I have never attended Agile Roots before, nor have I been a big part of the Agile community, but I have to say that spending time listening and learning has been very intriguing and I can see the definite value of using agile methods.

The morning keynote was pretty awesome, sharing how to collaborate and improving processes by letting others, including customers be involved.

Also, the afternoon keynote was incredible, Diana Larsen is a really bright and eloquent speaker who can really get you excited.  It seemed to me that she was really interested in solving some serious deficits with Agile methods.

I attended a great session on user experience design (UxD) and branding.  One where we branded a flavor of popcorn.  We had a cinnamon popcorn and branded ours with Jessica Rabbit driving a candy red convertible Volkswagen Rabbit to a Speakeasy in Toon Town.  The presenters really drove home the concept about branding and making sure it all made sense.  Very well done.

But I won’t say it was a perfect day of presentations….

The first half hour of the first presentation of the day (after the keynote) started out interesting and promising.  I really enjoyed the idea of playing Dracula vs Humans and the idea that the oppressor (management) actually felt relieved when they became oppressed.  I also enjoyed the idea that the oppressed (employees) were generally nervous about becoming the oppressor.    It’s an interesting concept to understand and valuable lesson learned.

The next hour of the workshop however, was confusing and frustrating because it didn’t make sense at all.  Why would making a sculpture of what you feel during certain work situations and then resolving them by making short simple movements in rhythm solve anything?  I just didn’t get it.  I’m sure there was value to some, but not to me.

Lightning Talks and the Food Rocked!

At the end of the day, we spend a bit of time doing lightning talks.  I really enjoyed the Su-Ha-Ri talk, the Architecture Haiku, Pigeon Sign Language (though I couldn’t keep up) and several others as well.  That was one of the best hours spent at Agile Roots.

As for the food, you cannot go wrong with Pat’s Barbecue!  One of the best choices the conference team could have made for a dinner.  Everything was excellent and I enjoyed a very nice conversation with a fellow from Version One.  He was from Atlanta and had never been to Utah before.  As usual, he thought it was very beautiful, and we spent a bunch of time talking about the need for a coach to help get Agile started in a large company like Backcountry.com

Agile Roots Day 1: Success!!!

Cheers,

Herlo

This project was dreamed up by Mr. Ian Weller and he graciously let me tag along to get the thing going.  At the Utah Open Source Conference tomorrow, we’re going to be digging into a workflow and concept around the items needed to make FES work.  We’ll be hanging out from 12:30-5pm in room 209 while we work on the project, feel free to drop by and ask questions as well.

So if you are interested in FES, come join us at UTOSC or remotely in #fedora-fad on irc.freenode.net

Cheers,

Herlo

First, there wasn’t (and still isn’t) any good instructions for setting up the Grandstream GXP 2000 with Fedora Talk.  I spent a good bit of time with Jon Stanley and Ian Weller who helped me get past this hurdle.  I would say that it’s much easier to set up Twinkle than it is the Grandstream VoIP phone.  But it’s all configured now, so I’m pretty happy.  I should get some energy in the next week or two to get up a page for this as well.

But that’s not why I am blogging this!  Instead, I spent some time today with Ian Weller to get some new Conference Bridges up on Fedora Talk, which he did in a snap.  I then proceeded to code a new page that describes the current conference bridges available within Fedora Talk.  If you didn’t know, there are several already set up for many sub-projects along with the 5 new ‘General’ conference bridges.

I sure hope you all enjoy the new availability, configure twinkle and start chatting more and more on Fedora Talk!

Cheers,

Herlo

The North American Fedora Ambassadors team has obtained a room for the first North American Fedora Activity Day @ SCaLE 7x!

What is a FAD, you ask? Well, let’s try to explain.

It is clear that while FUDCon is a great event, a lot is accomplished there and many successful projects launch or gain much speed there. The problem is that not everyone can attend. For whatever reason, not every Fedora Contributor will get to make it to every FUDCon, it’s just impossible.

Because of this dilemma, the great Max Spevack decided to propose the FAD. A mini-FUDCon of sorts, where, in a smaller forum, a group of folks regionally located could gather, and get a few good things done in a one day session. You might think of code sprints or bar camps as good descriptions of what might happen at a FAD. Still confused? Check out this link for more information.

Any Fedora Contributor can suggest a FAD anywhere, anytime, and it’s even likely to get funding*.  So the next question is, what can be done at a FAD?

