Planet Olin

Let me paint a picture here in words, because I haven’t done that in a while.

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.

Wow. Working in an office is… awesome. (In some ways, at least!) You run into people! They talk with you! You can print and scan things at decent machines, and there’s water and snacks and meeting rooms and really big whiteboards! The AC always works and there’s fun stuff going on and you can turn around and talk to people.

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.

On the way from Boston to Raleigh this weekend, I stopped by Karl Fogel’s place for lunch (more accurately, a Mexican restaurant down the street from his place). We talked about life and a million other things, but one of our conversation topics was The Open Source Way.

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?

Some of my Olin buddies (Sebastian Dziallas, Colin Zwiebel, Andy Pethan, and DJ Gallagher) are putting together their first Fedora event, a FAD focused on Etherpad deployment. Predictably, it’s called the Etherpad FAD. In preparation for this, Colin asked some questions about Fedora Infrastructure that I thought other newcomers might have, so I’m posting my responses here in the hopes that people can (1) correct me if I’m wrong, and (2) transfer this information somewhere else more useful (wiki?) if I’m right.

By the way, if you’re interested in Etherpad development or deployment and would like to participate in the event, get in touch with Colin Zwiebel and he’ll get you started. Packagers, js/scala/java developers, infrastructure folks, experienced Etherpad developers and deployers along with new folks who want to learn… we need all sorts of people! It’s in the Boston area, and some travel funding is likely to be available, or you can participate remotely (I’ll be pitching in remotely from Cape Town, South Africa). Again, get in touch with Colin and he’ll get you started.

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.

Back from vacation. Just staggered (literally) back into my apartment in Raleigh a few minutes ago. My brain is approximately like this:

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.

From the latest Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) meeting minutes:

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.

Shameless plug: I’m helping man the AANE’s WordPress blog. There’s a general call for contributions and suggestions for how to make the blog a better resource to the aspy community.

I’ve never dealt with moderating contributor-level access on an Internet-facing WordPress instance. This should be rather interesting.

Dear families of 9/11, I wish you could see the caring and the pain that Muslim families around the world felt with you on that day.

Three Cups of Tea is a book that tells the true story of an American mountain climber named Greg Mortenson who nearly dies but his life is saved by a poor Muslim village near Mount Everest.  He promises to come back and build a school for them.  Thus begins his epic quest to build schools for needy Muslim communities all over Pakistan and Afghanistan.

On 9/11, he is traveling to the opening of another remote school in the mountains.  There is an opening ceremony, with the keynote speaker Syed Abbas, a "supreme religious leader" of Shiite Muslims in Baltistan of Northern Pakistan.  Abbas says,

"We share in the sorrow as people weep and suffer in America today... Those who have committed this evil act against the innocent, the women and children, to create thousands of widows and orphans do not do so in the name if Islam.  By the grace of Allah the Almighty, may justice be served upon them."

"I request America to look into our hearts," Abbas continued, his voice straining with emotion," and see that the great majority of us are not terrorists, but good and simple people.  Our land is stricken with poverty because we are without education..."

Mortenson says, "By the time Syed Abbas had finished he had the entire crowd in tears.  I wish all the Americans who think 'Muslim' is just another way of saying 'terrorist' could have been there that day.  The true core tenants of Islam are justice, tolerance, and charity, and Syed Abbas represented the moderate center of Muslim faith eloquently."

After the ceremony, women  from the village lined up to offer condolences to the Americans, pressing gifts and eggs into their hands "begging them to carry these tokens of grief to the faraway sisters they longed to comfort themselves, the widows of the New York village."

The true tragedy is that all but 12 Republicans in the House voted against health benefits for 9/11 responders last month.  

WAKE UP AMERICA!  Don't allow politicians to cloud your knowledge with slimy arguments against the mosque two blocks away from ground zero. The vast majority of Muslims are peaceful, and these hateful arguments only spread ignorance. The politicians speak out against the mosque are only strengthening Osama bin Laden's power, a power that thrives on ignorance and fear.  The more America screams hate, the easier it is to recruit terrorists.  As Americans, we must fight back against this ignorance.

