The Mess
Ray wants to bake a cake.
Marguerite wants to float
on her gecko
in the pool.
These are, of course,
wonderful
things, fun and profitable.
I must try to
think of the fun
and not the work it will create.
I must,
or they will remember
that I was
no fun.
So I must be sure we have eggs
and sunscreen
when he gets home,
and when she gets up.
Setting your default printer
When I finally got printing working on my new HP5520, I discovered that apps like xpdf that print by invoking lpr directly would only work if I told them to use 'lpr -Php5520', which was a hassle. After some poking around, I discovered that the Cups web interface, at http://localhost:631/ let me set the default printer quite easily. Of course, you can do this via some config file or other, but this was easier. Here's how you do it.
Happy 15th, OSCon
15 years ago, I attended the first OSCon, in Santa Clara, I think. I was there for the Perl content, and managed to pay my way by giving a full day tutorial on the Apache web server. Amazingly, they kept asking me to come back and do it again, and I gave one talk or another every OSCon until 2006, after which I skipped a few years. Last year I made it back to OSCon again, and I'll be going this year too.
This will be my first OSCon when I have no speaking responsibilities at all, although last year I only had a BOF, not an actual session.
This year, I'll be working the Red Hat booth, and the OpenStack pavilion, as well as, hopefully, a little bit at the Apache Software foundation booth. Between that, and various evening events, and various meetings, I expect this to be another OSCon where I don't actually sleep. I can't quite manage that like I used to in 1998. But I'm really looking forward to the conference this year, and seeing the folks that I only see at OSCon.
Will I see you there?
Ode to a shoelace
Last evening we had a small gathering around the fire pit to read poetry. I started with Pablo Neruda's Ode to Ironing. My Beloved asked if there was an ode to shoelaces, and thus began an odyssey. For the rest of the evening, I read nothing but odes to shoelaces.
We started with Ode to a shoelace, followed by Ode to a shoelace, and Ode to a shoelace. Next there was Ode to a fraying shoelace, Ode to the dangly shoelace, and My shoelace. Then, Ode to an aglet, and Shoelaces.
There were others, too, but I can't find them this morning. But I've found many others this morning, ranging from the silly to the profound to the semi-literate.
Perhaps I'll write an ode myself.
Syndicated 2013-07-17 00:52:59 (Updated 2013-07-17 00:53:00) from Notes In The Margin
Podcasting tips
I was asked this morning for some information that I get asked for a lot, so it seemed reasonable to write it down once so that I can refer to it later.
I don't claim to be an expert on this. If anything, this is intended to be resources for folks who aren't experts, and don't really aspire to being experts in audio production, but just want to know how to do a podcast, or other simple recording, with whatever tools they might already have, or can get free or cheap.
So, here's the response I sent. No doubt I'll update this from time to time.
The cool thing about podcasting is that you don't have to be a recording expert any more. Just have to have some patience and a decent microphone.
I'm a big fan of the Blue microphone line. Their USB microphones are supported by whatever OS you're running, and are so simple to use. It's a little bit of an investment, but the results are worth it.
There's also a number of portable devices now - if you're planning on doing roving interviews, rather than recording at your desk, those are worth looking at. This is what I would get if I could afford it.
But there are cheaper devices that are pretty good. This is what the ASF bought for use at our events and I've been pretty pleased with them.
Just don't try to use one of those headphone/microphone combo things. They are universally awful.
I often do an interview on Skype and use a skype recorder to capture it. Unfortunately, the recorder I was using is Mac only, and I've recently switched to Linux and am having no luck, so far, getting anything working to record skype calls.
For editing, I have tried a number of things, and keep coming back to Audacity. It is simple to use, and has all of the tools that the more expensive options. It's available for whatever OS you're running.
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.
The Apache Feather
If you've been around the Apache Software Foundation for a while, you may have seen this photo:
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.
(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. ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
