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| 2008-05-13 16:56 |
| Woo! |
| Public |
 relieved |
| fedora, sdm |
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And with that, a couple of huge weights are lifted off my shoulder. Let's recap or those playing along at home...
Just one class tomorrow and I have a few weeks of "just" work before summer classes start up. It looks like I'm taking Systems Engineering and System Dynamics over the summer. Hopefully with the two classes, the workload won't be too high so that I can manage to get in plenty of riding ;-) Of course, if I bike on the days I come into the office like I did today, that'll help substantially with my overall mileage.
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Just really, really busy. Between the end of the semester and chugging towards the Fedora 9 release, haven't had a chance to write much. Highlights in bulleted form...
- Birthday was good. Had some people over for a game night and I think everyone had a pretty good time
- Prototype for our product in PDD is finished and it looks really nice. It's cool to have an idea and then see it realized in a physical form. Something you don't really get in the software world
- Tech Strategy continues to be good... I want to write up summaries of some of the classes, but just haven't gotten there. Maybe I'll do a whirlwind pass through them late next week
- Summer schedule is out... I think I'm going to take Systems Engineering and System Dynamics this summer, leaving the finance/accounting and supply chain classes for next summer
- Fall schedule is also out... pretty much have to take System Architecture and Systems Project Management then. But also have room for at least one other class, just need to decide what. On the plus side, lots of good options to choose from
- Fedora 9 is shaping up quite nicely -- only the last minute "oh no!" types of things cropping up now. Feeling a little bit more confident today about getting the release out "on time"
- Big presentation for PDD on Friday, big paper for Tech Strategy the first of next week... lots to do, not a lot of time
- Warm enough that I'm not letting rain stop me from biking... realized that I didn't take the T to class at all during April. I did let the rain stop me from racing, though
- Just another week and a half and things get a lot better...
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As really seems to be the norm, this week is also falling into the nice and busy category.
Had the ERBA quiz on Wednesday and didn't think it was bad at all -- fair in terms of what was asked and if you paid attention to the review session, you had a very good idea of what was coming. Tech Strategy I felt less prepared for than I typically do just because I hadn't had much time to really read and digest the case. We were looking at Adobe and while I had familiarity with a lot of the events covered, that familiarity just didn't run as deeply as some of the other things we've covered. PDD was a pretty interesting class too, even with a guest lecturer -- the speaker was the professor's husband who has a lot of experience in coming up with product ideas and selling them either to companies or through a company he's working for at the time. His experience had largely been in children's toys, but it was still pretty fascinating to hear the stories he had as well as some of the processes and lessons learned.
Then, we had the first SDM Connect event of the year. Unlike the ones I attended last year, this one was a bit more formal -- we brought in a few people from a private investment group who were actively recruiting to get someone new to join their firm. But instead of a more information conversation, it was tilted more towards being a presentation. Which isn't bad, but lots of slides with lots of words aren't my proverbial cup of tea ;-) We had a good turnout, though, which is good as hopefully it will help to ensure that we can bring in more people effectively through the rest of the year.
Today was a day at the office, but the morning started off with my alarm not having been set. Managed to get up just in time to get ready and make the bus, though, so it wasn't an entire bust. Then, I had been planning on looking at some blockers and also sitting down to do a review of pytrainer since the package got submitted. Of course, I had failed to remember that the materials for prep'ing for the office move were present now, and so instead, I spent the day doing that. My cube is now pretty empty looking as everything is instead in boxes. So, now I've shifted things and hopefully I'll get to what I wanted to from today tomorrow.
