A Christmas Gift

Every Christmas my son and his wife surprise me with an original home made gift they crafted themselves. The theme is always the same: Linux, Open Source, Free Software, and this year was no exception. What they made for me was an open source version of the classic Monopoly board game. They call it Openopoly. I made a youtube video. Unfortunately the video ends rather abruptly because my little Olympus camera ran out of memory as I was recording and I was too lazy to do a second take.

Anyway thanks Chris and Melinda. You’ve really outdone yourselves this time.

Fedora 11 Saves the Day!

Every summer I enjoy getting my hands dirty working on a project involving Linux. This summer was no different.

My 2009 goal was to build and configure my very own PVR similar to TiVo. Well, I tried Ubuntu and OpenSUSE without success. Then along came Fedora 11 and everything worked “out of the box”. Hats off to the Fedora Project Team.

You can read all the ugly details on my summer projects homepage at Seneca College in Toronto.

Another Semester Bites the Dust!

More importantly, it was Rose’s 40th birthday.

I’m Naming Names!

Patrick Lam, Stephen Carter, Chinmay Patel, Patricia Constantino, Ezadkiel Marbella, Kezhong Liang, Jesse Valianes, Varinder Singh Jhand, John Ford, Nino D’Aversa, Milton Paiva, Tony Lai, Nestor Chan, Joshua Doodnauth, Mohak Vyas, Sid Kalra, Gregory Masseau and Anthony Hughes. These are just some of Seneca’s brightest students who have spent the last one or two semesters working on Open Source projects. And yesterday, each gave a brief presentation of their work. WOW! Impressive stuff. Details of their efforts are documented on Seneca’s Planet.

Attending the presentations were people from Red Hat, Mozilla and OCE. It should be noted that each of these organizations contributed, with hard cash, to the Open Source work being done at Seneca. A big thanks to them for their generous support.

Here’s several photos of the event.

Mozilla and Fedora Project Posters

Students Preparing for their Talks

Chris doing Intro

More Posters

Connected

My New Year’s resolution (one of them) is to try harder to be connected with my current crop of students. In this day and age this means blogging more, using IRC more, emailing more and updating course wiki’s more often. For an old guy who would much prefer to sit and chat face to face beside a warm fireplace this is a difficult paradigm to get used to. But the fact is that, “being connected is not the same thing as communicating” so says Chilean philosopher Jaime Antúnez speaking at the 6th World Meeting of Families underway in Mexico City. From a report on zenit.org,  his address took a look at what values really are, considering on what basis we can affirm that a certain human act is good or evil, that a certain behavior is just or unjust, that a certain activity is correct or not.

 "Consider," he said," just the increasing dependence that youth live
 today on a whole variety of electronic media, which technology is offering
 every day. It's clear that -- besides the useful benefit that the good use of
 many of these can obviously generate -- the mental habit of living
 'connected' is spreading. This is a worrying situation because of the marked
 dehumanizing implication this has, which displaces the natural and personal
 [state of] living 'communicated,' a quality that characterizes a society of
 human persons."

So, is my New Year’s resolution a good one? Time will tell.

3 BarCamp Sessions at FUDCon 11

Dave Jones talks about Dracut

Dave Jones gave a short talk on Dracut which is a shell script tool that creates initial ram disk (initrd) files. Currently every distro has its own tools that do this. Dracut will be distro neutral. This is hard to achieve because of the way distros are put together – some have SELinux turned on, others off, some compile modules into the kernel while others do not. The goal is to make it part of the kernel build process. One advantage of Dracut is that if the boot up fails Dracut will drop you into a shell where you can fix things manually. More info on Dracut can be found at lkml.org.

Paul Frields Talks GIT

Paul Frields gave a presentation titled: “Git For Dummies, by Dummies”. I love this name and since I’ve only started with Git last November I thought it would be just my speed. Git is a distributed source code revision control system written initially by Linus himself. Paul did a great job explaining the basics of Git for us beginners. However, the room was filled with “git masters” who, on occasion, pushed Paul off track into some of the more esoteric features (uses) of git. Of course this totally confused us beginners. Nevertheless, I wrote down all the commands Paul demonstrated with a brief explaination of each. Hopefully I’ll have more time to practice this semester.

Jared Smith Talks Asterisk

Jared Smith gave a nice talk and demo of Asterisk – An Open Source PBX Telephony Platform. Jared is a co-author of “Asterisk: The Future of Telephony” an O’Reilly book.

What impressed me the most was how easily Jared wrote some code to add functionality to an Asterisk server. The Asterisk language he used reminded me of early BASIC and FORTRAN. With just a few lines he set up a simple telephone menu. It’s amazing how versatile Asterisk is. This is something I’m sure our students would love to sink their teeth into.

Kernel Stuff at FUDCon 11

Kyle McMartin talking about F11 kernel stuff

This presentation (new kernel stuff headed for F11) was given by Kyle McMartin.

Mostly a lot of wifi and lirc updates. Also, performance counters from Ingo Molnar.

There was also some discussions about driver staging in Linux. In fact, and this is the good part, Kyle suggested that he would agree to mentor anyone willing to take over the maintenance of some of these, mostly wifi, drivers. Maybe we can interest one of our students?

File Systems at FUDCon 11

Vallerie Aurora Henson Btrfs Q&A Session

This session was supposed to be a split presentation with Val discussing btrfs (pronounced butter fs) and C. Scott Ananian talking about versioning in file systems, but Val’s Q&A took up the entire hour. Thanks Scott for giving up your time slot.

Most of the discussions revolved around when (if) btrfs will be the preferred file system in Fedora. Certainly not F11 or F12. Currently it can be used but only for testing. Do not use it for “real” data.

Someone asked what benifits btrfs could offer laptop users. It is much more flexible, easier to configure, and fault tolerant to some extent.

There was also some talk about ext4 – seems like it too is not yet ready for prime time. Apparently there are some bugs remaining in some of the more esoteric features.

Val’s home is at http://www.valhenson.org and the main page for btrfs is at http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page

Barcamp at FUDCon 11

The idea here is that everyone can give a talk on any Fedora-related topic. All speakers introduce themselves and name their talk and write its name on the blackboard. Here’s a photos showing this process.

Speakers lining up to introduce their presentation.

Now the speakers write down the names of their talks.

Now everyone votes by adding a check mark beside each talk they intend to attend.

Now we have the result

My Hotel at FUDCon 11

We were given posters to place on our hotel room windows. My room was on the 22nd floor. It took me 15 minutes of walking around the base of the hotel before I spotted my posters. Here’s a photo. See if you can spot more posters.

My hotel at FUDCon 11