DoctorMo's Blog

The great news has finally been announced that launchpad _is_ Free Software. Firstly, I am very grateful to Canonical and to Mark Shuttleworth for making this happen and super grateful to the launchpad developers, some I know personally from my short time at Canonical and I know that getting things ready for publication can feel like a square law to the finish line.

Now the part that isn’t so positive, although Jono has indicated how grateful we should all be for this fabulous gift, I have to say that I’m disappointed it’s taken this long:

1. Software that was to be a central hub and set of tools for use by the Ubuntu community was not built in the community it was to serve. Completely illogically, and this goes as much for places like sourceforge but doubly so for launchpad since it was constructed to house community interactivity and not just as a hosting point.
2. Whilst other companies can claim to be semi commited to the ideals and principles of Free and Open Source software, Canonical can not. Our community has been built by standing up for those principles and a private launchpad was always a stab in the back for community trust on principled matters.
3. I always wondered weather Canonical really believed that Free and Open Source Software can be an economical business venture in it’s own right. The more closed source SaS applications, the more I believed that they didn’t really think it was possible to make money from FOSS development.
4. Getting inter community participation on projects that were hosted on launchpad has always been a PITA, it’s hurt our community’s work. The service is good, the terms on which project owners had no direct control over the technology being used was not good.

I know that Canonical have never had any obligation to release the launchpad code base, but it’s seriously hurt us by not doing so from the start. Taking it’s damn sweet time in serving the best interests of it’s self, it’s users and the community as a whole, let us not have it happen again and let it be a reminder to all SaS users to seek out free software in more than just their local computer’s software installation.

Now I’ve had my whine and moan we can put it behind us. I’m going to look forwards to a brighter future where we can add important features to launchpad and have real freedoms to control our own destinies. I’m looking forward myself to more tools for LoCo groups, event organisation, media and marketing, press release creation and so on.

To get involved in the development, go here:

https://dev.launchpad.net/Getting

https://code.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm

https://launchpad.net/~bzr/+archive/ppa

I was thinking about a recent post by Benjamin Mako Hill where he puts the case for stronger communication of the principles of Free Software as the reason and driver for adoption and community participation, and that the Open Source technicalities are just how we go about achieving these social-political ideals.

I realised that the guide I had written a few months ago to communicate effectively the mechanics and rationales of the Free and Open Source community was defective and lacking in any coverage of the principles at stake. I feel it’s important to not only discuss the merits and soundness of the method but also the very reason for seeking alternative software production and distribution methods in the first place.

So with that in mind, I’ve attempted to rectify the short fall and re-draft the guide. It is now at revision 23 with an extra page and some other edits. I ask the community to kindly lend me it’s critical eye once more and to look over this revision. I need to make sure it’s a good draft to present to people who know nothing about what we do, how we do it and most importantly, why we bother to do it at all:

Download PDF here

Download SVGs here

Update: Thanks to Popey, Denotes and Alvin, I’ve published revision 25.

Notice: If there are any budding video editors who would like to help me, I’m running out of time to do videos of these classes and without help from someone in the community I will not be able to do them until the first set of classes is over and we move onto just refining the creation.

Course creation and teaching is quite an exercise in production, both creative production and event production. There is so much to do.

I’ll keep the sources to my first video with green screen and use them to create a video editing work-flow which will be useful for the future. I am sorry to those who were looking forward to joining in online, this kind of thing just needs more than one person to operate at a quality level that I’d be happy with.

I’ll continue to post each week the course material and lesson plans and then once it’s out the way we can find some nice looking, non-stammering, video friendly personality to conduct each of the presentations.

But for now, just enjoy this pleia2 inspired American Ubuntu logo artwork:

Well I spent some more of today trying to do a similar guide for internal computer parts, a light guide. This was much more challenging since there is a lot of different things and most are not pre-drawn like some of the ports so everything is drawn by hand and it’s taken me a while.

So today I can only post 3 frames, there should be more to come.

Well, to bed with me now! I’ll try and work on this tomorrow.

As a part of my materials creation initiative for my Systems Administration course, today I put together a guide to computer ports. Below are each of the sections and you can download a useful pdf or svg source here.

Copyright 2009, Martin Owens, Creative Commons BY-SA

Let me know if you see any omissions or mistakes, this is currently revision 06 of the document, thanks for the comments from the community, you guys are the best verifiers a draughtsman could have.

As a local community group we have to decide what events it’s best to invest our time and energy into making sure we can do full on advocacy and which events are basically internal computer geek socials.

