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This Week in Foresight

And now, the news:

  • Alpha 3 is out! Read the release notes, and remember this is an alpha – things will break, and it’s not quite ready for everyday use yet, but it’s close. Download here.
  • The Foresight mailing lists are down due to this weekend’s rBuilder maintenance. Something about the MX record being screwy. Hopefully will be back soon. Foresight users outside of the US should see speed improvements in Conary now that rBuilder is in a new data center.
  • No one replied to my thread on the Marketing mailing list about the website that I linked to last week, and what they like in a website and what they don’t. That makes me sad. That might be ok, because:
  • We have another website mockup! Thorsten, a relatively new Foresight user, submitted to the marketing list a potential mockup for the new foresightlinux.org. Combined with Nixternal’s recent mockups, I think we can have some discussion and pick one and start coding.
  • I created a new page on the wiki – Foresight Love. Modeled after GNOME-Love, which are bugs tasked in GNOME’s Bugzilla as “GNOME Love”, which means they’re easy to fix and good for beginners. The goal of this wiki page is similar to that and to the GNOME GHOP, where developers can add to an ever growing to-do list of things that are easy for a new contributor to jump in an do. The page is still a framework, I need to add lots more links within the wiki and tasks. If you are a Foresight developer, and know of some easy tasks someone new could try, add them! This was inspired by Ken updating a page on the wiki last week listing all the trivial bugs in JIRA.
  • Foresight will be at SCALE next month, and now Flourish in Chicago in April. Nice work Kevin.
  • I was introduced to Gobby over the weekend. Gobby is a real time collaborative text editor. While I don’t think it will work for the userguide since we’re already using Mercurial, I think it might work well for things like the release notes, new website copy, or even the newsletter once we start publishing that in a blog and not the wiki. (Writing the wiki markup in Gobby would be kind of a chore). More to come.
  • If you’re looking for me in IRC or on email this week, I’ll be back Friday. Off to a conference for work all week.

Google Accounts

I have a few different Google accounts I use, including two for email, one for backup, and a Google for Domains account (pcutler at foresightlinux dot org).

I forward all my email to my primary account (silwenae at gmail dot com), and use that account to log in to all my Google services. Within that account, I have selected pcutler at foresightlinux dot org as my main account to send email from, when logged in as silwenae. Gmail makes this all pretty easy from it’s settings menu within Gmail.

One of the recent challenges I had, is that I’ve created a couple Google Groups for Foresight mailing lists. Since I was logged in to Google as silwenae, and my default email to send from is pcutler at foresight, I kept getting bounce messages when I’d try to email the group as I’d forget that I had to change my send email address in Gmail. So I then created another Google account for pcutler at foresight, subscribed to the group, but now I was subscribed as two different users. It fixed the problem, but wasn’t elegant.

Yesterday, the Google Operating System Blog posted about associating another email address with your Google account. Similar to how Gmail allows you to associate another email account (including receiving and sending emails), it allows you to use all of Google’s services, such as Calendar or Groups, with this account.

I had to delete the new Google account I set up using pcutler @ foresight, and then followed the steps above. Then, in Google Groups, I went to “Edit my Membership”, and it asks: What address do you want to use for this group? I selected pcutler @ foresight and voila, all fixed, with a much more elegant solution.

For those of you with @foresightlinux.org accounts, this trick may come in handy.

  • in Packers
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Emotions

“The difference between winning and losing in the NFL is so small, but the emotions you feel afterward, winning as opposed to losing, is so great that it’s really not fair. When you lose, it’s almost like a part of you died. When you win, you’ve never felt more alive.”

Packers General Manager Ted Thompson

Foresight updates

My blog has been quiet lately (darn work making me travel!). Let’s see what’s been going on in the world of Foresight:

  • Work on the updated Userguide continues. A Foresight-Docs mailing list was created on Google Groups. Japanese translation is almost complete!
  • The marketing team has kicked off a discussion about the new Foresight website. What sites do you like? What do you not like? Add your thoughts, and join the discussion.
  • Planet Foresight has re-launched, leaving Django behind, and now using Venus, a fork of Planet. Smerp gives an overview of Venus, and how he used rBuilder to create the appliance and how it can be customized. (Anyone out there up for creating a Foresight theme?)
  • The first Focus meeting occurred. Focus is a Foresight steering committee. I created a wiki page for it and published the meeting minutes. Congratulations to Eric Lake and Will Farrington, the first to be formally approved through the new process.
  • The download page links are fixed. Oops!

  • PackageKit errors are much more verbose now. Have you noticed? Fedora interviews Richard Hughes, PackageKit’s maintainer, who gives a nice shout out to Foresight:

    Has their been interest from other distributions about incorporating this?

    RH: Much. PackageKit is shipped by default in Foresight Linux and the GNOME Developer Kit. There’s also interest from Ubuntu, openSUSE, openSolaris, Mandriva, OpenMOKO and a few more that we can’t announce yet.

  • There was a marketing meeting this past Wednesday, which I will be publishing the minutes of this weekend. More of a status update, we will be deploying more appliances, including Mercurial, and best of all, a new forum! Jive Software has provided us with a free unlimited license as an open source project, and we’ll also be deploying Crowd to manage single sign on between Jive, JIRA and Confluence. Cross your fingers, we should have it up mid to late February.

Rumor is, an Alpha 3 release should be on the way shortly too.

Netflix

After a two year break, I signed up for Netflix again. Towards the end of my last subscription, I was paying $15 / month to hang on to two or three DVDs I never got around to watching. I’m the type of customer Netflix loves – really active, then a couple months of inactivity.

To curb my habit of buying Blu-Ray movies (they’re so pretty in HD!), I signed up again yesterday. And today comes news they are offering unlimited watching of movies online. Of course, it’s Windows only, so sucks to be me. Still not a good enough reason to use Windows though!