Older blog entries for Rich (starting at number 43)

Linux video editing

Quick notes about my video editing woes, so that I don't have to keep repeating myself

I'm recording the original content with RecordMyDesktop, which outputs ogv format. Have had no luck with other recording tools. ffmpeg seems to be the one most frequently requested, but getting it to record a window, or even a frame, rather than the whole screen, has evaded me so far.

OpenShot: Nice interface, but audio is always either double-speed or garbled, even when I record it externally (Audacity) and then try to insert it.

Avidemux: Won't open ogv video, and I can't get the necessary libraries/plugins to install.

Handbrake apparently won't build on Fedora 18. Getting warnings about libvorbis.

Found a resource that recommended kdenlive, so that's what I'm trying next.

Syndicated 2013-07-08 19:40:56 from Notes In The Margin

The Apache Feather

If you've been around the Apache Software Foundation for a while, you may have seen this photo:

lars7

That's the Apache httpd developers (most of them) at the first ApacheCon, in 1998.

You may have wondered what happened to that feather.

Well, it went home with Ken Coar (the guy with the CIA hat, over on the right) and hung in one office or another for the next 15 years.

Well, a few weeks ago, Ken moved into a smaller office, where there wasn't room for the feather, and I received an ENORMOUS box in the mail.

Yes, that's right, I am now in possession of The Apache Feather.

IMG_7963

(More photos here.)

It's mostly in pretty good shape, although at some point the stem broke off, and has been repaired, and has broken off again. We're investigating ways to fix it without further damaging it. It's very cool to have a piece of Internet history, although I expect that now that I've told the world where it is, someone on the Trademarks team will say that they should have it. ;-)

Syndicated 2013-06-22 00:12:33 from Notes In The Margin

RedHat Summit Summary

Last week I attended the Red Hat Summit in Boston. It was, for me, equal parts pep rally and intensive OpenStack training.

Jim Whitehurst's keynote was just great, because it reemphasized how much RedHat really *gets* Open Source, at all levels of the organization. So, this part was pep rally for me, and confirmed to me that RedHat is the place where I want to be. Same for Paul Cormier's keynote. Both of these are well worth watching if you care about cloud computing, IaaS, or PaaS, or expect to at any time in the near future.

I attended a number of sessions about OpenStack, and you can see a wrapup of all of that content in Perry's blog post about the conference.

And I helped out at the RDO table in the Developers Lounge. In the process I met many of the engineers that I'll be working with, and I learned quite a bit about RDO and OpenStack, as well as who I need to go to when there's something I don't know yet. And I got to play around some with TryStack, a free service where you can experiment with an RDO installation, launch virtual machines, and connect in to them to see how RDO behaves.

There's a huge amount of interest in OpenStack, and the ecosystem around it is full of really cool stuff. I was particularly interested in OpenShift, with which you can launch a non-trivial webapp in just minutes minutes. Very cool stuff.

Another high point of the week was the RedHat Summit 5K.

RedHat Summit, Boston

There were a few hundred people in the race, which wasn't a traditional road race, in the sense that there wasn't any official time keeper, and traffic wasn't stopped. We had pace groups (I ran with the 8:30 minute group), and a pacer who knew the route. I had set a goal of breaking 27, and I ran a 25:32, with which I was very pleased. This was the first 5k I've run since, I believe, 1994, so, not too shabby.

Syndicated 2013-06-18 20:05:37 from Notes In The Margin

VuPoint Magic Wand portable scanner

I just bought, returned, and bought VuPoint MagicWand scanners.

Here's the story.

The first one I bought was this one, which is a hand-held scanner wand thingy that scans to a micro SD card. That part works great. The other feature was that you could transfer the files wirelessly. There wasn't much information as to what that actually means, so it sounded like a good idea.

Turns out that what it means is that the device advertises its own SSID, which you must connect to, and then open a web site on the device which lists the files. I don't know if it was browser incompatibility or what, but the list of files didn't actually link to the files - just listed them. Viewing the source, it certainly had the links in the HTML, but something was preventing those links from actually being displayed on the page. Weird.