Let me explain, when the BLU (Boston Linux User Group) holds their annual Summer BBQ; there isn’t much point in 20 Ubuntu geeks turning up with CDs and flyers. The same goes for the FSF Software Freedom Day or the Boston Gnome Summit or a PyCon etc, all these events are internal computer geek driven and the people who attend really don’t need information or CDs to get them into Ubuntu. Chances are they’re already into or not into Ubuntu. But it is easy to turn up for social events, you can give away lots of CDs to people who already know about Ubuntu that way and they’re great places to get to know the wider network of people in the computer communities.

I think some of the best advocacy events though are when we step a little further outside out boundaries into other communities that have little or nothing to do with computers. The PiCon event last year was a success because it was a bunch of Maths and Science geeks, just not computer geeks. They’d heard every Anime or Manga and had come for Cory Doctorow (SciFi writer) and Randall Munroe (XKCD), but we could relate and lots of people were interested and informed about what Ubuntu was and how powerful it was while there because we held a table with demo machines, CDs and volunteers.

That’s the kind of external advocacy event I’d like to be doing more of in our Local Community. Places where normal people from other communities can get to know about what we’re all about. Hopefully at next year’s Anime convention we’ll be able to get a booth proper and be able to hold fort, this year we only managed a small contingent with CDs and Ubunchu Managa prints.

What do other LoCo groups think about attending externally organised events?

I’m reporting all the materials for the class that I taught this evening to seven students at the south end technology center. This section is for learning basic command line theory and practical and don’t forget, everything is alpha and I expect people to help edit and review as required.

Go here for the source files, or below for each of the PDFs.

• Lesson Plan for teachers
• Presentation Slides
• Overview Sheet
• Practical Sheet
• Cheat Sheet
• Sample Files

The video of me teaching this class is still held up in post production because of the tools, both Apple tools for being crap and Linux tools for being very hard to use. I’ll get around to learning video editing as time can allow, but hopefully this section will be replaced by the video later this week.

hopefully these materials will be useful to other people in the community so they can begin teaching important systems administration skills to the wider IT community. If we can get every sys-admin in every company to at least be comfortable with Ubuntu desktop and server networks then we’ll have a much easier time of advocaccy of Free Software ideals and getting people away from clsoed source, non-free software that limits control.

Update: Video is canceled because of lack of time/man-power

It’s Tuesday evening in Boston and like always we have our teaching session were we teach fresh faced non-technical users off the street what Ubuntu is and how it works on the Desktop.

Today was different though, we’re putting in a PXE server and a host of other upgrades for the community center where we conduct our classes. This is to allow us to teach effectively and manage the technology that we teach with. I put out a call to arms onto our Local Community mailing list in hope that some more faces would appear and take on some of the teaching tasks since it was going to be a busy evening just with the new tech.

Nine LoCo people came to help (including me) and I’d just like to shout out how grateful I am for all their help, these are some of the Massachusett’s Local Community Heros:

• Daniel Hollocher
• Danny Piccirillo
• James Gray
• Mike Rushton
• Mike Terry
• Nicolas Valcarcel
• Sara Abbot
• Yuriy Kozlov

We have such an awesome community spirit and despite some teething trouble with the new server, it doesn’t diminish the dedication of our local community members. We managed to also discuss some great new things we can be doing to increase publicity and do more events, something that having a large number of members present really helps with.

Tomorrow I will hopefully post the sys-admin video, sorry about the delay fokes, post-production issues with propritary Apple software (Final Cut Pro bleh) which I don’t use, but my producer/wife does. I may end up doing it in blender but howtos have been light on finer details about video editing in blender.

But besides the video, the physical teaching session will go ahead as planned and hand out sheets and presentation materials are all written, hopefully I’ll get into the swing of course writing as the weeks roll by.

Ubuntu Massachusetts, over and out.

I wasn’t aware before today that blender can also do video editing. This is quite exciting as it’s one tool I haven’t tried.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Composite_Nodes/Types/Matte

According to this wiki page, you can do Chroma Key work where you select colours to remove from the raw footage in order to display other things behind the actors. I will be playing with it and I will report back if it works as suggested, so far I’ve been told that it’s much better than other Chroma Key filters and should do a good job with my videos.

Now perhaps I can move all my video editing to Ubuntu instead of using that damned blasted Apple Mac.

I’ve also been trying to get a plan together on how I can turn an animated svg into an ogg theora video ready for overlay use. A commenter today suggested that the xml export per frame from svg could be done directly with firefox, but it’d need a lots of changeling work and not many people are willing and able to do the required development.

First let me apologise about the fuzzyness and quality. It’s ok for our first go at chroma key. although none of the editing was done with FOSS software. Damn it!

Next you’ll notice I say there should be a video here, but there isn’t. That’s because there is still editing to be done and it’s getting late in the night. So I’m postponing it until tomorrow.