To answer this question, I think you’d have to say that anything that benefits Fedora directly or indirectly can be done at a FAD.  Some of the things that have been brought up to my knowledge, starting with the two springs being held at SCaLE 7x.

• Fedora Docs – User Guide completion for F10
• Fedora Fonts SIG – Packaging fonts
• Infrastructure hackfest
• Ambassador Mentoring
• Moksha sprint

I’m sure there are a hundred more ideas floating around, feel free to add your FAD to the planning page and get something cool done in your backyard.  If you feel like it as well, drop me a line here with ideas for more FADs around Fedora-land.

Cheers,

Herlo

* – Truthfully, I can only speak for Fedora Ambassadors North America (FAmNA) to say that we’ll do what we can to help fund a FAD near you.

6:12pm: In hotel room, snuggled up to Jennifer.  Still debating whether I’m going to sleep or just head to FUDPub.

6:15pm: Send Dave an SMS message that reads ‘be down in 10 minutes’.

6:31pm: Dave replies with SMS that reads ‘Hmmm gave up and left’.

6:32pm: Head down to the lobby to try to catch up.   Nobody there, so Jennifer and I head over to FUDPub.  By this time, hunger has taken over and I am less tired than hungry.

6:40pm: Arrive at Flat Top Johnny’s for FUDPub.  Proceed directly to the rear of the building in search of food.

6:42pm: Find food, pile it on my plate and head back to the front of the building.  The place is packed an hopping.  Lot’s of pool is being played and it sure looks like fun.

7:00pm: Our server takes our order for drinks and the party commences.  We sit down beside Mike McGrath, Jeroen van Meeuwen, Dave Nalley and a couple others as well.  Of course, we start talking a bit about Ambassador stuff and the barcamp overall.

7:30pm: About the time we’ve consumed a couple drinks and ordered food, the conversation gets good.  We’ve had a few others join us, Jared Smith, Kenny and Cade all come over and at this point we’ve basically taken over the table.

8:00pm: I’m feeling much better, have eaten a chicken sandwich and consumed a few more beverages.  At this point I’m very happy I didn’t stay at the hotel and sleep.  Jennifer and I are having fun with the rest of the group.

8:??pm: Not sure quite when it happened, but Mo Duffy decided to come by to take our pictures for the Fedora Picture Book.  It was at this time I was invited to do something, rather egged on by the table pounding.  I proceeded to the front of the restaurant to perform my now infamous moonwalk.  (Thanks to Ian Weller).

9:ISHpm: Played pool with Jennifer, Dave, Jared, Colby and others.  Spent a good hour playing pool and trying not to repeat a performance of my moonwalk.

10:30pm: Arrived at the hotel and discussed the video uploading hackfest.  It was decided we’d meet on the 3rd floor and hack for a while.

10:45pm: Met Chris Tyler and Matt Domsch along with Ian, Dave, Kenny and a few others and proceeded to render video.  I wanted to play with the syncing of the video with the audio recordings I obtained, but after several attempts, it was clearly not going to happen.

1:00am (Sunday): Because video takes a long time to render, I was still up tinkering with my rendering. About this time, Mo Duffy had sent links into #fudcon showing my dance moves.  Ian and others at the video hackfest decided this was a much better hackfest.  In the next hours, Ian had created an animated gif as well as an ogg video of my moonwalk to the tune of ‘Smooth Criminal’.  Each time I made a comment about it, the pure ridiculousness was raised another magnitude.

3:00am: After enduring enough of the video rendering and ‘Smooth Criminal’ in midi, I decided it was time to head up to the room.

3:10am: Because I hadn’t gone to bed at a reasonable hour to be useless for Sunday’s hackfest, I decided it would be a good idea to pack my bags.

3:25am: Decided that it wasn’t late enough to sleep, I started on and successfully got Moksha up and running with Luke’s demo data.  I can see how cool it will be to build Fedora-Event-Splash with a Moksha back end.  I was also thinking about an Ambassador Portal, probably somehing with statistics and updates when a user updates.  Could also show tracking of resources and other useful tools.

4:00am: Time for bed.  ZZZZzzzzzz ZZZZZZzzzzz

8:35am: Arrive at MIT for the FUDCon bar camp, grab a muffin, some juice and coffee.

8:50am: Complete set up of audio equipment, quickly down my juice and muffin.

8:55am: Head out to get some more food, but I only found some morsels left.  I snagged a small bit of bread left, and begin my return to the audio equipment.