So, having to disconnect from my work VPN to connect to my scanner isn't exactly a great idea. Also, the network has a fixed name (MAGICWAND) and password (123456789), which ensures that as soon as I switch it on, everyone in range has access to my images. Not exactly idea.

So, I returned it and got the one without wifi. There's a USB cable, or the SD card can just go into a normal SD card reader. Only a $20 price difference, but I don't care to pay $20 for functionality I don't want.

Syndicated 2013-06-17 20:16:14 from Notes In The Margin

Open Help Conference, 2013

This weekend I attended the OpenHelp Conference in Cincinnati. Unfortunately, I was only able to go to one day of it, as we had to be back for something Sunday morning.

It was smallish, and so there was a lot of good conversation and brainstorming.

The focus was both documentation and support, which are, of course, deeply intertwingled. It gave me a lot to think about, and I really wish I could have been there for the second day as well.

Siobhan McKeown, from the Wordpress documentation team, was at the conference, and took amazing notes, so I'm going to link to her writeup for each talk.

The day started with Jorge Castro talking about using StackExchange to handle the Question & Answer part of support.StackExchange is part of the StackOverflow family of sites, Each StackExchange site is focused on a particular community, and is very focused on Question and Answer format, rather than general discussion. It allows users to vote for the quality of questions and answers, and seems to be a great way to get the subject matter experts more directly involved in the support process.

Siobhan's notes are here.

Following that, Michael Verdi, from the Firefox support team, talked about the SuMo site and the work that they had done to help users find the answers to their question. Of particular interest was some graphs he showed of the improvement in customer satisfaction, as well as the rate of answered questions, brought about by just improving the search functionality, to help users find the right docs so that they didn't even need to ask their question.

Firefox has their own home-grown, but Open Source, solution, called Kitsune. It has some StackExchage-like features, and also has a great tool called Army of Awesome, which is a way to watch Twitter mentions of your project/product, and ensure that at least one person from the expert community has responded to each one.

Here's Siobhan's notes.

This was followed by a panel discussion including Jorge, Michael, Jeremy Garcia (LinuxQuestions.org, and Siko Bouterse from Wikipedia. The discussion ranged from Wikipedia author retention to further discussion of many of the issues that Michael and Jorge had raised.

I spoke next, talking about listening to your audience. This is something I've thought a lot about over the years. My trepidation in speaking at this conference was that it seems like many of the people there know a lot more about documentation and support than I do, as I'm largely self-taught in this area. But it seemed that my remarks were well received. Once again here's Siobhan's notes, which in this case are way better than my own notes for my talk.

I was the last speaker of the day, and this was followed by a general discussion of the things that had been raised during the day, as well as many related issues.

You can see a lot of commentary about the events of the day, and of Sunday, by looking at the #openhelp keyword on Twitter. I'm looking forward to reading Siobhan's notes from Sunday's sessions.

Syndicated 2013-06-17 14:35:22 (Updated 2013-06-17 14:35:23) from Notes In The Margin

Mac OS X Time Machine disks on Linux

Useful information about accessing a Mac OS X Time Machine backup disk on Linux: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20080623213342356

This information has proved very helpful over the last few days - although what I ended up doing was plugging the drive into a Mac and scp'ing the data across the network, since that was less hassle.

Looks like a good place for some Linux utility that provides a file browser for this kind of file system. Although I expect there's probably already one out there that I just didn't find yet.

Syndicated 2013-06-03 00:02:22 from Notes In The Margin

What I've learned at SourceForge

Today I'll be leaving SourceForge and taking a role at RedHat. Please don't think for a moment that it's because I don't like SourceForge. I continue to think that SourceForge does community *way* better than either Github or Google Code, and while there are places where the platform can improve, the team that's working on it is one of the finest bunch of engineers I've ever had the privilege of working with.

Here's a few of the many things I've learned at SourceForge.

