J5’s Blog

For those of you who haven’t seen Tomeu Vizoso’s blog on the hackfest we are trying to pull together this is a second call to PyGObject, Python 3 and GtkIntrospect hackers who might want to join us in getting the future of the Python bindings to GTK sorted out.

At issue are a couple of roadblocks to the continual maintenance of the the bindings. First is the lack of support for Python 3.0 and second is the unclear picture of how GNOME 3 effects us. The current plan is to finish the work done on PyGI (Python GObjectIntrospect support for PyGObject), at the same time making sure it all works under both Python 2.x and Python 3.x. Moving to the PyGI bindings should make the maintenance burden somewhat lighter for our busy maintainers.

If you have something you can contribute and are interested in attending our hackfest please take a look at the wikipage and e-mail myself or Tomeu. While this is being sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, you don’t need to be a Foundation member to be considered for an invite. We hope to be finalizing things soon and getting a budget to send to the board for approval.

For those who are going to FUDCon on the FUDBus, expecially those flying to Boston first, remember to bring your Passport.  Luckly these days they check both ways but at one point you could get into Canada without a passport but would be screwed on the way back. In any case I thought I would remind people as I had run into a problem where I didn’t check for my passport until a week before my sisters wedding in Italy. Sure enough I couldn’t find it and ended up having to get it done the night before I left. Not to mention the years it took off my life trying to figure out the best way to tell my twin sister I might not be able to make it to her wedding See you all at FUDCon!!!

With FUDCon being only two weeks away, I’ve been polishing up my presentation and looking into what is in store for the future of Fedora’s Infrastructure. My main focus has been adding “push” capabilities throughout our infrastructure via the use of the AMQP protocol and qpid servers.

So why do we care about push messaging?

One can think of messaging as a conversation between two people. Poll messaging goes something like this:

Push on the other hand is a bit less chatty:

By eliminating the need to poll to know when an event has happened within Fedora’s Infrastucture, and making it easy for services to push out events in an easy fire and forget manner, we open up the door to a number of interesting possibilities. For instance, instead of implementing mail notification functionality in every service we simply create a mail notification service that listens for events and sends e-mails to people who what them. Do you want to get a notification on your desktop when your build is done instead? This makes it possible to provide that functionality without bogging down the Koji build service.

Human consumable notifications isn’t the only advantage of adding push messaging to our infrastructure. Because the data is first formatted for services to consume, notifications can be used for things like automation and synchronization. For instance someone could write a script that listens for new git checkins at fedorahosted.org and tries to package it into a private repo for personal testing.

What do we need to discuss at FUDCon?

Though this change is minimally invasive and you can ignore it if you don’t need to work with notifications, it is never the less a large undertaking. Some of the things we need to discuss are:

• Usecases – where can we benefit by adding notifications?  How do we envision the notifications will be consumed?
• Payload format – what are the pros and cons of the different ways we can encode and decode data
• Standardization – even though we have a routing protocol we still need to standardize on the type of data to expect
• Libraries – we need to make it dirt easy for infrastructure developers to add notifications to their service
• Performance and security concerns – AMQP is pretty complex so we will need to make sure all of our bases are covered when deploying the QPID servers

AMQP Sessions at FUDCon

There are a couple of talks planned and a hackfest.  Come to the talks to get a deeper understanding of AMQP and how we envision using it within Fedora and then attend the hackfest to help us map out the future of the Fedora Messaging Infrastructure.

Saturday:

• AMQP Messaging for Fedora Developers – come to my session to find out the basics of AMQP messaging and how it is relevant to Fedora’s infrastructure
• AMQP/Qpid on Fedora – The definitive guide – get a more in-depth view of AMQP in Rajith Attapattu session.  He will show you how to setup and configure the Qpid server on Fedora, use the client APIs, and where to go to find help when using AMQP.

Sunday and/or Monday:

• Get on the (Message) BUS Hackfest! – come to Jesse Keating’s hackfest to work out details and hack on the messaging infrastructure.

I managed to make it to the Beer Summit and the last day of the Boston Summit before succumbing to the inevitable jet lag. From what I heard the summit was again a success and I would like to thank Jon Mccann, Colin Walters and Ajax for pitching in and running the various aspects of the Summit and everyone else who came to make GNOME rock. As always we thank Henry Holtzman for being the MIT faculty backer of the conference and Walter Bender of SugarLabs for doing some leg work for us. The delegation worked so well I think I will save some of my stress levels next year by finding others who would like to help out.

Where scheduling was concerned, we had a little hiccup this year with other GNOME related conferences scheduled at the same time. Let me end the confusion and state emphatically that we will be having the Boston Summit next year at the same time, Columbus Day Weekend, October 9th, 10th and 11th. Further more, there is a chance we may be able to hold it in the newly built Media Lab building. No promises but there are those with some pull who would like to see this happen.

