Interview with Hawk Newsome of Black Lives Matter

The Unfettered Mind

During the past month or so, I've been reading books like Sun Tzu's The Art of War and Benjamin Zander's The Art of Possibility. Reading the Art of War gave me a much deeper appreciation for Eastern philosophy and I find myself recognizing a lot of those same philosophical ideas in The Art of Possibility as well which has gotten me even more interested in continuing on with this reading trend.

From what I understand, Miyamoto Musashi, like Sun Tzu, is another man who many consider to have been a "Zen Master" and so I'll be reading his book over the holiday: The Book of Five Rings. But before I read that, I plan on first reading The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi to get a broader understanding of the man. What I really liked about the copy of The Art of War that I picked up (Understanding the Art of War by Robert Cantrell) is that the author not only included the English translation of the original text but also explanations of the history pertinent to understanding the text allowing me to soak up quite a bit more value than I would have just reading the raw English translation. Likewise, I suspect that starting with The Lone Samurai might help me later in understanding Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings.

A third book that caught my eye for the holiday is The Unfettered Mind by Takuan Sōhō, another famous Zen Master who is rumored to have advised Miyomoto Musashi among others.

Maybe one day I, too, will have an unfettered mind (right now it is quite fettered).

Assignment: Apologize to someone you have wronged

This past Friday, on our walk back from lunch, Miguel told me about the latest assignment given to him by his teacher and mentor, Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. The assignment was to pick someone you have wronged and apologize to them.

For those who don't know, Benjamin Zander is the author of the book, The Art of Possibility, a book which I have been reading the past week or so. The idea of this book is to change your perspective on life by teaching you to see things in a positive light and thus present you with a world of possibility where you can accomplish anything you set your mind to because you are no longer held back by negative thinking (fear of failure, criticism from others, and most importantly, criticism from yourself).

To continue on with my story, as I was laying in bed last night after having read a few more chapters in The Art of Possibility, I was reminded of Miguel's assignment and I began to wonder: if I was given this assignment, who would I apologize to?

I thought of 1 person in particular and a community of users and decided to apologize to them all.

Lennart Poettering

Some of you might recall a series of rants about PulseAudio that I wrote a couple of years back. While it was not my intention to insult Lennart personally, it is obvious that I did. I had let my anger and frustration rule my actions and ended up attacking PulseAudio in ways I should not have. I should have, instead, been more respectful, more understanding and more patient. Attacking someone's project often results in that person feeling personally attacked. I should know this as well or better than anyone because I'm one of the authors of the most widely attacked projects in the Free Software community: Evolution, Mono, and Moonlight.

These days PulseAudio has been working well for me and that is a testament to how hard working Lennart and the other PulseAudio developers are.

Thank you, Lennart, for your hard work on Pulse Audio and please accept my sincerest apology for attacking your project and in so doing, insulting you. I was wrong. I should have, instead, come to you (or the bug tracker) and explained the problems I was experiencing in a polite and respectful manner rather than unleashing my frustrations on the project.

I hope we can meet in person at a future Linux or GNOME conference where I can give you a hug (and who knows, maybe even a beer).

Evolution Users

In the course of the 6+ years that I worked on Evolution, there were a number of occasions where I took criticisms in bug reports and the mailing-list as personal insults and lost my temper, attacking back. At one point, Nat Friedman reminded me that I should not take criticism of Evolution so personally and that the reason users criticized Evolution was because they cared.

In the early part of 2007 I moved over to the Mono team, giving me a fresh start. I decided that I was going to be a new me and really take Nat Freidman's words to heart. I'm happy to report that not only have I been successful in not taking criticism as personally and seeing criticism of projects I work on in a new, more positive light, but I have also been a much happier person because of it.

For those Evolution users out there who I have mistreated, I am truly sorry and I hope that my actions over the past 3 years has demonstrated my sincerity.

Lessons in Freedom

In the first episode of the second season of Kung Fu, there exists a dialog between a young Kwai Chang Caine and one of his instructors, Master Po which I think teaches an important lesson in freedom and what it means. I think there are a number of people in the Free Software community who are in desperate need of learning this particular lesson.

