Category: Blog

links for 2009-03-10

  • Strategic Presence: The Power that Fuels Leadership
    The goal of leadership is to produce superior results on purpose and that makes leadership a results contest. The challenge of leadership is to persuade and motivate those they lead to produce the results they want. When people voluntarily and enthusiastically do what their leaders ask them to do and the desired results are achieved, leaders are considered to be effective and successful! The question is how do leaders really get others to voluntarily and enthusiastically produce the desired results? There are many parts to this puzzle, but there is none greater than a condition I describe as Strategic Presence.
    (tags: leadership)

Intuitive packaging is vital to Gentoo

A post I made on the Gentoo development list last night deserves your attention because it illustrates a key aspect of Gentoo. I want to make sure it’s preserved instead of lost in mailing-list archives. This is in reply to a proposal to move a significant portion into a series of variables instead of being written as scripted functions:

I think the idea of ebuilds as scripts showing directly how to build software is a core part of the Gentoo build-system philosophy. This proposal pushes ebuilds toward a formatted file that is not a script. Instead, it is more like an Ant XML file that more abstractly describes a build. I think this is the wrong direction for ebuilds because they should directly resemble how software is built by hand.

One of the key reasons people use Gentoo is that ebuilds are so easy to “get” for anyone who has ever built software by hand. I will continue to vehemently defend anything that I think retains this key advantage of Gentoo over other distributions.

Gentoo is a distribution for advanced Linux users, or those who want to become advanced. Having packaging scripts that are easy to learn lowers the barrier to entry to editing them, which vastly increases our number of potential developers. It additionally comprises a key part of Gentoo’s ease of customization by allowing people to easily write their own packages or modify existing ones for their purposes. When users do this, it creates a natural pathway from building software by hand to editing ebuilds to becoming a Gentoo developer. The more difficult it is to learn how to write packaging scripts, the more of your potential developer base you repel.

links for 2009-03-08

  • How To Successfully Compete With Open Source Software
    “OSS concentrates on the software, not the problems the software can solve: Take a look at an OSS site, any OSS site. You’ll see a whole lot of talking about the software, the implementation of the software, the source code for the software, how you can contribute to the software, etc. You’ll almost never see anything about the problem domain — the assumption is that, if you’ve stumbled upon the site, you already know you have a software problem.”
    (tags: entrepreneurship opensource marketing business)
  • Leadership: Willingness to Take Risks | Learn This
    Innovation is not the job only of the leader. For innovation to happen at all levels and from followers as well, a leader must look to steer what is needed for a change or direction, but should never limit how to come about doing that. The adversity that exists in a team is far greater than any leader will ever have and so the possibilities and ideas generated from the whole group are always more than the leader could generate on their own. For this reason, it is especially important for a leader to not only allow innovation at all levels, but encourage and promote it as well. This will bring forth more ideas, more possibilities and enable more people amongst the followers to start having practice and interest in the decisions, risks and change as well.
    (tags: leadership)
  • Leadership: Give Direction | Learn This
    True leadership is about taking people to a place that they would not go to by themselves. Good leaders provide that by delivering and demonstrating purpose, direction, goals and guidance that is well beyond a supervising role alone. These are the areas that I feel make direction vital to leadership.
    Planning and Communication

    Direction cannot be given if it is not known by the leader in the first place. And a leader cannot lead if they don’t give a direction for people to follow them. This creates a big requirement to do something about that by using techniques, tools and resources to provide and develop that direction.

