J5’s Blog

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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From Matt Asay’s interview with our new CEO:

Tell me a little bit about yourself. What are the last three bands you listened to on your iPod?

I don’t have an iPod (or a Zune). It won’t play Ogg Vorbis files.

This is from a guy who knows a thing or two about generating profits and value. It is an exciting time to be a Red Hat employee.

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I’ll be in various places other than the Boston area for most of November.  Starting this coming Friday I will be driving down to NY where I am catching a flight to Florence, Italy for a friend’s wedding.  I’ll be there for a week and then am going to work from Atlanta, Georgia while visiting my best friend who is getting married next spring.  To round things off I will be working from NY through Thanksgiving.

The Italy trip is pretty booked but I should be visiting the ATL and NY Red Hat offices to say hi since I will be there anyway.  If any Fedora or GNOME folks want to grab a beer or just meet up let me know.

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It is good to see other distributions are picking up the eggcups printer autoconfiguration interfaces which I had started and Tim Waugh had perfected. It was more than three years ago that GNOME had a dream of making USB hardware ‘Just Work’ when plugging them in. Today one can’t imagine a desktop distribution which doesn’t have this. A key agenda at the next GUADEC should be getting a lot of this work accepted upstream and figuring out how last mile items like PolicyKit will add polish to great stack we have built up.

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Thank you mugshot for pointing this out. Apparently RHEL5 will be shipping on HP computers in Australia. A tip of the hat goes to the desktop team which I worked on before moving to OLPC and the GNOME community which makes such a wonderful desktop.

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As of Fedora 7 Red Hat had relinquished control of Fedora to the community by merging extras and core into one distribution and giving the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) oversight over the whole project. FESCo is somewhat analogous to the GNOME Board. Today it was unanimously approved by FESCo for the OLPC operating system Sugar to become part of the fold.

This means we will be moving from the Red Hat build and CVS servers to the Fedora servers which are open to the community. It also means we will be working within Fedora towards making it more and more flexible for targeted projects such as OLPC.

In the coming weeks I will be rebasing Sugar on Fedora 7 and moving all of our packages over. More information about the OLPC/Fedora partnership is on the Fedora wiki.

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