Fedora/RedHat

On day 2, Chris Grams of New Kind and John Adams and Jonathan Opp of Red Hat joined us to talk about growing and strengthening Fedora brand. They talked to us about the 10-plus year work that has gone into building Red Hat’s brand, and helped us find the right questions to ask about Fedora’s brand. The full log is probably more illuminating than quick notes on a complex topic. I also got a chance to take a look at the excellent book Designing Brand Identity, and did some reading in it overnight — enough to know I want to go get a copy of my own.

It seems like Fedora has been doing a good job of maintaining consistency in the way we present Fedora, and that our reliance on the same essential four foundations of freedom, friends, features and first can continue to serve us well into the future. We spent much of the rest of the day trying to flesh out our answers to the questions Chris, John, and Jonathan passed on as a good exercise.

Russell Harrison also took some wonderful head shots of some of the participants at the very tail end of the day. They turned out great and I can really see how much there is to learn as a novice photographer! Then we headed off to the Carolina Ale House for a fun dinner, followed by several hours of packaging introduction by the inimitable David Nalley (ke4qqq).

On day 3, we focused on PR and press-related content. Our guest speaker had a last-minute emergency and we rearranged some of our schedule. Henrik Heigl (wonderer), who’s an experienced press person himself, gave a fantastic presentation on press relations from the perspective of having a foot in both worlds. He’s helping to drive our work on a more modular, expressive, and useful press kit. Everyone worked on content for the kit, drafting up pages that we can shift in and out of such a kit over time and depending on where and to whom we’re giving it out.

Last night I had to hole up in my room to get some non-Marketing work done. Today we are pumped up for a day of video work with the awesome Red Hat Creative team. I’ll be leaving late this afternoon, bringing Neville Cross back to the airport to catch his plane back to Nicaragua, and then heading home.

There is not much in world what supports an very special language, like hungarian. But I always hope that I will met such sets like Libertine, that you could use not only free desktop publishing, else any purpose what you prefer.

After I have red that news the new Libertine set is released with new typographic modifications, specially targeted with some solved hungarian letter spacing problems, together with other small beauty repairs - what makes more usable at TeX environment too - made me very happy. This set hold 4 other types, and small capital type too, together with some letter equalisation, what means not just real levelling between letters (like in TeX: the Modern Computer set), else this is the first OpenType set what is usable perfectly with OpenOffice too. Such doesn't existed - until yet. The best is - the licence is GNU GPL and SIL OFL.

I really hope that will be packaged very soon.
Here is the zipped package and the differences, with some examples together.

For years and years I am using and promoting the term Open Standards. And it has always been very clear what an Open Standard is and, more important, what it is not.

You can go through various defintions of Open Standards:

• Free Software Foundation Europe
• European Interoperability Framework (v1)
• Digistan
• Danish Parliament
• Bruce Perens

And no matter what differences you find in those definitions, they all agree on some crucial points, the most important being the freedom to use and implement the standard without having to ask for permission or having to pay license fees for the use of an Open Standard.

The Freedom to Use and Implement is fundamental to Open Standards. This means that whatever so-called “Intellectual Property” like (software) patents etc might be involved in an Open Standard must be made available to any third party on a Royalty Free basis.

Which leads to a simple conclusion – if you have to pay for use/implementation of a standard, this standard is NOT an open standard.

If you agree this far, pay special attention to this:

Currently, the Chinese companies using technologies detained by European companies are not allowed to enter into negotiations on the amount of royalties due to the latter, when they use their essential patents in the framework of open standards. The situation is highly detrimental to European companies and their complaint has been reflected in the European Chamber of Commerce in China (EUCCC) – IPR Working Group’s Position Paper 2005. The Commission therefore urged the Chinese government to take action in order to ensure that those royalties are duly paid by Chinese companies.

Hartmut Pilch from FFII pointed my attention to this and added some valuable comments here.

