SWIG, Python, and PulseAudio.OK, we seriously need someone who knows SWIG to put together PulseAudio bindings for Python. I’ve worked on some ctypes style wrappers, and they are not only not fun, but I suspect that I am Doing It Wrong, or in a non-Pythonic way. And I know that Lennart Poettering, the chief PulseAudio author, writes his code in a very consistent manner, which if I understand correctly makes a potential SWIG wielder’s job much easier. It’s about time we exposed the power of PulseAudio to a new generation of Python folks (and got them to quit using python-alsaaudio when it’s really unnecessary and sometimes non-optimal). |
Road dogging, no. 14.In about an hour or so, I’ll be getting on the road for Red Hat HQ in Raleigh, to meet up with other Fedora contributors for the Events Fedora Activity Day. We have an agenda that includes planning Fedora events both at the macro and micro levels for this coming year, and hacking on some free tools that will allow us to better provide audio/video resources both for people who attend and those who can’t. Connectivity will be good, but I might be a bit slower on email than usual because this is going to be a packed weekend. The success of a FAD comes from making the most of a number of contributors, gathered in one place to achieve specific goals. All of us who are coming for the event are looking forward to showing off that final set of deliverables at the end of the weekend. If you want to be involved, but can’t be in Raleigh, you’re still welcome! Check out the notes on our wiki for information on how you can participate. I’ll be returning home on Sunday night, but between now and then I plan to post some reports here on what’s happening at the FAD. Stay tuned. |
Goals and gold.First, thanks to Greg for an excellent, thoughtful post on Fedora’s goals. I remember well — and I’m sure Greg does too — the FUDCon in Raleigh in January 2008 where members of the Fedora community sat down to try to distill “what Fedora stands for” into a powerful message. The result was the freedom, friends*, features, first mantra — guiding values that we’ve enshrined on our Foundations page. The ability of any Fedora contributor to scratch his or her own itch is one of the strengths of our community. It has yielded many exceptional contributors, brought volunteer leadership to many of our project teams, and produced a steady enough stream of young contributors to merit an annual scholarship recognizing their achievements. One of the jobs of every Fedora project leader is to balance contributors’ ability to scratch their itches effectively, even when they’re not in concert with everyone else. That facet of the Fedora Project is a deliverable for our objective of building FOSS communities, and we need to continue to provide it continually and continuously. At the same time, there’s a distinct difference between a project that has this capability of traveling forward in many directions at once, and a product with such a capability. And another one of our objectives is to provide a top-tier Linux-based general computing platform. We provide a myriad of free software packages that allow people to define a combination they want to personally use. Since we provide 100% remixability, anyone can produce a personally satisfying combination from that universe of installable stuff. That’s a more or less autonomic feature of Fedora these days, of which the many official spins produced each release are evidence. The Fedora Project can easily encompass, for example, a dozen hosted code projects that each manage virtual infrastructure with a slight twist, or SIGs that want to provide completely different desktop environments. That flexibility isn’t as easy or desirable with a single product. Finite resources mean choices, because one product can’t do all things equally. (And in complete fairness, even a big-tent project like Fedora can’t do completely opposite things equally well — such as promote rapid advancement at the same time as long-term stability.) That’s why, for instance, we don’t offer seven email clients directly in the default Fedora spin, nor three different mail servers to process their mail, nor three desktop environments in which to run them.** Community test, QA, and documentation efforts five times their current size couldn’t effectively test and note all those combinations of software! And the contributors doing those jobs in Fedora are just as important to our community as any others. So a shared set of priorities are important. That’s also reflected in aspects such as our packaging guidelines, which on the surface seem to restrict autonomy. But in reality they’re an expression of our community’s shared priority for scalability. These guidelines produce better software security and interoperability, as well as encourage forward momentum in all the upstreams whose software we distribute. That point — scalability — brings me to another complete agreement I have with what Greg wrote about sacrificing bedrock principles of free software methodology in pursuit of a worthy goal; the ends do not justify the means. Fedora provides and champions an honest, sustainable, scalable system of upstream collaboration. And one of the best ways for us to demonstrate how well that system works is by putting an exceptional distillation of it into users’ hands. That experience is not just about what appears on screen when they boot a Live CD or USB image, but what happens afterward as they use it daily — and how we can use that experience to on-ramp curious, willing people into participating in sustainable, meaningful free software practices. There is still betterment we can apply to the way that users (which includes, not excludes, our contributors) experience Fedora, and I’m interested in continuing to explore them, as we’ve done for many releases. So in short, I’m interested in focusing on a set of priorities in the Fedora distro, and empowering a wide set of alternative capabilities in the Fedora Project, following the core values of freedom, friends, features, and first. Which I think is just what the doctor (DeKoenigsberg) ordered. * “Friends,” as opposed to “folks”… less folksy, but more accurate. ** Of course, the user, once at the helm, has complete freedom to do any of these things! |
Warm fuzzies, no. 129.One of the many little delights about working on a community project is the unexpected ways that friends around the globe might surprise you out of the blue. Late last week I received this little gem from the Czech Republic (sorry I didn’t have time to do any fancier GIMPing on the scans): I’m not sure from whom this beautiful little card came, but it asks me to pass on holiday greetings to the whole Fedora Project. Done! If you know who sent it, feel free to drop me a line. |
