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.
(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.
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.
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.
A few anniversaries:
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.
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?