OSSPACK

The blog’s been pretty quiet for the last week because I took some time to just relax, spend time with family and friends, and enjoy the company’s holiday shutdown period.

This has been a very eventful year for me and my family, including my moving from the public to the private sector to take a job with Red Hat, many travels (including my first trip to Germany!), family events including death and birth, and helping my mom through some tough times recuperating from her back surgery, not to mention the financial and political tumult that affected everyone over the course of the year, two big releases for the Fedora Project, and all the work that went thereto. But all in all, 2008 has actually been quite a memorable year for me, and I’m looking forward to what 2009 will bring.

Right off the bat, I’ll get to see old and new Fedora friends at our FUDCon in Boston in about a week or so. It will be a fantastic event and I’m very much looking forward to participating in it, after all the planning! There’s something very fulfilling about seeing people come together at these events to renew bonds, to create new and exciting features, and to further break down barriers to free software contribution.

There’s no doubt in my mind that, now more than ever, Fedora is the epicenter of progress in FOSS, and that progress is powered by our entire community working together with our multitudinous upstream partners. Software freedom and community don’t come free of cost; they’re endeavors built on the hard work and tenacity of hundreds of thousands of FOSS contributors. The work of those contributors calls for gratitude and respect, and they continue to be my focus in Fedora.

When I get together with contributors at FUDCon, it’s always a good reminder to me that words must be backed up by deeds. Pledges to community and freedom too easily ring hollow without the accompanying march of progress through contribution. I’m constantly heartened by the enthusiasm shown by our community members at these events for making real progress in FOSS, with constant dedication to the spirit of openness that free software provides and demands. I’ll do my best this year to meet that enthusiasm with my own, to respect your hard work with more of the same, and to help you keep creating and promoting “freedom, friends, features, first.”

Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing as you ring in the New Year, I hope 2009 brings you and your loved ones success, fulfillment, and happiness. Now let’s break out the good bubbly!

Been creating Intrepid (lbex) HVM image,supposed to be loaded as PV DomU, i’ve got an issue with default LVM partitioning been done by Ubuntu Intrepid Server. Image been created may be easily loaded at Xen 3.3.X Dom0 via traditional xm-profile by not via “pygrub” or “pv-grub”, expecting /boot partition not of LVM’s type. Up on creating Intrepid HVM image, boot partition and LVM , containing “/” filesystem and swap partition have been setup

Wish you all a headbanging new year!       

Lu and I made a quick stop to Guangzhou pre-xmas where we met up with some of Lu’s old classmates Wang Ge (Gary), Lu Jun and Lu Jun’s girlfriend. Lu Jun and his girlfriend were rocking the new nerd glasses style that couples are wearing in Guangzhou now, so Lu and I took our best stab at wearing them well:

After Guangzhou, Lu and I flew from Hong Kong to SFO and then onto Missouri where we have been spending some time with my parents. Unfortunately, my Mom’s parents haven’t been doing so hot, so we wanted to spend some good time with them and our other family members like Brad, Tracy, Andy, Joe and my cousin Brittany’s new baby, who has my name!

Throughout this trip, we have been making many notes about post-economic-disaster living in America, noting all the highway adverts that are blank, how much midwest folks are consuming, and the huge amount of food served by restaurants.

Lu has documented this on her blog in Chinese and English. Here is an enticing one we took in a Walmart near where my grandparents live I will call “Lu Big Pants and I’m not talking about Koolhaus’ CCTV building”:

We are having fun here and its been a nice change of pace from the freezing dry weather in Beijing. Also, I don’t want to sound negative about American culture in the midwest. I’m trying to understand this place from a different vantage point now after living in China in order to offer comments, criticism and hopefully contributions to make it better — most of my family still lives here!

Today, I’m with my mom in the basement of my parents house going through old things, applying the kinkade principle to my parent’s old stored goods, and revisiting past memories. From nathan:

less is more. Do you want to uncomplicate your life? Start divesting yourself of material possessions, stem consumerism, live as consciously as possible. Live free

I’m still thinking about this last year. It has been an interesting year which I will post more about tomorrow and talk more about 2009 plans. Be safe tonite and see you in 2009 my friends. Also, watch out and not get to into some party like this (via Ian:

As the year comes to a close, it’s time once again for my annual look back on what we’ve done as the Camino Project.

