Fedora Design Team Planet

Maria "tatica" Leandro: FUDcon Margarita 2012: From -20 to -18 weeks

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 17:28:31 +0000

Si eres de habla hispana, da click en este enlace para leer la versión en español

In our past meeting we finally pick a date that doesn’t collide with RHSummit and don’t increase prices (hollidays). FUDCon Margarita 2012 will take place on June 14-15-16-17. Even if this cut off 2 weeks from planning we are all happy with this date.

You can read Logs and Minutes in here: Minutes (spanish) and Logs (spanish)

Also, we are just waiting for the appoval letter from UDO Margarita (Guatamare) which will be the venue for this event. UDO, Universidad de Oriente, is a University that has been open to students from all arround our country since 1969. You can read more about UDO in this link (Spanish)

Every week we get a new contributor that helps the team and adds a key spot. We will spend weekend working on Sponsorship letters (final tweaks), Marketing stuff and Sponsorship request since local sponsors LOVE to see everything organized. I’m sure that next week we will start to reach more goals.

Work as a team and keep everything open and clear is the OpenSource way to build a community… I really hope this small weekly-posts about what’s happening with FUDCon LATAM can provide a small window that helps us to reach the transparency goal, and give everyone the chance to, not only know what’s going on, but also provide feedback (even if you’re not in Venezuela).

Luya Tshimbalanga: Gimp and CMYK

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:39:03 +0000

Reading an post about CMYK support on Gimp is fascinating. For years, GIMP is my image editor of choice in completion of Krita for web publishing, photography and desktop publishing. The CMYK support debate shows how many designers forgot they mostly work screen in RGB and CMYK is mainly for printing. Because of the different process of ink, there is no guarantee the colours from CMYK will be the same on every printers.
Thankfully, majority of printing computer requires RGB file to avoid headache.

Sirko Kemter: Back from FOSDEM

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:27:36 +0000

It was definitly damn cold in Brussel, but warmer then at home. The FOSDEM begun with a damn hard ride to Brussel, we needed 12 hours to go there. But we had some time to meet some friends at the beer event. As Jörg said the booth wasnt really good prepared. On saturday I spent the whole day on the booth ( I dont know why because I didnt add me to the personal list in the wiki). But I had still some time to say personally THX to some people who donated to the “Tatica Travel Campaign” on pledgie, like the guys from Libre Graphics Magazin. On the evening I went together with Nicu to the Libre Graphics Dinner and we had some chats about graphic stuff and the upcoming LGM in Vienna. Btw, there is also a campaign for donations on pledgie, so if you use GIMP, Inkscape, Krita, Blender and all the other cool graphic software you can say THX with a small donation.

On sunday I spent most of the time in the OpenICC dev room, listen to the talks about color managment, I also had a talk about Taxi DB there. The cool thing was some asked in the talk about the OpenICC organization exactly for an application like this, so I had a good idea After the track the FOSDEM ended and we left for riding home another 14 hours horror trip.

Maria "tatica" Leandro: Teaching and spreading Fedora through videos

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:25:40 +0000

One of the things that always make me feel happy when friends ask me “why are you part of Fedora” is that everyday you will find a great idea, a great project or an awesome team to be part of. When we change our status from “user” to “contributor”, we agree to teach what we know and try to make FOSS tools and strategies go further. So now let me tell you about our new project… Fedora Videos:

What is Fedora Videos?

Our contributor Nitesh Narayan Lal came up with an idea to create a serie of videos and give our users an interface to check them on an easier way. We could say that we want to teach fedora through videos… but I’m sure that this project might have bigger goals in a short lapse.

Will be there a guidelines?

Yes, but consider it more like “recommendations”. We want to gather the best videos from the net, created by users and enthusiast, and turn them info Fedora official videos. Yes… we are thinking on give you an intro/outro and some easy tips so our job making translations and sharing can be easier. Right now we are working on this guidelines and you can actually check how it goes in here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Niteshnarayan/video_tutorials/Guidelines

How can I search though so many Videos?

Yes, But we need your help! We think that use the *Join Fedora categories* might be a good start, but we need more sub-categories. Nitesh has done a great work on this… can you help us improve it a bit more? Check: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Niteshnarayan/video_tutorials/Guidelines#Video_Categories

Current Tasks

In our amazing first meeting we start with some task that are currently under development. Tasks so far goes this way:

Create a guidelines for official videos – bckurera, tatica and Nitesh Guidelines first draft
Create a guidelines for submit and publish videos – bckurera, tatica and Nitesh Guidelines first draft
Categorize video sections by interests or teams – Nitesh Sections first draft
Check privacy, licenses and Ads for each service and Check on HTML5 alternatives who link you to the theora – FranciscoD: Analysis

Now, on a more personal task I’m needing people who have some experience with Video edit and intro creations. I might be able to do a Blender intro but I want to have some experienced hand to have some support and guide. Let me know if you can give us a hand :)

If I have an idea to share, a video to spread or just want to be part of this project, what should I do?

All mayor stuff will be online at our wiki, however, if you can make it to our meetings and share one hour weekly with us will be amazing. We will gather every Thursday at 1530UTC (Check your local time/date here)

Nicu Buculei: On why GNOME got to suck so badly

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 13:34:00 +0000

Below are a few snaps from a FOSDEM presentation by GNOME's Allan and Seif about "how to trick a developer to being a designer":So no wonder GNOME got to suck so badly and more and more people fondly remember the "good old days" when software used to be made by engineers and get your job done.

Nicu Buculei: Contributor communities @FOSDEM

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 11:16:00 +0000

Right now I am sitting in the room 1301 of the H building of the ULB at FOSDEM 2012 and watching the Working with contributor communities round table, which is moderated by Cristoph, which tries to be as impartial as possible:

On behalf of Fedora (other represented distros are, from left to right, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian, Mageia and Gentoo I believe) we have Joerg speaking:

Nicu Buculei: LGM @FOSDEM 2012

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 11:08:00 +0000

Yesterday evening, after the first day of FOSDEM, there was the dinner of the Libre Graphics people, talking about the upcoming conference in May in Vienna but not only, mostly having fun and catching-up:

Nicu Buculei: FOSDEM fanservice

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 10:59:00 +0000

I got a couple of personal requests, so I cannot disappoint my fans, fulfilling their inquiries now. One was for a picture of the official FOSDEM T-shirt design for this year (this is a tradition for the conference, to come every year with a completely new design):

The other one was for a photo of the Debian booth, which happens to be this year one of the busiest, being fillet with a lot of merchandise, mostly nice T-shirts. Too bad I don't see the Debian wine any more...

And being a nasty person, I will complete the circle with a picture of the wasteland at our own Fedora booth:

Nicu Buculei: FOSDEM 2012

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 10:22:00 +0000

After many adventures in snow and very cold weather (an about 5 hours delayed flight) I managed to finally reach a frozen Brussels yesterday late in the evening: Due to the unexpected delay, I missed the FAD and the traditional Drug Opera dinner, but at least got to the even more traditional (and important?) beer event at Delirium Cafe, making the first contact with the Fedora gang and many others:Today morning everybody goes to ULB for the FOSDEM conference:The Fedora team is, of course, here, preparing the booth. You can find us in the new K building, along with many other projects, like FSF, Mozilla, CentOS, Debian, openSUSE, Mageia, to mention a few:And the conference started, time for me to stop blogging and go meeting people, roam around, do things:

Maria "tatica" Leandro: Fedora APAC: Insights and Ideas from a midnight meeting

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 06:05:43 +0000

After our Fedora Videos meeting I found really interesting how organized are Fedora APAC community members. I must be honest, beside help them with some FUDCon Pune tasks I had no clue about what was going on at APAC. So I decide to stay until midnight (LATAM) and check out this saturday APAC meeting (morning).

Following the rules

* Respecting Meetings protocol: Dear lord… was so nice to have people respecting IRC meeting protocols that I really felt on heaven. When you have a really structured meetings wiki page, that people actually reads, everything is just easier.

* Knowing zodbot: everything is easier when you know how to work with zodbot. First time I see on a meeting that all attendees are mark as chair for a meetin (even me).

* Quorum: Is really nice to see a lot of people being at meetings and participating. Quorum is always an issue at any meeting. either we talk about time/date collide or just people not beign interested. Community members should try a bit harder to attend to meetings (even if sometimes are bored), you might always know about something new or provide a good idea.

* Mistakes: If you make a mistake, get slow on sending your message, got some lag, your nick was jumping or just missunderstood something… don’t make a big deal and keep the meeting going. Everyone can make a mistake, so don’t turn it into a meeting topic.

* Local leaders show up: This might be the most interesting, as community contributor, that you can find on a meeting. When a local (or general) leader shows up and interact on the meeting means that people care. Motivation and example arethea key that we should try to take advantage of every time we can.

Activities to spread Fedora

* Ton of Release Parties: Yes… perhaps only 2 so far, but they are working a lot and are already organized for this activities. This only encourage me to plan a Fedora Release Party full with Beefy Miracles :)

* Marketing Swags: When we talk about a big region this is a common issue that is always hard to work with. At LATAM we are still working on this, however, we are 21 countries (plus 9 dependencies), and even if we still have some unexplored places, we have to deal with shipping prices that most of the times, are equal to bring swags from EMEA.

* Media: I don’t know if I’m the only that receives perhaps 300% more tickets from APAC that from anywhere else. This means that Fedora media-program is beign effective in this region. Perhaps simplify how we send media, how we produce it and who can really make shipments can be a solution. For those locations where our users cannot get (or is too expensive) maybe contact a local company, school or college might be a solution. I guess is easier just to send a couple of bucks to a local person to buy a dvd pack that ship a single dvd through mail.

Sorry Shakthimaan - by Shreyank Gupta

I will keep trying to attend to each regional meeting. I think that know what’s happening all arround the world can teach us how to improove. Take a look arround, learn from your peers goals and failures, and make everyone take a step into change. “I never thought we could transform the world, but I think every day you can transform things.”- Françoise Giroud.

Maria "tatica" Leandro: FUDcon Margarita 2012: -21 weeks

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:16:11 +0000

Si eres de habla hispana, da click en este enlace para leer la versión en español

Is really cool to see how FUDCon Margarita is taking shape. I always love to see how an idea become something real and how people envolved work as a team to acomplish each goal. Fedora is the kind of place where you want to hang out if you want to be part of something :)

This week was full of tasks. We had our first meeting, which was really productive, and we delegate most of the tasks. That’s the way to work as team, however, we need to be more open and inform the rest of what we are doing, so our task don’t collide. We separate task this way: Travels – Location – Marketing.

You can find meeting logs and minutes in here: All minutes are in here… yes, in spanish: Minutes – Minutes (text) – Log

Acording to artwork, I have been working on some posters (which were awful) but thx to the help of our amazing team have started to take some shape. Like always, you can see progress on my tatica.Fedorapeople space or just ping me directly.

We are still dealing with dates and location since RHsummit is at same week we wanted to held FUDcon… but with our amazing team I’m sure we will figure this out soon.

Remember to join us next week, wednesday at 2230UTC (check your local time in here) at #fudcon-planning (and yes… everyone can attend, Fedora contributor or just an enthusiast)

Note: Now you might be asking yourself: Why is she posting this in english and not spanish? Because i need -some- of our sponsors to know what are we doing in their native language :) If you want to read this in spanish, please click here

Luya Tshimbalanga: Goal for/Objectif pour 2012

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:49:20 +0000

English

January is already over. For 2012, here is the goals I set:

- Improve productivity for design department from identity to magazine.
- Daily icon design inspired from artists like Jakub Steiner and more.
- Sponsor some free and open source project like Blender with its incoming movie codenamed Mango and Gimp for fully switch to GEGL engine. - For business part, fully expand the use of free and open source tools.
- For Fedora Project, work on opened tickets, active participation on Anaconda UI with more refinement, more fonts packaging and active usage of Synfig.

Français

Le mois de janvier est déjà terminé. Pour 2012, voici les objectifs que je me suis établi:

- Amélioration des productivités sur le département infographique de l'identité au magazine.
- Dessin quotidien des icônes graphiques inspirés des artistes comme Jakub Steiner et plus.
- Subvention des projects des logiciels libre comme Blender pour leur film nom de code Mango et Gimp pour la transition complète au moteur GEGL.
- Pour la partie affaire, étendre l'usage des logiciels libres.
- Four le projet Fedora, travaux sur les tickets ouverts, participation active sur l'interface Anaconda, empaquetage des polices et usage active de Synfig.

Maria "tatica" Leandro: Librebus: Viajando por el conocimiento libre

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:43:36 +0000

El LibreBus es un proyecto en el que se recorren varios países de la región centroamericana (Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador y Guatemala) y se complementa con espacios de participación en Internet… Una veintena de personas pasajeras de diversas nacionalidades y distintas habilidades se unen por un tema común: la Cultura Libre y la promoción del conocimiento para todos. El LibreBus es una invitación al diálogo y al encuentro, a la creación de redes regionales para el fortalecimiento de una cultura centroamericana compartida.

