Planet Olin

I’d like to use “Mel Chua” as my academic name [0] – that is, the nom de plume I publish under for academic papers, conferences, and whatnot. How do I check to make sure there aren’t any collisions of other people publishing under that name, aside from the obvious IEEE/ACM/Google searches (which haven’t found anything yet)?

Mel isn’t my legal name, but it’s what my friends and colleagues call me, and the name I prefer to be addressed by – and the academic world is ultimately where I want to end up, so I want to make a conscious decision to be called what I want to be called in a community that is important to me (and will likely get more important as time goes on). Whatever name I start publishing under is what I’m likely to continue publishing under for the remainder of my academic life (that is to say, “the remainder of my life”).

Is there a way people are supposed to do this?

[0] I might not be using the correct terminology for this.

I was explaining to Red Hat’s Mike Paquin, who runs the Technical College within the internal Red Hat University (training for Red Hat employees) why I spend a lot of time hanging out in the Fedora community, though that’s not the bulk of my dayjob. I’m here because I love the mission and the community and because it’s fun, but I also hang out in Fedora because I learn an amazing amount of stuff here. Fedora lets me overhear other people doing their work. It’s like being able to overhear conversations at lunch, except thanks to logs you can overhear lunch conversations that happened last week between Singapore and Arizona.

It’s harder to build up this sort of distributed community for a school or a company with offices and classroom buildings; if you’re co-located, you don’t need to have these side conversations online, and remotees don’t have enough common work to pool together and create the momentum needed to have a sustained conversation going.

original image by Francesco Crippa, licensed CC-BY

In the interests of “solving problems in your own house” and “scratching your own itch” first, I’m going to be running a Fedora Classroom on tools we use in Fedora for remote collaboration next week, and specifically inviting Red Hatters (though as with all Fedora Classroom sessions, anyone interested is more than welcome to join!) A lot of Red Hatters seem awed when we show them the tools that we folks in Fedora-land take for granted because we use them on a day-to-day basis, so I figure it’s high time we shared more of our best practices with the rest of the world.

All this is to announce I’ll be running a Fedora Classroom on basic distributed communication tools and practices on Tuesday, September 14, at 1600 UTC in #fedora-classroom on irc.freenode.net. These (open source, of course) tools aren’t coding-specific – in fact, our design, marketing, etc. teams use them as well – so anyone interested in distributed communties

I’m going to assume basic knowledge of IRC, because that’s how the session is going to be taught, but if you’re interested in this and new to IRC let me know ahead of time and I’d be happy to help you get set up prior to the session.

Topics covered:

1. Fedora Classroom – we have a channel (#fedora-classroom on freenode) set aside for learning experiences, so if someone needs to teach somebody else something in a structured way, they go there, and other people can then overhear it. This is where I will be teaching the session.
2. Running realtime meetings and synchronous conversations on IRC with zodbot – we have a logging bot that sits in the classroom channel (and in other channels for meetings). Using inline conversation tags like “#action” or “#topic” or “#agreed”, it produces meeting notes and full logs. Never take meeting notes again! Side note: log archives make for educational reading sometimes, because they’re the times in the channel that others deemed interesting enough to log.
3. Collaborative text editing with gobby and Etherpad – we’ll be using this to take notes on the classroom session being held in IRC. I like getting hands-on as early as possible when I’m teaching. :)
4. Sharing what you’ve done (asycnchronously) afterwards: For Fedora, this is a mailing list; you say things like “I’ll be teaching a packaging class on Tuesday” or “I taught packaging class on Tuesday, here are the logs.” Individual participants in that class (especially if it’s a multi-class experience) tend to blog their reflections to Planet. All these things promote accidental learning – the chances of someone who’s not already involved stumbling across these people thinking out loud about what they’re doing is very high, so learning groups tend to snowball into functionality very quickly, and people generally have a high degree of peripheral awareness as to what’s going on.

Please add suggestions and questions and whatnot here, and I’ll see you folks in #fedora-classroom next Tuesday!

“I have a surprise for you,” my Ama, my father’s mother, told me. “Very special surprise.”
I nodded.
“I brought you some tuna fish!“
I blinked. “Er… thank you. Tuna fish?”
“Special tuna fish. From Henry Sy.”[0]
“Why… do you have Henry Sy’s tuna fish?”
“It is very special. They make it just for him. And we are good friends, so he gave some to me. And I bring it to the States. I give a can for Jason, a can for Michael, a can for Mark, and one for you.” She pulled out a blue can and presented it to me with great pride. “See? Specially prepared for Henry Sy Sr. and Family.”

I read the can, still puzzled. “‘The true choice of gourmets.’ Do they do anything special to the tuna fish? I mean, is it…”
“This is premium tuna fish. Made from prime cuts.” My grandmother points to the can’s label, which does indeed say “…made from the prime cuts of rare young Yellowfin Tuna. Delicate, smooth and tasty…” I have a sudden urge to grab a pen and add the missing comma.
“What do I do with it?”
My grandmother laughed, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. “You eat it!”

