Jeremy's Thoughts
Cycling, Fedora, MIT SDM and Miscellany

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2009-10-16 15:46
Subject: EC2 and Fedora: Still stuck at Fedora 8
Security: Public
Tags:amazon, ec2, fedora

Amazon’s EC2 service is great for being able to roll out new servers quickly and easily. It’s also really nice because we don’t ever have to worry about physical hardware and can just spin up more instances as we need them for experimenting or whatever.

Unfortunately, they’re still stuck in the dark ages with the newest AMIs available for Fedora being Fedora 8 based. With Fedora 12 around the corner, that’s two years old — something of an eternity in the pace of distribution development. I’d love to help out and build newer images, but while anyone can publish an AMI and make it public, you can’t publish newer kernel images, which really would be needed to use the newer system.

So, if you’re reading this at Amazon or know of someone I can talk with to try to move this forward, please let me know (katzj AT fedoraproject DOT org). I’d really strongly prefer to continue with Fedora and RHEL based images for our systems as opposed to starting to spin up Ubuntu images for the obvious reasons of familiarity.

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2009-01-19 17:09
Subject: Rumours of my death are (largely) unfounded
Security: Public
Tags:fedora, fudcon, life, sdm

The rumours of my death are largely unfounded.  I've just been either busy working or trying to relax while not on a computer since this is as much of a "break" as I get.

I have, though, done various updates to twitter and identi.ca if you have some obsessive need to know what I've been doing.  It hasn't been that exciting, though.  Basically boils down to the following relatively short list

  • Went cross-country skiing a couple of times.  With the very wintry weather we've had thus far this winter, it's been something good to be able to get outside and do as it hasn't exactly been ideal biking weather
  • FUDCon F11 was held in Cambridge at MIT.  Since it was in E51 and I knew where things were, I spent a fair bit of time running around.  I had some good conversations, but didn't give any presentations and didn't really get any hacking done with the hackfest
  • The SDM 09s have started and I helped some with their first design challenge.  Was fun to watch and they seem a good bunch
  • Have been trying to read a fair bit and so made good progress on my book backlog.  Still hoping to finish that before classes start back up
  • Some poking and prodding in the hopes of getting Fedora 11 alpha out the door in a semi-decent shape
  • More work on the new initramfs tooling, although it's making slower progress than I'd really like
  • Getting extra sleep
 

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2008-12-17 14:24
Subject: dracut — Cross distribution initramfs infrastructure
Security: Public
Tags:dracut, fedora

As davej was alluding to, we've started trying to make progress on a new initramfs infrastructure that can be used across distributions instead of just being done for a single distribution. Thus far, the code is fairly early and proof-of-concept-y, but I can successfully boot root partitions, root on LVM or root on encrypted LVM. The next step is to clean up the build side so that I can switch to using it with my laptop. I wanted to go ahead and get the code out first, though.

The majority of the ideas behind the code are that we want to use the same tools and utilities that exist on the booted system (so regular bash, regular udev, no nash, no statically linked nonsense, no klibc) and also that we want to not have the initramfs as a slow-down. The latter means that we run pretty much everything off of udev rules right now so that as soon as the devices are available, we mount and switch into the rootfs.

So go ahead 'git clone git://fedorapeople.org/~katzj/dracut.git' and read the README, HACKING and TODO files. Also sent to lkml to get the mailing list started. More hands more than welcome…

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2008-12-17 14:24
Subject: dracut -- Cross distribution initramfs infrastructure
Security: Public
Tags:fedora

As davej was alluding to, we've started trying to make progress on a new initramfs infrastructure that can be used across distributions instead of just being done for a single distribution. Thus far, the code is fairly early and proof-of-concept-y, but I can successfully boot root partitions, root on LVM or root on encrypted LVM. The next step is to clean up the build side so that I can switch to using it with my laptop. I wanted to go ahead and get the code out first, though.

