This is a test post to see if my blog handles pushing via git correctly...

Does it???

Yep, now let's make sure it updates right

There has been a recent run of terrible bug reporting practices in recent months, so I am going to try to address this the only way I know how: by being a snarky ass about it! Hooray!

The following ways are examples of what NOT to do:

Report a bug over Jabber

This is just plain stupid. I know there are lots of those "little formy things" to fill out in a proper report in a given bug tracker. They are useful to solving a bug. Would you rather: put in a little more effort and have your bug solved quicker OR be lazy and irritate the people who are fixing your problem for you?

Additionally, jabber/IRC/instant messaging are all active mediums. In order for me to get the entirety of your bug report I need to do something. Here is an example bug-over-XMPP:

reporter: Hey have you had any problems with XYZ-1.3?
me: No
reporter: Oh, I have a problem.
me: Oh? What problem?
reporter: When I click the button it crashes
me: Crashes how? Is there any output?
reporter: Yes
me: Can you paste the output here?
reporter: Hold on
reporter: <output>
me: Oh ok. Please file a bug report. I will get to it later.

Now, the exact same thing as a generic bug report:

Subject: XYZ-1.3 crashes when clicking the button
When I click the 'foo' button, it crashes and gives me this
output: <output>

I leave determining which one is easier to understand as an exercise to the reader

Describe your bug via links to other things

The worst bug reports I see are of the following form:

Subject: Bug with foobar
I have the bug described here: http://some.bullshit.link

Why is this bad? Well, for one, I now have to follow yet-another-link to read, close that tab, remember what was written, and then read the rest of the bug report. Secondly, the links are usually forum posts, blog posts, or mailing list archives which never have the full information. I now need to read through 30 forum posts, stripping out the noise; or go through 5-10 back links for mailing list history; or even read comments on a blog to find out details of a bug report

A LINK IS NOT A BUG REPORT, IT IS A LINK

Throw multiple problems in one bug report

So there's a bug in barfoo-2.7. Also, the third menu doesn't work. Oh and
one time I made it crash. And I'd like a pony.

Don't let your ADD seep into the bug report. It's frustrating to read 100 different problems in one report. Stick to the mantra of "one bug, one report". If you have three bugs, file three reports - this isn't rocket surgery. I know it's tedious, but it's even more tedious on the other end - the end run by guys trying to help you fix your issues. Help us help you.

Don't read the bug reporting guidelines

Yeah, so someone wrote a wiki article about reporting bugs. Who cares? I don't need to read that, I'm above it!

No. Shutup and read it. Hell, I just learned something new by reading it right now. If you think you've read it already, read it again. If you just read it, read it one more time for good measure.

Epilogue

This little rant does, in fact, serve a purpose. With an influx of more inexperienced users, we get more and more shoddy bug reports. People need to learn how to do this properly - it's a skill that you can take with you to other distros, other projects, and even other jobs. Learn it!

Productivity literature on the internet is filled with reasons why you should "become a morning person" and references to all the famous people who woke up early - people like Benjamin Franklin and Dracula. Yeah, that's awesome, but it doesn't help me one bit.

Morning Enthusiasm

The realization I've come to recently is this: When I get to work in the morning, the first thing I do is check my Arch-related email, and respond/solve some of the issues therein, or delegate them for later in the day. In my head, I have this idea that "I will get to it when I get home from work." A noble goal, to say the least, but it usually doesn't work out that way. Work is stressful, and when I get home, I want to relax, or watch a movie, or read a book, or do anything but sit on a computer for a little bit longer.

But it's that initial burst in the morning that keeps niggling at me from the back of my brain. Why can't I replicate that after a long day at work? The simple fact is that I cannot. For this very reason, I am attempting an experiment.

The Experiment

This week I am going to attempt to "become a morning person."

Most geeks are known for their late hours. We stay up until 3am playing video games, writing python code to do something inane, tweaking code we use to manage our blogs, or even just fiddling with our config files. We all do it.

Sadly, late hours don't mesh to well with the rest of the world. We all still have to be at work or school at some point in the morning, and we rectify this by getting very little sleep. Any perusing of health literature will tell you that it's all sorts of bad for you to get such little sleep.

So, for the next few days, I will be making sure I don't touch my computer after 9pm, and will be getting in bed fairly early. Getting enough sleep will help me wake up early, and I will be able to do Arch-related work before I shower and go to work.

Status

This morning, in fact, I woke up 1.5 hours before I usually do, answered some emails, did some dishes, and took out the trash. It actually felt good to do simple chores when I woke up, rather than being rushed to shower and get to work.

Look for updates later and in the comments as to how my experiment goes. Advice and questions appreciated.

I've been finding it increasingly important to display the goals I want to accomplish in a public manner. As such, I will list my goals for this year.

