alex.polvi.net

… when we would have resizable textareas.

Bloggers will love it. ™

It seems pretty apparent that the “secret” we were keeping at the OSLUG meeting is out in the open now. The original plan was for Chris Beard, Chase Phillips, and Dave Miller to come and talk about their experiences with the Mozilla Foundation. Instead Chris was left in California, Chase was locked onto his laptop for some unknown reason, and Dave was left alert and ready to talk.

Near the beginning of the meeting Chase received a phone call, in which he quickly went out into the hallway. After about ten minutes Chase came back into the room. He promptly said something to the effect of, “If you can wait about 30 minutes, I will tell you in detail what a Mozilla release is” he continued “You also have to promise to not talk about this until we have an official release out.” We all agreed, Chase went back to his computer, and Dave promptly continued to talk to us about his work on Bugzilla.

Dave was very through about Bugzilla. One interesting point was how bugzilla cannot release very often because most of the users are large cooperations. Every time they release it requires the clients to prepare and upgrade migration plans that often take a lot of time.

Once he was ready, Chase went wild explaining what he was up to. Just that night there had been a zero-day exploit released on a public mailing list about effecting all versions of firefox. Being the release engineer he had built the first releases of 1.0.3 during our LUG meeting. Yep, Chase said we could say he built Firefox 1.0.3 during the meeting. Pretty wild!

The meeting ended up going roughly 3 hours all said and done. Pretty long, but well worth it. It seemed like everyone who participated had a good time. Also, everyone who participated gets a Mozilla shirt! I got an email a few days ago saying that the shirts are in the mail and will be on campus soon. Thanks Mozilla!

His homepage is right here! Congrats Brandon!

Looks like we will finally be semi-differentiated.

A fun design philips thought up, and I implemented:

Direct link to PNG, or EPS.

UPDATE: The EECS Dept didn’t care too much for it.

Thanks for the design. We’ve talked about it and think it would
probably work better for a student club shirt.

The platform for learning in CS has not gone very far. We got to the point that it was time to talk details, and nobody came up with anything good. Nothing has “clicked” that just works.

Tonight after talking with members from the OVP, I am all fired up to start a program creating paid internships based around open source software. This is something we have talked about before. As the famous Paul Querna once said, “every open source project can use more love”. The value given back to the sponsors is relatively cheap training. The students would obviously benefit by having the coolest job in the world. I mean what is better then being dedicated to a open source project AND being paid to do it?

There are a few distinct groups that need to be contacted in order to make this happen

• Sponsors: Find people to fund such a program.
• COE: Need to figure out how to best fit this in with what the COE is doing.
• OSL: This might be the perfect chance for some cross pollination.
• Students: Find people that would actively participate (should be easiest part).

Lets start with OSL and COE.

Two folks from the OVP will be in town tomorrow. They will be here to listen to student ideas for high tech and open source start-ups.

This was one of those “would this be a neat event” someone mentioned. So, after making it happen, lets see if people show up! Who wouldn’t like free pizza and possibly money?

What: Oregon Venture Partners pizza and pitch night.
Who: Dave Chen, Lucinda Stewart, and Oregon State Students.
Where: Trysting Tree Conference Room (Weatherford Hall)
When: Wednesday, April 13th, 5pm-6:30pm.
Why: Share your ideas, receive feedback, and perhaps be funded.

Today I received the following email:

Congratulations on your wonderful academic achievement this year!

On behalf of University Housing and Dining Services it is my pleasure toinvite you to a reception honoring you and your colleagues in the Residence Halls, Cooperative Houses, and Orchard Court Family Housing who made the Honor Roll during Fall Term 2004 and/or Winter Term 2005.

We will have several speakers at the event. Edie Blakley, Coordinator for the National Student Exchange program, will be speaking about exciting opportunities to do a student exchange at another college or university within the country. Tanya Ulsted, International Education Graduate Teaching Assistant, will be presenting information about opportunities for students to study abroad in both English and non-English speaking countries. Please feel free to bring a guest to share in your celebration. We hope that you will join us!

When: Saturday, April 30th

Where: Arnold Dining Center

I promptly replied:

> When: Saturday, April 30th

What time of the day? Or is it an all day event? :)

And a whole 5 minutes later received:

The e-mail sent titled “Academic Success Celebration Invitation” was sent in error. Please disregard, and apologies for any confusion. Thank you.

Oh well, looks like they dont like people who ask questions.

We had a good, relatively quick, meeting after the OSL Open House. The goal was to decide on a few things:

• When/Where
• Decide on a user/hobbyist distro

Rob Brown was oh so kind and typed up the InstallFest3 page. The outcomes of the objectives are there.

So far I have sent the email off asking for the room reservation, hopefully we will get the OK on Monday (calendar says it is free).

UPDATE: We secured the room

This is by no means a topic I am an expert on. I do not develop the kernel, am not even on the mailing list, nor do I know the full story. The only shred of credibility I have is that I stayed on Larry’s couch nearly a year ago. Even then, however, we only had one good bitkeeper discussion. Alas, everyone has an opinion…

BitKeeper is right on. From the discussion with Larry, allowing open source projects to use BK was something he was doing out of sheer kindness. The bonus for the project is that they get a good source code management. For BK there might be some marketing wins, a few write-offs, and get to help out the community. A nice win win. When people, or companies, do something stupid that takes from this common good it is only reasonable to end the situation.

Linus is fine with it. Greg is fine with it. Larry is obviously fine with it. Seems like the situation is a win win again.

Now I am super excited to see what source code management software comes out of the woodwork. Something is going to have to step up. Thank BK for forcing innovation and creating another win!

I really want to be a morning person. Starting today I am going to go to bed to later then 11:30pm, and wake up no later then 7:30am, including weekends. The only exception is when extraneous events keep me out later then 11:30, in which case I will still wake up as early as possible in order to retain my previous training.

Lets see how long this lasts…

UPDATE: This does not work.