The majority of the ideas behind the code are that we want to use the same tools and utilities that exist on the booted system (so regular bash, regular udev, no nash, no statically linked nonsense, no klibc) and also that we want to not have the initramfs as a slow-down. The latter means that we run pretty much everything off of udev rules right now so that as soon as the devices are available, we mount and switch into the rootfs.

So go ahead 'git clone git://fedorapeople.org/~katzj/dracut.git' and read the README, HACKING and TODO files. Also sent to lkml to get the mailing list started. More hands more than welcome...

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2008-12-07 21:08
Subject: Semester nearly over
Security: Public
Tags:fedora, olpc, sdm

At this point, the semester is almost entirely over. While I still have one day of each class left, pretty much every assignment is done and turned in. Only have to finish up the principles assignment for System Architecture and that's mostly a matter of sitting down and throwing some together from the notes that I've got from the semester.

Overall, it's been a good semester. The workload ended up being a bit higher than I expected, but it was probably what I should have thought. I knew that System Architecture was going to be time-consuming, but it was still more so than I thought. Similarly, Project Management ended up requiring more time both for the homeworks and the project than I really expected from the outset.

Those along with working to get all of the Fedora 10 bits working on the OLPC meant that it was just a very busy semester. But, now it's actually the time when I get nearly two monhs to relax and "just" work. Well, and I also am hoping to try to get some progress underway for my thesis so that I don't have to do it all while juggling classes also. It should still be a good sort of break, though. And then, it's on to the spring semester. Which I still need to figure out what I'm going to take -- suggestions welcome :-)

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2008-11-10 23:06
Subject: The end of the semester comes early it seems
Security: Public
Tags:fedora, life, sdm

For some reason, the end of this semester seems to be coming early this time around. Although the end of classes isn't until the middle of December, it seems that pretty much everything is due before Thanksgiving. Which, coupled with trying to get Fedora 10 out the door is going to make the next few weeks a pile of pain.

So if the updates from me seem sparse, that's why. And then of course, to make things even more fun, I came down with something the end of last week which I haven't quite managed to completely shake. Although at this point, it might just be my usual congestion for this time of year.

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2008-11-04 13:45
Subject: Party like it's 1999
Security: Public
Tags:fedora, gnome

I'm somewhat excited about the new gnome-shell stuff that has been blogged about a few times by various people since the GNOME summit a few weeks ago. And so when Owen posted that there was some initial code available, I had to check it out, even if it was pretty retro GNOME 0.9 at the moment. There was, though, one important piece missing...














Wanda!
Wanda!
(Click the link for the movie)

Not what I intended to work on today. But it was fun and gave me a chance to try out writing a tiny bit of code using both Javascript and Clutter, neither of which I'd used before. The takeaway is that it's really simple to do simple things with what is being worked on. Still not sure about anything more complicated at this point

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2008-10-31 15:33
Subject: Working around graphical glitches on the XO
Security: Public
Tags:fedora, olpc

Thanks to a pointer from warren, I've just pushed a workaround to the spins-kickstart repo to help some of the graphical glitches that have been seen on on the OLPC. This includes the blacked out buttons and also the cut-off text. Unfortunately, this probably won't make the Fedora 10 Preview release next week, although it will be in the final release. If you'd like to test it yourself, you can edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add a line

Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
below the EXA line.


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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2008-10-20 09:49
Subject: Fedora 10 Snapshot 2 posted with some improvements for running on the XO
Security: Public
Tags:fedora, olpc

As an update to my post last week, Snapshot 2 of Fedora 10 should be available via bittorrent now. (I had intended to post this update on Friday, but then my main laptop decided to start randomly and regularly dying on me :-/)

Again if you ensure that you have the latest livecd-iso-to-disk script, there are a few changes and improvements with Snap2

  • If you pass --swap-size-mb to the script, you'll get a swap file set up which gets automatically activated on boot. As mentioned by others, having some swap makes a huge difference.
  • We set up the inernal nand (flash) to be used for /home. We don't reuse the homedir from the main XO OS but the data is written there so you can update images without losing changes
  • Related to that, we now reset the overlay on every boot. This means the only saved bits are the things in /home. But this lets us worry (less) about filling the overlay and causing things to crash.

