Posts that are fedora-ish
Karsten and I task-swapped last week – he’s been driving Fedora Insight like a storm, and I took the Summer Coding SIG… and stared at my screen for days. When I don’t understand the global picture, I have a hard time diving into the tactics that need to be executed, and instead freeze up and babble aimlessly – I finally realize that the next step was to draw out the global picture, and whipped up the video below in a 30-minute whiteboard frenzy this morning.
What we’re trying to do is a generalization – think Google Summer of Code with the “Google” replaced by “any funding organization,” and “Code” replaced by any deliverable important to an open source project. What’s the underlying model here? How could, say, the Uncle Pennybags Summer of Test Plans build on this framework?
Karsten later told me this is called a “swim lane chart” – apparently I reinvented the wheel, thinking that I’d come up with the idea of sorting flowcharts into columns by role. ;-)
Now, I’ll put out the disclaimer that this comes from my brain aggregating everything I’ve seen and heard on Summer of Code and similar programs, and that there may be bugs or missing bits in the workflow I’m describing. Part of the reason I’m throwing this video out there is to get an idea of where I’m wrong. I’m sure I’m wrong in many, many places – if a patch needs to be made, please say so!
If this sounds about right, we should Inkscape up the flow chart and type out the narration and put that document up… somewhere. Any takers, or ideas where the upstream ought to be? I’m putting it in the Summer Coding SIG by default, but am happy to migrate it somewhere if there’s a better upstream to be found.
Thursday, March 4th, 2010 | fedora, teaching open source | No Comments »
“There is,” Mo says, “a Fedora guitar pick design.”
Paul’s fault. He wanted ponies in period clothing doing the hustle under a disco ball. Not knowing what “the hustle” or “period clothing” was, I put up the above, using Robyn’s pwnie and these dancers and disco ball from Wikimedia Commons. However, Henrik’s rendition beats mine hands-down.
You can read the full hilarity in the slogan-pickin’ log right here, thanks to zodbot.
Yes, the F13 slogan is “Rock it,” and Nelson will be sending out a more formal announcement shortly. Yes, Marketing meetings are usually this fun, in my biased opinion. ;-)
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 | fedora | No Comments »
Had a little fun today while talking with Diana about her research. She was explaining how it’s hard for her to figure out who’s an active Fedora contributor since there are so many ways and means and places (git, wiki, lists, etc) to contribute and everyone contributes in a different place (someone may maintain a lot of packages but never blog, another person may blog and never touch the wiki, etc), so I pointed out that just about everything in Fedoraland was a website with FAS authentication, so “fire up twill, scrape ‘em all down, do some text processing, and you’ll have a per-user portfolio you can analyze to get an activity count.”
8 minutes of coding and 29 minutes of documenting later, a quick and dirty solution prototype is up in the form of FAS scraper. It takes a list of FAS usernames and makes little portfolios for each user using his/her recent activity from a variety of services (so far, just wiki recent changes and packages-maintained). This isn’t meant to prototype the architecture of the code (this code basically has no architecture, it’s 11 lines long), it’s meant to be a rough demo of desired functionality. Think about making the user-portfolios themselves more query-able and you’ll have a notion of how this could be extended – it would be neat to run queries like:
- How many people who blogged on Planet at least twice a month for the last 6 months are also frequent wiki editors?
- Show me all the users who maintain at least 10 packages and are also members of the syadmin-test FAS group?
- For each user with recent wiki edits to the F13 Talking Points page on the wiki, give me all their emails to the advisory-board list in the past month.
I’m sure you can think of better ones. For students (and professors), I actually think this might make a neat variant of a problem set I was once given in college.
