Le blog de pingou

Today is the first anniversary of the day we said good-bye to a good friend.

There has been a number of tributes in the couple of months following his disappearance, and there are still some once in a while. Personally, I hardly spend a week without remembering him or asking myself "What would Seth say?".

Good bye old friend, may your wisdom lead us.

This morning I released fedocal version 0.7.1.

With this version comes a number of new features which I thought would be nice to advertise a little :-)

The main calendar view & the menu

The main calendar view has had two additions:

• a pop-up stipulating if there are meetings present that week that are not displayed in the current window (for example, if you're seeing the meetings from 8am to 6pm and there is a meeting at 7pm, or at 4am).

• shortcuts to interact more easily with the calendar. These shortcuts contains three actions: Add a meeting, switch to list/calendar view, iCal feed.

The menu now highlights the calendar you are looking at to make things easier on you.

The list view

When viewing a calendar as list, fedocal will now automatically scroll down to the display the meetings of today or the future meetings.

In addition, this page also has the three shortcut buttons mentioned above (add meeting, switch view mode, iCal feed).

The detail view

We have added three new features in the page showing the details of a meeting

• permalink: when the user clicks on the pop-up showing the details of a meeting the url is updated to provide a permalink to that specific meeting. This allows one to copy/paste the url and send it to someone.

• countdown: with the help from mpduty we have added a countdown in the meeting detail view showing the remaining time before the meeting starts. This can nicely circumvent the timezone conversion if you are not logged in fedocal and want to know when a meeting starts

• UTC titles: if you hover over the dates/times with your mouse, the date/time will be shown in UTC which is always handy as in our community UTC remains quite often the most used way to communicate date/time.

I would like to take here the opportunity to thank kparal, ralph, willo, red and lbrabec for their bug reports and RFE that led to all these changes which I think are making fedocal 0.7.1 its best release so far :-)

Last week I have had the opportunity to attend my first Libre Graphic Meeting conference, this year located in Leipzig (Germany). Not being much of a graphic person, I must say that I was sometime lost a bit in some of the talks (being during a presentation or at the coffee corner), but on the other side I have learned a lot! I discovered a whole new side of the Open-Source Software community working on low-level tools and algorythms for image and video manipulation. Meeting these people with such a deep understanding of computer science and photo, for example, was a really extremely enriching experience.

I have learned about image manipulation and the cool effects provided in gimp by the g'mic project. I have met some of the dev of the darktable and inkscape projects, these guys are doing a remendous work, kudos!

On the Friday, we had a presentation about the gooseberry project by the Blender foundation. If you have not pledged to help them, go do it now!. Their project is amazing and need more help!

Another amazing talk was Sebastian Koenig presenting us his work on reviving a medial manikin with Blender. Basically the story is that a museum in Leipzig (the GRASSI Museum für Angewandte Kunst Leipzig) had this old maniki (22.5cm tall) which used to be animated, you could move her arms, legs, fingers or toes but it got old and stucked. So the museum in collaboration with the university did some sort of scan of the manikin and they asked Sebastian Köning to see if he could reconstruct the manikin using Blender. The resulting movie is now on display in the museum next to the actual manikin. I found this research amazing both from a technical and a historical point of view! And icing on the cake, since they had the mesh to reconstruct the animation on Blender they have also been able to make a 3D printed replicate of the manikin giving it back its ability to move.

On the last day, I was able to attend a workshop offered by Tobias Ellinghaus darktable developer and Patrick David about image manipulation on darktable and gimp. I had to leave before the end but the workshop was really, really interesting. Patrick did a live image editing demo in gimp, performing it on photo taken just a few minutes before. I need to practice this a little bit otherwise I'm going to forget all the good tips that were given.

I could also discovered some cool project related to DSLR such as the Magic Lantern which provides a new OS for Canon DSLR, awesome right? There is also the entangle project allowing to remotely control your DSLR, quite handy for macro or astro photos.

I was also given the possibility to contribute to the party. gnokii and I gave a presentation about nuancier as a FOSS contributing and voting application for wallpapers. I think it was well-received and there is apparently already interest to update it to support font. In addition, I took the opportunity, during a lightning talks session, to present HyperKitty and its demo instance which also seem to have brought quite some interest.

All in all, this was my first LGM meeting, I learned a lot about the whole libre graphic ecosystem, met a lot a new people and was given the opportunity to introduce a couple of projects dear to me. I really enjoyed it and would advise it to anyone interested, even remotely, into libre graphic.

Thank you for anyone that helped me attend or enjoying it (Gnokii, Ryan, Garrett, Chris and all the others ;-))!

