Fedora People

On the bus to Boston and finishing up my notes from NECC09. As noted in an earlier post here, I was sick the first half of Tuesday (I slept in until my fever broke), but managed to get some good conversations in anyhow within the few afternoon hours I had.

Low floor, high ceiling. My hacker friends and I use this phrase to describe a good design - it should be easy to learn but not constrain you from doing powerful things. As a hacker, a high ceiling is a killer feature for me. I want control. I need control. I know I’m going to outgrow the defaults on - if not all, a substantial portion - of things I use; I actively seek to max out the capabilities of my tools. For this freedom, I’m willing to give up a good initial experience - I will climb a steep learning curve to get something set up on my computer and in my fingers and mind because the long-term benefits are worth it.

For teachers, low floors are the killer app. They need it working now. They don’t know whether their kids are going to be abe to take it further, so it’s not really worth looking at whether the thing can go farther. I mean, most of the assignments given to 8-year-olds take what, 1-2 man hours to complete? As a high school student (at an intense math and science magnet, too) spending over 5 hours on an assignment was unusual - and I remember sophomore year when friends of mine moaned about how hard it was to do so much work because they had to learn to make websites for their history assignments on top of… y’know, learning history.

If you have to think and train too much about the usage of a tool, that tool gets in the way of learning things other than how to use it. One teacher taught her elementary school kids how to make stop-motion films. When I saw the title of her presentation, I started thinking about all the neat things you could teach them with video editing and tricky lighting setups and special effects. But the teacher emphasized that all she had taught her kids was how to push the “take a picture” button on the camera. (Which was already mounted on a tripod. Pointing at a table. Which was lit.) The kids didn’t string the pictures into films, didn’t even zoom in or out. But those kids had time to tell a story.

Phrases I heard repeated over and over when teachers were showing me their work: “All you have to do is…” “It comes built right in!” (This one is followed by a chorus of awed “Ahhhs.”)  “You don’t have to set it up!” “If I can do it, anyone can!” These typically were repeated several times in rapid succession in the same presentation.

Other buzzwords: (yes, I made the bingo card - click picture to expand.)

Some of the teachers had brought their students to show off their work. In one of the booths, a 6th grader was being filmed by her teacher, reading a prepared speech off a laptop screen about how “technology changed her life.” I thought once again about how good we get at giving the answers other people want to hear.

I also discovered SETSIG, a group of educators interested in technology for special education students. My laptop is about to run out of battery, so I will need to type that in later.

Simply a great story reaffirming how the failure of technical leadership and fundamental understanding about the need to have a robust underlying technical architecture for something as fundamental stock trading. Compare that fiasco with how the New York Stock Exchange sustains it's leadership so much so, that the CIO himself is willing and able to go on camera to attest to the robustness of Linux and related technologies. Years ago, it used to be said that "no one get's fired for buying IBM" and then some tried to replace IBM with Microsoft. Big FAIL.

I am hoping that the decision makers who awarded the Standard Operating Environment of the Singapore government are reading this blog and following those links. I suspect that they are not for they are so blinded and entrenched in a MS worldview. I continue to hear of major defects in the project, massive cost overruns ("oh, that part is not budgetted for.") and general annoyance at the end user level. Try talking to anyone about the progress of SOE and all you get are snarls and a string of explitives. Wonderful. Almost a billion dollars plunked down for questionable and low quality proprietary software. No empowering of the local economy to help with the system. Wasted tax dollars. #fb

HI all,

This month’s SLLUG Daytime SIG meeting is this coming Wednesday, July 8, from 11:30am-1pm at BetaLoft.  I apologize for being slow getting this out, we’ve been working through a big datacenter move this past week at work.  Now that is over, it’s time for SLLUG Daytime at BetaLoft, (357 W 200 S Suite 201 Salt Lake City, UT, 84101).  Here’s a map if you need directions.

