So last week I flew out to Seattle for one of my regular visits.[1] Lots of good work-stuff was done, and as has been mentioned elsewhere at least one adventure was had on the ground.

Getting on the ground was probably the biggest adventure. See, we were flying right into the snowstorm that hit that weekend. The majority of the flight was uninteresting – I read a WH40K novel while the in-flight movie (Moneyball – not too bad) played in my new Skullcandy Hesh Headphones[2], but the landing into SEATAC, in the middle of a snowstorm – it was exciting. Exciting in the “re-evaluate your life and do you have anything you should have done before you died because, well, shit this might be it instrument landing roller-coaster with applause and cheers when we finally touched down” kind of landing.

It’s amazing what you think in that moment. And the fact that, life has been pretty good of late, and that maybe there is *ONE* thing you should have done, an it’ll be a lot of work, but hell, you can fix that and it’s not really that big a deal…

…except maybe it is, and oh my that’s going to take a lot of work, so you better get to it, my boy.

And then you’re on the ground and it’s all OK, and maybe, just maybe it wasn’t that big a deal.

Or was it?

[1] I’m REALLY sorry I/we didn’t have time to hang out with anyone this trip, but work and weather pretty much ate my life this trip.
[2] I’m a Skullcandy fanboy now. I bought a pair of Skullcandy Smokin’ Buds a few years back based purely on the logo design and my need for earbuds. I had no idea who they were, I just knew they were on sale and looked neat. It turned out that they sounded FANTASTIC. So I bought another set when I needed some iPhone earbuds that didn’t cost an arm and a leg, and when THOSE sounded fantastic, I was hooked.

Leadership North Carolina got a brief mention from WRAL today when news spread that Governor Perdue will not run for reelection. Now-declared gubernatorial candidate Lt. Governor Walter Dalton was scheduled to speak at today’s LNC forum but canceled upon news of Perdue’s decision.

I Tweeted earlier that Dalton wasn’t there and I wonder if WRAL used my Tweet as its source. Anyway, the mention was here in an earlier revision of this story:

Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton canceled a Thursday morning appearance at the Leadership North Carolina Forum in Raleigh after news of Perdue’s plans spread. He was supposed to speak on the state’s transportation planning and policy.

The LNC mention was posted long enough for me to show it to Kelly. Dalton later convened a press conference and formally announced, after which the LNC reference was removed.

Yikes! I’m not going to sleep so soundly tonight knowing that Progress Energy’s Shearon Harris nuclear plant is nearby and its hapless crews can’t bolt a reactor lid properly.

Makes me wonder why the NRC is still so chummy with utilities.

Emphasis mine:

Nine of the 12 workers who performed the reactor vessel assembly were not qualified. Some received “just-in-time” (i.e., last minute) training before the Fall 2011 refueling outage, but not specifically in stud tensioning.

The workers didn’t know how to read the instrumentation and torqued the reactor vessel lid’s studs at 1,300 pounds per square inch instead of 13,000 psi. In other words, there were off by one zero, and screwed the studs at 1/10th the required pressure.

Some the bolts were left so loose they could be turned by hand, the NRC said. Others turned easily with a wrench.

via .biz – Unqualified Progress Energy workers caused fluke mishap at nuclear plant | newsobserver.com blogs.

Leadership North Carolina Forum

I spent the day today at the Fifth Annual Leadership North Carolina Forum. While the panels and speakers were fascinating and informative, what captivated me the most was watching my lovely and talented wife while she was working. Kelly held herself with grace and aplomb, seeming so comfortable conducting the question and answer sessions with a roomful of hundreds of participants. I smiled as I thought about just how quickly she got up to speed in doing what she’s doing, yet you’d never know it from how confident she seems.

I’ve known for 14 years how special Kelly is. Now everyone knows it, too.

Isaiah D. Richardson

Here’s a look at the gentleman arrested in our neighborhood yesterday for breaking and entering. His name is Isaiah Dominique Richardson, age 16. It’s easy to see why police were so familiar with Richardson: he was arrested just last month for possession of stolen goods.

In the pic above Richardson isn’t wearing the diamond earring that he had in when I saw him. Though he was arrested about 9:20 AM he was booked at 7:50 PM. That makes me think he might have spent the day being interviewed by detectives, by which time he probably had his earring taken away.

Richardson's Dec. 2011 mugshot

As you might see from his mugshot he doesn’t look like a bad kid. He gave me a friendly reply when I wished him a “good morning.” I can’t seem to find any criminal record for him (though this might be because of his age). Friendly or not, he certainly helped himself to the contents of my neighbor’s van and I don’t take kindly to strangers messing with my neighbors!

That burglar never knew what hit him. This guy rides a bike into our neighborhood, thinking things are easy pickings here, and he rides out in the back of a police car.

My neighborhood is quickly gaining the reputation of being the place crooks go to get caught. The hapless crook must not have gotten the memo.

It all began a little after 7 AM as I was out walking the dog. As I neared home, I saw this guy riding towards me on a bike. Since I walk this way every other day, I’m usually quite familiar with the people I see this time of day but this kid was a stranger. Nevertheless, as he approached I gave him a friendly “good morning,” and he cheerfully replied. Cheerful greeting or not, I decided to get a close look at the clothes of this stranger – just in case.

Later this morning I had reason to remember the kids’s description. A sharp-eyed neighbor had called 911 after seeing a kid ducking between cars in my neighborhood this morning. She also took the time to let the neighborhood know through the neighborhood email list. Instantly, 300 neighbors knew this kid was a break-in suspect and he was in our neighborhood now. I responded to my neighbor’s email with a description of the kid I had seen. I also called the dispatcher to relay that information to police in the area.

Once I had the kids off to school I had a few minutes before I needed to go to work so I climbed into the car and drove around, hoping to find the suspect. I came upon an officer parked on Timber near Robin Hood and told him of an abandoned bike I’d seen nearby. He knew about the bike said the suspect was probably in the middle of a larceny. The officer hoped to be nearby when the kid returned so he could bust him.

After getting an update from the officer I drove on through the neighborhood, just driving through in case I happened to see anything. I didn’t really expect to see anything, of course. I really didnt’ know what I was doing. I figured it would be some sort of miracle if I even saw the guy.

It turns out I got a miracle and then some! I turned onto Banks Street and looked to my left. There was the suspect in my neighbor’s driveway and leaning against the front door of a van! He had what looked like a dipstick in his hand and was manipulating it through the van’s window. He was trying to unlock the door!

I grabbed my phone and was talking to the 911 dispatcher about the larceny in progress when I rolled back up to the officer waiting nearby. I told the dispatcher to hang on as I yelled out my window.

“He’s at Oakview and Banks right now!” I said, gesturing behind me. “He’s breaking into a white van!”

