Linux, musical road-dogging, and daily life by Paul W. Frields
 
FAD Fedora Talk 2009, Day 1.

FAD Fedora Talk 2009, Day 1.

After a very late night return from picking everyone up at Richmond and a hotel dropoff, I returned home (Ian Weller in tow) and crashed. Five hours later it was time to hit the bricks! My dog and I woke Ian, who, in the fine tradition of high schoolers everywhere, was difficult to wake but once having done so, immediately sprang into action.

We picked up the other folks, including Jon Stanley, John Poelstra, and Jeff Ollie for a fine Southern breakfast, where we joined up with Asterisk guru Jared Smith (to fight crime!) and then headed off to BusinessPlayce to get started. We met the owner Paul Delagrange, who saw our haul of equipment and immediately upgraded us to their larger conference room which happened to be empty. Thanks for your kindness, Paul.

I also have to thank SupaWife (Eleya) for making us freshly-baked, homemade goodies — a bag of amazing chocolate chip cookies and another bag of biscotti. Hopefully the BusinessPlayce folks were munching off them too, since we put them in the communal food area for people to take.Yum! (Or rather, yum install cookie.)

The BusinessPlayce office is clean, well kept, well stocked, and easy to get comfortable in. In no time, we had a bunch of different phones and network equipment set up, and got to work. John Poelstra, Jon Stanley and I worked on the user enablement tasks, including the talk.fedoraproject.org website and the materials we have for leading users through the steps of connecting to the system. Meanwhile, Jared Smith, Jeff Ollie, and Ian Weller worked on both the guts of our Asterisk server, to get it ready for stream recording, streaming, and publishing; and an application that will be used to expose more functionality to logged in users via a web interface.

I had a short rocky stretch at the beginning of the day where I tried to get some easy documentation of Empathy’s sofiasip-based client underway, but was stymied by what seems like a buggy implementation. Jared Smith confirmed that the telepathy-sofiasip code doesn’t appear to be responding properly to responses from the Asterisk server. Bug filing on the way.

Following that, though, I had a much more productive day working on the web pages, getting back into the groove of Git, the world’s greatest source code management system, and putting together a better page flow in a fad-ftalk experimental branch. It was a highly collaborative day as our user-page group tested each other’s pages, rewrote wording, helped each other understand genshi templates, using git to work more productively, and even debugging some strange HTML problems at one point.

In all honesty the work that Jared, Jeff, and Ian were doing was mostly beyond me, but we did spend some time whiteboarding a design for a simple conference room booking app which Ian then mocked up in HTML and is now working on coding in Moksha so it can become part of the Fedora Community portal. The initial release will be using dummy data but once it has proper connectors in place it will be able to show information about running conferences, start and stop recording, and so forth.

Tomorrow we’re going to dive into the GStreamer and icecast pieces, and hopefully make real headway on the streaming and publishing pieces of the puzzle. We’re hanging out in IRC Freenode #fedora-fad, and also have a conference line open on the Fedora Talk system itself. We may switch conference rooms tomorrow so that we’re using the “official” FAD room, which all of us forgot was there. Maybe we’re all just dunderheads, or maybe we can make that information more visible or obvious. ?

Day 1 has been pretty productive and I think tomorrow, with preliminaries out of the way, our 9:00 a.m. start time will be followed by a much faster acceleration! Everyone is working hard at the FAD and I’m really proud to be surrounded by such brilliant people. It’s one of the perks of being part of the Fedora community that I try never to take for granted. Great work today, folks!