El año pasado, el LibreBus viajó desde el 03 hasta el 16 de mayo de 2011, intercambiando experiencias alrededor del software libre, el conocimiento y la biodiversidad, la libertad de expresión y la libertad de compartir. La idea del recorrido, además de llegar a las distintas ciudades, es ir trabajando los conceptos, problematizando las propuestas, deconstruyendo esas “soluciones” que ya se tienen enquistadas en las ideas y promover así la discusión y reconstrucción colectiva de alternativas.

Si quieres ver como es el Librebus por dentro, como es la experiencia y te animas, entonces date unos 30min para que veas este clip. Creo que si tenemos tiempo de ver una serie en tv, ver las noticias o ver una peli en casa, esta es una peli que no solo nutrirá tu intelecto sino tu alma, porque las experiencias de vida se deben compartir. No olvides de visitarlos en: http://librebus.org/

Para quienes no pueden ver el embeded de youtube, el link directo es: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqUXkC7Iu9I

Maria "tatica" Leandro: Help Tatica travel to LGM

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:08:46 +0000

Maybe you have heard, that the next LGM – Libre Graphics Meeting, will be held in Vienna from May 2nd to Saturday May 5th That is the place where all the great and amazing FOSS artists and developers of the tools they use come together.

For a lot of years, I have followed this event online.There was always amazing projects, ideas on this event. I live on the other side of the world and is really hard for me to attend. Flights from South America to Europe are really expensive. My crazy… Crazy friend Sirko (gnokii) created a donations page, where people can make donations.

If I have helped you once, so maybe you can help me this time. :)

Those who have already made a donation, there will be a special surprise for you on retribution. So what do you say… ready to help me attend LGM and let me bring that amazing knowledge and experiences back to
Latinamerica?

Here is what Gnokii wrote on Pledgie:

“Maybe you know that girl here. You know she does a lot for FLOSS, using GIMP, Inkscape and Blender. Its not that she makes only graphics for Fedora and a lot of othere FLOSS-projects or events. She also give her knowledge always to others, giving talks and workshops on events or producing screencasts.

She always wanted to see an FLOSS event in europe, so the Libre Graphics Meeting and LinuxWochen Vienna would be the right event for her.
There is only one problem, flights from south america to europe are really expensive. From Caracas to Vienna is mostly between 1500 and 1700 $, why 2500 then. So maybe we can pay the hotel also? ;)”

Maria "tatica" Leandro: Thermaltake on Andromeda!

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:05:23 +0000

One of the things that I *had* to buy at USA was a power supply since my desktop computer was always shutting down when I plug anything (I couldn’t even use my DVD :/ )

Even if this wasn’t the one I was thinking on buy, was the best option. We went to so many stores that I was really driving crazy, however, worth it. I had saves for this since last year, because if you think on buy this kind of electronics in my country is completely insane (prices are +500%).

Now I can say that I have a *monster* at home where I can start to render my blender videos again and do all the crazy stuff I like to do :D. Sadly, now I have to wait a bit more to use it since where I’m living now only has enough space for me to… sleep… but at least I have weekends to play with it at my grandparents home :D

If you´re needing one… the thermaltake TR2 600w (W0388RU) is a good choice :) Here you can read all tech specifications

Maria "tatica" Leandro: Learn, Teach, Help, Enjoy

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 04:36:41 +0000

I think this 4 words can resume pretty much what’s FOSS about. A couple of months ago I had a small shutdown from linux communities since *real life* was going on, and with some friends help, I tried to figure out *why* we do what we do. Talking and giving a meaning to every action we take on this online world this 4 words got to resume everything. Why?:

Learn:

There is NO WAY you can be on ANY FOSS community or group if you are not willing to learn. Life itself is a learning journey that will take you to unknown places where you might get amazed. Some people join FOSS communities thinking that know everything, but soon they realize that there is no way you can know everything, and you will always learn something new, just need to keep your mind open :)

Teach:

Be a FOSS contributor is be a student and a teacher. Open Source way teach us that what we learn must be teach because you don’t know where is that next contributor that might change the source code of your world. Teach however isn’t easy. You must be patient, perseverant and if non of those work… friendly to send them to other teacher. We never say no, there is always an answer for everything.

Help:

Help people is what we do. We get up everyday and turn on our pc (some just never go off) and try to make someone life easier, either with code, design or translations, each one of us help everyday to make Open Source better. If you’re not a *people person* you can always help doing something else. I’m sure people will apreciate.

Enjoy:

At the end.. you will make friends, will find people to chat every single day, you will be able to learn different languages and maybe travel to other countries. You will find a new image that bring a smile to your face or a code line that will make you breath. Every day FOSS makes people life easier and our goal as contributors is enjoy this process. Is everything perfect? No, but like life, every single day counts.

What are you waiting to join a FOSS community? There are a lot of places where you can make a difference… just give yourself a chance :) Now… help me to spread some love! (click on each to get a full size or multiple sizes.)

and some banners :) (right click to save banner images.)

Sirko Kemter: fedora@clt

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:40:08 +0000

As Jörg mentioned in his blogpost, fedora will have again an booth at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. And there will be a lot of talks from Fedora people also this year. Thorsten Lemhuis will have 3 talks “Neueste Entwicklungen im Linux-Kernel” and how you can help the development of the kernel through testing new versions and also the “Kernel Kwestioning“. Christoph Wickert will speak about Methods fighting Spam. Robert Scheck will have a talk in the Newbie-Section and will explain how easy it is to build RPM packages. Jörg Simon will speak about “Fedora Security Lab and the OSSTMM” and myself will give a session about how easy it is to do with SVG and a few lines JavaScript presentations. But I also will have an part of the workshop program, doing some popsicle with Inkscape. Jörg think its the largest number of talks Fedora people there ever had, and I know that it is the biggest So maybe you can join us at this event, there are still some open places for the booth personal.

Maria "tatica" Leandro: FUDCon Blacksburg 2012 – Behind the Scenes

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 02:12:13 +0000

Those things that made FUDcon Blacksburg unique – Fun? Come and join us at http://fedoraproject.org :)

Link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bOsE5TGeU0

Sirko Kemter: Beiträge Chemnitzer Linux-Tage

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:38:51 +0000

Das Programm der Chemnitzer Linux-Tage ist ja nun seit 2 Tagen bereits veröffentlicht. Zeit um auch mal auf meine Beiträge hinzuweisen. Ich werde mit zwei Beiträgen auf den CLT vertreten sein und zwar rund um SVG und Inkscape. Am Samstag Nachmittag können Interessierte wieder gemeinsam mit mir Inkscape einige seiner Geheimnisse der Benutzung entlocken. Da ich ja immer bei diesen Workshops ein Zielbild vorgebe, es gibt auch dieses Mal lecker Eiskrem. Auf Grund der Zeit die mir zur Verfügung steht und auch weil hier die Teilnehmerzahl begrenzt ist, plane ich nicht nur Orangeneis sondern auch die Schoko-Nuß-Variante zu zeichnen.

Am Sonntag habe ich dann noch einen Vortrag “Free Your Slides“, den dürften wohl so einige bereits kennen. Inkscape und SVG können eben nicht nur für schicke Grafiken eingesetzt werden. SVG, one of the most underused technologies in website development today, wie Smashingmagazin vor einigen Tagen geschrieben hat. Das man Präsentation in Handumdrehen und ganz einfach und mit schicken Effekten erzeugen kann zeigt dieser Vortrag. Na dann man sieht sich.

P.S. Mein Inkscape – Praxisbuch, sollte bis dahin erschienen sein, eine gute Gelegenheit sich das Autogramm des Autors zu holen. Ich arbeite jedenfalls mit Hochdruck an der Fertigstellung.

Sirko Kemter: Vienna Calling

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:18:11 +0000

Im April und Mai ist es wieder soweit, Linux und Open Source tourt durch Österreich. Den Anfang machen die LinuxTage in Graz, welche bereits auf der Suche nach interessanten Beiträgen sind und am 28. April statt finden. Die Einreichungsfrist für Beiträge endet Mitte März. Am 3. Mai geht es dann weiter in Wien und zwar bis zum 5. Mai. Auch hier sind die Macher bereits auf der Suche nach Austellern und Beiträgen.

Die LinuxWochen in Wien haben für dieses Jahr folgende Schwerpunkte im Programm: Audio, Multimedia & Arts (Sound Design, Videoschnitt,…), Content Management, Webanwendungen, Webprogrammierung , Datenschutz, Verschlüsselung, Free Software (Gnu, GPG, Tor, …), Robotik und Steuerung (Arduino, Lego Mindstorm, …), GIS, GeoDaten, OpenData (Grass, OpenStreetMap, QGis, …) , IT Security, Programme für Home und Office PCs (Office, Browser, Email, …), Smartphones Hardware und Software (z.B. Android), Software Entwicklung von Anwendungen bis Embedded Devices, Grafik, Visualisierung, 3D (Gimp, Blender, Inkscape, …), Spieleentwicklung & Game Design & Level Editing, Systemadministration, Cloud & Cluster, Virtualisierung. Bis zum 1. April kann man hier Beiträge einreichen.
Besonders unter dem Punkt Grafik und 3D wird man wohl sehr viel in diesem Jahr finden, da das LibreGraphicsMeeting ebenfalls zu diesem Zeitraum unter dem Dach der LinuxWochen stattfinden wird. Hier treffen sich die Entwickler, wohl nahezu aller bekannten Open Source Programme aus dem Bereich Grafik, um sich auszutauschen. Wer selbst all die schönen Programm wie GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, Blender, DigiKam, Hugin, Krita, MyPaint, Pitivi und viele andere benutzt und ein kleines Dankeschön dafür geben will, hat hier die Chance. Das LibreGraphicsMeeting hat wie im vergangenen Jahr wieder ein Pledgie, mit dem man das LGM unterstützen kann, das Geld dient zur Unterstützung der anreisenden Entwickler bei den Reisekosten. Leider ist im vergangenem Jahr nicht genügend zusammengekommen, also unterstützt die Entwickler der Programme

Es wird sich also lohnen, an den LinuxWochen in Wien teilzunehmen. Ich selbst werde wohl ganz sicher, wie alle Jahre, wieder vor Ort sein und sicher auch mit Workshops zu Inkscape & Co. und Vorträgen vertreten sein.

Maria "tatica" Leandro: FUDcon Margarita 2012: -22 weeks

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:01:57 +0000

Si eres de habla hispana, da click en este enlace para leer la versión en español

I will try to make a weekly post about how is FUDcon planning going on. This will be the first time I organize an event where people from different countries and that’s pretty cool.

For those of you who don’t know what is FUDcon, is the Fedora Users and Developers Conference, a major free software event held in various regions around the world, usually annually per region. FUDCon is a combination of sessions, talks, workshops, and hackfests in which contributors work on specific initiatives. Topics include infrastructure, feature development, community building, general management and governance, marketing, testing and QA, packaging, etc. FUDCon is always free to attend for anyone in the world so if you’re near, come by :)

I can say that the first -real- planning week for me started right after I arrive to Venezuela from FUDCon Blacksburg. I had an amazing oportunity to watch closely to everything that needs to be done at FUDcons. Even if people sometimes didn’t saw me, I was usually taking notes and making weird plans at sessions, halls and even at the fireplace. Be able to see some FUDcons, and be close to the organizers gave me a different perspective, I’m really grateful for that.

Artwork, yes…

First thing I came up with was design (dohh…) since I know we need a logo that represent us as country. Our logo was created with the base FUDcon logo + 2 cliparts from openclipart.org (which I made some modifications to fit our needs). A Puerto Rican Cuatro (modify) and some Maracas, both from from Jeffryroldan. We are a tropical country and a very colorful one, so that’s why this is our logo :) – High-resolution PNG can be found here and SVG sources here.

Letters and more papers

One of the things that Organize events like FLISoL and others taught me was that, everyone needs a paper to sign or see. First, we need to have something to present the event to potential sponsors, because… things cost money. I used as base part of the letters from FLISoL and adapt them, so I don’t need to work too much on things I already have done. Is not ready, but feel free to take a look (might be in spanish right now, but I ask help to translate.team, so we can re-use it everytime we need to), is not complete since we still doesn’t know exactly what we need, and there are some items to check first, however, I’m sure is a good start.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Margarita2012/Organization/Sponsorship

Since I’m a designer, our brochure (or letters) will need covers and letterheads, so if you want to take a look click here and check them out: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Margarita2012/Organization#Artwork

Bills, payments and headaches

I think the chaos starts when you need to pay, or at that moment when you realize that you cannot buy the world. In order to know how much do we need, we must make a list to identify those items that need to be paid. In our case, the list is just starting. If you see that we are missing something, or you have an amazing idea, or just know a sponsor that can take care of this.. PLEASE let me know ASAP.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Margarita2012/Organization#Sponsorship_requests

First week, hotel, college and some potential sponsors are beign contact… work continues to bring you an amazing FUDcon full with knowledge, hard work and friends to spend an awesome weekend in Venezuela.

Sirko Kemter: need some money…

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:34:14 +0000

No not for me, for someone else I made a little pledgie for it, for what the money is you can read there or maybe the graphic speaks for it.

Maria "tatica" Leandro: FLISoL 2012 en marcha!

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:30:13 +0000

El Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre (FLISoL) es el evento de difusión de Software Libre más grande en Latinoamérica. Se realiza desde el año 2005. Su principal objetivo es promover el uso del software libre, dando a conocer al público en general su filosofía, alcances, avances y desarrollo.

