Planet Olin

• We’d like a local contributor, so we’ll pay for your round-trip airfare within Africa. If you’re from outside the continent and you can get yourself in, we’ll take you the rest of the way.
• Your hotel and living expenses (food, taxi, etc) will all be covered.
• That’s it. Short fine print.

I wondered how email message threading worked the other day, so I decided to go find out.

The question I had was “how do I reply to a message that was sent to a list before I subscribed to it, in such a way that it gets threaded in the proper manner?” Specifically, I wanted to respond to the summit-planning list’s email thread titled “Booth setup on Tuesday” yet choose my own level of nesting in the thread. For instance…

* original message * reply 1 * reply A to reply 1 * reply $foo to reply A * reply B to reply 1 * <--- YOUR REPLY GOES HERE * reply 2 * reply 3 * reply A to reply 3

I downloaded the archives for the appropriate month and looked around. Huh. This is the first time I’ve actually paid attention to what was in the message headers…


From bpowell01 at fedoraproject.org Thu Jun 10 17:33:50 2010
From: bpowell01 at fedoraproject.org (Brian Powell)
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2010 13:33:50 -0400
Subject: Booth setup on Tuesday
In-Reply-To:
References: <20100610012156.GC18467@victoria.internal.frields.org>
Message-ID: <aanlktikjb0w0nmy1rv1cppuqpbsmxbie3pr_w38bu8iq @mail.gmail.com>


Hrm. In-Reply-To and References seemed pretty promising. They pointed to the Message-IDs of the messages they were threaded under, in the order of their nesting. It wouldn’t be too awful to get a mail client to do threading with that.

As a side note, how do Message-IDs get generated? They’re specified in RFC 5322, but it seems like different mail clients generate them in different manners, and the only document I could find that had actual suggestions on the implementation is 12 years old. Seems like the answer is “pick your mail client, then look at the code.”

Anyhow. I think that if I changed the In-Reply-To / References headers to be the correct things, my message would nest nicely. Trouble is that I can’t find a way to do that in Thunderbird – the only promising extension I could find wasn’t compatible with the version of tbird I run (3.0.4). At this point (1) Paul started a new thread that was a better one for me to respond with my information to, and (2) I went “eh!” and decided to stop chasing this down because I was hosed with other things. Nice small adventure, though.

I’m happy to learn even tiny bits and snatches of how email works, because I’m still trying to digest how mutt setup works (after blindly copying Karsten’s .muttrc file and with help from Ian and Paul, I can send email using mutt, but haven’t… figured out how to read it yet). I have such a broken concept of how email works that all the bits and pieces haven’t quite sunk in the right way yet (the way that would let me, y’know, use this stuff with impunity).

Once I understand mutt, the next thing I want to figure out is dovecot. I can do these things blindly, I just don’t really understand what’s going on… and I would like to. Just because. It’s fun.

When we needed banners for spins.fedoraproject.org at the last moment, two newcomers to Fedora Design stepped up – thank you to Melanie Kim and Nikki Lee for the Moblin, SoaS, Design, and Kiosk[0] artwork! (Melanie made the first three and Nikki made the last.) And by “last moment,” I mean “everything was made within 48 hours of freeze.” I do not think I have ever seen Inkscape employed so quickly before. Dang.

[0] Strictly speaking, Kiosk is a Remix and not a Spin, but getting an early jump on materials for the process can’t hurt.

I wanted to call out this conversation between Kamisamanou Burgess, Karsten Wade, and Neville Cross on the Fedora News list because it’s a great illustration of the Raptor/Bus test – “if you get hit by a raptor or eaten by a bus, your project should still survive.”

Kamisamanou is the creator and sole maintainer of FAWN (Fedora Audio Weekly News), a podcast of FWN (Fedora Weekly News), and announced a temporary hiatus due to school obligations. Karsten replied, noting that when the same thing had happened to FWN itself, it led not to a pause, but to an explosion of contributors.

Originally and for a long while, Fedora Weekly News was many things done by a handful of people on a stand-alone server  separated from Fedora infrastructure.  As those people’s lives changed and they moved on to other things, Thomas Chung stayed with producing FWN.  He had an insight, a brilliant move, and saw that by bringing FWN in to Fedora as a sub-project he could create room for capacity.  The modern FWN system with beats was born from that.

Creating capacity is something Fedora does best, or at least tries to, and especially for contributors.  It worked for Thomas, allowing him to share the load initially, and later to let his brainchild out of the nest to be a living, breathing part of Fedora.

Then Neville chimes in with a brief +1, and… well, that’s the saga so far. Anyone interested in lifting up this podcast with more hands in the same way?