On the other hand, from my quick reading of mailing lists so far, there may also be some other performance regressions vs Snap1. Testing and details from people appreciated as always.

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2008-10-14 14:41
Subject: Fedora 10 Snapshot 1 on the XO
Security: Public
Tags:fedora, olpc

As the Fedora 10 release cycle moves forward, we are now in the stage where there are regular "snapshot" releases planned for every week. These snapshots are just a 'point in time' test of rawhide and released based on whether they work and if not, then we end up just waiting for the next week. The intent is to keep the required effort level relatively low but still give a basis for testing between the beta and the preview release.

On Friday, the first of these post-beta snapshots was released. This includes a set of live images which can run without modifications on the OLPC. This is nice as it will make me not have to do builds of images and host them on fedorapeople anymore :-)

With this image plus the updated livecd-iso-to-disk, the performance of the image on the XO is much better. How is this achieved? The single biggest thing that helps is changing to putting the ext3fs on the SD card as opposed to the squashfs. This means we're not paying the penalty of decompression. The downside is that this requires a 4 GB (or more) SD card as opposed to a 2 GB one.

A second thing which helps (significantly) is not using a RAM based overlay and instead putting the overlay on the SD card. There are some upsides and some downsides to doing this, but at this point, the upsides seem to outweigh the downsides. This will even more be the case for this week's snapshot with a few of the things I'm planning to have ready for that (more details below...).

So that said, what is the invocation of livecd-iso-to-disk that I'm using (and thus would recommend to testers)? Presently, it's

~/src/fedora/livecd-tools/tools/livecd-iso-to-disk.sh --force --xo --overlay-size-mb 512 - ~/Desktop/Live/F10-Snap1-i686-Live.iso /dev/mmcblk0p1

This sets up a 512 MB (persistent) overlay on the SD card and with --xo, we set up a boot/olpc.fth as well as moving over the embedded ext3fs instead of the squashfs.

So the obvious question is what's next/on my plate to make sure is in better shape for this week's snapshot?

  • Fix up handling so that we can easily set up having some swap on the SD card. This again feels like a situation where we're better off doing than not. Most of the mechanism should be present in Snap1, but for some reason, I'm not seeing /mnt/live being properly mounted from the live initscript. This should be a pretty straight-forward thing if someone wanted to take a look and send me a patch :) The live initscript itself lives in the spin-kickstarts repo
  • Non-persistent, disk-based overlay. The "persistence" is kind of kludgey in that it can pretty easily fill up and cause problems. Unfortunately, with dm-snapshot, there's not a lot we can do about that. Hopefully we'll get some form of unionfs in the future, but that definitely won't land for F10. This should just be a matter of changing the initrd to recognize a flag and recreate the snapshot store on the SD card when requested. The initrd is created from mkliveinitrd in the mkinitrd package.
  • Persistent /home on the internal nand (mtd0). Again, this should be mostly ready to go with Snap1, but was acting weird the end of last week for me. Should get mounted within the live initscript
  • Start making a dent in some of the reported bugs
  • Investigate the question which was asked of just sticking the ext3fs on the SD card directly and not doing the "normal" live image bits for the overlay. While this is interesting to explore, I have a sinking suspicion that it's not something that's really doable in the timeframe of Fedora 10, although it is certainly one that bears looking at more for Fedora 11.

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2008-10-14 00:26
Subject: Back...
Security: Public
Mood:tired tired
Tags:fedora, olpc

Took a long weekend from pretty much everything work related (although I had to do some school work) and then got back this evening and spent way too much time on some homework for System Architecture. This process was made more frustrating by OpenOffice deciding to crash and corrupt its own backup file in the process. I'm so glad that office software really hasn't improved :-/

So if you've sent an email and expected to see a response from me, hopefully I'll get to it tomorrow. Direct mail looks quiet, but I see there are some 800 messages on various Fedora related lists for me to get through...