A tal fin, las diversas comunidades locales de software libre (en cada país/ciudad/localidad), organizan simultáneamente eventos en los que se instala, de manera gratuita y totalmente legal, software libre en las computadoras que llevan los asistentes. Además, en forma paralela, se ofrecen charlas, ponencias y talleres, sobre temáticas locales, nacionales y latinoamericanas en torno al Software Libre, en toda su gama de expresiones: artística, académica, empresarial y social.

En Venezuela, el FLISoL se estará celebrando el día sábado 28 de Abril al igual que en el resto de Latinoamérica. Si quieres ser parte del FLISoL bien sea como colaborador o como organizador, no olvides dar un vistazo a la wiki oficial:

http://flisol.info/FLISOL2012/Venezuela

Recuerda también que en Venezuela, los últimos 4 años hemos hecho un esfuerzo enorme en dar mayor exposición al evento, convirtiéndonos en bandera de difusión en todo el continente. Revisa eventualmente también todos los recursos que ponemos a tu disposición, y recuerda que esta servidora; quien no estará a cargo de Caracas este año, siempre estará ahí para darles una mano :)

Este año me enfocaré a nivel internacional en ayudar tanto con las tareas de diseño, publicidad, marketing y patrocinios internacionales; utilizando esa experiencia que fue llevar la batuta del FLISoL en Venezuela los últimos 4 años. Nuevamente, agradezco a todos el apoyo que siempre me han brindado :)

Fecha: 28 de Abril
Website: http://flisol.org.ve
twitter: @flisolve
Identi.ca: @flisolve
Flickr 2011: Flisol 2011

Nicu Buculei: Winter wallpapers

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:05:00 +0000

Some more freely licensed wallpaper sized photos (wide), this time with a winter theme, use as you want:

Maria "tatica" Leandro: Why people should understand that FOSS users have a live outside Fedora

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:29:30 +0000

We are internet addicts and there is no way we can hide it. We live from 10 to 20 hours using our gadgets and jet mad when others ask us to stop and “enjoy the real world for a while”… This is OUR real world, why can’t people understand it?

Our social live, or some part of it, happens inside a screen, and we are uses to help because we learn from someone who also took part of his/her time to show us how special Fedora community is.

But every fairy tale has his dark side… What happens when people doesn’t understand that is not a requirement to be 24/7 waiting for someone who needs help? Problem is’t them… We are!

I can only use my experience as base for this: I have been using Fedora for about 5 years now and i was one of those who spend hours reading what people had to say because “there was a big chance to learn something from them”.

Most of the time that’s what happens… But when you are near 15 hours on IRC you become the person who give answers and knows who can provide them in case you don’t know what to reply.

Slowly, we create a dependency on people and they get used to see us Always on IRC/Mail_list/Whatever and we also delay meals and other activities because “we can give a short reply and will help”.

On an ideal world we could live that way, but truth is that we cannot because we have family, jobs and some of us are seeking to have a life outside the Box.

Now that we know that is our fault we need to consider what to do. People is already used to this behavier and new contributors have learn that this is the way things work… So is not weird to see someone mad if we are not online. So, what can we do?

1) Would be nice to tell them to go to… But we cannot.
We need to stablish limits. add that kind of info on your wiki user page or run a calendar that you can share with people. Let them know that your time is partialy dedicated to Fedora.

2) interact beyond the chat: people wont understand what you do outside Fedora if you don’t let them know.
I’m not asking to twit what are you doing at the bathroom or how many drinks you had… But a couple of daily/weekly facts about your non-robotic life may work.

3) help hem to learn what you know instead link them to everything:
Isn’t nice when someone ask you “hey, which is the Fedora site URL?” … Seriously….
If you’re an troll try with www.lmgtfy.com or simply point him/her how to Google it, how to contact other contributors, how to analize their problems… Don’t create a dependency on your shoulders. Create leaders, mentors and creative people.

4) You’re a community member… use that!
If you’re a developer and think on ideas to decreasse the dependency of new users, then do something (like ask.fedora), if you’re a designer or marketing team member then create a campaign (like we will with videos.fedora) or if you have anything in your head.. please, tell us. The only way to apply is to act, doesn’t matter if you only have 10min to explain us your ideas or you have 3 days to develop it.

5) if anything works… Turn arround and help the next one.
Is as hard as it sounds. However, we are a free-to-join community and everyday people comes and goes. It hurts, but that’s how it works.

What to expect?
People may not change or react to this in a while, however, people will change at the end. If we not start changing what we believe is not ok, we might get used to what is wrong. Make people Change is almost imposible, but we can all learn to adapt.

We need to stop showing how much we know everytime we can and start pushing people to learn and teach what they can do… Teach them how to fish with their own TCP/IP cables.

Sirko Kemter: Call A Cab To Bring The Colors

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:50:01 +0000

Before I left openSUSE I had an little idea how to bring color managment on the Linux desktop forward. If you use colord or Oyranos on the end you will need always ICC-profiles. On ubuntu you can install the package icc-profiles and you will have the most profiles for printing jobs mostly from Adobe. For Fedora and openSUSE you have to download them from Adobe. But this is easy against finding profiles from some hardware manufacturers. Sometimes it is an adventure to finde them, I can tell you that. It should be easy to build a platform for sharing free profiles and if there is an API applications can download them from there.
Now its not really only an idea anymore.

Last summer Sebastian Oliva worked as GSoC student on it, now the main parts are done. Also dispcalGUI integrated the service in his last version. But there is still some work todo. XOrg and ICC share on FOSDEM an DevRoom and on sunday there will be a lot of color managment talks and I will present the status of Taxi DB

Nicu Buculei: SOPA for non-Americans

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:27:00 +0000

Yesterday was the strike day against SOPA and PIPA and I tried to do my part: blacked-out my blogs, put related content on various places, shared link, informing. Many people seemed to understand the issue, but not everybody. Below is an excerpt from a comment (translation is mine) by someone in Romania, a person with IT and FOSS background, this make the quote even more relevant (I saw similar reaction on other tech sites):

I don't understand... SOPA is an American law, right? passed by their shitty Congress, right? how it affect me? how will affect Europe an American law? we aren't Americans so we don't have to obey their laws... what's the deal with this shit? Google and others can move their servers in Asia or Europe and... done... as Obama failed with Google and HP which moved to Ireland for lower taxes...[...]
Back to the initial question... SOPA is an American law, it will affect them.... not me... I am not American... and I don't ever want to be... European countries don't need to obey American laws... as they, in fact do... they don't obey... If the big companies want to keep up any site with piracy of any kind... they only have to host it in Russia :))... SOPA filters will be made in USA, not in our country...
You will say our routes pass there... so what? it takes 30 seconds to change some server routes on your workstation... and 1-2 hours for them to propagate... If USA want to do that, they can do it...

Some points from my reply:

US corporations won't move, they will stay and obey the law and even if they move servers elsewhere, they still have to obey the law, since they want to make business in the US
the case about moving in Ireland is different: it was for taxes, not to produce illegal things
SOPA filters will fork in such way that an European website may get blocked for people in USA
the American government has control over the root DNS filters and there the blocking will happen, the world would have to switch to an alternate DNS system
once it happens, other countries will follow with their own censorship laws, European countries are eager to do it, as demonstrated with TPB
"free Dmitry": you may get arrested even if you do something legal in your country.

For such reasons the Romanian Fedora community participated in the campaign with a notice about the Fedora's stance against censorship (not a full blackout as with my personal blogs, since neither the international project went for a total blackout). From my part, I would have preferred Fedora to go to a full blackout, like Mozilla, Wikipedia or openSUSE, I am disappointed by Red Hat having a stance so weak, it was not even mentioned on their own opensource.com and I am unhappy with Fedora stuck in bureaucracy and not being able to produce in due time an official statement I can link to in the news item.

Hopefully I will make your day better with shining examples from TheOatmeal, Playboy and FightingInternet.

Nicu Buculei: Strike Agains SOPA & PIPA

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 06:27:00 +0000

Máirín Duffy: Announcing Fedora Packages (and Fedora Tagger!)

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 23:44:34 +0000

Screenshot, front page of Fedora Packages

The story up ’till now

You might remember some earlier posts I’ve made about Fedora package social networking. The background here is that we built a web application called Fedora Community a couple of years ago. With Luya Tshimbalanga’s help, I ran a number of usability tests on this initial version at FUDcon Toronto. The results pointed out some key problems that over the past couple of years have definitely negatively impacted user adoption, including slow search and loading times.

Late this summer Luke Macken, John Palmieri, Spot, and myself went through those all of those issues and formulated a plan to try again and build a better application for package maintainers. We launched a beta version at FUDcon Blacksburg this past Saturday, and it’s called Fedora Packages.

We wanted to build only the most core functionality and keep things very light and speedy, being overly cautious towards adding features beyond the initial core to avoid the problems we ran into with the first version. I want to emphasize this because a lot of you provided great suggestions for functionality but we decided to focus just on the core functionality for now and have planned to work on several of your suggestions in future releases.

Fedora Packages

Screenshot, front page of Inkscape’s profile

You can think of Fedora Packages like a social networking system, where instead of profiles of people, you’ll find profiles of packages. We load the package’s icon in the upper left. Right now, we just load the icon if we have it, and if it’s too low-resolution, we blow it up. For some packages like clonekeen, this looks pretty awesome but for others, not so much. We very much appreciated your suggestions on an earlier blog post about package categories and how to display icons for packages that don’t have icons or high-quality icons, but again in keeping with our focus on the core and having something ready for you to check out by FUDcon Blacksburg, we decided to shelve that for now and focus on higher-priority features like optimizing our searches.

We also display basic details in the left sidebar such as like the latest version of the package in Fedora, the package owner, any packages in its family tree, and these pieces of information persist across the package’s profile tabs.

The front overview page shows the description of the package, what versions of the package are in what Fedora and/or EPEL releases, and a link to the upstream. I am hoping that in the next cut we can work with Vincent and the OpenSuSE folks on extending our upstream metadata; Luke has some ideas on this as well (more on that later.)

One core piece of functionality we definitely heard loud and clear from your feedback on Fedora Community, including during the FUDcon Toronto usability tests, was that the Fedora Community URL structure was complicated and made it difficult to go directly to the page you wanted. With Fedora packages, you need only append the name of the package you are interested in after the /packages/ portion of the URL and it will take you straight there. You can go directly to a particular tab of the package profile by appending the name of the tab after the package name portion of the URL (for example, https://community.dev.fedoraproject.org/packages/inkscape/bugs to go to the Inkscape bugs tab.)

Some new goodies: Patch Viewer and Contents Viewer

Fedora Packages’ patch viewer

You may recognize some of the tabs in Fedora Packages – both the builds and updates tabs are widgets Luke and J5 had built for Fedora Community. They have been cleaned up and optimized for inclusion here. We put some new goodies for you to work with as well.

Luke worked with me on the patch viewer, which not only gives you a full listing of all Fedora patches against any given patch with the committer and commit date, but also lets you view a diffstat per patch as well as across all patches for the package. You can also view the full content of the patches with code syntax highlighting inline in the page.

Expanded view on a patch from Fedora Packages’ patch viewer

J5 worked on the package contents tab, which displays the contents of the RPM binary for the package (see screenshot below.)

There are of course more nooks and crannies of useful information in each package profile: please try Fedora Packages out and let us know what you think!

http://community.dev.fedoraproject.org/packages/

Inkscape’s contents tab in Fedora Packages

Optimized search via playing games: Fedora Tagger

Fedora Packages search results for ‘email’

So how did we get our search to work so quickly this time, and how are we getting better search results?

Luke did a lot of research on how to best improve our search and concluded that the GPL-licensed Xapian Open Source Search Engine Library was the way to do it. Xapian searches package names, summaries, descriptions, and tags, and it shold weight the search results in the following manner (although John is still tweaking it, and I’m not 100% sure where tags are in the ordering):

If the search term(s) appear in the package name.
If the search term(s) appear in the package tags.
If the search term(s) appear in the package summary.
If the search term(s) appear in the package description.

“Where do the tags come from, though?” you might ask. Good question! Fedora PackageDB has a tagging system and yum is able to access those tags, so Ralph Bean pre-populated the Xapian index with the tags from Fedora PackageDB. Not all packages in PackageDB have tags, though. What to do?

Fedora Tagger

Well, Spot had this great idea for us to build a game that would let you both add tags to packages in Fedora as well as vote up or down those tags added by others, and win points (and hopefully soon badges – more on that later) for your efforts. It was a stretch goal for us because we really weren’t sure if we’d have Fedora Packages up and running in a development environment and all the core features ready in time – time was very short, especially with the Christmas holiday break – but we managed to pull it together with J5′s initial javascript prototype and a Herculean effort by Ralph Bean, who not only got the basic game mechanics and prototype in tip-top shape but who also implemented gravatar icon support, a leader board, and even vim keybindings!

