Last time our Free and Open Source Software (FOSS@RIT) campaign travelled to One Laptop Per Child Headquarters (OLPC HQ) in Cambridge, MA, the Open Video Chat (OVC) team worked with the upstream mentors of their co-op project to make huge strides in design and performance. The advances that were made by the team and their [...]

I am fresh back from OSCON and my brain is exploding. More on that soon, but first some news from the world of automotive “infotainment”.

First, go read Eric Brown’s piece on LinuxForDevices outlining GENIVI’s selection of MeeGo as the reference software stack for GENIVI. Also stop by ComputerWorld to read Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ summary from Friday’s blog.

For those who don’t know, MeeGo is the result of a merger between Intel’s Moblin platform and Nokia’s Maemo platform, managed by the Linux Foundation. I was able to speak briefly with folks at Intel in the booth this week at OSCON and they are definitely buzzing hard about MeeGo, and they have a right to be proud – MeeGo is a great accomplishment and a testament to Intel’s commitment to open-source. Kudos to Intel’s Open Source Technology Center.

For background information about GENIVI, go read this post on the MontaVista blog. In short, GENIVI is an alliance among auto manufacturers, in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) developers, and embedded Linux providers who are developing a new Linux-based reference platform for IVI. MontaVista is a member of the GENIVI board, as is Intel.

Now, for more background, see this blog post that explains MontaVista’s recently-announced relationship with Robert Bosch Car Multimedia, a premier IVI provider.

What does all this add up to? Hard to say, but from my perspective as an open-source philosopher and embedded Linux cheerleader, I’d say it is a big multi-way win among GENIVI and all of its members, Intel, embedded Linux developers in general, and, eventually, end users. Collaboration works so well it makes one wonder why some companies and industries still insist on competing the hard way.

What I want to know next… GENIVI has promised both x86 and ARM reference systems, so which ARM platform will GENIVI choose?

In my previous posts, (1, 2) I've been talking about why Small and Medium Sized Businesses (SMB) need Linux and Open Source solutions. I've also talked about Open Source industries. But what we haven't covered is getting in the game.While I could go high tech here or dazzle you with business terms, the truth is, going into business only requires that you understand the ground rules.Think of it

June 2007: the Free Software Foundation (FSF) publish their third ‘discussion draft’ of their proposed new licence, the GPL version 3. Alongside this new draft is published a so-called ‘rationale’, which helpfully explain the changes made since the last draft. Originally the FSF had planned to require all forms of encrypted GPL software to be accompanied by appropriate decryption keys, to prevent device manufacturers from putting GPL software in their products but making it impossible to end users to modify it. Many people had complained about this however, saying that it undermined a lot of legitimate uses of cryptography on software code. The FSF responded by limiting the requirement only to ‘User Products’ in its next draft, and went to a lot of trouble to define this subset of GPL-containing items. In the rationale document(pdf), they commented:

We considered including medical devices for implantation in the human body in the User Product definition. We decided against this, however, because there may be legitimate health and safety regulations concerning inexpert and reckless modifications of medical devices. In any case, it will probably be necessary to convince medical device regulators to allow user-modifiable implantable medical devices. We plan to begin a campaign to address this issue.

This paragraph demonstrates both the pragmatism that is creeping into the FSF (concerns for ‘reckless modifications’) and the ‘tin-foil hat’ eccentricity that has always been a part of Stallman’s free software movement. If nothing else, the activities of the FSF and its colorful leader will continue to give us plenty to talk about in the years to come.

June 2007: the Free Software Foundation (FSF) publish their third ‘discussion draft’ of their proposed new licence, the GPL version 3. Alongside this new draft is published a so-called ‘rationale’, which helpfully explain the changes made since the last draft. Originally the FSF had planned to require all forms of encrypted GPL software to be accompanied by appropriate decryption keys, to prevent device manufacturers from putting GPL software in their products but making it impossible to end users to modify it. Many people had complained about this however, saying that it undermined a lot of legitimate uses of cryptography on software code. The FSF responded by limiting the requirement only to ‘User Products’ in its next draft, and went to a lot of trouble to define this subset of GPL-containing items. In the rationale document(pdf), they commented:

We considered including medical devices for implantation in the human body in the User Product definition. We decided against this, however, because there may be legitimate health and safety regulations concerning inexpert and reckless modifications of medical devices. In any case, it will probably be necessary to convince medical device regulators to allow user-modifiable implantable medical devices. We plan to begin a campaign to address this issue.

This paragraph demonstrates both the pragmatism that is creeping into the FSF (concerns for “reckless modifications”) and the “tin-foil hat” eccentricity that has always been a part of Stallman’s free software movement. If nothing else, the activities of the FSF and its colorful leader will continue to give us plenty to talk about in the years to come.

This is a series of blog postings on quality matters in e-learning.

My plan is a simple one in which I will look for resources on quality matters in e-learning and then share them with everyone in this blog. So, it can be a Youtube video clip, a web page about success story in e-learning, a learning object about a teaching topic or students explaining how they have improved their learning using a certain e-learning approach.

After going through the resource, I do hope we can reflect on the learning aspects. For example, after going through a video clip, can you think of 3 things that you can remember about the resource? Sometimes, the resource might not appeal to you. Even then you might have learnt about something that did not make you learn. So, if I did not catch some main points in some web-based resource, I can conclude that the resource has not been done properly or I just could not remember the salient points! Whatever it is, it is good to reflect on our own individual learning. Personally, I feel it is important to spend some time to reflect on your own personal learning.

OK, my contribution for today is a Youtube video clip entitled “Training Educators to Build Courses that Meet Quality Matters Standards- Part I”

Here is a short writeup for this video clip:

“Lisa Young of Scottsdale Community College shares an overview of the presentation, which highlights the collaboration of three colleges that developed and implemented a training series to provide professional development to faculty who wanted to develop online or hybrid courses per Quality Matters (QM) standards. The four part training series used SoftChalk LessonBuilder and other practices to provide information on the QM rubric while modeling best practices aligned with the QM standards.

The presenters will demonstrate the lessons created with SoftChalk, provide information on why they chose SoftChalk, how they organized and developed the modules, as well as information on how the training was received.

Category:

Education

Tags:

* Quality Matters

* SoftChalk

* eleaning

* online lessons

* educational”

Did you find this video clip useful? Was it a bit long? What are your thoughts about this video clip? Can we apply the principles in SST?

This video clip lasts 8 minutes and 25 seconds. I found it a bit long.

However, I could remember the 3 important things about this video clip:

• Getting started with e-learning
• Assessment
• Engagement

I’ll have to write a longer post later, but I thought I’d just mention that OSCON is a great conference. Our presentation went well, and we’ve had a lot of great conversations with people about all kinds of things in the open source world.

More later… for now, it’s time to head out the door.

(Related, our parallel programming environment for the Arduino is now available on Ubuntu, Windows, and Mac. Hooray for packaging! And, I need someone to help me work through how to do proper source packages for some of the complexities I’m facing on the Fedora/Ubuntu side. Packaging compilers is not a lot of fun…)

This is the sort of topic I would usually post about
on http://gathatoulie.blogspot.com, but the medium
(some scans!) seems to suggest posting here instead.
There is some prose there already that may be a
useful accompaniment to these images:

http://gathatoulie.blogspot.com/2010/07/fenollosa-riff.html

On a more general note, I've been thinking a lot lately about
the various ways in which "philosophy" can be useful or
non-useful.

I suppose that insofar as it is just a collection of vague
and fuzzy ideas, it may just be a distraction, or even
a busy obsession. I found a nice quote from C. S. Pierce
about this...

http://gathatoulie.blogspot.com/2010/07/never-let-weeds-get-higher-than-garde...

At the same time things like intuitions, emotions, dreams... all
of these are part of human life, and it would be a shame to
leave them out, just because they aren't 100% cogent.

This, in a way, is what I'm trying to represent with the second
of the two pictures I'm posting here. Every structure (e.g.
a threaded discussion, but any other picture of a "network"
would serve) has an "outside" that includes human experiences
and a time dimension. Structures are in fact entirely non-useful
in the complete absence of dynamic qualities.

It may be that the mind's "busy activity" about certain points
tends, ironically, to make it more structure-like. Pierce's theme
could be sketched as having to do with moving from a mind
conscious of its own *activity* to a mindful behaviour, wherein
one is conscious of the various *effects* of activities in general.

If this is what is meant by "philosophy", then perhaps it is
supremely "useful"... but unfortunately, thanks perhaps to
the fact that we are so used to the typical objectifying way
of thinking, even these words about process will seem like
very vague gestures... but ah well :).

(Oh, and, by the way, I think

scanimage >image.pnm && convert -quality 85 image.pnm image.jpg

helps keep the file size down, but maybe that was mostly due to
cropping...)

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An interesting video message from Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, was published last week. The message was recorded in support for GNOME and its events, such as the upcoming GNOME Users’ And Developers’ European Conference.

In this video, she reflects on times when open source was not considered in public organisations, because of issues that were perceived such as lacking technical support and worry about IP infringement issues. The consequence was that officials were discouraged from selecting software on merit. There may have been open source products out there sufficiently fulfilling the requirements, but this was not enough to be considered by public organisations.

But times are changing and it’s meaningful that Kroes, who is also the Vice-President of the European Commission, acknowledges this. She mentions a few developments to illustrate this point. For example, OSOR provides unbiased advice and guidance on the use, development, and licensing of free and open source software (sounds familiar?). It also contains a ‘forge’ providing a home to open source software projects.

Kroes also mentions the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) as an example. This is interesting because there is a lot of debate and lobbying going on regarding version 2.0 of EIF. A few months ago Glyn Moody analysed a leaked draft of EIF 2.0 highlighting the confusing and vague references to openness and open source software. More recently, the New York Times wrote how companies like Google, IBM and Red Hat are lobbying for inclusion of open source software in the document, which is perceived as a strategy to break Microsoft’s hold. It probably won’t be until the end of the year before the final version 2.0 of the EIF document is released. Although the closeness around the drafting process of this document does not look very promising, it may be a good sign that Kroes includes the framework in this speech.

Additionally, Kroes stresses the importance of strong communities and the role they play in shaping Europe’s digital future. And now the EU commission has the opportunity to put the money where their mouth is, as it recently announced to fund projects worth 1.2 billion Euros to be launched in 2011. This is a genuine opportunity to invest in open source software and in open source companies to make sure that the open source offering can compete better with companies that offer proprietary alternatives.

The 9th Annual Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS, "eff-sauce") is coming up on October 28th and 29th, here at Seneca College in Toronto. This is a great event with a wide-ranging, eclectic mix of workshops and presentations.

I've been involved in planning FSOSS for the past few years, but stepped back a bit to catch my breath this year. Mary Lynn Manton has stepped up to the task of chairing this year's event with Rose Saliba, who is co-chairing for her third year.