The officer sprang into action, squealing tires towards Banks! I decided to come around from the other side to see what happened. By the time I returned to Banks Street, I saw the van’s driver side door hanging open and the suspect was already in handcuffs! I felt like cheering!

Thinking about it later, I realized that communication made this arrest possible. So many people had pieces to this puzzle that if those pieces had not been shared, this guy would still be out there breaking into homes and cars. I didn’t call the cops when I first saw the kid because just being a stranger on a bike isn’t exactly a crime. My neighbor did call the cops, though, when she saw him acting suspiciously.

What’s more, the cops shared plenty of info about the suspect with my neighbor, who then took the time to share it with the neighborhood. Now we all knew who to look for and roughly where he was. I happened to have a moment I could spend looking for the suspect and an officer was conveniently parked nearby in anticipation of an arrest. It could not have been easier for the officer to catch this guy red-handed and arrest him.

This perp is at least the third break-in suspect who has been busted by my sharp-eyed neighbors since we moved here four years ago. I think that explains why break-ins around here have become pretty rare.

Word is getting around that you don’t mess with East Raleigh, and particularly the neighborhoods of Belvidere Park and Woodcrest. It’s where crooks come to get busted!

…and in with the new.

On the 31st of December of last year (boy that sounds weird to say “last year” and it only be 4 weeks ago), I traded-in my 2004 Ford Escape which had served me well for 4.5 years (including racking-up nearly 90k miles in the time I had it (and for almost a year it was driven less than 10k miles … which I think means I used to drive a lot)) for a new vehicle.

my cute wife, and our new car

We had been looking at replacing one of our cars for a while, and with the end of the year incentives in place, it was a good time for us to do it.

So we are now the proud owners of a 2012 Ford Fusion in “steel blue”. It’s not quite fully loaded, but it’s more than adequate for our needs.

In addition to the Mordecai article, I was also quoted in a separate Midtown Raleigh News article on the new parks fees.

Many parks fees had not been raised for several years, parks board members noted. For example, the citywide youth sports registration fee has been $12 since 2004.

“This is an opportunity to make adjustments that have been needed for a while,” said board chairman Mark Turner. “I didn’t feel they were necessarily drastic … The variety of programs and offerings are still a very good deal for the public.”

via Raleigh raises fees for youth sports, park rentals – News – MidtownRaleighNews.com.

I was quoted in today’s Midtown Raleigh News on the new option for Mordecai Historic Park’s Interpretive Center. (Also, see the parks fees story. Two articles in one day!)

An earlier proposal involved using part of the park’s main lawn for a contemporary, window-lined building to house the center. Opponents banded together to fight the proposal, saying the building would clash with the historic charm of the park, home to Raleigh’s most significant antebellum plantation.

“We heard it loud and clear: Nobody wanted to put more buildings on the property,” said Mark Turner, chairman of the city parks board. “This solves that problem.”

via New option emerges for Mordecai park center – News – MidtownRaleighNews.com.

I am on the road this week (shout out to Boise) and it is the first trip I’ve taken where I’m spending almost all of my time on my Macbook Air since upgrading it to run Linux.

I’ve been pretty happy with it. Wireless works fine, and while I sometimes struggle with nvidia-settings when trying to run an external monitor, I haven’t hit anything where I had to boot back into OS X, at least for very long.

As someone who has decided to run Linux on the Desktop, I am very eager for news on the future direction of such things. I noticed today on Mark Shuttleworth’s blog that he was announcing a new feature in Ubuntu called the “Heads Up Display” (HUD).

The idea is simple – instead of a hierarchical menu have an intelligent search box that learns what you use the most, and can use “fuzzy matching” to help you get to what you want fast. Once it is considered ready for prime time, I’ll probably check it out.

However, there were a couple of things about his post that bothered me. First, he wants to add voice recognition. While that is all well and good, I must be the only person on the planet who doesn’t want to talk at his electronics. Sure, I love being able to dial my mobile phone by voice when driving, but I don’t want to have to speak “Find Nekkid Pictures of Scarlett Johansson” into my browser. I experience so many people on cellphones creating noise pollution that I don’t want to have to deal with it in other aspects of technology. While this probably won’t be the default for most devices, I am still not as excited about it as Mark seems to be.

Second, nowhere in his post did he mention Gnome 3 as an inspiration. I’ve been using the much maligned desktop for awhile now and I love it. When I need to run a program I simply drag my mouse into the upper left corner of the screen and type in the name of what I am looking for in the “Type to search” box. Now it isn’t smart or fuzzy, but it gets the job done and seems to me to be very similar to HUD.

I especially liked Mark’s comment “Instead of cluttering up the interface ALL the time, let’s clear out the chrome, and show users just what they want, when they want it.” which is very similar to what I wrote about Gnome 3: “It gets me to where I need to be, and then it gets the hell out of the way.”

As someone who doesn’t plan to leave the linux desktop, I am excited when improvements like HUD are being implemented. In the ecosystem that is open source, the great ideas will propagate, and if HUD takes off I would expect to see something similar in other offerings.

Many Fedora Docs project contributors enjoy writing on the wiki using the WYSIWYG editor that is provided by MediaWiki.  This is great for contributors but not so much when we are trying to pull all this information into DocBook for formal release.  The solution was simple: Ian had to fix mw-render.

This all went down at FUDCon Blacksburg, just a couple weeks ago.  Ian and John got together to break, fix, or eliminate the tool we once used to do the conversion of MediaWiki text to DocBook.  Ian worked for several hours trying to piece code together to make mw-render work.  It did not, however, ever get off the ground despite his best efforts.  Several releases prior to the current version of mw-render the DocBook functionality was removed leaving it no longer useful for our needs.

Once it sunk in that mw-render was dead to us, we started looking for an existing solution.  We found many but none that would do exactly what we wanted.  Ian started drawing up plans for a replacement and we decided that if we were going to do the work to build a tool to do the conversions that we should really do it up right.

This brings us to the project of DocsGlue.  The current vision of DocsGlue is a program that will take MediaWiki text, turn it into DocBook XML, then open a ticket in Red Hat’s Bugzilla instance for a certain guide and add the DocBook XML text as an attachment.  The guide owner can then easily use the attached file as source for a guide that can then be translated and published.

DocsGlue will be usable from both the command line and the GUI.  This will make it easy for anyone to use no matter how they like to operate.

This will hopefully reduce the amount of time spent on moving data from the wiki into our guides and also make this information a lot more useful for users looking for answers.

Currently the project is hosted on Fedora Hosted where all the source code will be available.

Loving the work that the RENCI folks at Duke are doing on top of Eucalyptus. They’ve got a set of patches that sit atop Eucalyptus proper, and they call their patches “Neuca”. I lol’d when I found that out.  It rolls swimmingly off the tongue.

We’ve seen quite a few of these kinds of projects.  It’s a key indicator of success that people are building this functionality on top of our base.