To run it, you’ll need the python and python-twill packages (that’s what they’re called in Fedora, dunno about other distros), so this is what I think most people reading this will want to do, for easy copy-pasting into a shell script or a terminal.
sudo yum install python python-twill
mkdir fasscraper
cd fasscraper
wget http://mchua.fedorapeople.org/FAS_scraper/FAS_scraper.py
python FAS_scraper.py
You’ll get a directory full of output that looks like this. They look reasonably pretty on account of they’re straight scrapes of the html pages. This is the sort of thing I pull up to show students when I speak about what a “FOSS portfolio” looks like, so I might just use it to quickly autogenerate “portfolio pages” for the folks I’m introducing them to on IRC. And yes, I realize some of these services are likely to have better APIs to interface with than “scrape the webpage, then consider parsing the html in later versions.” I do not know what they are or where they are.
I am, lines-of-code-per-unit-time-wise, one of the slowest programmers I know, because my docs-per-line-of-code ratio is ridiculous. It’s an old habit that comes from writing APIs usable by mechanical engineers. Fighting the temptation to rewrite. Will probably cave at some point and do a more proper version than the kludge that’s up now, but… if someone takes it off my hands before then, I’ll rest easier and not stay up all night fiddling with this.
In terms of moving this forward, what actually needs to happen is for this to be re-architected into a good general-purpose python library for getting data from FAS-authenticated services. Do things like “instead of manually defining the list of FAS usernames in the code, grab the list of usernames from the actual FAS system.”
Any takers? The first thing to do, methinks, is to get this baby under version control.
Monday, March 1st, 2010 | fedora, olin, teaching open source | 2 Comments »
In a little less than 2 hours, the Marketing Team refactored the self-introduction portion of its Join process to be (we hope) more newcomer-friendly. We did this by applying Mad Libs. For science. *little trumpet fanfare!* Actually, we don’t know if it’ll work, or if it actually is an improvement – that’s why we’d love thoughts and feedback.
Basically, the idea is that this…
- Full legal name (as you use it is fine)
- City, Country; you may use your timezone if you have a compelling reason not to specify your city or country
- Profession or Student status
- Company, School, or other affiliation
- Your goals in the Fedora Project
…can be made a lot friendlier to newcomers looking for a template email by reformatting it as something like this:
Hi, my name is _________________ and I live in _______________ (location or timezone). My Fedora Account System (FAS) username is __________, and my IRC nick is __________. (OR: I am new to IRC and would like help getting started!)
How this happened: Robyn found an article on how alternative form formats increase sign-ups; this hit IRC and the Marketing list in quick suggestion, whereupon Justin said that “we could also make an introduction madlib, because I don’t know about everyone else but I felt really uneasy about mine.” A few minutes later, Robyn, Justin, Nelson, and I were editing away in Etherpad – the video of edits is fun to watch as people hop in and things start to snowball (look at the bottom of the document the entire time). Afterwards, I tried rewriting my self-introduction with the new template, and found that I did like the Mad Libs version better, but I’m not the best judge on whether something’s actually helpful to new Marketing contributors at this point. ;-)
The revised introduction template, mid-revision. I’m yellow, Justin is green, Robyn is pink, and Nelson isn’t here yet.
If you have a moment, take a look at the old, bulleted-list version, compare it to the new, Mad Libs version, and let us know what you think.
Saturday, February 27th, 2010 | fedora | No Comments »
Mostly taken from this email call-for-participation that you may have seen around the mailing lists.
You may recall Robyn’s call for participation on choosing talking points for F13 – verily, thanks to the help of many, they have been chosen, and…here they are! From https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_Talking_Points:
For desktop users and everyone
- Automatic print driver installation
- Automatic installation of language packs
- Redesigned user management interface
- Color management
- NetworkManager improvements include CLI
- Experimental 3D extended to free Nouveau driver
For administrators
- BFO
- Authconfig UI redesign
- Pioneering NSF features
- Zarafa
- Experimenting with btrfs
For developers
- SystemTap static probes
- Easier Python debugging
- Parallel-installable Python 3
- NetBeans 6.8 first IDE to support entire Java 6 EE spec
New Spins
- Moblin Spin
- Sugar on a Stick Spin
- Design Studio Spin
- Security Spin
Now: to finish fleshing them out, we need your help. We’re aiming for a finished product like the Fedora 12 talking points. See the links to feature pages, heavily hyperlinked descriptions, and catchy one-line summaries at the end? That’s what we need for all the F13 talking points. So if you know cool things about a talking point that should be mentioned, good resources on it to link to, or otherwise have something to chip in, please add it to the wiki page; we’ll be cleaning up the final display next week right before the Alpha goes out.