Other features include a naughty-words filter (no, Tagger is not a dumping ground for your drama ) and anonymous tag voting, although you can’t add tags if you are anonymous. Log in and try Tagger, and let us know what you think!

http://community.dev.fedoraproject.org/tagger/

Planning whiteboard for Fedora Packages and Fedora Tagger

Where we go from here

Our FUDcon presentation, “Making Fedora Package Maintenance Easier”, was (thankfully! phew!) given to a completely full room and the initial reception seemed to be very positive. Here’s a rundown of the comments and feedback we got during the session from those that attended:

Colin explaining his upstream package metadata ideas

Would it be possible to show which patches were sent upstream and are pending, which were refused by upstream, and which have not yet been submitted? (Colin Walters & Nathaniel McCallum)
- One proposed solution during the discussion was to create additional rules/regulations for package maintainers to note this information in their package commits. This was noted to be an extra burden on maintainers, though.
- Another proposed solution that Luke has been looking into is called DOAP files.
- Colin noted that he was upset when people fix bugs downstream in code he is the upstream for and don’t even let him know about it. He ends up putting time into fixing bugs that have already been fixed because he just didn’t know.
- Both Nathaniel and Casey Dahlin noted that there is some functionality available in git where it can tell you if your lines of code from a patch is available in a given repo.
- Nathaniel suggested adding something to the DOAP files, such that whenever someone builds a patch and commits it, it would automatically notify upstream. Spot noted that there are quite a few patches that are not suitable for upstream and wouldn’t be useful to them because they are Fedora-specific. He suggested noting the upstream contact on the page of each package. Ben Boeckel suggested that maybe Fedora-specific packages could start with numbers in the 1,000 range, but Spot thought the kernel maintainers wouldn’t like that very much.
- Ben also mentioned an upstream version checker called ‘fever.’ Spot noted that Luke has been investigating its inclusion and it’s now called cnucnu. (More details on the Fedora wiki.)
Cool, this is like extensions.gnome.org for Fedora! (Paul Frields)
- It’s not a store, though (Spot)
- With a few small tweaks–filtering down to apps only, and adding a install button–we could build a separate app like that using this codebase, though. (J5)
What about screenshots? (Rahul Sundaram)
- We don’t have auth on the site, so we couldn’t let users upload screenshots. (Spot)
- Maybe we could set up a separate service to allow that. (J5)
Can yum use the tags? Can other applications use the tags? (Kevin Fenzi)
- Yum already uses tags from PackageDB … (lmacken)
- Maybe we could get rid of the extraneous pkgdb stuff so we don’t have duplicate / separate functionality (Toshio)
- What about using the tags in the package spec files? (Colin)
- We could take the tag cloud that we generate… if the tag achieves a certain amount of weight, we could take those tags with those mappings and use in the GNOME shell search logistics.
Is there a JSON API for this? (Casey Dahlin)
- It’s definitely do-able since it’s built using TurboGears (lmacken)
- Actually, I think it’s not documented yet but you could go to the connectors directory directly. (J5)
Could we use this to better document specs? (Toshio)
- Toshio had the idea of looking at adding the ability to annotate spec files. There was a project proposal to do this through the Google Summer of Code; the Django project documentation does it now, where you can comment on specific chunks/parts of the documentation rather than leave comments in a generic area. What if we added that ability to specs, so maintainers could document their specs when asked questions to new packagers they were mentoring? We could have a toggle to turn them on or off. The challenge is that we don’t have auth in Fedora Packages – maybe we could get around that by having the maintainer receive patches to the spec file with annotation via bugzilla?

Spot showing off Tagger

Some ideas we discussed adding, but have held back thus far because of our committment to implement the core first:

Full package description text available in tagger – We noticed while playing Tagger that there were many packages we had never heard of and we opened up new browser tabs to do research on them in Fedora Packager. It would be more streamlined to display the package description and upstream link right in Tagger (upon request, after clicking ‘more details’) to save time and effort.
Mozilla Badge Support – Mozilla’s Open Badges Project is something we could deploy to reward folks submitting tags and voting on tags in Tagger, as well as a way of rewarding our package maintainers and other Fedora contributors.
PackageKit integration – We could provide an API for PackageKit to use Fedora Packages and its optimized search results for returning package data rather than querying yum for this information. One advantage to this approach is that PackageKit could get the icons from Fedora Packages, even for packages not already installed on the system.
GNOME Shell integration – As mentioned earlier, the idea came up to allow GNOME shell to access the optimized search including tags to display appropraite applications directly in the shell.
A query language – We could implement a query language for the search to make it even more efficient to find what you are looking for.
Subpackage display in search results – This is a minor bug, but right now if your search terms match a subpackage, we display both the subpackage, its parent, and all of its sublings. We should only be displaying the subpackage(s) that match the search terms and its parent.
Newly-added tags don’t display on the package card right away in tagger – another minor bug we can address.
Improved linkage to bugs mentioned in spec files and patches – we have some links working now, but folks aren’t incredibly consistent with how they refer to bug numbers in their commit messages and comments so we missed a few.
Diffs between versions for spec files – is this something you’d be interested in seeing?
Diffs between the spec and its patches – this could show if you’re carrying patches for a package that aren’t even referenced in your spec (I think we saw a few instances of this too.
Interaction with the Fedora system accessing Fedora Packages – we talked about possibly having an icon or notification on a package’s profile if we detected that you have it installed, or if you have it installed and there’s an update available for your version. (In the released versions table we could even highlight your release.) We could also pre-populate the release dropdown filters across the UI with your current version. For updates, it might be cool to show which ones you have installed and allow you to easily given them karma.
Default or not? – some kind of indication on a package profile to show whether or not it is installed by default.
Timestamp the screens – we could display a timestamp on each page of packages… since we’re working from cached data.
Subpackage versions bug – right now we give subpackages the same version number as the parent even though they might not have the same version number as their parent, in active releases overview, might fall over in some edge cases on the relationships / contents tabs
Off-site upstream summary link indicator – this is a super-minor designery desire here, but I thought it would be nice to add an ‘offsite’ icon to indicate the upstream webpage links are outside of Fedora infrastructure (see “Patterns for Expressing Expansion Link Weights in Web Applications” and “More Link Treatments”.
Maintainer mail-to links – Right now we don’t link the maintainer’s name, it’s just plain text. Pingou suggested that we use the maintainer alias email addresses. We also discussed potentially providing, in a panel that pops up when you hover over the maintainer’s name, showing their IRC nick, emailaddress, and buglist. We opted to not do anything yet because we wanted to see what you might ask for here. What do you think?
Alpha-sort subpackages list – we don’t do this now I don’t think.
[NEW] Type-ahead in the searchbox – (idea from CodeBlock) this would be especially awesome once you’re already at a package profile page because you won’t have to bounce to the front page, you can go directly to the page you want

Summary & Where the Action is At

So we hopefully have provided Fedora package maintainers (and users? Maybe?) a better tool for managing information about packages this time. We now also have Tagger, which allows those of us (like me! ) who are less technical but still want to help Fedora a way to contribute and learn more about what’s available in Fedora along the way.

My life is now complete, and Tagger made it happen: I discovered xteddy!

I do think it was the right call to keep things as minimal as possible first. I think it left the slate open for a huge number of ideas (as you can see above) directly from you. We still have a lot further to go, though: your help, suggestions, and feedback all this time have of course been critical and we’ll need more. If you’d like to get involved, here’s the rundown:

Fedora Packages

URL	http://community.dev.fedoraproject.org/packages
Mockups	http://community.dev.fedoraproject.org/packages
Bug Tracker	https://fedorahosted.org/fedoracommunity/
IRC	#fedora-admin on irc.freenode.net
Mailing list	Fedora infrastructure list

Fedora Tagger

URL	http://community.dev.fedoraproject.org/tagger
Bug Tracker	https://github.com/ralphbean/fedora-tagger/issues
IRC	#fedora-admin on irc.freenode.net
Mailing list	Fedora infrastructure list

Oh, what about that weird radioactive panda post?

Remember that weird hot-dog-seemingly-with-a-grudge-with-a-panda post? Well, check this out (it will get even cooler soon with Fotios’ parallax animation… heh, heh, heh.)

Maria "tatica" Leandro: FUDcon Blacksburg day2: Barcamp and FUDpub

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 16:41:26 +0000

FUDcon is always about knowledge and fun, and this is not the exception. We all arrive in time (I think for the first time) to the *late opening* and had a really interesting list of barcamp session proposals so people could vote. After that our higly recognized lord of the zombies and aliens from Fedoraland, Jared Smith, gave his talk. I must say that after saw Russell photographic gear I must say “Yes master”.

We had so many interesting topics that we all the time look people running through the hallways trying to make it in time for other talks. Is kind of amazing to see people interested in learn and teach as much as possible just making FUDcon a special moment for everyone involved.

Just before lunch I had time to make a quick walk through Virginia Tech Campus and I must say that is just amazing, not also the structures, but also the way people take care of it. People here is really nice, so now I know why everyone loves Virginia :).

Evening was full of technical sessions where people was able to learn, teach and discuss topics that often are controversial or hard to deal through social networks, I believe that this is the mayor goal at FUDcons. On my side I was able to check a bit for Kdnlive tricks, Darktable trips with the most amazing photographer I have EVER meet, Russell (because I just realize that FOSS-photographers are different) and then a quick time for my small intervention about how make users and contributors cohexistence a bit more smooth.

Then fun came… FUDpub at an amazing place with amazing food. I play a bit of bowling… however… just a couple of minutes after arrive Markdude came to me with a HUGE snow ball and well… you might now understand why I don’t have FUDpub pictures because I just run as crazy to see finally Snow after so many years. I believe in Dharma, so for me this was the mayor payback from live… be nice worth it.

I wasn’t able to sleep too much because of the excitement and must say that thx to Russell and a quick lending from him of his flash+softbox I NEED one. I think Ruth is gonna like those pics I took. I believe I haven’t sleep at all looking through my window…. actually, is 7am and I’m just waiting to finish this post and run outside to keep the fun.

Today’s plans are for me: (just in case that anyone has an idea and please, ping me out through IRC, mail, twitter or alien signs)
* Work on STRONG ideas for a FUDcon website
* Finish as much as possible all FUDcon Venezuela information.
* play with snow…… is a work plan, right?
* try to go room by room asking people what they would like on our next release design, because even if we are designers, our work must like *them*.
* Work on how to bring more girls into Fedora…
* Work on a smoothly way to make users and contributors interact, so our dev people doesn’t need to take care of everything (develop and support) using our fedora people person resources.

That’s it… time for me to leave the comfortable Fireplace and go to our last FUDcon day.

Maria "tatica" Leandro: FUDcon Blacksburg: Frio, amigos y tecnologia

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 11:01:51 +0000

El dia de hoy comenzo el FUDcon Blacksburg en el estado de Virginia, realmente ha sido mas de lo que esperaba asi que les dare un breve resumen de como va todo hasta los momentos:

Buenos amigos.
Una de las cosas que mas disfruto en cualquier evento es poder encontrarte con la gente con la que hablas casi todo el dia, siempre… con esos que se convierten en tu familia a pesar de las distancias y de las buenas y malas conexiones. Es aun mejor cuando te encuentras con amigos de otros paises porque sabes que seran pocas las veces que tendras oportunidad de pasar un excelente rato con ellos. Son esos momentos en los que te das cuenta de que la tecnologia es un ecosistema completo en el que una sociedad puede surgir por completo.

Conocimiento, tecnologia y aprendizaje.
Venir a un FUDcon es un cambio completo a lo que estamos acostumbrados. Las charlas, talleres y demas actividades surgen en medio de un compendio de propuestas que siempre se hacen con previo aviso, pero se decide su ubicacion en el momento. En esta oportunidad he intentado ayudar con la logistica, lo cual me ha dado la oportunidad de comenzar una guia para el FUDcon que en Venezuela en el mes de Junio.

Pude dar mi charla en conjunto a Jared sobre “como hacer que la gent entienda que no somos empleados ni esclavos de Fedora y tenemos vida social” y terminar de preparar todo para mi taller de Blender. Asi mismo, asisti a la sesion de Drupal y a la reunion del Board, la cual segun los mismos miembros fue bastante productiva.

Creo que lo mejor del dia es que a la final pude tener un encuentro en el que comprendi mejor las diferentes necesidades entre un usuario y un colaborador (o potencial colaborador) y la forma en la que podemos ayudarlos cuando tienen preguntas. Sin embargo, es interesante conocer que en un principio, para los colaboradores que ya tienen tiempo en el equipo, ayudar usualmente tiende hacia lo tecnic y algunos no siempre necesitan la respuesta mas alocada. Es por eso que uno de los proyectos que comenzare con algunos amigos sera crear un escalon adicional en el que los usuarios que solo quieren ser usuarios puedan conseuir la informacion que necesitan sin necesidad de pasar por canales de IRC, cosas muy tecnicas y otras cosas que los hacen sentir incomodos (tanto a ellos como a nosotros).

Creo que lo importante luego de esta charla es saber que, cada persona es diferente, y aunque somos una comunidad muy grande, siempre hay una orma de personalizar las cosas para que sean mucho mas placenteras para una mayor cantidad de personas. Siempre la idea de Fedora es hacer que las cosas avancen y meoren en orden de hacer que los involucrados en este proyecto tengan la oportunidad de ayudar, aprender y disfrutar :).

