Ray Strode

So Fedora 12 is finally out. Give it a try.

It shaped up to be a pretty good release I think.

So, just a quick note to say Fedora 10 is out.

If you haven’t tried Fedora in a while, and you’re curious give the live image a try on a USB stick.

So I came across a really interesting mailing list post by ajax today. He’s totally right and it’s refreshing to see…

So, I am totally surprised to see that Matthew Szulik is stepping down as Red Hat’s CEO.  I wonder what comes next…

So I just wanted to publically say congratulations to my friend, Dave Malcolm (of Conglomerate, Evolution, and Dogtail fame), since he’s going to be marrying a great woman soon.

Congrats Dave!

So the desktop team here at Red Hat has decided we want a little more freedom in trying new ideas for Fedora. We can’t put radical changes into the main Fedora spin, because those types of changes often require make choices for the user that may alienate someone who currently uses Fedora.

Since Fedora 7, users of Fedora have had the ability to do custom spins pretty easily. Using that same infrastructure we (the desktop team) are going to do our own spin that tries various things, like disabling the root account, and not asking the user what partitioning scheme they want. Presumably, some of these ideas won’t work out, but it’s nice to have a play area where we can experiment and find the things the really work.

The key here is that we’re try to narrow the scope of the spin. It will specifically be ill-suited for a lot of users who happily use Fedora. Those users can keep using the mainline spin, though.

Aside from that we started a Desktop “Special Interest Group” (SIG) so that people outside of Red Hat can get more involved. We now hold weekly meetings on IRC.

Anyway, discussion about what should happen on the LiveCD happens on fedora-desktop-list

So there is a really cheap/yummy falafel place in Central Square I sometimes like to go to. Today I walked out of there with Falafel roll up and made my way down into the T to get home to Davis Square. The train went want stop to Harvard when a guy comes on and starts screaming:

guy: Attention everybody, attention everybody I’m about to dance
guy puts down boom box
guy: now I have three rules first. 1) If I do something you like, clap 2) If I do something you don’t like, clap 3) when I’m done, show your appreciation with donations or love. Hint: ladies, I’m single.
guy taps boom box to get it started
guy then does a series of back flips, double flips, hand springs and break dancing

It was pretty damn cool to see.

So one thing I wanted for my Graphical Boot stuff was a standalone environment for it to work in. I wanted it to have its own /proc, device nodes, etc, because it gets run so early in the boot process that those things aren’t set up yet globally. If I make my program set them up globally, then other parts of the boot process get confused that things are set up already. What I really want is my own private directory that only my process can see and that goes away when my process exits.

This is something you can do with individual files pretty easily. Something like:

int fd;
char file[] ="/tmp/XXXXXX";
fd = mkstemp (file);
unlink (file);

It turns out you can do something similar with directories, too, although there are some caveats. If your program

1. creates a temp directory
2. mounts a ram filesystem in the directory
3. opens the directory and stores the file descriptor somewhere
4. lazily unmounts the ram filesystem
5. remove the temp directory

Then the directory will no longer be visible from the filesystem, but will exist as long as the stored file descriptor is opened. The program can fchdir() to the directory using the saved file descriptor and work with it. Now some of the caveats are:

1. the program needs to be root to mount the filesystem
2. MNT_DETACH (the mount flag used to lazily unmount a filesystem) is unsupported api
3. you can’t mount other filesystems in your detached directory

Overall, it’s kind of a neat concept, but those caveats make it fairly impractical to use.

Well the last couple of weeks have been very fun.

The girl I mentioned previously, Mo, was an intern at Red Hat, but grad school was starting back up for her, so she had to move back to New York, which sorta sucks a lot. Yet, despite the fact that she moved back to New York last week, I saw her everyday except for yesterday last week. That’s right, she was either driving to my apartment in Nashua or from my apartment to New York everyday last week but yesterday. It was possible because this first week at her University was orientation (not classes) and so her schedule was really open.

Here’s a couple of pics of her:

She’s a very talented individual who is very skilled in Linux, Human Computer Interaction, artistic things, and Hello Kitty.

Let’s see, different topics….

I love Indian food. I eat it far too much now in fact. It doesn’t help that there is an Indian market store right down the street, and an insanely good Indian Restaurant a few miles away.

ummm…here’s a picture of me after my hair cut..kinda a junk picture though, cause my hair is wet and messy and i’m sorta unshaven…

Ummm, what else… I can’t really remember what’s happened lately.

…

Oh, car trouble…So Mo got a flat the other day (this was the night before the last day of her internship, the thursday night before last thursday), and she didn’t want to drive on the spare very much, so we parked her car and I drove her to work the next day. The plan was that I would drive her to her car after work and we would go down to a tire shop and get it replaced. The next day it rained hard….very, very hard, and when we got into my car after work and tried to start it–nothing. Just click…click…click… So we called a tow truck and had it towed to an auto shop down the road. Preliminary analysis suggested it was the starter that had gone bad. They were really busy though, and they are kind far away from where I live so the mechanic spent a few minutes to see if he could get it started so we could take it somewhere else more near my apartment. Sure enough, after about 100 turns of the key he got the thing to start! Damn, I just paid 60 bucks for towing. Ah well, at least it started.

So the plan was, I’d take Mo to her car, we’d pick it up and take both cars to the same shop near my apartment. Her’s was just a flat tire, so we’d get it back later that night, and mine would need a starter replaced, so it was going to have to stay into the weekend.

It didn’t turn out that way, however. Her bearings were bad, too, so it had to stay at the shop like my car. We just walked the mile or so to my apartment and on the way stopped at blockbuster to rent some videos. We crashed and in the morning we walked back to the auto center (it’s part of Sears actually) and guess what? My starter wasn’t bad at all, just a wire that went bad–presumably because of the harsh, harsh rain. What a weird twist of events, uh?

I took earlier today off work and went down to Boston with a friend. We got haircuts at a small shop ran by a couple of friendly Japanese guys named Fred and Steven. This is a bit of a big event for me because I’ve had long hair for so long that there was a lot of inertia stopping me from going shorter. I was ready for a change though, so I just told Steven to do whatever he thought would look good. I really like how it turned out.

On a different note, I also really like how my relationship with my friend is turning out. I feel really comfortable around her. We have a pretty close connection I think. We have a very open line of communication, and so we don’t play ambiguous manipulation games which are the norm in a boy-meets-girl world.