Bottom line is – DG Trade, represented by Mr. Luc Pierre Devigne, seems to use the term Open Standards in a way that is simply not compatible with the accepted definition of Open Standards. Royalty payments on Open Standards can simply not exist in my view.

So either Mr. Devigne made a little mistake by using the term Open Standards here OR this is the start of redefining Open Standards to mean the exact opposite. Could someone talk to Mr. Devigne and ask hoim for clarification? This is an important question.

hi sys admins!

We changed the deadline for the call for papers. You have now one week extra to think about a talk you want to give during LOAD . We want to see your papers before march 23.

hope to see you there!

For the Marketing FAD dinner tonight, we went out to a burger place called MoJoe’s. Later that night:

01:55 -!- You’re now known as mchua
01:55 -!- You’re now known as daddy
01:56 < mmcgrath> daddy: …. ?
01:57 < onekopaka_laptop> interesting IRC nick choice…
01:58 < daddy> mmcgrath: onekopaka_laptop: it’s a joke from the FAD – we had dinner at a burger place called MoJoe’s tonight.
01:58 < daddy> And they had this thing where if you ate their one-pound burger in one sitting they’d put your picture on their wall of fame and call you “daddy.”
01:58 < daddy> Now, since this was only a one-pound burger, naturally I had to go for it.
01:58 < daddy> It was delicious.
01:58 < mmcgrath> it sounds delicious
01:58 < daddy> So good.

(Honestly, a one-pound burger isn’t that big. I’ve had them as snacks before. It was a good burger, though.)

Also, my aunt Lynne May published her first article! “Striving for Cultural Proficiency” came out in the most recent issue of the Massachusetts Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development journal. Theme: “Building and Sustaining a Diverse Professional Community.” Reading things like this, I’m reminded that I don’t yet know how to understand a lot of other disciplines – brand books still don’t quite make sense to me, instructions on PR only dimly do, even education writing is easy for me to dismiss sometimes when I don’t understand it. But there’s value there. There’s value there, and I just don’t know how to see the vast majority of it yet. Need to keep trying to grok. I think we’re doing better at this over time, and folks like Henrik have been extremely patient in helping me learn how to see how the world of (in this case) journalism functions, how PR works, how they think differently than engineers do.

Ryan Rix helped me sand down many of the little snaggy sticking-points that had kept me from using KDE smoothly as a general productivity desktop. Most of them involved learning how configurations were set and how to click around and find my way through menus; it’s got a slightly different sense than GNOME (which is what I’ve been using the past few years) but it’s a good way to make my brain stretch out and think about the interaction paradigms that desktops choose.

My favorite new packages from tonight:

• digikam (photo management)
• yakuake (drop-down terminal, quake-style)
• kdenlive (video editor)
• sl (okay, this isn’t a KDE thing, and this came from Neville, but it’s great.)

There’s also plenty of stuff to do packaging practice on, if I ever find the time. That’s the KDE list. There’s also a bunch of Sugar Activities that need packaging. Between the two… I’ll never have to hunt for simple packages again (well, at least not for a long time).

Tomorrow’s the last day of the FAD, and we’ll be using it to create F13 videos and video-material. Stay tuned for the last episode of the exciting adventures of… (dah dah daaaaah) The Marketing FAD!

In the last few weeks I have been working on trying to find out how to make a Windows 2008 R2 Domain Controller, trust a Samba domain so that it would consider us able to handle PACs and therefore send us them.

This is different from the normal MIT Kerberos level trust. When using those trusts, the Windows DC does not expect the other Realm to be able to send PACs, understand PACs, or understand routing information for transitive trusts.

In order to set-up a cross-realm trust you need to make the Windows DC believe we are actually just another Windows Domain, with all the bells and whistles of a Windows Domain. Well, actually not all of them, and discovering exactly which ones was my goal.

As usual with Windows, there is a lot of redundancy and different ways to do things. Depending on the way you try to set up cross-forest trust relationships you will cause different netlogon RPCs to be issued.