• Learn to do a backflip (seriously)
• Workout more (concrete goal: 30 pullups & 60 pushups, with little strain)
• Stop spending money like a tool. (concrete goal: $5000 in savings)
• Pay off my random credit card debt (concrete goal: $0 debt)
• Release Arch ISOs more regularly (tied to kernel releases)
• Finally kick that smoking thing for good
• Eat better, lost some weight (concrete goal: 10 to 15 lbs)
• Take at least one week long backpacking trip

Maybe more to come, but these are off the top of my head. I figure if I maintain a list, I will be more accountable, and have something to look back on.

Cheers

This is a followup post to my Pay Attention! post. Here, I want to discuss not the HOW of being realistically productive, but the WHY of it.

I previously discussed how it is important to kill off distractions when doing important, or large, tasks. That's all fine, but what about those tasks that you just don't really feel like doing? Everyone has a classic example: cleaning the garage, washing the dog, scrubbing the toilet, etc. Things you know you should do, and want to do, but you simply would rather do something else at any given time.

It's easy for some outside to say "Just suck it up and do it." But we all know that doesn't work when it's us yelling at ourselves. Let's face it: we simply don't want to do these things. Should is not the same as would.

One size does not fit all

Motivation is an confusing notion that sits somewhere between psychology and self-help. There are seminars and books out there that will teach you how to "be the best you" and all that other rubbish.

And that's exactly what it is: rubbish. Unless a book is written specifically for you, you may end up taking only one thing away from it. What motivates one person will probably not motivate another. If you're expecting some motivational panacea from this blog, you came to the wrong guy.

Considering I can't tell you how to motivate yourself, I will tell you what works for me.

• Talk about it

  Nothing works better as a motivational tool than other people. People who are passionate about the same thing you are doing. This is all the more easier to find in the age of instant-communication. Baking a casserole? Find a cooking website, chat room, or IM buddy. Call your mom. Writing some code? Find someone else who has worked on something similar. Find an IRC channel for the language or topic. Get a partner interested.

  Having others who are interested, not only in the topic, but in what you are doing, is very important. How did that casserole turn out? Any leftovers? Did you ever finish that wiki-engine you were writing? Take a look at mine, I implemented [feature-x].

  It's easy to be impersonal and read web pages, mailing lists, and/or books about a topic, but "Cleaning your Garage, for Dummies" isn't going to actually make you get off you ass and clean your garage. Get someone else involved - significant other, your kids, your friends, someone.

• Pride

  Ah pride. Too much of it, and you look like a tool. Too little, and you seem weak. But pride motivates us. It can be a powerful tool.

  Pride is related to the above point about involving others. Do a good job on that casserole? Take some pictures, tell some people about it. Take pride in the fact that you did this and it was a good job.

  This is one of the main things that makes open-source software so fun. Showing people your code. The "look what I did" aspect. Think about when you were a kid. You'd make some puppet out of glitter and popsicle sticks, and couldn't wait to show you mom/dad/sister/brother. "Look what I made!"

• Advertising

  What? Like that Coke commercial I saw yesterday?

  No, no, no. Advertising your work. This is the third point in a little trickle-down of points. It relates to getting others involved and taking pride in your work. You're not going to get either of those without actually advertising that you did something.

  I'm not saying "show off." Don't invite people over to show them what a great job you did organizing your garage. That will just make you look like a knob. But you have to tell people. Only the people that eat your pork-chops are going to know how good they were. Give out the recipe, post pictures on the internet, write an article for a cooking blog. Advertise. Be vocal.

Are you paying attention?

No, I do not need to clean my garage, bake a cake, or scrub toilets. I have many different on-going projects for Arch that I constantly need to motivate myself to do. Backend stuff that no one ever sees, and the developers usually don't even fuss with.

Regarding the last point (advertising), expect to see posts here regarding some of the internals of the ArchLinux world. Feel free to ignore them, but, if you were reading, maybe you want to throw some e-highfives my way :)

Productivity. That ambiguous dream we all seem to be chasing these days. It's one of these million dollar industries like diet books and pornography. Something we all think we need.

But (ah, you knew there was a 'but', didn't you?), just like those diet books, you don't need a big complex plan and layout with note cards and special $100 pens to be productive, in the exact same way you don't need nutritional pills and Weight Watchers frozen dinners and low-carb foods to lose weight.

I'm going to keep running with the weight-loss analogy, because it makes so much sense here. The best way to lose weight is to change your habits. Stop the "boredom eating", stop buying Snickers bars and triple cheeseburgers, stop eating when your full. Well, the best way to "be productive" is to change your habits as well. Stop changing gears, stop doing thirty things at once, stop trying to work in front of the TV.

It's your attention, stupid!