Master Po: What have you found?

Young Kwai Chang Caine: A spider, master. It has trapped the fly. Should I destroy his web?

Master Po: Why?

Young Kwai Chang Caine: So that it will not make a prison for other living things that were free.

Master Po: Look more closely, grasshopper. Were you to destroy this web, would not the spider, knowing no other way, build another?

Young Kwai Chang Caine: Yes, but I cannot kill the spider.

Master Po: Look more closely still. Is not the spider also trapped by its own web?

Young Kwai Chang Caine: Yes, but if I do nothing, it will capture more living things, make them prisoner, and kill them.

Master Po: You are concerned, then, with the fly to which nature has given wings so that it might move around freely?

Young Kwai Chang Caine: It is cruel to see it made a prisoner.

Master Po: Ha ha ha. Still you do not see. Which is truly the prisoner? The fly, which, moving freely enters unknown danger? Or the spider, which, having spun its web, remains, never knowing the pleasure or the danger of the fly?

Re: Red Hat, 16%. Canonical, 1%.

While some people are busy complaining that Canonical doesn't contribute as much as others, I'd like for everyone to take a step back and ask themselves, "what would Gunny say?"

I'll tell you what he'd say. He'd say,

Hmm, that's interesting. Do you know what makes me sad? YOU DO! Maybe we should chug on over to mamby-pamby land where maybe we can find some self-confidence for you, you jack-wagon! Want a tissue?

After he finished ripping someone a new one, he'd point out that in that very same GNOME Census slide deck, I am ranked #8 in the top contributors list and I haven't contributed much of anything to any of the core GNOME components in about 5 years.

Yeah, that's right you cry babies, I put all y'all to shame.

On a more serious note, for better or worse, we all knew what we were getting into when we decided to take up the Free Software baton and start running with it. This is just how Free Software works. Don't like it? Cry me a river.

tl;dr

Update: It seems my post here has been misinterpreted. Allow me to try and rectify this. I'm not pissed off at Greg for voicing his opinion. We all do it. I'm just making a mockery of the whole situation because I was itching to trollcat and because I wanted to pat myself on the back for being #8 on the individual contributors list in terms of commits (as meaningless as that is). Also because I was up late last night and saw that Geico commercial with R. Lee Ermey which just cracks me up every time I see it.

Reflecting on 10 Years at Ximian

IMG_1047, originally uploaded by jstedfast.

Today marks my 10th anniversary since I was hired at Helix Code to work on Evolution.

In that time I've gotten to work closely with and learn from some of the most talented developers in the Free Software community including Michael Zucchi, Miguel de Icaza, Federico Mena-Quintero, Chris Toshok, Larry Ewing, Michael Meeks, Dan Winship, Radek Doulik, Joe Shaw, Vlad Vukićević, Dave Camp, Dan Mills, and many others (too many to name!).

Back in the early days of Helix Code/Ximian, we all worked tirelessly to put together the very best GNOME distribution we could and make Evolution the very best groupware client we could.

We had big dreams and I like to think we succeeded. GNOME has become mainstream and the Linux Desktop can most definitely be measured as a success.

Of course, we couldn't have done it without all the help and hard work from the entire GNOME community.

Today, a younger generation of hackers are taking up the reigns to make GNOME awesome with things like the Paper Cuts project by David Siegel's team at Canonical and the work being done by Red Hat on the new GNOME-Shell.

I'm still working with a couple of my old Evolution teammates like Larry Ewing and Chris Toshok on the Moonlight project in the hopes of making it possible for Linux Desktop users to view Silverlight content on the web. We've been making great progress with implementing Silverlight 3.0 and 4.0 features in svn and I've got some accomplishments on that front that I should really blog about but I've just been so busy.

Much love to all you GNOMEies and thanks for all the support and love over the past decade!

