Principal’s office, Mr. Zemeckis! NOW!

This is why, no matter how much a bunch of geeks might want to see a naked mockup of Angelina Jolie, Beowulf is just… wrong.

Give ’til it feels good.

I saw Michael Tiemann’s blog entry and it took me about a half a second to pitch in a donation to the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008. The people working on libre art are the same people who give freely of their time and energy to make everything you use in Fedora (and lots of other open source communities) look great. So why not thank them with a donation that will get some of them to a great conference where they can collaborate on even better tools and art?

Think about ditching that $4+ coffee for a day or two, and give that money to a worthy cause. Even if it’s not coffee, there’s always someplace to dig up some spare change. Can’t afford it by yourself? What about a group donation from your local LUG or other community association? It’ll give you a warm glow, guaranteed, and every little bit helps!

For those of you who are sticklers, the GNOME Foundation is taking care of the money-moving, and it’s tax deductible.

Meme o’ the day.

$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
125 sudo
110 ls
104 less
68 cd
60 make
49 rpm
38 sed
35 gpg
33 cvs
25 emacs

Probably due to a bunch of package messing about.

Art by any other name.

In response to Max’s post about release names and artwork, I think we haven’t yet had a release where we started the naming process early enough, but we’re getting there. When we do, the call for names ought to be long enough for our amazing Artwork folks to bring to the table not only suggestions, but some sketches or mockups of the themes that go with those names, or for that matter any that tickle their fancies.

I think, contrary to the worry that the Artwork team was constrained, they had been consistently asking for word on the release name earlier. If we get it early enough in the process that they can actually be part of the proposal process, we get better themes and a slightly more cohesive community. I love to see the early theming from Artwork, and I think if someone were to bring art as well as a name to the table during the proposal process, it would be a very exciting development.

The fact that the Artwork team has already started brainstorming about steampunk and gears can inform the naming process this time around. Someone mentioned the name “Neon” this morning for F10, since it has a new “is-a” link to F9 (“is an element”), and has plenty of ways out — how about “F11: Viper”? SEXY. All half-kidding aside, I’m sure if anyone could figure out how to merge neon into a steampunk design, it’s the folks in our Artwork project.

Loaves and fishes.

Today’s been a banner day full of free and open source software advocacy. This morning I had the great pleasure to present via teleconference to FOSSMeet in India about the Fedora Project. Things went swimmingly, and I had a number of great questions from the audience that were all about one of my favorite subjects — what sets Fedora apart from other Linux distributions and projects. (The answer: our concentration on innovation, and creating a culture of contribution, not just consumption.)

Then this afternoon, our daughter Evie was one of several students chosen to man her elementary school’s tables at the county Information Technology Exchange. Each school in the system presents an interesting way in which their students are using IT as part of their curriculum, or solve specific problems.

Of course, I couldn’t let a chance for advocacy go by, so I slapped a sticker on my shirt saying “Ask Me About LINUX!” and wandered the floor with Evie’s OLPC XO, and my Dell XPS M1330 running Fedora. I talked to a variety of people including teachers, administrators, students, and parents about the bounty and pleasure of open source and how it could help in classrooms, living rooms, and boardrooms everywhere.

As usual, the XO was the biggest hit, attracting scads of attention from lots of young students (and plenty of parents and teachers). Evie took a break from her demonstrations — she was one of several students there at a time — to show off what she loves doing with her XO. I was gratified to hear a couple parents say, “Oh, and I hear it’s all open source software inside.”

I also talked a bit to some of the school system’s administrators there, who are in the middle of deploying SuSE servers this year for file, print, and proxy services across the county. They’re also making use of Xen virtualization to maximize their hardware investments. Looks like they’ll soon be coming out to our local LUG to get free advice and help from the many Linux professionals we have in town.

So now to enjoy a nice Saturday, maybe get a little work done on the side. Have a great weekend!

FUDCon hotel info.

For those who aren’t subscribed to the watch list for the page, I’ve updated the FUDCon F10 page with information for the Summit hotels. There is a link there that will get you the prenegotiated (and deeply discounted) hotel rate for the FUDCon dates, or any portion thereof. Use the link in the Hotels section to book your room.

We are also looking for cheaper offsite alternatives, but room sharing is also encouraged for people who want to cut expenses but be very close to all the FUDCon action. (The cheaper Summit hotel rate, by the way, is $219, meaning that roommates only pony up $110 apiece — pretty reasonable for the middle of Boston in June.) We’ll post additional information as soon as it’s available.

Call to action, call for stories.

Fedora is being used in a hundred thousand interesting places out in the real world.

• At NASA to do analysis that makes future space exploration safer.
• In studies to improve development for children with Down’s Syndrome (trisomy 21).
• At Creative Commons, to promote open content discovery, creation, and remixing.
• Powering distribution of food to the needy in Mexico.

We want to hear a story about how YOU use Fedora to do something interesting. Enriching. Educational. Enhancing. At work or in your community. How did Fedora help you achieve something special? Just reply in a comment to this blog.

Dancing shoes.

For the last couple of days I was at FOSE 2008, the biggest IT conference and expo for federal government. I went to help out at the Tux.org booth to promote free and open source software (and, of course, Fedora). I wanted to especially thank Nicholas Brenckle, who headed up the group, got everything coordinated, got me a badge, greeted me warmly when I showed up, and was generally on top of everything.