Red Hat Summit 2010 plans.I recently drafted a page on the Fedora wiki for planning our presence at the Red Hat Summit 2010 in Boston on June 22-25. That page has, among other things, an attendee list. Never too early to plan ahead! We had a great time and a lot of interest at the Fedora booth at previous Summit events. We were able to talk to many of the attendees about how Fedora fits into the open source practices at Red Hat, and of course pass out a lot of free Fedora gifts. And even when attendees were ensconced in sessions, it was never hard to pass the time — Fedora people are notoriously fun to hang around with. Last year, for instance, the indefatigable Scott McBrien, valued Fedora Ambassador (known as “StabbyMc” on IRC), brought a big box of vintage Red Hat goodies accumulated over his illustrious career. Having been instructed by his better half to clean out the junk, he turned it over to the Fedora booth for disbursement. Palms sweated; hearts quickened; eyes twinkled like those of children on Christmas morning. But enough about me. Hey, even some of the old-time Red Hatters came by to pick up collectibles. I wonder how many of those trinkets hit eBay after the Summit…. Honestly, I only picked up only a couple things I felt I couldn’t live without, but the best goodie was a ridiculously long stocking cap, which I proceeded to wear for the rest of the day. (Thanks Scott!) I got several “compliments” about my headgear that, looking back, might have been a bit sarcastic… but I’m absolutely sure the folks at the Red Hat Cool Stuff Store across the pavilion were totally jealous. Totally. Anyway, enough haberdashery for one post. This year, we are planning on an expanded presence. It won’t be anything like a FUDCon because we’ve found that those events run better separately from other big, exciting events like a Red Hat Summit. But we will have a booth, and hopefully a special Fedora room where we can stage demos, hands-on labs, hardware testing, and 1×1 technical advice. If you’re a Fedora contributor who plans to be at the Summit and you’re interested in meeting up with other Fedora folks or possibly helping at the booth or the room, please sign up on the page to let us know. We’re working on securing a small number of free booth passes for volunteers who are willing and able to help out. More details will appear on the page as we head toward spring. And of course, don’t forget that you can sign up for a registration reminder for the Summit by clicking here. |
Restoring a voice.To Ian’s post I can only say, “right on.” There’s an even deeper underlying concern for free software’s desire to have an unencumbered way to create content. It’s to restore the ability of people to use moving pictures as part of their voice in the processes around them. Codecs are not just the “-dec” component — the decoder that allows people to consume content. It’s also very much about the “Co-,” the encoder component that lets people create content and then share it as desired. In free software communities like Fedora, we use these codecs to share information about innovations and the communities that create them. But they are just as powerful applied to social and political processes. If we ever want to have a hope of sharing the benefits of global information economy with cultures around the world, people must be able to express themselves without costs being applied by systems into which they have no input. That means having freely available codecs to create and share content. Red Hat has contributed substantial work in partnership with Mozilla and Xiph.org to improving the capabilities of free codecs for audio and video support, which HTML5 can use. Most free softies know these as Ogg Vorbis for audio and Ogg Theora for video. Their capabilities are excellent now, and are highly competitive with the best closed-source or patent-encumbered formats. Don’t believe me? Check out Greg Maxwell’s enlightening page about how good Ogg Theora looks at some typical YouTube transmission rates. Free content must not end up another victim thrown under the blundering, driverless train of software patents. The results would be disastrous, quashing freedom for people around the world, especially those who most desperately need a free path to content creation. The Open Video Alliance is concerned with this situation (Mozilla is a major partner in OVA), and Red Hat continues to do its part in the fight against software patents too. I hope that others will “get on board” as well. |
Decisions, decisions, no. 229.Like other community leaders, I am getting together my travel schedule for this year. Red Hat’s fiscal year starts in March, so that’s the start of my travel calendar. And while planning, I’m keeping in mind a couple factors, which I write about below. |
Gource CTA.So according to Michael and Greg, Gource is awesome. And it’s just waiting on a completed package review and sponsorship and then we’ll see it in the repositories. If you’re also of the opinion it’s awesome, and you are (or know) a Fedora packaging sponsor, check it out! |
GNOME Shell tryout.I’ve been using the GNOME Shell preview available in Fedora 12 this week and I’m really enjoying it. I was testing out some candidates for updates to the free drivers for my ATI Radeon HD4850 (and the stuff that went with them) already, and decided to see what happened when I picked GNOME Shell. At F12 release time, my graphics card wasn’t quite ready for GNOME Shell use. But now I get the whole kit and kaboodle! The free drivers for both ATI and NVidia cards have come so far in just 2009. But the fact that out of the box I can get kernel mode setting on so much new hardware, and also 3D acceleration on a new card like mine, is just phenomenal. My hat is off to the guys in both projects working on truly free software drivers for today’s video hardware, among them Fedora and Red Hat’s own Dave Airlie and Ben Skeggs. Bonzer! Anyway, back to GNOME Shell. My favorite feature is the application search feature. Since I’m often on the keyboard already, I don’t have to switch to the mouse, or hit a bunch of arrow keys, to pull up another app I need. Say I’m in Firefox, and I want to bring up my gEdit text editor. I can just hit Alt+F1, the normal key combination for the main menu even in current GNOME. Then I type g, e, d and by that time gEdit comes up because that locates gEdit as a unique word in its name or description. Then I hit Enter and up it pops. Nice! The new controls for selecting among multiple running application instances, or applications across desktops, through the Alt+Tab keycombo are superb — and very easy to read, even for my tired old eyes. Effectively rearranging my desktops to put the apps I want where I want them is a snap, too. The taskbar is now down to a single bar on top, and visually it no longer even draws attention to itself because of its black color. I think that GNOME Shell has probably helped me eke out another 2-5% productivity out of my day, just eliminating time-wasting aspects of the standard GNOME 2.x interface. The one thing I worry is that I’m missing out on some power keystrokes out there to do cool things. Is there some reference out there for under-the-hood goodies, or a way a non-programmer like me can learn how to make some? |
Swinging for the fences.This review popped up on my scope today, and three things struck me immediately:
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