OSLUG Planet

Last week, was rather productive for a change. I worked on adding pagination to my course format. I then found that pagination was breaking ajax. I couldn’t move sections around. I spent quite a bit of time tracing the code and figured out that the ajax code was assuming that all the sections are displayed [...]

Today, was the first day of open bridges conference. I didn’t make it in time to Portland to hear the keynote speaker. The first talk that I went to was on Tcl tk, the other one I went to was how to get started on open source by Leslie Hawthorne. It was nice to finally [...]

The May issue of Open Sources is now available.  This issue is almost exclusively about the OSWALD (Oregon State Wireless Active Learning Device).

On Monday (4/27) the LUG, CPATH, and EECS jointly celebrated the release of the OSWALD.  Not only did we get to see how many people can fit into the new LUG room, we also enjoyed an afternoon of cake, pizza, mingling, and hacking.

For those who haven’t been introduction to the OSWALD, it is a hand-held device originally designed by OSU student Kevin Kemper as his senior design project.  Now the OSWALD plays an active role in the undergraduate computer science program by demonstrating concepts in a hands-on setting.  Since it’s launch, first year students have written an MP3 player for the OSWALD in Java.  Read Open Sources for more.

Last Friday, we presented at the Under the Radar conference. Things went really well, and Cloudkick ended up taking best in show (people’s choice)! Techcrunch did a nice article on our progress. Exciting times!

Here is a link to the presentation if you are interested.

So, I’m now (officially) the webmaster for the Oregon State University Linux User’s Group. In addition to being a useful asset for this LUG, I’ll also be testing my ability to take things like, say, installing Drupal or configuring Planet, and turn them into easy-to-read yet somehow relevant song names. (Of course, fans of Muse already know today’s song.)

This blog will be added to the new Planet, so I can continue to blog here, and appear as if I’m doing useful things, while in reality, I’ll actually be discussing improvements to a site that neither of my regular readers care about! Man, I’m awesome.

~ C.

I moved my blog over to wordpress.com because of a number of problems including increased spam, lack of reader stats, and insufficient customizability. This will be my last post here. The new location:

http://dberkholz.wordpress.com/
http://dberkholz.wordpress.com/feed/atom (news feed)

Follow me there, where we'll continue the fun and excitement of random spurts of posting followed by extended inactivity.

People were so busy complaining about my pie chart that most of them apparently didn't have a chance to think about the meaning of the actual data. To try helping people look at the information rather than its presentation, here's a bar chart of the same information:

I don't recommend looking at it because you may go blind, but I've made available the (extremely ugly) script that created this.

I ran a quick, informal poll on the internal Gentoo developers' list last week, and tonight I began analyzing the results. 50 developers responded to my 9-question survey, and I'm going to post the results of 1 question at a time.

First question: What are the top 3 issues facing Gentoo?



Technical issues are way down on the list. Developers' top 5 issues are manpower, publicity, goals, developer friction, and leadership. It's good to see that we've been addressing at least a couple of them with the newly energized public relations project and work on the Code of Conduct. Other issues that have been ongoing for quite a while now are the lack of distro-wide vision and goals. The Council could provide those by increased activity and taking stronger stands in particular directions, and that's part of the reason I did this survey—to figure out which directions our developers care about. I think part of the problem is that nobody sits around pondering directions and ideas. Everybody's busy working in their own little areas and not thinking about the big picture. Manpower, or lack of it, is another issue I'm indirectly addressing in my push for greatness, which I'm going to post more about at some point (I promise!).

To create this chart, I used Google's excellent chart API. The neat part about the API is that it's simply a URL, so you can construct it with any language. I used a shell script since I was already fiddling around with awk. Any answer with less than 4 respondants was grouped into Other to make the rest of the chart readable.

Everybody who went to LCA entered their distro, editor, and shell upon registration. Peter Lieverdink posted graphs of the results.

Gentoo made an excellent showing, coming in 4th after Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. This is particularly neat because LCA attendees fit Gentoo's target audience really well: developers and power users.

Thanks to Daniel Black for the link to that graph.

This won't be a long post, because I'm tired. Sorry for the dearth of posts on here, but I've been busy writing other things—see below.

For anyone who hasn't heard, I took over as lead of Gentoo's public relations efforts a little over two weeks ago. Three days earlier, I wrote an LWN article concluding that Gentoo isn't falling apart, but it's totally failing to communicate. After writing that article, I realized that somebody had to step up to deal with this problem—who better than me?

My focus right now is showing people that Gentoo development is just as alive as it's ever been. I'm doing this by opening windows into development through more frequent news postings, with links to discussion forums to respond to the posts. Doing this, combined with writing to people ("You will") rather than about them (saying "Users will..."), will help build better relationships with our users.

Another part of improving the perception of a lively, active community is updating the look of our website. The old website redesign never made it to fruition, so a few of us have begun taking a look at how far it got, what happened, and what to do now. At a minimum, I'd like to make some slight changes to give our site a face lift. The design hasn't changed for 6 years now, and it shows.

One major, easily fixable problem with our website is that there's no obvious place to go for users who want to contribute. There should be a big "Get involved!" or "Help Gentoo!" link right up at the top of the page, next to "Get Gentoo!" All this requires is a little webpage that describes all the ways people can help. In fact, the whole website isn't task-oriented enough. This needs to change.

In the future, I'm going to begin improving the "press" aspect of PR, based on my notes from an excellent talk by Josh Berkus at OSCON 2006 on public relations for OSS projects. The main ideas here are providing a press kit for reporters with all the basic info they want, building relationships with local reporters by using local Gentoo contacts, putting together some case studies of people and businesses using Gentoo in interesting ways, and improving our process for creating and posting news and press releases.

Finally, any Gentoo users can help improve Gentoo by simply advocating it to Linux users you know, giving demos and talks at Linux user group meetings or conferences, promoting it in articles, or writing in your blog about something Gentoo does really well.

That's a question a lot of people have been asking lately, with the news about the nonprofit foundation, the lack of news updates on the homepage, and the canceled release. I answer it in a short LWN article.

I just committed xorg-server 1.4.0.90, which is a prerelease for 1.4.1. Here's the Gentoo ChangeLog:

Bump to 1.4.1 release candidate. It's gotta be an improvement over 1.4, so i'm letting it go into ~arch.

(#192221) 'xorg-server-1.4 - keyboard LEDs do not work' fixed upstream.

(#201047) 'xorg-server 1.4 no longer loads xmodmap via xinitrc properly' fixed upstream.

(#197104) 'xorg-server-1.3 and 1.4 consumes 100% CPU, locking the keyboard, apparently triggered by opening an OpenOffice pulldown menu' fixed with patch from master branch.

(#196019) 'xorg-server creates unnecessary file /etc/X11/X11/Xsession.d/92xprint-xpserverlist' fixed by not installing the same file twice to 2 different places (Andy Crook).

(#195886) 'xorg-server-1.4.0-r2 built with hal USE flag crashes on shutdown if dbus service is not running' fixed upstream.

(#195551) 'xorg-server-1.4 fails to build w/kdrive on amd64' fixed with Makefile.am patch designed for easier sed but unsuitable for upstream because the line gets too long (Michael Gorse).

(#194503) Don't spit versions when showing drivers to rebuild via qlist, and also provide a command for people to do it themselves later.

The upstream X.Org change list is available here.