For those chomping at the bit about Fedora on OLPC, the new snapshot images that went up on Friday should work better on the XO and integrate everything that's needed without requiring a special OLPC build. You'll also want the updated <a href="http://katzj.fedorapeople.org/olpc/livecd-iso-to-disk</a>livecd-iso-to-disk</a> which copies the uncompressed ext3fs.img onto your SD card rather than the squashfs. You'll definitely need a 4 GB SD card instead of a 2 GB one for that and there are also some corner cases like running out of disk space that I haven't fixed up in the script, hence why it's not in git yet. And if none of that makes sense, I'm intending to get a more verbose update up tomorrow. But right now, it's after midnight and I was up before 5 am to head down to a bike race and so I'm exhausted and going to go crash into bed for a few hours so that I can wake up in the morning and maybe even make it to class on time...

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2008-10-08 11:55
Subject: More Fedora on XO
Security: Public
Tags:fedora, olpc

So, you just got your XO to do some testing of Fedora on OLPC. You update the software that was on there, get a developer key, wait a day, and then get all ready to boot your Fedora image off of the SD card ....

And it boots. But it's slow. Very very slow. Some slowness is to be expected... this isn't a fast machine. But it should probably be a little bit speedier than it is. So want to try out a few experiments to try to help pin down the cause of the slowness? Then read on, pick a case and leave comments about your results.

  1. Try using a persistent overlay instead of the in-memory one. Add --overlay-size-mb to your livecd-iso-to-disk invocation. Amount should be relative to the size of your SD card.
  2. See if/how much having swap available helps. You can create a file on the SD card with dd, run mkswap against the file and then enable it on the XO. The best test for this would probably be to boot the XO single-user and run swapon from there and then do telinit 5.
  3. Try disabling some services from the live image. Again boot to single-user, chkconfig some services and then telinit 5
  4. ... your idea here. Hopefully other people have some ideas of things to try as well. Try them out and let us know how it goes.

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2008-10-02 23:11
Subject: More Fedora on XO progress
Security: Public
Tags:fedora, olpc

Made some more progress today with running Fedora on the XO. Until I manage to go and pick up the right SD card, I figured I'd give performance a little bit of a rest and so instead focused on seeing which bits of the hardware appeared to work (or not). So I booted up into run-level 3 with the image I posted last night and started poking.

  • Wireless: First thing to check was the wireless to see if it worked. And it does, the driver gets loaded, we have the firmware and it managed to find the access point at my house and associate without problems. Haven't really looked at mesh at all, and also haven't dived into making sure wpa works, but at least for the basics, it seems okay.
  • Camera: From the quick test of "does the driver load" and "does the driver give data", this looks okay too. Doing cat < /dev/video0 as a user turns on the LED for the camera and prints garbage to the screen.
  • Sound: Driver loads and the mixer shows elements, but playing sound isn't looking like it's working. Needs more investigation
  • Internal Flash (NAND): Driver seems to load and with a couple of pointers from dwmw2, is mountable without having to do any more module loads. Went ahead and did the next obvious step and changed things so that we can use that for the persistent /home.
  • Special keys: Most of the keys on the keyboard seem to be appropriately mapped, but there are some that will need mapping via hal. Should be straight-forward to sit down and do as it's just writing some fdi file bits (hint: if someone wants to volunteer to do this, I can point you in the right direction :)
  • Power management: Suspend to RAM isn't showing up as available at all right now. I suspect some kernel bits that haven't been upstreamed need to be pulled out. Will probably look closer at this tomorrow

And now, I think it is time to go watch some tv

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2008-10-01 17:49
Subject: New Fedora on the XO Test Image
Security: Public
Tags:fedora, olpc

A new image for testing Fedora on the XO is now available. This image runs quite a bit slower than the previous one in X and I haven't gotten to why yet, so if you try it, I recommend quite a bit of patience. But I wanted to get something up in the near-term so that people would see some sort of progress :-)

Changes and improvements in this image...:

  • Updated packages to match those that are included in the Fedora 10 beta that was released yesterday
  • Slightly newer kernel (the one that davej built last night) which has debugging disabled. Sadly, this wasn't the help I hoped it would be.

