Open Rights Group Internship

I started today and so far I’ve quite enjoyed myself. It’s a bit strange because I’m doing the majority of it remotely, but fortunately being part of the Fedora Project has stood me in good stead. We’re mostly using a combination of IRC, Skype and Google Docs (urgh, two proprietary apps are not so good, but it’s what they’re used to – wonder if I can improve this over the next 6 weeks?) and it’s worked really well today.

About 50% of time on the internship is to be spent on my personal project which is to finally finish Free Me and get it distributed and sent out, while the other half is to be spent on general ORG related activities such as drafting content, researching, reviewing etc. Though today was mostly spent on doing the planning for Free Me and I’ve prepared a planning document that we’re going to run past ORG’s chief, Becky Hogge, on Wednesday after spending a little bit more time drafting it. Free Me is really exciting, even if I do say so myself 6 weeks is a tight schedule, but I think we’ll pull it off.

Anyway, here’s to Micheal and ORG – they’ve never done a remote internship before and are taking a chance on me to see how it will work out – thanks for taking a chance!

p.s. If you don’t know who the Open Rights Group are, they’re a campaign group here in the UK who work on all kinds of “digital rights” issues, such as copyright term extension, privacy, electronic voting etc.

Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Weblog + The Guild

Dr. Horrible Banner

Oh my word! What a great evening’s entertainment I’ve just had Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog is fantastic, and if you’re reading this before midnight, I suggest you follow the link and go and watch it now.

Why before midnight? Well, before then you can watch it streaming from their site for free; after that you will have to pay to download it. I have nothing against paying to watch it, and I’m planning on paying because I enjoyed it so much, but I have no idea what format it will be in or if it will be DRM’d. So check it now – it’s awesome!

There should definitely be more musical super-villain stories. And make sure you read the extra information linked to somewhere, apparently this project is one of Josh Whedon (?) – I don’t know who he is (maybe Captain Hammer?) but he started it because of the writers’ strike – quite an interesting turn of events that something so awesome and completely different could emerge out of that (this is telling, maybe?).

I was also entertained this evening by The Guild, also fantastic but entirely different to Captain Horrible. Check out this one too, it’s far geekier and about a MMORPG guild who meet in real life for the first time. Each episode lasts about 5 minutes and so you can watch the entire season in one sitting Felicia Day stars in this, and also in Dr. Horrible and was the link between my two entertainment choices. She’s got an extremely endearing personality and is so completely charming I’ll be watching out for anything else with her in!

I originally came across The Guild thanks to Epic-Fu, the new show on Revision3.com. I love that show too, some of the indie artists they highlight are a little hit and miss but there’s always at least one super cool bit on the show and the extended interviews nearly always rock too. If anyone can suggest any other shows of this sort to me, I’d love it because right now I can’t get enough.

In other, non-TV related news, I’ve ordered a copy of Baldur’s Gate which I can’t wait to play. Yes, I’m more of a geek at the minute than I normally am. For some reason I’ve had a huge urge to bury myself in fantasy novels and games (Wesnoth is satisfying my cravings until Baldur’s gate arrives). I haven’t succomed to the novel element yet, I’ve been reading The Great Gatsby and am quite enjoying it so I’ll press on before I get too distracted. Oh, and also trying to read more journals to pick up some tips on how to write better papers for my second year – yeah I’m a geek and am doing reading before my summer is even half-way over. Still, The Silmirillion seems tempting at the minute.

And in final news, I’ve had an awesome day today. I went out for lunch with my parents, my brother and his fiancée. It was amazing weather, and we’d gone to a beautiful Cornish garden called Trebah to eat, so we ate outside and we could have been anywhere in the world – birds singing, blue skies, great food, beautiful plants and trees all around. After that we headed back to Sarah and Matt’s where we went for a walk in the woods that looked like the location of Robin Hood Prince of Theives filming, with a huge stream/river running through the middle with the remains of countless old water wheels from the quarry that used to work there. I’m definitely going back

Dean’s Commondation

Awesome I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this on my blog already, but my end of year exams went really well! Well enough that I wish they actually counted towards my final grade. Well enough that when I got home yesterday and checked my post I had a letter from the university – it had a letter in it and a certificate from the Dean of Undergraduate studies to say congratulations on just how well I’d done. I’ve no idea what the actual criteria are for getting one of these, but I guess it’s a good thing!

