Friday, January 29 — Day 1

Gathered at Red Hat’s main office, we brainstormed in a manual ‘tag cloud’ kind of way.  Mel had us all take sticky notes, write upon them based upon a few words on the white board and then, stick them to said white board appropriately.  This got our minds going about what a FUDCon or FAD should be, why it was important and the things that could really be improved.  I felt very happy about the amount of ideas that were shared on these sticky notes.  it was quite cathartic to get out the things that always had bugged me or I thought needed improvement in our Events.  I have a few pictures of us doing this process, enjoy them.

After spending about 1.5 hours doing this and discussing it, we broke into separate groups, the FUDCon 2.0 folks (upstairs) and FUDCon Live folks, aka me, Yaakov, and the freeseer folks online (downstairs).  My main target was to get the freeseer application working with completely free software and build the AV Kit from components I had, plus the ones that Mel had purchased for this project.

After getting downstairs with Dennis Gilmore (he was my helper for the first hour), we quickly discovered that one component, the Epiphan vga2usb device, was not working.  After a bit of digging, we also discovered that it had a non-free driver and that it would likely not be easy to find a free driver alternative.  We did, however, attempt to build the binary they provided, but kept getting errors.  More on this later on (or in another post), so stay tuned.

I spent the next few hours trying to get everything else up and running, doing research to find a different alternative for video output from a VGA source to USB input.  heffer joined us on IRC and gave me some good links as to where I might look for a Scan Converter and a easyCAP device.  While a little lower quality, the Linux drivers for it are completely open and free, so I set out with a plan to find one in Raleigh.

At 4pm, Max and I headed out on the town, hunting down several items, including firewire PCMCIA adapters (for our miniDV camera) and the Scan Converter components.  We needed to get a screw driver and some other firewire adapter stuff too, we headed to CompUSA. Though normally I wouldn’t go there, but this CompUSA had actually been converted from a Tiger Direct, so I thought we had a chance.  After about 1.5 hours of failure, we ended up with two firewire cards and some audio cables, we headed off to see Avatar in 3D.

Saturday, January 30 — Day 2

After leaving Avatar, we discovered a nice big blanket of snow had come down in Raleigh.  Just 2-3 inches, and in Utah, we’d think nothing of this, but here it’s quite a bit different.  First off, North Carolina doesn’t seems to have the infrastructure, no plows or ice melt, to really deal with something like this kind of storm.  There were news reports of it on every station, the Governor called for a state of emergency, and I just thought it was odd.  Because of this, it was determined that we would not leave the hotel for Day 2 of the FAD.  Instead, we reserved a room in the hotel and worked from there.  Luckily, the hotels infrastructure, plus the Days Inn next door provided us with our networking needs, while Max stayed at his apartment and called in using Fedora Talk.

My work was to spend as much time with the FreeSeeR folks and do tons and tons of testing of their code, plus provide feedback and gstreamer pipelines to get us closer and closer to our eventual goal.  Thanh had spent a lot of time while we were at Avatar to turn FreeSeeR into an API.  He also altered the code to put the gui into a more sensible tool, with both Qt and Gtk implementations.

About half way through the day, I discovered that I had accidentally left my power adapter for my audio mixer in Max’s car (he was 15 minutes way with no snow and at least 25 with), essentially eliminating my high quality audio testing.  Luckily Chris Tyler had a headset with a microphone and Dennis Gilmore had a webcam we could use because the firewire cards were a bit flaky and kept crashing my kernel.

By the end of the night, with some tweaking by Dennis and I, we had FreeSeeR working with DV input, USB video input, 1/4″ audio input and were able to output to an ogg file with reasonable quality and consistency.  A lot of testing later, and we were able to determine that we still needed to tweak some of the code to provide for a better way to adjust audio and video settings prior to recording.  All in all, the FreeSeeR software is coming along very nicely.  Andrew Ross and Thanh Ha have been doing an amazing job and I really appreciate their help working on getting this working.  The new version of FUDCon Live thanks you as well, because without this, we won’t be able to provide our users with a good quality remote experience.

Sunday, January 31 — Day 3

The sun is shining, but for some reason, the roads are still not that clear.  Several cars are still having difficulty climbing the incline out of the Best Western to the main road, which is now melting, but still very snow covered.  Today, we discover that we’ve met one major part of our goals, the Fedora Pony has been created!!  We must thank Robyn Bergeron for creating, Frank, the Fedora Pwnie.  Now mind you, Francis is really her name, but she’s such a tomboy that, well, you just can’t call her that, she doesn’t enjoy it too much.  So we call her Frank.

In addition to our major goal above of a Pony, the FUDCon Live team has done some amazing work.  Yaakov has been working on the FUDCon Live document with Mel, while I was working with the FreeSeeR guys to get their git repo moved over to fedorahosted.org, which is awesome!  I’ve been given commit and sponsor rights to the repo, so we’ll start getting more developers involved right away.  Have a look at the screenshots of the GUI if you’d like to see what FreeSeeR can do.