Booting to runlevel 3 is okay for at least some testing, though. So be sure to add --extra-kernel-args 3 to your invocation of livecd-iso-to-disk in addition to passing --xo. And hopefully we'll have a new image up shortly that fixes some of the slowness and makes things more reasonable for general use "soon"

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2008-09-22 22:20
Subject: Progress with the end of seasons
Security: Public
Mood:optimistic optimistic
Tags:cycling, fedora, mitcycling, olpc

This was the last weekend of summer and on Saturday, it actually felt a bit like fall was already here. I went out with the MIT cycling club on their ride to Dover (MA). Was a nice route and largely in areas that I had never been before, which was good. Relaxed pace and a good opportunity to talk with and start to get to know some of the other people riding. Was glad that I had picked up some knee warmers, though, as they were pretty much the perfect extra layer. Yesterday, though, felt more like summer again as I went out on the Quad ride. Again a beautiful day, though, and nice to get some more good riding in.

Today brought the actual beginning of autumn and waking up to it being kind of dull, gray and cool was not the way I had hoped to start the morning. But I dragged myself out of bed and headed to the office for a day that I had somewhat booked already with meetings.

Between them, managed to get the serial cable hooked up to the OLPC in the office and started with trying to track down kernel things again. And finally started getting somewhere. After a week (plus) of dead ends, I happened upon the right avenue and was able to confirm that the problem was OpenFirmware loading the initrd into RAM where it shouldn't have been. Wrote up a good description of what was going wrong, sent it off, and Mitch Bradley (aka OFW Ninja) had me a fix in about an hour. I didn't see it for a while longer due to other meetings, but it was in my inbox.

So, after getting home and having dinner, I tried it out and was greeted with success. So modulo fixing some more "normal" kernel problems, it looks like we should be well on our way to having the XO able to boot with the regular Fedora kernel. And this means that having an XO run just any old Fedora live image is now a very big step closer to reality...

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2008-09-18 18:45
Subject: Catching up
Security: Public
Mood:busy
Tags:fedora, sdm

About this time last week, I came to the realization that I had a ton of pending work to get done. Luckily, I'm now starting to feel more like I'm on track and not behind. But it was less than fun, so I'm definitely going to try to be better about staying on top of things, especially the system architecture "opportunity sets" for the rest of the semester. Otherwise, classes are going good. Given the amount of time getting sucked up, I decided to not actually be a listener for the Software Systems Engineering course, which is too bad. But this way, I should have some time to just to a few more random talks around MIT. Which is probably going to be more interesting and helpful.

On other fronts, the Fedora on OLPC and Sugar on Fedora efforts are picking up steam a bit. Hopefully we'll have some more useful milestones for both in the next week or so. But due to work there, I haven't had much time to spend on getting a SIG for other smaller form factor machines (including netbooks, the XO and more) underway. Luckily, Peter Robinson has volunteered on fedora-devel-list to help get this off the ground, so hopefully we can get that going to.

Never a dull day...

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2008-09-10 22:26
Subject: Fedora on an XO
Security: Public
Tags:fedora, olpc

As I mentioned before, one thing that I've been spending some time on is getting a "stock" Fedora to run on the OLPC XO hardware. Obviously there's not a CD drive, but there is a USB port and there is also an SD card slot. Which given the support in our live images for running off of such things, there seemed to be a bit of an obvious matchup.