FSOSS is still looking for interesting workshops and presentations on a variety of open source topics. If you're working with open source in any way, this could be a great opportunity -- please check out http://fsoss.ca and submit a presentation proposal right away!

I was wondering if anyone might be interested in this software localization project - http://www.africanlocalisation.net/call-applications-language-teams-2010. You could forward the blog-post to anyone you think might (also) be interested.

And I am more than happy to work with anyone, who is interested in the project.

I promised Asheesh I’d write this post, though it’s coming a day late because I crashed through the 2nd day of CLS 2010.

What’s the balance between inclusiveness/accessibility and being able to use the best tools/formats available (in other words, not having to worry about whether everyone else is keeping up)? For instance, during the first day of CLS, I found myself zoning out a lot; as someone who can’t hear, it is extraordinarily hard for me to lipread multiple people in a conversation with background noise – should I have interrupted them and said “excuse me, I’m deaf… would you mind signaling when you’re about to start speaking so I know to lipread you?”

The issue is not that I should scratch my own itch, nor that it would not be an entirely unwelcome or unwarranted interruption and imposition on my part. I’ve been speaking up and making (and asking for) my own accommodations since I was a child. I fully admit that I’m frustrated and to some extent just venting/whining here, but my frustration is that there is that extra expectation that I must – and will – expend energy on rectifying this every time I’m at an event, and the incremental cost of doing so slowly chips away at my willingness to participate at all (because it “costs” me more than hearing participants to have the same level of participation). There is nothing I can do that will fix it permanently (if there were, I’d be more than willing to work my ass off for an extended period of time to make that happen) – things will always be this way, no matter what I do. And I am tired.

It’s like being told you need to pay a dollar every time you want to participate in a conversation. It makes you pause slightly about participating in that conversation at all, and even if the conversation isn’t that great, you’re more likely to reluctantly stick with it, because… well, you paid a dollar. Others will look at you and go “why don’t you just pay the dollar?” or “it’s only a dollar,” or “well, if you can’t even pay a dollar (you lazy bum) you shouldn’t be here” – and not recognize that it adds up. Say you have a dozen conversations each day, which is on the low side – you probably walk by many more in the space of an hour without realizing it (the questions on the bus? the chatter by the water cooler? the informal banter about the soccer game at lunch?)  – that’s $4380 a year.

And you have to publicly put in your dollar. I have to stand up and tell people I can’t hear, and would they – graciously, please – accommodate me? Most folks are goodhearted and will gladly do so, but sometimes I don’t want to stand out. I don’t want to be labeled as deaf, because there are some associations that come with it that I find even more tiring. And offering to pay the dollar for me doesn’t really help, because you have to stand up and publicly say “hey everyone, I’m putting in a dollar for Mel!” which doesn’t help with the standing-out problem. So I just choose to opt out, and quietly slip out the back door and go away. Sometimes I come back. Sometimes I don’t.

I want to make this clear: I have no problem with paying the extra bill. I do so often. I stand up and ask often. I take a lot of extra, invisible effort to set up things (sitting in front so I can lipread, etc) so I don’t have to inconvenience others by asking whenever possible. But sometimes, when I’m tired, I wish there wasn’t that expectation. I wish I didn’t have to ask. I wish I could just be tired and not have to ask and have the world still work and have me be able to participate in it. I’ve expressed this kind of thing before. Multiple times.

Asheesh did a great thing yesterday: after we talked about this, we went to the next talk together and he started transcribing it in etherpad, in backchannel, in notes that everyone could see – including me. IRC transcriptions at the last FUDCon were a huge boon. One reason I’m so fluent in text-based communication channels is that it’s a part of the world where I never have to ask – I’m on equal footing by default. And I wish this could extend more to other parts of the world, even (especially) in tiny increments – my suitemates leaving captions and subtitles on in our lounge by default (I never asked for it, they never mentioned it) I am incredibly grateful for to this day. Small things like that – people understanding without you asking them to, and being able to participate in the tiny moments of life folks that people usually think “oh, this doesn’t matter” because they take it for granted.

I feel like I’m whining here, because I can’t propose a good solution – I’m just venting a frustration, and the frustration I’m venting is that I can’t think of a solution. But I promised Asheesh I’d give this voice, so here it is.

Thoughts?

I’m tired.

I've put together what seems like a reasonable
"first rough draft" of my probation report:

http://metameso.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/Probation_Report

Thanks to Dana Chandler for a just-in-time discussion
of the main ideas that have been circulating in my mind
about this project. (They're also depicted in a sort of
diagram here.)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Two thought-provoking pieces from Mark Guzdial’s blog (again):

1. The Molecular Workbench: “…is not just a collection of simulations–do not be deceived by first glance. While it presents many existing simulations that are ready to use in classroom, it is, however, also a modeling tool for teachers and students to create their own simulations and share them with collaborators. There are very sophisticated modeling capacities hidden behind its simple user interface that empower you to create new simulations and even explore the unknowns.” Given more resources, I’d love to do something like this for Software Carpentry (and for programming in general).
2. The Future of Tablet Textbooks: “[Apple] thinks…that the first iPad-based textbooks are going to come out as apps… But…Apple would prefer to have textbooks come out as EPUB books… [Because] EPUB books can be distributed through Apple’s iTunesU channel in the iTunes store…Apps are much more tightly controlled, e.g., they have to be checked for memory leaks and proper behavior (expensive!), and they have to be signed and distributed carefully to make sure that what the customer gets is what the publisher delivered (and what Apple vetted).  Apple doesn’t want to have to vet textbooks… I think Apple doesn’t see the problem as I do. When textbooks have the capability of rich textbooks, what makes them different from an App anyway?  Couldn’t they misbehave in the same ways as errant apps?”

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On August 14, we're co-hosting our biggest and best event yet with IEEE. This year's speaking line-up is fantastic with even more great speakers travelling to Ottawa. The list includes Scott Chacon (Github), Aaron Seigo (KDE), Emma-Jane Hogbin (Drupal), James Westby (Ubuntu), Pete Forde (Ruby on Rails), and more.

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From the announcement:

The University of Toronto Department of Physics hosts Toronto PyCamp 2010. For beginners, this ultra-low-cost Python Boot Camp makes you productive so you can get your work done quickly. PyCamp emphasizes the features which make Python a simpler and more efficient language. Following along with example Python PushUps™ speeds your learning process in a modern high-tech classroom. Become a self-sufficient Python developer in just five days at PyCamp! Conducted on the campus of the University of Toronto, PyCamp comes with your own single OS/single developer copy of Wing Professional Python IDE.

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Representing government interests, we have the NYS Senate’s CIO, Andrew Hoppin.  Representing regional and local journalism interests, we have WXXI’s Editor for their  new Local Journalism Center on technology and innovation, Rachel Ward and City Paper’s Editor-in-Chief, Mary Anna Towler.  From the technology sphere we have Tom Callaway, Fedora’s engineering manager.  

The board is already engaging with us in significant ways.  Red Hat/Fedora has given us critical development support and previously donated a server and software to the project.  WXXI has asked the LTL to offer training in CIVX as part of a weeklong workshop they will be hosting for members of NPR’s new Local Journalism Centers across the state.  The New York State Senate has asked us to participate in a Hackathon on August 19^th and then participate and present in their daylong technology and government conference CapitolCamp on August 20^th.

The full RIT press release has some more info.

Scientific American has an informative piece on Microsoft's Imagine Cup finals.  It would be great to see a movement toward doing something similar with HFOSS.  Whaddaya say people?

Location

See map: Google Maps

This is a quick demo of the Ingres geospatial data type LINESTRING including creating a table, inserting data, and using the crosses function to find where a line crosses other lines.

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Location

See map: Google Maps

This is quick demo of the Ingres geospatial data type POINT. The demo involves creation of a table with a point column, insertion of data, and calculating distance between two points.

For those familiar with Ingres technology, Ingres licensed under the GPLv2 license. Ingres' geospatial support is compliant to the OGC SFS SQL (version 1.1). Ingres geospatial also includes coordinate system support. Geospatial support is built in to Ingres and not a plugin. For more information, visit: http://bit.ly/geodb

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Linux Pro Magazine this morning posted an article on a new definition of “open source hardware” (version 0.3) by several industry leaders. There are 11 basic tenets that are defined in the article and in the official document on freedomdefined.org, which also takes cues from the TAPR Open Hardware License. Here are the tenets:

1. Documentation
2. Necessary Software
3. Derived Works
4. Free redistribution
5. Attribution
6. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
7. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
8. Distribution of License
9. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product
10. License Must Not Restrict Other Hardware or Software
11. License Must Be Technology-Neutral

I think it is fantastic that open-source hardware is being taken so seriously. In fact, it is taken seriously to the point of a summit, the first Open Hardware Summit Sept. 23 in Queens, NY. If you’re in the area for ESC Boston, definitely stop by.

Last Saturday I happened to watch a TV program on the Hampton Court Flower Show. Among this year’s winners of the garden design competition was the Bangladeshi Allotment, a small garden designed by Jeff Travers with help from the Adelaide Community Gardening Club in Camden, N. London.

As Jeff explained, about 20 years ago the central Camden residents were offered a gardening plot in an attempt to counter the effects of the visually appalling derelict buildings and tall blocks of flats that dominated the area. People started growing vegetables, and over the years the plot became the hub of a thriving gardening community.

Bangladeshi women in particular became effective users of these allotments. They grew vegetables for their daily needs using techniques they had learned from their parents and grandparents in Bangladesh. For them gardening was a key source of food, and over the years they became experts in producing sustainable gardens with minimal financial investment. One way of increasing cultivation space was to build ramshackle supports that favoured the 3D expansion of the plants.

It was these string-bound wooden structures that intrigued Jeff Travers in the first place. He examined them with his architect hat on, but at the same time he was curious about their role in increasing vegetable production. By growing his own plants next to those of the Bangladeshi families, Jeff learned a lot about sustainable gardening using traditional techniques, such as saving seeds and using recyclable natural materials.

Jeff’s collaboration with the Bangladeshi women gardeners brought him a silver medal. The right topic in the right place at the right time, one might say. However, according to Jeff, designing and building the garden was not such a simple task:

It’s quite an architectural problem to translate Bangladeshi allotments to suit the Hampton Court setting. We’ve used the intensive Bangladeshi horticultural techniques in the growing of the plants, but we’ve arranged them in a way that conforms to the written rules of 18th century potager of which the garden of Hampton Court Palace was modeled.

This story is a good illustration of open innovation facilitated by connecting groups with apparently disparate sets of skills. To design his prize-winning garden Jeff put together the knowledge networks of the traditional Bangladeshi gardeners, the skills of their British offspring who adapted these techniques to the London context, and his own ‘architect-cum-gardener’ ability to translate these in the lingo of a professional garden design competition.