Other good pieces of news include having figured out where I’m going to stay in London, although it’s only for a week now which is sad, and having only one day left of the SAS (student associates scheme) before I a) get paid, and b) don’t have to get up at 7am to go do a job that I really haven’t enjoyed. I’m going to have to find another way to keep making money over the summer, but I know a few people who’d like some simple websites doing (simple being the operative word, I can’t do anything too complex). There’s lots of things I’ve been tempted to spend money on lately, like a new monitor or phone (the Freerunner is tempting, but not really suitable for every day use as far as I can tell, especially without a camera).

Oh and Python learning group is starting to get rolling and is going quite well. I figured out classes the other day which was cool, but I think I need to learn to plan anything I work on. I also think I need to read lots of code (obvious) because there must be a thousand ways to use this stuff that I’ve not thought of yet. Will be easier to do these things when I’m not working in school anymore.

That’s all from my random life, I really just wanted to puff out my chest and shout a little about my dean’s commondation :p

Fedora TV Updates

A couple of quick responses about Fedora TV:

• @David Nielsen, thanks for your enthusiasm and for the suggested video I’m not sure if we want to post it alone like that though, or if we want to combine it with other videos and make something a bit more significant. Would you be kind enough to drop by our Trac setup so we can figure it out?
• @Nicu Buculei, I’ll update the page with information about videos that will be accepted. Initially I just had in mind accepting anything Fedora related but you raise some interesting points re: the Gimp etc so we’ll figure that one out.
• @Kushal Das, thanks for the help with the feed and creating the script! I’ll be sure to include some more of your videos in the near future, sorry if I’m a bit slow in responding with these…
• @The rest of the community – I’m always ready to accept new videos.

Fedora TV

What is it?

A way for our community to easily share video and audio related to Fedora with each other – the mechanism we’ve chosen to do this is an RSS feed that also exists as a channel in Miro.

How do I watch?

You can install Miro and subscribe to the Fedora TV channel. You can also add the RSS feed to any feed reader or suitable podcatching client. I’m personally using Banshee for my podcast needs these days as it has great video support and if you’re a Gnome user is really nice to use

The feed URL is http://jonrob.fedorapeople.org/fedora-tv.xml

Can I submit my own videos?

Yes! We want this to be a community channel where any Fedora community members can submit their content. So if you’ve created a screen cast tutorial, an interview, a podcast, a promo video or anything else Fedora related we want you to submit it to us. The only conditions for it’s inclusion in the feed is that it’s:

1. on topic
2. in an open format such as OGG Theora/Vorbis
3. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license

To let us know about your video head over to our Trac instance where you can login with your FAS account details and file a new ticket for each video you’d like to include. This way we can review your submission to make sure the above conditions are all met. If we decide that a video isn’t suitable, we’ll let you know in the ticket so all conversations of this manner are open and everyone can have their voices heard

At the moment you need to find somewhere to keep your video file as we don’t have dedicated hosting. For the time being, you might want to try using your Fedora People space.

What still needs doing?

A better way for us to update the feed. At the minute I maintain the feed, and as you can imagine this is not entirely ideal. We’d like to fix this and find an automatic way for this to happen, but we can tackle that in the future.

A better place for feed videos to be stored.

I’d also really like to have a place to tie all of our marketing activities together, and I hope we’ll have this in the not too distant future.

What do I plan to do for the channel?

My usual series of developer interviews! Yeah, I’m original, I know… hopefully the rest of you out there can come up with something better.