Below are the most recent 12 friends' journal entries.

Monday, July 7th, 2008
katzj	9:13a	Rest of the weekend In addition to my racing fun yesterday, had a pretty good and full weekend. My parents were up and so on Thursday after class, I headed down to South Station to meet them. We grabbed lunch and then headed back to Arlington. From there, my dad and I headed down to the bike shop so that we could pick up a bike for him to ride on Friday. Thursday evening, we went down to Tanjore for dinner and mostly avoided getting soaked. Given the rain and everyone being kind of tired, we decided not to go down and watch the Pops rehearse and instead just headed back to the house and watched Michael Clayton Friday morning, woke up and went out with my dad in the drizzle on the Quad ride. He did pretty well and we got in a nice 40 mile ride. By the time we got to Starbuck's at the end, the rain had stopped and it looked like it was going to be a nice day. Go figure. Then, headed down to Braintree and met up with Kara's parents for dinner. We then ended up going and watching the Get Smart movie. I was somewhat unsure how it would be as the reviews were somewhat mixed, but I really enjoyed it as did everyone else. I watched Get Smart a lot on Nick at Nite as I was growing up and so it was enjoyable a lot of the things that they pulled in. It was also good that they modernized it and tried to give some backstory. And I also thought that Steve Carrell made a really good Maxwell Smart and put his own little bits on the part rather than just trying to imitate Don Adams. On Saturday, we took a day trip up to Vermont to visit the Ben and Jerry's factory as well as a few other things. Vermont was pretty and the Ben and Jerry's tour was cool I guess. But lots and lots of driving. I'd like to go back to Vermont, though, to spend some more time. Seems like it could be pretty relaxing and also have some good biking ;-) When we got home, spent some time watching the end of the first stage of the Tour de France. Yesterday, my parents headed back home and I raced. After the race, came home and made some lunch and then watched the second stage of the Tour. Spent the evening between catching up on some email for work and getting started on the System Dynamics assignment for the week. All in all, a good weekend. The next few weeks are pretty busy for me, but busy in a good way. (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 6th, 2008
katzj	3:44p	Slip and slide Raced this morning in the Wells Ave C race. After sitting in the car a good chunk of the day yesterday, my legs needed some stretching, but I felt pretty warmed up by the time we lined up on the line. We had 4 Quad riders in the group -- myself, Matthew, Jim Smith and Kenton. There were also two guys from the MIT team that I knew were pretty strong. The initial strategy that Matthew, Kenton and I had was to try to get to where on the last lap, they could give me a lead-out for the sprint. The race started out relatively sedately -- the first lap was only about 22 mph but it looked like there were a few pretty strong riders within the pack. I made it a point to again stay up in the front third and decided that I'd stick with the MIT guys for a bit. By the 4th lap, things were heating up significantly and we had a very quick lap. I was working hard, but managing to stay in the front part of the pack. The preems began to be called and had the usual impact that they have at Wells -- they broke things up briefly, but then things would slow down afterwards and there'd be a regroup. About halfway through, I wasn't sure how much more I had and so I sat back a bit more and tried to recover while remaining near the front of group which was up to about 24 mph at this point. I also continued to look for the rest of the team so that we could try to get organized, but the pace wasn't entirely conducive to the others getting up to the front. With three laps to go, there was an attack by some of the stronger riders and to avoid them getting away entirely, I tried to hang on. And, for the most part, I did. Unfortunately, the remaining three laps continued at the high 26-27 mph pace. Coming around the back side of the course on the last lap, one of the other teams launched an attack sending one guy off the front and leaving another guy back to block a bit. This was more successful than usual in the C race since the front group had been riding a reasonable pace line for a couple of laps. Eventually got around him and sprinted hard, but got swallowed by the front of the chase group with about 50-100 yards to go. Placement ended up being about 10th of the 40 or so people out today and had an average over the entire race of 24.9. So not too bad, but could have been better. I need to get a better feel for when to actually jump for my sprint at the end of a race -- I do well on the normal club ride, but part of that is that I know the route very very well. So it's just a matter of being able to apply that to different situations. Also, working on how to