As for avoiding conflicts in the future, the board and ad-board should coordinate more instead of relying on a “who announces first” race condition to dictate scheduling. The board knows the dates of all the conferences they are going to run or sponsor well in advance, as well as having the dates of a number of other conferences readily available due to the fact that they often fund a number of members to attend these events. Utilizing this community resource is a good way to avoid future conflicts. I am also sure the community run travel committee would be happy to coordinate travel funding activities with other conferences that are related to GNOME but not run by the Foundation.

See everyone next year.

For those attending the Boston GNOME Summit this year the open bar social, affectionately known as the Beer Summit will once again be held at Flat Top Johnny’s with four reserved pool tables from 8:00pm-closing on Sunday October 11th. Chat about the latest GNOME technologies over some beers and a friendly game of pool. It is our way of saying thank you to our contributors and community.

I myself will be in Italy until the 11th so I may or may not be able to make it out depending on how I feel but I have left the conference in the capable hands of Colin Walters, Jon McCann and Adam Jackson. They will be there to make sure you get your coffee, find your hacking room and enjoy yourself during the summit.

This is a reminder to all you GNOME hackers that the 9th annual Boston GNOME Summit is only one month away. On October 10th through the 12th join your fellow GNOMies at the MIT Sloan building E51 for a grand hacking event. I don’t have to remind people that GNOME 3.0 is just around the corner. Come and be part of the effort to continue GNOME’s excellence as the premier Open Source Desktop Environment and application platform.

Details
October 10th, 11th and 12th

MIT Sloan Building (E51)
Cambridge, MA
Rooms 315, 325, 335, 345

Tell us you are coming

Please go to the Boston Summit wiki page to find out more information and let us know you are coming.

Travel Sponsorship

For the first time the Travel Committee has been given a modest budget to send people to the Summit. If you feel you have something to contribute but don’t have the funds to get here please go to the Travel page to find out how you can apply for sponsorship.

Travel Visa’s

If you are coming from a country from which the US requires you obtain a visa please contact the Travel Committee so that they may send you a letter inviting you to the conference. You will need this to apply for a visa.

What is the Boston Gnome Summit?

The Boston Summit is a three-day hackfest for GNOME developers and contributors. It is not primarily aimed at users or new contributors, but if you want to jump right into the deep end, it’s a fantastic way to meet everyone and get involved. Unlike traditional conferences, the Boston Summit is all about getting developers together and getting things done. While there are some non-hacking sessions, they are geared heavily towards many-to-many, interactive discussion and planning, rather than one-to-many presentations.

For those not at the AGM during GUADEC I had announced confirmation on this years GNOME Boston Summit in October at MIT.

Details

Dates
October 10th, 11th and 12th

Location
MIT Sloan Building (E51)
Cambridge, MA
Rooms 315, 325, 335, 345

Hackfests

As of right now we have funding thanks to Novell to hold one hackfest the week before the Summit. The content of that hackfest is yet to be determined. As always since hackfests are focused on getting specific teams together so that they may plan projects face to face, travel sponsorship will be done via invite and handled by the specific hackfest organizers.

If you are a company or organization which wants to organize and sponsor a second or even third hackfest please get in-touch with myself (J5 on irc) or the GNOME Foundation Board.

Event Sponsorship

We will be looking for companies to sponsor events such as a lunch, a snack hour and the ever present Boston Beer Summit. These events help people unwind and socialize between the intense hack sessions and BOFs. They have also been used by the sponsoring organizations as a thank you to developers and to make significant announcements of work being done by the sponsor.

Last year saw Litl throw a snack hour catered by Sel de la Terre where they announced their work on JavaScript bindings, now being extensively used to build the shell for GNOME 3.0. They also answered questions and reveled small bits of the project they have been working on.

Novell had budget left over from their hackfest and cosponsored with the Foundation an open bar at our annual Boston Beer Fest. Over pool, drinks and food GNOME hackers got to discuss numerous subjects and make new friends in a relaxed atmosphere.

On the last day of the Summit the GNOME Accessibility team through Sun sponsored a pizza lunch as a thank you for the support the Foundation members and hackers have given the Accessibility team (though I really think we should be thanking them for the work that they do).

Again if your are interested in sponsoring one of these events please get in-touch with myself (J5 on irc) or the GNOME Foundation Board.

Travel Sponsorship

Traditionally the Foundation has not sponsored travel to the Summit, relegating that to our flagship conference, GUADEC, and several regional conferences where we felt GNOME needed a presence. Unlike GUADEC which is a meet and greet for users and developers of the GNOME platform and related technologies, the Summit is a more intimate working event with specific goals in mind.