Recently I spoke about dynamic point of contact assignment in pkgdb2, I had generated some global stats about general changes but nothing specific, so here is a little more information about the impact this would have for packagers:

 652 packagers lose at least one package
 In average they lose 6.82668711656 packages
 392 packagers gain at least one package
 In average they gain 11.7168367347 packages
 
 Top 10 packagers losing packages:
    iarnell loses 305 packages : 385 -> 80
    spot loses 185 packages : 348 -> 163
    jplesnik loses 173 packages : 214 -> 41
    than loses 167 packages : 185 -> 18
    steve loses 129 packages : 137 -> 8
    eseyman loses 97 packages : 190 -> 93
    psabata loses 76 packages : 150 -> 74
    jwrdegoede loses 70 packages : 173 -> 103
    corsepiu loses 53 packages : 112 -> 59
    mathstuf loses 51 packages : 63 -> 12
 
 Top 10 packagers gaining packages:
    ppisar gains 1353 packages : 295 -> 1648
    rdieter gains 241 packages : 135 -> 376
    kalev gains 127 packages : 43 -> 170
    limb gains 123 packages : 234 -> 357
    pghmcfc gains 114 packages : 176 -> 290
    pbrobinson gains 106 packages : 58 -> 164
    remi gains 101 packages : 212 -> 313
    mizdebsk gains 97 packages : 54 -> 151
    spot gains 93 packages : 348 -> 441
    petersen gains 75 packages : 141 -> 216

Graphically this is how it looks:

What about relative lost/gained, so instead of the number of packages let's look at the % of packages lost/gained relative to the number of packages that this user is the current POC:

 Top 10 packagers losing packages (in %):
    <... 142 packagers...> lose 100.0% packages
    steve loses 94% packages
    than loses 90.2% packages
    silfreed loses 90% packages
    packaging-team loses 89% packages
    yyang, sxw lose 87.5% packages
    amdunn, rocha, kylev lose 85% packages
    pvrabec, huwang, jdornak, hvad lose 83% packages
    timn loses 82% packages
    mathstuf loses 81% packages
 
 Top 10 packagers gaining packages (in %):
    paragn gains 1325.0% packages
    atkac gains 1100.0% packages
    crobinso gains 1000.0% packages
    hegdevasant gains 700.0% packages
    aalvarez gains 550.0% packages
    ppisar gains 459% packages
    airlied gains 433% packages
    pmachata gains 417% packages
    jkastner, jpeeler gain 400% packages
    adamwill gains 350% packages

Below is a graphical distribution of the packagers by the percentage of packages they lose:

So from this we can conclude:

• We have two packagers standing out with regards to the number of packages they would gain with a dynamic POC assignment
• We have one packager standing out as it appears he/she has a lot of packages but is not working on them so much anymore
• Some packager are both losing and gaining packages
• We need to filter out the groups maintaining packages, but with the move to pkgdb2 it will be easier to filter them out
• Quite a number of person are losing all their packages with dynamic POC assignment. There are also two peaks around 50% and 33%.
• Amusingly, ppisar who gains the most packages is not the one gaining the most packages relatively to the number of packages he already owns

As before I put the script I wrote to gather these stats on my cgit

This morning I update fedocal to its latest version: 0.4.2, this update brought quite a number of changes, among them:

• New UI, closer to pkgdb2, nuancier and koji
• Add location to meeting, so that #fedora-meeting should no longer be a calendar but a location
• Improved list view
• Improved window to add a meeting
• Improved calendar view where the full day meetings are separated from the other meetings
• Store the meeting in the specified timezone instead of UTC (allows to have a meeting at 2pm/14:00 Paris time all year long, despite of DST)
• Enable viewing the agenda in another timezone
• Enable browsing the dates without using the small monthly calendar

I took the opportunity to re-generate the database to make sure all the fields were in sync with the DB model planned. The data was then copied over from the old DB to the new one, which gave some stats about fedocal:

10 calendars added
18 reminders added
236 meetings added

Check it out!

Following up on the thoughts about activity on our packages using the last build date I was curious to investigate the activity of our packagers.

So here again, I wrote a script that uses FAS to retrive the list of people in the packager group. For each of these person, it then queries datagrepper for their last fedmsg message, thus retrieving the date of their last activity.

Graphically it looks like this: On the X axis is presented the number of packager whose last activity was on that day, on the Y axis is how many days ago that day was.

Converted to a log scale, we get: On the X axis is the log of the number of packager whose last activity was on that day, on the Y axis is how many days ago that day was.

