Fedora People

fosdem 2010

2010-02-09T23:03:24+00:00

FOSDEM gets bigger every year, and the presence this year of projects that are part of the Red Hat family was as large as I've ever seen it -- Fedora had a booth, JBoss.org had a booth, and there were a number of engineers with red fedoras wandering around all weekend.

The Fedora booth, as always, looked good, with special thanks being due to Joerg Simon, whose car trunk doubles as an EMEA event box, with banners, shirts, hats, stickers, buttons, and everything else we might need. I'd also like to thank the ever-growing team of Greek Ambassadors, who did a great job of providing a professional presence at the booth. The donations that we received at the booth for shirts were able to provide a bit of sponsorship for some of the event's costs, and there was some money left over that will be deposited into the EMEA non-profit group's bank account.

As is FOSDEM tradition, I spent about half an hour cutting up sheets of stickers into individual stickers for the booth. Photos of said activity were taken.

I had a variety of conversations over the course of the weekend, ranging from informal chats to pretty in-depth discussions.

I spent a few minutes with Jeff Johnson, who I tend to run into at FOSDEM every year. Joerg and I talked a bit about some FAMSCO budget stuff, and both agreed that the 2010 version of FAMSCO is off to a pretty good start, and we need to keep up the energy.

I had a chat with Sandro Mathys. I had a chance to meet Zoltan Hoppar, Sascha Spreitzer, and Gregory Zysk -- three Fedora contributors who are relatively new, and have never attended FOSDEM before. We all had a very nice group dinner on Saturday night which left everyone in a really good mood.

I had conversations about the group's status and finances with Yaakov Nemoy, Gerold Kassube, Jeroen van Meeuwen, Joerg, and Gregory, though I don't really have much to say about that on this blog.

A group of us attended a talk by Paul Adams, who is working with Georg Greve on a new project, and they wanted to get some Fedora-related advice. What they needed was more technical than not, so my only real purpose in that conversation was to listen, and then point them at Jeroen for whatever they needed. Interestingly enough, though, Paul wrote some scripts that analyze and generate metrics about commits for svn repositories for his doctorate, and he's interested to see someone make those scripts work for git. I'd like to get them running against everything in Fedora Hosted.

I was pretty happy with the way my talk turned out. It was videotaped by the FOSDEM team, so we'll see when and where that tape turns up, and then I'll point folks at it. Following my talk, I had a conversation with a conference-goer who was interested to hear about how many people Red Hat pays to work on Fedora, and I was also happy to be able to explain to him that Red Hat has hired many of those people directly from the Fedora community, as well as having hired Fedora folks to do other engineering work at Red Hat as well.

I attended a talk on Spacewalk by Marcus Moeller, who is a Fedora contributor in Switzerland whose company works with (among other thingS) Spacewalk. I also attended a Mozilla panel discussion which focused mostly on general privacy issues on the internet, but I was able to ask a question about some of the community challenges that exist in the addons.mozilla.org framework, which led to a really interesting side-discussion after the talk.

A few other one-off notes:

* I didn't know that Joerg had taken over maintainership of the Fedora Security Spin from Luke Macken. Joerg's done a great job updating the spin, and it's not a great spin for Fedora to have, but it also serves as the basis for some of the work he's doing with his employer.

* Frederic Hornain and I talked a bit about how we can grow the JBoss.org presence at FOSDEM next year, and Frederic filled me in on the great success that was had in the JBoss dev room this year.

* It is absolutely essential that we always have 64-bit media available at events.

Finally, not be trivialized is my sufficient badgering of Nicu Buculei, leading him to ressurect the Fedora web comic.

On Sunday night, Pierros Papadeas and I went to a sports bar in Brussels to watch the Super Bowl, and we enjoyed some beers, some good food, and an excellent game.

My Fedora Muse

2010-02-09T22:48:03+00:00

nirik asks people to post what their most fun Fedora related activity is. here’s my answer:

Group debugging sessions on #fedora-admin or #fedora-devel. I love working with the fedora-admin team on finding and fixing programming issues with our web apps. The problems are usually interesting, the ideas various people throw out are instructional, and the feeling of accomplishment when we finally track the problem all the way back to its source and generate a fix is truly satisfying.

Compact VirtualBox disk images

2010-02-09T20:47:06+00:00

I’m using VirtualBox since a couple of years to run Windows on top of my Linux boxes. After a while, the virtual disk size may increase to unreasonable sizes and I was searching for an option to “compact” it like in Parallels/VMWare.

Contrary to these other virtualization tools, there is nothing in VirtualBox’ GUI to do this. Fortunately, you can use 2 tools to achieve the same goal…

First, you need to download SDelete from Microsoft and run it in the VM:

sdelete -c

Now stop the VM and compact the disk:

VBoxManage modifyhd blah.vdi --compact

That’s it, your disk is now compacted and you have probably gained a couple of GB!

Vista al futuro.

2010-02-09T20:33:53+00:00

vengo a tirar ideas y remarcar otras, creo que devemos mirar a futuro lo que queremos ser y hacer, y me surgieron algunas cosas.

Me parece bien que cada x meses nos juntemos, en algun lugar para hacer un asado, conocer caras nuevas e invitar a gente a participar de la comunidad, me parece que juntarnos nos hace un tanto mas fuerte.
La creacion de remeras de Fedora Uruguay. no puede faltar en esta comunidad remeras con el logo de fedora y un http://fedora-uy.org en la espalda.

[FOSDEM'10] Recognition

2010-02-09T19:29:07+00:00

Well…. Suprised.

Ref :
http://press.redhat.com/2010/02/02/wheres-red-hat-this-february-3/ – EMEA paragraph -

Thanks Max, Thanks FOSDEM Team.

BR
Frederic

Invitación a nuevo colaboradores.

2010-02-09T18:58:54+00:00

María Leandro (Tatica para muchos) está coordinando unas reuniones por irc para los que quieran participar de forma activa en el desarrollo de Fedora.
Lo bueno es que no se necesita tener conocimientos previos o ser un desarrollador incluso.
Dichas reuniones servirán para que los que tengan ganas de participar se sientan cómodos y apoyados por gente que ya tiene experiencia.

Aquí les dejo el calendario de las reuniones.

Priority is Certain .. Possible Meanings

2010-02-09T18:38:49+00:00

Yeah that is a malpropism that makes no sense. In general it has no meaning, but it could also be a misquote or a partial quote. I wrote this earlier on the Schneier Blog but I figured it was good to post here now:

The question seems to have been "What is the probability of an ATTEMPTED attack in the next 6 months?" I would also lay the odds at 100% that someone, somewhere will ATTEMPT an attack in the United States in the next 6 months. The question is so open ended that to answer anything but would be wrong.

People who would like to become terrorists do try to come into the country all the time. The vast majority of them have been stopped for years with the same methods that were in use before 9/11/2001. So technically they are ATTEMPTING to commit terrorist acts. [Of course the various people who blow up mailboxes every April 15th to protest taxes may be technically committing terrorism ... so you can go beyond 'attempting'.]

To me, the unconscionable part of the conversation was the open ended question, and the lack of digging by the reporter on that.

Obligatory Fedora Item: The Fedora 13 release name Goddard is which is related in a way to the Beta from 2001 Roswell. Goddard did many rocket launches near Roswell NM. The Enigma of all this... what will follow Goddard?

Mouse pointer

2010-02-09T16:40:23+00:00

My friend Adam pointed me to Anatoly Zenkov’s generated graph of his mouse pointer movements during 3 hours using Eclipse:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/anatoliy_zenkov/4160723711

The previous photo in his stream has a screenshot of his desktop in the background so you can see what lines up where. It’s more fun to guess, though

Paris Game AI Conference 2010

2010-02-09T14:53:09+00:00

The first sessions of the Paris Game AI Conference 2010 was announced.
AI Conference brings together veteran game developers and artificial intelligence professionals.
Tickets are now available, but the price is from 47EUR to 97EUR.
They have now only 160 tickets.
gameaiconf.com

Fedora y KDE

2010-02-09T14:39:10+00:00

El día de hoy se realizaron muchos anuncios dentro del mundo de KDE SC, desde nueva pagina hasta nueva versión.
Todos estos anuncios le doy el honor de realizarlos a Xigatec, nuestro fan numero 1 de KDE dentro de la comunidad.
Las ultimas semanas estuve probando betas y RC de KDE 4.4 SC, también en su momento use KDE 4.3 que viene con Fedora 12.
Muchas veces se dice que en Fedora, KDE es un ciudadano de segunda clase. Con respecto a esto opino lo siguiente, quien dice eso no probo KDE en Fedora.

Some FOSDEM 2010 photos

2010-02-09T14:24:05+00:00

Now that I can see beyond the snow is time to follow the Day -1 with more photos showing what happened during the event.