All the popular productivity (and weight loss) systems out there have one simple thing in common. Just pay attention. Stop dividing your attention between so much at once. GTD will tell you to have a "universal capture" system where you keep all your "to do" items in one central system. Inbox Zero will tell you to filter your email as much as possible so that you stay on topic when you need to check on things. Tim Ferris will tell you to simply stop checking email every 20 minutes.

It's all about attention. Have something important to do on your computer? Shut off your Instant Messenger, close your Browser (or all the other tabs/windows that aren't work specific), log off of IRC, and just do your work. This applies to other aspects of life too. Want to clean your apartment? Shut off the TV, close the laptop, put your cellphone sudoku game away, and just clean.

Now, it may seem like I'm trying to tell you not to have fun. Nothing could be farther from the truth. What I am saying is this: don't try to accomplish something and "have fun" at the same time. Dividing your attention isn't a matter of math. If 50% of your attention is on two different tasks, you aren't going to accomplish 50% of each task. It doesn't work that way. Changing mental contexts from one task to another wastes a lot of time.

How do I apply this in my every day life?

This part is easy. Try to cut out everything that could steal your attention away from your task. Get rid of popup computer based notifiers that will tell you when you have a new email. Keep your cellphone off or in another room. Shut off the television. Anything you can think of.

Now, work in short bursts. Let's say your email is important to you and you need to check it often, for the sake of example. Set a timer. 45 minutes of work, then when it beeps, do 15 minutes of non-work. Check your email, get a snack, write a blog entry (heh). This is what I've done in the past.

Doing this takes a lot of discipline. It's the same with weight loss. You just need to suck it up and do it, or find a reason good enough to keep you on task.

It's really quite simple: Just pay attention.

My blogging habit has gone down the tubes lately. I'd like to blame it on not really having anything to write about, but that's not entirely true.

So, Aaron, what are you writing this for?

Well, I want some help. Some ideas. I want to know what YOU would like me to write about. I consider myself an "expert" on a few topics with regard to Linux applications and programming, so I'm more than capable of answering questions in those respects. Additionally, there's always ArchLinux topics I could discuss. What do you want to see?

I dislike cowardice, and people who cannot stand by their opinions.

I received an email today from an "Anonymous Remailer" application, to hide the sender's email address. They may have some valid points, or even something important to say, but instead they hid behind the guise of anonymity.

So, for that, I give you, the email, in full. It will receive no comment from me, or even any second glance, because the route for proper discourse has been abandoned.

Hi,

I'm sorry to have to write it this way,
but if you are really willing to stop
stripping the info-docs, maybe you could
think about a few things first:

When you argued with tpowa (btw. the
big iso with flashy grub and spaceinvaders
is also a "big improvement" over the former
one...), you said:

[quote]
  for all the "old timers" out there, I am on your side.
  I *am* an "old timer", and I will do everything in my
  power to make arch what it was.
[/quote]

Now, that's exactly what I would like to see -
Arch, as it was defined by Judd. This distro IS
special, and I love its way. The people in the
forums can have their docs in thousands of other
distros, why bother with em? I mean, the current
preffered way of installing is based on downloading
stuff through FTP... and they would spend their
bandwidth on something, which a) they never use,
b) is taking the storage space (regardless of the
size).

OK, I hope this reaches you.
And I also hope that the "_lightweight_"
motto in the logo will be still appropriate.
Bye.

So, for future reference: don't do this. It is stupid.

So I sat down and slapped together some comment-ability for this blog. Not that it's really needed, or anything.

I am using disqus because it allows me to push all the comment management stuff offsite. Hooray!

There's a lot of backstory here, that I'm going to ignore. This is not a rant, or a personal attack, or a justification. I want to explain the way I see things and where I want to take them.

When I began using Arch, we had the philosophy that we were "as vanilla as possible". This means that we trusted the upstream developers. If an Arch user wanted featureX, they contact the upstream developers, asked for featureX. Whatever upstream's decision, yes or no, we went along with it. We did NOT add the feature to our package anyway.

When I began using Arch, we had the philosophy in mind to "Keep It Simple, Stupid". This means that if things were too complex, we did it another way, or didn't do it ourselves. Someone wanted custom hardware modules? They could build them themselves.

When I began this all, we kept things as simple as we could, and allowed (and actually encouraged) people to change things they wanted to. This was the core of Arch - if you don't like it, do it yourself. We told people "If you don't like how the maintainer did that, use ABS and rebuild it". We told people, "If you want a package for that, make it yourself". We had users that knew this, and worked in tandem with us. Some users provided custom repos, different PKGBUILDs, alternatives.

This has all changed. For the worse. And it shows in the mentality of our patching. One user requests a feature, we apply a patch - we don't worry about upstream. One user has a brand-spanking new sound card, kernel gets patched. One user doesn't like a configure flag in a package, it gets changed.

We can't continue like this. Arch wasn't made to sustain itself in this way. Arch was made to work in tandem with the users - users that can help themselves AND us. Arch was made to work with you, not for you.