On both graph the peak at the end represent the number of packagers for which no activity could be found on datagrepper.

To provide some more numbers:

• There are 1476 user in the packager group
• 224 were active today (day 0)
• 878 (59.5%) were active over the last 30 days
• 386 (26.2%) were not active for the last 100 days
• 296 (20%) were not active for the last 200 days
• 253 (17%) had no activity registered by fedmsg.
• The oldest activity registered is from 308 days ago.

You may be aware that we have a jenkins server running in the fedora infrastructure for our projects (and some others).

Until today, it was running two builders: one EL6 and one Fedora 18.

I have now added a third builder running Fedora 19 and I need to look into adding a Fedora 20 once the beta is out this could really help for testing applications against the latest Fedora.

I will probably retire the Fedora 18 builder when I add the Fedora 20 one, so if you have a project building only on Fedora, you might want to check its configuration.

PS: If you have a project on jenkins, you may want to check if every thing it still set-up correctly, I just had to re-configure a couple of projects which are using git as scm.

It has been a while but it has been about as long that I wanted to write this blog post.

I would like to come back a little on Nuancier.

Nuancier was born during the last flock in Charleston. The idea was to create an application to simplify the process of submitting and voting on supplementary wallpapers.

Until now the process was rather complex and not really user friendly.

• People upload their artwork onto the fedoraproject wiki
• Artwork would be validated by the administrators of the process
• From there we would set up an election in our classic election application
• The community would vote on names (the current election application does not have support for voting on artwork) which meant, having the list of submissions open on another tab/browser and keep navigating from one to the other

Not quite a user friendly process.

Nuancier aims at solving this. However, between flock and the last supplementary wallpaper election time was short, thus it was decided that if we could not manage to have a full feature app in place in time, we could manage to have the voting part done and deployed.

Thus we created nuancier-lite which is deployed and was used for the last election.

Among the features:

• Single page to vote where all the candidates are shown and you can just pick the one you like
• After discussions on the devel mailing list, you may claim a badge for voting
• Integration with fedmsg (election start/stop, results are published)

What I would like to do is come back on the results of these elections.

Anyone that had signed the CLA and was is more than one group could participate to this election.

The statistics of this election show that

• 128 person participated
• in average people voted on 12 wallpapers (16 was the maximum number of vote allowed)
• 52% of the participants voted on 16 wallpapers
• 68% of the participants voted on 10 or more wallpapers

And looking at the nuancier badge

• 79 person claimed the badge (61% of the people who voted)

Seeing that there are more than 3000 person registered on badges, I must say I was expecting a higher participation but according to the people used to run this election it is already much higher than it used to. On the other hand, we probably missed some annoucements as it was not even announced on the design-team list, something we'll have to be careful to do next time.

But for nuancier, there is still some work to be done:

• Add the capability for artists to upload their artwork via nuancier
• Possibility to name and pick a valid FOSS license for each of their artworks they submit
• Automatically check that the import is valid (type of file, size of the artwork...)
• Add the possibility for admin to moderate/approve submission using nuancier directly
• Interact with the design team to make the whole process as user friendly as possible

It is even a project for the Outreach Program for Woman 2013, so if you are interested, jump in!

Flock 2013 !

Since my last blog post about my arrival to Charleston (South Carolina), I have been participating to the Flock conference.

This time, around 200 contributors from 19 different countries gathered to discuss, debate, exchange and more importantly work on Fedora.

This is briefly what I have been doing over these four days:

Day 1

After helping out with giving away goodies, badges, lunch cards and T-shirts, I assisted to the fedmsg presentation by Ralph Bean. It was a nice overview of the project as it stands today and also a good presentation of the environment that is growing up around it (datagrepper, fedora-mobile, Badges and many more).

Then I had to decide between HyperKitty and the talk "Why Fedora sucks", knowing Aurélien and knowing that I am able to speak frequently with him, I went for the later. Christoph explained that he went back on some criticisms made few years ago about the project and going through this list, a number of them have improved or even some solved. On the other side he also listed a number of current issue, on UI, on comps and other aspect of the project. So there is still some work for us and we can't all retire yet ;-)

The last talk of the morning was from Haikel Guémar on FOSS development and Agile methods. I learned some things bout Agile itself and found out that some ideas I like are actually part of known project management processes. Quite cool all in all :)

The afternoon was dedicated to one larger discussion and a hackfest.