In fact such processes happen all around us at various levels. As Roland Harwood pointed out in his recent keynote at TransferSummit:

Many organisations are beginning to embrace more open and collaborative approaches to innovation. Inspired by the success of open source products such as the Apache web server and the Firefox browser, many multinational companies such as Procter and Gamble, Orange and IBM have made ‘open innovation’ – the sharing of the risks and rewards of the product development process with partners – a top strategic priority.

Academic institutions had been there long before the businesses:

The open source software movement has been a pioneer in product development which many others have sought to emulate. Like the open source movement, academic institutions have laid the foundations for a model of shared knowledge and incentives based upon reputation rather than ownership.

Increasingly however this academic model is fading out. As recent evidence demonstrates, especially in academic research funding and publication-driven assessment distort the natural balance between peer recognition and institutional hierarchy:

Research assessment exercise encourages individuals to publish independently, to keep things secret while there can be many advantages to their career, no matter if they have been funded publicly or not, because by doing that they appear to be better by the criteria used for measurement of the research assessment exercise. That’s a major cultural problem, because it makes it too difficult to persuade scientists to be open with their data, they fear losing it, and therefore their current position.

TransferSummit revealed that both academic and business teams are seeking inspiration from open development practice. More and more academic departments and businesses understand that by pooling together the expertise of their diversely skilled people they maximise opportunities for mutually beneficial innovation.

But understanding diversity in terms of domain or product expertise is not enough. While brainstorming with inter-disciplinary or professionally diverse teams can be productive, we need to bear in mind that innovation is not just generating new ideas. In fact, as Roland suggests, in the context of our expanding access to global knowledge, one’s expertise is becoming less important:

The cost associated with finding new knowledge is falling fast, to a point where in the not too distant future we can reasonably assume that all knowledge will be in principal accessible [...]. In this scenario our knowledge will no longer differentiate us as individuals or organisations.

The professional diversity of the innovation teams will remain important, but increasingly cultural diversity will become their true unique selling point. As Jeff’s success story implies, his prize-winning garden was less the result of him acquiring in-depth knowledge of Bangladeshi gardening techniques, and more of him experiencing this knowledge in action, in the ways his Bangladeshi gardening mentors had internalized and used it for their daily needs.

In other words, what is becoming important is the diverse cultural practice of the innovation team members, rather than just their external expert knowledge. More than just being clued in about growing veggies differently, the ideal candidates for open innovation will be eating their own grown.

Are you a Fedora tech guru in S.A. or any part of Africa? Or do you know of any in S.A. or any part of Africa? Please ask him or her to take a look at the information here – http://bit.ly/avrztf

I just got the news that one of my high school math coaches, Chuck Hamberg, passed away. He was retired by the time I got to IMSA, but still made an impression on my green 14-year-old self, co-coaching our little team of ’shmen with great gusto alongside Dr. Condie. After several years of hungrily burning the midnight oil studying math (the kind they didn’t teach in school) by myself, hiding in the bathroom in the middle of the night to read books, these guys were the ones who first taught me how to do math, how to spin proofs and play with numbers and ideas in a way that’s never left me since.

It was the first time I’d heard good mathematicians talk to each other about math and do math, joyously, in front of a group of awestruck and excited kids. This sounds simple, but… when your prior exposure to math classes has largely been full of rote stuff, watching adults having fun with it is absolutely spellbinding – and heartening, if you’ve grown up wondering whether any other real (i.e. not in books and/or dead) people also actually like this stuff. And to watch adults having the kind of dialogue I wanted to grow up to speak – but had never heard before and therefore couldn’t even picture – that was awesome.

Mr. Hamberg also gave me a valuable lesson in teaching. The summer I turned 16, I taught math camp for the first time. As one of the most experienced students in the group (I was a rising senior, so I wasn’t that experienced), I was in charge of the Number Theory team. We’d worked hard on our curriculum all school year, and the first day went well – we taught 3 classes, identical curricula, 1 before lunch and 2 after. And then we pulled out the curriculum for the second day… and failed. The kids (our students were just a few years younger than I was) blanked out, weren’t engaged, weren’t excited… and we had lunchtime to figure out how to turn this around before sections 2 and 3 hit. My team was looking to me for guidance; I was the leader, I was supposed to know what to do. I had no clue.

Shamefaced, I slunk over to Mr. Hamberg’s lunch table, sat down beside him, and apologized for being a failure. He and Dr. Condie asked why, and I explained the situation and that we didn’t know what to do, wavering between resigned dejection and mild panic the entire time. “Well, what were you trying to teach them?” Something about Pascal’s triangle, I replied. Anything, really. “Lunch is ending. Come watch us and then tell us afterwards what it is you saw us do.”

They proceeded to pull off this spectacular class on Pascal’s triangle, Fibonacci numbers, the Sierpinski triangle, and all these lovely little things tied into that sort of stuff – the kids were practically leaping out of their seats, shouting questions… and then during the break between sections, they walked up to us and said “okay, now you teach the next section.”

“But… but…” I sputtered, “I don’t know what to say! I… didn’t prepare that curricula!”

“Neither did we.” They backtracked and explained how teaching wasn’t a script – how you knew the material, and then roamed around it with your students, helping them dive into interesting things, roving on the fly. “All the stuff we just covered,” Mr. Hamberg pointed out, “you played with during your first year on math team. You know this stuff.” And then they left, and the students poured in, and my team looked at me expectantly.

And I proceeded to lead my crew through team-teaching one of the best math classes I have ever taught in my entire life to date.

8 years later, I’m still proud of it. We were sailing by the seat of our pants, but I really did know the material, and it was exhilarating improvising it and knowing it was okay to do that, that you could make it up, that you weren’t doing it COMPLETELY WRONG!!! if you didn’t follow a script, and that… kids get really excited about math if you do that. Wow. Excited students, learning stuff… I was on a teaching high.

I went up to them afterwards all excited with this revelation – probably babbling something like oh my gosh you make it up and it works you totally make it up and it works and it’s okay and they were so excited and and and PASCAL’S TRIANGLE!!! and the ideas lead so many places and you just go! and Mr. Hamberg smiled and told me that I was a teacher.

And so I am.

Thanks, Chuck. We’ll miss you.

This week, I am traveling to Oregon to attend the Community Leadership Summit Sat-Sun and O’Reilly’s OSCON Mon-Fri. That’s a full week of high community involvement, and I am looking forward to every minute of it.

As regular readers know, I’ll be speaking at OSCON on the subject of the BeagleBoard, my favorite inexpensive single-board computer based on the ARM Cortex-A8. I’ll present detailed instructions on how to boot several flavors of Linux (with demos!) and I’ll have a prototype of the new BeagleBoard xM that is set to debut at the end of July. My talk is Wednesday at 2:30 just after Bryan Smith’s presentation on the SheevaPlug, which I am very much looking forward to hearing.

I’m also looking forward to the Embedded Linux Community BoF, which I’ll be running on Wednesday evening at 7pm. This BoF is opposite the recently-announced Android Hands-On, but I am hoping to stimulate a conversation more about the embedded community in general than about specific distributions. The roundtable discussion will likely focus on non-mobile embedded computing, particularly build systems like OpenEmbedded and the new crop of inexpensive reference platforms, and how communities can accelerate development, even among corporations (witness GENIVI, open-source success in the automotive industry).

I will also be joining the Teaching Open Source crowd at the Education BoF on Monday evening, where we hope to discuss many issues surrounding the Open Source Way and its impact on open-source concepts in education. A splinter group (ha!) will very likely stay late to discuss the schedule for the upcoming Education Mini-Summit at LinuxCon, which I have the honor to help organize. I’m also speaking at LinuxCon about desktop Linux and holding another Embedded BoF.

Yes, I love participating! Life is a contact sport, if you do it right.

Feel free to comment if you plan on attending any of these events, and you will win one (1) Jefro.net business card and a hearty handshake at the event in question. See you at the show!

I found this mailing list conversation snippet to be very insightful, and wanted to share it.

Scott: “Open to critique” isn’t quite the same as “responsive to critique”. From an outside perspective, it seems that frequently SugarLabs is just not listening to people who offer contrary opinions.  This is better than flaming them, but maybe not as good as it could be. For an end-of-year report, I’d like to see instances enumerated where SugarLabs actually internalized some outside critique and responded in a positive way — some concrete change made to the UI, or Sugar, or to process.  That would be more convincing that simply stating, “we are now open to critique”.
 
Bernie: We’re definitely intimidating to non-technical people. At least, this is what I sensed at the Realness Summit. OLE also seems to be doing a better job at connecting with educators. I’m not completely sure what corrective actions should be. We might need to do some work on the  wiki, maybe add web forums, which non-geeks tend to prefer…

Scott: I suspect that the answer to this problem does not involve installing additional software.

Later in the day, Jeff and I were having this conversation on #teachingopensource.

Jeff: Is IRC really a barrier to entry?  maybe I have simply been using it too long, but it seems immediately recognizable to me. I think one barrier might be the attitudes that crop up.  Even with emoticons, sometimes it’s hard to discern intent.  Hard enough in email, but sometimes devastating in real time.

Mel: Actually, yes. I had a really, really hard time figuring out IRC. First, figuring out that it existed and I had to use it. Then how to get it, how to set the software up. Then what the heck networks and channels and whatnot were – and why channels? my IM paradigm was “you have a buddy list and you ping people individually.” So “chatrooms are the default!” wasn’t hard to understand once I realized it, but it took a while to realize because I wasn’t looking for it.

And then “oh man, who are all these people? I am nervous about pinging them, will they yell at me?” And then all the /commands I had to remember. It was so bewildering and terrifying and new and it was being used as a way to present new information to me at the same time, sort of like… taking your first calculus class in… Mandarin, if you’ve also just started studying Mandarin as a foreign language. You can’t concentrate much on the calculus because you’re going “zomg it’s in CHINESE.”

It’s hard to remember how hard things can be, especially when you’re surrounded by a community of people who are the ones who self-selected and made it past that hardness. By definition, if you’ve gotten into FOSS, the current participation mechanisms worked for you… so why fix them?

Because we want others to join us.

It seems that after an initial spike

http://hyperreal-enterprises.posterous.com/postings-to-google-groups

my posting activities went back to normal. I was probably writing more
on my research wiki,

http://metameso.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/joe%27s_research

and doing other "whitepaper" kinds of things,

http://metameso.org/~joe/docs/?C=M;O=D

Also, work on GravPad took some time, and I'm glad to say that in
my demo at WikiSym last week, I was able to show a (really) real
live demo:

http://metameso.org:9000/ep/rtrc
http://github.com/holtzermann17/pad/raw/master/contrib/gravpad.user.js

I'm getting excited about some a new Wikimedia mailing list I heard
about at Wikimania (and presumably posting there won't show up in
Google's stat-keeping).

