Could anyone point me in the direction of work that’s being done to define the requirements for a free web application. I’m particularly interested in thoughts about data security and portability.
Has anyone thought about what their elevator pitch (30 seconds – sell the idea) would be for free software/Fedora?
Over dinner this evening I got into a short discussion about why I use free software and not Mac OS X/Windows (yes, I am that exciting!), and I damn well couldn’t explain to people in a reasonably short and understandable way. It’s not often I struggle to get words out of my mouth, but this really caught me out.
I’d be interested to hear people’s views on why they use free software, and what their elevator pitch would be. If you care, leave a comment.
NB: I know many people don’t agree with this point of view, but to me the only real argument for using free software on the desktop is freedom – I’m not sure there are any other areas where we knock the competition on its arse, and there are a number of areas where we fail to compete in any meaningful way too.
Well, since I last posted my brother got married(!), I moved into my new house for the year, started lectures, built a server, finished up a website for Mum’s school and got my first package approved for Fedora and into F9 updates-testing. Doesn’t sound like that much, but it feels like I haven’t stopped for the last two weeks.
My Brother’s Wedding
This was a really fantastic day! Matt and Sarah both looked awesome, lots of family and friends made the trip down to sunny (for a change) Cornwall, and my best man’s speech went perfectly. We certainly couldn’t have asked for anything more, and it’s the perfect start to their new life together 
Think Mum and Dad are finding it a little strange with Matt married and me at uni, but they’re getting used to it and already reaping the benefits with a holiday to the Lake District in half term!
Moving House
Last year I lived in catered halls, so didn’t have to pay bills or cook; this year, I’m living in a private house with 4 friends, having to arrange and pay for utillities, cook for ourselves, and do all the general things you do to keep a house in order. So far, I love cooking Had a crack at a roast dinner on Sunday, hardly a typical student meal, but it was Fay’s birthday and she loves roast potatoes!
General living is the same as last year, but a little busier during the first week, heading out to see lots of different friends again etc.
Bills are rubbish though, and I think I’m going to need to earn a little bit of cash to help me through the year – any body got any suggestions!?
Started Lectures
Have less lectures time tabled this semester, but I think that’s due to Hebrew being 30 credits but only 3 hours. Means I have a fair amount of work to do outside of class this time, but I’m confident I have plenty of room to step up my efforts compared to last year. Besides Hebrew, I’m doing modern theology and the divine world in the Hebrew Bible this semester – both look like they’re going to be really interesting. Hebrew is definitely going to be even better than last year, as we’re doing actual translations and criticism of translations – will help a lot with my understanding of how theologies develop etc.
Trying out the Cornell note taking method this term, as referenced by Life Hacker. Seems cool so far, but I’d like to look into reading methods to help me approach that better too.
Built A Server
Partly for fun, partly because I’m paranoid, I’ve built my own server for hosting all my web related activites. Still working on and learning to deploy the software properly, but it’s been cool so far with lots of learning happening!
Mum’s School’s Website
My Mum’s school were in desperate need of a new website, and while I’m no web designer, anything I did would be better than what was already in place! Finally got that online this week, and all seem pleased with the result.
ume-launcher Package
After switching to the Mini Inspiron 9, I decided to try out my packaging skills from FUDCon and package a few of the Ubuntu netbook packages. I think there’s 5 in total, and I just got one of the major components through review and into updates-testing for F9. Found a bug with it not building for rawhide and F8 which I’m working on now, and I’ve also got to deal with the other reviews and fix the problems with those packages. Hopefully we’ll have a full set of netbook packages in Fedora within the next month or so.
All In All
Things are going well for me… Feel tired tonight, but I’m taking the time to recouperate a little bit. My best wishes to everyone who reads this far, you certainly deserve them (even if you didn’t read this far, you probably deserve them anyway!) . For now, I’m off to read a little non-theology, non-geek related stuff: Pilgrim On Tinker Creek – my Dad recommended it and I’m really enjoying it, although taking it slowly.
Before travelling on thursday (which was dull, but I guess nothing compared to David Cantrell’s flight from Hawaii!), I said that I would try and post regularly from FUDCon; it turns out that the three days are far busier than I ever imagined, and network access was a lot harder to come by than I thought it would be. I’m now sat in Red Hat’s Brno office, so will try and write something about what happened this weekend in the tme before I start travelling home.
Firstly, FUDCon is cool I had lots of fun this weekend, met loads of people who I’ve been working online with, and loads of people who I hadn’t worked with before too. I also learnt plenty, spending a fair amount of time on creating and reviewing packages with Hans de Goede and Jereon Van Meeuwen (thanks for all the help guys!). I’m going to start by helping to review some packages, and try and get a little more involved in Fedora packaging.
I didn’t get to spend as much time on marketing stuff as I’d hoped for, but I think it was still a worthwhile trip from this perspective for me: I had the chance to speak with people who were working on so many different things all around the project, got to hear their thoughts and opinions on what Fedora is and what’s important about the project to them. This has given me some thoughts on the way I want to develop my work in the marketing project, and also some thoughts about the way we can change how we do things to become more effective. I should have grabbed Greg and Max to talk about this stuff at some point, but they’re both busy and I didn’t want to interrupt them. I’m going to try and arrange an “off-beat” marketing meeting so we can talk about some things other than the list of tasks that we currently have.