Travelling with a sponsorship from Mozilla (thank you guys a lot!) and being a rabid Fedora fanboy I shared my time between the Mozilla room and the Fedora booth:

And hanged with people from both communities:

Also, had the opportunity to take part in a planning for the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting, where it looks like the Fedora Design Team will have a good presence:

It was impressive how many people have attended, many presentations had the rooms jam-packed, with more people in the audience than seats available:

Being there with two groups, one night I partied with the Mozilla people (food, drinks, bowling and laser tag):

And the other with my Fedora friends (food, drinks, jokes, photography)

I don't know from which project they were, but some people seems they had partier even harder than us:

It was not all fun, jokes and trying to impress girls:

I even managed to get some work done (if you can call that work):

OSOR.eu

2010-02-09T14:07:41+00:00

Dear *,

Today, I had the chance to discuss to a good friend who is working at the European commission and he makes me discover this interesting website : http://www.osor.eu/.

The Open Source Observatory and Repository for European public administrations (OSOR) is a platform for exchanging information, experiences and FLOSS-based code for use in public administrations.

Projects could be interesting to package.

Rem :
Event related links URL -> http://www.osor.eu/events

BR
Frederic

Virtaal supports Haitian Creole through Machine Translation plugin

2010-02-09T13:35:12+00:00

Update: Originally published on 2006-01-26 but somehow I didn't get this pushed on to the RSS feed so I've published it with a newer date.

Virtaal, a Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tool, has been providing translators with Machine Translation suggestions through its plugin system. We've just committed a new Machine Translation plugin that allows Virtaal to use Microsoft Translator's new Haitian Creole translation engine.

The Microsoft Translator plugin has been waiting for the next major release as we didn't want to introduce any User Interface changes. But the usefulness of this tool in the current Haitian crisis means that we've released it so that people can use it and benefit from the feature.

How does this help?

Any software that needs to be localised into Haitian Creole can now be more easily translated in Virtaal with Haitian Machine Translation support.
Documents (OpenDocument Format and wiki texts) can be translated into Haitian Creole using Virtaal and the Translate Toolkit's txt2po and odf2xliff converters.

How do I use the plugin?

You have two options:

Windows: Download our special Virtaal .exe for Windows.
Linux: Copy the Microsoft Translator plugin into your plugin directory (on Linux this is /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/virtaal/plugins/tm/models/

How to use the plugin?

You'll need to define Haitian Creole as a language in Virtaal

Bottom Right > New Language Pair...

Add Missing Language...

Name 'Haitian Creole' and language code 'ht'

Ensure that the plugin is enabled. Edit > Preferences > Plug-ins > Translation Memory > Configure... Ensure Microsoft Translator is checked.

Open your file and begin translating, I'm using the tutorial Help > Tutorial and as you can see I'm getting Machine Translation suggestions from Microsoft for Haitian Creole.

SourceForge нашли решение

2010-02-09T13:24:00+00:00

"И всё-таки она вертится..."

Светлые головы в SF нашли таки решение нашумевшей проблемы.

Как сообщает официальный блог, по дефолту все проекты помечены как подпадающие под ограничения, но авторы имеют возможность указать в web-интерфейсе "Develop -> Project Admin -> Project Settings", что на их проект экспортные правила США не распространяются.

SourceForge removes blanket blocking: "Beginning now, every project admin can click on Develop -> Project Admin -> Project Settings to find a new section called Export Control. By default, we’ve ticked the more restrictive setting. If you conclude that your project is *not* subject to export regulations, or any other related prohibitions, you may now tick the other check mark and click Update. After that, all users will be able to download your project files as they did before last month’s change.
We at SourceForge are fully committed to the ideals of free and open source software, including the principle of free exchange of information."

Geek Camp 2010

2010-02-09T12:41:52+00:00

The Call for Papers is now open for Geek Camp 3.0, Bluepoint's 2nd local APNG camp which will be held from March 5 to 7, 2010 at the Loreland Farm Resort in Antipolo City. Combining the collaborative approach of Geek Camp 1.0 (2008) and the technical orientation of Geek Camp 2.0 (2009), Bluepoint's 3rd Geek Camp will be a venue for participants to present their papers and discuss related topics within the following working groups. function wg_0() { document.getElementById("wg_topics").innerHTML = "Submissions must include the following: presentation title, presentation abstract, speaker name, speaker biography, presentation format and duration, and audience expertise level."; } function wg_1() { document.getElementById("wg_topics").innerHTML = "Appropriate E-Culture topics include social networking, interactive humanitarian websites, blogging, effects of Internet on social development and culture, digital divide, local language e-content, role of Internet policy, implications of digital technology on the ethics, culture, language, and the society at large."; } function wg_2() { document.getElementById("wg_topics").innerHTML = "Appropriate Green ICT topics include cloud computing, virtualization, energy efficient computing, terminal servers, power management, multi-functional hardware, smart materials, AI hardware and software for appliances."; } function wg_3() { document.getElementById("wg_topics").innerHTML = "Appropriate Internet Technologies topics include web applications, Internet servers, network management, mobile communications, VoIP, IPTV, wireless technologies, Internet security, and P2P networking."; } function wg_4() { document.getElementById("wg_topics").innerHTML = "Appropriate Disaster Management topics include disaster management standards, DM hardware and software, DM and alerting standards and technologies, DM and GIS, DM and sensor networks, DM and biometrics, DM and research."; } function pp_0() { document.getElementById("pp_topic").innerHTML = "Many thanks to those who submitted their applications. Final slides for all accepted entries listed here should be emailed to the secretariat on or before February 20, 2010."; } function pp_1() { document.getElementById("pp_topic").innerHTML = "Basic UML for Systems Analysisby Ryan BaclitSystems Analysis is an important part of software design. It allows software engineers to get the system requirements, design and implement correct data structures, and create effective schedules to deliver software as soon as possible. To help software engineers in systems analysis, they must know how to document the software during its development cycle. An effective method to document the system is the use of Unified Modeling Language (UML), a standard language used in software engineering."; } function pp_3() { document.getElementById("pp_topic").innerHTML = "Trac: Issue Tracking and Project Managementby Heherson PagcaliwaganTrac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. It strives to impose as little as possible on a team's established development process and policies. For this reason and more, Trac is being used by the Fedora Project for its fedorahosted infrastructure."; } function pp_4() { document.getElementById("pp_topic").innerHTML = "The Arduino Project: Promoting Tech Culture by Letting People Innovateby Michael BalcosThe Arduino project is an established effort to make available an open hardware microcontroller and an Open Source programming environment that goes with it. Work on it began at Avrea, Italy in 2005. As of October 2008, 50,000 Arduino boards have been sold. Aside from having an open hardware design and an Open Source programming environment, it is also multi-platform. The Arduino board can operate as a standalone microcontroller, but it also can be used to interface custom hardware with computers."; } function pp_6() { document.getElementById("pp_topic").innerHTML = "OpenERP for Your Business Needsby Chivas SicamEnterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems allow you integrate business information such as manufacturing, supply chain, accounting, human resources and project management into one system instead of having separate systems handling specific needs. However, the high cost of software licenses and consultant fees of integration providers make adoption of ERP a hindrance to small and medium enterprises. OpenERP offers free ERP and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions in one package."; } E-Culture Green ICT Internet Technologies Disaster Management Submissions must include the following: presentation title, presentation abstract, speaker name, speaker biography, presentation format and duration, and audience expertise level. Please email your papers, slides, and latest picture to magie at bluepoint.com.ph on or before February 10, 2010. UML Bug Tracking Open Hardware ERP Many thanks to those who submitted their applications. Final slides for all accepted entries listed here should be emailed to the secretariat on or before February 20, 2010.

Tip: VM won’t boot, troubleshoot with guestfish

2010-02-09T12:12:24+00:00

Unbootable virtual machine? Here are three useful guestfish commands to help. (You can also consider using virt-rescue).

1. Edit /boot/grub/grub.conf

$ guestfish -i Rawhide

Welcome to guestfish, the libguestfs filesystem interactive shell for
editing virtual machine filesystems.

Type: 'help' for help with commands
      'quit' to quit the shell

><fs> ls /boot/
System.map-2.6.32.1-9.fc13.x86_64
System.map-2.6.32.3-21.fc13.x86_64
System.map-2.6.33-0.40.rc7.git0.fc13.x86_64
config-2.6.32.1-9.fc13.x86_64
config-2.6.32.3-21.fc13.x86_64
config-2.6.33-0.40.rc7.git0.fc13.x86_64
[...]

Use the “edit”, “emacs” or “vi” commands to edit grub.conf:

><fs> vi /boot/grub/grub.conf

From here you can change the boot kernel, change it to boot in single user mode, enable the grub menu, remove the “rhgb quiet” option so you can see boot messages, and much more.

