Jono Bacon @ Floss Weekly

Last week's Floss Weekly was really very interesting and funny. This show is part of Leo Laporte's Twit network and features on weekly schedule, various projects belonging to open source world.
With episode 65 Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte interviewed Jono Bacon the outstanding community manager of Canonical's Ubuntu Linux distribution.

Notwithstanding the imminent (at the show time) release of Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope, the purpose of the show was different. After a brief presentation of Jono's work and career at Canonical, the show focused on discussing the importance of communities for open source and free software projects and even commercial software in general.
Even though the discussion wasn't a geeky one, I mean they did not discuss of Ubuntu's new release or the trends in Ubuntu's development and marketing, I think they hit an interesting field too often overlooked by the open source and free software world. To support the economics behind free software it's not sufficient to create a consistent and refined product. Like an object belonging to an ecosystem, it's necessary to engineer how to deploy the product in the social environment. A product (and by this word I mean not just the software but all it's surroundings -website, documentation, brochures, etc..) must fulfill several requirements in this sense; it must be appealing, well documented, easy going and have a community to hold people together and attract new stakeholders. In this last aspect communities literally do the difference. Say that you're interested in learning 3D graphics it. There are a few open source choices and among those one project in particular (Blender) has a strong community representing an expanding sea of resources which metaphorically embraces the newcomer and reassure her/him with tutorials, free models a forum and even commercially available books and video guides.
Going back to the Floss episode, Jono Bacon also presented "The Art of Community" a book, published by O'Reilly, about to create and maintain a community which is going to be released either for free under a Creative Common License or for Purchase. The book is currently being written by Jono so it's scheduled for release during the next summer.
For more information read here below the very announcement of the book made by Jono on his blog

Today I am proud as punch to announce the Art Of Community.

A while back I was approached by Andy Oram, a senior editor at O'Reilly to write a definitive book about how to grow, build and energise a community. This book will be called the Art Of Community.
The book covers a wide range of topics designed to build strong community. This includes the structure and social economy behind community, building effective and easy to use infrastructure, setting up community processes, creating buzz and excitement, governance, conflict resolution, scalability and more.
This book is much more than merely a textbook on building a compelling community. I believe that we learn how to build strong community through the exchange of stories and experiences. We all have great insight into community. These stories are illustrative vessels for important lessons and subtleties in how great communities work. The Art Of Community is a compendium of stories, anecdotes and experiences inside and outside the Open Source world. These stories illustrate the many concepts scattered throughout the book, and many of these stories will include some of you reading this and your projects.
I am currently part-way through the writing process, and we have an expected release date this summer.
The release of Art Of Community is actually rather exciting. The book will be available in two forms.

• Firstly, there will be a normal printed copy available to buy. This will be available from the usual places you can buy O'Reilly books.
• Secondly, The book will also be available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. This provides everyone with the opportunity to share, modify and re-use the content.

O'Reilly has my utmost respect for embracing the Creative Commons. This is a great opportunity for O'Reilly, Creative Commons content and community building.
In addition to the announcement, I am also pleased to announce a website devoted to the book over at www.artofcommunityonline.org.
The website will feature updates, sneak peeks of the content, profiles of the topics and stories in the book, profiles of the editors and proof readers and more. I am really keen to hear your stories and experiences, and there will be plenty of opportunities to get involved in the discussion. Also, when we release the book, the top ten posters with the most number of comments on the articles there will get a free signed printed copy of the book.
So, exciting times. Lots of work, but exciting times nonetheless. Lets get rolling...

For those that after having listened to the show think it's a pity it wasn't that into Ubuntu's behind the scenes, just know that Randal Schwartz announced a so called "FLOSSing with Bacon" project so we will hopefully hear from Jono very soon.
Finally, kudos to Leo and Randal for the great job they do in presenting open source and free software projects. With respect to what I've written above, they play an important role for the cause.