better get everyone else into position so that we can work together at the end rather than being spread throughout the field would be good as well. Unfortunately, after going over the finish line, I hit something on the road and my bike went skidding out from under me, leaving me with some nice road rash to remember today's race by. Nothing major, but it's definitely something that I'm feeling now and will likely continue to feel over the next few days. So I'll probably try to take it a little easy so that I can heal and then, in two weeks, I'll be doing the Seacoast Safari charity ride for cystic fybrosis. And then, I think my next race is likely to be the circuit race in Norwell on the 27th, assuming I can talk a sufficient number of Quad riders into going. Having a hill on the course should be good for changing things up :-) Current Mood: ow (Comment on this)
darklordmoeser	9:42a	Oh.. E-no, not E-mo I've heard about this Eno River for some time, but I'd assumed it was a bit more off in the field of things natural, protected by sunburns and bees, rather than simply about 10 minutes away off of MLK.  Ellen so far has been the better of the two of us at coming up with date ideas, and we went down there during the big Festival, where I discovered that is quite a nice little river, and that my canoeing skills have recovered somewhat since I capsized the boat in New River.  It helps to have a dock.  They also have a rather nicely isolated swimming hole, which is set off in the middle of Goddamn NoWhere, which I discovered is dreadfully hard to hike to in flipflops.  A quick trip back to get real shoes made things much easer, though we took the most round about way to get there with the trail barely caved from the woods, and marked mosly by roots and spiderwebs.  Of course, on the way back, we found this softcore trail that was super wide and seeded with gravel. We ran into Caitlyn too, who was off playing with her sadly not on fire sticks, preforming for less than immolated children, and I was more surprised to hear Jon's name announced as the base player for one of the bands, but there he was, with a bass about as big as him.  Its funny how even though I don't know that many people I could likely run into some of them no matter where I go. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
darklordmoeser	12:28p	of money and mouths I've got a curiously undefined feeling of respect and loathing for British writer Christopher Hitchens.  He earns my admiration for his distinct lack of bullshit relativism when discussing the less than moral practices in certain religions, and not being afraid to say that certain practices and beliefs are, in fact, dumb.  At the same time, he is also, quite easily competes with Richard ("The Dick") Dawkins in terms of being about as sensitive and understanding as a rabid wolverine, and he's also been a long time supporter of the Iraq War, and unwilling to call the Abu Ghraib stuff "torture".   At the same time, he's pushed himself back in the positive by going off and actually trying out waterboarding, so that he could see exactly what its like.  And he found that he was wrong, and was willing to admit it. (Comment on this)
katzj	10:45a	Short weeks With the 4th being tomorrow, this is something of a short week for most people in the US. For me, my parents are coming up to visit, so mine is even a little shorter. While they're up, we're going to try to get out and do some different things. For one thing, we're going to try to catch part of the rehearsal by the Boston Pops later on this evening rather than fighting the full crowds for the real deal tomorrow. Then, tomorrow, we're going to try to avoid crowds -- I'm going to take my dad out on a bike ride with the Quad folks and then we're hoping to watch the Get Smart movie later in the day. Then, Saturday we're headed to Vermont for the Ben and Jerry's factory and a few other things. Then, they fly back on Sunday and I'm intending to race at Wells Ave. So it should be a pretty good weekend. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
spot	9:18a	calling local fans? I'm thinking about going to ConnectiCon... any locals know anything about this? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
darklordmoeser	2:27p	In which there was an Excess of Couches The roommate transfer is largely complete, though there is still much mucking around to do with the putting of various things where they are best.  The Ziggy couch shall be henceforth banished from our realms, though I still need to sort out the how and when of its dismissal (and if anyone would like a free sectional couch they are welcome to it).  Also, as Erin lacks the piles and piles and piles of books that Kim or Xav had, I can expand my control over the shelves, and we're still left with some big holes.  Perhaps Shannon the cat will like to use them for sitting. Its also quite nice to throw out all the various unwanted junk that has built up over the years... its amazing the amount of odds and ends that I've had moved by accident that belonged to old roommates and never properly culled.  I think I found some sheets that belonged to Nick, which have traveled quite a long time before they were finally noticed. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 30th, 2008
