Sexy Sexy Penguins

Recently, I’ve been very interested in getting involved more and more with the Fedora Project.  In fact, the latest project in which I’m involved, the Getting Involved Guide (GIG).

I started with this guide because my so-called friend Jared Smith (hi Jared!), introduced me to the original creator of this document, Paul Frields at FUDCon a couple months ago.  I started the hackfest portion, not entirely clear where I’d end up, but somehow I rolled back to hang with Jared and Paul while they were working on this Contributor Guide, if I remember the name correctly.  I got involved late in the day, and either my misunderstanding, or pure genius took over and the Contributor Guide (intended mainly for developers), quickly turned into the Getting Involved Guide or GIG, which had a much broader focus.

While I am happy to be a part of this guide, and have had a hand in changing its purpose, I’m not at all familiar with much of the Fedora Community processes.  Which, for this document to be successful, I am going to have to learn, since that’s the point of this guide to begin with, helping others get started when they want to help the Fedora Project.
Think of it this way, if you are a corporate entity, an individual, or a small non-profit group (like my UTOSF group) and want to give back to the community that has helped you so much.  How do you do that?  What’s involved in getting started?  What projects are out there where we can help?  Do we need to be developers? If not, what else is there for us to do?  Well, those are all good questions, and I am sure there are many, many more we haven’t yet considered.

I guess what I am doing here is soliciting from the general communities at large, what they’d like to see in this guide.  What confused them about joining a large project.  I’d also like to hear stories about being a contributor to the Fedora Project, and why you think its a good idea.  I want to take these ideas and integrate them into the Getting Involved Guide.  I want to take these issues and make it clear for others how to get involved, why its important, and show that value.

Currently, if you are a Fedora Project member, I have a document in gobby.fedoraproject.org called GettingInvolvedGuide, which you are welcome to modify as you feel necessary.  I may also be hitting you up to answer questions regarding particular processes in your group as well.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: Community, Fedora, get involved, utos

Its been a very long time since I’ve done the Product of the Week, so I am going to change the name to Product of Whenever. This suits me better.

In July of 2001, I was introduced to a little editing tool many of us now know fondly, the wiki. I was travelling to New Zealand looking for work. During my month’s stay, the fellow I traveled with showed me his wiki-wiki. He explained how collaboration could work and the simplicity of the system made it even great for a one person quick web page. Immediately, I was hooked. When I returned from New Zealand and enrolled in school, my mind quickly went back to this funky wiki-editor thing I’d seen. Being a geek even back then, I promptly installed one.

Fast-forward almost 7 years. We’ve seen the wiki evolve from a little app that could be used to make an entire website of information so grand that even the largest collectors of physical data can’t compete. We’ve seen tools like DocuWiki - the documentation wiki, MediaWiki - which needs no introduction and Tomboy - the little desktop wiki. Many other wiki’s emerged to help people collaborate all around the world. How great a time it was…

This article isn’t about wiki’s, rather it is about collaboration. This article is about a different type of collaboration, one that’s more real-time than a wiki can be. In some ways its more limiting and in others, much less. The feature I’m referring to is real-time collaboration. And the tool that enables this, gobby, and its closely related cousins, sobby and obby.

INTRODUCING GOBBY

Gobby is a collaborative text editor, with a bunch of cool features. While gobby is still young and not quite feature-full, its quite amazing what it can do out of the box. The collaboration abilities of gobby come straight out of the box. One can choose to create a session on the local network, or create a server version, with sobby, where everyone can connect to a centralized server to collaborate. I’d like to also point out this application can also run in Windows according to the authors’ website, though I’ve heard rumors that it doesn’t work as I’ve not personally tried.

To get started with gobby, its easily installed:

# yum install gobby
.. snip ...

Once its installed, gobby will easily load from Applications -> Internet -> Gobby Collaborative Editor. Up pops the window we showed you above, albeit a little more bare. The toolbar is the most important piece here.

There are two distinct features here, plus the ability of a regular text editor. On the left, are the connection buttons, one can join or create a session. On the right hand side, are user and document lists, and a chat button. The left hand side controls how to connect, the right controls once you are connected. Of course, the middle does have tools of a normal editor.

Clicking the Create session button provides this dialog, allowing for a local session to be created and maintained.

This session can be just one person, but is definitely better with at least two. Notice that you’ll need to pick a colour. This feature is what makes it easy to tell who’s edited what parts of every document in gobby.

The other option is to join a session. Joining a session also lists any local sessions currently available.

Once the session is created and/or joined, its just a matter of using gobby like an editor. The fun part about gobby though, is when the collaboration begins. When working on a document, others can work on it as well, at the same time. Which can be confusing, and troublesome the first time you play with this tool. Give it some time and you’ll be hooked.

In addition to creating an obby session with the gobby application, its also possible to create a persistent connection with the sobby server. Unfortunately, sobby doesn’t have features that let it run as a SYSV service, but it is possible to get a server up and running quite easily even still. The organization I run, UTOSF, has one currently up and running at gobby.utos.org. If you want to join up, please let me know and we’ll get you connected.

Take the time to get to know this awesome collaboration tool, and start working with your friends who code, or document or even just for simple brainstorming sessions.  The possibilities are endless.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: Collaboration, Fedora, gobby, Tools, utos, wiki

All I’ve got to say is “I had nothing to do with starting it, but it happened anyway.  And I had fun!”

Cheers,

Herlo

PS - I’m awaiting myspace friend approval for those in the know.

