J5’s Blog

Fedora Community Screencast - Background music edited from the song Conversion by Kourosh Dini off his Live At Bliss Gardens album (CC Some Rights Reserved)

Fedora Community, codename MyFedora, integrates the Fedora infrastructure into one interface focused on usability and streamlining user workflows.  This is a beta release with a production version to be released alongside Fedora 10.  While the first revisions are focused on Fedora Developers, the underlying Moksha framework, based on top of the Python WSGI TurboGears 2 platform, provides a base for writing self contained applications which can integrate to create one large application.  The applications seen on Fedora Community interact with the Fedora infrastructure to produce a single, unified view.  In the future applications can be written to interact with Transifex for translations, listen to upstream for project releases and even federate between infrastructures such as OLPC being able to have a view into their services along side the services they use in Fedora.

We are calling on Fedora members to test out the site and file bugs.  We plan to roll this out alongside Fedora 10 so pitch in and help us make a great release.

Edward Hervey recently announced the 0.11.2 release of the PiTiVi video editor.  Even though it is rough around the edges it is feeling really nice and a couple of major features away from being baseline usable for every day simple video editing.  The features I would personally like to see are:

• Splitting of audio and video channels
• At least one more video channel which makes it easier to line up cuts
• Being able to split a video into segments (with gnonlin this should be as easy as setting the time properties on the video timeline object, cloning the video timeline object to the end of the cloned object and adjusting the time properties on the clone)

The only other thing I would want is a compositor so adding titles and credits would be easy.  Things like having a text tool, transition effects, being able to undock controls for dual screen use and other nice but not needed features would simply be gravy after that, the majority of which could be implemented as plugins.

Thankfully Collabora Multimedia has started to put muscle behind the development of PiTiVi and hired Brandon Lewis who’s summer of code work significantly contributed to the latest release.  Edward, it seems, will also have a limited amount of time to work on PiTiVi.

We can’t forget  Sarath Lakshman who was my Fedora Summer of Code student.  Although he had done very little pygtk work (he had done some projects in pyQt previously) his eagerness to learn and willingness to take criticism had him make significant contributions in the form of the webcam and network capture code.  He also started on a D-Bus API for doing direct desktop recording in PiTiVi in conjunction with the Istanbul desktop recorder.  That did not get in this release because the API was deemed to be too PiTiVi specific.  This is basically blocking on me finding time to review the code and make comments on how the D-Bus API should look.

All in all I’m looking forward to what comes out of this renued interest in PiTiVi.

The Beer Summit was a smashing success last night and I even managed to still wake up at 6:00am today.  It was even better than last year which I partially attribute to being closer to the venue.  What really made it better though was people were interacting a lot more this year both with shop talk and community building small talk (no not Smalltalk).  I thrive on community and every time I get to hang out with people in the community that I love, it reminds me why I do this whole Open Source thing and motivates me to try to do more. I hope that others feel the same and find our conferences and the surrounding events bring some measure of value to the work they do.

I have to admit I am very impressed with MIT’s setup for conferences.  Though you do tend to get bounced from department to department the truth is most of it is a turn key operation with third parties waiting in the wing to help you out with the extras.  Internet and A/V were already setup in the space we got.  The doors were unlocked and the cleaning crew comes in the morning to clean up the common area.  All of this comes for free because MIT gets it.  They understand that conferences bring a wide variety of educational experiences and are great places for collaboration for students and for industry.  It also creates a great ecosystem for local businesses who’s services are available at moments notice.  There are a few caveats however with holding a conference here:

First, conferences can only be organized by MIT departments.  This means you need to have contacts with MIT people who are enthusiastic about your conference.  Luckily we have held the summit here in the past and the Media Lab has always been very helpful getting us space.  I would like to thank Walter Bender for getting me in touch with Henry Holtzman and Steve Pomeroy.  Henry got the ball rolling and got us the booking while Steve, who is attending the conference, did all the leg work and has been invaluable with last minute prep work like making and printing out signs.

Second, the MIT campus is a large collection of buildings forming a quite intimidating maze.  Even with a link to a map a lot of people got a bit lost.  I even got lost as the reservation says Sloan but the building is actually one of the Sloan buildings which all have different names.

Third it isn’t always clear what extra services one needs to acquire.  I was running around looking for a way to rent tables.  As it turned out there were already tables in the hallway which was sufficient for what we needed.