Forbidding this mosque is like forbidding the construction of a community church near a site where the Ku Klux Klan held a massive hanging and murdered lots of people.  The Ku Klux Klan consider themselves Christian.  Do they represent Christianity?  Not by a long shot. Would the average Christian even consider the Ku Klux Klan to be a part of Christianity as well?

It's the same type of fear that made Americans think it was okay to send Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II and the fear that fueled the Communist witch hunts during the Cold War.

Know your enemy.  The enemy is not peaceful Muslims.  The Qur'an promotes peace, education, and women's rights.  The enemy is the terrorists, an entirely different breed.  As Obama said, "The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics--a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam."

Oh, wait.

George W. Bush said that, not Obama.
See his full speech here.

But I disagree with Bush's words. Terrorists are not following an Islamic extremism, because they are not following Islam at all.  Just as the Ku Klux Klan is not following an extremism of Christianity, their horrible acts against humanity make it impossible for them to be truly Christian. 

The mosque, called Park51, is a community center with a basketball court and cooking classes. It embodies peace, it embodies religious harmony as its board of directors is full of Christians and Jews as well.  The founder, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, is a peaceful man who has been sent on numerous speaking tours by both Bush and Obama to promote tolerance in Arab and Muslim nations. 
"Islamic extremism for the majority of Muslims is an oxymoron," Iman Feisal says.  "It is a fundamental contradiction in terms." 

The outrageous arguments against Park51 are just a smokescreen. Politicians are manipulating our emotions to buy votes for this fall. Don't be fooled.

And don't sit quietly, either.  Stand up, speak out, talk to your friends, family, and neighbors.  Don't let manipulative politicians drive America toward a hateocracy.

Required reading:

There is No "Ground Zero Mosque"
How Fox Betrayed Petraeus
Taking Bin Laden’s Side

Quotes from 9/11 families who support Park51
Build That Mosque
Three Cups of Tea (on Google Books)

There are easy times, and there are hard times. Days when I feel like a real boy living a charmed life, and days when I feel stunted somehow. I think it’s in my wiring to be… not bipolar, but functionally cyclic. Cyclic in how I respond to data and stimuli.

The pattern was more distinct and regular in college, when my work itself had something of a fractal ebb and flow, and I was meeting regularly with people in various positions in my support net and being more deliberate about self awareness. Things never got too far in a bad direction before being caught, and conversely there was way too much fun and novel stimulus to maintain good habits forever. Neither state was ever stable.

Now I work in a technical office, where projects typically have monthly deliverables. But in practice one month’s work can run seamlessly into the next. And I’m more independent at home than I’ve ever been.

I see larger patterns now, and smaller ones. Six months of head-in-the-sand server development where I become rather short-sighted and difficult to work with, followed by two months of interaction design where I’m highly participatory and best friends with everyone. Then I’ll get in a fight with a friend, or worried about my latest bloodwork, and for a matter of hours or days nothing works and I can’t focus worth a damn.

It’s particularly hard to control lately. I accept this as a natural result of medical pressures, and the poor sleep habits I am trying to fix, and I cut myself some slack.

Today was by and large a good day. I found a new housemate for us, I made calls, and started some things. I continued my recent trend of sticking my finger into lots of figurative pies, which is really a wonderful thing if I’m having a productive day/week/month. It means I actually grow as a person and get my name out there.

Then tonight, I had to deal with someone in a business context, and it was one of those situations where I struggle to plant my feet and act like a normal human being with a spine. People like that make me feel as if I still don’t understand people. Still haven’t learned, haven’t come so far since the boy with foot in mouth and hand in cookie-jar. Bleh. One step forward, one step back.

Of course, the real story behind the data isn’t the local minima or maxima, it’s the trend. And for the most part I’ve been feeling increasingly self-assured as a person, if not as an engineer. As an engineer I’m still relatively fresh, subject to increasing responsibilities and to the Dunning-Kruger effect. As a person, I’ve had a bit longer to come to grips with who I am and what I’m capable of. And recent experiences are helping to further crystallize it for me.

I’m like this:

Rise and fall, fall and rise.