9:05am: Streaming has begun, or so I think.  Darkice won’t start, giving a strange error that the device wasn’t there.  It turns out I’ve forgotten to plug in the usb cable from the mixer, so the first few minutes of Greg DeKoenigsberg’s talk are missing.

9:08am: Plug in the usb cable and restart the stream.

9:30am: Pitch a session on the Fedora Classroom.

9:40am: Vote for my favorite sessions and hope others want to participate in the Fedora Classroom session.  As I we are voting, I chat with Dave Nalley, Ian Weller and Ricky Zhou about recording audio in whatever room they are in each hour.  It seems to be a good plan.

9:50am: Paul asks me to help get sessions scheduled, so I grab chalk and start crossing out sessions that have been scheduled.

10:15am: All the sessions are scheduled, because I am recording the audio of many of the presentations, I choose to stay in the main room, also the largest room.

10:30am: I begin streaming the Filesystems session, Chris Tyler is also in this room recording the video for posting later on the web.  The session did not start off all that interesting.  Near the end, I learned a bit about the transition from ext4 to btrfs for the future of Linux in general.

11:30am: This was my favoritest hour of the entire bar camp.  Luke Macken and John (J5) Palmieri presented on Moksha.  Moksha is an application built upon Turbo Gears 2, orbited, jQuery and about 10 other technologies to bring together a simple interface for making real time applications on the web.  It’s much more than a simple AJAXified application and has benefits to allow one to write a simple connector to communicate to the browser.  Watch for another post on this in the near future.

12:15pm: During the Moksha talk, I recalled that I desired to head over to the Marriott hotel and take pictures of the Fedora window posters.  Because I hadn’t brought along my camera, I first asked Mairin Duffy to see if she had a long range lense, She did not.  John Stanley informed me he had one with his Canon Digital Rebel XTI, and that he would happily lend it to me.  However, he couldn’t leave as he was covering for others during the lunch hour.

12:30pm: Jennfer came over and spent about 20 minutes with me while I ate my lunch.  Then we found John together and headed out *quickly* to get the pictures of the hotel.  We talked about what she was going to do that day, visit some older churches in the area and such.

As we arrived at the hotel, we saw several windows with the Fedora window posters.  I pulled out the camera and fired away, catching several good photos.  After taking the first photos however, I noticed that the camera was reporting that it did not have a CF card.  It turns out John didn’t know he didn’t have a card in his camera, which means no pictures from the hotel experiment (unless others have some, here’s hoping).

1:33pm: After hurrying back from the failed photo shoot.  I found myself running behind the schedule just a little.  It turns out the Puppet session was next and Jeroen van Meuween wasn’t too interested in waiting on me.  As luck would have it, everyone seemed to be in this session and Ricky Zhou saved the day by recording the first few minutes on the stream for me.

The puppet session was good, but I wish I had seen a bit of a demo of advanced features.

2:30pm: The desktop session was started recording, however, I was asked to come out and do an interview with my good friend Dave Nalley about the progress of the Ambassadors with Colby Hoke.  We spent a good bit of time talking in front of the camera about the awesomeness that is the new AmbassadorKit, the new Media Box and some other initiatives coming soon to the Fedora Project.

2:55pm: Headed over to the remaining bits of the Git Basics session run by Paul Frields.  I really enjoyed this session.  While I know quite a bit about Git, I was able to help teach others about a few things and even learned a thing or two about git-reset.

3:25pm: Returned to the main room to finish up the streaming for the Desktop session.  There was a lot of discussion going on about the new feature in the GNOME (I think?) desktop, but coming in at the end, I wasn’t certain.

3:30pm: After starting the recording for the KVM session, along with Kevin Fenzi, I headed over to the session we were holding on Fedora Classroom.  I was saddened to see that there were only 6 people (including us) in the session.  But that’s what you get when you compete against KVM and other blockbuster sessions and your topic is really, really new.

Even with the small audience, Kevin and I were able to come up with some positive plans for the future from the group.  I anticipate we’ll see more basic topics for the #fedora and FedoraForum.org crowds.  We talked about how a lot of the folks we’ve seen in the #fedora-classroom sessions over the past two months were those who really could become great contributors with just a bit of opportunity.

We also discussed ways to get more presenters and topics into the curriculum.  Part of what is keeping this from blooming quickly.  Hopefully the things we discussed were useful for the future of Fedora Classroom and its future does look bright.