A tool like this looks helpful for further analysis:

http://lifehacker.com/379328/analyze-your-email-usage-with-mail-trends

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

The Mozilla Summit far surpassed my expectations. The event was personal, technical, creative and inspiring all at once.

The Mozilla Summit is an invitation-only gathering of some of the most active contributors in the Mozilla community. This year's theme was "Be More Like the Web".

I was lucky enough to be among those who were invited, due to my involvement with the Drumbeat project. There were a total of around 600 Mozilla community members at the event: hackers, localizers, testers, marketers, and the individuals formerly known as 'users'.

Background

Mozilla is most well known for the open source browser, Firefox. In addition to Firefox, there are number of other software projects like Jetpack at Mozilla Labs. Although Mozilla has been incredibly successful with open source software, they're ambitious and ready for the next big challenge. As stewards of the open web, Mozillians around the world are banding together through Drumbeat: a collection of practical projects and local events that gather smart, creative people around big ideas that improve the open web. The Summit was our forum to share the project with the greater Mozilla community.

Day 0: Arrival & Reception

I flew in from Alaska, direct from my family vacation to Vancouver and then hopped on a bus to Whistler, BC. I arrived on Tuesday afternoon just in time to join the Mozilla Foundation meeting and presenter's workshop. I spent the better part of the afternoon working on a speed geek with my new partner in crime at P2PU, Pippa Buchanan. We rehearsed our talk a few times and got valuable feedback for the next day.

The rest of the attendees arrived in time for a reception, where we had a chance to get to know each other and kick off the event properly.

Day 1: Getting Started

The day started off early with a few inspiring keynote speakers and an extended lunch break to watch some of the World Cup. After lunch I headed to a session from Mozilla Messaging where they demoed experimental Thunderbird mail client features.

Photo CC-BY-NC-SA, Nathaniel James

The next session was "Drumbeat in 2100 Seconds," led by Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. Mark took about four minutes to describe Drumbeat and why it is important to Mozilla before splitting the crowd into groups for the speed geek sessions. All three of the featured Drumbeat projects (P2PU School of Webcraft, Web Made Movies, &amp Universal Subtitles) were represented along with Drumbeat Events and a couple others. The speed geek session went really well; we got a few people to join the project.

Day 2: In the Groove

The second day was filled with more sessions, and some especially interesting HTML5 demos including WebGL and the <audio> and <video> tags. I had a chance to talk to Ben Moskowitz about open video and the upcoming Open Video Conference in New York City.

The Flight of the Navigator is a WebGL demo rendered in the browser that built by the Mozilla audio team. The demo pulls in live data and video from the web while rendering. Everyone in the crowd was awe-struck.

I spent the better part of the afternoon at the Summit Science Fair. There were around thirty individual booths showcasing all kinds of software. Everything from accessibility for the blind to a JavaScript framework for building Firefox extensions.

Photo CC-BY-NC-SA, Michael Morgan

We rounded out the day with the Summit World Expo and International Dinner, where representatives from the over forty countries in attendance showcased their local communities and cultures.

After dinner, there was a late night JetPack hackathon. I built a Firefox extension (more details in a later blog post) in just a few hours. The extension is called 'Clickable Phone Numbers' and it makes any number on the web into a click-to-call number using the Twilio API.

Day 3: Grand Finale

The final day of the conference was a bit more laid back, we talked about the Drumbeat event strategy and did a bit of planning for Drumbeat NYC (August 7th) and the Drumbeat Festival (November 3-5) which is going to be held in Barcelona. I attended a few more lightning talks and a session on the future of client-side debugging.

Pippa and I ran our session on the P2PU School of Webcraft. There was a 10 minute intro, and then we split the audience into four groups with tasks:

1. Design a course for P2PU School of Webcraft
2. Brainstorm a list of core web developer skills
3. Brainstorm a list of 'soft-skills' that employers look for in web developers
4. Come up with ways to legitimize P2PU School of Webcraft so that we have some 'street-cred'

The session went incredibly well, so well that we had a lineup of people to talk to for almost 30 minutes after it was over.

At the end of the day, we took a Gondola ride up to the peak for a farewell party of sorts. The views of Whistler were magnificent and the "Army of Awesome" was incredibly fun. We enjoyed a delicious dinner, cartoony mascots, toasts, and a dance party before calling it a night.

Day 4: Departure

We left Whistler by bus through the mountains, luckily unobstructed by rock slides. Now I'm on the ground in Seattle for the next week, followed by a trip to Portland for OSCON. Get in touch if you're nearby.

Crowd-sourced Coverage

• Flickr Photos
• Tweets
• Delicious Links

 

P2PU just got coverage in The Hindu, which, according to Wikipedia "is the second-largest circulated daily English newspaper in India." The author, Ajai Sreevatsan, quoted me and mentioned my course "Mashing Up the Open Web."

Video discussions

John Britton, course organiser of 'Mashing up the Open Web,' says time zones are a problem while attempting to simulate a "sit around the fire and learn by discussion" environment virtually. "But lively weekly video discussions (using a combination of Skype and IRC) to review materials and work through the questions presented by the peers still happen."

The 'class' is very diverse, he says. "We have peers from Korea, Japan, India, Spain, the U.S. and Canada. They're artists, technologists, environmentalists, and traditional students."

Aside: This blog post was posted while on a moving bus from Vancouver to Seattle. The wonders of modern technology.

 

On 07/10/2010 09:54 PM, D. S. wrote: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=microsoft-imagine-cup No I hadn't seen it yet, but MS is losing ground to companies like Google and their "Don't be Evil" stance on business. So how does a company become less evil? They start finding projects for the good of the order and shout it from the rooftops every time they do something that's even

Wednesday, while the team was driving down, I was touring the Museum of Science and catching up with former student Keith Simmons who's been Technology Manager for the Intel Computer Clubhouse there for about 2 1/2 years.Keith has been rooming with a crew of hacker/maker types, is getting into fabbing and has fantasies about getting a laser cutter :-).  He's involved with a new cool space called Artisan's Asylum and was excited to hear about Interlock up here in Rochester.


Much of Thursday was spent happily hacking at OLPC headquarters.  Much progress was made on OVC, the Python Engine projects and on CIVX.  Check out the OLPC Hackfest photos from Qian.  Some of the crew peeled off for the OLPC Soccer Game at 4:30.  Others joined me for the GAMBIT focus testing fest at their offices just two buildings down from OLPC. If you're in Boston and missed the one this week, there'll be another July 22nd.  Same directions and times apply I believe. We had a great time testing games and Keith was able to join us for that and for Remy's Birthday dinner afterwards.

Friday 10-2:30 was spent with the Gambit crowd.  From 10-11 Philip Tan and I talked about ways in which our two programs could collaborate and I left with a good list of items to pursue in the next few weeks. Then, after catching up on some e-mail, I joined Philip and some of the GAMBIT faculty and students for lunch.  A good crowd of folks and I had a great time.  They may take a road trip up to visit us and ICHEG sometime in the fall.

The annual Linux Plumbers Conference has opened its call for participation, with a lot of very interesting tracks. If you have something important to discuss about the way Linux works, make sure to submit an abstract and attend the conference, which is in Cambridge, MA, November 3-5.

I’ve been toying with the notion of encouraging faculty that teach our “welcome to the IT major” courses to include information on FOSS and the FOSS community.  Specifically, I’d like to see students exposed to IRC, blogs, wikis, etc., earlier on so that they can tap into the wealth of knowledge available out there and (hopefully) give back to the community.

I discussed this idea with some folks from TOS and they’re all for it.  Unfortunately, after discussing it with a professor in the IST department here (at RIT), he opened my eyes to the flip-side of what may occur when pushing students to access these resources: the “cheating” aspect.  This certainly poses a challenge because, as I was talking to Mel about this, I was able to clarify that there are some hardships that students need to go through in academia to genuinely grasp some of the material they need to learn.  Having access to the various FOSS resources, like IRC, may allow them to skip the hardship that would detriment the learning process.  The example I made was how in our Computer Science department, students need to code different data structures by hand while students in Information Sciences and Technology department don’t need to code data structures by hand.  Being an IT student myself, I still don’t necessarily know which data structure might be best for certain situations (regardless of how much I’ve read up on them), while some of my friends who went through the CS curriculum know it like the back of their hand.  My point is that directing freshmen to access to different FOSS resources might cause them to skip the ‘hardship’ of learning how something genuinely works.

The primary solution I see to this conundrum would be introducing students to the FOSS resources and community later on in their academic career. (say…sophomore or junior year).  The reason I feel this would be more effective is because students have gone through the initial learning experiences/hardships and may be a little more independent when solving problems without automatically falling back on the community as a crutch.  I feel that this would also allow them to be more effective in giving back to the community.

Mel pointed out that by having students blog about their experiences with an academic hardship and how they fell back on the community may also be a solution, but I still feel there might be some loss in the educational value of some content if students are readily able to fall back on a community resource to solve their problem.

Thoughts?  Please comment and give me feedback!  I’m hoping to get some other perspectives and thoughts on this so I can find the best way to help the FOSS community and resources penetrate into our curriculum earlier.

Being involved with the TransferSummit was one of those experiences that I will look back on with great pleasure for years to come. Not only was the theme of innovation and collaboration through open source something  I have for long time wanted to see become reality in the accessibility arena, but being part of such a great team has been of enormous personal benefit. If only I could have concentrated more on all the talks and BOFs, but that would have required the TransferSummit to run 3 times so I could attend everything.

Of course one of key values of such conferences derives from the connections and discussions that go on between the presentations. Having spoken to some of the people who attended from the open accessibility space I’m really pleased to hear they wasted no time in connecting up. For example Garry Paxton of Straight-street.com said he found it extremely valuable and hooked up with folks like Matthew Lee of Pengwern Mencap National College. I’m extremely pleased to see the strong community of open accessibility collaborators that is forming in UK HE. I understand from those of the community present, that they found TransferSummit provided them ample food for thought and discussion opportunities.

Equally pleasing was that the TransferSummit hosted the rather impromptu introductory launch meeting of REALISE, a new JISC funded project exploring open innovation in accessibility software. EA Draffan and Peter Cudd from the lead institutions of Southampton and Sheffield met with Ross Gardler of OSS Watch (and chairman of the conference committee). There could not have been a more perfect setting for this first REALISE meeting.

I’m sure there must be other stories of successful connections made at the TransferSummit. Please do let us know about them in the comments to this post

Notes I wrote up months ago that have since been found by others to be useful. Posting for posterity. Basically, these instructions are for how to set up an always-on logger for IRC (chat) – helpful for being able to hear the conversations others are having about the project you’re working on while you’re away. I am assuming a fair amount of background knowledge here, but the content is remixable, so feel free to yoink/improve/etc.

