I have a few minutes this evening after a full day at the hospital. My first child, a little girl, was born last nite. Everything went well and we’ve been getting used to the new addition in the hospital today. We’ll be back home tomorrow sometime, and I’m sure life will be a lot different.
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My apologies for the lack of updates this week. My poor wife is nine-months pregnant and we’re expecting a baby any day now. We even spent one evening at the Hospital wondering if that was going to be the big day. She’s taking much of my focus this week, but with her fast asleep this afternoon I have a few minutes to catch up.
An update on the project I’ve blogged about recently. I’m really happy to hear from all the people that have shown an interest in the project. I did get a lot of responses and I’m, again, impressed in the great people we have in our Ubuntu community worldwide.
I was also a bit surprised to hear that this team already technically exists, but I found that its been a bit neglected. So, it looks like we’ll be resurrecting a team instead of forming a new one. I’m excited about this. On the bright side there is already a Launchpad page, mailing list, etc. We’ve got the tools (thanks to the initial founders for that work!), we just need to get to work.
If you’re interested in helping out with this project take a minute and subscribe to the ubuntu-classroom mailing list. We’ll also try to have a meeting (again, apologies for the last minute nature) tomorrow in IRC. We’ll try to use #ubuntu-classroom room if we can, at 12:00pm EST. Stay tuned to the mailing list or, at worst case, my twitter page for last minute changes.
Let’s get this team going again and do what we can to make Ubuntu the best distribution on the planet. With more people educated on how to participate we can only improve!
If you’re going to attend the meeting tomorrow you’ll want to be subscribed to the mailing list, join us in IRC and install Gobby for some group collaboration. See you then!
I worked on 5 bugs today. A few of them were new bugs that I found in Hardy, a few of them were follow-ups with previous bugs that I’d worked on or submitted. I think the 5-A-Day is a great program, and I’m glad to see so many people have jumped on board. I’m going to try and continue working on it.
…I just hope I can get the bugs worked out of update-signature so I can actually share the bugs I’ve worked on 
So I’ve finally, somehow, become the latest casualty of twitter. I don’t know how it happened, because for the longest time I did not get it. Well to give you some idea I get twitters to my phone… yeah, shameful I know.
In any event, if you’re a twitter user drop by at https://twitter.com/zelut and join the ‘ol network.
…Thanks a lot bordy!
Based on some of the feedback from yesterday’s post regarding my latest project I thought it deserved a little more detail. I don’t mean to be cryptic about it, I think I’m simply having a hard time describing the team. Something, obviously, that I’ll need to resolve quickly.
The best way I’ve found to describe this project/team is to think Open Week, just much more regularly. One example (not related to this project) is that this week we’re having the Ubuntu Developer Weeek, and something like this fits right into the goals of this project.
Basically this team will plan and organize regular “Open Week” style events to educate Ubuntu users on how they can participate in the community. Topics will range from bug work to documentation, packaging to loco activism, etc. Pretty much every existing team within the Ubuntu community will have a chance to present on what their team does, invite others to participate and educate them on how they can join in.. and this team will be the engine behind making this happen.
The team itself will organize these events, market the events, and also try to follow up with users as they attempt to participate in the existing communities. It has been interesting to follow some of the blogs on the Planet regarding the journey towards MOTU. This team would also help track (and help the user track) their progress toward participation in their respective community projects.
I want to make sure that new users know how they can participate, who they can contact for help and when they can find ubuntu training events which will make their transition toward participation easier.
I will be sending some reply emails soon to those that have contacted me. I will also be planning a meeting for this upcoming Sunday (Feb 24th) in IRC (details pending) for continued discussion and organization.
I hope this helps clarify what I was trying to say in my previous post. I think there is a real place for this type of project. We’ve got the best community in the free software world, let’s really help show that by being part of a project like this. A project which focuses solely on helping everyone learn how they can participate in one of the greatest free software projects in the world!
