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SCALE Part 2

I’ve been remiss in recapping SCALE – I really need to blog more.

In addition to all the great things I saw in the Linux community at SCALE, the best part is the face to face communication you get, especially within your own community, namely Foresight.

Spending time with Ken, Kevin and Stu, usually after the show while grabbing a beer, we had time to talk all things Foresight. Our discussions ranged from:

  • Alpha 3 blockers and next steps
  • Inclusion or exclusion of proprietary codecs. This was a pretty interesting conversation that ranged from helping a user make it “just work” to what it would take to code an application similar to Automatix for Ubuntu to help users get the codecs they need. Anyone up for coding an app?
  • Using JIRA as more than a bug tracker. There are so many features in JIRA, if we as Foresight developers can continue to add tasks to JIRA in addition to bugs, we can build a roadmap right from JIRA. Foresight continues to be a very IRC-centric community, and we don’t use the mailing lists often enough. Capturing workflows in JIRA will help both developers and users understand next steps in the development of Foresight.
  • Lots of great conversation with Kevin about the next steps for the Marketing team. From the new website development etank is rocking out on, to flyers we can pass out at upcoming shows, we talked about lots of ideas to share Foresight with new users. (And Kevin rocks more for filing these tasks in JIRA!)
  • Lots of Conary talk. Not only did Ken host a BoF session on Conary Sunday night, but I learned a ton of new things about how powerful Conary really is. I think Stu even learned something new too. 🙂

The best part of these in person discussions is how fired up and excited you get. The ideas are free flowing, and you really come back jazzed to get even more involved and make a difference. Foresight is still a relatively young project, and with so much to do, anyone can jump in and start helping on any number of tasks from web design or development, packaging, documentation writing or marketing. I continue to work on the Foresight Love project modeled after GNOME Love, and will add tasks that are easy for a new contributor to jump in and help with. I need to add some links to that page to within the wiki, and make it more specific. More to come soon.

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SCALE Part 1

I spent last week working at my office in Los Angeles so I could also attend the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) this past weekend. Along with Ken VanDine and Kevin Harriss, we hosted the Foresight booth on the show floor.

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(L to R, myself, Kevin Harriss and Ken VanDine)_

We also hung out with Stu, who flew in with Ken and was manning the Bongo Project booth. Not only was Stu showing off the Bongo Project, which by itself is a cool mail and calendar server and web client, he was showing a demo of it as an rPath appliance.

Stu hosting the Bongo Project booth

(Picture taken by Kevin Harris under a CC Attribution-Share Alike license)

I attended Jono Bacon’s keynote, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: The Coming of the Linux Desktop which was a fantastic talk. Jono is right: it’s all about the community.

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I later had the chance to catch up and chat with Jono, as well, as Ken, and we talked about the community, how we can work together, and Ken’s thoughts on helping the Patch Squad and making it easy for users to do more testing and bug triaging.

I met some folks at dinner Friday night, including Eric, Christian and Jeff, a couple of which were also at the GNOME booth next door to Foresight at the show. Chatted with Christian briefly on a new RSS reader he just started working on for GNOME, which looks awesome.

Saturday night Ken participated in the Weakest Geek competition (based on the TV show Weakest Link), and I’m proud to say he wasn’t one of the first two voted off. It was pretty darn funny, and other contestants included Ted Haeger (formerly of Novell), Jono Bacon (Ubuntu), Jeremy (Linuxquestions.org) and two others. The questions were hilarious, and some of the answers were even funnier.

Unfortunately, I missed Karen Sandler’s talk Sunday. Karen is an officer of the Software Freedom Conservancy and gave a talk on Legal Organizational Issues for Free Software Projects. I’m really kicking myself for spacing this one and missing it.

I put up a handful of pictures in a Flickr set, and Kevin has even more.

32 bit Firefox on 64 bit Foresight

We’re still at SCALE, manning the Foresight booth and introducing Foresight to lots of new users. (I’ll need to check download statistics and see if we made an impact).

While here, Ken helped me get 32 bit Firefox running on my laptop, which is running 64 bit Foresight. (I missed having Flash).

There has been some discussion on the mailing list lately, and we are leaning towards including 32 bit Firefox by default, and leaving Epiphany at 64 bit for those users who want a 64 bit browser.

To get 32 bit Firefox installed, run the following commands:

sudo conary erase firefox

sudo conary update firefox['is: x86']

sudo conary erase nspluginwrapper['is: x86_64']

sudo conary update gtk-engines:lib['is: x86']

sudo conary erase nspluginwrapper['is: x86']

Reboot.

And voila, Firefox is now runnning 32 bit, and Flash should just work.

Thanks to Ken for walking me through it this morning.

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  • Courthouse News Service
    Samsung is being sued for knowingly manufacturing defective Blu-ray players. I have a Samsung BD-P1200, and while awesome for upscaling DVDs, it definitely does have some Blu-ray playback quirks and Samsung is slow with firmware updates.
    (tags: dvd)
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Anniversaries

A few anniversaries:

  • Last month was 5 years of blogging. Wow! From your basic blog / diary, to more tech and copyright oriented, to almost all Linux all the time, it’s been quite a journey. I’m sure my friends will give me even more crap about it now.
  • Last month marks 9 years since I first installed Red Hat 5.2 that I bought right after Christmas. (I still own the original box and CD). Next month will be my 3 year anniversary of being exclusive with Linux. Don’t miss Windows one bit. Get my gaming fix via Xbox 360 and Wii these days.
  • I’m a year older this Saturday. I’m now leaving the coveted 25-34 demographic. Sigh.

I’m off to Los Angeles first thing in the morning, and working out there this week. So if you don’t see me in IRC or blogging, now you know why. This weekend I will be at SCALE at the Los Angeles Airport Westin. You’ll be able to find in the bright green t-shirt. Someone buy me a drink on Saturday.

Yahoo! and me

I’ve read enough of the stories of Microsoft’s takeover bid for Yahoo!, and I hate to contribute more, but Wired has a great story on the Flickr communities’ reaction.

I’m a Yahoo! user by acquisition. I absolutely adore Flickr, with over 4000 photos posted and viewed over 67,000 times. (My Foresight screenshot is #1 for me with 2000 views). I bought a Pro account when Flickr first launched, ages before it was acquired, and was rewarded for overpaying by gaining a year. I have hundreds of bookmarks at del.icio.us (which annoy Planet readers to no end as they auto-post to my blog). I applaud Yahoo!s recent OpenID implementation.

But I’ve seen first hand what Microsoft does with its acquisitions. If I was a Yahoo! shareholder, I’d take the money and run. Their stock has been declining for years. Their search market share is stagnant. Their media strategy, including music, isn’t really working.

But does it have to be Microsoft? Please, no. Anyone know how to migrate photos from Flickr to Picasa?