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  • in Politics
  • 1 min read

Get out and vote!

If you live in the U.S., today is the day. After almost 2 years of campaigning and listening to the candidates, it’s our turn as citizens to make our decisions and vote for our candidates.

I voted an hour ago – and the turnout was higher than 4 years ago, and I live in the state with the highest percentage of registered voters and those who vote. We had more voting booths than I’ve seen in 10 years of living here.

The best part? In Minnesota you can register to vote on election day, and vote. There were 6 people registering to vote, all, I would guess, under the age of 25. That’s what it’s about. For years the younger demographic has had the lowest turnout – I hope what I saw wasn’t just a fluke, and the young voters turn out today, and keep voting for the rest of their lives.

Please vote today. Every vote does make a difference.

Foresight Packages

We are getting ready to release Foresight GNOME edition in the next week, once GNOME 2.24 is out.

Foresight is a rolling release distro – our packages are almost always up to date, and we keep them up to date, unlike most distributions that have 2 big releases a year, which is when they update packages.

Being a rolling release, this means that a Foresight “release” is just a snapshot in time of what is available in the repository.

With a big release coming up, how can you help? I’m glad you asked!

We have over 100 issues in our issue tracker (JIRA), of package requests that are complete, but need testing before we send them to the stable branch of Foresight.

To do a search in JIRA:

  1. Click here to go to the Foresight issue tracker
  2. Click on Find Issues under the Foresight logo, third from the left.
  3. Under Project, select “Foresight Linux”
  4. Under Issue Type, select “Package Requests”
  5. Now scroll down, and under Issue Attributes and Status select “Needs QA”
  6. Click View, and all the package requests that have been built and need testing will appear

Then do a couple of things:

Make sure the package hasn’t been promoted to fl:2 already:

sudo conary rq packagename=@fl:2

If it hasn’t, make sure it’s not in the QA branch:

<br /> sudo conary rq packagename=@fl:2-qa

If it’s in QA, install it:

<br /> sudo conary update packagename=@fl:2-qa

And test it!

It’s possible it might have been built and needs to be promoted from fl:2-devel, and tested:

sudo conary rq packagename=@fl:2-devel

sudo conary update packagename=@fl:2-devel

In both cases, after testing, please comment on the Issue in JIRA whether the package worked or not, or any other relevant information, for example if it’s missing a .desktop file or menu entry.

That’s it! The QA team and I watch all bug reports via email or the the #foresight-qa and #foresight-alerts channels on Freenode IRC. From there we’ll make sure it gets added to the groups and promoted to the stable branch.

Happy testing, and thank you for the help! Let’s see how many packages we can test in the next few days before Foresight 2.0.5 is released.

  • in Books
  • 1 min read

Gregory Mcdonald, RIP

Gregory Mcdonald, most famous for being the author of the Fletch series, has died at age 71 from cancer.

I’m not a big mystery reader, but due to Kevin Smith‘s praise for McDonald’s dialogue in his novels, I picked up one or two of his books, and then quickly bought them all a number of years ago.

You thought the Fletch movies (well, at least the first one) were funny? Each and every one of these books will have you chuckling and laughing out loud at some point, and the mysteries weren’t half bad either.

They’re light, quick reads, and the next time you’re looking for a book to read, I highly recommend any of his books, including both the Fletch and Flynn series.

Via John Scalzi

Foresight Bug Week Wrap-Up

Foresight Bug Week wrapped up yesterday. I was pretty excited as it seemed we touched a number of issues. Upon further review, we still have a lot of work to do!

Some stats on the last 9 days of working on the issues (hope the formatting works):

9/1/2008 9/8/2008 Net Change

Total issues: 1644 1661 17

Open issues: 597 546 -51

In progress: 19 26 7

Resolved: 578 614 36

Closed: 322 372 50

Needs QA: 106 116 10

Open Issues (By Priority)

Blocker: 2 2 0

Critical 22 20 -2

Major: 66 56 -10

Normal: 505 491 -14

Minor: 57 53 -4

Trivial: 9 10 1

I’m happy to report that Package Requests, which make up about 20% of all issues in JIRA, have been assigned to the new Packagers ID, making it easy for our crack team of packaging experts to search for stuff to do. (Which I blogged about last week).

I personally spent some time porting packages from the fl:1 repo and user contributed repos to Foresight, and closed those package requests. (It’s so much easier when someone has already written the recipe for me!)

What the stats above don’t show is the number of total issues touched, which a report I ran in JIRA puts at 275 (about 30% of all issues in JIRA, both opened and closed). This includes linking duplicates, commenting on bugs if more information is needed, etc. At the end of the day, 5% of all bugs (86) were closed and / or resolved last week, which is a good start.

Next steps:

Out of the open issues, 30% (191) remain assigned to Distro – which means they need to be assigned to a developer to be addressed. Issues needing QA – which means the packages need to be tested, is 7% (116). We also have 19% (123) open package requests assigned to the Packagers ID. Poor Ken (138) and doniphon (82) have the most issues assigned to them, so give ’em a hand and help them out! Test some packages that need QA, and comment on the issue, or if you have time, package some applications that our users have requested.

This is just the beginning of a more regular QA / Bug Triaging process. It was a good first step, and thank you to everyone who lent a hand last week to help out, and I look forward to more help in the future.

Ouch

I was traveling in Los Angeles when Kelly got a bit of a scare last week.

Jack was running around upstairs, ran into the bathroom, and he slid on the linoleum right into the shower door.

With a cut on his head bleeding profusely, I think Zoe was more scared than Jack was. (Zoe seems to have rolled a high D20 for empathy when she was born).

Kelly rushed them to the emergency room, where they numbed Jack and gave him 6 stitches. The ER nurses were amazed that after 12 years with 3 children, this was our first visit to the ER.

Jack’s doing well – since he can’t see the cut, it doesn’t bother him at all. Surprisingly, the nurses thought it won’t scar, and if it does, it will be very small and almost unnoticeable. He’ll get the stitches out later this week.

I miss all the fun when I’m off traveling for work.

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