Many of my colleagues and lots of Fedora community folks will be heading to the frozen wastelandlovely city of Toronto next weekend for Fudcon.
To reiterate what I’ve said in email to a number of people: I won’t be joining them.

This year has been hellish for sorting out immigration details. In April, I needed a VISA renewal. Then there was a passport renewal. Because my passport was expiring, my VISA only ran until the length of the passport. So now I need another new one for my new passport. As part of the renewal process, I’m not allowed to leave the US. (Well, I could, but I might not be allowed back in).

In other news: I’m warming to the idea that the internet be switched off whenever there are public holidays.

The last couple of days have been those sort of ‘awake too early / asleep too late’ sorts of days that are typical of a Linux conference. FUDCon has been kind of awesome. Friday, I sat in on a hackfest/brainstorming session on automated QA, where a whole bunch of interesting ideas were thrown around. I got to talk a little about the work I used to do grepping across whole checked out source trees, and why it isn’t practical any more, and we came up with some ideas of how we could do some of the checks at check-in/build-terim instead. Because I’m a life novice, I had something of a panic attack mid-morning, when I thought I had lost my checkbook. (I had it with me the previous day, but couldn’t remember what I did with it, and it was no longer where I remembered it last). So I bailed for an hour or two to run home and put my mind at rest. (It was of course, safe at home). It also meant I got to grab my phone which I had forgotten in the rush to get out that morning. When I got back, I hung out in various sessions, mostly ‘the hallway track’, and had various interesting conversations throughout the afternoon. I pitched a hackfest session on dracut, but by the time I had got back, it was pretty clear it wasn’t really going to happen.

Saturday was the barcamp day, with a lot of interesting presentations. This FUDCon, I didn’t do ‘the kernel report’. Instead Kyle did it, and people seemed to like it. I followed up with a session providing an overview of what we hope to accomplish with dracut, and the current state of it. Lots of good questions. Just before Paul Frields wrap-up session, I discovered a neat ‘turn a photo into an obama photo’ generator, and came up with a fitting backdrop for his talk. It turned out well for a rush-job started five minutes before he started talking.

In the evening, was the ‘FUDpub’ session at flat top Johnnies. By this time, I was starting to feel a bit run down, and spaced out. I sat on one of the sofas and just chatted the whole night. A bunch of people I know I’ve met before came up and talked to me, but I was so out of it, that I didn’t recognise them. (Apologies if this was you!). It wasn’t until later in the evening I realised who various people were who I had talked to. We had another dumping of snow just in time for us to head home.

I bailed on FUDcon for Sunday, and stayed home hacking with Kyle. We dug into a few things plaguing us, like the ‘huge modules on x86-64′ problem. Roland McGrath finally got to the bottom of that one. Other than that, and the inevitable ‘catch up with email’, it was kind of a winding-down day for FUDcon.