Recent blog entries for skvidal

If you haven’t seen this yet take a look at Greg’s post to fedora-devel-list.

There are lots of low-hanging fruit to take on and if you want to contribute to fedora but don’t have any specific itch you want to scratch then maybe scratch one of these: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/WishList#OLPC_Wishlist

Hi folks,

fedora board meeting on irc today at 1800 UTC - that’s 2PM EDT.

* Join #fedora-board-meeting on freenode to see the Board's conversation.  This
channel is read-only for non-Board members.
* Join #fedora-board-public on freenode to discuss topics and post questions.  This
channel is read/write for everyone.

Please come and harass the board, we need abuse.  

Do you have an operation in yum that you consider slower than it should be? Do you want to help us determine what you mean when you say ‘yum sucks, it is slow’? Then try these things:

1. run yum 3.2.14 or higher

2. run your yum command like this:

time echo ‘n’ | yum -d3 [your command here] | grep ‘time:’

3. run it again.

4. save the output from a couple of runs.

5. post the results in a pastebin with some info on the machine you’re running it on (cpu, memory, etc)

thanks!

I’m on vacation and only sorta answering email and I’m away from irc quite a lot.

I am here

Don’t go looking for me.

Also - thanks to all those who voted and elected me back to the board. I’ll continue my challenge of being a thorn whenever possible and telling Jef to shut the hell up when he’s blathering on.

ps: love you jef

Had dinner with a small group of people then miss chang wanted to go to the harvard bookstore afterward. We mosey over. We walk in and I notice a distinctive looking individual browsing the books. I lean over to Mike McGrath and say “umm, isn’t that richard stallman?”. He agrees it might be. I decide to ask. It is in fact RMS. We say hello and introduce ourselves. Tell him thanks for the things he started, etc. He says if we want to show our thanks we should refer to our work as free software not open source software. Which isn’t an unreasonable request.

This fits in well with my past experiences in cambridge.

So, after all the mess trying to order a laptop I was contacted by someone from lenovo US. He wanted to know what could be done to retain my business. I told him I liked the laptops over all (if only for the number of mouse buttons) but I was very displeased with the service I was given. I told him, if I find another refurbished laptop to buy, I’d appreciate it if you could do what you can to expedite the shipping so I can get it before I need to leave for fudcon.

So, I found another laptop to buy, bought it, sent him the order information and lo’ and behold the laptop showed up today. I’m rather pleased this occurred and I just wanted to say so publicly. It’s a shame it had to be such a godawful mess to get here but it’s good to have a problem addressed when things do go wrong.

Glancing through dimitris’ photos of linuxtag I see this one:

and I can only think: “Wow, Max looks like the ceo of a large company giving a talk in front of thousands of rapt customers/devotees”.  Must be nice to be so comfortable. Damn right, max.

Dad.

Originally uploaded by skvidal

About 36 minutes late but I wanted to write something about my dad for father’s day. I got him what he asked for as a present. What I always do. We have a pretty good relationship - no bullshit nor impossible expectations about presents and no having to chase around to find the “right gift” which never is. Just ask him what he wants or needs and acquire it.

I think a lot of people would probably be surprised to hear I talk to my dad about 2 or 3 times a day. He and I are not afraid of phones and are good with very short, very straightforward conversations and telling each other ‘gotta go’ when we do have to depart the conversation.

I’m glad I get to talk to him regularly. He’s been the source of some excellent and not-so-excellent advice over the years. He has a penchant for vinyl windows that I do not share but he is also perhaps the most well listened/read person in the world. (He listens to books on tape nearly all the time due to his job) and he has told me about a neverending stream of things I should read. His interest in reading is what got me reading and I’m quite pleased with that. He acquired for me my first computer(Timex Sinclair - which didn’t take) and my second computer (Dell 286 with 3M of ram - which did take) and that investment paid off well. He’s been a constant and influential part of my life since ever. And in the last 11 years or so since I moved out of the house he’s been a constant part of my phone bill, too.

Suffice it to say I love him and I hope he had a good father’s day despite having to paint in the new laundry room.

don’t ever press ‘hibernate’ on your keyboard when you’re only ‘hard drive’ is an sd card and it is 8GB

scribble, scribble, scribble

On the plus side - I’ve setup alpine to handle my email accounts on my slicehost. So I can send and receive email, which is nice. Shockingly email in alpine doesn’t make me cry. It’s weird how much muscle-memory returns using [al]pine. I guess using it for years etched itself across my hands.

I’ve got partial jabber access via gmail - working on more than that now.

Irc was easy once I remembered my frelling dircproxy password.

and I’ve got a quasi functional system using the usb live key.

There’s also been some progress on my “Trying to buy a new laptop” saga. If things arrive tomorrow (as ups claims they will) I shall update and cry-out triumphantly, or something.

I voted today. How about you?