Anyone have any suggestions about where I could stay extremely cheaply in London for two weeks? I’m thinking a youth hostel, and that’s certainly my fall back plan, but recommendations or other ideas are welcome!
I went to Eden for the first time in a few years today to see the sexy green car show, and it certainly was worth it! The best part of the car show was the beautiful Morgan they had on display, which was a hydrogen fuel-cell powered car:
Eden itself didn’t disappoint either, it’s grown a lot since I was last there and there’s lots of new buildings and activites dotted around that all make it a more engaging experience. If anyone gets a chance, I’d recommend checking it out. Here’s a couple of pictures, one from the outside and one from the inside:
Also, I saw this wall paintaing there that I might post to the art-list as a possible base for the Fedora 10 theme. Sulphur was an image of hell, how about an image of heaven with Eden? The idea of growth could be a nice metaphor we could work into marketing material too about our community and our software.
Has anyone else noticed that GMail has become increasingly unreliable lately? Often I find that it won’t open my inbox, or the page will need refreshing several times for it to load; also, after composing e-mails and clicking send, the e-mails are just not being sent while the interface hangs – very frustrating!
I’ve been thinking about moving to Evolution or Thunderbird, but I find that GMail’s IMAP support is frustrating, not dealing well with archiving and deleting mail.
What do other people do for their e-mail? My attempts at starting a free web-apps co-operative weren’t very succesful (clearly!) but I think projects like Bongo look promising.
I’ve just arrived home from university for a week of rest, relaxation and revision! Exams start for me in three weeks time, and I really need a chance to get my head down and start making some progress ploughing through the massive amounts of material I need to know. I did well in my mid-year exams, but my only problem was ensuring I had the breadth of knowledge needed to do really well – if I get started now that shouldn’t be such a problem.
The trip home itself was awesome too. Firstly, it has to be one of the most beautiful stretches of railway any where in the world, and is the perfect length of time to enjoy the sights and get some jobs done (like minuting the websites team meeting!). Secondly, I travelled first class! It turned out that it was only 80p difference to do so, and it really was cool … the seats were comfortable, the drinks free, and the tables were huge and full of free newspapers to read – even better, it was quiet and spacious 
Anyhow, to celebrate the beauty of the journey, I recorded some video (about 20 seconds) on my phone and then used Pitivi to edit the two clips together. For this simple task, Pitivi was excellent. As I’ve seen on Planet Fedora before, it could definitely use some support for fading, but it really couldn’t be any easier to cut clips together and produce a good final product, exported in whatever file format you want. I would post it here for people to see, but I don’t know that WordPress.com supports OGG Theora, even if I buy the $20 space upgrade. Instead, here’s a screenshot from the video:
Here’s to a nice holiday, and I hope everyone else has as nice a week as I’m going to
Oh, and p.s. Has anyone else seen the annoucnement about the new OLPC? I sincerely hope this will be built to run free software … that aside it looks *amazing*
Yesterday we had the websites team meeting, which is now happening weekly There’s a lot of energy and enthusiasm to really improve Fedora’s websites and create a great team, and hopefully in the next 6 months we’re going to see some massive improvements and interesting new sub-domains appear. If you’re interested in Fedora’s websites and want to help out, I encourage anybody to join the mailing list and come along to the meetings.
One easy task for people who’d like to help out would be to test the new wiki (hint: you can login with your FAS account) before it goes live next week. There’s a huge amount of content around and we’re mostly worried about syntax errors in the move, so if you could check on content that you care about and make changes where needed that would be awesome And if you see anything else go wrong, ping ricky, mmcgrath or ianweller on #fedora-websites and they’ll help you get it fixed.
In the past three weeks we’ve made real progress. We’ve identified the goals that we want to work towards, and individual people are stepping up to take responsibility for getting things done. Some of the coolest things that we have in mind are:
Check out the latest meeting minutes and log to see our progress on these so far, and as I said before, feel free to join us!
Rahul just posted this to the marketing list, and I think the comments made are perhaps the best I’ve seen in any review of Fedora to date.
What is it about Fedora that’s so appealing to me personally? As much as I’ve liked Ubuntu, for instance, there’s just something about Fedora that seems more immediately welcoming and less ostentatious. That’s a subjective thing, but there are other things that are not as subjective. It’s not about which window manager to use, or even the code itself, since the vast majority of what’s in any given Linux
distribution is all the same code. It’s about the choices made by the folks who packaged the distribution: how closed-source drivers are handled, how the distro deals with the upstream, what they felt was worth keeping in a default installation, and what could be left up to the user to install. The distro choices are becoming more about this kind of aesthetics, and Fedora feels like it has the best mix of these things for me.
Read the full article here. With the set of reviews Fedora has received this release, it seems like our commitment to upstream, to free software, and to encouraging participation and not just consumption is really paying dividends. The strength of our community, the quality of our software and our reputation have all grown.
I might be jumping the gun a little bit, but I wanted to say a big congratulations to everyone who’s worked so hard on making Fedora 9 as good as it is! A quick read through of Planet shows it’s not just me who thinks this, and every review I’ve seen so far has been extremely positive so there’s plenty of reasons to be proud.
My thanks, and best wishes to every one…
OK, these two aren’t related, but I’d be greatful if anybody out there could advise me of some resources to help answer these two questions:
Thanks web people!
I couldn’t resist writing a post with a double meaning title
Meaning number 1: Woop!! Over my easter holidays I took up running, going about once every two days and doing from 4-7 miles depending on how I was feeling by the end of the 4 weeks. Since being back at uni though I haven’t been once – partly because I had a slight phobia about running in a city instead of through the countryside (there’s sooo many people here!), and partly because I’ve been lazy. Well, today I finally went for a run and it was awesome! I did about 4 miles at a fairly good pace and found a nice route that, for about half the distance, went along the riverside. My legs feel heavy now, but it was the ideal way to procrastinate for a while
Meaning number 2: I might put myself forward for the Fedora Board elections. I originally planned not to, but it seems like the general vibe is the more the merrier. If I did get elected then I’m sure it would be a great experience (working with so many older and wiser people than myself :p) and lots of fun – whatever I do with Fedora has always been lots of fun so I’m confident it would be no different! And if I didn’t get elected, I’m pretty sure the community wouldn’t be losing out on too much with my abscence, and it’s something I think I’d definitely like to come back to at some point in the future after I’ve been around the block a few more times.
Agh, and I’ve just noticed WordPress now has a word count – how depressing to see I’ve written nearly 300 words in a 10th the time it’s taken me to do the same for my essay this afternoon!! I’d better get back to work…