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 | fedora | 2 Comments »
Spent the day at RIT (thanks to Karlie and Todd Robinson and their family for graciously hosting me!) working with Steve Jacobs and Remy DeCausemaker on POSSE (we’re on for June 14-18 with Chris Tyler coming down from Toronto to be one of our instructors) and RIT’s teaching-open-source-fu. As part of this, Remy and I spent the evening at Computer Science House (CSH) talking with students about how Getting An Open Source Job/Internship/Co-op Works. It was one of the best such sessions I have been to; Remy and I are both recent-enough grads to remember our student-brains and bridge a little bit of our current world (FOSS) back to our old one (school).
It was done completely off-the-cuff, but I now have a 10-slide set of slides that I think will replicate the important parts sitting as pages in my notebook. At some point I should transcribe and post them. Nagging me may help accelerate this process. ;-) This, however, was the most important section (in my mind). Here’s what we’re taught as kids. Or at least what I was taught as a kid.
In My Parents’ World – How to Do Stuff (answer: “Get A Job according to these Complex Procedures”)
- Be interested in something
- Study (very, very, very) hard
- Get (very, very, very) good grades
- Make a resume
- Buy suit
- Apply to jobs
- Get introduced to recruiter
- Get interviewed
- Get hired
- Do Stuff
Except that the “Do Stuff” might be… well, entry-level job, filing stuff, doing thankless gruntwork waiting ’till you could move up the ladder and really Do Stuff, you know…
In The FOSS World – How to Do Stuff (answer: “Do Stuff”)
- Be interested in something
- Do Stuff
- Get hired
So here’s the thing: to your employer (according to my parents’ world), steps 2-8 in the first list are filters for the “getting hired” step. Hypothetically, your future boss can use things like grades, cover letters, etc. to figure out who’s going to add value to the project. And… all right, maybe they kinda work. And that’s about as good as you can get when Getting Hired is a prerequisite to Doing Stuff – they have to hire you before they give you access to the lab, the mailing list, the hardware, the code, and so forth.
But in FOSS-land, Getting Hired is not a prerequisite to Doing Stuff. In fact, it’s the other way around. Doing Stuff is the filter. Your future boss is waiting for you to give him/her an excuse to hire you. Not only hire you, but hire you to do something you’re already so interested in that you’re doing it for fun in your free time, and do it better. And this is not restricted to open source companies – banks need sysadmins, hospitals need programmers, robotics labs need UI designers… if you ask the question “could open source benefit this place?” and the answer is yes (and it should basically always be yes), then seriously consider offering to be the one to Bring It There.
Now, folks who’ve been around open source for a while will think this is obvious. But to me a couple years ago, coming squarely from the mindset I was taught as a kid, this blew my mind. In FOSS-land, we toss around “oh, just Do Something” as if it were the most obvious thing in the world – but it isn’t. See, steps 2-8 in the first list serve as a filter for potential employers, but they also serve as scaffolding to first-time jobhunters. You’ve never been through this process before, where do you start, how do you figure out what people value? Well, you make a resume according to these recommendations…
So if we’re replacing and reordering a whole chunk o’ steps with an extremely nonspecific instruction to “Do Something,” we’d better elaborate a little more on what that is and how you start going about it.
That’s what the rest of the evening was about.
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 | fedora, teaching open source | 4 Comments »
Dear students involved in Fedora, Sugar Labs, OLPC, and/or any other open source project:
Please take a minute to explain to people with fancy titles why you are awesome.