4:30pm: As everyone gathered into the room, I learned that we were going to be having a hackfest in the evening after FUDPub.  The goal of the hackfest was to get the videos and audio uploaded and shared as quickly as possible.

5:08pm: Paul’s final remarks for the bar camp, thanking many of the contributors.  I was grateful for everyone who put in effort today.  The MIT folks were very gracious for letting us hold FUDCon there this year.

Paul announced the FUDPub at Flat Top Johny’s and that the OLPC folks were sponsoring the food and one drink.  Very nice of them as well.

Part 2 will be coming shortly as it is another day unto itself.

Cheers,

Herlo

8:30am: Decided I was finally awake enough to write FUDCon F11: Day 0 post.

9:00am: Packed everything I needed (or thought I needed) into my backpack.  This took incredibly long.

9:10am: Somewhere around this time, I was expecting the reminder “We’re waiting” SMS from Dave Nalley.  None had arrived.

9:14am: Send SMS to Dave asking if he’s downstairs yet.  Get reply that he has not made it down yet, with a 7 minute ETA.  I chuckle, pack the rest of my audio equipment and head downstairs.

9:20am: Arrive with others for breakfast, many have given up on us, headed over to order food and head out.  Dave arrives approximately 1 minute later, we head to Au Bon Pain and promptly order and eat breakfast.

9:35am: I look up the instructions to the Tang Center for everyone.  None of us had decided it important enough to do this earlier.  Luckily, it’s about one block away.  We head out toward the HackFest.

9:45am: Arrive at Tang Center on MIT’s campus without incident, proceed to the 3rd floor (following well placed signs).  Obtain our badges and head into the main room for a short discussion.

10:05am: Discussion begins.  Approximately 25 projects are placed upon the board.  Names include, AmbassadorKit, Moksha, DevShell, OLPC / Sugar development and many, many others.

11:00am: Head to room 395 for the AmbassadorKit HackFest.

• AmbassadorKits are designed and put in place.  It is determined we need to obtain Tyvek bags to ship them and make the kits disposable and easily distributable.
• Media Boxes are a big hit and everyone is cutting them out and taping them together.  I did a short video presentation on how to fold them (hopefully will have that content really soon) for inclusion in the AmbassadorKit.    Tape is also needed for the Media Boxes.
• Discussion of the many uses of the Media Boxes was held.

11:30am: Decided the printed Fedora Window Posters were great for the Tang Center.    Placed them on the windows wherever good and visible.

12:30pm: Four ambassadors; myself, Ian Weller, Brian Powell and Dave Nalley head out toward Central Square to obtain packaging and tape from the UPS Store.  We had it in our mind this was a good idea now that we have a NA UPS Account.  In reality, after traveling on the train, walking 20 minutes in the windy, brisk cold weather and discovering the lack of true UPS supplies we could purchase on our account, it might have just been as good to head to the nearest shipping store.  Ahh well, lesson learned.

1:15pm: Arrived at a lovely pizzeria recommended by one of the nice UPS Store employees.  We decided to share a pizza.  After ordering, the total came to just over $20.  I reached into my wallet, pulled out a $20 bill and thought, “gee, I need some change”.  Dave promptly swiped the bill from my hand, and nonchalantly handed it to the cashier as if it were payment.  Thus, i was paying for lunch.  Dave promptly got a “waaa!” from me.  I then received a $5 bill for my trouble from Dave, as if that fixed everything.*

2:15pm: Arrived at the hotel, headed up to get the Live Media to bring to the event.  Headed back over to the Tang Center.

2:30pm: The AmbassadorKits were packaged, Brian Powell will be shipping out 2 (or 3) this weekend.  The remainder will be distributed among the Ambassadors to fulfill future requests.

3:00pm: Decided it a was a good time to distribute the rest of the Fedora Window Posters for the hotel.  Ran out of posters with doublestick tape.  Need to buy more.

3:15pm: Set up and tested audio streaming for tomorrow’s FUDCon sessions.  It appears we’ll have enough to do 4 rooms with streaming audio and 3 rooms (I believe) with video to be distributed soon after FUDCon.  Test was quite successful.

3:30pm: Discussed the new CMS with Karsten and others.  Promoted WordPress as a possible CMS platform.  Argued for its stability, value and flexible API.  Not sure I converted anyone, but it was worth a try.

4:30pm: Hung around, discussed media and other Fedoraish topics with others in the room.  All in all a good bit of work was done.  Much to mull around in this brain of mine.