Ever since I attended the Ubuntu Developer Summit last October I’ve had an idea on my mind for a new Team within the Ubuntu Community. I think there is a real need for this project and I’ve been cooking up some basic specs for it for the past few months. The reason I’ve been sitting on it is that I want to make sure I do it right, and I want to make sure that it is properly organized. I’ve had a good amount of team involvement over the past two or three years running the Ubuntu Utah LoCo Team and helping put together the US Teams Project, and I think I’ve learned a thing or two about the processes behind community involvement. The focus of this team is #1 community involvement and #2 retention, something that I have some passion about.
At this point in the team development process I’m looking for a few determined, hard working volunteers that can help with the project. I don’t (initially) expect that this will be an open-enrolled team as I want to have very defined roles, but there are a number of positions available. Each of these positions could potentially be held by one or two individuals. If you are interested in helping with a project that focuses solely on helping existing and future users get involved in improving ubuntu please see below:
Scheduling: I am looking for someone that has experience with event scheduling (online events), perhaps with some experience with the Fridge and similar. This project aims to have regular education events, teaching users how to get involved. This position would be primarily focused on scheduling those events, securing presenters, selecting topics, etc. Also making sure these events are properly communicated with the marketing position below.
Marketing: This position is primarily focused on making sure the events and the purpose of the team are properly advertised prior to events. This includes being added to prominent calendars, contacting prominent blogs, news, etc. Be the public-face and get publicity to the events and the team.
Logging: I am also looking for someone that is good with the books. We will want to track the team progress as well as that of those wanting to participate. Experience with keeping logs, minutes, tracking contacts, etc would be great. Helping document goals within the team and on a contributor-basis is critical in measuring success and monitoring improvements.
Sys Admin: We will need someone that can help maintain the facilities end of things. From mailing lists to irc channels, wiki maintenance, etc. This position won’t always be involved in the day-to-day education, but someone that can make sure the wheels of the organization are well oiled is critical. We can’t work without the proper tools.
I will mention that I would like to try and organize this team in a very task-oriented manner. It is important that we mesh as a group, and I want to make sure that things get done. I want to make sure there are regular goals and things get achieved. If you’re interested in working and making a difference please let me know.
I also want to make sure that this team involves the international community that we are. If you have worked much with translations I’m sure we could use your help as well!
I don’t claim to have all of the workings of this project worked out so far, as most development projects it is a work in progress. I would like to get started soon however. I would like this project to be in full gear by the time Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy” is released so that we are ready for the influx of Ubuntu adopters (yes, it will happen!)
Please contact me via my Contact Page if you are interested in this project.
Minor update available for folding.sh. For those interested the download is available in the traditional location as well as on Launchpad. Still working on a package folks.
As usual, if you are using folding.sh as a front-end to your folding @ home the only thing you need to do to upgrade is overwrite your current copy of folding.sh with the new one. It will not affect your current folding data or processes and does not require anything is restart.
We were having a discussion in IRC this morning about how promoting free software and open standards can sometimes end up restricting your freedom. Now tell me if I’m wrong here, but as I understand the idea behind OpenOffice is:
To allow you to use any document format, and in the end any application that works best for you. Preferably you use the open .odt format, but when its all said and done compatibility is the key here.
In other words, Open Office reads and writes to a large number of document formats. This allows Open Office users to read from many applications and write to many application. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter what application someone uses, its the underlying format or compatibility of that format that is important.
Now fast forward to this years BrainShare, put on by Novell. A local contributor is going to present but they *require* slides be submitted in Open Office Impress format. His slides aren’t in Open Office Impress format. Now we’ve come to the point where promoting free standards and applications has actually ended up in a lock-in, removing the freedom from the end user.
His slides are in a standards compliant s5 format which, in my opinion, completely solves the issue (need?) of Impress or Powerpoint. s5 is a standards compliant web-based presentation format. You can recreate most of the features of Impress or Powerpoint through the use of standard css and javascript.
Everyone has a browser. Everyone can view s5 presentations. Not everyone has Word or Impress or Powerpoint and not everyone can view or submit presentations in Impress format.