My new Induction Cooker

Given that I'm moving the kitchen to the apartment beside mine (the one I bought to enlarge my apartment), I am doing some modification on the furniture and arrangement. Some modifications are compulsory and forced by the space arrangement, others are style-driven.
One of these latest concerns a new cooker. I will dump my gas cooker (not really dump) and put a stylish induction heating cooker by Siemens.
The principle is to heat up directly the ferrous pots and pans by means of electromagnetic induction.

The appliance itself is made of ceramic glass and satin-finished stainless steel, and has touch screen controls. You just slide the bar with the fingers to set the power. The design it quite elegant and sleek.

The Idiotic Warden

I work for a company which has a tight relation with a big market leader multinational company which produce some sort of pumps. The type of pump is not important. What's important is that their millions-of-euro balance is made of pumps, yeah P.U.M.P.S.
Well, if I send them an e-mail (and I write them continuously during every shining and rainy day of my working life) and the subject contains the word "pumps", then the e-mail is rejected by their spam filter as.. sex spam.
Isn't it more idiotic than rotten meat in the wedding cake?
Enjoy.

Image by stgermh published under this creative commons license.

What's Google Knol?

Can someone explain me how Knol is supposed to be different or give the community a benefit with respect to Wikipedia?
Maybe providing way to share alternative knowledge on same topics?
Maybe Google's trying to limit Wiki's "power" by introducing and, possibly, pushing an alternative tool?



Knol is currently beta. What a surprise! :)
Thanks for feedback.

Fin d'été

Awesome!

In an abandoned city before a tropical storm, a woman decides to stay...
Through this film, our ambition was to portray a particular ambience and feeling more than a heavy storyline. We (Patrick Harboun, Ronan Le Fur and Joaquim Montserrat) worked on it for 6 months within our studies at Supinfocom, a French CG animation school.
The soundtrack was composed by Christophe Julien.
The film's website www.findete.com features a lot of background information.
We hope you'll enjoy it.

The Ballad of the Troubleshooter

In the end of March I wrote an article about Manchester Mark I. Some days ago the article got plugged by Slashdot geeky newsite and as a results thousands of readers poured on my blog to read it. This was nice but it brought with it a surprise even better. I got comments from two of the people who actually worked on the Mark I machine.
In December 1953 Owen Ephraim was a newly appointed Ferranti maintenance engineer sent to maintain the Mark 1 at Manchester University. His job was to to find and repair whichever of the 20,000 valves or 100,000 components had failed. He worked with Alan Turing and as the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) was as low as 1 hour, Turing was delighted to get a few minutes running time after re-entering his software on tape or by hand, whenever he handed the 'working' machine back to him after repair. Owen tells that Turing usually had a useful suggestion as to which 'module' was at fault and then left him to identify and replace the component by sight or touch. (bright valves are OK, cold components were probably gone). The big danger was to have a second fault develop while looking for the first. In that case all evidence became doubtful.
He continues:
"Turing was quiet and focused on his work. We did not chat nor have any contact that was not related to the work in hand. He was 17 years older than myself and I had no idea of his previous work.
A second 'engineer' joined me in early 1954 and I was instructed to teach him. He was called Frank ? as I remember, good technically but a bit remote socially. On one occasion I found him in the computer room when I arrived on the Monday morning. He claimed to have spent the nights in the broom cupboard as he did not wish to travel home. I did not report his misdemeanour and it was not repeated. He left abruptly soon after Easter as I remember and I now suspect he was an MI5 plant to watch Turing.
I was not particularly surprised when Turing did not turn up on Tuesday the 8th as he was absent from time to time without warning. I did not hear about his suicide until the Thursday or Friday. I 'cleared my desk' and returned to 'normal duties' at the main 'works' in another part of Manchester, a few days later.
8 months later I was sent to Italy to install the Mark I in Rome"