After implementing some of them, and finding that some others were hard, I tried to find a way to reduce the amount of calls we need.

It turns out, as one might expect, that creating the 2 half of the trust on each DC would be easier as only the verification process is left. What I did not expect was that that was going to be true even if the tool used to create the trust on the Samba side, was actually a Windows 7 box.

Long story short, after fiddling around and hacking up some netlogon calls obscenely, in some cases hard coding server names in there, I was able to convince the Windows DC that we were indeed a trustworthy realm. Something to which it could route kerberos packets including the PAC.

At the same time the Samba domain KDC was able to parse the PAC and use the cross-realm trust account password to release tickets. And the Windows side was able to use this to seamlessly access the Samba fileserver.

For the moment it is all a big hack, and I have tested it only with a one way trust relationships (the Samba domain trusts the Windows domain but not the other way around). Yet it allowed me to finally confine the problem and understand exactly what is the minimum set of calls we have to answer and, most importantly, what we are supposed to answer.

Because of the hacks this code won't go in any tree for now, but it the base I need to plan the next steps. There is a lot of work to do before we have the mechanism needed to substitute the hacks with the proper actions the Samba server needs to take.

Ah, almost forgot, while researching this matter I also found interesting oddities and some protocol issues. Those always spice up your day, as it derails all your work and distracts you from your path until you understand and then solve or work around the problem. Usually just to fall into a new one a few days later, just as soon as you got back to the thread and remembered what were you actually doing and expecting to happen, so that you can happily forget it all over again. But this is also fun if you can take it philosophically :-)

Fedora's Audible Weekly News episode 4 for Fedora Weekly News issue 217.

This item belongs to: audio/opensource_audio.

This item has files of the following types: Metadata, Ogg Vorbis

Fedora's Audible Weekly News episode 3 for Fedora Weekly News issue 214.

This item belongs to: audio/opensource_audio.

This item has files of the following types: Metadata, Ogg Vorbis

Here it is in all its 5 long glory in reverse order.

• We received an @reply about it saying the current one sucked
• Lost all of the source files for all branding elements
• There’s a new Adobe CS release soon and we want to incorporate the new features
• Weird Al did a parody and business didn’t increase
• Our girlfriends think our logos are too small and scale badly

Honorable mention:

• Because Paul Rand hasn’t rolled over in his grave enough

in the last 2 days we had much work done. On sunday some Marketing Guys from Redhat step by and we had a little talking round about Brand and to have some kind of brand book.

Then we talked on our own brand and some talking points for. Rest was covered in mel’s blog. In the evening we have an amazing late late Howo Packaging workshop with David Nally and Ryan Rix.

Now I understand how that all fits together and can pack maybe sometimes pong on my own (just kiddin).
It was also my first time at the FAD I get toknow gobby and for such collaboration work as “look here is a php-gettext.spec File we take and here I do some editing then we ad here and here some comments and then it will work” was crazy, but it works REALLY good.
For creative working on texts remotly gobby is THAT tool of choice.

Day3 mostly was on PR stuff (as previously mentioned) and I was really happy about what we all could make happen within half an hour of straight work. So hopefully to the Redhat Summit in a few weeks we can put up the first presskit with some infos, a backgrounder, some history, some statistical data, maybe some pictures and videos and the additional USB stick should not be forget. Then all can stuffed together in a nice folder and ready to ship. Hopefully after I get home on thursday I find the time to do some first designs for our presskit. Rest we will discuss with some more design gurus.
In between we heard some talk Max had at the redhat building for the “Newcomers” and also videoed it.

In the evening we had some really tasty Burgers at Mo Joes and from now on we can call mel “daddy”, because she had a really big burger …

O jogo “Lucy and The Time Machine" de autoria dos brasileiros Vitor Balbio e Bernardo Hasselman, que participou do processo de desenvolvimento do Level Desginer e Concept Arts 2D, vence em duas categorias na disputada Blender 2010 Game Contest.