1. ssh into the box you have an account on – for instance, Sugar Labs folks can use sunjammer (aka people.sugarlabs.org) by requesting an account at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sysadmin/Shell_account_request
.

2. Run these commands (comments in parentheses).

screen

(a dialog will pop up, hit return to kill it)

irssi

(you’ll get a mostly blank screen, with a stripe across the bottom with the
time and a number [1] in brackets – that’s the window list – and then a line
below that with [(status)] in it, which is the description of the window that
you’re in, and the place you type the rest of the commands.)

/connect irc.freenode.net

(and then, if you want, /msg nickserv identify <password> to sign in.)

/set autolog on

(it’ll start storing things in ~/irclogs in self-explanatory filenames)

/join #sugar

(and whatever other channels you may want to be in)

(You’ll notice that every channel you join opens up another window – the first
channel will be in window 2, the next in window 3, and so forth. Use ctrl-p
(previous) and ctrl-n (next) to switch between windows, or alt-NUMBER to jump
to the NUMBERth window.)

(You’ll also notice that the numbers for each window light up in different
colors when someone joins/leaves a channel (blue), talks in a channel (white),
or calls your name in a channel (pink).)

(All the normal IRC commands work as expected, and so does tab-completion.)

(a note on /whois: if you have a PM window open for that person, the whois
information will appear in the PM window. Otherwise, it will appear in window
1.)

3. When you want to stop, do

/away <away message>

and then detatch from screen, which is

CTRL-a, d

(ctrl-a followed by d)

which will dump you in your normal sunjammer shell outside of screen.

Or you can just kill the terminal by typing

~.

or whatever.

When you log in again, restart the screen session with

screen -raAd

…and you’ll be back. If you then type

/away

…you’ll see all the messages sent to your nick in the meantime in window 1,
and you’ll be set to not-away.

4. More docs at http://www.irssi.org/documentation/startup
and http://quadpoint.org/articles/irssi
.

I mostly find irssi useful for being always-on all the time and having backlogs
of conversations that have happened while I’m away. It also means that anywhere
I have ssh, I have IRC.

Hi all – I have been out of touch this past week or so with the holiday & putting together my upcoming BeagleBoard presentation at OSCON Weds 7/21 at 2:30pm, where I’ll be booting and demonstrating several flavors of Linux, including Angstrom, Android, MontaVista Linux 6, and possibly Ubuntu and/or MeeGo as well. Whatever we don’t get to at the talk can be covered at the Embedded Linux BoF to follow that evening at 7pm. I will also have a BeagleBoard xM to show and perhaps one or two other goodies. Hope to see you there!

UPDATE: If you are planning to go and haven’t registered, contact me for a 20% discount code.

While in Portland that week, I will also have the pleasure of helping to coordinate the second annual Community Leadership Summit. This unconference-style summit is a fantastic gathering place for community leaders in all walks of life. The focus is truly on building community rather than the nuances of Twitter vs. Facebook (though certainly that will probably be covered as well) and the event is free, though registration is required. See the website for details.

In a recent conversation with Nnenna Nwakanma, one of Africa’s leading open source experts and community lead for Dreamfish, Nnenna shared her experiences, passion and ideas on this exciting on-line community. In her own words, Dreamfish is an open and friendly community which balances software development with human interaction and best of all converts project [...]

It's become quite clear to me that I'll never fit all I want or need to say about the business of Linux in my LinuxCon talk. In fact I could make it a full day workshop and still not cover everything there is to know about making money on products your customers can get for free.The solution is to begin evaluating what information really needs to be in the presentation and what would be better

I'm done paying cable bills. And if you are interested, you can do so also - legitimately and legally. Read more to find out how.

read more

Buildings that last are always open

How is the open source model like Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre? Ross Gardler, in his introduction to the TransferSummit conference this June, put forth this theory: the Sheldonian, Christopher Wren’s greatest early work, required a huge range of transferred expertise and what was then the latest technology in its construction. A swath of different individuals’ skills were employed to produce a cutting-edge building that, finished in 1668, is still used today. The end result was not only a magnificent building but also new construction and architectural techniques shared with the craftsmen brought in. Ross’s point is that the University of Oxford looked outwards to leading figures in construction and architecture to fulfil their needs – and, with open source, this relationship between academic and business interest continues to flourish today.

A shared future

Traditionally, universities have been seen as research institutions not unduly concerned with value. But Ross hoped that at TransferSummit, those working in academic institutions and non-profit communities, and those working in industry, could show, over the course of two days, how both can work together to their mutual benefit.

These are exciting times to be involved with open source. As many mentioned over the two days of TS, the average person encounters Linux ten times a day without even knowing it, all thanks to a quiet revolution in industrial attitudes to the open source community. Many talks recounted the difficult journeys taken by companies over the last ten years, learning how and why to use open source software to deliver the most innovative products to their consumers. If companies are to produce their own Sheldonians they must look to open source.

Why industry is becoming more open

Matthew Langham spoke of his own experience of combining two very different worlds – the corporate and the open source. He remembers back in 2000 the difficulties he had as a software developer in getting his boss to embrace a new, apparently insane business plan: ‘We give away our code for free?’ But Matthew, who now runs a company connecting the corporate and open source worlds, explained the benefits of going open source: the strength the company would derive from allowing other people to improve its code, the advances made in their software that they could never have come up with alone, and, ultimately, how much more use their software would enjoy by being offered in this way. Open source provided their company with hugely increased exposure, and allowed them to make a good profit by offering support for their freely available products. Having proved the commercial viability of going open source, Matthew started suggesting these benefits to other companies, inspiring them to have a go too. He has found it easy to persuade them to try it out, but perhaps one of the biggest challenges has been getting them to admit that they do so. Phone companies, big banks and other organisations all embraced open source at a developmental level but were wary of admitting it to their employers and certainly of being evangelical about its benefits.

Of course, this is set to change. Matthias Stuermer’s talk investigated the ways in which Nokia has been playing with open source and Linux for the last ten years and how since 2005, they have been openly working with the open source community. One benefit of that relationship came about when the Nokia 770 was hacked to allow the use of flash cards as RAM – something Nokia’s own developers thought couldn’t work. They were then able to adapt the design to allow the feature.

An army of R&D

This ability to innovate as a community is also something that Phil Andrews spoke about. If SourceForge were to pay, as R&D, the 50,000 people they have involved in their community, the annual wages bill would come to £4.5 billion. He also pointed out that the number of coding errors generated within an open source community is much smaller than those produced by a closed company.

This change in approach can be seen outside of coding, too, as Roland Harwood from 100%Open pointed out in his keynote speech. His organisation encourages businesses to look at sharing their skills with very different industries, investigating how technology can be deployed in new and unrelated contexts. This use of ‘open innovation’ has led to companies such as McLaren F1 having their software used in hospitals and in air traffic control towers. Roland pointed out other examples – organisations like Virgin Atlantic embracing an unofficial group of around 50,000 customers who started their own community analysing the quality of Virgin’s services, from the website to their planes’ seating. By reaching out to and working with this community, they improved their services at an estimated 10% of the cost of doing so in-house.

But why should the open source community get into bed with business?

If the benefits of open source are clear for business, another question was raised and dealt with during the two days of TS  – what’s in it for the open source community?

Certainly, Simon Phipps fears that unscrupulous business practices can often destroy what makes open source brilliant. Having worked with Java and Sun Microsystems before becoming a board member for the Open Source Initiative, Simon has seen both the good and the bad of open source companies. He believes that the nature of open source is being undermined by some companies taking the benefits of others’ innovation without giving anything up of their own – such companies declare themselves to be ‘open core’ , which he sees as a euphemism for traditional closed software.

To Simon, in fact, such businesses are reptiles without souls or ethics. They can’t embrace the principle of openness for any reason other than to benefit from the growing marketing power of the term ‘open source’. They use open source as a way of making short-term savings rather than to generate long-term freedoms.

Companies must be honest

Some of these issues were dealt with by Gerv Markham from the Mozilla Foundation, which focuses on ensuring that no one company has control of the internet. Mozilla has an unusual corporate structure – a charity that wholly owns a number of conventional companies. Gerv has many suggestions as to how companies can be ethically involved with the open source community – for instance, Mozilla makes no distinction in worth between their paid members and those who volunteer. Even one of their security managers was not allowed into the Mozilla security discussion group until eight weeks after he had been hired – he had to prove his worth to the whole community, not just those who paid his salary, before he made the grade. Markham is also deeply aware of the importance of having a clear and transparent licensing scheme. It took many years to refine, but now users of Mozilla’s code get the choice of three different licences.

He also understands the ethical difficulties inherent in persuading volunteers to sign over copyright to an organisation, though, as Rowan Wilson pointed out, in his talk, that assignment of copyright is not the only way to manage IP in open source. Still, many companies have betrayed their volunteers’ trust by deciding that their ‘open source experiment’ has failed and absorbing the work of outsiders as they turn back into closed companies. Companies must avoid abusing open sourcers’ trust if they are to succeed in the open source world.

How companies are learning

The issue of earning and preserving trust is familiar to many previously closed developers attempting to make the transition to open source. Matthew Langham mentioned that it took about a year for his company to become welcome in the open source community, and that many large companies just don’t get how it works, expecting it to be an online pool of free employees. David Woollard, a senior software engineer at NASA, encountered similar difficulties. Only in 2005, where NASA used the skills of two big open source developers already on their staff (Sean Kelly and Chris Mattaham), did the necessary cultural shift begin within their section of NASA – and it took five years until they were finally able to enter the Apache Incubator in January 2010. The largest problem they faced during this time was persuading their own lawyers that, as publically funded organisations, they should be giving away their resources (i.e. their code) for free. The next problem was persuading contributors to mix in. They dealt with this by creating a clear framework to define how to get involved, what is expected of contributors and what they can expect in return. Finally, this transparency is reaping its reward – their community is starting to take off.

Open source communities – the future of society?

But the future of open source, as discussed at TransferSummit, should soar far beyond its relationship to industry. As Simon Phipps argued, in inspiring terms, it could well be the future of society. In the past, we have been accustomed to a societal model involving a group of individuals centred around one powerful ruler, or, after the Industrial Revolution, one large organisation, whether a company or a parliament. Open source removes the need for this central figure, allowing all members of a society to contribute in different ways. But if the idea is potentially so revolutionary, how should the open source community ensure that it is strong enough to achieve its ends?

As Steven Pemberton’s keynote on the first morning of the summit made clear, a good open source community will involve everyone, not just coders. After good content, what users want most from the websites they visit is good usability. Programmers, typically, cannot achieve good usability alone – they need designers, writers and testers to create a new structural way of ensuring that open software addresses the needs of the general public. Like the Sheldonian, any successful open source project will need to draw on a broad spectrum of expertise.