There's just one (large-ish) problem. The XO is a Geode, so an i586 processor with cmov. So the stock i686 kernel on the live images definitely doesn't boot there. Unfortunately, neither does the i586 kernel. I'm working on tracking down what the relevant configuration difference is so that it can be fixed -- interestingly enough, if you don't load an initrd, a Fedora i586 kernel can boot fine. So there's definitely something a little odd going on. If you have experience in debugging early boot of an XO and have any tips, leave a comment or catch me on IRC or send me mail :)

So, instead I've done a modified version of the main OLPC kernel with the help of sdziallas that includes squashfs and also turns on things like dm-snapshot which we need for live images.

That plus a pretty straight-forward image config and we can build a live image that boots into the GNOME desktop on the XO off of either an SD card or a USB stick. There are definitely still things to be fixed, though. To try to help some of that, I've created a tracking bug that can be used by those who have an XO and try running a Fedora live image on it.

Do you have an XO and are interested in trying it out? If so, first be sure that you have a developer key for your system. Then, you can download an image based on today's rawhide (debranded) from here. I've basically tested that it boots, logs in to the desktop and associates to my access point. Then gpk-update-icon fires up and we run out of memory for things. If you kill it quick enough, then you can fire up firefox and slowly do a little bit of other stuff.

Some things that are continuing to be worked on:


  • Having somewhere to swap would help a lot
  • Using the SD card/USB stick for your persistence instead of eating up valuable RAM
  • Persistent /home on the internal NAND (jffs2)
  • Looking at high memory usage things and helping to make them better
  • Fixing the standard kernel so that we can boot it on the XO
  • And if we do the last one then we can boot the standard live images, any of them, on the XO


Any help appreciated! Any bugs you find, please be sure to make them block the tracker so that we can keep up with them accordingly.

As for the questions about what the end goal is here -- ultimately, I'd like to have any Fedora spin working on the XO just like it works on lots of other hardware. For Fedora 10, this may be a stretch (although I'm going to land any small changes that can be identified in that timeframe even though it's not a feature and we're at feature/beta freeze). But for Fedora 11, it should certainly be doable.

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2008-08-28 19:31
Subject: What have I been up to?
Security: Public
Tags:fedora

Things have quieted down on the livecd-tools front -- it is mostly to a point where it's pretty stable and works fairly well. Also, I did not run for election to either the Board or FESCo this time around. Instead, I've tried to free up my time a bit so that I can spend more time looking into some "new and different" things, while still managing to spend most of my time on Fedora.

And after some time looking, it's mostly ending up being spending time helping to get Fedora working better on various "small" form-factor x86 machines. I sent out a message to fedora-devel-list about two weeks ago now seeing who else was interested and got a bit of a gamut of responses. Some were right along the lines of what I'm thinking with things such as Netbooks, UMPCs, MIDs and the XO. Others were more things like the OpenMoko. And while the latter is perhaps interesting to Fedora in the longer-term, it's not really a space that we're well equipped to work in at present.

So basically, I'm hoping to spend time in the lead-up to Fedora 10 helping to make Fedora work as well as possible on some of this hardware. Luckily, a lot of the drivers for these devices have made it into Linus's tree for 2.6.27, so this will be a lot less painful than it would have been previously.

I'm also spending some time with the OLPC people to help reconcile some of the forks which have occurred. I've spent some time over the past couple of days helping to get a live image which is bootable using the stock livecd-creator and booting into the "normal" Fedora environment. I also started a little while ago on helping to get more Sugar activities packaged up so that they can be built and installed as normal packages within Fedora.

Now, how are these things related you might ask? Well, longer term, I think that it could make a lot of sense to have a spin of Fedora available which is better suited for some of these smaller form-factor, internet always available devices. The idea being that with the resolutions in question, you may well not want to be running a stock GNOME or KDE. Instead, something like Sugar really is nicer, although there are definitely rough edges on Sugar right now. So maybe these new emerging form-factor devices can give a good additional place for Sugar to be deployed and used. And more people using Sugar means more people writing Sugar activities which means more things for the kids :-) But, that's likely Fedora 11 before it becomes a reality.