2. Look at the /init script

When the kernel panics because it cannot mount root, it’s often because the initrd or initramfs is broken in some way. Two commands help here:

><fs> initrd-list /boot/initramfs-2.6.33-0.40.rc7.git0.fc13.x86_64.img | less
><fs> initrd-cat /boot/initramfs-2.6.33-0.40.rc7.git0.fc13.x86_64.img init | less

The first command lists all the files in the initrd, which lets you see if the right drivers got included for the (virtual) hardware. The second command lists out the init script — which is the shell script that runs first before the OS proper starts to boot.

solang@fosdem

2010-02-09T11:28:06+00:00

Solang was demonstrated by the Tracker team as part of their talk in the cross desktop developers’ room at FOSDEM 2010. Here are the slides in PDF and the corresponding LaTeX sources.

SourceForge.net has some good news… :)

2010-02-09T11:17:00+00:00

Yesterday there was some good news from SourceForge.net according to its policy against users from “banned countries” like Iran. Now, sourceforge lets the project admins to select if they want to block such users or not. There is a new option in project settings page about export control. Unfortunately, the default setting is to ban users from such countries to access the content, but at least the admin(s) of the project are able to allow this access.

This is a welcome decision, and it has been made in a reasonable time. We had some discussions about moving the SimSpark project (RoboCup Soccer Simulation 3D Server) to a new project hosting service, and all expressed opinions were supporting this decision. However, with the new policy change it is less likely that we will move the project. Specially, it seems that they have opened https access to the contributors of these countries which was blocked since a long time ago.

Currently, it is still not possible to download the projects which allow access; but instead of getting an “Access Forbidden” page you’ll get a blank page if you are accessing the site from a banned country. Sine the access is supposed to be allowed, it seems to be a bug in their software which hopefully will be fixed soon!
BTW, there can be always some bad news too: Adobe has changed its policy recently and you can no longer download their free content (e.g. Adobe Flash Player) from banned countries.
Have Fun!

Innovation and focus in Fedora

2010-02-09T10:43:20+00:00

Fedora Board has been discussing about the target audience for Fedora for a long time and I hope to see some clarity from that process soon. There has been some concerns that defining a audience is going to curtail volunteer freedom to choose their own direction and I think that is a false notion. Any free software has a audience in mind when it gets started along with some natural biases regardless of whether we are explicit about it or not and as it grows it might change over time but sometimes there is a distortion of focus and different parts of it starts acting differently which is confusing for the end users.

We have that problem now in Fedora and it shows up in many places including how maintainers view updates to general releases. Some are very conservative and some are quite happy with pushing the latest upstream software and while some of it can be ustified by the nature of upstream projects themselves it is always useful to some amount of consistency in this.

Fedora has been recognized for a while as a place for free software innovation and many of the fundamental changes in every distribution is driven via Fedora first and this ranges from deep changes in kernel and glibc to desktop changes like Networkmanager or Packagekit and naturally we have gathered a community which prides in being a good contributory base but it is important to recognize that if our contributions do not reach a user base directly they are not going to value it much and we should not lose sight of end users in these conversations ever We need to tilt the focus slightly from speed to scale. Quality and robustness is a big piece of this equation and I am happy to see more visibility for the QA efforts within Fedora.

Canonical and the Yahoo deal

2010-02-09T07:53:38+00:00

Canonical recently signed up a deal with Yahoo and switched the default search engine of Mozilla Firefox from Google to Yahoo and it is a interesting move with many implications and I wanted to add my thoughts on this.

It is a fairly non intrusive change atleast for new users since Firefox does allow you to switch to a different search engine very easily and it could bring substantial revenue since they have a large user base. In this agreement users search results are being traded in return for cash even if the users dont click on any advertisements (ie) the aggregate data from the search by itself is very valuable for Yahoo. Some people have focused on the Microsoft angle and the argument is that since Microsoft’s Bing “decision engine” is powering Yahoo via the deal that Microsoft and Yahoo had made earlier in essence Canonical has sold access to their users searches to Microsoft and Microsoft is willing to trade some money to compete against Google.

What bugs me more is the process in which the decision has been made however with no discussion whatsoever and no input from anyone in their community and purely as a business decision from Canonical and the result is a inferior user experience if most of their user base is expecting Google to be the default and it also affects Firefox as upstream which is the platform for this whole deal since Firefox is going to lose money.

If Fedora was looking for revenue via commercial agreements with any search engine provider I would expect far more transparency in the process and the Fedora Board would definitely be held accountable for that. Canonical is in a tough position since there is not as much separation between their commercial product and their community project unlike Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux which has its own advantages and disadvantages. They already have made some controversial moves like integration of Ubuntu One (where the naming was itself a separate debate on usage of the Ubuntu brand) and Landscape which are proprietary services and more decisions like this are going to have ripple effects within their community and contributor base. There can only be so much community goodwill to trade on and the balance is going to be very difficult one. I will be watching from a safe distance.

Back in the trenches

2010-02-09T07:43:08+00:00

The expression "back in the trenches" is usually used as a metaphor for going back to work on something... this time I use it literally, just like the digging ditches:

Returning from FOSDEM (more posting about FOSDEM is in the queue), where the weather in Brussels was not bad at all, I found Bucharest waiting me with a big surprise, when arriving home the snow was so big, it was impossible for me to open the gate, I had to take it out from its joints:

My house is positioned in such a way that it provide shelter against Crivăț, the mighty wind from the Nort-East (from Russia, Siberia, from where most of the nasties come), so during a snowstorm like that, the blizzard will blow the snow from the open areas and pile it where its sheltered (like in front of my house):

The snow had formed a crest with the peak at about 80cm exactly in front of the door and where I have to dig trails, I used a ruler to measure it:

My dog was the happiest to see me back, she was alone for those few days (with a big reserve of food) but she didn't like at all to be isolated by snow like that. I was a liberator!

Now in Bucharest is -5°C and snowing slowly...

Orgueil et préjugés

2010-02-09T07:10:00+00:00

Non, rien à voir avec le best-seller de Jane Austen. Je voudrais vous raconter une histoire, qui m’est arrivée il y a une semaine ou deux.

Je rentre du boulot le soir, par le bus. J’en ai environ pour une heure, donc je vais m’assoir, mais les places sont prises, sauf au fond où il en reste quelques unes. En arrivant à la rotonde, je vois qu’une des places a été dégueulassée par une espèce de Gloubiboulga beige qui semble bien collant, avec des morceaux, mais qui ne pue pas. Je m’assois donc bien loin et commence ma lecture.

En m’asseillant, je ne peux m’empêcher de remarquer mes deux voisins, qui sont des archétypes des rebels des cités. Survêtements larges, casquettes brillantes vissées sur la tête, écouteurs dans les oreilles, bling-bling de partout et un regard aussi vivace que celui d’une vache au passage du TER Meuse-Champagne.

Les arrêts passent, les places propres se remplissent. Une ou deux personnes pensent avoir flairé la bonne affaire en repérant la dernière place libre au fond, voient l’étendue des dégâts, et font demi-tour avec une moue dégoûtée. Finalement, une jeune femme (blonde, mais c’est peut-être mon souvenir qui est influencé ;o) ) s’approche, apparemment sans avoir repéré la tâche. Avant que j’aie eu le temps de préparer ma phrase, et de briser le Mur du Silence des Transports en Commun, elle s’assoit. Tout le monde semble un peu gêné, et au bout de quelques secondes une des deux racailles pointe un doigt à demi tendu au bout d’un bras à demi plié vers le siège de la jeune femme, et dit d’une voix grave : « C’est sale ». Elle se lève, manifestement très embêtée d’avoir sali son beau manteau brillant, peste un peu entre ses dents, cherche des mouchoirs pour essuyer et s’en va.

Et voilà. Parmi les 9 personnes assises au fond du bus, aucun des 7 trous du cul de bourgeois bien pensants dont je fais partie n’a osé se sortir le doigt du troufion ne serait-ce que pour avertir l’arrivante que son siège était tâché. Qui a bougé ? Celui que les préjugés véhiculés par le journal de TF1 affichent comme asocial, communautariste, violent et ghettoïsé.

Et moi, moi qui m’imaginais avoir de l’intérêt pour les autres, faire passer la disponibilité avant les convenances sociales, qu’est-ce que j’ai fait ? Rien. Je ne vaux pas mieux que mes autres moutons de voisins dans leurs prés carrés[1]. Clairement, je n’en menais pas large ce soir-là.

Évidemment, dès que la personne suivante a fait mine d’approcher du siège tâché, ce fut un concert d’avertissements. Des avertissements qui sonnaient comme des applaudissements pour notre improbable professeur d’un soir. Je pense ne pas avoir été le seul à retenir la leçon.