Well, okay. That was obvious.

I brought the can to Boston with me and recounted the story to my aunt Lynne May. Then I cooked some spaghetti and poured the oil-packed fish over it; it was packed as an actual whole filet (not ragged clumps), beautifully cooked, perfectly seasoned. The fish flaked beautifully over the pasta, and the oil was subtly spiced. It was a perfect dinner.

I didn’t feel right just recycling the can, so I photographed it in commemoration first. (And then I recycled it.) Thank you, Ama.

[0] Henry Sy is a Chinese-Filipino tycoon who owns the mega-mall brand SM (Shoe Mart, which is what they originally sold). I guess the American equivalent would be something like “I have Sam Walton’s tuna fish!” and your grandmother being friends with the fellow who founded Wal-Mart, or… yeah. Honestly, I’m also a bit confused.

Sometimes I pause, look at exactly what I’m working on, and am stunned by the sheer audacity of it all. Oftentimes when people ask me what I do for a living or what I learned in school, I’ll reply “hacking the universe,” and… well, it’s true. I learned it from many people who are far better than it than I am, alongside many friends who are also becoming skilled at it in different ways, places, and disciplines than I. And it’s not that we suddenly (or even gradually) gained superhuman powers… we’re still ordinary people doing ordinary things.

But the ways and the places and the tiny shifts of intonation and timing with which we do these things – somehow, they add up to nudge and nudge and roll the world into a position where it might, might sometimes tip over into being a better place than it was before, a cascade of thousands and millions of little acts over time that sink in, sink deep, and make that transformation last. Everybody does these tiny things, but one of the qualities I value most about my friends and colleagues is that they’re conscious of it. They live their lives with deliberate intent, so that these small actions they make do add up to make the change they’d like to see in the world.

I am so unbelievably lucky.

1. I live down the street from an Indian supermarket.
2. And a kung fu school!
3. And a 24/7 Harris Teeter (supermarket) with a good selection of stuff!
4. People in Raleigh are very friendly! While eating BBQ at Ole Time, I struck up a conversation with the family behind me, and got a bunch of suggestions on things to check out in the area. (Unfortunately, I’m not into sports so much, so half the recommendations aren’t that interesting to me, but… still!) I should explore this area more.

On that latter note, I’m going to see if I can make it to the Durham farmers’ market tomorrow morning. If I wake up in time, that is. I’m still slowly unpacking my things into my apartment and trying to get rest and pace myself through work, because I’m still wiped out from August and this summer in general, and October’s travel is going to be brutal (yet awesome!) so… taking a breather is… a good idea, possibly, right now.

Feeling good. Today I got a bunch of work done, a bunch of not-work done, and whipped the apartment into far better shape. I hate cleaning, so I bribed myself – one of my high school teachers, Doc Nok (Dr. Nokkentved), gave our class his sage parting advice of “make sure you have one nice dinner per week, at minimum.” So I decided, all right, I will make that dinner day be the same as cleaning day, so I have something to look forward to. And that’s why I went to Ole Time tonight. Raleigh BBQ is… mmm.

I also looked at the contents of my fridge and decided that (1) the hardneck garlic was more perishable than I would like, (2) peeling and chopping garlic every time I cooked was a messy pain, and (3) batch-processing was awesome. I spent much of the evening peeling every single head of garlic I had purchased and placing them in a olive-oil filled container. I originally had started chopping then, but realized I could do that while cooking because I’d probably be chopping other things too (and besides, sometimes I might want larger pieces of garlic, etc). So now I have a container absolutely stuffed with peeled garlic, some of which is chopped, and olive oil that’s going to taste magnificently of garlic when I use it. Life has gotten more convenient. WIN!

This plus the cleaning made me feel incredibly domesticated, so I continued plugging through Project: Make My Car Suck Less by researching how to fix my side mirror. Looks like fun – need to unpack my tools first, though, and order the mirror. My current fix is very much a kludge.

But hey. It cost $6 (for the mirror – I already had the duct tape). It’s just… yeah. Car needs fixin’. Also needs new wiper blades. The battery already gave out in Boston – got a new one – and then both brake lines started leaking, also in Boston… got new ones, and… I’m just going to start paying much closer attention to this car now. It’s 17 and I’m not sure how much longer it will last. Ah well. I should learn things by fixing it, and when I take it to the shop I’ll ask if I can watch and learn from what they’re doing, and… it’ll be all right.

Life’s good and I’m having fun and am considerably more relaxed than usual, given the circumstances. Getting rest. In fact, getting rest now. I am sleepy and it’s bedtime.

*thud*

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.