Led by none, led by all

Bertrand Delacretaz acknowledged this in his own talk, explaining the studies he has made as to who is most involved in various open source projects. Showing visual maps of people’s involvement, he demonstrated that it was rarely the originator of a project who was the most influential – as the project grew, so did the community’s input and influence, drawing it away from the originating individual.

Mark Johnson looked in detail at the process of how an open source community comes together and develops in the talk he gave about his involvement with the Moodle project. Beginning with his initial experiences of working on simple bug fixes, he told his audience how the satisfaction of working within a community and getting recognition for his work got him hooked on using their issue tracks and forums to contribute more and more.

Becoming part of a bigger world

Excited, valued community involvement was also a preoccupation for Noirin Shirley, employed by Google but talking about her work with Apache. Given a good community of forums, bug trackers and credit always being given where it’s due, a project will inevitably be stronger. Noirin argued that to get people involved in your project, the best rules of open source communities are actually much like those of kindergarten – share your toys, don’t be selfish and always be generous with praise. Also, don’t expect people to dive into the complexities straight away. She pointed out that it’s wise not to bother fixing the simplest bugs in your code, but to leave them for the community, so that – as was the case with Mark and Moodle – someone else will fix them, derive confidence and satisfaction from doing so, and get to grips with understanding the more challenging aspects of your project.

From military tech to the schoolyard

Given a strong, multi-skilled community, there is very little to which an open source project cannot turn its hand. Miles Berry hinted at the breadth of the spectrum by arguing the usefulness of greater open source involvement in schools, not just in dedicated ICT lessons. Berry made a commanding case for the positive impact open source could have in all classrooms, from geography lessons using open source gps software, to language work using Moodle. His case was greatly strengthened by the fact that he had masterminded such a broad, school-wide adoption of open source software at the St Ives Prep School, where he was formerly headmaster.

Code speaks louder than words

What the two days of TransferSummit made abundantly clear is that with a strong community, a mixture of disciplines and a willingness to embrace and pursue innovation, open source can do just about anything. But as Bertrand Delacretaz argued, its potential best displayed not in the giving of talks but in the writing of code. So the most exciting glimpse at what the future might hold for open source happened during the Birds of a Feather meetings – informal, community-led gatherings at which attendees and speakers exchanged ideas, learned from each other and arranged to pool their projects. From visual communication tools for those who don’t speak the same language, to ideas as to how universities can better reach out to industry, the groups’ advice to each other showed conclusively that for open source communities, the sky’s the limit.

Looking through various proxies and caches (don’t ask why) I ran across Varnish and was struck by a short piece one of their developers wrote in 2006. Let me quote a line or two (emphasis mine):

Take Squid for instance, a 1975 program if I ever saw one: You tell it how much RAM it can use and how much disk it can use. It will then spend inordinate amounts of time keeping track of what HTTP objects are in RAM and which are on disk and it will move them forth and back depending on traffic patterns. Well, today computers really only have one kind of storage, and it is usually some sort of disk, the operating system and the virtual memory management hardware has converted the RAM to a cache for the disk storage.

You should read the whole thing, it’s a nice summary of technological changes that still haven’t made it into everyone’s head. I feel guilty myself: I recently taught our OS course, but I don’t think I ever made this sufficiently clear when we talked about virtual memory. I’ll try to add a relevant assignment to the Unix course next semester…

I have my scansnap working under Ubuntu now; scanning is as simple as

scanimage >image.pnm && convert image.pnm image.jpg

(The page should be put in face down and upside down to scan
in the proper orientation.)

Maybe the thing that will motivate me to both DRAW and POST images
is the fact that the mouse I'm using has to sit on a piece of paper to
work properly, so I am essentially required to have a sort of "blotter"
as part of my work life.

Still, I have the feeling that unless there are people I'm actively trying
to explain things to, I won't be as motivated to draw pictures as I might
otherwise be.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I'm going to Olin. It's the place I want to go to. I didn't imagine this to happen, but apparently, sometimes everything in the universe aligns and a lot of magic happens.

A close friend of mine once said, that sometimes, no matter how many more words one strings together, one can't get any closer to the true sentiment. He's right. So thank you, folks, for being there and making this happen. This is totally awesome.

Will be winging my way to Boston Weds-Friday for a multi-faceted trip.  Hitting the Boston Science Museum and their Intel Computer Clubhouse Wednesday to catch up with former Rochester Digital Ripple collaborator Keith Simmons.  Then an OLPC visit for a new hackfest with the RIT OVC, Game and Animation engine teams.  Then, to feed the the games side of life off to MIT for Gambit Thursday night and Friday am and then home.

This past week, Radu and Drew worked through the details of setting up PWM-based servo control on the Arduino. This gives us robust control over servos from our occam-pi based programming environment without having to interrupt our execution every 20ms to update a servo.

Here, the Science Dinosaur demonstrates how things work.

Radu and Drew’s work is “foundational,” in that it lays foundations for other projects. (We’re excited about moving on to some more interesting explorations shortly.) The servo control is absolutely necessary for another summer project we have going: the <a href=”http://rockalypse.org/blogs/flyinggator/”>Flying Gator UAV</a>. This flying robot (an “unmanned aerial vehicle”) is being custom built by Ian, and Ian and Anthony are developing the control system in occam-pi on the ArduPilot Mega. This combination gives us a lot of real-time safety, which we hope translates to “no surprises” when we are actually executing our code on a functioning UAV.

The nice thing about the ArduPilot is that is has a built-in hardware override, so that even if your code goes wrong, you can take control over your aircraft with a radio.

Here, you can see Ian taking the fuselage (that means “body” in airplane-speak) out for a test spin. Our aircraft is incredibly overpowered, it turns out.

You can follow an aggregation of all the students’ work at planet.rockalypse.org.

I’ve just returned home after a fascinating two days writing the live blog for the Innovation Track, one of three tracks at the TransferSummit, a conference sponsored and organised by OSS Watch. This track was billed as a ‘top-level immersion into the world of open source’. It delivered comprehensively.

Far too much ground was covered to hope to include every detail in a piece like this one. Hopefully, the live blog should demonstrate how informative the discussions were. You can also get a good feel for the breadth of the talks if you click through the links on the TransferSummit programme to look at the speakers’ slides. Here I’ll just aim  to provide a few general impressions.

Keble in the sunshine

The first thing to note is how pleasant the whole event was. Even though I was working hard to keep up with the blog, I enjoyed myself. True, when I had to pull down a blind to stop the strong sun shining on the screen of my laptop, it gave me a slightly sad feeling – but being at the conference still beat being in the office. It was certainly far more interesting than the average day’s work. Indeed, bathed in that sunshine, in the beautiful Victorian Gothic enclosures of Keble College, there was a feeling of respite from the problems of the world.

That’s not to say that delegates didn’t have such troubles in mind, however. The budget cuts faced by projects across the education, public and commercial sectors were clearly causing serious concern.  Even so, the overall atmosphere was optimistic. There was a a definite sense that progress was being made in the arguments for open innovation – and indeed that in a time of financial hardship that case becomes even stronger.

As Steven Pemberton said in his keynote speech, Open Source Is Not Enough!, ‘we are through the first stage’ in getting open innovation technology accepted and now the main task is to make it better.

Of course, there are still difficulties and complexities relating to the use of open innovation. Martin Michlmayr in his talk on The State Of Open Source Licensing and How To Improve It and Mark Taylor in his talk on FOSS Business Models ably demonstrated the tangled wood of licences and legal complexity faced by anyone hoping to launch an open source project – as well as providing a good route through.

It should also be noted that delegates again and again returned to the point that although open innovation may reduce some costs to close to zero, it shouldn’t be seen as a free for all. Andrew Savory, the open source manager for Limo Foundation, stressed in his talk about the Economics Of Innovation In Mobile Technologies, that open source is not an ‘all you can eat buffet’. It works best when the companies that use it give something back. It’s then that it does offer real cost savings, as well as access to reservoirs of talent that couldn’t otherwise be tapped, and an economy of scale begins to build up.

On that note, Steven Pemberton gave the famous example of wikipedia compared to the  hugely expensive Encyclopaedia Britannica of old and how ‘little things’ (such as the many individual wiki contributions) can join together ’to make a big thing better and better’.

The savings that open source software (OSS) can deliver in all sectors were also widely referred to, but one of the most striking examples of its benefits came from the fiercely commercial mobile technology sector. Andrew Savory pointed to the smartphone market, where consumers are demanding ever more features for ever less money, meaning that we have now reached a point where companies are having to invest more than they get back from their technology. So those companies have now started to look more seriously at open source software. They have discovered that it brings not only reduced costs to the acquisition of software, but also reduced costs of access to innovation and - crucially – reduced costs of software ownership (since there is a greatly reduced maintenance burden for true OSS). So it is that HTC has leapfrogged the competition thanks to its use of open innovation.

Clearly there is going to have to be a big cultural shift among companies who are generally secretive, and who are unused to the meritocracy that exists within OSS development, but evidence that OSS is the way forward is beginning to stack up. Andrew also highlighted the Mobile Open Source Economic Analysis white paper, showing that it’s even cheaper for companies to merge early and contribute early to OSS development streams – rather than ‘forking’ off and trying to keep their own innovations with regard to the software to themselves for as long as possible.

Coming back to the question raised by Steven Pemberton, about how to make open innovation work better, there were a number of well-attended talks about how to build up and value communities. Paul Walk of UKOLN stressed the simple importance of giving recognition to the work that developers do and helping them better explain their ideas and projects to the world away from the keyboard. Gianugo Rabellino, the former CEO of Sourcesense told us that if we recognise communities as places ‘where individuals come together to reap a reward …  we come to understand why collaboration works so well – and why people are producing open source software’. Gill Rysiecki gave excellent practical examples of how the Technology Strategies Board initiative, Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, can help academic developers reach out to the business community – and vica versa. Scott Wilson, the Assistant director of CETIS also made the important point that ‘inclusion and openness depend on collective responsibility’. open source works when people feel they have a stake in it.

In his keynote speech on day two Roland Harwood also gave powerful arguments about the importance of community  - and how effective exchanging ideas with different companies can be – a particularly striking example being how the McLaren Formula 1 team were able to help improve processes in A&E at Great Ormond Street Hospital. To emphasise his point he quoted the proverb: ‘If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, got together.’

Happily, this latter theme was well demonstrated by the conference itself. The buzz was all about open innovation and how best to achieve it. All the delegates I spoke to were deeply involved in the subject and determined to use the conference to learn as much as they could. They were also eager to make those vital connections with people heading in the same direction. There was just as much debate at lunchtime as there was in the formal talks and plenaries.