People are passionate

Every time I talk to anybody about my job, I mention two projects: PonyKart and OpenMRS. These projects illustrate to me how people can be passionate about anything. Having talked with the leads of both of these projects, I'm blown away by their passion for excellence.

Of course, these projects could hardly be more different.

PonyKart is a My Little Pony themed Mario-Kart style game. It's fun. The physics are well done. The courses are well designed. The community is very engaged. And it has My Little Pony characters in it. The guys that did this project wanted it to be a MLP game, but they also wanted it to be excellent. They wanted it to be fun. They wanted it to be *good*. They are passionate about it.

The OpenMRS project is a medical records system that was developed for a hospital in Kenya that had a hacked-together Access database monstrosity, and it was faster and easier for these guys to hack something together than to try to fix what was there. But that wasn't enough. They were passionate. They wanted it to be done right, and they wanted hospitals all over the world to benefit from it. And now they have a non-profit dedicated to giving this product away to hospitals in developing nations that need it. These guys are my heroes.

I am continually blown away by the quest for excellence, and the vast range of ways that it manifests itself.

People are kind

I've met amazing people in my time at SourceForge. These people are helpful, kind, patient, and, as I've mentioned, passionate. For the most part, people get that I'm human and can't solve all of their problems immediately. They get that we all have the limitation of time and resources.

Most people *don't* throw tantrums or demand their way. For this I am very grateful. I'm glad to have met a few of the nice people.

People are cruel

Sure, SourceForge is the underdog right now. I get that. It's not necessary to be a jerk.

It's hard to remember, when people are being jerks, that they're in the minority. Most people are, in fact, nice. But the jerks are very loud.

I'd like to remind the jerks that the folks who happen to be developing their project on the SourceForge platform are passionate, and they are pragmatic, and they are doing something useful while you fling mud at them.

'nuff said.

People are pragmatic

Tools are tools. They are not your children.

For the most part, people want to get a job done, and they use the tools they have, because the focus is the task, not the tools. Once, we used CVS and MailMan and we *liked* it. SVN is better. Some people like Git better. But if we had to use CVS and MailMan, you know what? We'd still get stuff done.

Religious debates over the relative merits of DVCS and CVCS systems are all well and good over beer at conferences, but most of us have a job to do, and we don't have time for that indulgence. You may, in fact, be right, but I don't have that kind of time.

I grow very weary of the This vs That flame wars that have characterized the IT world for so long. Perl vs Python, VI vs Emacs, Linux vs Windows vs Mac, Git vs SVN. The thing is, if you're a professional, you need to know *all* of them, and you're not coming across as brilliant, you're coming across as only knowing one tool. Nice hammer. Sometimes a screwdriver is useful.

But, much as most people are nice, it turns out most people are pragmatic. Most people don't have time for those debates either. They want to get their job done. I really appreciate having met a lot of those kinds of people.

Syndicated 2013-05-20 12:03:49 (Updated 2013-05-20 12:05:14) from Notes In The Margin

Maqetta

Today I discovered Maqetta - http://maqetta.org/ - which is exactly what I was looking for about a month ago. It's a browser-based HTML5 editor for creating mobile web app thingies without having to actually know anything about mobile CSS.

Syndicated 2013-04-05 21:20:42 from Notes In The Margin

A Haiku, in honor of today's meeting

For a brief moment,
I thought I had no meeting.
It was very nice.

Syndicated 2013-04-05 12:48:23 from Notes In The Margin

FitBit - Not what I was looking for

This evening I returned the FitBit I purchased a few days ago. It wasn't what I was looking for.

So I guess it's best to define what it is that I was looking for. Basically, I want everything that Strava does without having to lug my phone around. I thought that the FitBit was that, but it lacks one important element - a GPSr. I thought it had GPS fu in it, but it appears that I was mistaken.

So, instead, I've ordered a cheap armband thingy so that I can carry my phone without wearing a fanny pack. And maybe that'll be all I want.

The alternate is a $150 watch from Nike, and that's just a little too much to pay.

Syndicated 2013-04-02 00:44:16 from Notes In The Margin

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