Our ability to incorporate these kinds of patches directly into mainline will be a key indicator of our maturity as an open source company going forward.

As I discussed at SCALE 10x this past weekend, I believe that our current contributor agreement needs an update.  That work will take some time, and I can’t really say much about it yet — but the prospect of working more closely with RENCI and others provides strong motivation to Get It Right.  It’s a key challenge, and I’m exciting about tackling it head-on in the coming weeks.

(p.s. RAGE HATE SPELLING FAIL.  The likelihood of my typing “eucalytpus” is pretty much an even money bet.)

I’m looking for FOSS knowledge base software that will integrate with SalesForce.  Already packaged for EPEL would be great but not required.  Anyone know of such a monster?

Heh, I just noticed that, due to the fact that my last name ranks early in the alphabet, I’m listed first in the 2011 opensource.com People’s Choice Award voting.

I really enjoyed writing those articles on running an open source business, and it is nice to be in such company as the rest of the nominees.

Though it was being shown locally on over-the-air TV, I decided to hunt for the N.C. State-Miami basketball game on satellite today. When I found it I was amazed at how much better the satellite signal was from the OTA signal. Players in motion seemed blocky as the compression artifacts piled on, but the signal direct from Miami was crystal-clear.

Whenever you compress a signal that’s already compressed, you really start making a mess as the tricks that compression schemes rely on get broken in the process. Given a choice, I’ll tune in the satellite signal every time if I want a quality signal to watch.

Worn out but happy!

I vividly remember growing up in Atlanta and my siblings and I being awakened by my parents and piled under a mattress in our home’s hallway as a tornado warning. The winds would howl, the rain would pound, but the tornado would remain more of an idea – an after-bedtime reason to play with my brothers and sister in the hallway – rather than a real threat. That is, until April’s tornado rolled around.

I’ve already blogged about the tornado and the cleanup efforts I participated in. Looking around the neighborhood now I see only a few homes still covered with blue tarps. Some damaged trees still abruptly end 30 feet from the ground. A ride on the Millbank section of the Crabtree Creek greenway still shocks me when I reach the path of the tornado. I dubbed that portion “Tornado Trail” and it will likely live up to that name for many years.

Still, with time comes healing. On a walk with the family through Lake Johnson park today, I pointed out to Kelly one bank of the lake that Hurricane Fran once completely stripped of trees. Now that area’s wooded over again with tall hardwoods.

Nature bounces back. And our neighborhood has weathered the storm’s after-effects very well.

Each year each of the city’s Citizens Advisory Councils nominates an organization or an individual for its Neighborhood Recognition Award. Last year the East CAC honored Powell Elementary and its PTA for the incredible service they provided to the Lockwood neighborhood following the tornado. It was one of the true highlights of my time as a CAC chair to be able to present that award.

After meeting some well-organized volunteers during the tornado cleanup, I decided to get some emergency management training through the city’s now-defunct CERT program. I felt very fortunate when I was able to lead my class of students through a disaster scenario, even though many of my fellow students were 30 to 40 years senior to me.

So now after 36 years or so of avoiding one I can say I’ve lived through a tornado. As my friend Ronneil Robinson said to me afterward, it was the day the community became a family. It was a rewarding experience to be able to help out my neighbors and get them back on their feet.

Last August ended with a bang as Kelly and my job situations changed dramatically. I was let go from my job at Monolith the very same day Kelly accepted a position with Leadership North Carolina.

How things happened for me is still a mystery. I received a favorable performance evaluation in June and completed the personal objectives which would’ve qualified me for a bonus. It was at this point where things got murky and other executives took issue. Rather than being paid my bonus, I was told I was no longer performing to standards even while my manager reassured me that he had always been happy with my work. But whatever . . .

That same day, though, Kelly accepted her new position as Program Director of Leadership NC that very same day. It’s a great program designed to educate the state’s business and governmental leaders about the issues facing our state. Kelly’s role is to facilitate the many meetings that take place during each class, which means she is often traveling the state for many nights in a row while the classes are in session. It turns out Kelly travels more now that I did in my last sales engineering role.

It’s been very good for her, though, and for us. She’s so talented at organization and was craving a professional role again that it seemed the perfect fit. Having been familiar with the program for over two years, I knew how much fun it would be. In fact, I was quite jealous of her for a time. But seeing how happy and fulfilled Kelly’s been is proof positive that it’s been a good decision.

A few weeks later, I answered a Craigslist ad for a part-time Linux sysadmin position. To my surprise, my neighbor was the one who advertised the position and I quickly got an interview. I took the position and set up a schedule where I work 25 hours per week.

So, just like that our work schedules flip-flopped. Kelly became the full-time worker and I became the part-timer. I’m a stay-at-home Dad, for all practical purposes. It’s been great for providing me more time with the kids than I would’ve ordinarily gotten. I walk them to school and back each day, take them to their music lessons and basketball practices, and make sure they do their homework. When they’re at school, I work either at home or in the office. And around all that, I do my volunteer stuff like the Parks board and RCAC board organizing.

Kelly and I were marveling last night about how well our current arrangement has been working out, and it has. It took a ton of getting used to on my part but we’re making it work. It’s certainly made a difference in how we live our daily lives.

Just a tip for anyone using Evolution mail with the SOGo Carddav address book. Sometimes I launch Evolution (usually after a reboot) and I notice that there are no contacts in my Webdav calendar, Nothing I can do in configuration seems to help, and I get an error if I try to delete the address book to re-add it.

I figured out that if I stop Evolution, open a terminal and kill the:

/usr/lib/evolution/e-addressbook-factory

process, my contacts will reload properly. Might be some sort of race condition but I figured I’d mention it here in case someone else hits the same problem.

Oh, this is on an up to date Debian Wheezy install running Gnome 3.

A friend posted a picture on Facebook today from Linville Caverns, which prompted me to look up our recent family visit to Linville Caverns. Only it wasn’t recent, it was over two years ago! It only seems like it was yesterday!

What was I just saying about time flying by?

Just put my Zeo Sleep Manager birthday present through its first test – the obligatory birthday nap. Five minutes of deep sleep in a 31 minute nap.

I’m going to enjoy putting this thing through its paces!

Gizmodo points out the obvious: if the US DOJ can bust Megaupload in New Zealand, why does it need SOPA/PIPA?

The feds—those tasked as intellectual property sentinels in particular—want more power to kill sites like Megaupload. It looks like they’re not going to get their way through legislation, so setting a prominent target ablaze in a very public and dramatic manner is a great screw you to SOPA’s foes.

If that’s the case, the Department of Justice should be gagging on irony: their swift destruction of Megaupload sans SOPA proves how gratuitous the bill was in the first place. This week has been the week of copyright warfare, but the decision to nuke the king copyright violator so spectacularly only goes to show how little the feds need bigger bombs.

via Why Did the Feds Target Megaupload? And Why Now?.