After coming home, I headed down to the bike shop for our monthly social event where I hung out and just chatted with people. It sounds like we're going to have a good showing for the race at Blue Hills in a little over a week, so hopefully that will work out well. Also, before I headed down there, Kara gave me my birthday present even though I had said she didn't really need to get me anything. She got me the Garmin Edge 305 which I've been wanting for a while but trying not to buy for myself. It should be pretty sweet for keeping better track of my riding and helping to improve my training. The next trick will be getting it to work nicely in Fedora and seeing if I can figure out what some of the web-based apps are looking for in terms of data so that we can have good support for them ;-)
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| 2008-04-22 22:54 |
| Long Weekend, Cars, Bikes, and then Catching Up |
| Public |
 tired |
| cycling, fedora, life, sdm |
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Since it was a long weekend from classes, I decided to take yesterday off of work and turn it into a long weekend in general which turned out to be a pretty good thing overall. After spending the day at the office on Friday where I successfully threw out a lot of crap from my desk in preparation for the office move, I came home and then we headed out to dinner with a friend of Kara's. Dinner was good, although for some reason, I couldn't fully get into enjoying it.
Saturday, woke up in the morning and started the day off right with a nice long bike ride. Lots of people were out and a fair number of stronger riders within the group made for a good and spirited ride. Got in about 50 miles and felt like my legs were feeling okay after a few days of not. Then some time at Starbucks and a quick stop at the shop and then headed home. Kara and I then headed out to look a little more at cars since hers has been showing some signs of its age. Then, dinner with friends and eventually home to pack up what I needed to have for the race on Sunday.
Sunday was pretty much consumed by the race and not much else between travel time, food, etc. A good time was (I think at least) had by all. See my last post for the details around it.
Yesterday ended up turning into car day. After doing some additional preparation, we headed out again. And a few hours later, we had signed a chunk of paperwork to purchase a new Prius. Okay, that makes it sound like it was a spur of the moment thing, but really, it was the result of a while worth of looking into our options. The hatchback will be good for when I need/want to carry a bike and it's just me or just me and a passenger and it's also practical from other perspectives. Going for the nav system may not quite have been "practical", but it's at least fun ;) It's definitely the car to appeal to geeks. After all of that, we came home, had dinner and did some cleaning up around the house. Later in the evening, we finally got around to watching Juno which was fun.
Today, it was back to the grind of school and work. Although to be fair, I did start out Earth Day with a few of my classmates doing a loop up the bike path and back. Was good to get to show some more people what's out and about and the weather really is getting to be perfect. After that was diving back into the piles and piles of mail and bugs awaiting me. Made pretty good progress plowing through them, though. Also studied a bit for the ERBA quiz tomorrow and did some work for Tech Strategy. I'm pretty glad that tomorrow is the last day of ERBA as having one class less should help a bit for my sanity which is good as the continued march towards the Fedora 9 release isn't helping it any ;-) So maybe it'll balance out. Hopefully information on the summer class schedule will get sent in the next few days as I'd really like to figure out what my plan is for the summer.
But now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go relax and then try to get to bed a little early.
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| 2008-04-17 03:21 |
| Late night hacking is oh such fun... |
| Public |
| sleepy |
| fedora |
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Got on a bit of a roll tonight on fixing up some bugs from the Fedora 9 blocker list and so kept going. Haven't had a good productive late night hack sesssion in a while and it felt pretty good. Most of them were little things, but it's always the little bits of polish at the end that help to make a release good. I'm finally starting to feel better about the release as the bugs seem to be on the right trajectory at last and things are shoring up. *knock on wood*
Hopefully a post about today's Tech Strategy discussion (about Danger) tomorrow as it was pretty interesting. But now, bed.
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| 2008-04-15 15:23 |
| Clearly nearing release time |
| Public |
| fedora |
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We're clearly getting closer to time for a release. Lots of things breaking, tensions rising and the like. On the plus side, we're getting a lot fixed. On the downside, there are still a few scary things outstanding :-/
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| 2008-04-14 23:21 |
| Monday, Monday, Monday! |
| Public |
| fedora, sdm |
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Another busy Monday. Today was a little weird with Tech Strategy being directly after than ERBA rather than after lunch. Was a good class, although less interesting than last week's look at Apple. I just felt less engaged by looking at some of Polaroid's mistakes than some of the other cases that we've looked at. I'm not sure if that's because I spent less time preparing for the class (due to the previously mentioned "trying to do less work over the weekend") or if it was the specifics or what, but it just didn't grab me as much.