katzj	11:36p	The days get shorter Got out and had a couple of nice, fast rides this weekend. Saturday was a double dinosaur for a metric century and then about fifty miles yesterday. And I'm doing pretty well at getting my speed up while still being able to do some sprinting from there. Should help a bit when racing. My original plan for the weekend had been to do the Wells Ave training race on Sunday, but it ended up being cancelled for various reasons. But, the intense training rides were a good substitute. And then hopefully I'll get down to Wells Ave this Sunday instead. Otherwise, a pretty uneventful and low key weekend. Then, spent today in the office taking care of a few things. Ended up spending a lot of time talking with people about various things and made little progress on my attempt to get us down to one set of keyboard data. I think that the quickest route to actually making this happen is going to be to take the Debian ckbcomp perl script and just pre-run it against the xkeyboard-config data into a package for the "primary" keyboard maps. And then if you want to generate your own for an abnormal case, you can. Eventually it would be nice, though, to get ckbcomp written in C and do the xkb -> console keyboard mapping done at boot-time (or even within loadkeys directly). If it's something you're interested in working on, let me know and I can point you in the right direction. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
spot	9:43p	oh noes, look whos back Back home in Boston. Will write more later, possibly tomorrow. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
spot	1:47a	Vacation: Fedora Thoughts my summer vacation is almost over. this post covers a few other "fedora" thoughts i've had lately. Unfortunately, I had to miss the last day of the Fedora User and Developer Conference (aka "FUDCon") this year, the first North American day I've missed (in its entirety). From what I was able to read, it looked like the last day was a good one. I did have a few thoughts about this years' event: - Having it with the Red Hat Summit was both good and bad. Good in that we got folks from the Summit, bad that we didn't always know what to do with them. I know some folks were able to come to FUDCon because they were officially here for the Red Hat Summit, which is good. Unfortunately, the overlap meant that those folks (including me) had to choose between the two. Seems like keeping the overlap to a minimum would be a good approach in the future. - We should do the hackfests after a day of organized talks/events. Starting with scheduled discussions and letting it flow from there seems to be good for both the established folks and the walk-in crowd. If they get excited about something they hear on day one, they might come back for the hacking on days 2 and 3. I think it would also be worthwhile to have a wrap day 4. Yes, I'm proposing that we make FUDCon longer, and yes, I know this year was the longest yet. I think its worth it. We should be intelligently growing this, the community-driven FUDCon success in contrast to the Ubuntu Live failure. (Oh, I can hear the slashdot trolls warming up now. Know that I'm not wishing ill on anyone, just pointing out the obvious contrast.) - I thought everyone involved in the planning and execution of FUDCon did a fabulous job. If I were to attempt to list all of their names, I would certainly miss lots of worthy mentions, so I will not. Know that you are all awesome, and I am grateful. - I think it would be nifty to invite some random contributors to the next FUDCon. Send out an email to every Fedora Account member with a signed CLA and some kind of group/SIG membership, inviting them to check a box in their account expressing interest in the FUDCon lottery. NN number of random folks would be chosen and brought to the event on Red Hat's dime, with the only caveat that they would be expected to blog about their FUDCon adventures, and that their stories would be recorded (heck, maybe even videotaped) for publicity. I'm lucky, Red Hat pays me to represent Fedora. I want other contributors to be lucky too. - More international FUDCon events! I know this is difficult, but I know we can do it. I'm even willing to try to attend some of them! Believe it or not, this is a job perk! (Remind me of this after I spend more than 5 hours on a plane in cattle class.) ***** During my vacation, some folks voted me onto the Fedora Board. To those who voted, thanks. There were a lot of great people on that ballot, and I hope that those who did not get elected will run again. I'm humbled at the fact that I had the highest "vote count". Even though I know that some folks may think that I am a "brainwashed" Red Hat automaton, I always think of Fedora first, and I look forward to representing the