Notes

[1] Au passage, je ne leur en veux pas personnellement bien sûr, c’est juste qu’ils sont le reflet de mon échec, ils me mettent le nez dans le caca.

"The priority is certain" ... Wait, What?

2010-02-09T05:00:00+00:00

Last week there was a meeting in the US where our top intelligence official testified to lawmakers
Senators Warned of Terror Attack on U.S. by July
It contains this interesting bit.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked Mr. Blair to assess the possibility of an attempted attack in the United States in the next three to six months.

He replied, “The priority is certain, I would say” — a response that was reaffirmed by the top officials of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I.

I'm not entirely sure what that means, I doubt anyone really knows, the comment was probably meant to be ambiguous. Such a question is probably nonsense, but anyone looking to keep their job is going to tell you it's almost a certainty. If someone says anything else, then there is a terrorist attack, they're going to be blamed for whatever breakdown in intelligence happened and have to find a new job.

One of the unfortunate parts of being accountable for security is having to answer questions. It's easier to say an attack is imminent, then get praised for "preventing" it, than to say probably not and having to answer for the failure. All aspects of security work like this unfortunately. As long as everything is going great, nobody cares, then when something bad happens, it's all your fault. Intelligence people keep themselves known by constantly stating that something bad is about to happen any day now.

The right question to ask any security person isn't to predict the future, rather "What are you doing to minimize our risk?"

There is a saying about the old Berlin Wall, "Nobody ever escaped the same way twice." Security is no different. Rather than try to guess what the next attack will be, you should have all around good practices that not only help prevent attackers from targeting you, but then minimize damage when they do attack. We can easily guard against the past, but predicting the future is impossible.

Fedora AMQP

2010-02-09T03:39:42+00:00

At FUDCON 2009 in Toronto, a bunch of us sat down to talk about what the new message system was going to look like for Fedora Infrastructure, and today I finally got around to putting in the RFR for the test space we need to start messing with this technology.

This will be a major step forward for us.

*Create a unified way of communicating between Fedora services.
*Allow for abstraction that would allow for easier migration of services such as SCM.
*Allow for more real-time changes rather then depending on hourly cron jobs.
*Create a more dynamic system.

For me the main goal here is to create an awesome interface with Bugzilla so that the QA and Bugzapper teams can much faster process bugs that have been submitted. This will hopefully also result in a much more streamline approach to doing package reviews.

The extent of this system will be far reaching spanning everything from server monitoring, to creating an abstraction layer between the bodhi, koji, pkgdb, etc… and the SCM system. This may allow for later migration from CVS to something else deemed more effective.

I will continue to blog over the next months about progress that is being made in this area.

More information on this project can be found at:
Fedora Messaging SIG

“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt

–Brennan Ashton

whats in drm-radeon-testing?

2010-02-08T23:58:05+00:00

I'll try and post these regularly when I make major additions/removals.

drm-radeon-testing is the cutting edge KMS radeon branch, it is going to be rebased and things will be added/removed as they are worked on by developers. So you can base patches on it but you should talk to the developer who owns the area first.

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/airlied/drm-2.6.git drm-radeon-testing

I've just pushed a rebased tree now with the following:

latest i2c algo + hw i2c engine code + all fixes squashed: This adds support for hw i2c engines found on radeons and
exposes them + sw i2c buses to userspace so i2c tools can use them. (agd5f).

pll algorithm reworking + quirks: cleans up the code to allow for the selection of the old pll algorithm on some hardware. (agd5f)

pm support so far: Adds all the current PM patches - just does engine reclocking so far using the power tables from the BIOS. (Zajec/agd5f)

Evergreen (Radeon HD 5xxx) support: basic KMS support for the evergreen range of devices - no irqs or accel yet. (agd5f)

radeon unlocked ioctl support (airlied)

bad CS recording (glisse)

misc cleanups/fixes - Dell/Sun server support ported from userspace hopefully.

The tree did contain Jerome's r600 CS checker but I've dropped it for now at his request as he has newer patches
in testing.

WWW2010 Developers Track: Call For Proposals

2010-02-08T22:52:09+00:00

The Nineteenth International WWW Conference is taking place in Raleigh, North Carolina from April 26-30. It is, as the kids say, A Pretty Big Deal. (Is that what the kids say?)

Vint Cerf is keynoting. Don’t you want to present a paper at WWW2010, where Vint Cerf is keynoting? Of course you do. So submit a paper to the Developers’ Track. It’s an ideal venue for short reports of both industry and academic technical works. Submission deadline is February 26th.

The gory details, from the official CFP:

The Developers Track focuses on the general WWW development community. Participants are invited to present new trends and interesting ideas, code and APIs of applications, platforms and emerging standards. Demonstrations of technical “nitty-gritty” are strongly encouraged. Focus areas include, but are not limited to, Browsers and Plugins, Web Metrics, Health, Science and Education, Web Social Impact, Information Integration and Mash-ups, Web Software and Tools, Information Mining and Reporting, Mobile Web, Monetization, Multimedia, Scalable System and Cloud Computing, Search, Security, Semantic Web, Social Network, Standards and Protocols, User Interface, Open Source (FLOSS) Development for the Web.

Note that bit on the end. All of you who care about Freedom On The Web: this means you.

So let’s see some papers. I’m the chair of the developers track, so you gotta make me look good. Ping me if you have any questions.

A couple cute Linux games

2010-02-08T22:23:30+00:00

I spent Christmas writing lectures and I thought I deserved a little break. As a reward I had a brief look though some commercial games available on Linux. I am not all that keen to support closed source development, but the game side of the open source world is sadly relatively weak, and I am pro supporting publishers who develop with Linux in mind. Traditionally, closed source games were a pain to install and would break after updating the kernel or libc (as I found recently when trying to play some). This seems no longer the case. I have gone though maybe 20 demos and all worked out the box on Fedora 12. Here are the two that really stood out.

Machinarium

This is a game by Amanita Design who have been making some fantastic things with flash for years now. One of the best things I have seen from them is a very short game they made for The Polyphonic Spree (who are amazing in their own right) where it became a different way to experience their album.

Machinarium is a much longer and fuller game with vast amounts of detail. You play as a cute little robot who has been discarded in a pile of junk.

The scenery of every screen is fantastically detailed with layered moving foregrounds and animated background characters.

The body of the game is a puzzle adventure. These are often frustrating as you spend hours of your time trying to rub every object against every other object to make anything happen. The puzzles here are, on the whole, rather logical. You rarely have more than four items in your inventory and the game has a fantastic hint system. There are two types of hints, the hint icon simply repeats the obvious stuff you should have noticed. The second hint system gives you a cheat sheet for that screen, only if you pass a level of a mini game. The mini-game is a last resort thing but the cheat sheet is a hand drawn scribble notes explaining the solution in an incredibly cute way. When the robot gets a bit bored he starts day dreaming, giving a short entertaining animation.

Having said that, there were some weird dead ends I ended up getting into. At one point, I needed an oil drum which was offered in a shop. The shop owner asked for moeny, so I spent ages wondering around looking for sources of cash. The actual solution (SPOILER ALERT: of throwing a swarm of flies into his eyes and stealing the drum) was somewhat bizarre.

For $20 (£12.40 in the UK) you get about 4 hours of game-play. If you like this game, you should also try Samorost (Free) and Samorost 2 ($5).

Aquaria

This is not the first time I played Aquaria. It was an addiction of mine a couple years ago, before I removed my Windows installation. This is one of the most engrossing games I have ever played. On the face of it, you basically swim around and solve the mystery Aquiaria. The game is part puzzle mystery, part atmospheric escapism and part arcade shoot-em-up and one of my favourite games of all time.

The swimming comes very naturally and it is a pleasurable experience just to have a bit of a swim though the environment. As the game progresses, you attain more powers, which open up more of the vast map to explore. Unfortunately this was ruined somewhat by one of the final powers, the power to get a boyfriend. I liked Niaja (the main character in the game), she is strong, determined and has kick ass moves. Yet then she falls in love with the most pathetic guy who follows her around, occasionally throwing a fire bolt at some harmless fish and uselessly getting stuck flapping around on every piece of rock you go past. Then he manages to get himself captured and I could never get past the final boss to free him. This is possibly because I suspected the final scene would be them swimming hand in hand towards the sunset while I was screaming at the monitor “NOOOOOOO! You can do so much better! He is not the only fishman in the sea!” (well actually he is, but that’s not the point).

So, as I mentioned earlier, the game can be very hard at points. This can frustrate you if you can’t get past some stage. The second issue is the enormity of the map. The game is sandboxish, which allows you a bit of freedom to the order in which you attain your powers. On the other hand, you can spend quite a while swimming around looking for areas you have not explored.

