alex.polvi.net

Looks we are not the only ones that thought it was cool: Slashdot, Spreadfirefox

Between the hours of 12-6am Saturday morning a group of friends and I “took back the sidewalk” by painting a 24ft x 24ft firefox logo in the middle of the quad. We used 100% earth friendly materials: cornstarch, kool-aid, and water. Our process involved drawing a large grid with yarn and then chalking outlines for the different areas of paint. We only got talked to by campus police once and they were very understanding.

We all had different jobs. Some people were painting orange, some red, and some white. My job was to paint the ocean… instead of using paint brushes we used our hands (for the most part). Thus, my hand is blue.

Crazy fun way to support the community!

Project page: here
Photo gallery: here

Tonight we had a meeting with Greg and he blew our socks off. He had heard that mozilla released during one of our meetings, so being the Linux kernels 2.6.x.y maintainer he did the same. He showed the entire release process from checking his email for patches to uploading the .tar.gz. He even went as far to name this kernel release “Woozy Beaver” (2.6.11.8)!

In the announcement to the Linux kernel mailing list he thanked us, but the real thanks goes to him! Greg, thank you thank you thank you for everything you have done for the community including our own!

Photos here

The Linux Users Group shirt is finally coming together. I asked my friend Logan, who is very graphically inclined, to try and whip something up for us.

Needless to say, Logan rules. I could see this becoming a great logo for Linux in general.

Full pdf: front, back

The server that runs spreadfirefox was melting down because of the new firefox download counter. Going in to fix it we decided we would get much greater performance by caching the feed once a minute. This broke all the fancy live download counter plug-ins (sorry about that).

Since then it has been neat to see the evolution. The fancy live counters came back, this time using math to simulate being live. People have even started using regressions to find when we will hit 50,000,000 downloads.

Never really realized how many people were watching this little chunk of xml…

As silly as it sounds, it is a busy time to be a beaver. Today is sort of the last chance to sit back and breath. Here is a brief overview of the future:

• 30 mozilla servers land at OSL
• ACM Workshop on installing web apps, taught by yours truly
• GregKH is coming to visit OSU
• MTH351 Midterm
• New FTP hardware lands
• Physics + Botany midterms
• On going server madness at OSL
• Finding place to live in CA
• InstallFest3
• Finals
• Move to CA
• …

Good thing it is fun to be in way over your head!

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!

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.

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