Interesting look at the continuing dispute between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands. I was not aware that the British Navy currently lacks an aircraft carrier.

As Prince William prepares to head 8,000 miles from home to serve as a helicopter pilot in the remote Falkland Islands, the traditional "Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves!" refrain seems rather far-fetched.

Britain’s naval fleet was once twice the combined size of its two closest rivals. But austerity cuts have seen billions of pounds vanish from military budgets. Even the Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier hasn’t been spared — HMS Ark Royal was sent to the scrapyard last year.

Tensions have been increasing between Argentina and the U.K. as the 30th anniversary of their 10-week war over the Falklands approaches. Argentina claims sovereignty over the British-ruled islands, which are about 300 miles off its coast in the South Atlantic.

via World Blog – Will Prince William’s tour of duty reignite simmering Falklands dispute?.

Today I complete my 43rd trip around the sun. Watching my kids remind me how slowly time seemed to pass when I was their age. Now time seems to pass far too quickly.

I spent a little time yesterday afternoon visiting Travis’s classroom for his class’s “publishing party.” The various cards on the wall with the words “second grade” on them caught my eye. It hit me that this was the last year I’d be the parent of a second grader.

I took a moment to soak up the scene. I looked around the roomful of squirming kids, up at the decorations on the wall, and finally over at my son of whom I am so proud. I wanted to capture the moment in my memory forever, knowing it would soon be gone.

Life is short. We have precious few days together and then they’re gone for good. I hope to make the most of the ones I have left.

Every day is a good one.

Last year was the year I became chair of Raleigh’s Parks board after three years serving on the board. It was something I could not have imagined when I started out and yet here I am.

Looking back, I did have some preparation for the role. As a boardmember I attended many of the ribbon-cutting ceremonies, I chaired my first meeting right after my election as vice-chair, and I filled in for the chair to speak at other park dedications the times he could not be present. I figured I could do the job, so why not take the next step and do it?

The year started off with a bang when, while still vice-chair, I was invited to go on the Bill Lumaye show to discuss the Parks board’s banning of smoking in parks. It was generally a hostile crowd but I held my own and made points most folks would find reasonable. The city council later approved the ban and to date there have been exactly zero incidents or complaints about the smoking ban.

Then in September I was elected chair of the Parks board. I wasn’t going to run for chair but go for another term as vice-chair but my fellow parks board members encouraged me. I was thrilled when my fellow board members put their trust in me but also wigged out once the enormity of it all began to sink in. Turns out I needn’t have worried since I’d had over two years’ experience conducting meetings for the East CAC. I do speak before City Council far more frequently now and that can be nerve-wracking (see Tuesday’s Council session for an example – I’m on around 1 hour, 35 minutes into it), but even that is getting to be more routine.

One of the best parts of being chair is all the park dedications where I get to speak. There were many in 2011, including St. Monica Teen Center, Marsh Creek Greenhouse, Millbrook Senior Center, Dr. Annie Louise Wilkerson MD Park, Strickland Road Park Dedication, the Neuse River Greenway, Pullen Park, and probably a few I have forgotten. I winged the talk at the Neuse River Greenway but felt like an idiot afterward so when it came time for Pullen I stayed up late crafting my speech. Some Parks staffers have told me they look forward to my speeches. I try to keep them entertaining.

It was a good year for serving on Raleigh’s Parks board and this year promises to be just as much fun.

Southeast LinuxFest (SELF) 2012 will be in Charlotte, North Carolina, which is a much better option than Atlanta or wherever the other proposed locations were.  I am excited to see what talks will be offered this year.  I am also thinking of taking the train down the Charlotte.  From Richmond the train goes through the cities of Raleigh, Cary, and Durham, to name a few.  Perhaps we can have a hacking car on the way down!

Seems I was wrong when I said the church has removed from its Facebook page the inflammatory post from Dr. Cooper. It’s still there.

Also, a Facebook visitor named Adul Siler posted this as a comment on the church’s page:

“thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself! Has anyone thought about it being 10:30 at night that it is not acceptable to have loud noise blazing in a residential neighborhood. Christians are not to do of this world but yet churches have service when it is clubbing time and when the freaks come out. Then get upset when folks complain. Not even is St Aug down the street immune from having late night functions. They must get a permit to have any loud or sport events at night. Remember that St Aug had to make their football field smaller due to noise restrictions. So all those false comments being made about the cops and all is basically making all of us christian folks look bad. How would you like it if someone blasted rap or even hard rock during service on Sunday morning? You’d call the cops too to stop all the noise. Watch how you make accusations for most of the advertising out there is not for MLK on that day but for what you all and who were in the church advertised the event for. Ya’ll making yourselves look bad and everyonre else not involved. Also remember 10 or so years ago that area was drug, prostitute, and crime infested being mainly a black neighborhood. The city and private companies cleaned that area up when they began working on downtown. The only racist thing that happen was they moved many of us out of the area which was blighted, cleaned it up and gave the white folks tax incentives to move in the new or refurbished homes.Doubt ya’ll be having any kind of service late at night if it was like it use to be in that area all the way to Shaw. Admit someone made a mistake in church,everyone got carried away, and things got noisy like in the past. Don’t be surprised karma might come your way while your preaching on Sunday morning and you hear loud music outside. Sometimes its not the devil but just plain ignorance. God bless and be an example for the Lord………..”

Again, the neighbors simply want peace and quiet. No one wants to have to call the police on the church because it’s 10:30 at night and their kids can’t sleep. The police certainly don’t want to have to issue citations. Southeast District Captain Lull was all but begging the church at last Friday’s meeting not to make him issue citations.

With any luck, the publicity will allow the church to accelerate its purchase of new windows and everyone can be friends again. I’m wishing my neighbor Bishop Spain good luck!

UPDATE: Bishop Spain just posted the comment to the Church’s Facebook page:

“Bishop William S. Spain
I live and pastor in a wonderful neighborhood. On Frieday, January 13th, members of our community, the Raleigh Police Department and The Glorious Church had a wonderful and productive meeting to iron out some of our differances. As citizens we have the right to complain when there is a problem. My issue is not with my neighbors but the manner in which the police handled a call on the next night (Saturday the 14th). We have explained to our neighbors that we too are concerned about the noise that they are complaining about. We are attempting to renovate the santuary and hopefully this will improve things; however it is going to take some time to accomplish this. We’ve got to raise the money to do it.We want to work with our neighbors and we ask that the neighborhood will have patience with us. By the way, the service on Saturday was a guest group using our facility and knew nothing about our previous meeting. Let us continue to bridge the gap between us. I wecome your response”

Thank you, Bishop Spain!

Yesterday we received a PO from Ireland, which is the 25th country in which we have commercial customers.