I’d like to let you all know that I (Herlo) will be presenting this month, and the topic is: Cobbler, the powerful, installation, dhcp, dns and repo server!

If you have ever wanted to setup a system with pxe, dhcp, customized repositories and more, then cobbler is for you.  Feel free to read up on the cobbler website before the meeting.

I should mention that cobbler supports several distributions of Linux, and will soon support Windows remote installation (using Linux RIS).  Albeit, I’ll focus on setup of cobbler, a simple installation server with just one distro, using kvm and koan (kickstart over a network) with some basic networking and showing the gui tools as well.

Bring your lunch and your brains and learn all about setting up your very own install server in under an hour.

See you all on Wednesday!

Cheers,

Herlo

Related Posts

• Meeting: SLLUG Daytime SIG - May 13, 11:30am-1pm, Basics of Puppet
• Reminder: Cooking with PAM - This Wednesay 11:30am @ SLLUG Daytime SIG
• Reminder: SLLUG Daytime SIG meeting THIS Wednesday @ 11:30am
• Event: SELF: Day 0.5-2.0
• SELF: Day 0-0.5

I still see bugreports that blame HAL for various things including my mouse buttons don't work", "the pointer jumps", and various other things. In none of these cases HAL is at fault. From the X server's point-of-view, HAL is merely a replacement for the xorg.conf.

The simple tasks HAL does for us in the X server is:

1. List all input devices (the equivalent to the InputDevice sections in the xorg.conf).


2. Nominate the appropriate driver for each input device (the equivalent to the Driver "..." line in each InputDevice section).


3. Provide user-configured extra options such as the keyboard layout (the equivalent to the Option "Foo" "bar" lines).
   

Note that 2 and 3 are a result of your local configuration files and not some random guesses.

So whenever it's unclear if a problem is in fact caused by HAL ask yourself: if you had a xorg.conf, could this problem be fixed by editing it? If not, then you need to report the bug against the input driver or the X server. Here's Fedora's rough checklist for reporting input bugs.

That HAL is being replaced by DeviceKit everywhere is a completely different issue as well.

I’ll cut to the chase: it doesn’t work. But have no fear, there’s an OSS solution.

I recently got into using Amazon for buying MP3s. It’s DRM-free and has a great integration with pandora.com, which lets me hear a new song and click directly in pandora’s interface to buy it. It’s technology at its finest, if not its most dangerous (to my credit card).

Amazon is annoying in the sense that you can download single MP3s as an MP3 file, but to buy a full album you have to use their proprietary downloader. This was bearable until a recent change where all MP3s now have to be downloaded using their downloader.

The problem? The most recent build of their client is for Fedora 9 (or Ubuntu 8.10 if you go that route). So their software is, um, I’ll just say “not up to date”. I was able to hack around to get it to run under Fedora 10, but it’s flat out busted in Fedora 11.

As I said at the outset, there is hope. Clamz is a command line app to download MP3s using Amazon’s .amz formatted files. It’s exactly what you think it is. You download the .amz file from Amazon (at the point in Amazon’s workflow where you should be just downloading the MP3 itself) and run the clamz executable passing in the .amz file. Poof, it just works.

I’m disappointed it has to come to this. I know Fedora 11 is still new, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was never a Fedora 10 build (and still is no Ubuntu 9.4 build) of the Amazon downloader. Serious good karma to the Clamz project for stepping up and filling this need (at least until I find a new outlet for buying MP3s; if Amazon doesn’t want to let me buy from them then I’m not gonna go nuts trying to).

“What does it take to be good at something at which failure is so easy,so effortless ? ” : a quote from Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande which is a highly recommended reading for those who have not read it yet (that’s a link to the flipkart.com entry for those who are local).

