Recap

I haven't posted in awhile, mostly because I've been busy with Lug Radio Live USA and Summer of Code. We'll be announcing accepted student proposals on Monday, so the craziness has died down and bit and we're in a calm patch for the moment. Things will heat up again in two days. Our duplicately accepted student resolution meeting in IRC yesterday was fast and furious as ever, but turned out very well and with no major damage.

I decided to take a break this morning, chill out, drink iced tea and read. Jeremy recently lent me Ben Elton's Blind Faith, and it was such a great book that I read through it all this morning. It's also left me with no desire to share anything whatsoever, so I'll just post some snippets:

Lug Radio Live USA was awesome. However, don't believe me, believe the hype. I learned a great deal over the weekend, especially about effectively managing a large-scale conference, spent some quality time with old friends, made some new ones, and even got to sing karaoke. Woot!

(Of course, that's not a particularly flattering photo and given what I've just read, I remain uncertain of just how excited I can and should get about karaoke.)

Among the many highlights, Emma Jane Hogbin's discussion of Women in Open Source was fantastic. She's right folks - we need more people in Open Source, and a great way to find them is to start with the very old and the very young. Ask her about her thoughts next time you see her.

Lessee, what else is going on....

After finishing off Elton, I now have a near irrepressible desire to go on to Atwood. So I shall. But first a few things about the house - the omnipresent laundry. Rearranging my office. Screwing around on IRC. I think I'll make some hummus. Perhaps I might even get saucy and include some roasted red pepper. Definitely a lot of lemon juice.

Then again, my blender is offline due to overuse. Meh. I also need to make myself some more iced tea.

The X.org folks were in last week, and it's always a treat to see them. We also hosted a MySQL architecture meeting on Friday, so I got to see Brian, Colin and Stewart. ++

Next week should give me some time to start preparing my speech for BSDCan.

That's about it heading west. Oh yeah, Lex is back in town. And happy birthday Louis!

LugRadio Live USA & Jono's Recent Talk

Registration for LugRadio Live USA is now open, and I hope that anyone reading will be able to make it. It's shaping up to be an awesome two day show in the beautiful city of San Francisco, in the heart of the Federal Republic of Northern California. Google's Open Source Team, and by Open Source Team I mean Cat Allman and our colleague Kynan Dent, has been hard at work to make this show a reality. Please be sure to thank them when you see them at the Metreon.

I had the pleasure of hosting Jono Bacon for a tech talk when he visited a few weeks back to do a space tour, and would highly recommend checking out his talk Standing on the Shoulders of Giants. He makes some great points towards the end of the presentation about the damage done to healthy communities by the "noisy minority." Speaking as someone who has dropped out of more than one project due to poor behavior on the part of a few vocal participants, his remarks really hit home and were a great off-shoot of the material Ben and Fitz cover in their Poisonous People talk.

All too often people tend to shy away from confronting folks who pontificate a great deal, contribute little or nothing, but damage the community by derailing consensus and creating quarrels where none ought to be. This needs to stop. If you find yourself or your project dealing with this issue, Ben and Fitz have some great advice to help you deal with the problem. My recommendation is to simply point out to said noisy minority that you believe that their opinions are not widely shared and that the point of your community is to achieve consensus around common goals as opposed to creating divisions. If you find your remarks only championed privately, you might just want to move on to a healthier project.

I'll get 'round to posting highlights from DrupalCon Boston 2008, including my truly awesome lunch today with the crew from the Free Software Foundation, tomorrow. Or possibly later.