The afternoon was consumed between trying to pay attention to the rel-eng meeting (and largely failing), doing the ERBA problem set that's due on Wednesday and a quick check-in with the faculty for PDD. Then a quick stop to look at panniers at the bike shop on the way home and it was time to dig into the piles of mail, bugzilla and work for the day. Mostly spent the time looking at some really bizarre bugs but finally tracked them down and got some fixes. Hopefully can continue to knock things out over the next few days to help solidify Fedora 9 as much as possible. Unfortunately, getting tablet PCs to work out of the box just didn't happen in time, although I have a good solid start and should be able to finish getting it working for Fedora 10. And it's always good to have a nice list of things to do for the next release before the current one is out the door ;-)
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| 2008-04-03 23:04 |
| Ghost bugs |
| Public |
| fedora |
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Feel like I spent pretty much the entire day just chasing down ghosts. Things that have been reported fleetingly but weren't reproducible. Luckily, was able to reproduce one or two of them so it wasn't entirely frustration. The ones I was able to reproduce were because davej came into the office and brought his eeePC, so I was able to reproduce one or two things that have been reported on the box and actually track down the cause. Of course, the bugs that he had noticed and reported disappeared into the wind when I tried to look at them. Blargh. Very very frustrating.
And interestingly on a related note -- after using the eee, I'm actually pretty non-interested in them. Sure, the form factor is nice. But the keyboard is absolutely impossible to use. And after using it for a little bit, I don't even see how it would be that practical for just a travel device for things like mail, etc. The Nokia tablets seem better suited to it and even smaller. Maybe it's just the trying to squish a standard Fedora user experience onto the screen and if apps that were better suited were being used, it would make more sense to me. But, since lots of other people care, hopefully the few remaining little install niggles for them will be worked out in the next couple of days so that the process of using Fedora 9 on one can be pretty straight-forward.
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Unfortunately, the not feeling well persisted beyond Sunday. Woke up on Monday and forced myself to head in for class anyway. It was the first day of Tech Strategy and I didn't really want to miss it -- definitely the right call to make. The class is very intense, but interesting. The class is run case style, so plenty of opportunities to chime in and get some different viewpoints. Monday's class was specifically around E-Ink and some of what they faced in their early days. Was interesting to learn some of that history. Also, the class is one of those that is going to be incredibly helpful in building up a way of thinking about things that's consistent and not just arbitrary.
Monday also had a pretty good guest lecture in PDD -- we had a guy in from one of the local (video) game companies come in and talk about the design of games. It was an interesting talk from the "well, video games are cool" angle as well as some of the parallels that the game studios have to what we see sometimes. They've gone from pretty small teams to much larger ones and are struggling with some of the questions of how to keep effective communication
It was pretty cool and interesting on some level to see how they struggle with a lot of the same issues of scheduling and releases and also, some of the approaches that are starting to be taken to address that in their world.
Yesterday, I decided not to go in for the thesis seminar and instead spent the day working from my couch. Overall, pretty productive just going through and working on some of the bugs that need fixing for Fedora 9. Nothing ground breaking or that interesting, though. It's to the point where most of what needs doing is just kind of the dredge cleanups. But still, more testing needed! And then file bugs. And thus give us more to do ;-)
Later in the day, I headed down to the bike shop to pick up my bike as I had left it there for a tune-up on Sunday. While I was there, I went ahead and made the plunge to pick up some nice wheels. Looking forward to the weekend when I can really give them a good spin. Although it's temping to bike into the office tomorrow on the Merlin rather than taking the bus.