It is a shame that many people will snub this game for it’s girly overtones. Cookery and collecting recipes features heavily which I found a bit bizarre at first become compelling after a while as you collect ingredients to attain special temporary attributes. I was completely trapped by this game for weeks and enjoyed it immensely.

Aquaria still has not been released for Linux, but the beta has. The free beta version is of the full game with no restrictions (although the site says this is only until mid February 2010), and I have not seen any bugs yet. There is a solid month worth of game-play here and even when the game becomes final, it is easily worth the £13.54 that the Windows and MacOS versions are selling for. I should also mention that the game does use a lot of open source elements. There is a heavy use of ogg/png and the lua scripting language.

Favorite Spam of the day

2010-02-08T21:49:20+00:00

While I have worked in technical support and been a system administrator.. I really don't think I would want more abuse (or at least have it cheaper)


Subject: Personal abuse 75% Off

Now abusing users.. well I might go for that


Subject: User abuse Buy on 78% cheaper price

But why should I want to abuse winter? I mean its a nice season and all


Subject: abuse Winter -80% Deals

The sad part is that most of these things you can do for free.. so 80% off is still free (well unless you include shipping, handling, and VAT).

Fedora: On Research Design

2010-02-08T21:27:44+00:00

Research design in anthropology is a tricky thing. It is the part of the process you do before you do anything else, and thus you do before you have any real sense of the situation in which you will be researching and the people with which you will be working. It is the place where you lay down the questions to be answered, setup ways in which you will attempt to answer them, try and anticipate all of the ins and outs of the process as well as all the steps necessary to be taken with all of the stakeholders, which in my case includes my client, my masters committee, and my university IRB.

Then you get into the project and start your research, and only then do you start to realize and understand what you’ve got yourself into and just how many things you didn’t anticipate. So far with this project, being a cyber anthropological based research study (all of the research is being conducted online), my problems have all centered around technology.

My first limitation was understanding the process to get my blog on the Fedora Planet blogroll. With help and some ‘hacking the system’ I got on and while at FUDcon I figured out why it didn’t work in the first place (I wasn’t a part of enough groups!).

Now I am realizing my second limitation, that of requiring a signed piece of paper from all interview participants before each interview can commence. Pen and paper is perhaps one of the oldest forms of communication and technology known to man and yet it is the one thing standing between me an several potential interviews.

This was not a hindrance I anticipated when designing my research study, and it is perhaps not something with which people who are not researching under a university have to deal. However, it is something I now realize is important and am bringing attention to in case there are others embarking on similar research studies with similar IRB limitations that require them to have signed consent forms so they can account for this process in their research design.

Were I to design a similar project in the future under the same IRB limitations, I would ask my IRB to approve an electronic encrypted signature on my consent forms.

Here’s to hoping someone out there can learn from my mistakes!

That all being said, if you have a means for returning a signed document to me electronically and you would like to be interviewed for the Fedora research project, but have yet to contact me please do so soon! All interviews will be wrapped up (as best they can) by Friday!

Puppetmanaged.org and Load

2010-02-08T21:09:34+00:00

I'm barely back from Fosdem and i'm already planning for the next event. Bert Desmet has asked me to submit a paper for Linux Open Administration Days. Since "Handwerpen" is just a hop, skip and a swallows flight away from the Netherlands, i said yes. I submitted the following abstract for presentation. I plan on talking about Puppetmanaged.org.

Abstract

Puppet is a batteries-not-included tool for configuration management.
In order to implement it in your infrastructure, it requires the use
of pre developed modules that can enable all kinds of functionality.
Puppetmanaged.org is an upstream community of KISS oriented modules
that enable you to migrate from most any other structure with a
minimal amount of effort. It also enables the installation of multiple
working environments for the purpose of running a development and
integration testing laboratory inside your domain. This presentation
will cover Puppetmanaged.org, some of the more useful modules offered
and as a practical example how we customize it to our needs within the
DBG at the UMC Utrecht.

[FOSDEM'10] Thanks !

2010-02-08T20:15:59+00:00

Dear *,

I would like to thanks for their helps, presence, questions, answers each of you who were at FOSDEM 2k10 Edition.
Well, THANKS !

See you next year !

Rem: if you have questions, remarks, feedbacks and so on about that edition or the next one, feel free to contact me…

BR
Frederic

localized spins

2010-02-08T18:27:58+00:00

Today I want to add some points to ongoing discussion about localized spins in Fedora Project. As a member of translation team, I think there is no need to create such spins. In translation of any packages there are two surfaces that every localizers can work on. The first one is the translation of GUI. As my experience shows that great majority of users prefer to use the source language rather than their localized GUI. This case is very special for RTL languages, like Persian and Balochi. Because the users based on their previous experience with LTR interface are not familiar with this new interface. He can spend sometimes on RTL environment for example here, then when he surfs in internet, he uses LTR web pages. So the translated UI is not as favorable as we expect. For example, I myself get confused as I use a translated UI, because I don’t get accustomed a RTL interface at all.
The next item is translation of documentations. This is the point we should emphasis in localizing. A lot of Fedora users are not English native speakers or have difficulties in understanding English. As they get into trouble in using Fedora they are unable to find any local help, I mean in their computers. Localized docs can be useful here.
Shall we have a localized spin? frankly I should say that NO. As I check in Transifex in Fedora I find that we have 89 languages. If the Board authorized creation of a language-based spin for one language or two, the other languages that don’t have any spin up to that time may request a new spin. One day we have a lot of spins. I think it’s better to have a plan in development process to have some sort of modifications in coding for example in Anaconda. As a user select his region, for example, Anaconda suggest usage of localized version. developers can think about installing of selective packages based on users locale, for example.

Any thought?Idea?

ocsinventory-1.3-1

2010-02-08T18:07:00+00:00

OCS Inventory NG version 1.3 is out. RPM are available in fedora repository (rawhide only), and in remi repository (Fedora ≥ 6 and RHEL / CentOS 4 to 5). It is a major update.

Open Computer and Software Inventory Next Generation is an application designed to help a network or system administrator keep track of the computers configuration and software that are installed on the network.

Official Web Site : http://www.ocsinventory-ng.org/. Of course, install could be done using YUM : yum --enablerepo=remi install ocsinventory The ocsinventory package is a meta-package which allow to install in a single command: ocsinventory-server : the Communication server ocsinventory-reports : the Administration console mysql-server :... Lire ocsinventory-1.3-1

libguestfs gotchas

2010-02-08T16:53:04+00:00

I just added this section to the libguestfs man page. Always good to be upfront about your mistakes.

   LIBGUESTFS GOTCHAS
   Gotcha (programming): "A feature of a
   system [...] that works in the way it is documented but is
   counterintuitive and almost invites mistakes."

   Since we developed libguestfs and the associated tools, there are
   several things we would have designed differently, but are now stuck
   with for backwards compatibility or other reasons.  If there is ever a
   libguestfs 2.0 release, you can expect these to change.  Beware of
   them.

   Autosync / forgetting to sync.
       When modifying a filesystem from C or another language, you must
       unmount all filesystems and call "guestfs_sync" explicitly before
       you close the libguestfs handle.  You can also call:

        guestfs_set_autosync (handle, 1);

       to have the unmount/sync done automatically for you when the handle
       is closed.  (This feature is called "autosync",
       guestfs_set_autosync q.v.)

       If you forget to do this, then it is entirely possible that your
       changes won’t be written out, or will be partially written, or
       (very rarely) that you’ll get disk corruption.

       Note that in guestfish(3) autosync is the default.  So quick and
       dirty guestfish scripts that forget to sync will work just fine,
       which can make this extra-puzzling if you are trying to debug a
       problem.

   Read-only should be the default.
       In guestfish(3), --ro should be the default, and you should have to
       specify --rw if you want to make changes to the image.

       This would reduce the potential to corrupt live VM images.

       Note that many filesystems change the disk when you just mount and
       unmount, even if you didn’t perform any writes.  You need to use
       "guestfs_add_drive_ro" to guarantee that the disk is not changed.

   guestfish command line is hard to use.
       "guestfish disk.img" doesn’t do what people expect (open "disk.img"
       for examination).  It tries to run a guestfish command "disk.img"
       which doesn’t exist, so it fails, and it fails with a strange and
       unintuitive error message.  Like the Bourne shell, we should have
       used "guestfish -c command" to run commands.

your fedora muse?

2010-02-08T16:34:09+00:00

There has been lots of discussion on various lists recently about a overall “vision” or “goal” for Fedora. Sometimes that debate has been heated and not all that positive, so I thought I would ask a more positive question:

Just quickly, as the first thing that comes to mind, what is the Fedora related thing you do that you find the most fun?

