Not really, I’m leaving tomorrow, but officially today’s gonna be my last day on the Earth^W city of Valencia (and surroundings).
It’s been a good season. Valencia it’s not the best place I’ve lived ever, but it’s OK. I’m leaving a lot of friends here, what it’s sad… but awesome at the same time.
You may know I’m moving to Exeter, and I’m planning to retake my Fedora ambassador activities there.
The first step will be checking the usual suspects: Fedora UK and the UK Fedora ambassadors. It’s gonna be fun :)
Nautilus Flickr Uploader Reached 100 Authenticated Users
Yay! I just wanted to share the good news with you.
I’m planning some new stuff to add to the already full working features in Nautilus Flickr Uploader, but not now. Now it’s time to party!
Photo CC (by-nc-nd) by Nicole Hanusek.
Bugzilla for Humans
This is a very nice videocast by Johnathan Nightingale, and there’s more info (and a Vimeo video) in his blog post: Bugzilla for Humans.
Bugtracking is an important part of every open source project (well, I would say that it’s important to any software project), and I believe it’s the most nasty part of the community management too.
I have to deal with Bugzilla when I file a bug in the Fedora bugtracking system and the Gnome bugtracking system, and I agree with Johnathan that Bugzilla is scary and against the poor humans trying to file a bug. It’s even cruel, not only you found a disgusting bug, but when you want to contribute to fix it… you have to face Bugzilla!
The videocast it’s worth watching, meanwhile Bugzilla doesn’t turn into something more friendly.
Link: MongoDB and Ming; a Schema for a Schema-free NoSQL Database
Sourceforge rewrote the project pages of their hosting service to use MongoDB, a document based store (with binary JSON documents, also known as BSON), that it’s schema-free.
Today, in a SF mail, I notice that SF has released Ming, that is a Python layer over MongoDB to provide a schema for the schema-free store. So they liked MongoDB because it’s document oriented, fast and has simple, easy to use replication, but the schema-free feature can be a pain because you can’t make assumptions about document structures in your code, or at least you can’t make them easily when working with a big monster like SF.
It’s an interesting spin to the NoSQL idea: add schema to schema-free stores!
From Android and the Linux kernel community, by Greg Kroah-Hartman.
The whole post it’s worth reading, lemme quote another sentence Google shows no sign of working to get their code upstream anymore
. That’s important, IMHO.
It reminds me the complaint on the way Google is developing another open source project: Chrome (er, Chromium browser); they use several open source libraries, including them in the source tree, and forking existing FOSS code bits for Chromium like a rabbit makes babies: frequently, and usually, without much thought.
So if you want, you can find a pattern here. Google isn’t playing the open source community rules, they’re just using (abusing?) open source. Come on Google, give something back!
Please, Help Me to Be Cool!
Recently there’s a very interesting thread in Planet Perl about marketing or we suck at web design:
- Marketing the Entire Box (including the wrapper)
- More design love please…
- On Nagios, Thunk, Shinken and wrapper included marketing
I fully agree with those posts: the picture you show about your project is as important as the project itself. I think this is true in all the RoR projects I’ve seen so far. In fact, looking for a Trac substitute, I knew Redmine was a RoR application just for its appearance (well, I was lucky… it could have been a Django based application as well hehe).
How many times you have tried an application because of the screenshots? Yes, it looks cool, let’s make a try.
The problem is that not every developer has the skills or the good taste to make a cool website to support his project, and that sadly may affect the project success.
So, I bet there are good designers out there that want to contribute to the open source community. Would you adopt a project or developer?
PS: I would have liked to post a comment in the cited posts, but I don’t have an account. You guys should think about allowing comments of non-registered users.
From What Will Kill The Cloud?
It’s a worth reading article, and the quoted text is quite enlightening for me: with cloud computing we’re going back to the datacenter, its bureaucracy, and the control of the companies that own the clouds.
Don’t you agree with me that the cloud computing era (or call it SaaS) will result in less freedom for us (the users), do you?
The Second Barcamp Valencia it's Over
Yesterday was held the second Barcamp Valencia, and it was a total success: 124 attendees (from 156 registered, and 23 non registered attendees that finally attended the event), 12 interesting talks + 1 (I hosted a talk about GPG, and I hope it was as interesting as the rest hehe).
That was a very nice experience, again (the past edition was great too), and I made a lot of new friends an learnt some new stuff (not much, because being in the organization team I couldn’t attend more that a couple of talks… not counting mine).
It’s surprising the high interest of the people to attend to such events, but the very low participation in the set up. In fact I was almost alone in all the setting before the great day (that day I had help from two guys, and without that help it would have been impossible!).
I don’t know if it’s related to the Spanish idiosyncrasy, but I think the barcamp idea of an event doesn’t work out here. In fact we didn’t run a pure barcamp event yesterday, but something a little bit more like a more classic congress.
Another conclusion it’s the impressive power of the social networks (mostly Twitter in our case) in order to promote events. May be you don’t know it, but 124 attendees it’s a very good mark of an event of this kind in Valencia.
In other news, some people speculated about the possibilities of the next barcamp once I’ve left the area (and the country!). Come on, I don’t feel I’m essential.
Sometimes called Santayana’s Law of Repetitive Consequences.
I’m sorry, but I told you. Guess what? Yep, we’re out of disk again (146GB and about 6 months later).
Firefox 3.6, Theora and the Flash Video Player Killer
I must confess I’m not in the video/audio business, and I don’t know 100% about the differences between Theora and H.264 and its licensing model.
But I do know about GIF and MP3, so it’s easy to choose a side in this topic: go for open source supported and royalty-free technology for the win!
There’s another point. My three years old laptop can hardly play a video in some of the flash players out there, and certainly it’s not able to play most of the HD videos. Flash on Fedora (eh, Linux) sucks and melts my CPU even with small ads.
With HTML5 and in-browser Theora support it’s different. The video in this post plays smooth and using about 30% of my CPU. Yes, it’s the way to go (or you can donate some bucks so I can buy a new laptop, dammit!).
I don’t get the point to buy a Quad Core laptop just to watch some videos on the Internet, do you?