That is all. I hope to see some of you in Boston in April spreadin’ the good news.
Thursday, February 11th, 2010 | fedora, olin, olpc, sugar, teaching open source | No Comments »
This is the latest episode in the CFS SoaS Deployment Saga.
Netbooks arrived today! We filmed the unboxing.
I annotated the video so it’s easier follow along with my excited-and-way-too-fast narration. Annotations converted into bulleted transcript form below:
- We are unboxing netbooks for the 1st grade SoaS pilot at the Cambridge Friends School.
- We got Acer Aspire One 532h netbooks because they’re (1) cheap and (2) known to work well with Fedora (the underlying OS for SoaS).
- I am talking really fast because I’m happy (and nervous about being on camera).
- We’re doing this at the kitchen table in the middle of a normal day – it’s a snow day for school, a lunch break for me.
- Melanie is way better at opening boxes than I am.
- We’re keeping the boxes the netbooks arrived in to be used as cases for transport.
- We may someday need to buy accessories like extra batteries or cases. We’re not worrying about that now, though.
- The netbooks cost $298.95 each; we got 3, for a total of about $900 out of our $1000 hardware budget.
- There are 3 netbooks and 9 students, so 1 netbook for every 3 students.
- The netbooks come in 3 different colors so they’re easy to tell apart; students will be assigned to a netbook to keep them from fighting over their favorite colors.
- I apparently cannot identify colors. We eventually figured out that the netbooks were silver, blue, and red.
- We would like to plaster these netbooks with Sugar Labs stickers. (And Fedora ones, for that matter.) If you have 3 extra Fedora or Sugar stickers floating around that can easily reach the Boston area, let me know.
- Concerns: is the hardware usable? (Can they use trackpads? Should we buy mice?)
- Concerns: will the hardware survive a classroom of 6-7 year olds? (The students need to write a usage agreement and sign it with their parents, promising that they will take good care of the netbooks.)
- The 6th graders last year (7th graders now) used XOs, and the 4th graders are using them this year, so the 1st graders will ask the older students for advice on how they did their usage agreement.
- The 4th grade and 1st grade are buddy classes, so the connection between the two grades using Sugar this year will be especially strong.
- The 1st graders will be working on their usage agreements during the first week of the deployment, and blogging about them on Planet Sugar Labs.
People in the video:
Lynne May (black vest) – voice, camera: my aunt and the 1st grade classroom teacher involved.
Melanie (red vest) my cousin, a high school freshman off school for a snow day today, and another deployment support team member (brand-new, as of an hour ago).
Mel (blue shirt) – me: deployment support.
This concludes my deployment duties for the day. Melanie will be installing Fedora 12 (one each of GNOME, KDE, and XFCE) on the netbooks later this afternoon. Strictly speaking, this isn’t necessary for the deployment, since the sticks (liveusbs) will bypass whatever is on the hard drive, but if, for instance, a stick isn’t working and they need to boot a computer to go online and figure out what’s happening, they won’t have to boot into Windows 7 (which came on the netbooks) to do so.
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 | fedora, soas | 1 Comment »
As you may have read earlier, Ryan Rix and I are doing a desktop switchoff next week: he’s going to go GNOME for a week, and I’m going KDE. In order to prep up for the week (…or more, if we decide we need a longer timesample to get a good evaluation period going) of fun, it seemed prudent to ask the metabrain for thoughts on…
Help with KDE: I have never used KDE before, though I’ve had a general idea that it was around and Did Some Things Differently, though I didn’t – and still don’t – know exactly what that means. I haven’t the slightest idea what I’m in for. KDE testimonials (or complaints), guides, cool-stuff-to-try – all are extremely welcome. (Why do you use/contribute-to KDE?) I’m starting with KDE’s “An Introduction To KDE” and Bruce Byfield’s “KDE 4.2: 10 tips for getting started” article (yes, I realize 4.2 is no longer the latest version, but I’m trying to grok whatever subtle paradigm shift is needed here) and have also found some general KDE reviews to peruse.