The discussion was about the future of IT in general and trying to get some ideas of where we would like to be in five years as a project. Quite an interesting debate started from this with ideas bouncing around of where people believe we will be in five years. Time will say if we were right during this session :)

The second part of the afternoon has been dedicated to a hackfest on semantic web technologies and more specifically how we could include the ontologies in our application. Using the DOAP ontology we can provide a standard way of describing a project, using the same standard as launchpad, pypi or debian. This should make data integration that much easier in the future.

For the evening program we had dinner in a restaurant few minutes walking from the hotel. We had a good time, it was hot and quite humid but we were outside and the fans helped us quite a bit.

Day 2

The day started with an awesome talk on 3D printer by Aeva Palecek from Lulzbot. Unfortunately, as pointed out by kevin earlier are out of stock for their printers :-D.

After that I went to the presentation of Suzanne Reed from FOSSBOX RIT the project she worked on gourciferous based on gource to visualize the history and evolution of git-based project. Quite a nice tool and a nice presentation as well.

Following this presentation, I went on learning a little more about darkserver and what it can be used for. Kushal had already introduce it to me some time ago but I wasn't sure I had understood it completely, while I have a much clearer idea now :)

For the last talk of the morning I went on learning a little more about clouds and Eucalyptus. Greg DeKoenigsberg is a really good speaker and the presentation (even was unfinished slides) was really really nice! It gave me a clearer representation of the cloud stacks available these days and how they differ form each other. Really interesting, thanks Greg!

The whole afternoon has been spent with the infrastructure to figure out how we would design and eventually setup a AuthZ server using some of the 0Auth principles (but not all).
The idea is to support the use case of people running job via CLI or cron against the Fedora Infrastructure but limiting their range of actions by providing them certain tokens that restrict them to the given action. (Am I clear here?) This is something we want to work on, so keep in touch if you are interesting, there are more thing coming ;-)

In the evening, we went to a bar, pretty much right in front of the hotel. The food was nice and the atmosphere really to 'relax'. We ate, we drunk, we danced and we had a very nice time over there. Toshio and Aurélien are making such an amazing dancing duo! Do come to Flock, if only for that ;-)

Day 3

The keynote speaker of the day was the author of the Cantarel font, used by default on Gnome 3. The talk has been about font development, open-font, he touched upon the web-fonts as well. It was quite interesting, less in my usual area of interest so most things were new to me which was nice.

I was supposed to give a presentation after that session but when I showed up in the room, no-one was there. I waited until ten past the hour and nobody showed up so I just went to Ricky's talk on code review for Fedora apps. Ricky did a nice job in presenting the advantages and limitations of code review as well as listing the different points to pay attention to when doing one.

The following talk had been by our local OpenID expert, Patrick. He presented us with how OpenID works in general and what are the extension that he developed for the Fedora Infrastructure, to satisfy our needs. All our application are slowly moving to OpenID, providing a single, central place where the user gives his password. In theory, ultimately, our contributors should not have to enter their password in any other place than the OpenID server.

And the last presentation of Flock I went to, was the presentation about Census by Nathaniel. Census is the replacement for smolt. It's still work in progress but the progress made are really nice. Nathaniel presented us with the design of the application, I must say I really liked its simplicity. I do think it should scale well and we should be able to make something of it. The bonus is that on the contrary to smolt, Census is design in such a way that we can throw any kind to data at it. So it is another place for us to collect and provide statistics about the project and its contributors.

The afternoon has been spent hacking on fedocal with Haikel. The next release is almost out of the door. Haikel, lbrabec and I were able to close the last remaining tickets for the version 0.2.0.

For the last evening, the organizer planned, I think, one of the most awesome dinner location I can think off. We had the full aquarium of Charleston for ourselves! From 7pm to about 10:30pm, we had drinks and food at the aquarium, looking at fishes, some snakes, an impressive white alligator and a very cute bird that spent 10 minutes seducing tatíca! It was an amazing evening a big thanks to the organizers for this awesome opportunity!

Day 4

The last day was dedicated to hackfest. So I hanged around with the infrastructure team. We were able to make a list of the coming tasks we want to do as well as those that we want to spend more time discussing about. After lunch, when we all moved to our tasks, I spent some time testing the new fedocal, fixing some of its configuration files and adjusting its spec file, testing the DB upgrade, only a couple more things to check/do (such as the update of the documentation) and I should be able to push this new version.

I have had a really good time with everyone in Charleston. I met new people, made new friend, got work done and work planned and we just had some good times all together.

The Fedora project is full of awesome people and every time I meet them I realize how lucky I am to be and work with them :)

A big thanks to the organizers and Fedora for making this event possible and giving me the opportunity to be part of it.

Organizers at work ;-)