O game de “Lucy and The Time Machine" ganhou nas categorias de melhor Physics Gameplay e Graphics.

Mais uma vez Vitor provou o quanto do talento e do potencial dos brasileiros na criação de games o mundo até agora desconhecia. Provou mais do que isto: que todo trabalho levado a sério e com um objetivo bem definido inevitavelmente obterá sucesso, e seus realizadores alcançarão a glória e poderão dizer: EU SOU BRASILEIRO, COM MUITO ORGULHO!

Parabéns Vitor e Bernardo. Sucesso e que as portas continuem se abrindo para vocês.

É o que deseja toda a comunidade Blender Brasil.

http://www.blogindiana.com/tv/

I tried to embed the video but for some reason ustream hates me so just click the link up there

Massachusetts (and most of the NorthEast) has endowed us with Torrential Rain. And in the spirit of engineering, Olin College has added electricity to the mix.

This

is happening in this context: Kiefer clearly doesn't fear electrocution.

Uncontrollable flooding is not something I like to see in the electrical room. Even with this pump setup, until ~10min ago, water was still pouring out onto the floor.

In the spirit of student involvement, "do something," and student naïvety, Kiefer and I ventured into the electrical room, found that the pump wasn't working and fixed the problem. Now draining nicely.

Colin

 

 

 

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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as a part of the today Marketing FAD I talked a bit about PR work can be done and how to improve that work in FOSS.

Therefore I tryed to translate besides the talkings about the different presskit modules we want to have my talk I had at Linuxday 2009 in Berlin and you can find it here.

Dear fellow Fedora Project contributors,

over the past few months, the Fedora Project Board as well as several special work-groups and including a Marketing FAD all seem to be headed in the same direction; Fedora's target audience, the "minimum bar" to target from a Marketing point of view, and whatever jargon I supposedly don't know about because I have not read the correct books on the subject, consists of a couple of groups;

• users (curious, new)
• users (computer-savvy)
• users (not-yet-contributor)
• users

I hope we're all users too. I'd like to think that at the very least, we are all users. Of course if this is the minimum bar then it includes everyone. Yet -while we're pinning down what exactly is our target audience and various constituencies- I'm missing one particular group in this list, which is the committed. In other words, the developers, the free software pigs. All I see anyone be concerned with is chickens.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's very important to pay a lot of attention to potential contributors and get them to come off their asses and kick some other asses. I think it starts with the computer-savvy, the curious and the new. I think it's a good thing to spread Linux to general productivity users. But I also think it's very important to explicitly rather then implicitly target those that make those users have something to aim for. Otherwise, I believe, this particular group quickly becomes the departed.

True, first-hand testimony of how no-nonsense Gets Things Done!

I came to Cardiff virtually empty-handed, except for a couple of heavy books on chemistry-foo Lydia wanted me to bring from our place in the Netherlands. Believe me, there was no room for a proper birthday present ;-) Buying flowers on the airport just seems too tacky...

Either way, I had a very enjoyable weekend with Lydia! As it was the first time in Cardiff for me, we did do some site-seeing, with the positive side-effect of getting to know the area -since we're both going to live there in some kind of house/flat some time soon, we needed to make up our minds on what area of Cardiff would be most enjoyable.

Let me first say that Cardiff is full of houses and flats that are either for sale or to let. So, there's plenty of options available! I'm sure we'll be able to find something to our liking, but let's see what the bank has to say about that before calling the shots.

Back to the original subject of this blog post... No-nonsense birthday presents ;-)

I offered to pay for anything she wanted (within a reasonable price-range of course, no huge-ass diamant ring for Lydia quite yet), and she picks up some straws, tissues and gets her mugshot taken in one of those passport picture booths in one or the other mall. Lydia's happy, so fine with me! Done!

I'm going to have to think of a better present to bring along in two weeks though. I understand chocolate is good... Maybe some flowers from the airport... ;-)

Matt and I are speaking about V2V and libguestfs at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, June 22-25 2010. We’re speaking on the Thursday morning, in the “Decoding the Code” track. Here’s the summary: V2V — Moving VMware & Xen Virtual Machines to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization / KVM.