It’s pretty exciting, although being a huge fan of Guinness I am upset that I don’t get to go.

The other countries are, in no particular order:

Spain, Portugal, Egypt, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Japan, Australia, Israel, Denmark, France, Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands, the UK, Italy, Trinidad, Malta, India, Honduras, Chile, Sweden, the UAE and the US.

By Tom Sulcer

The moment City of Raleigh Public Utilities Director John Carmen mentioned the book The Big Thirst during a recent CAC meeting, I logged onto the library webpage and requested it. It arrived yesterday and surprisingly I can’t put it down.

Water is fascinating. We take it for granted, but as author Charles Fishman says, water is becoming more scarce and it will soon create conflicts.

I’m just cracking the book now and I’m sure to have more to say about it, but if you’ve ever wondered what goes into making water appear at your tap you should read this book!

A church behind my home has been making a exceedingly-joyful noise unto the Lord for many years now, to the dismay of sleepy neighbors. For years, neighbors have made repeated calls to police to get the church to keep the peace but police have been understandably reluctant to get involved.

At a police-organized community meeting with church leaders Friday evening, neighbors aired their concerns about the noise and church leaders offered solutions. Neighbors even offered to help raise money. It seemed everything was on track to work together.

It didn’t last long, though. The very next night, a group renting the church blasted the neighborhood with music again, causing neighbors to call police again. This time, police entered the church and shut the celebration down. It was 10:30 PM.

The pastor of the group renting the church blasted the police response as racist, and characterized the neighborhood as a “white neighborhood,” though neither is true. Among others, she sent her response to WTVD, which did a story. Reporter Ed Crump asked for a neighbor to be interviewed and I accepted his offer.

I thought Mr. Crump did a fine job with the story and his point about the visiting pastor not being notified is probably true. Since the story ran, the inflammatory post from the visiting pastor has been removed from the church’s Facebook page. I see tonight the story’s headline has also been changed to remove the racist charges and stick more to the facts.

I’m hopeful the church and neighbors can continue to work out our differences and become good neighbors again.

People attending a celebration on the eve of Martin Luther King Junior’s birthday say actions by a Raleigh police officer were racist and violated their civil rights.

It happened at the Glorious Church just northeast of downtown Raleigh Saturday night. A group had rented the church but didn’t know about an ongoing dispute with neighbors over loud music late at night.

Just the night before, church leaders and neighbors had met and begun working out their differences. So, when neighbors heard loud music the next night they called police.

via Organizers upset after MLK event visited by police | abc11.com.

Just a quick note on my #noapple efforts. I am now running Debian wheezy with Gnome 3 on all three of my main machines.

Since I have a dynamic IP address at the house, I use DynDNS to maintain a DNS record that changes when my IP does. In order to update that automatically I used to use a tool downloaded from their website, but I found that ddclient does the job on Debian.

I tried ez-ipupdate as well but it seemed to want to monitor the physical address of an interface on the machine itself, and I have a router between my home network and the Internet. ddclient was able to pick that up automatically.

It is doubtful that anyone who actively uses the Internet missed yesterday’s protest of the SOPA/PIPA bills now before congress (well, at least PIPA, I do believe SOPA has been stalled in the House but not killed outright).

I am, of course, against this legislation, but more due to the fact that I doubt the US Government would understand the Internet enough to correctly enforce it versus wanting to support piracy. Last year saw a US congressman lose his seat because he was clueless when it came to understanding how information on the network is made available, and my belief is that he was probably one of the better informed politicians. SOPA and PIPA go much farther than, say, legislation like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and there have been several notable abuses of that law (such as its use against Dmitry Sklyarov) that one can only imagine the horrors that would be unleashed.

I read a number of commentaries about these bills, including the one by Scott Adams and the one by Wil Wheaton, who both produce creative content and are against SOPA/PIPA (although for different reasons).

My take on the whole thing is that it is not a effort to protect the content industry from piracy, but instead it is an effort to protect a dying business model. Promoting entertainment, in the forms of music, video, books, software, etc., is both very profitable and controlled by a small group of people. It used to be necessary to have a studio, record company or publishing house manufacture and promote an artist’s work, but with the advent of the Internet both the cost and need of these industries has diminished. They used to be a necessary evil, and it appears that in the interest of greed they often screwed over the people who actually created the content (see Hollywood Accounting on Wikipedia). Now that they are becoming unnecessary, they are scared, and since we are talking about billions of dollars here, it is doubtful that they are going to go gently into that good night. They want to lock down and control distribution again, and one way to do that is to create legislation that lets them go after any site that displeases them, preferably with as vague and nebulous rules as it is possible to create.

Most people hate change (I think I am one glaring exception) as it tends to cause some friction and stress. In every great transition: from the telegraph to the telephone, from the horse and buggy to the automobile, from radio to television, even from closed to open source, there are those that want to hold on to the old way. But no matter how long it is delayed, change is inevitable, and it is often better to adopt early then to fight it.

That is why I always applaud when I see artists attempt new models. Bands like Radiohead sell directly to their fans (the biggest fear of the record companies) and performers like Louis CK are able to produce and distribute their own films. Those are examples of how the Internet changes distribution, but what really gets me excited is when business models change. Randall Monroe makes a free web comic, and he is able to make a living at it (it does help when the work is brilliant). Likewise, the band Phish makes money touring (even inviting fans to record and distribute their performances) in addition to record sales, and acts like Jonathan Coulton offer certain bonus “bundles” in addition to the music itself.

In the case of SOPA and PIPA, we’re lucky that it impacts a number of companies with as deep pockets as the media industry. The next time we might not be as lucky. The price of our freedom is constant vigilance.

It’s always nice to visit family for a while, and see how the kids have grown.  FUDCon Blacksburg felt an awful lot like a family reunion — except one with a lot more learnin’ going on.  Just a small part of what I learned:

* ARM is coming.  Raspberry Pi is cool, and there’s way cooler down the road.  We’re working on our first little event kit that Eucalyptians will be able to use for demos at some point.  Right now it’s three laptops.  In a couple of years, it’s likely to be a laptop and a half-dozen itty bitty ARM systems.

* Talked with Seth and Smooge about a use case we’d been considering in Fedora-land for a long time: the “community cloud”, in which community members can basically dedicate machines to the Fedora cause.  It’s been a dream scenario for a long time — maybe we’ve got a shot at making it reality with Euca’s help.  Each contributed machine could become the equivalent of an “availability zone”, essentially.  Could be an interesting way of provisioning a lot of build systems in a pinch, and so on.  We’ll see how things shake out.

* Silvereye, a project to simplify Euca installation, is coming along.  I installed my first ever Eucalytpus system this weekend using Silvereye 0.01 and Euca 2.0.3, and I’m basically the equivalent of a trained chimpanzee.  We’ve got some improvements to make, but I’m convinced that we’re on the right path.  (Silvereye == Silver I == AgI == Silver Iodide == Cloud Seeder.)