This year however, we do want to start sponsoring specific people to attend the conference who would otherwise not be able to attend. The difference is, anyone applying for sponsorship must have a specific reason for coming and detail concrete goals which they aim to accomplish at the Summit. The Board and Travel Committee are still working out the details so look for more announcements in the future.

Make your travel plans now and start getting psyched up to have another successful Boston Summit come this Fall. If last year’s Summit successes continue their momentum, look to see even greater things to come out of Boston come October!!!

Notes

It is unfortunate that the dates, October 10th-12th, conflict with the Maemo Summit but should be noted that we have for the most part always had the Summit on the second weekend of October (Columbus Day Weekend). Those plans were set in motion well before we were able to get a definite confirmation on the venue and make a formal announcement. We should perhaps use the Foundation as a way to coordinate all GNOME related gatherings in the future.

–
John (J5) Palmieri

The Open Video Conference just ended yesterday. I attended the first two days and just stopped in briefly during the hack-fests yesterday before having brunch with some old highschool friends and heading back to my parents house where my dog and car were stashed.

I can say without a doubt the turnout was amazing and even though not everything I heard all weekend was positive it was a giant leap forward in then understanding of the importance of Open Video and culture. I won’t put a figure on how many people attended but some of the upstairs talks were standing room only and after the first day some of the organizers were lamenting that then needed to get bigger rooms (consequently some of the talks were swapped the next day). Speaking about the organizers, they ran an incredibly smooth ship and should be thanked and praised for their efforts.

The Good

Apps

I was mainly there looking to see what video producers wanted from FOSS application developers and to support the PiTiVi/GStreamer teams on behalf of the GNOME Foundation. It is amazing to see the PiTiVi non-linear video editing app at such a usable state. While Edward Hervey (bilboed on irc) gave his mini presentation on PiTiVi I was busy hacking up a “How To Make Chocolate Truffles” video from pictures and clips I had laying around.

Afterwards I showed him some of the bugs I encountered in the 0.13.1 release and he just rattled off, fixed in git, fixed in git, fixed in git…etc. Sadly the releases are tied to GStreamer releases (which is a good thing from a development/bugs standpoint but not so good from a user standpoint given the early stages of PiTiVi) so we won’t see an official release soon. I plan on trying to automate a Fedora Repository at some point just to be able to view the progress without breaking my system.

The point is PiTiVi is about 90% there (and perhaps 100% in git) to be able to support my needs for basic video editing in terms of stability and basic tools. That should be pretty reflective of those who need to do things like screen casting and interview style video blogs. Some advanced features like effects (look at Cheese for some examples of this already working in an app) already exist in GStreamer and just need to be integrated in PiTiVi’s UI and rendering pipeline.

There was also a show of Cinelarra but more interesting is the GTK+ fork Lumiera which unfortunately is not usable yet but the direction they are going in (GTK+ interface and some GStreamer integration) looks like a great re-start in the case of pro level editing tools.

Also of interest in the pro level space was Blender which seems to be the pro project with the most momentum and features for pro’s. At least that was the initial reaction from some on the Red Hat media team. The dev’s did admit that the functionality is limited to what they needed during production of Big Buck Bunny (and other productions currently in the queue) but that in those areas it is rock solid. It is interesting to see a UI designed with different usability profiles. For instance one of Blender’s usability criteria is the avoidance of repetitive strain injury. To combat RSI mouse clicks are evenly divided between left and right mouse clicks.

Bassam Kurdali, one of the Blender developers and animators, came up to me later in the conference and said he had noticed me using PiTiVi to edit my video. He was impressed at the simplicity and slickness of the interface and how far along it is. There is plenty of room for different approaches and a real potential for cross pollination between the pro tools and the every day end user tools.

What Content Producers Want

Speaking of end users we got to hear from a bunch of them who let us know how we could support them. One of the biggest themes was that Windows tools suck and those who taught others couldn’t just tell them to go out and buy a mac (praises were heaped on iMovie and Final Cut Pro). They really want an easy to use tool, with the unfortunate note that it would have to run on Windows. One really good thing is that a lot of the non-tech content producers understood the need for free codecs. However in the end they just want a simple way to render down to DVD, You Tube, Daily Motion, iPhone, etc. and don’t want to deal with formats.

I ended up collecting a bunch of buisness cards and am toying with the idea of starting a feedback group with content producers which would get them involved in improving GNOME App usability from the perspective of those who are not yet familiar with the GNOME workflow. If we are serious about expanding our reach we need to go beyond our current self selecting internal feedback loops. The goal wouldn’t be to get these people using GNOME (though giving them a way through the apps wouldn’t be a bad thing). It would be more about getting groups outside of GNOME/Linux to be part of the process of improving GNOME. Will it be fruitful? I don’t know but it is an interesting experiment with a potential huge payoff for a little bit of effort.