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2008-08-26 23:35
Subject: Well, that was interesting
Security: Public
Tags:fedora, life

So when I last left you with a post, it was to note the end of my summer classes and looking forward to at least getting to relax a little bit.

Hah! That mostly certainly didn't happen. Instead, I got thrown into the ultra-fun world of helping to deal with the cleanup for the Fedora infrastructure intrusion. Spent a lot of time reinstalling a lot of servers and doing everything I could do to help get things online as quickly as possible. Not how I intended to spend last week, but you do what needs doing. I will say that the setup for the Fedora Infrastructure is a whole heck of a lot nicer than it used to be. And while editing puppet configs makes my skin crawl, it is pretty effective.

In the middle of that, Kara and I did manage to have some people over now a week and a half ago for a night of games of the carded variety. A good time was had I think by all and the approach of making a theme worked pretty well for avoiding the phenomena of "game of Rock Band" and "everyone else". So we'll probably have to try to keep going in that vein. Not that there's anything wrong with Rock Band, per se, but it's good to get people interacting in different games as well. We'll probably try to get something else together in a couple of weeks.

Then, over this past weekend, Kara and I headed down to DC for a (very much needed by that point) vacation. Did a lot of sleeping in, touristy things, and eating good food. Which, all in all, was exactly what we were looking for. Went to the Newseum and was actually pretty impressed and see how they can manage to charge for a museum admission and be right next to the Smithsonian. We also hit up some of the exhibits at the Smithsonian, although a different set than the ones I've usually hit in the past.

The only downside of the trip really was that I didn't have a bike with me and so haven't really ridden to speak of in about a week. But that shall be remedied starting tomorrow and I'm pretty certain it's going to involve the round trip commute to the office. Although I should probably be sure to do a few things like plug in the nice light, etc tonight before heading to bed.

This week, I'll hopefully get back on track with what I was hoping to do last week. And maybe get enough done for two weeks in... err.. three days. Seems doubtful, doesn't it? Then a long weekend for Labor Day and then classes start back up. How does that saying go about no rest?

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Jeremy Katz
Date: 2008-08-04 23:34
Subject: Last week flew by
Security: Public
Mood:busy
Tags:cycling, fedora, life, sdm

So yeah, last week kind of flew past me and I didn't do a good job of keeping up with posting. Lots of it was building live images for the Fedora 10 alpha (coming to a mirror near you tomorrow), testing said images, building new images, and doing over and over again. Also a whole ton of mail on various fronts. Today was more of the same, although also a lot of time trying to track down what was going on in a weird livecd-creator bug that has been popping up from time to time forever. Finally figured out the root cause so hopefully we'll get to the bottom of it real soon now.

On the school side, it was the usual level of madness for summer classes. Spent a good chunk of time Tuesday after class finishing up the System Dynamics assignment and then home to work and have dinner. Only a tiny bit longer of that and then I get a few weeks off before fall classes begin. And Kara and I have booked a short trip for in that time period as we have some overlap this time around.

And then to keep things even more busy last week, we had a pretty busy social schedule. Wednesday had a group of the Quad racers getting together at Redbones and so I wandered down there as, hey, why miss a good chance of eating at Redbones. Thursday was then the monthly "Cafe Quad" social, although I really only briefly popped my head in before going home due to the tiring week. Friday night, Kara and I ended up going out with Kate and Jon to drink to a better August, as Kate's July kind of sucked. Saturday was probably the slowest day -- Quad ride in the morning, spending a little bit of time between work and looking at school stuff in the afternoon, and then dinner and watching Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story which was no better or worse than I expected it to be. It was just the sort of light comedy that I was needing at that point.

And I think that mostly catches up to the present... this week might be a little bit less insane on some fronts, but I'm sure it will make up for it on others.

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October 2009