New discussions added to the Hall of Fame

A reader named Jill passed a few discussions to me recently. They’re National Hurricane Center discussions about two storms that refused to die: 2002’s Hurricane Kyle and 2005’s Hurricane Epsilon (which was notable enough just for being a December Hurricane). I’ve added them to the Forecast Discussion Hall of Fame page at http://weather.funnelfiasco.com/fd-hof/.

Fedora Docs QA

The Fedora Documentation team has been kicking around the idea of adding a QA process for a while. The idea is to catch errors in formatting, spelling, and grammar before a guide ships. The challenge is that all of our manpower is volunteer. They have jobs and lives, and don’t always have the time to do extra steps, even when those are needed. This problem exists for all community-driven projects, but it’s my first time experiencing it in a leadership position.

Fortunately, there are some great contributors. I think the QA process we developed will work really well. The main challenge will be doing QA-by-committee, which will require me to be a nagbot when tickets go stale. I will rely heavily on the bugzilla command line tool to nag me to nag the QA group. After Fedora 17 is released, we’ll revisit our process and see what needs to be fixed.

LISA ’11: the first half of the week

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you know I’ve been in Boston for the USENIX Large Installation System Administration (LISA) Conference. Once again, I have the honor of serving on the conference blog team, which means I spend all day sitting in sessions and all evening writing about them. We’re halfway through now, so here’s what I’ve written so far:

You can follow along with the rest of the blog team at http://blogs.usenix.org

New entry in the Hall of Fame

Robert Deal sent in an AFD from Lake Charles, LA discussing how NWS employees remove ice from their cars. I’ve added it to the Forecast Discussion Hall of Fame. Since I edited the page, I also updated the copyright wording to reference the CC-NC-BY-SA license I’m using. It’s on my to-do list to PHPize at least some of the site so that these sorts of things are easier.

That’s certainly not going to happen for at least another week, as I’m leaving in a few hours for the LISA Conference in Boston. Once again, I’ll be on the conference blog team, so you can follow along at http://blogs.usenix.org/.