On a side note: one of my favorite things about reading Planets is the accidental learning I pick up along the way. This is harder for me to get in person, since my hearing makes it difficult to randomly pick up on conversations that aren’t directly addressed to me, but when reading blogs (and lists and IRC logs), I catch words and go “oh, what’s that?” and sometimes I learn stuff. Today’s discoveries: urlwatch and tee.

This post is mostly a roundup of Planet Fedora snippets I thought might be of interest to the 40 Allegheny students from Matt Jadud and Darren Miller’s {Technology, Art} and Activism course who just got introduced to the ecosystem of free and open source and content … on Tuesday. It’s a firehose of context, so we’re doing what we can to scaffold them gently into the community as they start on their projects, mostly within the realm of Marketing or Design (more on this later). The remainder of this post is addressed to them.

Hey, folks. How’s it going so far? I know we’ve introduced you to a ton of material – this is a huge experiment for all of us (for me, for your professors, for the Fedora community members you’ll be working with for the next 5 weeks), so thanks for coming and learning along with us. One of the things that came up at the end of Tuesday is http://planet.fedoraproject.org, which is our blog aggregator; just like you’ve got a class blog aggregator that lets you see what your classmates are thinking and writing, we have our Planet as a way of seeing the thoughts and projects of members of the Fedora community. It’s a lot of content, though – so this morning I sifted through recent posts to pull out a few I thought you might be interested in.

First, since it’s April Fools Day, I couldn’t resist pointing out Nicu’s post on Fedora’s rebranding from blue to magenta with a medieval French lily-textured background. Nicu is one of the most active members of our Design community; he hails from Romania.

Tom “Spot” Callaway (from Boston) wrote up a proposal for a User Driven FAD. A FAD is a Fedora Activity Day, which I usually describe as a hackathon, or “a bunch of folks from our usually-distributed community all fly into one place and spend a couple days working to Make A Cool Thing.” What (I think) Spot is describing is a FAD where (1) experienced folks would come in to make the software that would let new users test Fedora as described in his proposal, and (2) new folks would come in to try that software out right as it’s being made. As new folks with fresh eyes yourselves, I’m curious if you’ve got any thoughts on the idea. The post and the linked-to wiki page are written for an audience of existing contributors – what do we need to do to make it interesting to new ones as well? Is this something any of you might be keen on participating in?

The comments are also interesting: Colin Walters is also from the Boston area, but Greg DeKoenigsberg is in Raleigh and Jef Spaleta is out in Alaska. And actually, if you go back and take a look at the comments on Nicu’s post – Tareq is from Saudia Arabia, Nushio (Juan) from Mexico picked up on it and translated the joke into Spanish, since we have a large Latin American community, Adam is from Canada…

Speaking of Adam, his blog post today pointed out two things: the F13 release date has slipped by a week, and today is ABRT Test Day. The first topic (release date) may be a confusing read, since it assumes a lot of vocabulary and context we haven’t introduced you to yet (Beta release, release criteria, RC, gold, slip…) – that’s okay. Basically, what is means is “we decided that we weren’t going to be quite ready in time for our original due date, so we now have a 1-week extension on all of our deadlines for Fedora 13.” That’s it.

The other (and last) thing is ABRT Test Day – a Test Day is a day where a bunch of community members get together and try out a new feature to see if it works, and what could be improved. It’s open to all – you’re welcome to join if you like, and I’ll be around after class in case anyone would like to hop in on it with me. Today’s feature is ABRT, which stands for “Automatic Bug Reporting Tool.” On Tuesday, I talked about how if, for instance, Firefox were to crash, you could report a bug to the Firefox developers and potentially help… oh, somewhere around 270 million users that way. Well, ABRT is one tool that helps you do that by popping up afterwards and saying (in this example case) “hey, it looks like you found a Firefox bug! Want to tell the developers about it?” and walking you through that process.

We want to make sure ABRT itself works and actually does help people through the process of reporting bugs, so the ABRT developers (Jiří Moskovčák (jmoskovc), Nikola Pajkovsky (npajkovs), Denys Vlasenko (dvlasenk), and Karel Klíč (kklic)) and a few members of the QA team (Kamil Páral (kparal), Michal Nowak (mnowak), Adam Williamson (adamw)) are hanging out online today to help people get started testing, and to answer questions. So again, I’ll be around doing this right after class if anyone would like to join me; I’ll show you how to use the livecds we’ve burned to do exactly that.

There’s plenty more on Planet Fedora, but this is the stuff that caught my eye this morning while I was reading. What caught yours?