Last evening over dinner, among other things, Runa and me got talking about translations and, translation quality. That is one of our favorite shop-talk items and, since the morning blog had bits about my performance with spellings, it was a bit more significant. It is a somewhat known issue that most translation teams measure the length of the sprint, that is, how many strings were completed or, the percentage of the coverage for a particular project. Some projects attach badges like “supported” / “unsupported“, “main” / “beta” to the coverage and thus make the rush to the tape more important. At some point in time, it is important for the teams to sit down, understand and make notes about the quality of translations. Left to itself, the phrase “quality of translations” doesn’t mean anything does it ? For example, if the phrase was “Disconnect from VPN…” and, you were required to translate it – how wrong can you go ?

It seems you can go wrong, and, most often do.

• One of the reasons that I have observed is that translating strings in application and, translating content like documentation/release_notes/guides require different kind of mind patterns.
• The second reason is the lack of fluency in the source language. So, if you are a translator/reviewer for any language, if you are using English source files (as most of us do), you need to be extremely proficient in the language. The way the sentences, phrases and sub-phrases arrange themselves in English may or may not lend themselves to direct translations
• The third reason is that most translators do not take time out to first use the application in English (or, read the documentation completely in English) and, use it again (or, read it again) after translation. That is a recipe for disaster. English is a funny language and, sometimes, due to the structure of the source files, the context of the content is lost. What does look like a simple word might have a funny implication if the comprehension about how it is placed within the UI or, the user-interaction flow is not made a note of.

Now that most projects have some kind of “localization steering committees” it would be a good small project to observe which locales are coming up with the highest quality of translations and, attempting to understand what they are doing. Asking the language teams about the reasons that inhibit them from maintaining a high quality would also enable deeper understanding of how a project can help itself become a better one (in a somewhat strange loop way). Such discussions would enable coming up with Guidelines for Quality which are important to have. I firmly believe that all developers desire that their applications be consumed by the largest number of audience possible and, at heart, they are willing to sit down and listen to constructive suggestions about how best they can help the localization teams make it happen. That is the sweet spot the “LSCo” folks need to converge on and get going. In fact, for projects like OLPC, where a lot of new paradigms are being created, understanding translation processes and, chipping away at improving translation quality is highly requested.

Translation is still an activity that requires a fanatical attention to detail and, that little bit of ingenuity. There is something not right about committing a translation that smacks of a “letting go of the disciplined focus on detail” and, does not contain anything new. The job is made somewhat more hard when it comes to documentation. One cannot (and, perhaps should not) go beyond what the author has written and yet, it has to be made available in the local language after “stepping into the shoes” (or, “getting into the mind”) of the original author while making it aligned with the natural flow of the target language. This is also the place where the “translator memory”, as opposed to the “Translation Memory” becomes important. The mind should be supple enough to recall how similar idioms were translated earlier or, if an error that was already reported has cropped up again. Translators have a significant bit to contribute towards making the translation source files better, cleaner, well-maintained and, well documented. And, they have to do it right every time.

All this would come together to produce high quality translations and, wider usage of applications and documentation. Collaboration for the win !

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.6

Saturday night/Sunday morning, from 02h00 to 03h00 I prepared my slides.

On sunday, I was the only one scheduled for a presentation, while the day was reserved for hackfests. I wanted to take the opportunity (since there are Fedora contributors from various continents) to report back to the community about the progress made behind Fedora Electronic Lab.

Normally, I use PDF for my presentations. But that I was using the slides directly from openoffice3.1. I was surprised with the beamer features it has.

Most of the heads whom I was hoping to attend my Report were not present, I changed the orientation of my Report towards a presentation instead. It is sad, because many people know of FEL as just a collection of EDA tools, which it absolutely not the case. I said this couple of times before. After my presentation, Fedora Italians, Greg, Max,Jeroen and I had a chat in the park about a new way of marketing via Xuropa.

Bert, Jeroen and I spent some time on the spin maintainers’s reponsibilities and wikipages. Wow, Fedora wiki got a lot features since I was heavily using it during the time of Kadischi.

