I’ve been with Red Hat for over 8 and a half years now and while it would have been nice to get my 10 year plaque I was given an opportunity to join a newly created startup in downtown Boston called Stackdriver. I will be working there with former Red Hat employee and fellow Arlington neighbor, Jeremy Katz. It will be exciting to once again have a team that I will see every day and to be working in an office inside of Boston (ok the OLPC office was 1000ft outside of Boston – but close enough). I’m going to miss Red Hat and the OpenShift team. They are pretty amazing and I encourage anyone who is looking to apply for a job with them.
In any case it is time to take a risk and the opportunity presented itself. I wouldn’t leave Red Hat for just any company but the team they are putting together at Stackdriver along with the management’s views on how a startup should be run convinced me that it is a great bet to make.
I will be transitioning out of Red Hat at the end of the month and starting full steam at Stackdriver. Rest assured I will still be using GNOME and Fedora as my development platform and will continue to be part of the community though less visible. I am also coming back to Python land after my brief stint with Ruby. I have learned to like Ruby even while muttering under my breath on the lack of some documentation and strange design choices here and there. But I digress. It will be nice to get back into Python development.
To all my Red Hat coworkers and friends, lets make sure we keep in touch. Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it’s been. Keep on truckin’!
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Since GNOME’s move to using git and the fact that upstream is where all the cool kids hack I have decided to move D-Feet to the GNOME servers to make it easier for contributors to contribute and users to file bugs. That doesn’t mean I’m going to fix every feature request but it does mean others can help make D-Feet more useful.
I was sort of blown away that my humble little project was being used by more people than I had realized. I was even more amazed that it was mentioned in the literature for the GNOME Developer Training Days at this year’s GUADEC.
That is not to say I think D-Feet is a particularly shining example of how a D-Bus debugging app should be written. It kind of sucks but it does fill a niche, which is why I am starting a new design process for potentially developing a better D-Bus debugger. Here is the hitch, I don’t want feature requests, I don’t want your bug reports (those can go into bugzilla), what I want is your workflow. How do you debug your D-Bus apps? What are the pitfalls, the annoyances, the most repetitive tasks that you encounter? Please head to the Workflow Design page and add your own voice.
D-Feet is a D-Bus debugger written in PyGtk+ by John (J5) Palmieri
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I’m at the Red Hat Summit and FUDCon listening to Joel Cohen’s keynote. If his name doesn’t ring a bell, he is the associate producer of the Simpsons. What does this have to do with Linux? Scenes from the Simpsons are actually rendered on Red Hat Linux before being approved and going the more traditional, and expensive route of hand drawing the cells. It is a cool example of how technology and specifically Linux can streamline traditional work flows.
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…and say hello to Cappuccino in a Cloud.
The Red Hat “Boston” office just moved into new diggs down the street from our old office space. This is the second move we have made since I got here four years ago and a needed one as the company continues to grow at a steady pace. Inevitably the discussion of coffee makers comes up every time we make a move (and quite frequently in the interim too) with a new coffee gadget showing up shortly after. We opted for the Flavia drink station this time around. This brings up the issue that any new gadget presented to a large audience will inevitably see high traffic for the first few days before the novelty wears off and the traffic reduces to a steady level of consumers.
There are many questions that need to be considered here. Will the machine stand up to the first few weeks of abuse? If it was engineered for a high peak capacity is it still economical to run when that traffic has fallen off? Do we just accept that the first few weeks will see some breakdowns, pissed customers who will not come back because of the failed experience and keep on chugging with the knowledge that our initial costs were low? If coffee making could be parallelized could it scale up and down economically and efficiently?
This is the Cappuccino in a Cloud problem. How do you make processes efficient and scalable for both high load peak and the inevitable lower day to day traffic? The travelling salesman problem dealt with efficiencies of one single entity (the salesman) finding the most efficient (read cheapest) single threaded route through a number of destinations. In today’s word the consumer comes to the buisness or service, sometimes all at once, and it is important to figure out the most efficient way (measured in the consumer’s satisfaction and producer’s bottom line) to handle that load.
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For those of you in Fedora land who don’t know Matthew Garrett has just accepted an offer from Red Hat . If that name doesn’t ring a bell, it should. Matthew is one of the reasons Linux works on laptops. Being one of the few people who truly understands Linux from the hardware all the way up to the desktop, he will be spending his time working on power management in both Kernel land and Userspace.
It is great to see my company recognize the need for such improvements and hire top notch people to get it done. Welcome aboard Matthew.
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Welcome to the first post of my VLog, a video blog of the various things that interest me. Today we talk to Soeren Sandmann about his efforts to make projectors “Just Work”, the fruit of which has just landed in Fedora Rawhide.
This production was done using
Cinelerra,
Kino (DV to Ogg Theora post processing) and
The GIMP.I hope to have videos from time to time and will be setting up a dedicated blog for them in the future. The biggest factor right now for not producing more video is the state of Open Source and Free Software tools for video editing. Cinelerra is very capable but the UI is frustrating to work with. Anyone who can accelerate the development of
PiTiVi or produce a tool with a
UI similar to their advanced UI mockups will have my eternal thanks (and I will buy them beers whenever I see them).
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A couple of weeks ago I made a post on how NOT to treat your customers. Today I had an experience which prompted me to write a counter point to the last post. As my readers may know, I just joined a gym. To kick thing off right (wait for the pun), I went out today looking for sneakers. For most people it is a simple trip to the local sports shop or shoe store but I needed shoes for the gym so they had to fit just right and provide proper support. The issue for me is I wear shoes one half size smaller than most stores carry. That is a bigger difference than it sounds when it comes to shoes I will be running in.
I decided to go down to the specialty running store, Marathon Sports, in order to see if they carried my size. I walked into a busy shop and looked around for a bit, clearly confused by the myriad of choice, mostly of brands I never heard of. This wasn’t your everyday shoe store. Just then a man asked if he could help and then made the strange request that I take off my shoes, roll up my pant legs and walk up and down the store. I complied and from that he deduced my gate, stance and the fact that I had wide feet. He promptly brought up a pair of some of the most comfortable sneakers I have ever worn.
I ended up paying a bit of a premium for the sneakers. Nothing huge but about $10-$20 more than I would anywhere else. The fact is from the service I was given I would have paid much more. These sneakers are going make sure I get an optimal workout without injuring myself and when they wear out, I know where I am going to get a new pair.
To review, expertise, good merchandise plus great customer service makes a happy customer. A happy customer comes back for more and may even bring friends along to start the cycle anew.
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