Trolls

Thanks go out to Stormy Peters and Jo Shields for tweeting a link to Seth Godin's blog post entitled: Trolls. Had they not tweeted it, I likely would have missed these marvelous words of wisdom:

Lots of things about work are hard. Dealing with trolls is one of them. Trolls are critics who gain perverse pleasure in relentlessly tearing you and your ideas down. Here's the thing(s):

1. trolls will always be trolling
2. critics rarely create
3. they live in a tiny echo chamber, ignored by everyone except the trolled and the other trolls
4. professionals (that's you) get paid to ignore them. It's part of your job.

"Can't please everyone," isn't just an aphorism, it's the secret of being remarkable.

Thanks, Seth. I needed to be reminded of this fact.

And yea, Team Mono is remarkable ;-)

Re: Black and White

I've just finished reading Linus' blog post entitled Black and White and I have to agree.

It's not productive to be anti-something, it is much healthier and more productive to be for something.

I think Linus' article ties back into the How To Survive Poisonous People presentation I linked to and commented on back in June.

Very often times, the poisonous people in a community are those who try to make everything black and white and typically take the anti approach to things.

We all do it from time to time (myself included, *cough*), but the truly poisonous people are the ones that can't ever let things go.

Time-off This Past Week

Took this week off from work to go visit family and did a bit of cycling in my quest to "get back into shape" (or some semblance of shape, anyway).

Started off doing an 8.5-mile hill climb to the top of the eastern hill at Blue Hills Reservation in Milton, Mass which is about a 6% grade or so. Nothing awe-inspiring, but a bit of a workout for me. On Monday I continued with a 10-mile ride accompanied by relatives up in Rochester, NH - no major hills this time but quite a bit of ups and downs, so it was still a workout since I pushed fairly hard. Tuesday and Wednesday I did some 21-mile rides pushing hard and by the end of Wednesday's ride (in the pouring rain, btw) my legs could push no farther so I decided to take Thursday off. Traveled back home and cleaned as much of the sand/grit out of my bike as I could, de-greased and re-lubed my chain and derailleurs (looks like I picked up a little rust on my chain, but nothing major). Then today I went out to take on Blue Hills again, this time managing to push farther, so ended up climbing the eastern hill twice, once from each side. Coming from the west, the incline averages a good 7 or 8% iirc, so not too shabby. That puts me at about 70 miles so far this week.

4th of July Fireworks from VMWare Office

I watched the 4th of July fireworks from the 11th Floor offices of VMWare in Cambridge this year with some friends.

dscn0265.jpg, originally uploaded by jstedfast.

dscn0343.jpg, originally uploaded by jstedfast.

dscn0349.jpg, originally uploaded by jstedfast.

dscn0400.jpg, originally uploaded by jstedfast.

dscn0401.jpg, originally uploaded by jstedfast.

Update: I should note that these photos were made possible thanks to Alan McGovern's 256 MB CF card he mailed me last week. So thanks, Alan! ;-)

A Moment of Zen

And here it is, your Moment of Zen:

Those who assume the worst in other people, are by their very nature among the worst people.

Those who assume the best in other people, are by their very nature among the best people.

-- Jeffrey Stedfast

Good Luck, Bad Luck

Things are not always as bad as they first appear.

There once was a farmer living in the country with his wife and son. One day, one of their horses escaped from the stable.

Bad luck, their neighbors said.

The father took his son to go look for the horse. In so doing, they came across a dozen wild horses which they rounded up and brought back with them.

Good luck, they thought.

A few days later, while trying to tame one of these wild horses, the son broke his arm.

Bad luck?

The very next day, the army marched through town gathering all the abled young men into their ranks. The son was wounded and so wasn't drafted.

Good luck.

A few months ago, I lost my job. Bad luck, you ask? Not at all. When I was laid off, I had been feeling burnt out and really needed a good break from programming. The two and a half months of unemployment gave me the necessary time to regain my passion. As it turns out, I was hired by one of my best friends and mentors, Miguel de Icaza, to join him on his Mono team (which just so happens to be the "dream job" I had wanted before getting laid off).