Jon Stanley and I discussed the possibility of moving fedorahosted.org over to gitolite, and discovered that Jesse Keating has been experimenting with it himself, so this might be something we can do in the near future.  While we currently appear to use gitosis, gitolite gives us the ability to set ACLs on a particular branch, which then can help keep the master branch cleaner.  To help illustrate this, there’s a very great article on nvie.com which explains a git branching system which can really make development and commits very clean and easy to track.  Gitolite can help with this, so I’m going to be experimenting with it this coming week.

I spent the rest of the day writing up the AV Kit wiki page along with Mel.  I stubbed it out, and she added a big section regarding the modules in the AV Kit.  I then rewrote much of that to cover the two styles of AV Kit we’ll be building over the next month or two.  In fact, I plan to have one complete in time for the Marketing FAD in March, where they can use and test it out.  I really hope to get some good feedback on it and improve FreeSeeR some more using these upcoming events as testing grounds.

Currently, I’m on a plane which I didn’t think would take off tonight, headed home for Salt Lake City.  I’m excited to see my sweetie and get some much needed sleep.  As much as I enjoy hanging out with my Fedora friends and working on projects like this, it really wears me out.  I’m ecstatic at the amount of work we accomplished though, and am very appreciative to Paul, Jon, Chris, Denis, Dave, Mel and Max, plus all the folks online for their hard work this weekend.

FUDCon 2.0 is alive and kicking, FUDCon Live will make it just that much better.  Watch for upcoming posts in the near future regarding FreeSeeR and the Fedora AV Kit and how everything is going to work.

Cheers,

Herlo

We have a great presentation lined up for you all!  Here’s the details:

Infrastructure Renaissance

Open source is at the forefront of an evolving ecosystem of tools and processes for building more adaptable and maintainable computational infrastructure. Virtualization and network booting tools speed up and simplify the process of provisioning. Configuration management tools provide policy based service descriptions which collapse the complexity of scaling. Monitoring solutions provide feedback which potentially drive provisioning and configuration. For organizations to fully leverage these tools is often as much a social engineering problem as a technical one. This talk is about building computational infrastructure with the tools, and processes that can help maximize the benefits.

About Andrew

Andrew Shafer is a Co-founder of Reductive Labs Inc., helping organizations build more flexible and scalable systems through better tools and processes with the Open Source system management framework, Puppet™. He brings with him a background in computational science, embedded Linux development, web frameworks and Agile methods.  Currently, Andrew is devoted to AR⊗TA (arxta.net, watch the video). Andrew has been an Open Source user and advocate since the late 90s. His two sons think he is pretty cool.

See you all this Wednesday.

Cheers,

Herlo

After creating the Fedora Project Mind Map, I was better able to understand how UTOS was currently structured.  I was able to put together the main pieces pretty quickly, although it seems there are several gaps in my thought process still.  For that reason, I’m opening the UTOS structure up as well.  It might not have as many contributors, but I’d like to see the structure grow.

To that end, I created a very shabby hierarchical structure which I passed around a week ago at the Core Team after conference dinner.  It went over okay, but people had a lot of questions about how the structure was organized and what not.

Organizing My Thoughts is Hard!

I didn’t know what exactly to do.  As it is, I’ve never been an integral part of an organization before like this one.  Nor have I ever created organizational charts that were very well done.  I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon.  But, something amazing did happen in the span between last Friday and today, that was VYM, or View Your Mind.

When a “Mind Map” was first suggested to me by my buddy Doran Barton, I thought “well, I’ll look into that later”.  However, the more I kept trying to cram jobs into places they didn’t go, the more I got frustrated that there wasn’t a good application to accommodate the structure I was trying to build.

VYM is an application that helps get your thoughts out onto a structure.  It lets you move it around quickly and easily and even associate pictures and notes where applicable.  The problem for me was understanding how to use VYM in an environment I already knew and UTOS was not the right place!

The Fedora Project “Mind Map”

It turns out that a lot of people always wonder how the Fedora Project is structured, where the pieces go and who, what, where and how the project is put together.  Because I could at least see all the pieces, I decided that would be a good place to start.  While it’s not complete by any means, I present to you the Fedora Project VYM “Mind Map”.  From VYM, one can create pdf, png and other output sources, so I created a pdf as well

Contribute!

I’d like to see the Fedora Community take this up and add many pieces to it as it grows and builds into something more than I could make.  It’s fairly simple to add pieces as well.  You can create separate maps which can be integrated into the larger map.  Or, since the format is a zip file (essentially) with an xml definition file, I believe patches could work.

Cheers,

Herlo

Recently, I learned that our website doesn’t render well in Internet Exploder, Safari and some older versions of Firefox.  I’m guessing its due to the inability I have to create and maintain css, because well, I’m not a design guy.  Because of this, we’re having a hackfest tonight, both at my house, and online.  Feel free to come by at 8:30 and help out.

