced to by exhaustion, and then only long enough to duct-tape myself back together in a sufficient manner to take off again. But… it feels… really good. To run this hard and do this much.

Vacation. I am taking it this month. I may even lock my laptop in the trunk of my car or something like that.

The Entropy Key uses P-N semiconductor junctions reverse biased with a high enough voltage to bring them near to, but not beyond, breakdown in order to generate noise. In other words, it has a pair of devices that are wired up in such a way that as a high potential is applied across them, where electrons do not normally flow in this direction and would be blocked, the high voltage compresses the semiconduction gap sufficiently that the occasional stray electron will quantum tunnel through the P-N junction. (This is sometimes referred to as avalanche noise.) When this happens is unpredictable, and the occurrence of these events is what the Entropy Key measures.

These noise generators are then coupled to a 72MHz ARM Cortex-M3 CPU on the device. This processor samples the generators at a high frequency, forming a stream of random bytes. These streams of bytes are then analyzed using Ueli Maurer’s universal test for random bit generators whereby the amount of entropy in the streams is estimated rather conservatively. The streams are also exclusive-ORed together and that stream’s entropy is estimated in the same manner. If the raw streams appear to have severely reduced entropy then it indicates a fault in that generator, if the third stream has low entropy then it indicates that the generators have correlated and are not independently gathering entropy. Any of those three states are considered a failure mode and will result in the eKey locking itself out of the host, returning only an error code instead of generating entropy packets.

The two raw streams are then processed further in a de-biasing process invented by John von Neumann. Their entropy is estimated after the de-biasing process has been performed. Again, if the estimated entropy in the streams is seen to vary too wildly at this stage, the Entropy Key will lock itself out. The processed streams are then mixed into a pool made with a secure hashing function. Once at least 50% more (estimated) entropy has been mixed into the pool than it could possibly hold it is finalised and another pool initialised. Once enough pools have been processed to fill 20000 bits, the totality is subjected to the tests stipulated in FIPS 140-2. These tests produce a PASS/FAIL indicator for the block. On its own, this is not useful, since a perfectly random block could quite plausibly fail the tests. The Entropy Key therefore keeps running statistics on the FIPS 140-2 tests and will lock itself out if the ratio of failed blocks to passed blocks rises above a conservative estimate of the statistical likelihood of failure.

Once the block has been analysed, regardless of its PASS/FAIL indication, it is chopped up into 32 byte packets and these are handed off to the protocol handler in the device. Through this process therefore, each 256 bit block of data handed to the host was formed from somewhere in the region of between 3000 and 5000 bits read from the generators.

This has been your geeky moment of the day. (Or if you’re lucky, one of many. ;-) Carry on.