Today, woke up and was feeling pretty much entirely better. So biked in to Cambridge and was in class a good chunk of the day again. Tech Strategy was again interesting, today looking at Lexar. One thing that's becoming very obvious to me is that it's tough to look back at these case studies and try to analyze the decisions which were made and talk about what should or shouldn't have been done while at the same time trying to avoid having your ideas colored by what has come since. In this case, the question of Lexar branching out from their "digital film" products (CF cards and the like) and into USB sticks really doesn't necessarily seem like it would have been a good idea only knowing what they knew -- the USB stick wasn't a given and realistically, the main reason they've become as practical as they have is the drastic drop in the prices of flash due to increased demand. Which has been driven quite heavily by Apple and the iPod. It definitely gives me a bit to chew on and think about.
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| 2008-03-27 13:54 |
| Hack, hack, hack, hack |
| Public |
| fedora |
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Fedora 9 Beta was released earlier in the week and I've been spending my "Spring Break" buried in code and trying to make sure everything is working well. Way too much to fix, way too little time. It's just been one of these weeks where it feels like everything I touch is broken somehow which is a little less than fun.
Back to it, though...
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A busy, busy week is now behind me and I get some small measure of relaxation. Spring break is here at last. Of course, I have to work next week instead of having the week entirely off, but it should still be quite a bit less hectic. And today just happens to be a holiday for work and I have no classes. So if you don't see me online much today (or over the weekend in general), don't be surprised.
But this was a pretty good week really. Was a little bummed by the weather last weekend leading to me not really getting any riding in, but so it goes. The first part of the week, I took one of the Sloan SIP workshops titled "Leadership Under Fire: Managing Hostility". This was an interactive session where we got to look into some techniques for dealing with a hostile audience as well as getting to practice them. Which also meant we got to practice being a hostile audience, although I don't think that was the real intent :-) It was actually very, very helpful and hopefully I'll be able to actually have some of what was learned sink in rather so that I can use it in the future when in such situations.
Also related to classes, my Product Design and Development group has now narrowed things down to an explicit product concept as opposed to just having a few floating around. We think that it's pretty cool and the people that we've talked with about it also think so. Stay tuned for more information on this as things move onward.
For von Hippel's innovation class, I finished up the second paper last night and now am completely done with that class. Overall, quite enjoyable. I would have liked to have been able to dive a bit deeper into some of the things we talked about rather than remaining at the high level, but part of that is due to the fact that I have a fair bit of familiarity with the subject matter already. For the second half of the semester, I'll instead be taking Tech Strategy which is looking like it is going to be an amazing class, although with a fair bit of work. But I'm still looking forward to that starting up.
Outside of classes, there's been the big push over the past couple of weeks to finish up the beta for Fedora 9. We've now finally done so and it's on its way to the mirrors now. That means that we can sit back and really start adding the polish and final bugfixing to help make Fedora 9 as good as possible. I encourage everyone to at least download the beta live image and try it out on your hardware and file bugs if things don't work. And even more importantly, if you can help fix things, contribute patches :-)
But today is not going to be about any of those things. Today is about relaxing. I think I'm going to take the time to really clean my bikes good, play some video games, maybe waste some time down at the bike shop and just generally unwind.
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Had a pretty good weekend and even managed to get in a little bit of relaxing (which I'll pay for later, but I needed it). Friday night after meeting with my PDD group, I headed towards home and we got dinner with some friends. Mmmm, thai food. Also sat around for a while just chatting. Then headed our separate ways and Kara and I headed home and played a bit of Rock Band.
Saturday was monsoon day and also the day that Kara and I were going to observe as our anniversary, given our busy school schedules. So we ran some errands, worked on some homework together and then ordered dinner in and watched a rented movie. It was just the low key sort of evening that we both needed.