FUDCon is always an exciting moment for a Fedora contributor. I always enjoy good moments with Fedora EMEA members, whom I have great respect for. A big thank you to MaxSpevack, GeroldKassube, JoergSimon and the rest of the Fedora Linuxtag crew for making this FUDCon a success.

Saturday started with a delicious german breakfast with ChristophWickert, SebastianDziallas and a LXDE developer. LXDE was on the table. I was trying to reboot my brain while my body was seeking for a bed. At about 09h15, I followed the Fedora wave to the Berlin Messe.

There everyone was showing me the FEL Flyers , while Mo put a Fedora tattoo on her cheek. I went straight to a neighbouring booth about FPGA, to learn more about the EDA tools they use. To my astonishment, they haven’t heard of FEL. So I gave them a basic introduction of our objectives behind FEL, from my point of view, they were not very enthusiast with it. It was the same feeling when you are asking an Altera fanboy to use Xilinx ISE to timing analysis.

I went to the KDE booth to tell them that FEL is KDE-based and that I want to learn more future power optimizations and boot time optimizations for the upcoming releases. However, I got the confirmation about a theory on KDE developers, “You will never have productive discussion with KDE developers, if you said there is something wrong about KDE.” I have this theory since I was a KDE booth member at CeBit 2007 in Hannover. I was firm on the fact that I was not only a user, but a KDE distributor as well. But the only respond I got was to ask my users to upgrade their hardware. Well, if KDE is juicing to much about Fedora (gnome) desktop, then there is a problem with KDE. I pointed the fact that RexDieter and FedoraKDE had worked a lot to improve KDE’s boot time. The discussion was not going anywhere, so I ended it and head to the Fedora booth. I was a booth staff from 12:00 to 14:00 as per ThomasWoerner’s sheet. There, I showed Mo how I used their early work on Fedora Community website for Fedora Electronic Lab’s website. She instantly pointed out some improvements and suggested a sublogo for FEL.

Then I want to fetch my FUDCon M-size t-shirt from MaxSpevack. Someone stole my M-size t-shirt and finally got a XL I caught JoergSimon and we went to have lunch with AndreasRau. It is always a pleasure to sit down with Joerg and chat with him. While we were heading to Mo’s “Fedora Community” presentation, GregDeKoniegsberg caught us on the hallway asking assistance with the beamer for his presentation. Ultimately, I gave Greg’s my laptop for his presentation and I stayed with him, while Joerg went to Mo’s presentation.

During the last 2 hours of Linuxtag, I went every electronic hardware related booth to learn more about their projects and the set of EDA tools they use. Among those were, Beagleboard of TexasInstrument, OpenEmbedded and a robotics booth. I am amazed that none knew of FEL’s existence. It is a real issue that openhardware community are unaware of the opensource solutions Fedora Electronic Lab provides. Another item on the my todo list.

I went to one of the last sessions (2nd day FUDCon) about the spins with JeroenVanMeeuven. You can read the meeting minutes here. I shared my intention of a possible migration of FEL Livedvd from KDE-based to Gnome based. After that, we headed to the hotel and then with the germans we went to eat real meat. After dinner, some of us went to the Ubuntu BBQ for which we received an invitation at the booth. There, it was very silent. I spent some quality time with Lennart, who introduced himself as the one who breaks my pulseaudio.

Firefox 3.5 was released Tuesday. And you might have noticed this story from Slashdot.

Now, the issue has been explained in true Internet fashion (via my friend Sam):

I was not supposed to visit LinuxTag this year and but finally I managed to come on Friday evening, 27 June 2009 (special thanks to those who encouraged me). It was also the first day for Fedora’s FUDCon Berlin 2009 session (the most exciting part of LinuxTag09).

I was supposed to give a presentation (about Fedora Electronic Lab) Friday morning, however due to some personal reasons, I could only manage to come on Saturday. My apologies to those who came to my presentation on Friday. However during the week, MaxSpevack and I exchanged some phone calls so that he could takeover my presentation and show how Fedora is the ideal platform to excel in promoting innovative ideas (FEL, in this case) based on free and opensource software. Special thanks to MaxSpevack.