    (tags: leadership)

links for 2009-03-07

  • Great Leadership: 10 Tips on How to Lead a Global Virtual Team
    2. As the team or project leader, pay extra attention to the basic mechanics of good meeting and project management. The importance of agendas, role clarification, project charters, action items, and documentation all magnify when leading a virtual team. For a one hour conference call, expect to spend 4X the time in “administrative” preparation and follow-up.
    (tags: leadership)

links for 2009-03-01

  • Lipstick on a Pig? 10 Ways to Improve Your “Executive Presence”
    9. Learn how to lead meetings. Meetings are where we “show up” as a leader. Like presentation skills, there’s a science to meeting management that can be learned. And honing your meeting leadership skills helps you become a better meeting participant. Ask a skilled trainer to teach you "facilitation" (how to lead a discussion) skills.
    (tags: leadership)

You can help get Gentoo into the Summer of Code

This year, let’s try something different! I posted a rough draft of our organization application on the Gentoo wiki, in hopes that we can all work together to improve it over the next week. Applications are due starting March 9, and earlier is better. Here’s a list of questions that you can help answer:

Go to the wiki, and help Gentoo’s application rock!

links for 2009-02-27

  • Coding Horror: Paying Down Your Technical Debt
    Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future.
    (tags: productivity programming)

links for 2009-02-26

  • danieltenner.com — Counting hours doesn't make sense
    So the useful question is not “how many hours do you work?” but “how much energy do you put into your work?” Other useful questions that come with it are:

    * How much of your daily energy do you spend increasing your total energy? Do you feel you spend enough? Do you feel you spend it on the right things?
    * How much of your daily energy do you waste each day? How do you define waste? Is all that waste really unproductive or does it have some beneficial side-effects? Are those side-effects sufficient to justify spending that energy?
    * Do you spend energy on things which actively hurt you?
    * Has your daily energy increased or decreased in the last 6 months? year? 5 years?

    Any of these questions is more worthwhile than “How many hours do you work each day?”

    (tags: productivity)
  • Trolls
    There's a sort of Gresham's Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it. Which means that once trolling takes hold, it tends to become the dominant culture. That had already happened to Slashdot and Digg by the time I paid attention to comment threads there, but I watched it happen to Reddit.

    News.YC is, among other things, an experiment to see if this fate can be avoided. The sites's guidelines explicitly ask people not to say things they wouldn't say face to face. If someone starts being rude, other users will step in and tell them to stop. And when people seem to be deliberately trolling, we ban them ruthlessly.

    (tags: community)

Xorg-server 1.6 preview in Gentoo’s x11 overlay

To compete with Remi’s post about getting xorg-server 1.5.3 stable in Gentoo, here’s one about getting xorg-server 1.6, which was released today, into testing in the main tree. We’ve been maintaining the 1.6 release candidates in the x11 overlay for a while now. Tonight I added the final release to the overlay. (Update for Google users) What’s new in 1.6, you ask?

What’s left before it can move to the main tree? Here’s what I can think of, offhand:

  • The new XRandR stuff needs to get released upstream (randrproto, libXrandr, xrandr). Right now we’ve got the xrandr userland tool depending on live git of libXrandr, which won’t work for the main tree. (Update: randrproto and libXrandr 1.3 are out, just waiting on the userland tool xrandr)
  • We need to sort out the issue with XCB’s Xlib library renaming forcing recompiles of practically everything. This is becoming more and more of a blocker because now libXext 7.0.5 requires a new libX11. I think giving ourselves a hard blocker on 1.6 from this will help us get it fixed. See bug #248743 to track progress on this. (Update: solution in x11 overlay for testing)
  • The server now has a fix to keep looking for HAL if it’s not running when started. Should we change /etc/init.d/xdm to compensate for this change by no longer depending on hald, thus allowing gdm/kdm/etc to start earlier? This will give us one of the steps taken by the fastboot work seen lately in Moblin and elsewhere.
  • I think Remi’s going to add xf86-video-intel 2.6.2. (Update: done)
  • Our xinit is crazy stale, mainly because we patch it like crazy and I don’t like porting those. I’d like to get it updated to a current release for 1.6. In the longer term, we need to merge distro-neutral parts of our work upstream, but that’s not a 1.6 blocker.

To sum up, you can try xorg-server 1.6 now by adding the x11 overlay with layman, or you can wait for the above issues to get solved, and it will show up soon in testing in your main tree.