Yesterday, woke up early and headed out with the Quad folks for a ride in the wind. While windy, it was good to get out again as it'd been way too many weeks since I'd ridden with the group. And similarly, too long since I'd ridden the Merlin. Thus, a very enjoyable ride -- only about 35 miles, but that's okay for March. Eventually headed home (after length stops at Starbucks and the shop), tried to work a little and then headed into school to meet with my PDD group again. Which ends up meaning that my total milage for the day was like 50. I think the last time I did a 50 mile day was November, so this morning, my legs were wondering why I was pushing them again as I rode in to school.
But a very good weekend. And now a busy week ahead. It's the SDM business trip, so lots of people on campus and lots of activities, etc. Also, have to finish up my two papers for von Hippel's class, do an ERBA problem set and get ready for the ERBA quiz next week. Oh, and finalize our selection of a product concept for PDD for next week. And on top of that, there's also the Fedora freeze. So, yeah... busy, sporadic availability and seeing just how much can be gotten done over the next 100 hours or so ;-)
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| 2008-03-06 21:13 |
| Who says the mp3 patents aren't enforced? |
| Public |
| fedora, patents |
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One of the common things that has come up about Fedora for as long as Fedora has existed has been "why doesn't Fedora ship mp3 support?". We've been pretty up-front about the patented status, but often, this is still met by questions about if the patents really matter or are enforced.
Well, for the doubters, see what happened at CeBIT, where there was not just one, but over 50 cases of companies with devices infringing on patents and being busted for it. And apparently, most of those cases were over mp3.
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| 2008-03-06 20:10 |
| Persistence with live images |
| Public |
| fedora |
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One of the things that will be new and shiny and exciting in Fedora 9 beta is going to be the support for having your changes persist over reboots when using your live image off of a USB stick. It's an often requested feature and having it should help make the live images even more useful. Most of the hard work in getting this going was done by Douglas McClendon a few months ago and I've finally gotten around to merging it in. But it could definitely stand to have some good solid testing with the beta just to help ensure that it's as good as it can possibly be for Fedora 9 final.
The way it works is pretty simple. Once you've downloaded your live image, you'll also want to grab the livecd-iso-to-disk script either from the web or out of the LiveOS directory of the image. Then, you'll want to plug in your USB stick. Note: a 1 gig USB stick is the minimum, but if you really want to have some space to work with, you probably want to go for a 2 gig stick. Then, run the script with arguments like the following:
# ./livecd-iso-to-disk.sh --overlay-size-mb 1024 /path/to/iso /dev/partition_of_your_usb_stick If your USB stick is a 1 gig stick, you'll probably want an overlay size of 256 instead of 1024. Then, reboot with the stick, select to use it as your boot device and you should boot up and be using the file on your USB stick as the persistent store rather than a temporary, in-memory store. Big flashing warning -- at this point, it should be considered beta -- while we don't think you'll lose data, you could. If you do, please let us know how you did so in bugzilla. There are still a few little improvements that I'd like to make before Fedora 9's release. One of them involves some better verification when setting up your USB stick. Things like making sure you have enough space, etc. Another is a way to "re-initialize" a USB stick without having to use the ISO again. A third is making it more clear to the user whether or not you're running from a session where your changes will persist or if they'll go away when you reboot. And a final thing is the open question of whether we should install based on the _changes_ or from the pristine live image. As for the gory details of how it works, the live images have always used dm-snapshot to layer a read/write snapshot on top of the read only filesystem image from the disc. This snapshot has been backed by RAM. We've basically just changed things so that instead you're backed by a file on disk. What's been a little tricky has been some of the questions around shutdown, unmounting things, etc. I haven't been able to hit any problems in my testing, but there definitely were some six months ago. Hopefully they were kernel problems which have been fixed ;) The other thing that was a little tricky was thinking about using an arbitrary device when booted from the live CD. dmc made the (elegant) leap to thinking "well, if you want persistence, just boot off the device that you're being persistent to". Sometimes, the obvious answers are the hardest to realize :-) By doing this, we don't have to worry about some of the things of "did you want to use this changeset from your hard drive on this boot".