Help with GNOME: Same questions as for KDE above. I’m actually asking this for myself (although I’m sure Ryan will find it useful too ;-). I’ve been a GNOME user for several years now, having gone from enlightenment to xfce in high school to fluxbox and then GNOME in college, largely due to… well, to be honest, laziness and the path of least resistance. But I actually have very little insight into how the GNOME community works, what GNOME is all about, why it’s awesome, things to try with it, etc. Various places on the GNOME website seem like a good resource to start with for understanding this.
A list of use cases: This is something I should be adding to as the week goes by, but I’m trying to think of a list of tasks I’d want to be able to accomplish with any desktop, so I have something to compare with. I’m not sure how one goes about building a good list like this for comparing desktops, but that list is at least a stub where I’m attempting to start. Edits welcome. I’ll take notes on what it takes to complete each task in each desktop during the week of the test (and the first week I switch back).
Ultimately, I pretty much agree with Stormy: it’s not a GNOME vs KDE thing for me, it’s about trying to understand the uniqueness – and the richness – of both projects for what they are and what they’re trying to be, and getting a better feel for what is in the land of open source desktops, and why. I sometimes (er, often) feel far less informed about the various components of the stack I run than I should be, and this is one of many attempts to rectify a portion of that – and to learn stuff while having fun. It’s an experiment! We’ll see how it pans out.
As an upside, I’m also learning how people with very little context into a piece of software and its community start hunting for clues as to what that project is all about – and yes, I’ll blog about this for Fedora Marketing as notes pop up. We do have much to learn.
Sunday, February 7th, 2010 | fedora | 3 Comments »
One of my two jobs for the week for Lynne May’s SoaS deployment is getting hardware for all this to run on.
The first (and largest) purchases we’ll have to make are the netbooks. Peter Robinson, our resident Fedora netbook guru, looked earlier for something that fit our specs and price range ($1000 USD for 3 netbooks) while being sturdily-built (mechanical design is important; we’ve got first-graders here) with a good battery life. One requirement was known compatibility with recent versions of Fedora, since SoaS is Fedora-based (the next release will be a Fedora Spin) and we’re trying to stack the deck in favor of the software and hardware working together as smoothly as possible. Based on these criteria, Peter recommended the Acer Aspire One 532h, which is about $300.
(photo cc-by from ndevil)
Lynne May also wanted a little video/still camera to capture the students playing with Sugar – they’re still learning to read and write, so having an easy way to record verbal presentations (and demos/screencasts, for that matter) in the classroom means we’ll get that much more documented output. (We will, however, need to get permission from the parents of individual kids to share the video material.) But right now we just need to get the hardware – so I pointed her towards the Kodak zi8 which can be had refurbished for about $150 USD and has gotten a big thumbs-up from Mo Duffy. Seriously, I borrowed it at the office two months after she got it and she was still raving about it, so it’s got to be good stuff. Waiting for the +1 on funding for that.
(One of the things I’ve learned while writing this post: finding CC-licensed photos of hardware is hard. I couldn’t find one for the zi8.)
And of course we need the sticks themselves. We need 14 sticks (9 students, 1 teacher, 4 testing/backup) and need them to have caps that aren’t removable, because that’s just asking for lost caps in a classroom full of 6-7 year olds. Other than that, we don’t really care what we get, so this should be easy to source once we get the (very small) amount of funding needed for them. (Yes, when you’re working with a classroom, $100 can be a blocker.)
(Original images cc-by from molotalk – superdry, red bull/honda, ship, and banana. Also, this picture should make it painfully obvious why I need friends like Nikki to fix my wince-inducing color schemes.)
I’m going to be placing orders early on Monday morning, so any last-minute feedback (including running screaming in our direction going “noooooooooo this is a bad ideaaaaaaa!” if applicable) would be muchly appreciated.
Saturday, February 6th, 2010 | fedora, soas, sugar | 2 Comments »