Naturally, since this was a gathering of technologists, there was also a lot of interest in the ipads, smartphones and various pieces of kit that people had brought with them. Samuel Klein, speaking as a a volunteer Trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation (who had been re-routed into the Innovation Track after being delayed in Boston),  provided a great firsthand account of the history and development of wikipedia and many of its related projects – and how MediaWiki has scaled up using open source methods.  However, he caused the biggest stir with a demonstration of one of the first new OLPC XOs that also run Gnome, which he had with him as he is also the director of outreach for One Laptop per Child.

Samuel Klein and the new OLPC XO

Yet even when it came to gadgets, the conversation kept coming back to licensing and the openness of various software platforms. My own HTC phone was several times singled out for approval (gratifying for a technological layman such as myself). But it was the arguments rather than the compliments that left the strongest impression. The innovation track had generated a real feeling that open source is only going to become more important in the next few years.

After a long, long wait, the Supreme Court of the United States has finally delivered its opinion (pdf) in the so-called ‘Bilski’ appeal. The judgement was eagerly awaited by those who opposed software patents, as it held the potential to change the rules on patentability of software in the US.

Thirteen years ago Bernard L. Bilski and Rand Warsaw applied (pdf) for a patent on a process that sought to allow commodities traders to reduce their risk exposure. The key components of their invention were a list of steps traders could take, and an expression of those steps as a mathematical formula. The patent application was rejected on the basis that it did not describe a specific apparatus, that it manipulated only abstract ideas and that the problem it solves is an exclusively mathematical one.  Bilski et al kept appealing the decision at progressively higher courts, and kept getting knocked back. Finally the en banc court (a kind of grand moot of all the Court of Appeal judges reserved for issues where uniformity of opinion is particularly important) knocked it back while also tearing down one of its previous ‘tests’ for patentability which might otherwise have been interpreted as supporting Bilski et al’s arguments. This test, established in the case of State Street Bank & Trust Co v. Signature Financial Group, Inc. in 1998, held that a process could be patented if it produced a “useful, concrete, and tangible result”. The State Street decision was taken at the time as a green light for patent applications on abstract concepts like business and software processes.

In the light of the Bilski patent claim, the en banc court decided that this was too low a hurdle, and that they needed a new test for patentable processes. Instead they insisted that a process must meet the following two criteria: “(1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing.” This has become known as the ‘machine or transformation test’. Bilski responded by taking the final throw of the dice and asking the US Supreme Court to review the en banc court’s decision. The Supreme Court agreed.

So what does this have to do with software? Well business processes are frequently embodied in software, and the discussions of where the borderline between invention and abstraction lies is an extremely relevant one in the world of software development. The ‘machine or transformation test’, if affirmed by the Supreme Court, would very likely have made many pure software inventions unpatentable (as general purpose computers are not ‘particular machine[s]‘, and their own internal processes and data unlikely to qualify as ‘particular article[s]‘). After the en banc decision hopes were high in the anti-software-patent community that the Supreme Court would affirm the ‘machine or transformation test’ and make widespread software patenting a thing of the past. On the other side of the argument, groups like the Business Software Alliance and Dolby Labs submitted amicus briefs to the Supreme Court arguing that the machine or transformation test would kill off a large proportion of their livelihoods.

Perhaps inevitably the Supreme Court has chosen a middle path that brings little certainty to anyone except Bilski et al – who now definitely know they’re not getting their patent. The decision finds that the specific Bilski patent is indeed an attempt to own an entirely abstract concept, and so should be disallowed. It does not, however, go as far as to agree with the en banc court that the ‘machine or transformation test’ is the new gold standard for patentability in these worryingly abstract domains:

The Court’s precedents establish that although that test may be a useful and important clue or investigative tool, it is not the sole test for deciding whether an invention is a patent-eligible “process”

A little further on, the decision gives the effect on software patentability as a good reason for not adopting the ‘machine or transformation test’, and in doing so cites a group of software problem domains that – it seems to imply – are very firmly the proper subject matter for patents:

But there are reasons to doubt whether the test should be the sole criterion for determining the patentability of inventions in the Information Age. As numerous amicus briefs argue, the machine-or-transformation test would create uncertainty as to the patentability of software, advanced diagnostic medicine techniques, and inventions based on linear programming, data compression, and the manipulation of digital signals.

Yet a little further on, we get the qualification:

It is important to emphasize that the Court today is not commenting on the patentability of any particular invention, let alone holding that any of the above-mentioned technologies from the Information Age should or should not receive patent protection.

Clearly there is confusion here. There seems to be an anxiety on the part of the Supreme Court that they will ‘break’ innovation whichever way they lean. This is perhaps best expressed in this elegantly-phrased linguistic shrug:

This Age puts the possibility of innovation in the hands of more people and raises new difficulties for the patent law. With ever more people trying to innovate and thus seeking patent protections for their inventions, the patent law faces a great challenge in striking the balance between protecting inventors and not granting monopolies over procedures that others would discover by independent, creative application of general principles. Nothing in this opinion should be read to take a position on where that balance ought to be struck.

True, that.

Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University are creating the P2PU School of Webcraft, the ultimate environment in which to learn the craft of open and standards-based web development.

This coming September we'll be launching our first cycle of six week courses including Introduction to HTML5 and Building Social with the Open Web. We still have space for a few more courses, so whether you can teach a class for novice web developers, or run a workshop for web developers managing thousands of user accounts, we'd love to have you involved.

Following on the delivery model developed by P2PU, course organizers volunteer to take existing open learning materials or develop their own content and lead a group of peers through 6 weeks of online classes. Courses focus on project based learning in a peer environment and are proposed, created and led by members of the web development community — so the content will always be up to date with the latest technologies.

Over the next 18 months we'll be developing a new way of assessing and recognizing skills, hacker attitudes and knowledge that rewards project portfolios and realistic developer challenges, rather than hours spent cramming for a meaningless exam.

We'd love for you to become a part of this project and until July 18 we're inviting course proposals for P2PU School of Webcraft. We've made it really easy to get started, just fill out the proposal form, it takes less than 5 minutes!

Propose a Course

If you're unable to commit to organising a course this September, there are other great ways to become a part of the community whether as a curriculum adviser, web development guru and of course, as a student.

Participate in a Course

Join the P2PU Webcraft community

Find out more about P2PU School of Webcraft

Mozilla Drumbeat is a global community of people who use web technology in new ways that help them understand, participate, improve and take control of their online lives. The P2PU School of Webcraft is just one of many exciting projects that Drumbeat supports. Find out more here.

Mozilla Drumbeat: Innovation on the open web. Powered by everybody.

 

I’m at a curriculum development workshop at Olin working on the design of POSSE. It is… well, let’s just say I think I understand what POSSE participants feel like (this is also a week-long faculty workshop; I’m the only participant who’s not a professor) – it’s an experience that’s making me see a world (in this case, curriculum design at universities) in an entirely new light, and finally starting to gain the ability to learn at the level I’d like to learn at… I’m nowhere near there, but I think this week is bootstrapping me up to the point where I can learn much of the rest by doing (a lot, for a long time – now I need a lot more experience). This workshop is giving me cultural context. Whoa.

Awesomeness of the day (one moment of many): running into Sanjoy Mahajan, an MIT professor who was my advisor for my humanities capstone on open content engineering textbooks. Sanjoy is also a FOSS geek, and he’s a visiting professor at Olin this coming year. Back in the day, we talked about software for writing textbooks. Turns out he kept working on it, and now one of his students has made an open source textbook writing software called nb – the code is actually under an MIT license, I’m told, but there’s no (easily findable) public repo of it yet, etc… we’ll fix that soon.

A Guided Tour of NB from Sacha Zyto on Vimeo.

Basically, it’s heatmapped commenting on textbooks in pdf format, inspired by the comment workflow on the GPL v3 draft back when it was a draft a few years ago. This way you can see at a glance where folks have commented, and how much, so you know what areas of the text you need to work on. See Sanjoy’s book, Street Fighting Mathematics, for an example of an annotated text.

How would this work in practice?

• source code: TeX
• compiler: LaTeX
• submit a comment/patch: write an annotation on the book using nb
• accept/push a patch: revise the upstream TeX, “recompile” the pdf in LaTeX
• forking: get the TeX source and build your own
• etc.

I don’t know how well it would work, but I’ll be poking the maintainer over the weekend, trying to get an instance of nb up, and then throwing the latest instance of the TOS Textbook up on it to see how that goes, just as an experimental “let us try this tool!” branch. Hrm. When… do I have free time? That is the hard part. If this works out, it would be amazing to have students in classes (Heidi and Tim, I’m looking at you) comment on the textbook as they’re using it.

I just discovered a cute tool called pocco on github. Apparently pocco is the Python version of what is also known as docco, rocco, and (gasp) shocco out there. Quite the zoo really! So what does it do? It parses Python source and separates comments from code. It then dumps everything into HTML with a little CSS, making the comments appear on the left lined up with the corresponding code on the right. Neato.

Or it is? What could this possibly be useful for? Comments in Python are not usually used for documentation: we have docstrings after all! But docstrings are not perfect, for example you can only (by “natural” means anyway) attach a docstring to a module or class or function: What about those globals over there? Do I really have to document them in the module docstring?

But I realized that something like pocco is actually useful in Python. After all, the documentation you put into a docstring should be concise and clean: it should say exactly what it needs to say for someone else to use your stuff, nothing else. Boring! What about all those humorous anecdotes you accumulate while you hack? What about false starts, things that others should be told about before they head down the same wrong way. And so on, and so forth. With pocco, you can use comments for commentary and docstrings for documentation yet extract and (nicely?) format both. How cool is that? Let’s just hope that pocco will leave docstrings alone for good…

The other use I could come up with is code handouts in programming courses. Often the comments I write in this context have more of a “let me take you by the hand and work this through with you” feeling. Reading them in a nicely formatted and syntax-highlighted way may be nicer for everyone involved. True, since all comments are extracted it’s hard to “comment on comments” that way… But that’s okay, at least for me. Now all I need for this second application is Java, C, and C++ support!

I was at the Greenpoint Stadium last nite to watch the Spain vs. Portugal match. It was not bad. The first half of the match was quite boring, but I saw a more tenacious spanish team during the second half of the game. Below are some pictures and videos I got from the match.

The Videos

1. Welcoming both teams to the pitch (31MB)
2. A short clip of the match (11MB)

I really did have fun!!

Last year, Texas Instruments started providing a quarterly one-day online conference just for developers targeting TI’s equipment called ETech Days. These mini-conferences feature presentations from TI’s engineers as well as industry leaders, live TI representatives all day in the TI E2E community forums, and online live training sessions in several tracks. The summer ETech Days happens this week, and features short presentations from each of the six students participating in the BeagleBoard Google Summer of Code project, for which I am honored to be a mentor.