Meanwhile if you’re in London this week, I’m speaking at GLLUG this Thursday, March 18th. All the details are on the GLLUG home page.

Image shows Paul Cormier giving the keynote in 2008

The Marketing FAD continues, and we’re trying to do our best to summarize, transcribe, etc. things in real time as much as possible – both for our future selves and for remote attendees now. Here’s what we did this morning:

Paul Frields recapping our discussion on Fedora’s plans for Red Hat’s 2010 Summit:

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Neville Cross, Ryan Rix, and Paul Frields recapping our discussion on social media:

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When I begun to work as ambassador, never believed that I truly get in return so many things together. 
First, many people looking for me just about the project, what I'm working on - and how's going with linux - and more like this. When I remember that where I have begun, then I feel that I'm do something what really makes changes. 


The last surprise is was more special - after I have helped to my old friend - exactly, her workmate. Here it is what happened:
I have met with them a 2 weeks before, and we talked a lot. You know, beers, and so on. She has told me a lot about her second job, an tiny little glass manufacture, where they purchasing/making several types of bottles, painting them by hand, and selling them - mostly - filled with good quality wine, or liqueur. I have heard also about an ASUS notebook, the usual problems with XP, and Ms Office, Outlook, viruses, Internet Explorer, precious lot of contacts, stored graphics stuff to the paintings, and some arguing like "I don't want to purchase any more MS products ever again" - "...and this is the part what makes my hobby and second job to hell." or "I never want to save/reinstall in two days procedure....". I could understand.
Well, I have suggested to replace that OS to Fedora, with OOo, and maybe with Shotwell, or F-spot, Gimp, and Inkscape. "To... What? What is Fedora?" Well, I have made an simple, quick FOSS talk, linux and 4F, bunch of things of our OS, and slowly accepted to try it out. 2 days later I have sent an liveCD to her with my friend, along with an sheet of printed paper with full of website links, that maybe she has interest, or she has must be read to begun.


Next, one and half week later we talked again by phone, and my friend has told me, that I made an new beginner linux user, and a new fan of Fedora. "It seems Fedora works, fits perfectly for her" - and she is happy with it, and truly could use it to whatever needs... "Never seen her like that, diggs through the repository with PackageKit, and when I hear the 'Oooh, I need that too!' words - then I know that she found something again, what she wants to use or learn. Man, I always afraid to makes questions about what she founds. Like an kid in candy shop! I don't know how, but she also wants now an another Wacom table for drawing, for her paint-shapes! I don't know what will happen next when you send more links..." - and laughed. He has also told me that she wants to pay me out for the disc, but I told him the disc is free, and I didn't made that for money - so I couldn't accept it. "But she wants to be grateful... but I talk with her, and you will see it what she thinks."


Yesterday, I have met personally again with my friend, and at the end of the talk he gave an box to me. I looked above that a bit curious: What's that again? My friend just said "Accept that just as thank you, she made it this by their own hand, and don't open it until you're at home. Agree?" "Sure, but... what's that?". He didn't answered, just smiled and drived out with his car. At home packed out superfast, and what was that? Take look on these pictures:





Later I called my friend, and told him an big thank you, and questioned what is inside that is so blueish? Well, guys this is nothing else just blue Curacao..... And all that just for our work. 
The ship of Freedom. The ship of Fedora....

I had my birthday on the 27th of feb. Nothing special, though I was gladd some people did give me a call on that day. Like my boyfriend. When he was in Cardiff last weekend, he wanted to buy me something for my birthday. So... I picked a couple of things: straws, tissues and passport photo's. Isn't that great? He gave me exactly what I needed. Well, more to be honest because he himself added some cookies with chocolate dips (can't go wrong with chocolate :))! Everyone in favour of no nonesence presents say I................................... I