Prior to the hackfest, I will be working with Fedora Ambassadors to grow the North American region.  We’ll be discussing such things as AmbassadorKit, EventBox and of course, Fedora’s presence at UTOSC 2008.  This meeting tends to get a lot of good people making the world a better place.  I am interested in making this happen starting with North America.  If you are interested in helping out, or just lurking, feel free to drop by #fedora-meeting on irc.freenode.net at 1:00UTC (9pm EDT).

Prior to the Fedora NA meeting, I’m planning on working on the PCs that we’ll be using for the Utah Open Source Conference.  This will be done over at a friends house, who is loaning the PCs to UTOSC for the week of the conference.

I am attempting to record every presentation this year with either audio or video.  We have been rewarded again this year by having our friends over at KnowledgeBlue come and video record much of the conference, but they don’t have enough staff or equipment to simultaneously record 4-6 rooms.  So the plan went to me to setup recording devices in each room.

The plan is simple setup 6 PCs with Linux, install audacity and darkice.  This way we can stream the keynote audio live over our streaming server and also just record the audio from other presentations to be published at a later date.  I anticipate I’ll be able to install and complete this task pretty quickly.

Well, its now 7:40am here at my desk in my house.  I still have head into the office today for a bit of work, so off I go.  Feel free to come by #utos anytime today and wish me luck (or help if you are so inclined) with anything you can suggest.  Hopefully, today won’t be too long.

Herlo

Cheers,

Herlo

[clints@herlo-lap ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
144 svn
144 cd
108 ls
104 ./manage.py
101 ssh
69 su
43 screen
26 vim
25 rm
15 ping

[clints@thor ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
266 git
260 make
71 cd
57 ls
55 vim
55 rt
26 rm
19 bin/send-patch
18 grep
16 bin/validate

I guess I love RCS’.

Cheers,

Herlo

If you click to add a new calendar item into Google Calendar, you get a new button “I’m Feeling Lucky”…

After clicking this new button I recognized, here’s what I got:

Woohoo!  So right before the Ubuntu/Fedora Release party on May 3, I have a date with Jessica Alba!  Nice!  I might blow off the release party if the date goes well…

I tried this a few more times and here’s the results I’ve received.  I’ve got dates with:

• Anna Kournikova on May 5 at 4pm
• Eric Cartman on May 10 at 6pm
• George W. Bush on May 6 at 4pm
• Matt Damon on May 8 at 8pm

Wow!  I’m popular.  Who else, what else did you get?

Cheers,

Herlo

Yes, I really have done it this time!

Well, maybe…time will tell.

I’ve gone and posted an idea for a project on the Fedora wiki page for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), but that’s not all, no!

In addition, I took the time to apply to be a mentor at the Google Summer of Code Project page.  And what’s weirder, is I hope I get the opportunity to make this idea a reality, because I think its something that Fedora could really use.

I’m somewhat surprised it hasn’t already been created. A couple of people found this idea too, and have emailed me about it, and I need to reply.  Soon that will happen.

I am really excited.

Cheers,

Herlo

I started with this guide because my so-called friend Jared Smith (hi Jared!), introduced me to the original creator of this document, Paul Frields at FUDCon a couple months ago.  I started the hackfest portion, not entirely clear where I’d end up, but somehow I rolled back to hang with Jared and Paul while they were working on this Contributor Guide, if I remember the name correctly.  I got involved late in the day, and either my misunderstanding, or pure genius took over and the Contributor Guide (intended mainly for developers), quickly turned into the Getting Involved Guide or GIG, which had a much broader focus.

While I am happy to be a part of this guide, and have had a hand in changing its purpose, I’m not at all familiar with much of the Fedora Community processes.  Which, for this document to be successful, I am going to have to learn, since that’s the point of this guide to begin with, helping others get started when they want to help the Fedora Project.
Think of it this way, if you are a corporate entity, an individual, or a small non-profit group (like my UTOSF group) and want to give back to the community that has helped you so much.  How do you do that?  What’s involved in getting started?  What projects are out there where we can help?  Do we need to be developers? If not, what else is there for us to do?  Well, those are all good questions, and I am sure there are many, many more we haven’t yet considered.

I guess what I am doing here is soliciting from the general communities at large, what they’d like to see in this guide.  What confused them about joining a large project.  I’d also like to hear stories about being a contributor to the Fedora Project, and why you think its a good idea.  I want to take these ideas and integrate them into the Getting Involved Guide.  I want to take these issues and make it clear for others how to get involved, why its important, and show that value.

Currently, if you are a Fedora Project member, I have a document in gobby.fedoraproject.org called GettingInvolvedGuide, which you are welcome to modify as you feel necessary.  I may also be hitting you up to answer questions regarding particular processes in your group as well.

Cheers,

Herlo