FOSE is an interesting kind of show. Because it’s located right in the heart of DC at the Washington Convention Center, federal IT people don’t have to pay any money (other than for a Metro subway or cab ride) to travel there, so it’s always very heavily attended. This goes especially for the expo, which generally gives away free tickets to anyone who suscribes to any of dozens of different federal government IT news magazines. This also means that many of the people there aren’t there to really do business, but to see cool gadgets, watch demos of new technology, and pick up free stuff. Their bosses generally don’t let them travel or have a say in the technology that goes into place in their agencies, so big companies exhibiting aren’t expecting to make big sales.

This puts free and open source advocacy groups like ours at a HUGE advantage because we are there to give away as much free stuff as possible. We hook them with free as in beer, and then bend their ears about free as in speech.

Nevertheless, there are a lot of big exhibitors there, and of course it’s dominated by hardware vendors. Lenovo, Dell, HP, IBM, Fujitsu, Toshiba… all present and accounted for. There were also tons of vendors with everything from server racks to air and power handlers to cable ties to IT office furniture. Google did have a prime-position booth, though, showing off their search engines and other online services, and there were some jobhunting organizations there too, like Dice.com.

The first day, I met a bunch of the Tux.org folks, including Tim Ferro, who, when I introduced myself as the new Fedora Project Leader, replied, “Really? Well, you’re my new best friend — I LOVE Fedora!”

Nick, Nick’s SO (I’m sorry I’ve forgotten the name!), Tim, and I went over to the Dell booth, where the kind people from Dell had a beuatiful big-screen laptop waiting for us to use for the entire length of the exposition. “Do whatever you like to the hard disk,” they said. (Thanks Dell!) Tim and I proceeded to load Fedora 8 on it, and a nice selection of fun applications to show off on virtual desktops.

[UPDATE: Nick's SO's name is Dana. Thanks for reminding me, Nick!]

We only had one table at our booth, so display space was at a premium. However, the booth itself had plenty of floor space, and the location next to us on one side was unpopulated, so we had room to spread out there to talk to people (and keep folks from doing “drive-by grabbing” of schwag without at least taking the time to hear a little about FOSS).

The awesome folks at Linux Journal had sent hundreds of copies of their April 2008 issue for us to give away, into which we inserted fliers for Tux.org and its member LUGs around the Washington metropolitan area. Max and Greg had sent us what I believe were the last several hundred copies of Fedora 8, both DVDs and Live CDs. We also had a huge variety of stickers from Linux Journal, the Free Software Foundation, and others, plus some great hanging posters for Tux.org.

Notably, a couple of the folks in Tux.org had brought XO laptops to show off at our table as well. The table was a little cramped, but by midday, we realized that we were actually ONE OF THE BIGGEST DRAWS AT THE WHOLE EXPO. No joke. Even the big shots had a hard time keeping up. I didn’t have my camera with me to shoot the relative wastelands that were the booths for some of the big names, but here’s someone just up the aisle from us (name obscured to protect the lonely):

Here’s what our booth looked like for most of the two days I was there (the people on the left aren’t moving by, they’re waiting to talk to other Tux.org folks on the left side of the booth, and see the wares we’re holding):

I talked to a number of people about how Fedora was a great way to develop innovative solutions using the latest Linux technology, and moreover how they could get involved. Some of the interesting people I met:

• Bennett Kobb, communications manager at the Public Technology Institute, which promotes best practices and innovation in technology at the local government level. Benn related their success at moving Web services from IIS to Apache, and his happiness at finding Fedora after trying many other Linux distributions and finding them lacking in professional polish and usability. John Babich who was at FOSE with me yesterday, did a short mock interview with Benn that we hope to post shortly!

• A sergeant with the Alexandria Police Department wanting to use Linux to do digital media forensics. As luck would have it, I spent oh, about a decade doing that in my past life, so that was a fun conversation!

• A DHS employee interested in getting more free and open source software in the parochial school system where his children attend. As a parent paying the dreaded “technology fees” so many schools are charging these days, he wants to make sure that he’s not paying costs for software when there are so many great FOSS alternatives available (he mentioned OpenOffice.org as an example).

I was continually amazed at how many hundreds of people came by looking for Linux by name, and talking about how they’ve heard of how open source can save them from the hell of malware abuse they endure as Windows users. This is always a great shim for me to talk to them about contributing back — “Did you know, it’s not just that you can use this software so easily, you can also contribute back in some way, even if you’re not a hardcore geek!” Another frequent pitch I made to people was that FOSS represents a return to the purity and simplicity of neighbor helping neighbor — you help me raise my barn, and I’ll help you till some acreage. Representing a LUG advocacy organization is a great platform for that message, where you’re not just sending people off with a free disc of software and a handshake, but also a promise to help them if they need it in the future, and a place where they can meet other neighbors with similar needs.

All in all, a great way to spend a couple days, although my feet and my voice are both happy to be resting in my home office again! Thanks again to Tux.org for the welcoming camaraderie, to Dell for the loaner laptop, to John Babich for coming by on his brief time off here in the States, and to the many people who came by and talked about Fedora and FOSS. Let’s do it again next year!