6:00pm: Gathered with Paul, Greg and many others for a round table session about Fedora. This part was the most useful for me so far.  I was quite grateful for the opportunity to come in and discuss all the great things happening in Fedora.  To see the gratitude from these folks was cool.  It really pushed home why I like hanging out with Fedora folks, they are very genuine appreciative people for what we all do.  I learned so much about the contribution benefits and how others contribute.

7:45pm: Met in the lobby of the hotel, then headed over to Cambridge Brewing Company for a nice dinner.  Quite good food and drink.  Good company and gorgeous girlfriend to boot.  What a day!  What a day!

10:30pm: Arrived back at the hotel to hack on Fedora-Event-Splash with the new Moksha functionality.  Essentially, we wanted to get a better feel for Moksha and what it provides after Paul described it earlier in the day.  Thing is, there are a lot of things to getting it working and we could only get so far.

However, while working through this, I was able to discuss plans for tomorrows Audio Streaming and Video Recording of the sessions.   Thus the blog post and some logistics which should make things easier for everyone.

I was also able to discuss the Fedora-Classroom session Kevin Fenzi and I are proposing tomorrow.  We’re looking to have a lively session tomorrow regarding this and see where it might go.

Another discussion that came out of this was the usefulness of EMEA and its non-profit.  Seeing as we’re looking into this for North America.

2:30am (Saturday): In bed.  Zzzzzzz

Essentially, the goal of Fedora Talk is to make it easier for use Fedorans to talk with one another, hold conference calls and accommodate impromptu conversations that need to happen over voice.  A few of the features is that it’s tied into FAS (the Fedora Account System) and authentication uses a password different than your FAS password, which is very nice.

So tonight, I was interested in getting this working because recently I was given a VOIP phone from the Fedora Project and wanted to use it soon.  However, I’m currently in Denver, and the phone was in Salt Lake.  That means it will have to wait for this weekend at least.

But all is NOT lost!!!

I decided to spend a bit of time helping get this great idea off the ground by creating a screencast to configure your machine to use Fedora Talk with Twinkle.  It took me only about 20 minutes to create and only two takes.  It’s fairly easy to set up as my screencast shows.

There are some restrictions I wish to share, mainly because didn’t mention them in the video.

• You must have a computer with a microphone and speakers.
• I recommend you purchase a $5 mic from radio shack, it makes the quality of your voice so much better.
• Headphones work well also.instead of speakers, keeps the feedback down.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the screencast and join the Fedora Project.

Cheers,

Herlo

When I arrived downstairs just after 8am, people were setting up for FAD NA.  Jeffrey Tadlock had arrived and was loading the food in from the car.  Bagels, donuts, fruit, coffee and orange juice.  Nice array of foodstuffs for the morning.

My presentation went pretty well, we had fun with it and I really enjoyed the gag about the Ambassador Class Starship.  Unfortunately, I forgot to grab the vga cable for my projector so we couldn’t use it but I did have pdfs of the slides online.

I brought up a lot of thoughts about how we should be ambassadors, how we should act and especially how important it is that we represent ourselves well to the community.  I talked a bit about the message we should spread and ways we can represent Fedora to the community.  I think it was well received by the ambassadors and I hope it made a good impression.

The rest of the day was very well focused, we made some serious progress in areas I wanted to see the progress as well as things I hadn’t even considered.  Pascal was gracious enough to take notes and place them online already.  I learned a ton about how FAmSCo works and what we need to do as ambassadors to make sure they will provide us with the tools we need to spread the word about Fedora.

After a good long day, we cleaned up (most of us anyway) around 2pm and started heading out, though my flight wasn’t until almost 8pm.  Brian Pepple, Jon Stanley and I headed to a coffee shop after dropping John Rose off at the airport and me shipping my projector and phone home.  It was a nice relaxing conversation.

UPDATE: Pictures are being uploaded as we speak to my flickr account

The interesting part about this site is that he has about 10-12 different elements on his front page sharing information about what was going on, etc. in his life.  I am interested in implementing something similar, but couldn’t find any reference to a cms that he might be using.

To give a little background, I’ve followed a few links off his site, including the one to the designer of the site, which also indicates no cms that they use either.  It seems I may be out of luck, but wondered if anyone else had seen a cms similar or that might be capable of such features without major modifications??

I’ve looked at drupal and joomla and am more interested in something a little more like concrete5 or django-cms, but haven’t settled on anything.  So LazyWeb, do you think you can help me?