* I love the ideas behind Boxgrinder, and Marek’s presentation reinforced that lovin’ feeling.  I think we should absolutely be pimping Boxgrinder as one of the primary tools to build Euca images.  Poke to Marek to make slide deck public plz. 

* Thanks to John Mark’s excellent Gluster presentation, I learned why Eucalyptus calls its storage mechanism “Walrus”.  I am clearly late to this understanding.

Good times, good times.  Looking forward to the next one, whenever and wherever that may be.

Today MT.Net is participating in the Stop SOPA protest to fight against corporate censorship of the Internet.

Tell your Congressional representatives that censorship isn’t American!

And Chris Dodd, former senator and current head of the MPAA, is a poopyhead.

As I hinted in my post from earlier this week, today the Raleigh City Council approved moving forward with the purchase of a home that may one day become the Mordecai Historic Park Interpretive Center. The plans were announced during the council’s Budget and Economic Development real estate report.

The plan is for the city to renovate the home of the late Arthur Danielson, who lived at the corner of Wake Forest Road and Cedar Street up until his death in April of 2011. The home dates from 1913, provides almost 5,000 square feet, fronts Wake Forest Road, and is directly adjacent to the park.

As a longtime residence, however, it does not meet code for commercial use. Rooms will have to be remodeled, sprinklers installed, extra egress added, plumbing upgraded, and asbestos and lead paint removed. It also pushes the budget a bit higher than the previous options, though the available square footage is greater than the previous options.

A public hearing regarding the building will take place Thursday, February 2nd at 7 PM at the St. Marks Chapel. I have high hopes this finally leads to the Interpretive Center that Mordecai Historic Park has desperately needed for decades!

So it’s been over two years since my last post.  Been very busy in my life and haven’t had time to do as much tinkering and computer stuff at home as I usually would.  That’s not to say I haven’t done anything, just haven’t documented it.  Here are a few things that happened in the last two years:

1. I changed jobs, I now work in computer, network, and systems security full time.  I’m loving it!  Finally getting to really practice what I preach in the security field.  Georgetown was fun and a great time to grow my general systems experience, but I’m enjoying the focus on computer and network security.




2. Got a new car, this actually happened about three years ago, but I never posted about it.  The Chevy Blazer was taken out by it’s imploding supercharger and deemed not worth my time, effort, and money to repair.  Given it was early 2009 and car dealers were giving away cars I got a great deal on a new 2009 VW Tiguan SE with AWD.  Still love the car and making small upgrades to it as the years go on to make it more mine.  I did actually stand up a page for that work here: My SUV Project (Tiguan).




3. I made some network and computer upgrades at home as well.  I replace my original first generation MacBook Pro 15″ (Intel Core Duo 2Ghz) with a late 2010 model MacBook Pro 15″ (Intel i7 Dual Core) with HD display and 8GB of ram.  It’s currently triple booting MacOS X 10.6, Fedora 16, and Windows Ent 7.  I have a post on how to setup triple boot in the works.  I also upgrade my old Promise NS4300N 2TB NAS box with a new NetGear ReadyNAS Pro 6 12TB.  Much faster and a lot more storage plus so many options.  Finally I’ve kept the network up with technology and run full WiFI a/b/g 300mbps+ and GigE wired via NetGear WNDR4000 and assorted GigE switches paired with FiOS internet.  Finally I upgraded my workstation piece by piece to get it up to a Sandybridge i7 and 16GB ram so that I can build out a new HD+CableCard MythTV network using VMs, the NAS box, and the new Silicon Dust HD Prime. I’ll have a post later documenting my network general gear later as well as posts on how I setup MythTV.




4. I’ve got a Barnes and Noble Nook Color as well.  It’s a great little device and hoping to take better advantage of it this coming year.  And yes, it’s rooted.  Running stock Nook Software but with the added benefit of sideloaded and standard android market apps too.




5. And last but not least, still being a dad and husband working away enjoying watching the kids learn and grow (as I learn and grow).

Today marks the ten year anniversary of my blog, MT.Net, with the first post being added 17 January 2002. I couldn’t have possibly known on that day how active I would become at blogging, with over 5,304 posts logged. That’s an average of almost 1.5 per day for ten years. Not too shabby!

Besides all the obvious fame and fortune, blogging has made me a better writer and speaker. It has led to lasting friendships. It has emboldened me to have an opinion on things – any things – and be able to defend my position. It has shown me that there are others who think like I do but might have not have been brave enough to say so until I did. It has changed minds and made me a better leader. But to put it in simple terms, it has provided me a platform with which I can help form my world through my thoughts and the words that convey them.

Some of my blogging friends have pointed to their stats and pined for the long-gone days of their Internet celebrity. I’m as sure of my blog as they are about theirs that my traffic may never be what it once was.

You know what, though? That’s okay. I’m in this for the long haul. I’ve spent ten years trying to get get this right and I’m sure I’ve got another ten years or more in me. Visitors may come and go but I write more for myself than anyone else.

With that said, for those of you who have tagged along with me on this strange journey, thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts and observations with you. I’m pleased you’ve enjoyed it!

This evening I chaired my last meeting of Raleigh’s East Citizens Advisory Council (East CAC). It was a bittersweet moment for me, knowing how much work I’ve put into it over the past three and a half years.

And yet, I leave it in very good shape. I accomplished almost everything I set out to do. The new leaders are engaged and ready to take it to new levels, too. It’s time for me to turn over the reins and let some of my fantastic neighbors take over.

As I said last night, I don’t know what the future holds in store for me but I don’t know if I’ll ever do anything more rewarding than what I’ve done with the CAC.

This concept is something I’ve carried around with me for my last 3 jobs, and since I’m writing it up for my current employer, I figured I should document it here as well. I’ve mainly worked in Linux/Windows environments, so you may sense a bit of bias away from older systems. It’s not intentional, just a result of my experience. Thanks to Mick for introducing me to this schema.

My droid has reached the end of it’s life, so I’ve gotten a replacement- the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

Pros

• Peppy- My droid was showing it’s age. It lagging pretty badly, regardless of what was installed or how it was configured. The Nexus can run several things without issue.
• ICS -The nexus is the first phone running the newest version of Android, “Ice Cream Sandwich”. A lot of cool new features that I’ve just barely touched.
• Front facing camera – This makes video chats possible. Hopefully I’ll figure out how to use it with google hangouts.
• Face recognition unlocking – Thanks to the front-facing camera, looking at the phone while bringing it out of sleep mode will unlock it. It’s peppy compared to trying to do the pattern unlock, which it fails over to if it can’t match a face.
• Digital menu buttons – the control buttons at the bottom (options, back, etc) are on the screen rather than physical buttons; this allows them to be customized or removed completely.
• Big Screen – massive screen makes reading easy on the eyes.
• Clamshell case – seems more durable than my first one, and it has a built in stand for propping the phone upright.
• Active Wallpaper map – my background is my current location, which also shows traffic conditions. I suspect this may be draining the battery badly, so I’ve turned it back off.
• Traffic widget – shows how long it’ll take to get to a location with the current traffic conditions.
• App/widget menu – apps and widgets are all in the main menu.