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| 2008-03-04 22:24 |
| Everything hits at once |
| Public |
| busy |
| fedora, sdm |
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As is probably typical, it seems that everything wants to happen at the same time. And so it's gotten to be a pretty busy time.
On the school front, classes are definitely up to full-speed now. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is occupying quite a bit of time. ERBA is continuing onward and I am continuing to enjoy doing the problem sets, even if they take some time. Being able to get back into some math, though, is nice and I had actually kind of forgotten how much I enjoy taking problems, getting some equations and just cranking through them. I do sort of wish that the problems had more applicability for me as opposed to being nuclear engineering based. But I can kind of squint and make it work. I'll have to look at some of the other courses available to me, though, and make sure to get some good math-y ones :-)
In PDD, we've moved on and are starting to really get into defining our target userbase as well as some concepts. There's still a lot more to go towards developing a product, but I think that we're going to end up with something that's at least interesting and fun. We've decided to target the market of tea drinkers and (probably more specifically) tea drinkers on the go. After spending a lot of time with users, we're also now to where we have some ideas for products, but I'll keep those under my cap for now. The class is pretty good, though. The material is well-thought on and is definitely applicable across a variety of fields where products are built from our tea drinking type user to software products.
Eric von Hippel's class continues to just be fun. I need to get on the ball, though, and work on the papers as they're due (and the class ends) in a week and a half. I'll be sorry for it to end as I think there's a lot of useful information there. I need to do some more thinking, but I could easily see my thesis coming out of an area that would interest him. Which is a good thing to start on too.
In addition to all of that (it's not enough?), next week is the SDM Spring Business Trip. It'll be good to see the distance folks again even though it really hasn't been that long. The week is pretty jam-packed with things to do, though, so that'll just add to the already high load. One thing that I'm really looking forward to is the session with Lou Gerstner on Thursday because his success with IBM is more than impressive.
And then, there's also the Fedora beta freeze. The added week is a good and a bad thing. It's making it so that I can shore up a few things that would have either only very roughly made it or not made it at all. But at the same time, it puts freeze resolution at the same time as the business trip. Somehow, I suspect I'm not going to be sleeping much over the next week and a half.
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| 2008-02-29 21:20 |
| Making it easier to test anaconda changes |
| Public |
| fedora |
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Those of us that work on anaconda have long been in a bit of a difficult place when it comes to actually testing our changes. Things are dependent on a tree being available with a new anaconda that had buildinstall run... and these tend to take long enough (hours) that the run occurs once a day. If it works, great. If not, oh well. Which is pretty sucky when you have a typo that gets in the way of all of your testing. Sure, we had updates.img for some things, but it still ends up being dependent on the tree existing to begin with.
But now, that's changed. I've just sent off a set of patches which ultimately add a make testiso target to the anaconda makefile. Given an existing yum repo and this target, you can now get a testable, bootable ISO image to kick off a network install in a pretty short time period. To do this, I've cleaned up a lot of old cruft in our image building scripts and also now take advantage of the fact that we're using yum repos and thus have commands like repoquery and yumdownloader rather than depending on shell globbing and find commands to get packages. I've also made the necessary changes so that boot.iso goes away. While boot.iso had its day, these days, downloading 100 megs to start a network installation isn't that big of a deal. Especially when it means that you already have the second stage available and thus don't have to download it during the install. So for Fedora 9, we'll instead have a netinst.iso (note: better names still accepted) that you can download for starting your network installation.
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| 2008-02-26 22:33 |
| A miscellaneous debugging tale |
| Public |
| fedora |
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I had noticed a week or so ago that the daily rawhide live cds I build had been failing to boot with SELinux enabled. At first, I thought it was just broken policy for a day as that happens from time to time. It then continued, though. So I started looking a little. Was it some of the changes in livecd-creator? A few too many debugging cycles later and I confirm that the labels on files were right after our package install and after our relabel. but they're definitely wrong on the disk when we boot.