Sita Sings the Blues

This good section wouldn’t be complete without the mention of Sita Sings the Blues by Nina Paley which is a feature length (82 minutes) animated film released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You have complete rights to watch, screen, remix and redistribute the film as long as you abide by the license. I do suggest you watch it and if you like it buy the DVD or simply donate to encourage more works like this (I bought the DVD for $20). Not only is Nina a content producer but she is heavily involved in advocating her distribution methods, going as far as documenting the process that went into releasing Sita under a creative commons license and in her work with QuestionCopyright.org.

Mozilla and the Open Video Contest

I was very impressed with Mozilla’s involvement and their push for Ogg Theora to become a base line codec for the HTML 5 video tag. They are also helping launch the upcoming Open Video Contest which would see the winner flown to the 2010 South by Southwest conference. We should probably run some sort of sister contest to encourage GNOME users to submit entries.

The Bad

It wasn’t all roses. While I feel we are reaching independent content producers way more than I would have though at this point, some of the big companies still don’t get it or are afraid of Open Video implications.

Adobe

It must be said that Adobe has been somewhat good at working with the community over long periods of time but that they just never get around to resolving key issues. What really surprised me was when on one of the industry round tables the Adobe representative pointed to their release of the Flash documentation as a shining example of this relationship. After checking with a developer of an alternative flash implementation I was told those documents are pretty much useless. Due to bugs, some of the spec just doesn’t work as written and other issues makes it impossible to write a third party Flash player.

YouTube/Google

While reportedly Chrome will ship with Ogg Theora support their flagship video site YouTube seems afraid to do so. Their rep at the round table stated some pretty audacious things such as continuing the myth that Theora wasn’t good enough when clearly that argument was directly debunked (the side by side comparisons were even playing on HDTV’s at the conference).

Even more of an issue was the representative’s idea on what Open Video meant. He declared that they would love to support Open Video but that it meant letting anybody do whatever they wanted and that doesn’t work from a buisness perspective.

Open Video isn’t about wild west, trample on rights. If anything it is about balancing the rights of content producers, end users and fair use. From what I read, YouTube’s position is that they are the 1000 pound gorilla in video distribution and at the end of the day they only believe in a user’s and content producer’s freedoms if it is walled behind their own servers. “All the world’s video” indeed.

The solution there is to drive traffic to sites like Daily Motion and Blip.tv which understand the issues involved.

Conclusion

Nothing is perfect, but we are off to a really good start. In the end it is up to us to keep the momentum going and eventually produce a better experience within the complete Open Video stack, from content production to delivery. The web was built and exploded around the concept of open technology. Let’s continue to make sure this is the case going forward. The last thing we want is the web to become the domain of a few, with creativity being stifled by restrictions in the non-open parts of the stack.

Dear Foundation Members,

In the past, by this time, the Board would have already sent around the GUADEC call for hosts. In largely closed door meetings it would have been decided where next year’s GUADEC would be held, announcing it at the current year’s conference. Since this has been a year of significant change (this is the first year GUADEC is being co-located with Akademy) we would like to get more input into the process and find out what our members want to see come next summer, as well as how to best pick the winning location.

We have decided to postpone the call for proposals until after this year’s GUADEC has concluded. We fully expect to discuss the topic during GUADEC at the foundation AGM, as well as on the foundation list to find out what you, the members, would like to see happen next year. Please feel free to talk about your likes and dislikes about this year’s conference and if you don’t get a chance to attend, what would make you more likely to attend next year.

As for those who wish to make a proposal, a formal call for hosts is not a prerequisite for starting the process. If you can, we encourage you to meet with us and other attendees at this year’s conference and get a head start by starting the drafting process sooner than later. You may also contact us with questions you may have.

On behalf of the board,
John (J5) Palmieri

As a culmination of all the positive momentum that has been going on the past few years all the important Open Video players will be gathering at NYU’s law center for the first of hopefully many Open Video Conferences on June 19th.

The interesting part of this conference is it isn’t exclusively a tech conference. According to their website:

Open Video is a broad-based movement of video creators, technologists, academics, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, activists, remixers, and many others. When most folks think of “open,” they think of open source and open codecs. They’re right—but there’s much more to Open Video. Open Video is the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video. These qualities provide more fertile ground for independent producers, bottom-up innovation, and greater protection for free speech online.

If we have any hopes of success in bringing the general public an understanding of our views on the importance of openness and freedom, forming a larger community with like minded content creators is the next logical step and another piece of the puzzle.

I will be attending the conference as a representative for GNOME. Others should consider registering and attending to represent their own media minded project. I hope to see you there.