This post is mostly a roundup of Planet Fedora snippets I thought might be of interest to the 40 Allegheny students from Matt Jadud and Darren Miller’s {Technology, Art} and Activism course who just got introduced to the ecosystem of free and open source and content … on Tuesday. It’s a firehose of context, so we’re doing what we can to scaffold them gently into the community as they start on their projects, mostly within the realm of Marketing or Design (more on this later). The remainder of this post is addressed to them.

Hey, folks. How’s it going so far? I know we’ve introduced you to a ton of material – this is a huge experiment for all of us (for me, for your professors, for the Fedora community members you’ll be working with for the next 5 weeks), so thanks for coming and learning along with us. One of the things that came up at the end of Tuesday is http://planet.fedoraproject.org, which is our blog aggregator; just like you’ve got a class blog aggregator that lets you see what your classmates are thinking and writing, we have our Planet as a way of seeing the thoughts and projects of members of the Fedora community. It’s a lot of content, though – so this morning I sifted through recent posts to pull out a few I thought you might be interested in.

First, since it’s April Fools Day, I couldn’t resist pointing out Nicu’s post on Fedora’s rebranding from blue to magenta with a medieval French lily-textured background. Nicu is one of the most active members of our Design community; he hails from Romania.

Tom “Spot” Callaway (from Boston) wrote up a proposal for a User Driven FAD. A FAD is a Fedora Activity Day, which I usually describe as a hackathon, or “a bunch of folks from our usually-distributed community all fly into one place and spend a couple days working to Make A Cool Thing.” What (I think) Spot is describing is a FAD where (1) experienced folks would come in to make the software that would let new users test Fedora as described in his proposal, and (2) new folks would come in to try that software out right as it’s being made. As new folks with fresh eyes yourselves, I’m curious if you’ve got any thoughts on the idea. The post and the linked-to wiki page are written for an audience of existing contributors – what do we need to do to make it interesting to new ones as well? Is this something any of you might be keen on participating in?

The comments are also interesting: Colin Walters is also from the Boston area, but Greg DeKoenigsberg is in Raleigh and Jef Spaleta is out in Alaska. And actually, if you go back and take a look at the comments on Nicu’s post – Tareq is from Saudia Arabia, Nushio (Juan) from Mexico picked up on it and translated the joke into Spanish, since we have a large Latin American community, Adam is from Canada…

Speaking of Adam, his blog post today pointed out two things: the F13 release date has slipped by a week, and today is ABRT Test Day. The first topic (release date) may be a confusing read, since it assumes a lot of vocabulary and context we haven’t introduced you to yet (Beta release, release criteria, RC, gold, slip…) – that’s okay. Basically, what is means is “we decided that we weren’t going to be quite ready in time for our original due date, so we now have a 1-week extension on all of our deadlines for Fedora 13.” That’s it.

The other (and last) thing is ABRT Test Day – a Test Day is a day where a bunch of community members get together and try out a new feature to see if it works, and what could be improved. It’s open to all – you’re welcome to join if you like, and I’ll be around after class in case anyone would like to hop in on it with me. Today’s feature is ABRT, which stands for “Automatic Bug Reporting Tool.” On Tuesday, I talked about how if, for instance, Firefox were to crash, you could report a bug to the Firefox developers and potentially help… oh, somewhere around 270 million users that way. Well, ABRT is one tool that helps you do that by popping up afterwards and saying (in this example case) “hey, it looks like you found a Firefox bug! Want to tell the developers about it?” and walking you through that process.

We want to make sure ABRT itself works and actually does help people through the process of reporting bugs, so the ABRT developers (Jiří Moskovčák (jmoskovc), Nikola Pajkovsky (npajkovs), Denys Vlasenko (dvlasenk), and Karel Klíč (kklic)) and a few members of the QA team (Kamil Páral (kparal), Michal Nowak (mnowak), Adam Williamson (adamw)) are hanging out online today to help people get started testing, and to answer questions. So again, I’ll be around doing this right after class if anyone would like to join me; I’ll show you how to use the livecds we’ve burned to do exactly that.

There’s plenty more on Planet Fedora, but this is the stuff that caught my eye this morning while I was reading. What caught yours?