Blacksburg: Una ciudad de pelicula
En el anterior FUDcon en Tempe quede impactada culturalmene por la diferencia que hay entre los paises, sin embargo, debo decir que Blacksburg (y las ciudades cercanas) son increiblemente hermosas. Es estar en el campo con las casas de madera, la gente que sabe que quieres comer en los restaurantes al estilo de los 80′s… pasear por las calles de Blacksburg es una excelente experiencia que cualquier persona que venga a USA debe tener.

Para ir a la galeria de fotos solo haz click en la siguiente imagen.

Y como bono.. John Dulaney amenizando la velada con su musica :)
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Máirín Duffy: Beefy has a beef.

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:40:59 +0000

I have seen a vision of the future, and this is what I saw:

Why would Beefy be targeting the panda with a laser gun? Why is the panda glowing green? How did this situation come about? What happens next?

Your mission!

It’s a contest. Come up with the best story to go with this picture, and:

You’ll get to name the panda.
Your story will be illustrated and used in a Fedora webapp’s error message pages (more on that tomorrow at FUDcon. )
You will receive a LIMITED EDITION, ONE-OF-A-KIND, direct-to-garment printed Beefy Miracle and radioactive panda T-shirt, using the design of your choice from your story (or the design above.)

Want to give it a shot? Submit your ideas in the comments below!

Nicu Buculei: Fedora and SOPA

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:07:00 +0000

USA Congress is going to debate and, as the current signs say, approve SOPA and Internet censorship on January 24. Trying to prevent this, a number of online entities are planning an awareness campaign on January 18, ranging from entire blackout of websites (to show the public the expected effects of the law) to mere informational banners and interstitials.

Would Fedora join them? I have little faith it will happen, but we are going to be affected, the project is USA based and was affected in the past (look at multimedia support, audio and video codecs as an example), the main sponsor is also an USA corporation. As a community Fedora is relying user-generated content, and SOPA will block user-generated content, imagine a Fedora with no wiki, no planet blog aggregator, no web archived mailing lists, not even Bugzilla or Koji. Would that be of any use for you? (and don't imagine the project won't be affected, it won't move servers outside USA, it won't change sponsors, it will obey the USA law).

How about other FOSS projects, we are all pretty much in the same boat?

From my party, my own blogs will turn black on January 18.

Nicu Buculei: RHL9

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 07:47:00 +0000

Back from the holidays for the New Year, one of the first thing I did was to check g+ and learn about what happened in my absence. Among many things about the SOPA atrocity, I found this funny piece titled 10 Reasons to Switch to Linux in 2012, is funny because it gets every one of the 10 points wrong (if I am bored enough, I may write a follow-up showing how and why), but this is not about I want to write now.Scrolling down the article, at about the middle, there is a Best Prices on LINUX/UNIX box in the right sidebar. What is it about? Red Hat Linux 9, Red Hat Linux 8, things discontinued 7-8 years ago (I am too lazy to count).And the site is real, even if so poorly maintained and updated, it has product pages and user reviews. It felt like browsing the web of 10 years ago, both in terms of products and predictions. Let me check again: yes, is 2012.

Nicu Buculei: Getting contributors

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 11:58:00 +0000

A slow day near the New Year break, calm and silent. Then I get a private message on IRC from a total stranger: he wants to know if is possible to join the Fedora design team. I start by making clear I am not part of the team currently (he supposedly saw may name on the contributors list) and then say is an open community, anyone can join, and point to the instructions on the wiki.

The guy insists in learning the name of the "maintainer", I direct him to the mailing list and #fedora-design, insist on my turn about using normal, open, channels, not people who can be busy or away for the holidays but still tell him the name of the team leader, is public information after all. He want a "chance to join", I repeat joining is open for everyone and point to the mailing list again.

Passing briefly the part about which software is used, my alarm signal is triggered by the next one "in this field coding is not need ?". I answer calmly and now, half an hour into the talk, is my time to ask "what are your skills? what do you know to do? why do you want to be part of the project?" and learn he is a college student with the hobby of doing graphic design.

Then comes the icing of the cake, his following question "after contribution , money will be got or not?" Now is crystal clear my interlocutor knows nothing about Free Software, open source, community, Fedora, Linux and such. Is the time for me to point to our homepage and tell directly we are a volunteer project (duh! we have poor wording on the front page, a poor English speaker is confused).

As a last item, he is stunned to learn I do not work for Fedora and Fedora is not a corporation hiring people. I have the feeling I won't hear from him any more and he won't post to the list. Should I call this over a half an hour wasted time or should I call it a learning experience? Anyway, my current confidence in new contributors is quite low at this minute.

Nicu Buculei: Thunderbird adventures

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 10:01:00 +0000

I use Thunderbird as my mail client, keeping it up to date to the latest version, Tb 9, thanks to Remi's repo, all on a Fedora 14 desktop. It may use a bit more resources than I like (my desktop is an old computer, with limited RAM amount), but overall I get by.

Not so much the other day, when I was sent a scanned image to crop and adjust it and I just tried to do that. Naive me! An email with an 7.2 MB attached JPEG rendered the mail client unusable and the entire desktop almost unusable: a memory consumption increase from 89.0 MB (Thunderbird "normal" usage) to 373.5 MB (trying to open that particular message) it may not look like such a killer but somehow that was the effect:

In the end I managed to download the attachment and learned the problem: it was a 7.2 MB big image, but the resolution was 9924 x 14039 (don't ask, whoever scanned the image, scanned a full A4 for a small, university diploma sized image, and made it at a huge DPI, so the result can be printed big size. I said "don't ask"). No wonder it was a killer to try and decompress it in RAM.

Now the next challenge, edit the image: crop, rotate, remove cracks and scratches, delete a stamp, improve colors and so. I bet you guessed already: GIMP can't open it, at least my GIMP 2.7.1 (the newest available for Fedora 14) tried with no result until I killed it after over 10 minutes of waiting (yeah, I know, don't preach me the benefits, working with large size images is one of the real benefits of Photoshop).

Fortunately, it was possible to open the image for viewing and Shotwell has a crop function included. Once the important part of the image was cropped all was well, GIMP did the job, another success was checked.

Máirín Duffy: The Wall of Anaconda

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:50:32 +0000

I set this wall of Anaconda mockups up in the office today. Hope I don’t get in trouble What I really want is a nice tool for doing the same online. I’ve been using Mediawiki for a long time, but it’s not the most user-friendly from the POV of folks trying to leave feedback. Mediawiki also only has one axis – you can see here I have major sections horizontally, with variations on each section vertically.

A combination of Mediawiki + Notitie would be nice at least. I have this set up on my own private server but nothing public.

Luya Tshimbalanga: 2011 Bilan as Fedora Designer

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:47:45 +0000

I chose to review my 2011 years now. Although I have played minor role with Design Team, I realized my impact with them was important especially with the porting of Gimp 2.7.x in rpm format because the stable version does not cut it anymore.
I keep a close eye to anaconda redesign learning about planning, meeting and some terminology for user interface face though not the first time since my participation to One Laptop Per Child project.

The lack of blog is due to my focus on my own design business which was very challenging because it was an uncharted territory for me. The beginning was frustration with, for example, the selection of content management system (I ended up with CMS Made Simple) bringing demotivations sometime. I am currently working on a magazine project with a partner only using FOSS tools like Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus. I saw the post about Interaction Designer but chose not to apply due to my priority as part-time self employee. However, I will still contribute to the project which needs more spices in term of elegance.

Gnome 3 usability was straightforward despite the heavy debate that occurred within FOSS community. Granted it needs improvement, the shell appears to be the right path. Another window manager that is missing for Fedora is Enlightenment due to its failure to build for multiple releases. I attempted to rebuild with the newer release but multiple dependencies added much burden so hopefully another packager (maybe from E project themselves) will take care of it.

Sirko Kemter: Schicke Charts in Inkscape

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:17:18 +0000

Wie heißt das so schön unverhofft kommt oft. Gestern habe ich noch nach einer Erweiterung gesucht, die aus Calc-Tabellen bzw. CSV-Dateien, schöne Charts in Inkscape generiert. Angeregt zu dieser Suche hat mich ein ziemlich alter Screencast. Nützlich ist das Ganze ja schon, aber Gnumeric haben die wenigsten installiert, die Masse nutzt wohl Libre bzw. OpenOffice und die Hangelei, dass erst mit Draw zu Öffnen um es dann als SVG zu speichern. Zumindest ich bin da wohl mit direktem Zeichnen schneller

Heute bin ich aber durch Zufall doch auf eine Erweiterung gestossen, die mir wenigstens anäherungsweise gefällt – NiceCharts. Nach der Installation (hochtrabend für das Kopieren nach ~/.config/inkscape/extensions/) findet man die Erweiterung unter Erweiterungen>Rendern>NiceCharts. Es öffnet sich ein kleiner Dialog, in dem man die Werte eingeben kann und wählen, ob es sich um einen Bar-, Stacked Bar- oder Pie-Chart handeln sollen. Nach der Bestätigung wird der entsprechende Chart generiert und zwar auf einer Extra-Ebene, was mir gut gefällt. Weniger gut gefällt mir, dass der Entwickler bereits anfängt, die Charts aus seiner Sicht “nice” zu gestalten, sie z.B. mit Schatten hinterlegt.

Ein kleiner Schalter ob ich das möchte, wäre hilfreich. Jedenfalls besser als sie nachher alle löschen zu müssen Leider ist an dem Code seit Mitte letzten Jahres auch nichts mehr geschehen und das obwohl so eine Erweiterung auf jeden Fall sinnvoll ist. Naja vielleicht findet sich ja jemand….

Máirín Duffy: What’s your partitioning persona? And, the partitioning UI thus far.

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:00:47 +0000

Partitioning personas

Redesigning the UI for something as complex as an OS installer has the potential to be disruptive to some classes of users, so in designing and re-designing and re-re-designing the partitioning screens for Fedora’s installer, we’d like to make sure you’re going to be covered.

Do any of these cases describe you, and if not, can you let me know how you use the partitioning functionality of Anaconda or really any OS installer so I can account for your use case?

The partitioning UI thus far

What are we doing to the installer’s partitioning UI to bring us to ask such questions? What is all this redesigning that’s going on? Well, let’s talk about partitioning as it works today in Anaconda.

Note that this is a screenshot of Red Hat Linux 8.0 from 2002, almost 10 years ago now. Aside from the online help / release notes pane on the left which has long since been dropped, this partitioning screen does not look much different today.

Our partitioning UI is currently very technology-centric. I suspect users care a lot more about the mountpoint layout of their OS with the technology underneath having a less primary role for them. (What the technology does for them, such as give them redundancy for their data via mirroring or increased performance via striping, I think they *do* care about, though.) Above is a screenshot from Fedora 15 showing part of the workflow in creating a partition. Before you can create a mountpoint layout or configure your filesystems, you have to create partitions and choose what technology to use with them.

Creating partitions is a means to an end of staking out some space for your files; if what the users really want to do is arrange their filesystem as they’d like it, why don’t we let them do that first, and guide them amongst the technology choices based on what it will do for them and their files later on?

“Wait,” you may ask, “are you trying to say that the goal of a user in a partitioning UI isn’t to create partitions?” Yep, basically I am. An illustration of how configuring RAID in the current UI may help explain:

Say I did a bit of reading and decided that for me, the best way to store the data in my home directory would be to set up RAID mirroring and striping between two physical disks (AKA RAID 10). If I set out to do this, what kind of workflow would seem most natural? Would it make sense to create my home directory, dictate the (when-all-is-said-and-done) capacity I want for it (let’s say 100GB), and apply the appropriate RAID level to it afterwards?

That’s what I thought. That’s not how it works in our UI right now, though. Right now, here’s the ~~basic~~ convoluted workflow:

Delete the auto-part layout since it’s all LVM and you want to use RAID on top of physical partitions. Click click click click click click click!
Create a RAID Partition; Give it the capacity you ultimately want (100 GB). Make sure it’s on hard disk #1.
Create another RAID Partition, identical to the other, 100GB. Make sure it is *not* on hard disk #1 but is on hard disk #2.
Create a ‘RAID device’, and add the two RAID partitions you just created to it.
Set ‘/home’ as the mount point of your ‘RAID device’ and set the RAID level you’d like.

That seems a little backwards to me. You create the partitions first, then the device. Why can’t the partition manager create the partitions for me based on my specifications for the device? It also seems a bit error prone, because I think it’s pretty easy to forget to create the two partitions on two separate disks. If you don’t, your mirroring doesn’t make sense since if the hard disk fails (what mirroring is meant to protect against), both of your copies are dust in the wind! The RAID device creation UI doesn’t state which physical disk each partition is in, either, so it’s easy to miss if you did make the mistake. The other thing this doesn’t protect against is that you could quite easily, without any complaint from the interface, mirror RAID together a 1 MB partition with a 1 TB partition, and lose 1 TB – 1 MB worth of space since the partition with the least capacity dictates the capacity for the device in mirroring. Sigh.

So a while back I went over in detail our buffet-style, technology-based mockups for partitioning – we had a sense that it was not the right approach but had whiteboarded and wireframed the mockups so I thought posting them would generate some feedback on a better way. And it did, of course, because the folks who find the time to read this and provide feedback are smart and helpful. Here’s a quick snapshot of one of those mockups as a refresher (the technology-focused tabs across the top is what I consider a ‘buffet’):

A new, mount point-based hope?