For me it would have to be helping out someone on #fedora who is willing to provide info and try things and together we discover what the issue is and fix it. It’s just a nice feeling to know that someones machine is back to working as they wish and it was a cooperative activity to get there.

How about everyone else out there? Feel free to answer in comments or post your own blog entry on what you find the most fun. Is it coding? Packaging? QA work? blog posting? Showing off Fedora at a conference? Just general interaction with others in the Fedora community? Chatting on #fedora-social? Helping folks on mailing lists or forums? Getting a new Feature all done in a Fedora release? Translating Fedora software? Seeing something you wrote used by someone you know?

Display an XML doc from the command line

2010-02-08T15:17:26+00:00

Leading me down the garden path today, how to quickly display an XML document … graphically, from the command line?

This doesn’t work:

$ virt-inspector --xml RHEL54.img | firefox -

Creating a temporary file is possible, but ugly.

Then I was tipped off that you can create and pass a data: URI to Firefox.

There is no existing command line tool to generate data URIs, but we can write one in 3 lines of shell script:

#!/bin/sh -
echo -n data:$1\;
uuencode -m notused | tail -n +2 | tr -d '\n'

Example:

$ cat > /tmp/test.html
<b>Hello,</b>
<i>world!</i>
$ datauri text/html < /tmp/test.html
data:text/html;PGI+SGVsbG8sPC9iPgo8aT53b3JsZCE8L2k+Cg======

This also doesn’t work. There are two problems: the XML generated by virt-inspector is too long for a data URI, and in any case Firefox seems to ignore the data URI although I’m sure I’m constructing it correctly. Maybe it’s a security or configuration issue?

Well, good idea, but let’s go back to the temporary file idea. Bash process substitution might have worked:

$ firefox <(virt-inspector --xml RHEL54.img)

but Firefox’s frankly stupid session management crap gets in the way because this command expands to something like:

$ firefox /proc/self/fd/123

and the new firefox process passes the non-portable /proc/self path to the currently running instance of Firefox which doesn’t have the same view of /proc/self.

So we are finally left with:

$ firefox $(f=`mktemp -u`;
            virt-inspector --xml RHEL54.img > $f.xml;
            echo $f.xml)

which is fugly and unsafe.

If only there was a less insane tool to display XML, but being XML I guess insane goes with the territory.

Bringing things up to the here and now

2010-02-08T14:57:28+00:00

Okay, lets see. In the last week, I've sold my house, added a healthy baby boy to our family, had our first choice house fall through, had our second choice house fall through, and finally, bought a house. Oh yeah, and the Bruins broke their losing streak. :)

Pam did an excellent writeup about the baby's birth, so if you're interested, please go read it here: Pam&aposs Baby Birth Story
If you just want to look at baby pics, go here: http://spot.fedorapeople.org/baby/

While we were in labor on Monday, our Arlington condo was being shown, and the person decided they wanted to buy it and put an offer in. After a little back and forth, we got to a final offer, which we accepted. The only catch was that now we needed to find suitable housing to move to. We've been looking for 2 months now, so we had our short list narrowed down. We put in an offer on our first choice, which was an estate sale. It was a smallish house on 2 acres of beautiful land, we had already started planning out how we would expand and improve the house over time and where Pam would plant her garden. The house was priced very high, but the realtor assured us that it would never re-appraise for that value, so we put in a lower price offer. We assumed that they would provide a counter offer, but they refused! They were unwilling to move from the price at all. Our realtor strongly recommended that we not even consider paying their asking price. In fact, the seller's broker got so fed up with this decision that he dropped the listing entirely. Apparently, the sellers saw what the town had tax appraised the property for a few years back and intended to get exactly that much out of it and not a penny less. This was very sad, because the MLS listing had "MAKE AN OFFER!" as its first line.

Pam and I moved on to our second choice, but we wanted to go out and walk through it one more time to make sure, so we scheduled to go out with our realtor this past weekend. Our realtor was out of town, but her backup agreed to make the arrangements... but then she called us back to tell us that our second choice had gone under agreement the day before! Again, we'd gotten our hopes up, and now we really didn't know what to do. We did have a few more houses on our short-list, but they were honestly, not ideal for what we wanted. The backup realtor pointed out a new house that had just come on the market in Ayer, and encouraged us to go and check it out. It looked good on the MLS listing, but we'd been fooled before.

On Super Bowl Sunday, Pam, Baby Jimmy (we haven't decided exactly what we're calling the baby yet, James/Jim/Jimmy, so I'm trying nicknames out), Pam's parents (who flew down to help us out with the baby), and me all got into the car and went to see the house in Ayer, and wouldn't you know, it was just great! It had the space we wanted, nice high ceilings and wide hallways and a very open layout. There are a few places where it needs some work, the kitchen really needs to be redone and expanded, the finished office in the basement is a bit of a DYI job and it shows, but there is space to expand/fix it. Also, because it is in Ayer, there is no FIOS yet (the town website says it will be coming to Ayer in 6 months). :( But, we can have chickens (with permit)! It has an awesome yard with lots of gardening space and wooded areas. The lot backs up to protected land that the town owns that isn't buildable. The house is in a lovely little neighborhood, so Jimmy will have lots of other kids to play with when he gets older. I wanted to check out one other house that we hadn't yet seen, so we went to go look at it, but it had severe water damage, so I didn't get much past the front room before I knew it wasn't right. We headed back to the realty to meet our regular realtor (who was back in town) and we put in an offer on the Ayer house. During the Super Bowl, we went back and forth with counter offers, but they gave a verbal agreement to our second offer! Finally, we have a house!

My back is killing me! Babies involve so much bending and lifting. I haven't hurt this much in a really long time, but the baby is worth it. Today, we have more doctors appointments for Pam and Baby Jimmy. I'm going to try to get some small pieces of work done. I'm hopeful I can get back to work, at least part time, tomorrow. If you're waiting on me to do something, please be patient!

FOSDEM 2010

2010-02-08T12:03:59+00:00

from the traveling side this trip was horrible - broken car, hotel charged the wrong credit card, navigation system gave us wrong routes on the way back.

FOSDEM itself was better than ever for me, because i could meet so many motivated Fedora Contributors. We started on the Beer-Event, where i had a Cherry-Beer which made me drunk with only one glas.
The Beer-Event is crowded and geeky - you love it or you hate it ;)

First Day, we build up the booth and around 11:00 am visitors started to showing up and we could see right from the beginning that they love our T-Shirts which we gave away for a donation. After a short while it was possible to completely reimburse the trip and accomodation for our hungarian contributor from this donations - so cool! I attended Max's talk about Fedora-Governance, which gave me an impulse to think over how we can reduce governance as much as possible inside the Fedora Project without loosing the scope.

Second Day, much visitors, much booth duties - i could not even write my blog.
I hope we could convince some of them to join the fedoraproject.

I presented my foss.in talk and the Fedora Security Spin to several Fedora People on the booth they gave me very good feedback and i am happy and proud what we achieved together!

I brought 880 F12 DVD/CD with me to FOSDEM - i took not a single one back home with me!!! This means we gave out around 600 DVD/CD's!!! in 1,5 days to the visitors and distributed the rest between the Fedora People.

I brought also around 100 Splatter T-Shirts with me and they are all gone for a donation to Fedora EMEA for Future Events and for handling shipping and producing new stuff.

If you have the chance to attend FOSDEM one day you should do it, there are many strange places to discover ;)

FOSS.IN

2010-02-08T10:08:08+00:00

After many days of planning, discussions, hanging over the IRC’s , holding meetings for LUGB and decide only one thing . How to reach Bangalore and attend FOSS.IN that too from Bikaner which is not connected directly and most importantly how to manage all the 25 plus people who were so much motivated that they didn’t gave a second thought for going to India’s Biggest Open Source Conference ,most importantly the developers and contributors from different open source projects. I moved to Delhi as I had to get all my clothes and stuffs washed , join my friends at Nizamudin Railway Station and board the train at 6.45 am in the morning. I was praying that all the people arrive on time as we were around 30 and the tickets were all with pkuhad, luckily it happened and we were on the train.

What was expected from the Journey to Yashwantpur (a nearby railway station to Bangalore ) , passing those 40 hours , I would say one line that is — ” Total Fun” , we started by hogging on the food that every one was carrying and it used to get vanished by blink of the eye. But that I know we would be doing for rest of the two days. Every one engaged themselves by playing cards, antakshri, gossiping, clicking pictures, play stations, music . I was wondering how much distance we were covering just to keep ourself motivated and work for FOSS. The no of states we crossed was judged by the welcome message I got from my Cellular Network.