Did I mention that it is free as well? While it is true that value per dollar is undefined when the cost is zero (DIV/0!!) the value for ETech Days is definitely worth the time you will spend on it.

The remaining dates for this year are June 29 (yes, Tuesday!), September 29, and December 7. Be sure to mark your calendars and bookmark http://www.ti.com/ww/en/etechdays.

Dear lazyweb: there must be a simple answer to this. I’m trying to write a shell script that a cron job can run every week to update our Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) test image repository. The ticket in question is Sugar Labs #2058. Longer explanation than usual given so those new to the dev/test/release cycle can follow along.

Basically, SoaS is a Fedora Spin, so we get nightly composes made here (as in, “Fedora automagically builds our .isos for us so we don’t have to”). In order to (we assume) save on disk space, the Fedora servers only store the latest nightly compose – once a new .iso is made, the old one is gone forever, bwahaha!

This is fantastic for developing, but not so much for testing. Expecting testers to keep up with daily builds is a bit much, and it’s putting a burden on people who are downloading them every day (possibly even getting into trouble with their ISP), so we decided to go with a weekly test cycle – each Thursday evening we’d designate the most recent image as the “image under test” and point everyone there. That way, developers would also know exactly what image people were finding bugs in each week.

Problem: in order to (we assume) save on disk space, the Fedora servers only store the latest nightly compose -  once a new .iso is made, the old  one is gone forever, bwahaha! So we need to grab the most recent image – which has a special naming – at that time and pull it down to the Sugar Labs servers so we have the files at http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/test/ (We’re also storing the old test images so we can go back and forth between them Since the builds do contain their build date in their name, and we can’t predict ahead of time what the build date and time are, we don’t know the exact filename to pull.

So we’re basically looking for a shell script that will:

1. Pull the latest iso and checksum from the SL servers
2. Rename the checksum so it matches the datetime stamp of the iso (the checksum is currently called – rather unhelpfully – “CHECKSUM-i386″).
3. Update the symlinks so that http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/test/soas-i386-test-latest.iso and http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/test/soas-i386-test-latest-checksum.sha point to the latest iso and checksum that were just downloaded.

This probably requires some sort of weird wildcard bash-fu that would take me multiple hours to inelegantly figure out, and someone else 5 minutes to write a one-liner to solve.

Can haz halp?

Last week Red Hat put on a Professors' Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE) at RIT. Being an alumni, I was excited by the opportunity to be able to go back up to The ROC and teach some of the people that taught me. Going into it, I really had no idea what to expect. All I knew is that I was going to help lead the 'deep dive' section of the course, where I would teach professors how to dive in head first and get productively lost in a strange codebase. This is not something that can be accomplished with a set of powerpoint slides. Teaching how to hack on open source requires that you emerse yourself into a codebase, and bring your students with you.

The previous POSSE at Worcester State dove into the Sugar Measure Activity, and we were going to do the same.

Measure is an activity that turns the computer into an oscilloscope. Signals from the microphone (and sensors) can be plotted in time and frequency domains.

I had never used this activity, let alone hacked on it before. I've also never done any sugar activity development, aside from some tweaking of the OpenVideoChat, so I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. The obvious first step was to get it running. All of us were able to start the activity in virtual machines or emulators, except for one install which hit some odd errors upon startup. We were able to quickly track the bug down to a stray return statement in __init__ before some critical initialization code. Right after we fixed the problem we noticed that Walter Bender had already fixed this issue a few hours earlier. After a git pull, we were up and running.

Once we all got the activity running, we took a look at the bug list to see if there was any low-hanging fruit for us to tackle. Since the previous POSSE had already done some work on this activity the week before, there were not any trivial tickets left in the queue. So, in that case, we dove head first into the hardest one, "Measure activity gets stuck after recording". This ticket had very little information, and no log output, so we were on our own to try and track it down. We were able to reliably reproduce the issue on the XO-1.5, but not on the 1.0. In our virtual machines we hit it sporadically. We all agreed that it felt like a race-condition, most likely due to threading. So we started instrumenting the code and adding some debugging statements to try and figure out which line of code was the culprit.

In our efforts to scatter print statements all over the place to try and determine the code path, we noticed that none of our output was hitting the logs. When you have no idea if your code is even being run or not, don't be ashamed to throw in a raise Exception("WTF?!"). We finally realized that since the activity would freeze, it was never able to flush stderr/stdout to the log. A quick find/replace regex later, and we were using the proper logging module and seeing our debugging output hit the logs.

We were then able to track the bug down to a line of code that uses GTK to try and get the coordinates of the parent window. At this point, since none of us were GTK experts, we had to go upstream. So, I dropped into #fedora-devel and asked. Within 10 minutes I had responses from 3 different GTK hackers. One was a typical RTFM response, which humored the professors (who are very used to hearing/saying this), but the others pointed us in the right direction. One mentioned that gtk.gdk calls probably should not be done in a seperate thread. So, a suggested workaround was to add gtk.threads_enter()/gtk.threads_leave() calls before running any gtk.gdk code in the thread. A 2-line patch later, and we had squashed the bug.

We eventually bumped into the inevitable typo in some comments. So, we made the fix locally, and committed it to our git repo. A few minutes later and we found another one. I saw this as a great opportunity to show off some of my git-fu. Instead of sending two "Fix typo" patches upstream, I showed the professors how to use git interactive rebasing to squash multiple commits into a single one. They all followed along closely, and the workflow made sense to them.

While we were looking through the ticket queue, we saw an issue where Measure would apparently leak memory and crash when running it for a long period of time. While keeping this in mind, we kept our eyes peeled while wandering around the codebase to see if we could track the issue down. When looking at the code that takes screenshots of the waveform, I noticed that it created a temporary file with tempfile.mkstemp, saved the pixmap to it, injected it into the Journal, and then deleted the directory. This looked fine at a first glance, until I realized that it never closed the temporary file descriptor. Another 2-line patch later, and this issue was solved.

The next day both of the patches that we sent upstream were applied by Walter Bender.

Overall, POSSE definitely exceeded my expectations, and I'm extremely satisfied with how the 'deep dive' section went. I went into it feeling completely unprepared to teach, but by trusting my "hacker intuition", I feel that it turned out to be a fantastic learning experience for all of us.

This will be its official debut to the Deaf Access Technology World.  For all the details, head over to the Center for Student Innovation Site.

I got into all this OLPC, Sugar, HFOSS stuff because I'm a game professor at RIT and I wanted my students to make educational games for the platform.  So yesterday I spent a day introducing the various OLPC dev teams (almost all of whom are doing something related to Sugar games) to two great resources in the field that we're lucky to have in town; the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) at the Strong National Museum of Play and Second Avenue Software.

ICHEG has a collection of over 10,000 items related to electronic games and is continuing to build that research archive and design a 5,000 square foot exhibit on them slated to open November 20th.  It's been my pleasure to consult with them on those efforts, first as a member of their comprehensive advisory board and now as a visiting scholar there for the next two years.  The students were awe-struck by the museum in general and particularly their holdings of everything from a working replica of Ralph Baer's brown box, over 150 arcade games (many of which were part of Videotopia, which they acquired) and walls of shelves of software 3 boxes deep.  Thanks to JP for touring us around!

After a quick lunch in the museum food court we headed out to Second Avenue software, where we had an informal and deeply informative presentation from Tory and Mike on their process and will be applying what we learned to our current and future development efforts.  Thanks to them both as well

I was following a thread this morning on the TeachingOpenSource.org Mailing list about using Scribd for source materials.Five messages in, there's a reply that sends up a red flag for me.This is the second time hearing a story that's so similar that it can't be considered a coincidence. I've mentioned my "Rule of Two" theory of customer/community relations before. It states...If one person

After an action packed week of POSSE and FOSSCon, there was no slowing down this week. M-W was the NTID Tech Symposium where we delivered our paper on Open Video Chat. We also had a table for the length of the conference where we showed it off. Boing Boing picked up our Center for Student Innovation blog post on the RIT press release and ) several interesting things happened as a result (I assume) of the Boing Boing link...

Tony Anderson sent me an e-mail asking for some class projects in the fall including a typing game, a bingo vocab game, support for karma development and some work on Fez and Drupal. These all look like great initiatives and I'll be looking at the students enrolled in the Fall to see if we might be able to match some of them up.

Gerald Ardito, who I met when we presented at NYSCATE together last year, runs an OLPC deployment in a private school downstate, and has made it the focus of his PhD at Pace University. He asked if I'd be willing to come down to Pace and talk with folks there about what we're doing in Rochester, with the hopes of maybe helping them do something similar there. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to do so.

Kolawole Oreoluwa got in touch to ask about testing OVC for us in Nigeria. He'll be working with Adam to obtain some 1.5 for that very purpose and I look forward to hearing more about his program in general, in addition to finding out about his experiences with OVC.

Discussions in-channel with Collabora, the OVC dev team and members of the community during the symposium are leading up to a hackfest to attack problems with RTP, Gstreamer and Theora, to get the team up to speed with Telepathy-Farsight and to build some documentation for it that's currently lacking. We're shooting for a fest at OLPC headquarters the week of 7/12 and will be posting details once they firm up.

Last but not least we got to meet Kevin Cole of Gallaudet, who manned a table for OLPC and Sugar Labs at the event.

Many thanks to the FOSS@RIT dev team for all their great work and all the folks who got in touch with us this week!

Maybe it is wrong to say that the Salaminar is dead -- but I
think it is a good time to assess its pros and cons.

I personally haven't been rallying people to join in, and
I often haven't even been around on Fridays at noon.
If the project had enough momentum, it might keep
happening anyway -- but I don't think it ever had that
that much momentum.

The general idea of "meeting regularly to talk about research
at KMi" still seems like a good idea to me. Maybe there are
just some implementation details to work out (e.g. should we
be meeting on Tuesday afternoons instead of Friday lunches?)
in order to gather more momentum.

On the other hand, I wonder if there aren't more fundamental
issues that make our work at KMi tend to follow a more
"laminar" flow -- parallel strands progressing without complex
interactions. I mean, if everyone is intently doing his or her own
thing, how much motivation do we really have to talk to each
other? It seems a reasonable question.

Perhaps to discuss over lunch :)?

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For those who missed the news, Symbian – the most popular mobile platform of all time – is now open source (thanks Nokia & the Symbian Foundation!). What that will mean in reality over the long term is hard to figure, but one way to find out is to attend the first Symbian Kernel Community Kick-Off on July 8, about two weeks from now, at ARM’s headquarters in Cambridge (that’s UK, not Boston, sorry US folks).

If you ever wanted to rub shoulders with Symbianites, this is your chance, along with drinks afterward at Robin Hood & Little John, sponsored by Accenture. I wish I were in the area to attend, so someone please go in my stead.