He's a traveling man

He's a traveling man

I"m on my way to Paris, and I have to say any airport that serves up free wifi definitely gets an extra special award from me. Today's featured airport is the Rotterdam Luchthaven, in Rotterdam of course. Going through this airport is about as easy as Pittsburgh. It's quiet, tastefully decorated, and going through security and check in takes about five minutes total. Of course this may have something to do with it being a Saturday, and that there is very little traffic.

I can see a prop plane in the distance, I hope it's mine. It should be alot of fun.

Now if only the US could learn the fine art of offering air flights for eight dollars, plus ten times that in taxes.

The Best and the Worst

The Best and the Worst

There are some good parts and bad parts about basing yourself out of the Dutch country side.

• There are virtually no distractions, good for getting work done
  
• The air and water are much cleaner than Pittsburgh
  
• The people are relaxed and genuinely friendly
  
• You can leave your groceries with your bike while you step into the pub to have a drink or five
  
• It's normal to drink 6 beers during a football game
  
• You can go biking in the Nude
  

The Bad

• The train station is 20 minutes away by bike, when the buses are on strike.
  
• The train station is 20 minutes away by bus, when the strike is over.
  
• The train station is 35 minutes away when you don't bike like a crazy American.
  
• There is a crackhouse next to the train station. It's not a good idea to leave your bike there over night.
  
• There is no Foreign Police office in town, thus requiring a trip to said train station.
  
• Getting to the office in Amersfoort requires a bike marathon.
  

The Ugly

• Sometimes you wake up, and the town smells like sheep. It's so strong that the smell can reach Arnhem

Review Request

Review Request

Pertaining to my previous blog post, i have some packages that need reviewing.

Anyone want to review the following?

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=451768
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=451769
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=451771
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=451772
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=451773

Announcing the NetBookDora Project

Announcing the NetBookDora Project

What went from scratching an itch to finishing what I started, I would like to announce the formation of the NetBookDora sub project. The goal is to produce a respin of Fedora with a desktop well suited to the needs of Netbook and other sub-10-inch laptop users.

Recently, Canonical introduced its own foray into the world of mobile user computing with a set of tools for the Gnome Desktop. Canonical, however, denied any desire to release a generic respin of the Ubuntu desktop with these tools. Instead, this was left for the community to handle.

Currently, these components have been packaged for Fedora, and are available in a repository for download and testing. The next step is to get them included into Fedora as standard packages.

There is still alot of work that needs to be done to make this an official respin shipped with Fedora 10. Most importantly, there is a need for some art and graphic design. Currently, these packages ship with Ubuntu specific artwork. The current code for this project is set up as a Git repository to make sending patches easier. The only technical skill needed is some basic experience with Git.

For more information about the project, testing, development, or wanting to know how to help out, check out the trac instance. If you want to speak to me to help, I'm in #fedora-admin on freenode, and my email address is available through the Fedora Account System. You can also leave your email address in a comment to this post.

This really should be a reflex, not something to brag about

This really should be a reflex, not something to brag about

Why Trains are Better than Planes

Why Trains are Better than Planes

This weekend I went "home", in a manner of speaking, to Regensburg in Southern Germany, where I lived for a year. When you live anywhere and make really good friends with the people there, it doesn't matter how long you stay, it becomes a home. But that's neither here nor there, since it has nothing to do with Die Bahn, the German train system. What's important is that it's quite easy to get to and from Regensburg via the DB, as well as bring back some souvenirs.


This ain't no ordinary laptop bag.


Try getting this through airport security.


These are just some of my most highly recommended beers. They are (from left to right):

• Kneitinger Bock - "Nur echt mit dem Bock"
  
• Weltenburger Asam Bock - Usually one of the strongest beers available year round in any supermarket
  
• Bischofshof Kellerbier - so easy to open, yet so tasty
  
• Weltenburger Barock Hell - A Baroque Hell is usually where you end up the next morning
  
• Kneitinger Edel-Pils - A "Mas", a one liter mug, full of this beer is probably the best thing to have in September sitting around a beer garden.
  
• Schlenkerla Rauchbier - Complete with it's own dialectal features, and a flavour that has to be tasted to be believed.
  

It's true

It's true

The coffee in Raleigh really does suck. The Munich office on the other hand has some pretty good coffee. This is to be expected, as Germany's biggest export is coffee.