It’s past 2am, so I’ve decided that:

1. I’ve done enough POSSE stuff for one day.
2. My presentation for tomorrow’s lecture is as good as it is ever going to be. I’m working with a class taught by Matt Jadud (POSSE ‘09) and Darren Miller that will be spending the last 5 weeks of term learning how to contribute to Fedora – and we’re doing a lot of work in scaffolding them slowly into the community so that they will (1) be successful (we may have failures, but they will be successfully educational failures if so!) and (2) not completely overwhelm people with newbies are here and demand HELP NOW! but rather be an enthusiastic and encouraging productivity boost to the teams they join. And based on what I’ve seen so far, I’ve got high hopes.
3. I’m going to worry about burning 40 copies of live media… later. (Dear lazyweb: there isn’t a F13 live image that fits on a CD, is there? The tricky part is that we’d like them to have a live image of something more recent than F12 so they can preview things but not have to install to hard disk… and I don’t have a DVD burner, just a CD burner and CDs. I guess I could burn them the KDE spin.)

My hands now hurt from typing, so I’m going to go to sleep. More on this “Fedora in the classroom” thing later; I’m just thinking out loud right now so people know what’s on my mind in this respect – I’ll write more about our approach later, once class is over.

It’s past 2am, so I’ve decided that:

1. I’ve done enough POSSE stuff for one day.
2. My presentation for tomorrow’s lecture is as good as it is ever going to be. I’m working with a class taught by Matt Jadud (POSSE ‘09) and Darren Miller that will be spending the last 5 weeks of term learning how to contribute to Fedora – and we’re doing a lot of work in scaffolding them slowly into the community so that they will (1) be successful (we may have failures, but they will be successfully educational failures if so!) and (2) not completely overwhelm people with newbies are here and demand HELP NOW! but rather be an enthusiastic and encouraging productivity boost to the teams they join. And based on what I’ve seen so far, I’ve got high hopes.
3. I’m going to worry about burning 40 copies of live media… later. (Dear lazyweb: there isn’t a F13 live image that fits on a CD, is there? The tricky part is that we’d like them to have a live image of something more recent than F12 so they can preview things but not have to install to hard disk… and I don’t have a DVD burner, just a CD burner and CDs. I guess I could burn them the KDE spin.)

My hands now hurt from typing, so I’m going to go to sleep. More on this “Fedora in the classroom” thing later; I’m just thinking out loud right now so people know what’s on my mind in this respect – I’ll write more about our approach later, once class is over.

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?

For the Marketing FAD dinner tonight, we went out to a burger place called MoJoe’s. Later that night:

01:55 -!- You’re now known as mchua
01:55 -!- You’re now known as daddy
01:56 < mmcgrath> daddy: …. ?
01:57 < onekopaka_laptop> interesting IRC nick choice…
01:58 < daddy> mmcgrath: onekopaka_laptop: it’s a joke from the FAD – we had dinner at a burger place called MoJoe’s tonight.
01:58 < daddy> And they had this thing where if you ate their one-pound burger in one sitting they’d put your picture on their wall of fame and call you “daddy.”
01:58 < daddy> Now, since this was only a one-pound burger, naturally I had to go for it.
01:58 < daddy> It was delicious.
01:58 < mmcgrath> it sounds delicious
01:58 < daddy> So good.

(Honestly, a one-pound burger isn’t that big. I’ve had them as snacks before. It was a good burger, though.)

Also, my aunt Lynne May published her first article! “Striving for Cultural Proficiency” came out in the most recent issue of the Massachusetts Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development journal. Theme: “Building and Sustaining a Diverse Professional Community.” Reading things like this, I’m reminded that I don’t yet know how to understand a lot of other disciplines – brand books still don’t quite make sense to me, instructions on PR only dimly do, even education writing is easy for me to dismiss sometimes when I don’t understand it. But there’s value there. There’s value there, and I just don’t know how to see the vast majority of it yet. Need to keep trying to grok. I think we’re doing better at this over time, and folks like Henrik have been extremely patient in helping me learn how to see how the world of (in this case) journalism functions, how PR works, how they think differently than engineers do.

Ryan Rix helped me sand down many of the little snaggy sticking-points that had kept me from using KDE smoothly as a general productivity desktop. Most of them involved learning how configurations were set and how to click around and find my way through menus; it’s got a slightly different sense than GNOME (which is what I’ve been using the past few years) but it’s a good way to make my brain stretch out and think about the interaction paradigms that desktops choose.

My favorite new packages from tonight:

• digikam (photo management)
• yakuake (drop-down terminal, quake-style)
• kdenlive (video editor)
• sl (okay, this isn’t a KDE thing, and this came from Neville, but it’s great.)

There’s also plenty of stuff to do packaging practice on, if I ever find the time. That’s the KDE list. There’s also a bunch of Sugar Activities that need packaging. Between the two… I’ll never have to hunt for simple packages again (well, at least not for a long time).

Tomorrow’s the last day of the FAD, and we’ll be using it to create F13 videos and video-material. Stay tuned for the last episode of the exciting adventures of… (dah dah daaaaah) The Marketing FAD!