Tags: dating, puzzles, utos

I will be home for the entire week next week, which is the first time that’s happened this month. Not that I am complaining, but once I get home I have a very long laundry list of items to complete and only 6.5 days to complete it in until I go back on the road. So here’s the short list:

• Generic stuff that can be done anytime during the week
  • Laundry from the past week
  • Put my bed together at my new home - I have been in this house now for two months, still no real bed
  • Finish unpacking all of the boxes left under the stairs - working on not being a packrat so much of the stuff is bound to get tossed out
  • Put an ad in the paper for a roommate - save money this way
  • Work on the Fedora GI Guide
• CodeAway Saturday from noon to 6pm - good times
• UTOSF HackNight Saturday night, 7pm - more good times (gotta get call for papers out)
• Sleep in all day Sunday - my only real day of rest, but that’s the life I lead, this may lead a little into Monday as well
• BoardGames on Tuesday night with friends I’ve not seen for a couple months - that’ll be nice
• Lunch with my friend Tristan on Wednesday afternoon
• Two meetings Wednesday night at Applebees in Draper
  • Centralized Calendaring among multiple communities - 6p
  • UTOSC Planning Meeting - 8p
• Two events as well on Thursday I’d like to attend
  • CTO Breakfast Thursday morning would be worthwhile, we’ll see if I make it down there
  • Geek/Blogger Dinner on Thursday night
• Friday will bring something, but currently, there’s nothing. Maybe I’ll try to keep it free.
• Oh, and I still have to work on Thursday and Friday, so I guess I’ll work that in somehow as well

Whew! I’m excited to be home though, and am sure this list will grow!

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: codeaway, community events, ctobreakfast, Fedora, home, laundry, sleep, utos, utosc

Well, right on the heels of last weekends uber successful HackNight, it looks like the snow may keep some people from coming up, but we’re still planning on having a mostly ad-hoc HackNight tonight.  The project again will be ConMan.

We’re meeting at my place @6:00 in Murray and we’ll have food and hack for a long, long time!

See you all tonight for an awesome hackfest!

Tags: conman, django, hacknight, utos

UPDATE!

A quick update for those who are planning on attending tonight’s UTOSF HackNight. Its been moved to Guru Labs in Bountiful. If you still need a ride, feel free to email me, herlo1@gmail or you can twitter me at http://twitter.com/herlo.

If you still need a ride up, we’ll carpool/caravan up from my place @6:30 (instead of 7pm) in Murray. I’ll be leaving promptly at 6:30, however. If you’ve never been to Guru Labs, here’s a map.

See you all tonight for an awesome hackfest!

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: gurulabs, hacknight, utos

Well, it appears that I am one of the many victims of Qwest and their lurid line noise issues, thus no DSL for me! Because of this, I’m in the process of scrambling for a new location for our UTOSF HackNight this evening. If anyone who’s coming would like to donate their location, or know of some place central to those in Salt Lake County with free wireless and open all night, let me know. I accept emails at herlo1@gmail or you can twitter me at http://twitter.com/herlo.

If nothing pans out, fear not, I do have a possible alternate location for this event, which I should be able to arrange for by the end of the day as a backup plan. As it stands now, everyone should just arrive at my place @6:30 (instead of 7pm) in Murray and we’ll carpool and caravan as desired.

See you all tonight for an awesome hackfest!

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: django, hacknight, utos, utosc

So for those of you who follow this blog, its not the first time I’ve done shameless self-promotion. However, in this case, its only after the fact that someone else thought I was important.

I want to say thank you to the CodeAway and their organizers (Matthew Reinbold, and others, I’m sure) for putting me on this list. I hope to prove them right and kick some tail in Utah Open Source and around the tech community this year. I’m also glad to see at least a couple of faces I recognize, which means I need to meet the others on this list and get them involved in UTOSF and the UTOSC for sure.

Here’s the article: http://voxpopdesign.com/wordpress/?p=104

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: famous, utos, utosc

An interesting tool I came across in the last week or so is this week’s Program of the Week: Agave, from the GNOME Community. Recently, we’ve been working on a new logo for the Utah Open Source Foundation, and needed to come up with some simple color schemes that would work well with our logo. In doing so, I came across Agave and started playing with possible combinations of colors we could use.

This tutorial will cover some of the simple, but effective features Agave provides to help provide a good contrast in designing logos, websites and more.

To install Agave, I simply did the following:

# yum -y install agave
.. snip ..
Installed: agave.i386 0:0.4.2-5.fc8
Dependency Installed: gconfmm26.i386 0:2.20.0-1.fc8
Complete!


Once Agave is installed, it is immediately available from the main Applications -> Graphics menu in GNOME. If you use a different desktop, its possible to type agave at the command line. Agave starts up similar to this screenshot:

As is shown above, its simple to see that the three colors here would go nicely together, maybe a bit bright for a website, but not too bad for a logo maybe. In our logo, however, we didn’t want such bright colors, plus we wanted to base it on a color that already existed in our already established brand logo seen below:

This logo is well known in our community, and thus we wanted to make sure to keep the look and feel as our org morphs into its true form. Out game GIMP and with the color picker tool, I obtained the bluish color needed for contrast. Agave only needs the value to give several different options through its several available views. The first view shown is the triads view, in other words, a scheme with three colors that fit well together:

yields the triad

But the real power of Agave is in this section of the application:

The color picker provides for easy to choose colors on the left.

On the right hand side, is the color scheme chooser which allows 6 different choices; Complements, Split-Complements, Triads (3 colors), Tetrads (4 colors), Analagous and Monochromatic. In addition, on the toolbar near the top, is another feature that allows random color schemes to be chosen.

When we’ve finished our site and logo, I’ll update this article with the results.

Try out Agave today and maybe even paint your house using its recommendations!

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: agave, color, Fedora, logo, POW, utos