This is kind of what we’re leaning-towards now. After a few iterations, I call it the RPG partitioning UI. On the left, we give you a sane default mount point set up (dictated by either your particular spin or the install class, so if you’re using a desktop you get a desktop-focused one; for a server, a server-focused one; etc.) and let you modify as you like. By default for Fedora, we’ll have a btrfs set up (not reflected here.)

Notice how there’s selectors for each mount point where you can choose the partition type (physical, btr, LVM) and you can add on options, choosing the technology you’d like for each. RAID and LVM both offer mirroring. If you have a preference as to which one you’d like to use, there’s a spot for you to dig into that. However, we present mirroring as the feature you can opt into; we don’t present the technology at a primary level anymore here.

There’s also a cost associated with some options. If you choose to mirror a 100 GB home directory, for example, you’re going to need 100 GB x 2 or 200 GB to have that 100 GB mirrored. So there’s a ‘cost’ in terms of capacity for different options. What makes this the ‘RPG’ design is that as you add or remove features from how your file system is set up, the cost (or savings) in capacity are outlined right next to each option.

The general idea we have here is that if you don’t have sufficient hardware / capacity to choose a particular option, it will not be presented to you at all. No bait ‘n switch by offering it up front and then erroring out later.

Where this mockup needs work is how we allow the user to hook up their mount point setup and filesystem configuration to physical drives in their system. And that is why I’m showing the personas to anybody who will listen to try to make sure we understand where users are coming from when they do that hook up, so we don’t lock anyone out of essential functionality they need.

So that’s that.

OMG you’re redesigning the anaconda installer?

Yes!

Why oh why are we doing this? Learn here.
You can read lots more of my scribblings about the project in this blog’s ‘anaconda’ category.
We also have a Fedora wiki page for the project.
Drop by #anaconda on irc.freenode.net if you’d like to get involved or simply voice your opinions.

Peace & pandas everybody!

Nicu Buculei: European winner for Wiki Loves Monuments

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 08:09:00 +0000

After every country, including us, nominated their national winners, it was the time for the big European final, with 17 participating countries. And now we also have the European winners. Here's the first place:

Is a picture from Romania, illustrating the ruins of the Chiajna monastery near Bucharest and the funny part is, in my opinion, it barely made our top, it was 10th place from 10 finalists... there is truth in "last but no least". Why? Where it is a good, beautiful and powerful picture, those ruins are well known among the photographers from Bucharest... at least my personal reaction was "yet another picture of Chiajna? at least this one is good" (for over I year I plan a photo session on my own there, still looking for the "right" model, as I want something more glamour/goth).

Personally I am even more happy since the winner, Mihai Petre is kind of my friend (if you wonder, this didn't affect my notes in the national contest and I was not involved in any way with the European notes) and he is a very cool person. Here's a bonus: I have a picture of him I made this summer at a metal festival, can you identify him?

We rock. Literally.

Máirín Duffy: LISA ’11 Boston: Women in Tech Panel

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 16:00:42 +0000

Last night I had the pleasure of serving on a panel on “Women in Tech” at the USENIX LISA 2011 conference in Boston. The panel was organized by Chris St. Pierre, moderated by Lois Bennett, and the panelists were Carolyn Rowland, Deb Nicholson, and myself.

Lois, Deb, Carolyn and I met for lunch the day of the panel to talk about the points we wanted to hit during the discussion. One of our goals for the session was to not just get awareness out about the issues women in technology face, or to tell our stories, but to come up with action items anyone attending the session could take away from it and put into place to help make the situation better. Lois put together a list of ‘feeder’ questions to get the conversation started and to fill in if there was a lull in the discussion. There weren’t any lulls, as it turned out, but it’s always good to be prepared

The talk was well-attended by women and men alike. We started out maybe 3/4 full and by the end of the panel it was standing-room-only.

Women of WiFi, after Caillebotte by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com, on Flickr. Used under a CC-BY license.

Being the dork that I am, I took a lot of notes during the session; I kept two lists. One was a list of ~~problems~~ challenges & conversations (Nicole suggested “problem” might not be the best way to pose it ), and one was a list of actionable items.

The Challenges & Conversations

Female identity in a male-dominated field Carolyn talked about how she had found herself becoming almost androgynous while she had been in an on-the-ground sysadmin role. Since she’d been promoted up to management, she’d started wearing more feminine clothing. The point came up, as part of Carolyn telling her story, that in IT more than other fields you can be who you are. Carolyn asked though, now that she thought consciously about even the way she dressed as a sysadmin, was she dressing that way because it was who she was, or was she dressing that way to fit in?
Working twice as hard to be seen as equal Carolyn also brought up the point that many times she felt she had to work twice as hard or else she wouldn’t be seen as equal by her male peers. A question from the audience regarding life-balance and the fact that women need to take maternity leaves while men don’t added to this topic. Carolyn talked about how she logged in and responded to work email only 40 hours after having one of her children to make sure her co-workers knew she was serious about her job and wasn’t going anywhere. Women in the audience brought up the concern that they might not have a job or their position might be different coming back after maternity leave.
Cultural differences between men and women Deb brought up the point that many times, bad behavior happens in IRC, mailing lists, or even in person – foul language, sexist jokes and other remarks, and general aggression. One audience member brought up the point that the men didn’t mean to offend or drive people away, it’s their culture and they were just having fun, but it seemed a lot of folks in the room agreed that kind of behavior is probably best left for the pub after work rather than in the office or working on a project. Carolyn talked about putting on her “game face” while going to meetings to make sure people would take her seriously, and that seemed to echo with a lot of women in the room. An audience member brought up a point that had come up during the panelists’ lunch meeting as well – women tend to say phrases like “I think,” or “I’m not sure” to qualify their statements, while men generally tend to be a bit more cavalier in the same statements. This audience member talked about how after she writes an email she goes through and removes all of the “I thinks” and “Well”‘s and similar qualifying language to make sure her message was stronger. Women adapt their communication to fit in better with the culture. Deb even mentioned that when working in male-dominated projects, she had to remind herself to not be as aggressive conversationally when she was at home or with friends and family – it was hard to make the switch between the two modes. Another difference between men and women that was brought up is that women tend to take things personally & internalize the type of commentary and banter that men take in stride.
Not everyone realizes that there is a problem We were, sadly, preaching to the choir at this session – folks self-selected themselves to show up to the panel. There seemed to be wide agreement in the room that there is a problem: however, even Carolyn admitted when she was first asked to participate in the panel, she said no because she didn’t think there was a problem.
The conflation of gender and intelligence This was a topic that Deb brought up during our pre-panel lunch, and a point that a male audience member’s anecdote made clear – there is a sad conflation of gender and intelligence regarding technical subjects. When we talk about making it easier for women to participate in a community, this sometimes gets conflated with ‘dumbing down’ the technical content, or introducing more beginner-level, introductory topics. One audience member mentioned that when hiring for technical positions, women didn’t typically get selected because they are never the top candidate in technical prowess (!) The conversation came back to the differences between men and women in communicating, however – Deb and Carolyn both pointed out that between a male and female candidate for the same position with the same skills, the man will likely sell himself more and make stronger claims about his technical skills than the woman, so it’s more of a perception problem than an actual difference in skills. Bottom line, just because you’re female doesn’t mean you’re at a disadvantage skill-wise, even though that perception sadly seemed to be alive and well.
It’s difficult to find female candidates On a similar thread, one challenge brought up by an audience member was that if they were lucky, they had a 10:1 ratio of female candidates for technical job positions. They didn’t know how to recruit more female candidates.
When there are so few women, the few that are there become not only representatives of themselves, but they also have the additional burden of becoming representatives of all female-kind. One male audience member brought up that whenever there was a group of children touring their office, he thought it was a positive that one of the few female employees walked the children around. A female audience member in the front, in rebuttal, said she’d rather a male walk the children around so they could see their female co-workers hard at work in front of a computer or other system and that they could serve as a better role-model that way. Deb talked about how being the only female in a group means the extra burden of always having to be the token female for these kind of outreach events. She pointed out that it’s important to serve as a role model, but you have to balance it with getting your job done. Nicole in the audience mentioned that she went out of her way to volunteer for anything she could, her own choice, because she wanted to serve as a role model to encourage more women. Carolyn gave the example of being one of the only women and being asked what color all of the women would like the women’s room should be painted in a building – how would she know? I found this point really interesting because I hadn’t really thought about it before. Deb pointed out that there have been studies that show you can even this out in your workforce / community if you can hit a 15-20% of female participation. At that point, there’s enough women to go around that it’s not a burden on any single woman.
Cultural change is slow For all the suggestions (they’re coming! I promise ) we gave to the questions mostly male audience members asked us about increasing diversity, Carolyn gave a bit of a reality check by pointing out that while you can do these things we suggest, cultural change is slow, and it might be a long time before any of them might provide results. Cultural change is also hard, a point that seemed to be echoed by many audience participants.
A man and a woman working together raises more attention than two men Deb and Carolyn both pointed about that rumors tend to go around about a man and woman working together that no one would imagine ever thinking of if it were two men working together. “They must be sleeping together,” is something Carolyn said could go around. Deb also pointed out, when you’re the only woman on a team / in the office, whenever you need to get help or would like to get training from a team member, there isn’t any way you can do this without risking these kind of rumors. She pointed out that, “we just want to work in our office, not star in a drama about it.” The very act of getting trained risks these negative effects, Deb pointed out, such that it can limit a women’s upward mobility whereas this would not even be a concern for a man.
Not enough female role models There aren’t many strong female role models in technology. Not as many as there are men. One point that Lois and Carolyn brought up during our lunch is that they were raised to believe they could do anything they set their mind to. Lois pointed out that her mother was divorced in the 60′s. There were stigmas about women working in certain fields that were very real for our parents and grandparents, and we still are dealing with the cultural effects of them today.
Work-Life Balance A startup environment where you work 60+ hours a week is not an appealing environment for women to work in. For a young single guy, it may be appealing to have unlimited Mt. Dew, Doritos, and to be called a rockstar, but it’s not for many women.
Resources for Sysadmins vs. Coders A couple of audience members pointed out that there seems to be a lot more resources for female programmers than sysadmins. One mentioned that she was a developer primarily, but was also a backup sysadmin. While she really enjoys her sysadmin work and considering going full-time sysadmin, she couldn’t commit to being on-call 24/7. It couldn’t fit with her lifestyle – the theory here was developer jobs might be more appealing to women because they don’t come with the on-call burden.

11 Things You Can Do To Help Women in Technology

Since we had a goal of giving attendees some takeaways they could put into action, I jotted down some of the concrete suggestions that came up during our conversations:

Don’t be quiet. If you see something that’s not right happening, say something. Whether it’s simply rude and jerk behavior happening on IRC or mailing lists, or something more serious like harassing comments, you need to stand up and say something. I can tell you from personal experience, when someone calls you out in say an IRC room and talks disparagingly to you, and no one else in the room says anything, it feels like the entire room full of people agrees with the comments. It can make you feel atomically small and completely unwelcome. Don’t just speak up for the sake of the folks being belittled or otherwise mistreated: if you want your team, office, or community to be more diverse and reap all of the benefits that come from that (there are many), you need to stick up for your culture and make sure it doesn’t become a toxic one. Folks misbehaving need to know that’s not cool in your community. Sometimes people have a bad day sure – but we could all use a reminder from time to time on the proper way to behave.
Talk about the problem, help build awareness of it. Not everyone agrees there even is a problem with so few women in tech. I have heard people say it’s not a problem, that “women don’t like technology,” and even that they “aren’t naturally as good at it so they don’t do it.” Deb pointed out the difference between the ratio of women in free software projects from the FLOSSPOLS study (2%) versus the professional tech industry (~20%). She also pointed out, during our lunch, a study where female candidates were interviewed in one of two environments: a dorm-room like, soda-can and Dortios-infested ‘rockstar’ workspace, and a more neutral and professional environment with clean furniture. For the same technical position, more female candidates rejected job offers in the ‘rockstar’ environment, and far more accepted the offes in the more ‘professional’ environment. Does this tell you something about how the problem isn’t simply on the women’s side? Certainly, I believe some of the challenges listed above (e.g., communication aggression) stem from a monoculture lacking in diversity making it far more intimidating for women to participate than it should be. We could all benefit from improved communication. So talk about the problem with your team.
Make training opportunities available Deb mentioned the touchy issues that can occur when the only woman in the office necessarily needs to be trained by a male co-worker, or even worse on a larger scale, when male co-workers as a result receive more and better training and end up more upwardly mobile than women. One solution to this problem is to make sure high-quality external training is made available both to male and female members of your team. Support the women on your team if they ask to go to a conference or external training or other opportunities to improve their skills. If there isn’t funding available for such opportunities, advocate for it at your company / in your project.
Take the opportunity to serve as a female role model. Cultural change is difficult and slow, and I think it’s going to take all of us women in technology to stand up when we can and to show young women and even girls that they can succeed in technical jobs. At Red Hat, in many of our offices, we are involved in programs with local-area schools, and like Nicole, I try to get involved in these as often as I can. (Red Hat supported both a program Deb Nicholson and I planned to teach Girl Scouts how to use free & open source graphics software, as well as similar class at a local middle school my co-worker John Flanagan and I planned. ) I used to be the sort of person who didn’t think I could make these types of programs happen. If your job doesn’t offer these type of opportunities, ask about them. Talk to your local school. Put together a plan and a budget and see if your company will support it. It was a program just like one of these held at Rensslaer Polytechnic Institute (my alma mater) that really encouraged me to move forward in the field and study computer science. You can make a difference in a young women or girl’s life and help change their perception of our field.
Watch your communication. This goes to both the men and the women. For the women, don’t sell yourself short. Do edit your emails, look through any “I thinks” and other qualifiers you may have listed, and see if you can’t adapt your writing a bit to the culture you’re in. For the men, I think you could watch your language as well. Look through your written language and see if you’re being unnecessarily aggressive or forceful in your communications. Also! Gender-neutral language is really important. As one audience member brought up, it can be a pain at first to train yourself to do it, but after a short training period, it will become natural. It makes a big difference, too. One male audience member brought up the point that he’d become involved in a mostly-female community, and it was a strange experience for him to, by default, be assumed to be a woman and to have to correct others in communications. “Welcome to our world” was my response to him.
When holding ‘Women in Tech’ events, invite non-female supporters as well! An audience member mentioned that in the conference IRC channel, someone talked about how they didn’t go to the panel session because they weren’t a woman. Another audience member cited the GLBT community’s efforts to be inclusive of supporters who were not GLBT, and it was suggested we hold the panel at next year’s LISA with an ‘and friends’ or ‘and supporters’ tacked to the end of the title. If you are holding a similar event at your conference, consider the naming!
Make sure your meetings are inclusive. Deb brought up the point that in meetings, sometimes the loudest / most aggressive attendees win and some folks never get a word in. Carolyn talked about how her team had taken Meyers-Briggs tests and they found out they had a very diverse group of Meyers-Briggs types, and that some of the introverts who liked to think more deeply before speaking were getting cut off by the extroverts. Deb suggested exploring alternative meeting formats, such as going around the room during the meeting to make sure everyone got to say something.
Make your work more visible. I think it was Nicole in the audience who pointed out that if you’re doing your job as a sysadmin, your work is invisible. You should talk about your work and make sure folks know about the good you’re doing.
Start a womens’ mentorship community at your company or in your project. Red Hat’s Womens’ Leadership Community has been something that has really helped me personally. I’m at the stage of my career where I’m running into some serious work-life balance issues, and meeting other women from the same industry who’ve faced and surmounted those kinds of challenges and being able to talk with them and get experienced advice has been really helpful for me. If your company or project doesn’t have a similar group, consider starting one; if it does, join! Lois mentioned starting such a group for LOPSA, so there’s one you can join right there.
Review your recruitment process and make it more inclusive where you can. You could be driving away would-be female candidates and not realize it. Deb suggested that you take a look at your corporate website or your project’s website, for example. Do you have an executive leadership page with pictures of exclusively white males? This is a turn-off for female candidates. Try to promote the diversity you do have to attract more. If you have no women on your executive team, have pictures of the female leaders that do exist within your company, and tell their stories if you can. Try to use gender-neutral language on your website. Don’t talk about needing a ‘network guy’ – talk about needing a ‘network admin.’ Consider having internships targeted at women. Don’t just recruit in the usual places – you’re dealing with a pool you already know from experience is lacking women. Try female-oriented organizations like the Society for Women Engineers or similar.
The medium is the message! (Marshall McLuhan ) IRC and mailing lists can be less attractive to women than a more moderated communication medium such as blogs and forums. One way you can improve IRC, as Deb suggested, is to have more focused channels. Try to avoid off-topic conversations in the main channel and create an off-topic channel so those folks have a place to go if they need to. The thing is, it can be pretty intimidating to try to get involved in a project, go in the channel or on the mailing list, and instead of on-topic conversation, you see at best conversation about people and events you’re not familiar with, at worst sexist or otherwise offensive jokes and banter between friends (not intentionally offensive usually, of course.) Manage your communication channels accordingly, and consider supporting alternative communication mediums.

So there you go. I hope you can take something away from this summary. If this was TLDR (I understand, I truly do) just take away this one thing:

Things that make it easier for women to participate in your community make it easier for everyone to participate.

Thanks again to the folks who organized the panel; I had a great time and learned a lot from it!

Maria "tatica" Leandro: Tucaneando ando: Tucan downloads manager

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:59:18 +0000

A principio de semana andaba con el fastidio de que quería ver Ergo Proxy con subs en español, pero son 23 capítulos y es un fastidio tener que estar esperando a que megaupload / radpidshare / o cualquiera similar te de los XX seg de espera y luego la descarga, además de que tienes que estar pendiente de cuando termina para poner el siguiente y de recargar si se estanca.

Sé que esta es una app que tiene tiempo en el mercado, sin embargo como anduve tan alejada de todo por un tiempo y apenas la vengo conociendo ahorita se la presento a quienes aún no la conocen. :)

Tucan es una aplicación libre y de código abierto diseñada para la gestión automática de descargas y subidas en sitios de hosting como:

http://rapidshare.com/

http://megaupload.com/

http://gigasize.com/

http://mediafire.com/

http://4shared.com/

http://sendspace.com/

(…)

Tucan trae algunos servicios que de vez en cuando necesitan ser actualizados y otras veces hay nuevos servicios disponibles. Con el fin de actualizar (o instalar nuevos) servicios Tucan tiene un sistema de actualizaciones, para activarlo el usuario debe ir a la ventana Preferencias > Servicios > Buscar. Después de una actualización de servicios Tucan necesita ser reiniciado.

Tucan está escrito enteramente en python y su interfaz gráfica de usuario escrita en PyGTK (GTK+ toolkit). Es multiplataforma (GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows …). y viene en los repos de Fedora.Tiene gestión de esperas entre descargas (accesos anónimos) y reconocimiento de captchas donde se necesite (como los accesos anónimos de megaupload o gigasize), así que si las descargas tienen un captcha antes para validar, tucan lo soluciona por ti :).

Sirko Kemter: Screencast – Kirchenfenster

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:07:44 +0000

Es ist wirklich wieder Zeit einen Blogbeitrag zu schreiben, aber ich hab derzeit sehr viel zu tun und da bleibt leider sehr wenig Zeit für mein Blog. Trotzdem hab ich mich heute hingesetzt und ein Tutorial bzw. Screencast produziert mit einem Weihnachtsmotiv, so wie im vergangenen Jahr die Kerze. Ich hab auch wirklich lange überlegen müssen, was man denn machen könnte. Ich finde Christbaumkugeln und Klingelglöckchen gibt es schon zu Hauf. So ist es ein eher religiöses Motiv geworden, die Maria mit dem Jesuskind und zwar als Kirchenfenster. Da in der Grafik eine Grafik verwendet wird, die vorher vektorisiert wurde und ich nicht 2 Stunden lang zeigen wollte, wie das geht, gibt es hier die Datei mit der Maria zum Download. Irgendwann mach ich aber mal noch einen Screencast mit Tips und Tricks zum Vektorisieren. Bis dahin gibt es aber erst einmal dieses Tutorial hier:

1. die Datei mit der Maria und dem Jesus Kind herunterladen und in Inkscape öffnen.
2. ein Viereck zeichnen, das etwas breiter ist wie die Maria mit dem Kind
3. einen Kreis von der gleichen Breite und Höhe zeichnen
4. Kreis und Rechteck zu einem Pfad vereinigen, beide auswählen und Strg und +, gleich ein Duplikat dieser Form anlegen.
5. dieser Form eine Konturlinie geben und die Breite dieser anpassen, das sie in etwa die gleiche Breite hat wie die Linien der Maria
6. der Form die Füllung nehmen und die Kontur in einen Pfad umwandeln und mit dem Pfad der Maria vereinigen.
7. die Berge einzeichnen

8. mit dem Polygon-Werkzeug ein Dreieck zeichnen, dieses duplizieren und spiegeln und nach unten versetzen, so dass ein Stern entsteht.
9. dem Stern ebenfalls Füllung nehmen und Konturlinie anpassen, auch hier Kontur umwandeln und im Anschluss mit dem restlichen Pfad vereinigen.
10. Den Pfad zerlegen und umfärben, Palette auf Auto stellen für die gleichen Farben.
11. Das Duplikat der Grundform hernehmen und wieder ein Duplikat anlegen, das Duplikat über Erweiterungen > Aus Pfad erzeugen > Voronoi Muster umwandeln lassen. Dieses Muster dann auf das Bild positionieren.
12. Das Duplikat hernehmen und die Hälfte abschneiden, dann in der Mitte einen Knoten setzen, diesen symetrisch machen und verdrehen. Diese Form mit einem Farbverlauf Weiß nach Transparent füllen und auf dem Bild positionieren.
13. Das Duplikat hernehmen ihm eine dunkelbraune Füllung geben und mit dem Pfadwerkzeug “Dynamischer Versatz” etwas vergrößern.
14. Einen passenden Hintergrund anlegen, meiner ist schwarz mit einer kreisförmigen Farbverlaufsfüllung nach einem dunklem Grau. Ein passender Schriftzug dazu und fertig ist die Weihnachtspostkarte

So dann wünsche ich euch viel Spaß beim Nachmachen.

Máirín Duffy: Firewall Zones UI Design

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:07:25 +0000

Over the past couple of months I have been working with Thomas Woerner on some enhancements to and new UI for Fedora’s firewall controls. These additions are part of Thomas’s work in adding the concept of firewall ‘zones’ to Fedora to simplify firewall configuration and help make it easier for folks to keep their computers safe.

Today, we provide users with a lot of control over their firewall in the system-config-firewall, but the problem with our current model is that with a laptop, you may connect to multiple different networks during the course of the day, and firewall rules that make sense for one network might not make much sense or may even be dangerous on another network. An example of this is if you’re sitting at home or at the office, you can pretty much trust the other systems on your network (well, at least if you’re at my office where we don’t have Windows systems ), so you might want to have your httpd service running if you’re a web developer and want to show others working links to web application code running on your laptop. However, when you’re at a coffeeshop with other systems on the network that you don’t know much about, you might not want to be serving up a web application that’s in development and not fully hardened / tested for security flaws since that would leave your system open to attack. Right now, though, to handle your location changes from a UI perspective, you’d have to open up system-config-firewall manually every time you changed networks and set up every little bit of configuration you’d like for that network, every time. There’s no concept of saving profiles that you can recall later (see screenshot below).

With the firewall zones concept, we’ll pre-define a set of generally useful zones (‘Home’, ‘Work’, ‘Public’, etc.) and configure them out-of-the-box to have sane default settings for each particular type of network. We’ll also allow you to tweak these settings to your personal taste and create new, additional zones to accommodate your particular network environments. Finally, we’ll let you recall these just by selecting a profile when you’re on a given network, we’ll let you set a default zone for networks that are new to your system, and hopefully will eventually allow you to set a default on a per-network basis so you don’t have to manually set which firewall zone you want to use every time you connect to a given network.

That’s the basic concept behind firewall zones.

Managing Firewall Zones

So Thomas first came to me, gave me some of the back story above, and described the components of this application he would need UI mockups for (my notes from that conversation):

A dialog for creating / editing / deleting firewall zones.
An applet which:
- Gave you a quick way to jump to the Firewall Zone dialog above
- Provided a panic mode functionality to completely wall the computer off from the network in case of a suspected attack
- An ‘About’ item where you could get more information about the applet

Since I didn’t have a lot of time at the time, I proposed doing the mockup sketches with pen and paper and Thomas seemed cool with that, so you’re going to see my scribblin’ by hand below rather than the usual Inkscape-designed artifacts. (I used the Gimp Difference of Gaussians trick that Garrett taught me a while back to clean these up; they were originally on yellow ruled legal pads. Cool, right?)

Round 1: First mockups

I designed the applet in the context of the GNOME 3 panel. I know yet another applet won’t be popular. Hopefully it won’t be needed long-term; I think it would be nice to have one applet icon for all security & trouble-related items (ABRT, SELinux alerts, Firewall, etc.) so those things, as necessary during crisis situations, are readily accessible but cumulatively don’t land grab a larger swath of real estate on-screen than is really called for given the infrequency of crisis situations. We’re sadly not there yet though, and needed a way to access the dialog, so we thought an applet would serve the purpose for now. (It wouldn’t be unreasonable to add it to the NetworkManager applet, but since that applet is already a bit crowded, it’s probably not the best approach.)

The applet is extremely simple, as you can see in the mockup above: it tells you what your current firewall zone is, and gives you a button to press to open up the full Firewall Zones dialog. The ‘About’ item Thomas requested I don’t think is really necessary – we could have an about in the full dialog if needed.

I wasn’t really sure about the panic mode use case at this point in time, so I dropped it from this first mockup attempt.

As far as the dialog itself goes, in this first sketch, the idea was to drive the UI from the zones themselves, and across services, ports, and interfaces, offer notebook tabs to customize each zone. For example: I want to stream audio from my media device at home when I’m at home. That requires UPNP access, so I’ll go to this dialog, select my home zone, and go to the port tab to open up the UPNP port while I’m at home. Perhaps I’ll set my coffeeshop zone to disable the UPNP port since my home media device isn’t available in the coffeeshop and I don’t want that open port sitting around as a possible way for someone to attack my system.