And in Rome was also the second guest of my blog who also commented the Manchester article and shared his memories of that glorious time. In 1955 Prof. Roberto Vacca was maintaining a Mark I machine located at the National Research Council in Rome, Italy. He worked out a theorem in number theory (distribution of 0's and 1's in powers of integers) and Owen Ephraim was his mentor. In 1957 Roberto wrote a ballad while he was freaking out watching an oscillograph. There was an issue with the machine: every 10-30 hours it miscalculated certain sums when the number to be summed contained a 00100 configuration which in duotrigesimal (base 32) reads @. So he wrote a program (nicknamed tete-à-tete) which repeatedly summed @@@@ = 00100 00100 00100 00100 and figured out the issue.
THE BALLAD OF THE TROUBLESHOOTER

Note from the author:
"The ballad is bawdy, but it was written under stress -- many hours of staring at an oscilloscope in turns without even batting our eyelids to watch a rare fault occurrence. So the vulgarity may be forgiven - after 52 years. I guess there is a statute of limitations."

Sweat is tickling down my face,
The taste thereof is salt:
I'm running on a race
With an intermittent fault.

I don't think I can cope
With the hunt for the bloody clod
To stare at the bloody 'scope
Is a job for a bloody sod.

I do begin to hate
The bright traces on the screen;
It shouldn't be my fate,
But the fate of a bloody queen.

The boss he doesn't guess
What a difficult job it is.
To clear this bloody mess
Takes bigger ball than his.

To clear this bloody muck
Takes more than half a mo'
And blast and curse and fuck
Who says it isn't so!

Roberto Vacca, 1957

You can reach Roberto at his website http://www.robertovacca.com/inglese.html. He is also a writer of essays and novels. You can read about his books and buy printable copies here.

The Treat of the Week #002

Teslan high-voltage generators lost in the russian countryside…

Copyright of Master_z_great

Linux Foundation coordinates Intel's Moblin development

That's a good news indeed, that Intel's called The Linux Foundation to host and take care of the management behind the development of their former vendor-tied Moblin platform.

Moblin was created in 2007 by Intel as a platform for devices powered by their first generation of Atom processors, codenamed "Silverthorne", which landed on the market in 2008. Now that the new Atom generation, codenamed Lincroft, is about to be released (Q4 2009) Intel's has handled over the Mobile project to the Linux Foundation. This has officially happened on April 2nd 2009.

Intel's already a Linux Foundation member and has now taken a more important step in promoting the Linux ecosystem than merely financing the Foundation. But don't misunderstand me, with promoting I'm not stating that Intel's effort is a bare charity-driven promotion. This is the sort of business move are good for Linux. Obviously Intel's believes in Linux, as the lots of companies which had chosen this operating system as the engine for their product. Don't forget that if Linux's market share as a desktop system is ridiculous with respect to Microsoft's, the same is not for a lot of other real world technology from flat screen tv  to supercomputers, from navigation system to Nasa's Mars rovers and so on. With Linux Foundation's stewardship Intel can hope to increase its market share of its Atom processor especially in the view of the constantly rising mobile Internet devices (MIDs). The Linux Foundation, on its turn, will ferry Moblin to the vendor-neutral shores thus providing a new open source platform and libraries for the development of mobile systems such as notebooks and car computers or infosystems.
Linux vendors such as Novell are positively impressed by Intel's choice that will surely boost the Linux development and adoption in the environment of the mobile devices.
You can find more information by reading the announcement post on the Linux Foundation website.
What I deem more important about this is the fact that Linux, as a platform, is more and more getting support from big agents in the market. This is especially important because the war that Linux and its users fight on a day to day base is that of getting support for third parties software and hardware. What's more frustrating to be unable to exploit your new sleek mobile phone or portable media player and so on, because the manufacturer didn't even think about releasing the software/driver for Linux? And the most frustrating part is that you know that with modern programming languages (like Python) and software development toolkits (like Qt) it's not so hard to write a software that can run on Windows, Linux and Mac with minimum or even no modifications on the original source. These sort of battles can only be won through politics and public relations, that is to say creating a critical mass of alliances and support to induce the above mentioned vendors to take into consideration that their few Linux oriented customers deserve support the same way do their Windows oriented customers.