After dwelling at my friend’s place and moving to NIMHANS Convention Center where the buzz and breeze was for Open Source and Open Source (I loved it) , meeting some of the great guys who have been working for FOSS , past few years and motivating lots of us , there were GNOME people , KDE guys , Fedora and many open source projects with their introductions and priorities , the five days was with the finest geeks , listening them , attending their views , it was totally fun . Hmm and how could you forget the food , totally yummy !!

Although it was my first experience at Bangalore, I could not see most of the places , but I still managed to be at M.G Road, and the how could you forget Mysore trip , that was like icing on the cake.

Any ways I hang up now , will write something as it comes to my mind

Mukti’10

2010-02-08T08:49:18+00:00

Mukti is the annual FOSS festival organised by the GNU/Linux Users Group of NIT Durgapur. Mukti 2010 was held on 5-7th Feb. Students from various institutions in and around Durgapur and many FOSS enthusiasts were present through the three days and AFAIK, for the first time, the registrations crossed the 1000 mark!

The first day began with the lighting of the lamp after which Prof. S. Bhattacharya, Director, NIT Durgapur, Mr. Indranil Das Gupta and Mrs. Stephanie Das Gupta addressed the audience. There were many events and workshops and after hanging around a bit at the IOTA stall, I went to attend the workshop on “Developing applications using Android“; although, I missed the workshop on Qt.

The second day, Indradg, Stepdg, Rtnpro and myself went to Bijra High School and thus, missed most of the events. The final day, I attended Debayan Banerjee’s session entitled “FOSS + Me” in which he talked about his own experiences with FOSS. It was inspiring to know the kind of the commitment he put into his work. This was the last talk of Mukti’10.

Although this time I did not attend many sessions ( just two in fact), it was nice to meet FOSSy people especially Indradg, Stephdg and Debayan. Debayan is one of the guys whom I know from the days when I had just begun using Linux and meeting him was a very nice experience.

Congratulations to all those who put their labour to make the event a huge success and hoping that the next year would be even bigger.

Rotoscope

2010-02-08T04:34:13+00:00

Hace unos días mientras aprendía algunos truquillos en GIMP me pregunté como lograr el efecto de hacer un foto parecer como un dibujo(como en la película A Scanner Darkly por ejemplo). Encontré un par de tutoriales bastante largos para lograr en ese efecto en Illustrator, trate imitar los pasos usando Inkscape, sin embargo no encontré como imitar el pincel que utilizaba el tutorial, así que

[Input Style] What's Over-the-spot, on-the-spot ... etc?

2010-02-08T04:09:11+00:00

Last Friday I saw an ibus issue about input style support in ibus-anthy. The maintainer, Fujiwara insist that editing in the candidate window is not "over-the-spot".

Ok, time to do literature review:
According to sun and Mozilla, preedit area is INSERTED into the inputing spot in on-the-spot, the text after the input spot WILL be pushed to the right when preedit area expend; while preedit area is PUT OVER the inputing spot in over-the-spot mode, the text after the input spot WILL NOT be pushed to the right.

Reference from IBM tells different story. Over-the-spot, as the page states, is the mode that candidate window closely followed the input spot, but the preedit string is formed in candidate window.

Java also has its own definition. Below-the-spot is the term for IBM's over-the-spot.

Summary:

After the intensive web search and discussion, we conclude that we should use some thing like "Embedded preedit in client application" to avoid confusion.

Desktop Switchoff: suggestions?

2010-02-08T03:56:06+00:00

As you may have read earlier, Ryan Rix and I are doing a desktop switchoff next week: he’s going to go GNOME for a week, and I’m going KDE. In order to prep up for the week (…or more, if we decide we need a longer timesample to get a good evaluation period going) of fun, it seemed prudent to ask the metabrain for thoughts on…

Help with KDE: I have never used KDE before, though I’ve had a general idea that it was around and Did Some Things Differently, though I didn’t – and still don’t – know exactly what that means. I haven’t the slightest idea what I’m in for. KDE testimonials (or complaints), guides, cool-stuff-to-try – all are extremely welcome. (Why do you use/contribute-to KDE?) I’m starting with KDE’s “An Introduction To KDE” and Bruce Byfield’s “KDE 4.2: 10 tips for getting started” article (yes, I realize 4.2 is no longer the latest version, but I’m trying to grok whatever subtle paradigm shift is needed here) and have also found some general KDE reviews to peruse.

Help with GNOME: Same questions as for KDE above. I’m actually asking this for myself (although I’m sure Ryan will find it useful too ;-). I’ve been a GNOME user for several years now, having gone from enlightenment to xfce in high school to fluxbox and then GNOME in college, largely due to… well, to be honest, laziness and the path of least resistance. But I actually have very little insight into how the GNOME community works, what GNOME is all about, why it’s awesome, things to try with it, etc. Various places on the GNOME website seem like a good resource to start with for understanding this.

A list of use cases: This is something I should be adding to as the week goes by, but I’m trying to think of a list of tasks I’d want to be able to accomplish with any desktop, so I have something to compare with. I’m not sure how one goes about building a good list like this for comparing desktops, but that list is at least a stub where I’m attempting to start. Edits welcome. I’ll take notes on what it takes to complete each task in each desktop during the week of the test (and the first week I switch back).

Ultimately, I pretty much agree with Stormy: it’s not a GNOME vs KDE thing for me, it’s about trying to understand the uniqueness – and the richness – of both projects for what they are and what they’re trying to be, and getting a better feel for what is in the land of open source desktops, and why. I sometimes (er, often) feel far less informed about the various components of the stack I run than I should be, and this is one of many attempts to rectify a portion of that – and to learn stuff while having fun. It’s an experiment! We’ll see how it pans out.

As an upside, I’m also learning how people with very little context into a piece of software and its community start hunting for clues as to what that project is all about – and yes, I’ll blog about this for Fedora Marketing as notes pop up. We do have much to learn.

What I learned at Shmoocon 2010

2010-02-08T01:32:55+00:00

Freezing hd's for recovery purposes is not a good idea.Bluetooth hacking is easy.Marriott skylights don't support 2ft of snow and it does snow in the lobby during special events.Wifi is something that no one does correctly, and even if it is done correctly, it's easy to break into and mess with.Fedora's early days gave users a bad taste that they still remember so many are now using ubuntu or

PackageKit

2010-02-07T23:27:46+00:00

When I first used Fedora, PackageKit didn’t exist. I had no Internet connection either. So I used a local repository that I had to configure with a lot of reading and googling. I was a newbie with no Internet connection, using one of the most difficult distros by that time. So, I managed to compile most applications which did not install by default or not contained in the media install. It was a lot of work and learning. When I finally accomplished my local repository I said “C’mon, what do I need Windows for?“

It was something I had to do every time there was a new Fedora release, until I get Internet connection using Fedora 9, and then PackageKit came. It was so dissapointing. I switched to Yumex with some relief. But then I realized that the most fastest and practical way to install your packages was yum. Simply.

Everybody was complaining about PackageKit.

And thus is how I said goodbye to PackageKit and had a big welcome for the simplest and fastest way to install in Fedora: yum.

Recently someone told me Packagekit is no more the turtle it used to be; but, sorry, I am happy installing via yum

Besides, even installing with yum I get PackageKit causing this never ending error:

$ sudo yum install compiz-fusion Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, presto, refresh-packagekit Existing lock /var/run/yum.pid: another copy is running as pid 9189. Another app is currently holding the yum lock; waiting for it to exit... The other application is: PackageKit Memory : 84 M RSS (108 MB VSZ) Started: Sun Feb 7 16:56:08 2010 - 01:00 ago State : Uninteruptable, pid: 9189 Another app is currently holding the yum lock; waiting for it to exit... The other application is: PackageKit Memory : 84 M RSS (108 MB VSZ) Started: Sun Feb 7 16:56:08 2010 - 01:02 ago State : Uninteruptable, pid: 9189

This error comes when PackageKit is locked to fetch update database. It does that in the background.

Maybe some day I give it a try, though it may be just to make things easier for someone is used to install in graphical mode.

Fosdem 2010 Day 2 (End)

2010-02-07T19:47:00+00:00

Back on FOSDEM 2010

La fin du FOSDEM 2010

English version

There we are, on the way back home.
These 2 days have been really nice, this event is attracting every year more and more people and covers more and more topics.

Today I have been able to attend 2 very interesting conferences. One from Richard Hughes on PackageKit one year after. It is a very good tool and the future of it, looks really nice. After that I stayed for the talk on 'Semantic Desktop' this being a technology that I have professionally interest in. The conferences covered a quick introduction to the basis of the semantic technology and format with a quick presentation of the RDF format, the second part was more applied to the implication of the semantic technology in the development of the 'Desktop Environment'. Unfortunately time was running I could not stay to this part.
I have to say that I would love to see more conference about this, but FOSDEM is probably not the best place for that. I should look for more semantic oriented conference.