Round 2: Applet + Dialog Mockups, Improved

Multiple network interface support: the assignments tab

After looking over my first set of mockups, Thomas pointed out one fatal flaw – a system may have multiple network interfaces (especially in a server context), and those network interfaces may need to be set to different firewall zones. Maybe one example of this is a publicly-facing webserver with one network interface that openly serves content out to the public, and another network interface that faces its internal network that has a very locked-down firewall configuration to protect the internal network from outside attack. (For example, this web server may need to get software updates and patches from the internal network, and its firewall may be configured so that no network traffic can flow from the web server into the internal network; only from the internal network out to the web server.)

So we added a top-level ‘Assignments’ tab that provides a list of the network interfaces present on the system on the left, and per network interface you can turn the firewall off or on and assign a particular firewall zone to it on the right.

Minor improvements to the zones tab

The ‘Zones’ tab is essentially the design from round 1. However, more complex configuration might be needed (for example, a port or service we don’t know about), so there is now a ‘custom’ button in the lower right that could work similarly to the current ‘other ports’ dialog in system-config-firewall – you can set up a custom service or port to include in your firewall rules.

Updating applet to accommodate multiple network connections and add a panic button

Finally, the applet dialog has gotten a bit beefier after the multiple network interface use case discussion we had. It’s modeled very much after NetworkManager’s applet. Each network interface / connection is listed alongside its current firewall zone, so at a glance you can see the firewall status for all of your network interfaces & connections. Below this list is a separator that provides you the link to the full firewall zones dialog, as well as the previously-discussed panic button to block a suspected network attack.

Setting a default zone

Initial designs and discussion

So last week Thomas came back to me after he’d put together some glade mockups. He was afraid the initial design (see screenshot above) that he’d done up in glade was overly complicated, and there must be a more simple / elegant way to offer a default firewall zone for users. This would be the default zone unknown / new networks would be assigned; it would appear during firstboot after installation since it would be nice to know before you start up your system how you would like the firewall to treat networks as they are encountered.

After a bit of discussion on the screen, I came up with the following goals for it:

Enable users to easily select their default network zone.
Provide users a basic understanding of what the default network zone is and what the implications of selecting it are.
Help users make an informed choice as to which zone might work best for them, out of what may potentially be a long list.

While this initial glade mockup makes it appear as if there may be four ‘buckets’ or ‘categories’ of firewall zones because of the four vertical sections of buttons, there weren’t, really, and visually it’s a bit of a toss-up whether it’s intentional or not because the alignment of the buttons is a bit haphazard within the rows. There were no titles or names or descriptions for the various categories. Also, high vs. low wasn’t labeled – it actually denotes the level of trust you’re placing in your network, not the level of security you’re getting out of the choice! Finally, each zone has a simple name without any kind of description to help the user figure out which one would meet their needs – even if they decided they wanted to be somewhere in the middle in terms of security & trust level, picking a choice across the columns of the row they selected would be difficult without more information.

So over IRC we talked through an alternate way of arranging the screen, where we created four distinct buckets (‘Very high trust,’ ‘High trust’, ‘Medium trust’, ‘Low trust’) and had the user select the trust level they felt appropriate first, then within the trust level, use the drop down to select the particular zone in that level. While I think the explicit categorization helped a little, this arrangement combines radio buttons and dropdowns, which I think physically is a little clunky. It also suffers the same issue as the first mockup – we’re limited to only a simple label for distinguishing between zones within a category. High/low is also not really clear – I still felt as if someone might assume it’s security level, not trust level.

More detailed descriptions

So I came up with a quick Inkscape mockup showing what the dialog might look like if we provided some more details on each individual zone. The name’s in the upper left of each list entry, the description below that, and the general category in the upper right. The main way this UI works is you have one list of all of the zones available, and you could filter it down using the dropdown in the upper right to only see zones with the security level you’re interested in and compare them within that category using the fuller description.

The weakness of this mockup is that it’s geared for a large set of zones to choose from. However, users won’t have a large initial set of zones, and it could be confusing when they filter and only see one zone to choose from unless we default to showing all available zones in the filter dropdown. Also, what if you wanted to compare across ‘High’ and ‘Very high’ security zones? You couldn’t unless you viewed all zones, including medium and low.

So then we tried this toggle idea. You’ll see a listing of the various categories along the top of the list, and you can click once to see those zones included in the list below, click again to ‘turn off’ that category. After doing this mockup though, I definitely felt like it needed more thinking. Is this on/off button-based filtering really common enough for users to follow? I liked that we could set the list to, by default, display the zones we felt most useful for basic users but still enable more advanced users to get to what they needed, but I’m not sure as a UI pattern it’s common enough to be intuitive.

Thankfully Thomas did some brainstorming on his own after I sent him this mockup, and came up with this glade design:

While interacting with this glade file felt more natural than the button-based filtering one before it, the problem is that spreading the categories across notebook tabs means you’ll have one zone list per tab, and there is no unified list. So if I pick a zone in the first tab, then a different one in the second tab – which zone is the selected zone? It’s an instant apply dialog, sure, so some folks would assume their last-selected zone is the one that’s actively selected. Alternatively, though, I think a different user might think they had to pick one zone per tab. We could work around this in the design by having some central (outside of the notebook tabs) indicator to say what the currently selected default zone is. It might make the screen more cluttered. Some more IRC discussion and thinking later, thankfully spurred by this design, and we came up with the next mockup…

The winner… so far?

This is kind of a rip-off of how the GNOME control center’s keyboard layout tab works. By default, you have the three zones that would be the most useful for desktop users to work with in a list. Whichever zone is highlighted is the selected zone. As you click on zones in the list, you get a full description of that zone in the pane on the right. Now, this makes it more difficult to compare across many zones, but I anticipate that many Fedora desktop users are just going to pick from the base set of three or so that we offer by default and not worry too much about the others. If you’d like to explore additional firewall zones, you can click the “+” button at the bottom of the list and select from others we’ve made available by default.

If this was a control center module, it would not have the ‘Choose selected zone’ button on the bottom-right, because it would be an instant-apply window. However, for firstboot it needs a button to progress forward (or backwards to the hub, as the case may be.)

(And now I see an inconsistency in the mockups “Firewall Zone” in the window title, but “Network zone” in the dialog content!)

What do you think?

This is a little something Thomas and I have been working on over the past couple of months. Let us know what you think or if we missed anything!

Shameless plug

This is cool, right? Think you or someone you know could do this kind of design work and really enjoy it? We’re looking to hire a great interaction designer to work on projects like this, so if you or someone you know are interested, please apply!

Nicu Buculei: Chrome vs. Firefox

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 10:49:00 +0000

Compared with other services, I usually found the stats given by StatCounter having bigger values for Firefox (have no idea about their, or others, methodologies), this is why I don't take the exact numbers as absolute but was looking at the trends. The latest report, which made the rounds in the tech press is showing how worldwide Chrome slightly overtook Firefox (with half a percent) and both of them added are way above Internet Explorer (10 percents). This pretty much mirrors my anecdotal evidence of seeing IE mostly on the computers of the most clueless users, Firefox on those installed by a knowledgeable friend or admin and Chrome used more and more by simple-to-average users and even techies.Is funny how the stats change when looking at my country, Romania, here the places of Internet Explored are switched: Firefox is the top-dog on a slow but sure decline and Chrome just overtaking Internet Explorer for the second place. Of course, the sum of Firefox and Chrome is crushing IE. Not bad.As for myself, I still use Firefox as my main browser for the simple reason I can't stand the UI of Chrome. I am worried about Mozilla's idiotic policy to blindly copy the Chrome UI (is a different browser, it should look and feel different, otherwise why use it? I use it for some reasons, and Gecko is not the only), but continue to use Firefox, deploy only Firefox and support (as in user support) only Firefox.

Luya Tshimbalanga: Brief message - message bref

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:37:02 +0000

English

It has been a while I wrote a blog. The reason is my intense work on a magazine project for my local area in Vancouver. I set my own challenge to only use Free and Open Source from Gimp to Scribus via Inkscape.

Français

Il y a longtemps que je n'ai pas écrit un blog. La raison est un travail intensif sur le projet de magazine pour la region de Vancouver. Mon propre défi est d'utiliser seulement les logiciels libres de Gimp jusqu'au Scribus via Inkscape.

Nicu Buculei: Open letter to the Romanian Ministry for Culture and Patrimony

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 14:24:00 +0000

A group of organisations and interested persons from Romania are addressing an open letter to the Romanian Ministry for Culture and Patrimony about the Romanian cultural patrimony on the Internet, which can be published at Europeana.eu, where our country was to submit 789,000 works until 2015 and currently has managed to publish less than 36,000. We ask about the status of this project and propose the use of the images contributed in the recent Romanian Wikipedia photography contest. The full text can be read on the ProLinux website or in printable format (along with the signatures list) from the APTI blog.

Martin Sourada: Fedora 17 Beefy Miracle Wallpaper—Accepting Concept Artwork

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 11:11:18 +0000

We're a little bit behind and should have started much sooner, so the time is running short. We are now open for submissions for the Fedora 17 Beefy Miracle default wallpaper concept artwork. If you are interested, please submit your work as soon as possible, the closing date is about one month ahead (the deadline will be officially announced next week).

Submit your concept work here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F17_Artwork/Submissions/Wallpaper_Concept

Máirín Duffy: Looking for a Linux & free software-friendly interaction designer

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:10:09 +0000

What I Do

Hi, I’m Máirín. I’m an interaction designer with a little open source company called Red Hat. I work full-time as the token designer for a free operating system called Fedora.

For me, it is my dream job and it is also the best job in the world. My personal passion for making free software easier to use is encouraged & celebrated, and I’m always in the company of folks much smarter than I with a never-ending supply of interesting and challenging projects to work on together. The position also comes with the satisfaction that it is, even if only in a small way at times, making the world a better place. Not only does Red Hat work to make more free software available and to make its power more accessible, saving time, money, and pain for businesses: with Red Hat’s support, for example, I’ve been involved in initiatives to teach kids how to use free software and to develop openly-licensed course materials for teachers interested in their own free software programs. It’s a position that has never been boring and through which I’ve been able to travel internationally and constantly learn and grow as a person.

Jealous Yet?

Well, here’s your shot: Red Hat is looking for a talented, Linux & free software-friendly interaction designer to work with me on making Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux easier to use. So if you are an interaction designer looking for a position you can be really passionate about, love doing, and in the process make a positive difference in the world, this is a great opportunity and I really encourage you to apply for the position.

Questions & Answers

I’ve put together a little Q&A about the position since it’s essentially the same as my own; I’ll add to it as I get more questions because this is not your run-of-the-mill interaction design job:

Where is the position located?: The position is based in Red Hat’s main engineering headquarters in Westford, Massachusetts, USA, but finding the candidates best qualified for the position is the highest priority. Our Westford office is a beautiful new 3-story building with on-site cafeteria next door to Nashoba Valley ski mountain, and is a 40-45 minute Red Hat-provided shuttlebus trip from the Boston MBTA’s Alewife redline station.
Do I need to already be an free / open source software community rockstar to be considered?: No, absolutely not! If you’re not already involved in the free software community, that’s okay. We’re looking for folks who have a sincere interest in open source, though, who are willing to learn the free software tools and become visible members of our community. This means, unlike in other design positions, you’ll need to become comfortable writing about and showing off your work publicly, even if it’s not finished or is just early-stages, and you’ll likely need to make regular blog or mailing list postings on your work to keep open an active line of communication with the larger Fedora and open source community. We’re happy to get you up to speed on working with the free software community and our tools, but we can’t give you the interest and passion it will take to learn and succeed at it: you’ve got to bring that to the table.
What software do I need to be familiar with for the position?: A requirement of this position is that you’re able to establish yourself in the free software community and help enable and organize design participation to the community. The design tools of choice in that community are free software tools such as Inkscape, Gimp, and MyPaint, among others. For various reasons, the use of the Adobe suite of design tools tends to exclude participation and its use is discouraged. While you need not be an experienced user of the free software design tools coming in to the position, we do expect a willingness and effort towards becoming proficient in preferred free software tools.
Do I need to use Fedora for this position, or are free software apps on top of OS X okay?: Yes, you’ll need to use Fedora and become familiar with it in order to meet the requirements of the position.
How technical do I need to be for this position?: The free software community in general tends to be dominated by highly technically-sophisticated developers and users. This is a design position, however, not an engineering or development position. You will not be expected to write production-quality code or make technical decisions you are not comfortable with. You’ll need to be comfortable interfacing directly with engineers and users, however, and not be afraid to ask questions and get up to speed on any technologies related to the design work at hand.
What kind of projects will I be working on?: The position involves working with both the Fedora Engineering team at Red Hat as well as Red Hat’s base operating system team. Projects could involve anything from the infrastructure used to develop Fedora to the installer for both Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I make detailed posts on a lot of the projects I work on so going through my backlog of interaction design posts might give you a pretty good picture of the types of projects you’d be working on, the kinds of deliverables produced, etc.
What do you mean when you say it’s not a run-of-the-mill interaction design position? What makes this job unique?: I wrote a paper for the CHI 2010 open source workshop that talks about some of the challenges and suggestions for working as a designer in the open source community: you may find it an interesting read in terms of understanding the opportunities and challenges of the role.