There are a number of other minor things I have learned I need to look into when organizing conference space.  If asked to do so again I will now have a better idea of what needs to be thought of in advance.  Luckily my first conference was at MIT so the major stuff was already covered without much fanfare.  For future reference (for others and as a link for myself) MIT has a helpful event planning guide.

Novell came in and is sponsoring the 2008 GNOME Beer Summit at Flat Top Johnny’s tomorrow night starting at 7pm.  You will need to be at the Summit to receive your GNOME foot stamp in order to partake in the open bar.  Beer, wine and soft drinks will be covered.  We also have the four pool tables in the back next to the couches.  So come on down and discuss the future of GNOME with good friends over a couple of pints and a game of pool.

Just a reminder,  the Boston Summit is being held in the Sloan Building E51 (if you are at E52 it is right across the street on Wadsworth).  The some of the doors are locked but there is an unlocked door next to it so try them all.  Go in and take the elevator to the third floor.  The rooms are 315, 325, 335, 345.  We are printing posters right now to make it a bit easier to find.

I’m going to be at Tommy Doyles in Havard tonight around 9pm.  The Josh Dion Band - a local NY band my friend just got me into - is playing a two set show for free.  Best of all it is around some favorite hacker haunts such as Grendels Den and Charlies Kitchen.

Forget all that sci-fi mumbo jumbo and papers on University Professors injecting themselves with microchips.  The future is now and for years they have been implanting tracking chips in pets to aid in recovery if they ever got lost.  Never mind that I a bit jealous that my dog got the bionic treatment before I could have some sort of electronic enhancements embedded in me, not that I would want a tracking device under my skin.  And, no, it isn’t because I am a cruel task master or that I have an ugly mug which makes me afraid of Ty running away.

Ty has actually been great on the long leash though he does get distracted and run ahead sometimes.  In my driveway I can leave the gate open and let the leash hang free, confident he will listen to all my commands and not bolt when he had an opportunity.  Outside the gates he is a bit less disciplined as sensory overload tends to win over his short attention span.  Hot dogs do have the power to eventually bring him back though.  Right now I am trying to train him to eventually be able to walk off leash.  If he walks ahead he doesn’t go that far before he circles back to check that I am still there and when he is by my side (usually begging for treats) he will stop when I stop and turn when I turn.  All of this are good signs but I still need to train him to stay by my side unless I release him to run around.

Because I wanted to have confidence to drop the leash while training him I wanted him to be chipped.  I didn’t want to confuse him or make him nervous by being myself being nervous when letting go of the leash.  I brought him to the vet and lo and behold, he already had a 24 Hour Pet Watch chip in him which saved me some dough.  Actually the vet didn’t know which company Ty’s chip was from so I ended up cold calling one of the companies whose tech person was more than happy to take the serial number and tell me it was a 24 Hour Pet Watch chip.  I signed up on the web site and now Ty is good to go.  For further insurance I also bought a dog tag which has the number of the company along with the serial number engraved on it.

This is all leading up to a fall camping trip I am trying to put together where I am going to allow Ty to hike with just a light clothes line attached so he feels like he is off leash.  If he does well eventually he will be able to walk in the numerous off leash dog parks in the city, including Russell field right behind my apartment and that would be trey cool.

Havoc Pennington is well known in the GNOME and Open Source communities. He was one of the driving forces behind GNOME’s shift in focus to usability and simplicity during the GNOME 1.0 to 2.0 switch. Recently he had moved on from Red Hat to a small company named Litl. Other well known GNOME hackers followed suit after Havoc had announced in his well read blog that Litl was hiring.

Not much has been revealed about what Litl is working on. Up until this point their employees have been fairly silent and only rumours based upon job openings and the projects that their employees had formerly been working on before getting hired. Litl contacted me recently to ask about sponsoring something during the summit.

At around three o’clock on Saturday the 11th, in between sessions, Litl will have an informal catered snack break at the Summit where their CEO, John Chuang, will speak a bit about the company. Also, employees will be around to answer any questions the community might have. They will also be having a release announcement for some GNOME related technologies which they hope will be valuable to the continued development of GNOME. If it is like anything these GNOME contributors have worked on in the past, it should be some pretty cool stuff.

A big thank you goes out from the Foundation for Litl sponsoring snacks to satiate hungry hackers. It will be great to see what our friends at Litl have been working on.