To be honest with you I don’t even have Open Office installed. I *never* use it. What is the point of a word processor other than to communicate ideas via text? What are you doing with your word processor that you can’t do with vi or emacs? If you’re doing fancy formatting why not use the web? Use html or, hell, even use Google Docs.
Google Docs is genious because it solves the whole issue. It doesn’t matter what word processor you have (or don’t have), it simply requires you have a modern browser. Done. End of story. (The fact that Google pwns your content is another issue for another time however.)
If someone out there can tell me why I should use a fancy (read:bloated) Word processor instead of vim, or can tell me why I should use Impress instead of the web I’m open to suggestions.
I installed Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy” Alpha 4 a day or two ago and I finally got some time to poke around with some of the new features. The new features that are of the most interest to me are the security related features such as firewalling, SELinux, etc.
note: SELinux will not be default in Ubuntu 8.04 but the Ubuntu Hardened team has been working hard on getting it usable. If you’d like to help in the testing and development of SELinux on Ubuntu join our team!
The feature that I played with this afternoon is Ubuntu’s “Uncomplicated Firewall”. I have to say that when I first heard we were going to reinvent the wheel again (I mean, we have iptables, right?) I was a little discouraged. After playing with ufw I have to say I am pretty impressed.
ufw is simply a front-end to iptables. We’re still using the same iptables/netfilter underneath, just not requiring iptables syntax–trying to make things a little more “for human beings” I suppose you could say.
Now I may not be the “standard” Ubuntu user as seen by the rest of the Linux world. I know my way around Linux, spend the majority of my time on the command line and even teach Linux for a living. What I’m trying to say is I’m familiar enough with iptables, so I wondered how we could possibly make it easier. Well they did a good job. Here are a few examples:
sudo ufw default deny– sets the default policies to deny (drop)
sudo ufw allow 22/tcp– allows tcp connections on port 22
sudo ufw deny 25– denies connections on port 25 (tcp/udp)
sudo ufw allow proto udp 192.168.0.1 port 53 to 192.168.0.2 port 53– we can even be specific between source and destination ports and ips.
… you get the idea. It’s really simple, nearly human readable syntax. I still think iptables is pretty easy, but I think I’ll be perfectly comfortable using ufw as a front-end to iptables moving forward with Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy”.
First of all I need to thank Daniel for turning me onto this tool. I’m administrator on more lists than I’d prefer and this has been a godsend!
If you happen to be one that missed his post recently on the planet, or if you’re just finding this via Google, Listadmin is a tool to help you bulk moderate mailman lists. If you are the admin or moderator on more than one mailman list do yourself a favor and keep reading. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, well, thanks for the visit anyway.
Installation
Installing Listadmin is just as simple as installing anything else really. Use the following command (or click the link using apturl):
sudo aptitude install listadmin
Configuration
Before we can begin moderating our lists we’ll need to tell Listadmin which lists to moderate. This is done by creating a file in your home directory ~/.listadmin.ini
With your favorite editor create the file and follow the below example, replacing with your own information:
default skip
log ~/.listadmin.log
# this example uses the same password
# for the users, process and admin lists
adminurl http://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
password mypassword
users@lists.example.org
process@lists.example.org
admin@lists.example.org
# this example uses different passwords
# for the supporters and staff lists
adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
password "myotherpassword"
supporters@lists.example.com
password "mythirdpassword"
staff@lists.example.com
As you can see the configuration is pretty simple. The address to the list, the password needed and the lists you want to moderate.
If the lists use the same password you can list them under a single password block.
If the lists use different passwords you can list the by individual password and address.
Once you’ve replaced the details with your own information there is one more step before we run the utility. Considering this file holds sensitive passwords you’ll want to limit access to the file.
chmod go-r .listadmin.ini
Go ahead now and launch the tool and moderate your lists:
listadmin
I’ve been using this now for only two days or so but I’m so thankful I found it. Instead of manually moderating a large number of lists I simply run this tool once a day, clean out the garbage and get back to real work.