The format of FUDCon is cool too: it seems to create a really relaxed atmosphere where people do what they want to do, form into groups with people who care about similar stuff, and just “get stuff done”. The BarCamp day in particular was interesting, just seeing people wandering around from meeting to meeting. Some people suggested that it would be good to have BarCamp before the hackfests so people can get an idea of what everyone else is working on and what they’d like to do with their own time – seems like a pretty good idea to me.
Besides the work in the day, the time spent getting food in the evening was great fun. Usually we’d finish up around 6 and head out with whoever you could find to get some food and drinks, before heading back to the hotel around 12. The funny thing is, people spend all day hacking on Fedora here, and then spend the evenings discussing it too (we did talk about other stuff too, of course)! Getting up in the mornings seemed to get harder as the week went on, but Fabian was always awake and that got me up too (Fabian, by the way, is a really nice guy – even offered to bring some chocolate or cheese from Switzerland before we travelled!)
Hopefully I’ll get to make it to some future events too, maybe even a FUDCon in the US so that I can meet a few of the Fedora team based out there, and see the people I’ve met here again too. A huge thanks to everyone for organising it and also to Max for helping me make it here as I couldn’t have come otherwise.
I’ve just spent this evening getting ready to travel to FUDCon. Had a crazy 20 minutes where I couldn’t find my passport, but it showed up in the car so I now have everything that I’m going to need (I think I’ve got everything!) packed and ready to go.
Next on my todo list is to wake up on time to get to the airport tomorrow morning. I need to be there by 7 to get checked in, so leaving the house around 6.30. I’ll be stuck in Stansted for 4 hours or so, between 9 and 1, so if any one is around there at the same time drop a comment! After that, I’m arriving in Brno around 4pm local time and will make my way to the hotel. I plan to wear my Fedora t-shirt so I’m easily discoverable by others
I’ll be bringing some Open Rights Group swag for everyone, and also ORG Supporter sign-up forms for anybody who might be interested in supporting an awesome digital rights organisation.
Looking forward to seeing as many people as possible over the weekend, and like Max said already, I’ll try and blog plenty and hang out in #fudcon.
/me thinks outloud
What’s its status? I think it’s pretty flat right now, and perhaps it’s time we kickstart it.
I’m going to be at FUDCon, hopefully doing some usability testing for our websites, but maybe this is the opportunity we need to get this going properly again.
Also, completely unrelated, but is there anybody reading this who has some time to answer a few questions Re: FAS? I realise most of our infrastructure people are busy right now – keep it up, and you’ll have us back in shape in no time. Here’s another line from If … by Kipling to help inspire you
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;…
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!
Just one of those times when what I really want is for everything to work exactly like I want it to.
My MacBook is a pretty good piece of hardware, and the reasons why I chose this over a Dell (keyboard, position of the headphone jack, power lead) or a Thinkpad (price) still stand, but there are a couple of things I really regret about it too. First, that I have to use ndiswrapper for my wifi. This must be one of the only wifi cards that doesn’t have an open source driver at least underdevelopment now, and although Livna does a pretty good job at keeping up with kernel updates, I was left hanging for a number of days this week 
(Note, I’m not grumbling at Livna, those guys do a great job, just at the lack of an open source driver for this broadcom card).
Second, I must be doing something wrong with my setup because it just hangs on that grey screen for the better part of a minute before grub starts loading. I don’t have Mac OS anywhere on here, and have grub installed on the MBR, don’t know how else to do this. I know there was some work in the pipe for EFI support in Fedora previously, but I never got it working even with help from the developer. Maybe that bugs been found now and I should try again.
Thirdly, weight. I didn’t realise but this is actually a pretty heavy laptop for its size (found out during my previous week’s visit to London town). It’s lighter and better put together than my old 15 inch Toshiba, but it could still be more portable. This is a pretty important element for me as I travel a reasonable amount and I like to have my computer with me when I do.
Also, I’m wholly unsatisfied by my mobile phone experience. I have a 5MP camera on mine, but it’s such poor quality optics the image is nearly always blurry, and it takes ages for the shutter to react. Wifi would also be nice, a decent keyboard, email client, and web browser too (although the latter too don’t make much difference considering the price of mobile data still).
Ah… this is all pretty irellevant though. Not to get all philosophical, but I can’t seriously complain when I consider that I have all this in the first place.
In other news, I’m home from London and should be more on the ball with Fedora related things again, like websites’ meetings, Fedora TV etc etc. Internship continues, but once again remotely. After spending a week in the ORG offices, I have even more respect for the work they do than I did when I started!
So, as part of my internship I’m putting together a guide on how to maintain your privacy online. I’ve covered basic computer security tips, and I think that section is reasonable. However, I’m struggling to figure out what material to present, and how to present it, for sections on:
Is there anything I’m missing here? Do people have suggested starting points on these topics, or ways to tackle them?
I want to explain the ideas behind them, rather than just saying do this and this, so that users can make informed choices about the level of security, privacy and annonymity that is appropriate for them.
Had fun this morning searching the net for content for Free Me, turns out that Librvox have some freaking awesome audio books that are superbly well read And Open Source Cinema has a super cool rotoscoped video of Girl Talk performing.
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.
A couple of quick responses about Fedora TV:
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?