I let it sit for a few days to try to come up with more inspiration. Yesterday I got the idea to try without our minimization and that was fine. So now I'm on to something. Another day and way too many image builds later, it looks like the root is resize2fs running on filesystems with 256 byte inodes losing xattrs. And esandeen has now managed to reproduce outside of livecd-tools and should hopefully have a fix soon. Until then, I've changed livecd-tools to default to 128 byte inodes so that it doesn't hurt testing.
But man that sucked to track down :/
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The month started out with the beginning of spring classes. A month in and I think i've got a good feel for the amount of work required for them. With 36 credits, its a pretty sizable amount but doable. It helps that for PDD I have a pretty awesome group. Building a product is going to take some time, though. ERBA is matching my expectations pretty well although the class drags at times with some of the questions. The idea of broadening it to also include some game theory types of things is interesting and probably compelling to be considered. Professor von Hippel's class is, as he said on the first day of class, fun. I probably should get started on the papers for it this weekend, though. The discussions and ideas are quite good and incredibly relevant in open source where its easy for lead users to contribute and help innovate.
On the work front, its been a balancing act. I've had to let a few things slide a little, but I still think I've gotten some cool work done for Fedora 9. There's also been a large chunk of time taken by a non-Fedora project.
Outside of those, its been a crappy month for riding. The weather has alternated between pouring rain, snow/ice and super cold. Even my commuting has been a lot less. I'm optimistic that things will get back to a more normal level in March. The fact that I didn't sign up for the March T pass will impact that too :). And hopefully the weekends will be nice for getting in some longer rides on the Merlin too. But given the weather (okay, and a few other reasons ;), I did pick up a PS3 and Rock Band. The PS3 actually is pretty nice from a hardware point of view and some of the games look impressive. And Rock Band is as much fun as its made out to be ;)
But now, back to work...
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| 2008-02-07 11:25 |
| New anaconda partitoning goodies for Fedora 9 |
| Public |
| fedora |
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We've been working on a few new goodies for when partitioning your disks at install-time for Fedora 9. The first one, which I've previously mentioned, is support for resizing filesystems at install-time. The second one is a bunch of work from dlehman to support installing to encrypted devices (including your root device).
I've now managed to get both of these hooked up to be easily usable for those who don't want to do manual partitioning. And once again, I think I'll let the movie do the talking...
Ogg Theora Screencast of resizing + encryption during auto-partitioningThis should help a bit with those users who are new to Fedora (or Linux in general) and want to do an install on their machine. And actually, even help those who aren't so new but just got a new machine.
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| 2008-02-06 23:57 |
| Balance, balance, balance |
| Public |
| fedora, sdm |
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Two days of classes down while getting work done at the same time. On the class side, I've now had the first classes of Thesis Seminar, ERBA and PDD. Thesis seminar is pretty much what I expected -- an effort for you to get to know some professors and start coming up with ideas for the thesis. ERBA was this morning and seems like it's going to be a fun class. I was sitting there today and thinking "ooh, discrete math, whee!" and I also think some of the examples should be interesting. PDD was this afternoon and seems like it should be pretty good, too. Having some more rigorous background in how to do "traditional" engineering should help a lot when working with people for whom that's their background. Also, there are times when a more rigorous approach than we tend to use in the open source world could be truly beneficial. All that said, I'm also planning to have my project for the course not be software based -- I think that'll help me to avoid some bad assumptions from the beginning.
The balance side of things is balancing going to classes (and the work to be done for the classes) with actually getting things done for work. Thus far, that's going pretty well. Yesterday was very productive and today isn't ending up being too bad. Made some good progress yesterday on some anaconda stuff and today is more getting some things fixed up in livecd-tools so that I can push the new version into rawhide. Stay tuned for a neat screencast soon with one of the anaconda changes...
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hungry