Fedora Community in my elected seat. In addition, I've decided that I will not seek re-election for FESCo. It doesn't make sense to try to wear so many hats at once. It was a hard decision, as I've been involved with FESCo from day one, but I think it is only fair. I do not want to monopolize things, and I am a lousy single point of failure. What this means: FESCo needs volunteers! Run for election! Help us shape Fedora's future, make its technical decisions, encourage the SIGs, and improve the contributor experience. You can nominate someone (or yourself) here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/SteeringCommittee/Nominations (If you're going to nominate someone else, you should probably ask them first. It would be polite.) I'm still going to drive the Fedora Packaging Committee for the time being, and I might run for FESCo in the future. I'm just going to let other people have the chance to play in the sandbox that I helped build. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
spot	12:51a	Vacation: Geek Thoughts my summer vacation is almost over. this post covers the geeky thoughts i've had lately. Firefox 3 hates me. I know that hate is a strong word, and that Mozilla and I have had our differences lately, but it can't seem to run for more than five minutes without crashing. I suspect that this is the same bug that I'm seeing, so I'm going to try to generate some debugging information with the advice in that bug report. Thank goodness that this Fedora Rawhide Firefox binary is FOSS. :) Hopefully, I'll be able to figure out why it hates me soon, and find a way to soothe its anger. ***** While I was at the beach, I took some time to work on my little side project: Coccinella. Specifically, I was trying to package the pre-built binary bits that it requires as clean Fedora packages, built from source. Turns out this is mostly a lot of TCL extensions. Some of them were actually in Fedora already, but it seems not to like the tkimg package in rawhide (its actually an SVN checkout of a newer codebase). I need to see if anything in rawhide uses that tkimg, and look at what changes might be necessary in Coccinella to make things work with that. ***** I don't know if my laptop is a good "example" system, but I noticed that some things in rawhide really don't seem to work very well at the moment. Specifically, at one point, I was asked by Pam to do the following: * Take her father's digital camera (nothing fancy), USB cable, and blank CD-R. * Copy pictures taken at the beach onto my computer * Burn a CD of those pictures Easy, huh? I thought so, and when I plugged in the camera to my laptop, it popped up a screen showing me that it detected the camera, and offered to open gphoto. As I went to click ok, another window, similar, but slightly different popped up, telling me that it also had seen the camera and offered to show me the pictures. Neither window worked, each giving me cryptic errors about I/O failures or locks. Poking around, I discovered that somehow the camera had also been automounted as a hard drive, which was preventing either tool popup from getting to the camera's pictures sanely. I closed the popups, unmounted the camera/hard drive (but not unplugging the USB cable), then manually opened the gphoto application. From there, I could see the pictures and copy them into a directory in my homedir. Now, I needed to burn them to a CD. I disconnected the camera and popped in the blank CD-R. As expected, an icon for the blank CD-R appeared on my desktop. No wizard helper popped up, but opening it showed a window that implied I could copy files to it. I selected all of the beach pictures from the local folder I had copied them to, hit Cut, then Pasted them into the blank CD-R window. They seemed to show up, so I clicked the "Burn CD" button, and a progress bar appeared, and the CDROM light flashed. It showed a completion time of 45 seconds, scrolled a bit (about 45 seconds worth), then failed. I ejected the CD-R, put it back in, and it popped up as blank. Well, to be accurate, it popped up with the window showing the files I had "pasted" into it. I had to drop to the command line to confirm that the CD-R was indeed, still blank. I gave up on that tool and opened k3b, selected the pictures, and told it to burn the disks. It burned for a few minutes, then reported success. This time, when I ejected and reinserted the CD, it didn't show up as blank, but rather, the freshly burned "Beach 2008 Pictures" CD. However, when I gave that CD to Pam, and she gave it to other folks with laptops, no one was able to get all the pictures off the CD. Some of the laptops (windows XP) could see the files but not all of them, or couldn't copy some/all of them off the CD. A Macbook (OSX) could copy them all, but some were corrupt. Maybe my CD-R drive is going bad, or that first burn pass scribbled junk on the CD-R, but I had failed at my simple task. I wonder if we test this simple task before we freeze a release. If not, we should. Yeah, I know, I can hear the comments