Thanks to Max I am also carrying with me about 600 laptop stickers that the French NPO will be able to redistribute, thanks a lot Max !

Finally I would like to thanks all the people that made this FOSDEM such a good one, starting of course by the FOSDEM people and Frederic who organised the Fedora and JBoss participation this year again. Thanks to all the folks from Grece, Turkey, USA, The Netherlands (yes there were some, although not all were real Dutch), the German community present as ever, the French and Belgium guys who showed up but also our ambassadors from Switzerland, Hungary, Roumania, Italy (I am probably missing some, sorry about that).

I was nice to see all and I am already looking forward to see you next year.

PS: Nicu if you read this, since I could not pay you a beer today, let me know how to be sure you get one. I want the Fedora Comic back !! ;-)

Starting Anew

2010-02-07T17:48:18+00:00

A few years ago I took up blogging, then ironically life got in the way, now realize how I miss it. So what should you expect from this blog? It’s really a mixed bag; their will be information on projects that I am working on in the opensource world, some school projects, some general analysis, trips and plans, and general thoughts on life.

So what do I do. Well I run a engineering consulting business, Inspired Engineering, back in my home town of Bellingham, WA, but am now on the east coast going to school at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I am a Freshman pursuing the dual-degree MBA program with a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering. It is a lot of work here, but everything is amazing.

I have also been active in the opensource world with Fedora Linux, and this year attended FUDCON, in Toronto. My current project is a system for doing metrics on a bug tracker, however first an infrastructure based on AMQP has to be implemented. Expect more information on this in the next few months.

I am also planning a solo cross-country bike ride this summer, which I am getting more excited about every day. As some of you know I am a chronic workaholic.

Comments on the design are welcome, I am still doing some tweaking to it.

Remember,

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods;

There is a rapture on the lonely shore;

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

I love not man the less, but Nature more… -Lord Byron

Live free,
Brennan Ashton

Inkscape Class Day 7

2010-02-07T16:34:59+00:00

Friday morning, I taught the seventh session of an 8-session (40 minutes per session) course on Inkscape at a Boston-area middle school. (For more general details about the class check out my blog post on day 1.)

Friday’s Class

Well, this Inkscape course is quickly wrapping up. One more class after this past one on Friday. The students’ work was due at the end of this class and they all did great work in prepping their designs for the printer. I handed out a sheet with the export instructions (available for download below.)

We weren’t exactly sure the best approach to gather up the files at first; Ken had set up a shared drive on the network for the students to save their work to, but on some of the Macs, Inkscape’s export bitmap dialog could not see the shared drive (and some could!) What we ended up doing:

Have the students export their work out to the desktop – 300 dpi, PNG format.
I asked them to use either their band name or their own name in the file so I could tell them apart.
Then, ask them open up the appropriate network drive folder and drag both the exported file and original SVG into it from the desktop.
I then connected to the shared drive, inspected all the files to make sure they had exported correctly (they had! If they hadn’t, I would have gone back to the students whose files had issues and tried to help them re-export them.)
I then copied the files from the network drive onto a USB key.
Immediately after I got back to the office, I went through the files carefully, adding the requested T-shirt size from the students’ filled-out T-shirt size sign-up sheet from day 5 of class. My naming scheme was the following format:

01-studentfirstname-bandname-sizeS.png
I then uploaded the files to a URL, both as individual files and bundled in a zip file for Walter’s convenience – then I emailed Walter the URLs.
John called Walter from EmbroidMe Chelmsford up to make sure he had gotten the email (he hadn’t yet, so great thinking on John’s part) and Walter set out setting up the T-shirts that morning.

A few things we learned from this process I think you could take away in teaching a similar class to make it run more smoothly:

Make sure you pass that T-shirt size signup sheet around early on, and keep bringing it back to class until every student has filled it out. Students are absent sometimes, especially in the winter cold season, and you want to make sure you’ve got each student’s size.
We had one student absent this past Friday. We’ll get his file on the last day of class and get his T-shirt to him after the class is over. That being said, you may want to have the students save out to a shared drive throughout the class (we weren’t doing that, we were having them use their individual accounts) and in the days of class past the halfway mark of the entire course, ask the students if they are going to be there for every day, and if not would they like us to go ahead and print their files if they’re not there or to wait.
Make it easier for your printer and put the students’ T-shirt sizes in the file name.
Make sure you get the students’ SVGs as well as PNGs! Rendering PNGs from SVGs with a lot of blurs can take a long time! I was really surprised by this. The Whisp logo took the longest – a good 15-20 minutes to render! If you have the students’ SVG files as well and run out of time during class, it enables you to do the rendering on your own post-class to make sure the printer will get the files on time. It’s also good to have the SVGs in case you or the printer notice any issues with the PNG that might have been missed during class.
Bundling the files into one compressed file makes it easier for them to download than individual files.
If you’re on a tight deadline, don’t rely on email only – give your printer a call!

Many students were finished with time to spare, so they had the rest of the period to explore Inkscape on their own. They came up with some very cool sketches using the techniques they learned throughout the class:

You can see the full set of photos John took of the students’ work in the Flickr album for session 7. On Tuesday, if all goes well (fingers crossed!) we’ll hand out the T-shirts and do some fun exercises with Inkscape, so look forward to those photos.

Follow Along on Your Own

Here’s the lesson sheet we used for class on Friday:

Introduction to Inkscape Lesson 7

As always, the OpenOffice.org source files and the outlines for the entire course are at the course page on my website – but please note that’s a rough outline; as we progress through the class I’m coming up with the more-solid lesson plans based on how far the students get each session. By the end of the course I hope to have the course page organized much better.

By the way, if you’d like to follow all the blog posts about this class at one URL without getting the rest of my feed, I’ve set up a category in WordPress specifically for these posts:

http://mairin.wordpress.com/category/inkscape-class/

Enjoy! And please do let me know in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions

This course is sponsored by

Filed under: Inkscape Class

Just Like Three Weeks Ago

2010-02-07T16:08:22+00:00

Yesterday (2010-02-06) Benjamin and myself were again in Lech/Zürs snowboarding; just like three weeks ago. Last time (2010-01-17) Pattrick and Torsten were also able to join. This time it was only Benjamin and me.

The weather was similar to our last visit. Mostly cloudy with a few peeks of sunshine. This time, however, we had lots of new deep powder and it was freeriding time. Extremely exhausting but great fun.

SoaS deployment hardware: the ideal set

2010-02-07T14:26:05+00:00

One of my two jobs for the week for Lynne May’s SoaS deployment is getting hardware for all this to run on.

The first (and largest) purchases we’ll have to make are the netbooks. Peter Robinson, our resident Fedora netbook guru, looked earlier for something that fit our specs and price range ($1000 USD for 3 netbooks) while being sturdily-built (mechanical design is important; we’ve got first-graders here) with a good battery life. One requirement was known compatibility with recent versions of Fedora, since SoaS is Fedora-based (the next release will be a Fedora Spin) and we’re trying to stack the deck in favor of the software and hardware working together as smoothly as possible. Based on these criteria, Peter recommended the Acer Aspire One 532h, which is about $300.

(photo cc-by from ndevil)

Lynne May also wanted a little video/still camera to capture the students playing with Sugar – they’re still learning to read and write, so having an easy way to record verbal presentations (and demos/screencasts, for that matter) in the classroom means we’ll get that much more documented output. (We will, however, need to get permission from the parents of individual kids to share the video material.) But right now we just need to get the hardware – so I pointed her towards the Kodak zi8 which can be had refurbished for about $150 USD and has gotten a big thumbs-up from Mo Duffy. Seriously, I borrowed it at the office two months after she got it and she was still raving about it, so it’s got to be good stuff. Waiting for the +1 on funding for that.

(One of the things I’ve learned while writing this post: finding CC-licensed photos of hardware is hard. I couldn’t find one for the zi8.)

And of course we need the sticks themselves. We need 14 sticks (9 students, 1 teacher, 4 testing/backup) and need them to have caps that aren’t removable, because that’s just asking for lost caps in a classroom full of 6-7 year olds. Other than that, we don’t really care what we get, so this should be easy to source once we get the (very small) amount of funding needed for them. (Yes, when you’re working with a classroom, $100 can be a blocker.)

(Original images cc-by from molotalk – superdry, red bull/honda, ship, and banana. Also, this picture should make it painfully obvious why I need friends like Nikki to fix my wince-inducing color schemes.)

I’m going to be placing orders early on Monday morning, so any last-minute feedback (including running screaming in our direction going “noooooooooo this is a bad ideaaaaaaa!” if applicable) would be muchly appreciated.