Cons

• No Mass Storage Option – MTP is the new protocol used, and normally I would support moving to new tech, but it would have been nice to keep the existing mass storage option available since MTP support isn’t automatically connected like the mass storage option.
• Convoluted process for adding Ringtones and Notifications – On the droid, you drop an MP3 into the ringtones directory and that was it; my Nexus moves them to the music directory automatically, and I had to download a 3rd party app to get it to set it up my custom ringtone and notification.
• Battery Life – My droid wasn’t very good, but it lasted over 24 hours. Waking up at 9 and writing this at 2:20, the Nexus is at 20% already, and this is with the *extended* battery.  I was expecting it to be bad, but not this bad. I suspect this is from the maps wallpaper- I’ll test again tomorrow with a static wallpaper.
• Vanilla ICS – You get spoiled using CyanogenMod, which is what I’ve been using on my droid for the last years. As of right now, the Nexus isn’t supported by Cyanogen yet, but we’re hoping to see it real soon now. Currently missing a lot of configurability.
• No Hardware keyboard – This is the biggest adjustment I’ve had to make; it’s a little more awkward, but it results in a much thinner phone. Not sure if it was worth it.
• Big screen – big screen means it’s hard to hold with one hand.

Those are my initial thoughts; I’ll provide more as I find them.

Ian hard at work.

Overslept.  The Docs Hackfest was supposed to start at 9A and run until noon.  I awoke to knock on my door… at 9A.  Luckily everyone knows how to gather and start without me.

We cleaned up all the Release Note Beats so that those pages, on the wiki, are ready for the F17 Release Notes goodness.  We also got two new contributors setup to contribute.

Unfortunately I didn’t get a lot done on Sunday.  I needed to leave around noon (actually drove away from the Inn at 12:45P) so I could get back home at a decent hour.

It was great seeing everyone, again, and I hope that everyone had a safe trip home.  Next up, Southeast LinuxFest!

One of the many ways I put myself through college was as a bartender. At the time I perfected my Bloody Mary recipe but as time has gone on I have forgotten the exact recipe so I have been trying to figure out the right proportions. This still isn’t quite right but it’s getting close.

Spicy Bloody Mary Recipe

I usually just buy a 64 ounce bottle of tomato juice and pour out the eight ounces so I can use the bottle for the mix.

• 56 ounces tomato juice (I go for the low sodium Campbell’s but use what you like)
• 2 TBSP Horseradish (if you grate your own that works, otherwise buy some good german horseradish)
• 1 TBSP Old Bay Seasoning (crab seasoning if you can’t find the original)
• 2 TBSP Worcestershire Sauce
• 4 ounces Clam Juice (if you like clams you can skip this and substitute Clamato for the tomato juice) if you don’t like clams then just start with 60 ounces of tomato juice.
• 1/2 TSP Celery Salt
• 1 TSP Hungarian Hot Paprika
• 1/2 TSP Tabasco
• 1/2 TSP Sea Salt
• 1 TSP Black Pepper

Obviously you can mix an 1 1/2 ounces of your favorite vodka. Then garnish with celery, or if you got one a cocktail shrimp. I have toyed with substituting Wasabi for the German Horseradish but I think that would really change the taste.

Last year saw some transitions with my work with Raleigh’s Citizens Advisory Councils. After seeing how energized neighbors in the East CAC had become over a noise issue with Enloe High School’s air conditioning unit, I decided it might be a good time to turn over the reins to new leadership. When you identify leaders, the next step is to put them to work, right?

My decision did not come lightly. For over three years, I’ve been planning meetings, coordinating speakers, conducting meetings, and streaming live video from the meetings, to keep my neighbors informed and engaged. In between, I met with neighbors who needed help navigating the city departments to get something done. I also administered neighborhood email lists so that people could stay connected.

It’s been a lot of work, I’ll admit, but many evenings I would return from a CAC meeting with a big grin on my face, my mind bursting with exciting new ideas. It’s been so exhilarating to me to see engaged citizens, and I do believe you’ll never find citizens in the city more engaged than the ones right here in East Raleigh. So has it been work? Yes, absolutely, but it’s also been a blast.

While I made my decision to step down in 2011, my last meeting as chair is tomorrow. I may get choked up.

I couldn’t walk completely away, though. Part of a CAC chair’s responsibility is to attend the umbrella CAC organization, the Raleigh CAC. When a leadership position opened up for this organization, I decided to put my hat in the ring. My fellow chairs liked the idea, too, and elected me RCAC chair. While being tapped to lead a group is always a humbling experience, it’s especially humbling when a group of fellow leaders chooses you to lead.

As far as I know, it’s the first time a (soon to be) former CAC chair will lead the group. I’d considered running before but the workload of running both the East CAC and the Raleigh CAC (and the Parks board, for that matter) was a little too daunting to me. Transitioning away from the East CAC gives me more time to focus on the RCAC, and with the help of our very capable vice-chairs I think we’ll do well.

The city worked up a press release about my election, which was unexpected and quite flattering to me. It was pretty cool seeing this announcement be the top news story on the city’s website over the holiday break.

I don’t know what the future holds in store for me, but I do know that few things could be as rewarding to me as my time with the CACs.

Jared explaining DocBook XML

Whew!  I forgot how tiring these FUDCon days can be with all the work that is getting done.  It is truly awesome to see so many people come together for a common cause.

The day started with photographs, bar camp pitches, and the State of Fedora talk.  I led a talk on the Documentation Project until lunch and then sat in on the DocBook and Publican talk.  After that I sat in on the design class where Mo was discussing Inkscape.

With all the instruction done for the day (for me) I attended the CAcert Assurance event and received enough points to be assured by CAcert.  Immediately following that event, I hosted, with Nick, the GPG key signing event where 35 of us all signed each other’s keys.

FUDpub followed with games, food, and beverages for all.  I bowled a horrible game (bowling is like golf, low score wins, right?) and watched the end of a football game while enjoying some food.  I left a bit early with Smooge and Smooge Sr and hung out with them working on a few projects until I decided to hit the rack.

All-in-all a very good day and one where a lot was accomplished.

The year 2011 was an election year for Raleigh and I was right in the thick of things again.

For a while now I’ve been wondering what it might take to play a bigger role in Raleigh government. In February of last year I quietly took a day off from work and drove to DC to attend a Veterans Campaign workshop aimed at getting more military veterans to run for office. It provided an eye-opening education to what it takes to win an election, some of which isn’t particularly pleasant.