now, blah blah resources, blah blah time, blah blah QA. It just seems to me that the community could come up with simple tasks like this, stuff that anyone can test and report success or failure on, without any real experience. I started thinking how I could make this better. Bugzilla is not really well suited for this. I might know what components to file bugs against, but Pam probably doesn't. So, I started brainstorming (hold on, it may have lightning): How cool would it be to have a Fedora "Simple Tasks" (i'm sure someone can come up with a better name) website? I boot into the Fedora Beta, open a web browser, and log into my Fedora Account. On the Simple Tasks website, I see a list of Fedora 10 "Simple Tasks" to test, maybe even see how many people have already tested the task. I see "Digital Pictures on a CD" and click it for more information. It expands to explain the task: Requires: * Digital camera (any make/model) with USB cable connection * CD/DVD Recorder * Blank CD-R or DVD-R Task: * Take some pictures with the digital camera. * Connect the camera to the computer with the USB cable * Copy the pictures into a folder in your home directory * Disconnect the camera * Burn a copy of the pictures onto the blank CD or DVD. * Confirm that the pictures are on the burned CD or DVD. * [OPTIONAL] Put the burned CD or DVD into some other computers (Linux, Mac, Windows, etc) to confirm that they can also see the pictures on it properly. I accept the task by checking a box. When I finish the task, I return to the website and see it in the list of tasks I have accepted ("Tasks In Progress"). I'm presented with options of "Success" or "Failure", along with a box to explain both. If we're clever, we'll also have fields to input the type of computer I used, the type of CD-R drive, media, and camera. If we're super clever, we'll have a way to detect some of that from the webpage. It may also ask me what software I used to accomplish this task (Some tasks may specify specific software to use) When I'm done, my report gets sent. Others can then see my report. Because we're Fedora, anyone can add their own Simple Tasks at the same web page. The helper lets you setup the "Requires" and the task steps, as well as the custom data fields for post-task reporting. Our Task moderators can help look over submitted tasks, merging duplicates together and cleaning them up. People can cast a vote on each task (think Amazon rating), rank the complexity of the task (from newbie to guru), add keywords to a task, and mark their "favorites". The QA team can also mark tasks as interesting or recommended. When you complete a task (success or fail), you get a karma point. Maybe if you gave a good post-task description, someone from the QA volunteer pool could give you another bonus point. You could also get karma points for creating a new, quality, unique, task. Karma points might even earn you Fedora schwag, and at a certain point, invite you to join the Fedora Task Moderator team. We'd be doing QA. As a game. :) Sure, its not automated, but it sure is distributed. Task text can be translated, so it can be international, and we want to encourage simplicity (but not discourage complicated tasks, as long as they are marked as such). Can you picture it? (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
katzj	4:53p	More git support for fedorapeople One of the things provided for Fedora contributors is access to fedorapeople.org for hosting various web content. One thing that has become somewhat common there is hosting a git repository for someone to take a look from time to time. And since its inception, making this a little bit nicer has been one of the things I've hoped to be able to do. Now that we have some time from observing the load and feel that the box isn't terribly loaded, I spent some time this afternoon making things a bit nicer for users who want to have a small git repository hosted there. As of right now, this should be considered beta (at best) and it may go away based on some trial time. Also, if you are hosting something more substantial with a number of contributors, I strongly suggest using fedorahosted instead. With those disclaimers out of the way, here's the basics for using it. Create a public_git directory in your home directory Put your git repository under this directory. Common methods for initially doing this would be rsync or scp of a repository you already have. Touch the git-daemon-export-ok file in the repository. This makes it so that others have access to the repository You can also set a description for the project by editing the description file in the repository Users can clone your repository via something like git clone git://fedorapeople.org/~katzj/isomd5sum.git You can see your project listed in gitweb once the project list updates (hourly). Note that this URL may change And that's all there is to it. The documentation for fedorapeople has been updated with this information as well. Let me know if you run into any problems. (3 Comments |Comment on this)