Jared Smith
Thoughts of a Traveling Geek
Wearing a new hat
Jul 7th
Well, it appears that the news is out about my new role in the Fedora community. (I apologize for the slow response — I was at Scout Camp with my son last week when Paul made the announcement, and have been busy tying up loose ends at my current employer.) I’m very humbled to be able to follow in the footsteps of some very fine leaders such as Greg and Max and Paul. I’m sure many of you are wondering “Who is this guy?” and “What is his vision for Fedora?”
First, let me introduce myself. My name is Jared. In short, I’m a big Linux nerd. (How does that analogy go? “Nerd is to geek as Star Trek is to Star Wars.” Or did I get it backward again?) I’ve been very lucky to have been employed by some great companies over the past several years — companies that had the vision of how to both use and contribute to open ecosystems. Most recently, I’ve been working for a company called Digium, which is the benevolent corporate sponsor of the Asterisk open source telecommunications platform. I’ve done both community relations and training work for Digium, and I learned many valuable lessons that I hope to use in my new role. Before working full-time on Asterisk, I spent a number of years doing large-scale Linux systems administration and network operations for a large web analytics company. When I’m not on the road, I’ll be working remotely from my home in Virginia. My wife and I used to joke that maybe I’d get lucky and get to work on free software when I retire; luckily for me, the opportunities came much sooner!
I’ve been using Fedora ever since it was announced, and was using Red Hat Linux before then. I very passionately believe in the freedom and community that Fedora represents, and want to do everything I can to further the cause. Over the past few years, I’ve gone from being an end user of Fedora to being a contributing member of the Fedora team. I’ve come to learn that our greatest asset within Fedora is our vibrant community of users and contributors. More specifically, I love the way our community can help individuals rise to their fullest potential and become leaders. I’m a firm believer that if you give someone the tools they need and a little bit of vision and then get out of their way, they’ll come up with solutions you never dreamed of. I’ve seen it happen time and time again in different open source communities, and each time it gives me more hope for the future.
Please bear with me over the next few weeks as I wrap my head around this job and start to articulate my goals and visions for Fedora. I’m sure there are a lot of things for me to learn, and I look forward to sharing some of my knowledge along the way as well. I’ll be on the road for the next few weeks (another blog post about that shortly!), but I’ll be blogging more while on the road. You can also catch me via email or IRC. (My IRC nick is “jsmith”.)
Here’s to a bright future for Fedora!
Weight loss update
Jun 26th
I’ve had an unpublished draft post here for several months, talking about a weight loss challenge my wife helped organize. Since the challenge is over and I’m happy with the results, I might as well publish the details 
My wife and some of her friends decided to start their own “biggest loser” weight-loss contest in January. Of course, all the husbands got their arms twisted into joining the contest as well. I was definitely in the “heavier than I ought to be category” in January, so I gave it a shot. The contest ended in the middle of May (and thankfully right before a business trip to Brazil, so that I could enjoy lots of good churrasco there). While I didn’t win the contest, I was very happy with results. I was able to drop over eight percent of my body weight, and even more importantly I’ve maintained a good weight since then.
Just goes to show that a little hard work really can pay off! Now if I could just figure out how to stop craving donuts…
Time to update the ol’ blog
Jun 26th
It’s not like I don’t have a plethora of perfectly valid excuses for not writing in my blog. It’s just not something that comes easily or naturally to me. But since I’ve updated a few things on my server (including the software that powers this blog), I might as well at least post something to make sure ye ol’ blog is working as it should.
In other news, it’s been a very crazy spring. I’ve been doing entirely too much travel for work, and I’m a bit road weary. I thoroughly enjoy what I do (and love interacting with open source enthusiasts all around the world!), but it takes me away from my family too much. And when I finally roll into bed at yet another hotel after a long day of teaching class or speaking at conferences, the last thing I feel like doing is tooting my own horn on my blog.
OK, time to stop complaining! Here’s to a happy (and hopefully less stressful) summer!
The Little Things You Find Along the Way
Nov 5th
I’m constantly amazed by the little tips and tricks I stumble upon as I’m working to solve problems. Earlier today, I found this little gem.
Apparently, there is a setting in OpenSSH 5.1 and later for visual remote host fingerprinting. The basic concept is that it’s much easier for the human brain to notice a change in a visual pattern than in a string of hex digits. To turn it on, simply add a line that says
VisualHostKey yes to your ~/.ssh/config file. Then, when you go to SSH into a server, you’ll see a visual representation of the remote host fingerprint, in addition to the regular fingerprint, as shown below:
[jsmith@hockey ~]$ ssh fedorapeople.org Host key fingerprint is 07:d4:02:db:9f:70:d5:2d:7f:1b:6a:df:83:73:95:1d +--[ RSA 2048]----+ | .... .. . | | +. .. o .| | . +.. o | | = . Eo| | S + . B| | . o oo| | . o o| | o +.| | o .| +-----------------+
See, now isn’t that handy?
Documentation (or the lack thereof)
Jul 23rd
I’m in Seoul, Korea this week teaching one of the ever-popular Asterisk Bootcamp classes. As luck would have it, my hotel room has the most amazing remote control in the world! Not only does it control the big ol’ LCD TV and the DVD player, but it also controls the air conditioner and all the lights in the room (including both lights in the bathroom!)
In trying to actually use the remote control, however, I was given a stark reminder of how important documentation can be. As you probably already know, I try to take an active role in the documentation teams for both Asterisk and the Fedora Project, but never seem to make the time to write as much as I’d like. As such, I can only hope our documentation efforts are more effective than the yellow labels on my remote control — just documenting the bare minimum and forcing the user to experiment to do anything useful (and very likely getting lost in the process).
(It’s my own personal opinion that this is one of the ways that free/open source software often fails to keep up with it’s commercial rivals; Many open source projects can’t afford to hire technical writers, and if they’re lucky enough to have volunteers do the work, there often isn’t much praise for the hard work and effort that goes into it.)
If this reminder has you feeling the same way I am, why not step up to the plate and help out on the documentation front? After all, the fearless leader and the rest of the docs crew needs your help! As the old adage goes… many hands makes light work! We’d be glad to have you join our ranks.
My first thoughts on Publican
Feb 15th
So as part of my work with the Fedora Documentation team, I’ve started playing around with Publican. For those of you who aren’t aware, Publican is a documentation tool chain that started out being used internally at Red Hat (where it was called documentation-devel), and is now being opened up and hosted by Fedora. I won’t bore you with all the details yet, but needless to say it makes it easy to get started with writing documentation in DocBook format and getting that documentation packaged up correctly. Continue reading below if you’d like to know more. (If you could care less about documentation, just be on your toes — the docs team is gonna be a lot more efficient in the near future!)
Alas, it’s about time I got this going…
Jan 19th
So, it’s been about three years since I last blogged on my personal blog. Why, you might ask? I don’t really have any wonderful excuses… it all boils down to the fact that I let other things take priority in my life. (And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing — haven’t you got anything better to do that read my random ramblings?) Anyhoo — the blog is back up and running, so with any luck I’ll post some thoughts here from time to time.