On the way to check-in at the hotel, I met YaakovNemoy, BertDesmet and a few other Fedora contributors. To my surprise, I got the chance to meet JohnMcDonough and his son, JP. Thanks, to JohnMcDonough who reminded me before the freeze of F-11 release notes to write the release notes for FEL. After check-in, I went straight to my room and met my room mate. I was only able to manage a 2 minutes of chit-chat with him when GeroldKassube knocked at the door to fetch me for the Fedora’s social event, FUDPub.

We arrived around 19h30 at the FUDPub. I was shocked by the number of new faces I could not recognized (149 Fedorans subscribed). I barely shared a hug with Max. Most of the usual Fedora EMEA(aside the French) were having chit-chats with their beers. The germans as usual started pointing to me that I was missing something, beer . Out of the blue pizza came to the table, so I took a piece and talked with Kanarip, JP, JohnMcDonough and a few others I didn’t even knew their names. I made a small trip to all the tables saying “hi” to everyone I knew. The waiter came with a vegetarian pizza and no-one was eager to eat it. So I took the pizza to MairinDuffy, knowing the fact that Ray and she have a blog about vegetarian food. Hence I managed to talk to her and JesseKeating for a few seconds, when Kanarip and I engaged into a deep conversation (specially about FEL’s Statistics) and lost completely track of what others were doing. At about 01h00, everyone was gone except the Fedora Italians and AlasdairKergon. In accordance to AndreasThienemann, they went to better places.

I'm going to be away from fedora and from my repository for a few days.

A full week, dedicated to GLPI and more precisely to ITIL work

During this time, my internet access is going to be very restricted, so It will be quite difficult to communicate with me. We have a very ambitious plan and the week should be both studious and convivial. See you soon.... Lire Away for a few days

Lets take a moment and look back about 5 years at the state of the GNU/Linux desktop from an emerging web based world. There was really only two web browsers worth mentioning, Mozilla and Netscape (which in hindsight were essentially the same thing). The problem? They were heavy set in terms of the resources they required, so what happened? Mozilla released Phoenix, and it was amazingly fast and nobody could believe how quickly it would fire up and run on their old Pentium II machines that they slapped Linux on in an attempt to breath some life back into them.

At the time only those "in the know" were running the browser but it was quickly gaining steam just in time for a name change to Firebird due to angry people with trademark hooks on the name and for a decent amount of users this caused enough confusion for there to be a riff in its general usage but as time progressed and users were aware of the name change things were back to normal. Forums were booming with the merits of the browser as the popularity gained, it was insane how fast your browser could be. It truly raised the bar for expectations of what users compared all other browsers to. Now that we've gotten some happy users, lets go ahead and change the name again. This time the Firebird database people are upset so Mozilla politely obliged and changed the name again. Thus, Firefox is born and the web browser revolution is under way. Firefox hits the ground running with features no one can compete with, it is wildly extendible, is "secure" (I always use that word with a grain of salt), open source, and its fast. This is truly innovation that will go down in the history of computing.

Lets fast forward to today and walk into a room of GNU/Linux aficionados and ask "What's your opinion of Firefox?" and as we make this inquiry let us remember that this was the same demographic that half a decade ago was singing the praises of the now main stream browser. The responses you will receive are probably going to be something along the lines of "I don't use FirefoxOS", " pwns Firefox in the face", or "Bloatware is annoying". What happened? Geeks are fickle creatures, that's what happened. We love the latest and greatest tech that nobody else is using because its new and shiny, its fast, it shows promise, and because nobody else is using it we are somehow elite for doing so. What about when that new shiny tech reaches maturity and succeeds in a big way? Firefox happens.

