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2008

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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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?

This Week in Foresight

And now, the news:

  • Alpha 3 is out! Read the release notes, and remember this is an alpha – things will break, and it’s not quite ready for everyday use yet, but it’s close. Download here.
  • The Foresight mailing lists are down due to this weekend’s rBuilder maintenance. Something about the MX record being screwy. Hopefully will be back soon. Foresight users outside of the US should see speed improvements in Conary now that rBuilder is in a new data center.
  • No one replied to my thread on the Marketing mailing list about the website that I linked to last week, and what they like in a website and what they don’t. That makes me sad. That might be ok, because:
  • We have another website mockup! Thorsten, a relatively new Foresight user, submitted to the marketing list a potential mockup for the new foresightlinux.org. Combined with Nixternal’s recent mockups, I think we can have some discussion and pick one and start coding.
  • I created a new page on the wiki – Foresight Love. Modeled after GNOME-Love, which are bugs tasked in GNOME’s Bugzilla as “GNOME Love”, which means they’re easy to fix and good for beginners. The goal of this wiki page is similar to that and to the GNOME GHOP, where developers can add to an ever growing to-do list of things that are easy for a new contributor to jump in an do. The page is still a framework, I need to add lots more links within the wiki and tasks. If you are a Foresight developer, and know of some easy tasks someone new could try, add them! This was inspired by Ken updating a page on the wiki last week listing all the trivial bugs in JIRA.
  • Foresight will be at SCALE next month, and now Flourish in Chicago in April. Nice work Kevin.
  • I was introduced to Gobby over the weekend. Gobby is a real time collaborative text editor. While I don’t think it will work for the userguide since we’re already using Mercurial, I think it might work well for things like the release notes, new website copy, or even the newsletter once we start publishing that in a blog and not the wiki. (Writing the wiki markup in Gobby would be kind of a chore). More to come.
  • If you’re looking for me in IRC or on email this week, I’ll be back Friday. Off to a conference for work all week.