I was pleasantly surprised to meet my friend Randy Stagner there. Randy obviously put his training to better use than I did as he was elected to the City Council.

As for me, I put my energy into helping Randy and others get elected. Becoming newly-unemployed in August gave me the the time to spend putting out political signs, canvassing neighborhoods, stuffing envelopes, and doing whatever else I could do. The result was a huge victory for my candidates, including Mayor, City Council, and the Wake County School Board.

It was hard work but worth it. Winning sure is a lot more fun than losing, too!

It was a bit unexpected that Mordecai Historic Park would become a milestone of the year 2011. I’ve served on this sleepy little board as the Parks Board liaison since I joined the Parks board but the last year was by far the most eventful.

Things really heated up in the spring when the board was presented with the location options for the Mordecai Historic Park Interpretive Center that’s been on the books for a number of years now. I’ve extensively covered on the blog the pros and cons and the thoughts behind my decision-making process, so I won’t do so again. Highlight entries are for reflection from a bit more distance, though, so from this perspective I see the growth opportunity this event provided me.

Some neighbors became nasty in their response, questioning our motives in a way that made me uncomfortable. I wasn’t used to this kind of criticism and to hear it from folks I had once called friends was difficult to accept. I always strived to maintain the high ground in the face of the opposition and many neighbors reached out to me to express their admiration for the restraint and courtesy I showed. That was really welcomed because the urge to tell some folks where they can go was so, so tempting. The episode showed again that in politics holding one’s tongue can be just as important as wagging it.

The other thing the episode taught me was that you have to make the best of the hand you’re dealt. None of the options the board was given were particularly ideal. We had to work within the parameters we were given and I believe we made the best possible choice. The controversy (while painful) did have the benefit of attracting the attention of city leaders and resulted in them redefining the parameters. The outcome promises to be far better than any of the ones the board could’ve achieved on its own. That’s the silver lining.

On Tuesday, the City Council will receive a recommendation from its Budget and Economic Development committee regarding the Interpretive Center. While city officials have rightfully held the news close to their vests, it appears that something big will be announced. I expect that Tuesday’s announcement will be good news for all involved and that we’ll finally move forward with the Interpretive Center.

The Park played a role in other ways last year. I was elected Vice-Chair which was a nice perk. Travis and I also had a blast playing zombies for the Haunted Mordecai trolley tours around Halloween. Then the whole family wore period costumes to represent Mordecai in the Raleigh Christmas Parade.

This year promises more excitement for the Mordecai board, too, as – unless something changes by May – I will become the most senior boardmember when all but two members rotate off the board at the end of their terms. It’s less than ideal for a board that oversees historic sites to have its own history vanish overnight when seasoned boardmembers all leave at once. Fixing this will require the City Council to suspend the rules and extend the terms of a handful of boardmembers so that board terms are then staggered. With the addition of the Tucker, Borden, and Pope Houses to the domain of Mordecai Historic Park, maintaining a knowledgeable board will become more important than ever.

Here’s an interesting take from TechCrunch about how mayors need to think like entrepreneurs. If Raleigh is gunning to be a city of innovation it might want to take this advice.

On stage at last month’s Le Web conference Shervin Pishevar, a Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, stated “The World is a Startup.” It’s an interesting perspective, and I think what’s true for the world is also true for countries, states and municipalities. With developments like last month’s announcement that Cornell was selected to build a new tech campus in New York City, it seems to follow that if “a city is a startup,” then the best mayors are the ones who are looking at their cities in much the same way as entrepreneurs look at the companies they have founded.

via A City Is A Startup: The Rise Of The Mayor-Entrepreneur | TechCrunch.

Nametags ready to be picked up at FUDCon registration.

It. Is. Cold.  It’s not really that bad unless you are facing into the wind.  And then there is the snow.  But what’s a FUDCon without a few bumps and ice?

This morning I lead an intrepid group of Fedorians from the Inn over to McBryde.  After checking in with registration, Ian and I escaped for food and returned to hack on the tudu package and determine that my laptop won’t work with external video because of my crappy nVidia video card.  I’ll have to hack on that later.

After lunch Ian, John, and I (I was just observing) hacked on mw-render to aid in the pulling of information from the Fedora wiki and putting it into the Fedora Release Notes.  This is just a use-case, mind you, and can be used to pull any information from our wiki and put it into any of our guides.  Helpful for those that want to use the wiki as a collaborative sandbox.

Infra discussed using two-factor authentication on servers for certain groups to help protect the infrastructure that runs Fedora.

Work on mw-render turned into the writing of DocsGlue: a program that will read a MediaWiki page, turn it into DocBook XML, and the submit it to Bugzilla as a patch to a guide.  Work continued into the night…

This will take your breath away.

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

If you are among those brave (foolhardy?) enough to have already updated systems to Ubuntu’s Precise Pangolin, you may have encountered the following error while updating your system over the last 24 hours or so:

Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/libreoffice-core_1%3a3.5.0~beta2-2ubuntu2_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix. I am not sure exactly what is causing this, but it occurred on two of my systems yesterday, and still this morning on a third. Initially I thought it might have occurred on the one system because it has been upgraded through several releases, but when it started occurring on freshly installed systems that idea went out the window.

Regardless, the following commands should help get your system back on track.

Source code

sudo mv /usr/lib/libreoffice/basis3.4/program/ /usr/lib/libreoffice/basis3.4/program.old
sudo mkdir /usr/lib/libreoffice/basis3.4/program
sudo apt-get install -f
sudo mv /usr/lib/libreoffice/basis3.4/program.old/ /usr/lib/libreoffice/basis3.4/program

Good luck!

What is up with 3:05 AM that’s waking me up at 3:05 AM? Every single morning this week I’ve awakened at exactly 3:05 AM and I have no idea why.

It started the morning of my Zombiehead post. That night (Wednesday) I went around to all the computers in the house to put them on mute. It’s not the computers.

When I woke up anyway, I assumed that maybe Kelly has been shifting around and waking me. Last night she spent the night away for work, though, so that isn’t it.

There were very strong winds last night as a front is moving through, but would the wind wake me up at the exact same time? Unlikely.

It’s not a case of me waking up naturally from a sleep cycle, either, as my bedtimes have varied all this week.

It’s not the Norfolk Southern train yard as I hear trains all night, every night. Rarely do they wake me up, and rarely at the same time.

I’m not hearing any sound that I can recall. The dog isn’t barking so I don’t believe it’s someone at the door (though I don’t know for sure).

My strongest theory is perhaps someone at my next-door neighbor’s home is coming or going at that time and I’m hearing a car door or something else. Possibly an indistinct sound of some sort.

For the next few nights I’m going to set up some recording devices in the hopes of figuring this out!