Here's the reality of the situation, yes webkit is cool as hell from a geek standpoint because its new and its shiny but Firefox is tried and true, it supports all the latest and greatest web tech, is popular as hell, its well supported, stable, "secure" (remember that grain of salt), cross platform, fast, extendible as ever, open source, and it just flat out works. I'm not saying you should turn your nose up at webkit in any way, shape, or form because it truly is the new shiny tech that shows a lot of promise. But I'm tired of people bitching and moaning about Firefox's "issues" when all the arguments I have heard thus far are simply cases of a Geek stigma haunting what is now too mainstream to be "cool" or "l33t" enough for those of us who pride ourselves on our technological prowess.

Lets try to be Geeks and be happy for that which emerges from our depths as a great mainstream success in the user share market.

This link seems to be being passed around the blogs, but I first saw it at pjp news.

http://www.commandlinefu.com

It’s a collection of user uploaded and ranked useful commands. The idea is similar to the two entries I wrote on shell tricks but on a much bigger and cooler level. Just quickly poking around the first page of the site has already shown a number of things that are going to come in really handy. They also support all the usual useful channels like RSS and twitter, both of which you can use with a filtered threshold for user votes to limit the incoming commands to the truly awesome. There is some serious black magic to be learned on this site.

jtannhauser: Wo hat der Frosch eigentlich die Locken?

Comparto a ustedes el discurso que dio el Presidente Luiz Inazio Lula da Silva de Brasil durante la clausura del Festival Internacional de Software Libre.

Publicado originalmente aqui y traducido al castellano por su servidor

Bien, de hecho, Dilma ha hablado por parte del Gobierno Brasileño. No había necesidad de que yo dijera absolutamente nada aqui el día de hoy, porque creo que el haber cruzado ese “Pasillo Lustrado”, el cuál atravesé para llegar aqui, vale por lo menos cuatro discursos. Pero quería felicitar a mis camaradas del Ministerio quienes están aqui con nosotros.

Quisiera felicitar a los diputados federales, a nuestros senadores, al Gobernador Olivio Dutra, al alcalde Fogaça. Quisiera saludar a un invitado especial quien llegó tarde aqui, nuestra camarada Lourdes Munhoz, de España, una congresista de Barcelona quien aconseja al Presidente Zapatero sobre Software Libre. No le veo el rostro porque ella no se ha presentado aún. Párese por favor.

Leer discurso completo …

Articulos Similares:

• FLISOL Monterrey 2009 – Un Exito!
• FISL Dia 0
• Planeta Linux México
• Algo de promoción…
• FISL Day 1 / FUDCon Day 0

Discurso del Presidente Lula durante el FISL 10

Comparte el enlace:

jtannhauser: Watching the game, having a bud. True... True...

jtannhauser: Ich würde ja einen Tee trinken, aber so Pulvermist aus dem Automaten schmeckt widerlich...

Comparto a ustedes el discurso que dio el Presidente (me quito el sombrero) Luiz Inazio Lula da Silva de Brasil durante la clausura del Festival Internacional de Software Libre.

Publicado originalmente aqui y traducido al castellano por su servidor

Bien, de hecho, Dilma ha hablado por parte del Gobierno Brasileño. No había necesidad de que yo dijera absolutamente nada aqui el día de hoy, porque creo que el haber cruzado ese “Pasillo Lustrado”, el cuál atravesé para llegar aqui, vale por lo menos cuatro discursos. Pero quería felicitar a mis camaradas del Ministerio quienes están aqui con nosotros.

Quisiera felicitar a los diputados federales, a nuestros senadores, al Gobernador Olivio Dutra, al alcalde Fogaça. Quisiera saludar a un invitado especial quien llegó tarde aqui, nuestra camarada Lourdes Munhoz, de España, una congresista de Barcelona quien aconseja al Presidente Zapatero sobre Software Libre. No le veo el rostro porque ella no se ha presentado aún. Párese por favor.

Leer discurso completo …

jtannhauser: Gibt es ein Leben VOR dem Tod?

jtannhauser: 20 Uhr, totale Langeweile, die Frisur sitzt!!!