1. We followed up on 2007’s Camino 1.5 with Camino 1.6 in April, providing our users with a significant upgrade based on the stable MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH, with features like the scrolling tab bar, automatic software updates, and improved AppleScript support. We’ve continued to release security and stability updates on an almost-monthly basis since then, and the Multilingual version of Camino 1.6.x currently ships with 14 languages.
2. As Gecko 1.9 began to stabilize for Mac embedders, we released two milestones, Alpha 1 and Beta 1, on the road to Camino 2. We continue to knock out some of our most requested features and hope to deliver a solid 2.0 release in early 2009. Sean Murphy, Stuart Morgan, and Jeff Dlouhy all have contributed major features so far.
3. We had the second of what now can be characterized as “annual” contributor meetings, again following WWDC in June. In addition to the gang in San Francisco, Desmond Elliott and I joined in remotely (alleviating fears from some that I did not, in fact, exist ).
4. As with every year, people come and go. While a number of older contributors have had to cut back their time spent on Camino, we were delighted to welcome new contributors this summer and fall.
   • Christopher Henderson and Ilya Sherman joined the team in 2008; both jumped in and made an immediate impact. Christopher arrived with a full content zoom patch and soon became adept at all-purpose extermination, and Ilya jumped in to our unloved download window code, breathing some life into the old Growl patch along the way.
   • In addition, Bryan Atwood returned with the Flashblock whitelist, and Philippe Wittenbergh, who has provided graphics, design, and CSS-wrangling for some time time now, stepped in to fill more of the shoes left by Jon Hicks (who was snapped up by some other browser developer).
   • We were delighted to add Catalan to the languages shipping in the Multilingual version of Camino 1.6.x, and as the year came to a close we heard from teams looking to add Galician and Turkish localizations in future releases.
5. It was not a good year for tinderboxen, alas.
   • Both the long-serving binus and the hard-working maya (which had served as the first Universal tinderbox in the Mozilla world), finally succumbed to boot failure.
   • maya’s replacement, a 1.24 GHz G4 Mac mini, also succumbed to tinderbox disease late in the year, after stints serving as the primary tinderbox for both Sunbird and Camino while our respective Xserves were down for about two months for unexplained failures. (Did I mention it was a bad year for tinderboxen?)
   • Thankfully, binus’s replacement, cb-minibinus01 has been a model citizen. As a result of all the excitement, Samuel Sidler and I learned more about tinderbox-wrangling than we ever wanted to know! (Please join me in knocking on wood in the hopes not to curse us with more tinderbox disasters in 2009.)
6. Our localization teams successfully transitioned from AppleGlot+ADViewer to iLocalize this year, in the final run-up to Camino 1.6. After a couple of years with unreliable AppleGlot versions and annoying Intel strings bugs, the iLocalize solution was a welcome breath of fresh air. These hard-working people bring you Camino in more than a dozen languages, complete with localized release notes for each release. If Camino is not currently available in your language, drop by the caminol10n project website, join the mailing list, and learn how you can help!

I think that covers most of the major events of this year—and I managed not to be so long-winded this time around! 2008 has been another good year for the Camino Project. Camino 2.0 Beta 1 has a number of new features I’m really excited to be using, and 2009 promises to bring more good things to Camino users.

Thanks to everyone in the Camino community—our developers, our testers, our localizers, users, and friends—for a great 2008. Happy New Year and welcome to 2009!

I’m sure there’s already a million “Happy New Year” type posts up but I figured I’d throw in my two cents as well (since I’m actually here for this New Year’s Day).

While I’m at it I’ll pass along some things I managed to accomplish over the past week:

• Have some troubleshooting that you need to do that requires you to have a small partition? (In my case, troubleshooting for bug 118594). You don’t need to re-format your hard drive. Instead (at least on Linux) just create a partition on a file:
  1. Create a small-ish file (for instance, using dd if=/dev/zero of=file-name-here bs=1M count=size-in-megabytes).
  2. From there, you need to create a filesystem on it. I used plain ext2. If you’re not running as root you may need to manually run /sbin/mke2fs file-name-here. (since /sbin is normally only in the PATH for root). mke2fs should complain about the file not being a special block device but you can tell it to proceed. Please note that mke2fs is a horribly horribly destructive thing to do on a live filesystem. Make sure to take the extra second to get the filename right, and don’t run mke2fs as root.
  3. From there you can mount the file using the loop device. I had to do the following: mkdir test-dir # Create directory to mount filesystem to
sudo mount -o loop ./file-name-here ./test-dir/.
     On my system root permission is required to run mount even for a single-user mount like this, it may be different on yours.
  4. Now use your new filesystem normally. Any changes that you make to the test-dir/ folder actually affect the file you created for that purpose. This is handy for testing out-of-disk-space problems in your app.
• If you use Gentoo you will want to start shifting over to split ebuilds if you haven’t already. Their KDE-style modules were stopped (for the most part) at KDE 3.5.9, which was fine with me until every emerge world I tried to run started complaining about blocked packages at the various kdelibs requirements started to get inconsistent. I’ve decided to take this opportunity to simply get rid of the majority of the system KDE 3 and upgrade to KDE 4.1.3 instead. So far my wife hasn’t complained about it at all (and she really likes KSudoku as well) so as soon as I’m convinced I haven’t forgotten to install a KDE 4 program I’ll need I’m going to uninstall KDE 3 with the exception of the libraries and a few apps.
• World of Goo is definitely worthy of play. A Linux version is in beta but the Windows demo ran fine for me in WINE. Well, it crashed WINE on shutdown before the video mode had been restored but I suppose that’s good enough nowadays. :)

No penal accusation will be recorded against the agents of the police enforcements assigned the dead women of the execution of the Jr. gilded of the Billy Frank 17 August. The District Proxy Scott Thomas of the county of the Craven has freed the result in a relationship Wednesday of the be-page.

I'd like to wish all Stellarium users a Happy New Year on behalf of the Stellarium developers. Thanks to everyone who supported the project in 2008 and here's to 2009 - lets make Stellarium better than ever. (0 comments)