John Goerzen: Catching the mudball
Dad, can I bring my mudball inside? Jacob
Ooo, dad, I need a mudball too! Oliver
You d have to have been there to see how excited Jacob was about his mudball. We had been out hiking down by the creek a day after a rain, and he, well, made a mudball and carried it around with him. I m not used to finding mud all that exciting. To me, mud is something that my car can get stuck in, that my boots can drag into the house, that needs to be suppressed by a little gravel on top.
But to Jacob, he was holding a ball of excitement, of adventure, of discovery. And Oliver wanted in on the fun!
Jacob wasn t thinking about consequences of bringing a mudball indoors, because he didn t need to. He wasn t visualizing the damage it could cause, the time of cleaning it up, or even the fact that a mudball doesn t really stay a mudball permanently. He just wanted to carry his ball of excitement with him.
Being a parent means being a teacher, an example, and a leader. It is fine for Jacob to not think about the consequences of bringing a mudball into the house at age 6, but part of my duty as a parent is to make sure he thinks about consequences by the time he gets behind the wheel of a car. As we grow up, we are shown, taught, and prodded into thinking about consequences of our choices: getting good grades in school, thinking about the impression the clothes we wear to a job interview might leave, worrying about what people think about us when we talk in front of a group. We take on real responsibilities when we leave childhood, and the consequences of our actions become more significant.
But where s the off switch? Shouldn t there be a way for us to wonder about bringing the mudball indoors, too?
There was a time in our lives when we didn t care one bit about whether we were wearing fashionable clothes, making a good impression, or doing things the right way. After being in the mindset of taking careful responsibility over life for so many years, it s hard to re-discover that earlier time.
A colleague forwarded a little speech about Thanksgiving. It contained, Those who live in thanksgiving daily have a way of opening their eyes and seeing the wonders and beauties of this world as though seeing them for the first time.
This is something children know how to do, and we adults have often forgotten, because we are too busy worrying about dirty floors and stained curtains to see the potential for fun in mud.
I am convinced that, just as important as being responsible, is learning how to let go, to let our hearts feel peace and joy as if a child. We can t open our eyes and see the wonders of this world if we re too busy worrying about convincing someone else to vote for our preferred candidate, about saying things perfectly, about being right.
There s beauty in that daily commute in a car or subway. Look around, and you might see kids with their noses pressed to the window, even if it s mostly black tunnel outside. There s wonder in that business flight, in the mud, in the doctor s office waiting room.
When I see people using insults in a discussion thread on the Internet, I am saddened, because it means they have lost sight of the wonder of being able to communicate with and understand a person thousands of miles away, instantly, and are more worried about their position looking good, or are unable to see the beauty in a person that thinks differently.
I once had this conversation with Jacob in an airplane, probably surrounded by people impatiently waiting to turn on their electronic devices:
Jacob, we are in the air! Woooooooow! Jacob, we re flying! Dad, I don t know that I ve ever been a butterfly before!I hope we can all find ways to be a butterfly more often.
What is this?
It s been a long time I wanted to blog about my recent work on the Openstack packaging. I finally can find a bit of time to do it.
For those who don t know yet
Public service announcementWhen porting GNU/Linux applications to a new architecture, such as 64-Bit ARM, one gets familiar with the following error message:
The War on Time
Whoosh! I ve been incredibly quiet on my blog for the last 2-3 months. It s been a crazy time but I ll catch up and explain everything over the next few entries.
Firstly, I d like to get out a few details about the last Ubuntu Developer Summit that took place in Copenhagen, Denmark in October. I m usually really good at getting my blog post out by the end of UDS or a day or two after, but this time it just flew by so incredibly fast for me that I couldn t keep up. It was a bit shorter than usual at 4 days, as apposed to the usual 5. The reason I heard for that was that people commented in previous post-UDS surveys that 5 days were too long, which is especially understandable for Canonical staff who are often in sprints (away from home) for the week before the UDS as well. I think the shorter period works well, it might need a bit more fine-tuning, I think the summary session at the end wasn t that useful because, like me, there wasn t enough time for people to process the vast amount of data generated during UDS and give nice summaries on it. Overall, it was a great get-together of people who care about Ubuntu and also many areas of interest outside of Ubuntu.
Copenhagen, Denmark
I didn t take many photos this UDS, my camera is broken and only takes blurry pics (not my fault I swear!). So I just ended up taking a few pictures with my phone. Go 
The Road ahead for Edubuntu to 14.04 and beyond






Usually I'm monitoring stuff with
(If you want to ignore the explanations and see how to stop the Linux kernel from flooding the console with low importance messages, go straight to the bottom of the article, is the small bit at end with larger font.)
After this
This post is about the port bootstrap build ordering tool (naming suggestions
welcome) which was started as a
My 1Tb laptop drive started misbehaving a few weeks ago, just spending a lot of time spinning when it should have been reading frequently changed files (like the browser cache). I was tempted to blame the browser at that point as no other packages appeared affected.
I moved to Boston in 2005 at the same time that