FUDCon Toronto 2009: Day 1, Part 1

A bit late, but finally have some time to post about the Fedora Users’ and Developers’ Conference, aka FUDCon, which was recently held in the Seneca College buildings on the York University campus, in north Toronto.

Apart from attending the Fedora Ambassador Day at Ohio Linux Fest 2008 in Columbus, this was the first ‘official’ Fedora event I’d ever attended, and didn’t know quite what to expect. There were an amazing number of people attending from across North America and quite a few from Europe as well, so I knew this was going to be a great learning opportunity and chance to contribute!

The York campus is pretty large, but well-marked and after driving around a bit I was able to locate the parking garage behind the York Lanes mini-mall. A short walk south a bit and in to the Seneca @ York building.

I happened to meet Mel Chua from the Red Hat Community Team and she got me my nametag and t-shirt. I was just in time for the barcamp pitches that would be the focus of the first day.

Wow! That was really the line for the barcamp pitches?! There must have been 40-50+ people in line, waiting to give their 30-second summary of what they wanted to present that day. I’d been to one barcamp before, but it was nothing like the size of this, and it was amazing really to see how this model can scale to a meeting with 175+ people. It was really great to put faces to names that we see on the Fedora lists and in the Fedora Weekly News beats each week. The sessions were broken down into two tracks: User and Developer. This offered a nice mixture of general to specific, novice to advanced topic sessions, and with such a variety that it would be hard to choose what to actually attend!

As people finished their pitches, they passed their one page sheets to get posted outside the room on the wall, where people could vote on the sessions. Considering each proposal that we’d heard, all the attendees placed a mark on the sessions that they thought were worth having from a broad perspective, not just what they planned to personally attend. A bit of controlled chaos here, as folks were released into the hallway to vote a couple rows of seats at a time. Next, after everyone had voted, the sessions that had the most votes were placed on another wall, into the schedule for the day! There were about 10 concurrent sessions, running 50 minutes each from 11:00 am through 6:00 pm with an hour for lunch. A lot of the sessions were team-presented, really showing the collaborative community that is Fedora, and also leveraging different and complementary skill sets that co-presenters brought to the session.

The schedule went up on the wiki, so both attendees and remote folks could see what sessions were going on in which room at what time for the remainder of the day.

We had five rooms on the first floor of the building and then another 4-5 on the second floor.

Attendees were encouraged to live transcribe the meeting on IRC channels that were set up for each room, which was an interesting way to engage remote attendees in each of the sessions. Fedora uses something called zodbot on the fedora* channels on irc.freenode.net, which allows one to record a meeting and have log files automatically output to a location where they can be linked to to more widely share. A great idea, as this essentially documents the Con as we go along through the schedule with very little effort!

Tomorrow I’ll get into the rest of FUDCon Toronto 2009 Day 1. Stay tuned!

Filed under: fedora , fudcon

Jazz Traditions, 2009-11-30, 10:00 pm – 12:00 am WSND 88.9FM

Modern Jazz Quartet – Third Stream Music (1960)
1. Da Capo
2. Fine
3. Exposure
4. Sketch
5. Conversation
Milt Jackson: Vibraphone; Jim Hall: Guitar; John Richard Lewis: Piano; Connie Kay: Drums; Percy Heath: Bass; Bill McColl: Clarinet; Manuel Zegler: Bassoon; Paul Ingraham: French Horn; Bo Di Domenica: Flute; Jimmy Giuffre: Calrinet, Tenor Sax; Gerald Tarack: Violin; Joe Tekula: Cello; Betty Glamin: Harp

Theolonious Monk – Brilliant Corners (1957)
1. Brilliant Corners
2. Ba-lue Bolviar Ba-lues-are
3. Pannonica
4. I Surrender, Dear
5. Bemsha Swing
Theolonious Monk: Piano; Sonny Rollins: Saxophone; Clark Terry: Trumpet; Ernie Henry: Saxophone; Oscar Pettiford & Paul Chambers: Bass; Max Roach: Drums

Wayne Shorter – Night Dreamer (1964)
1. Night Dreamer
2. Oriental Folk Song
3. Virgo
4. Black Nile
5. Charcoal Blues
6. Armageddon
Wayne Shorter: Saxophone; Lee Morgan: Trumpet; McCoy Tyner: Piano; Reggie Workman: Bass; Elvin Jones: Drums

Filed under: WSND , WSND, WSND-FM

Classical Cafe, 11/26/2009 12:00-1:00 PM, WSND 88.9FM, Notre Dame, IN

Henry Purcell
1. Sonata no.3 in D minor (1683)
2. Sonata no.4 in F major (1683)
Sonatas of Three Parts (1995)
Editions de L’Oiseau-Lyre 444 449-2

Aaron Copland
1. Scherzo Humoristique: The Cat and Mouse (1920)
2. In Evening Air (1966)
3. Midday Thoughts (1944, 1982)
Complete Music for Solo Piano (1994)
Performed by Leo Smit, Piano

Ludwig van Beethoven
1. String Quartet in F minor, Op. 95 “Serious”
Living Quartets, Op.18, no.4, Op.95, Op.135
Performed by the Tokyo String Quartet
BMG Classics 0926-68038-2

Filed under: WSND , WSND, WSND-FM

Jazz Traditions, 2009-11-23 10:00 PM – Midnight WSND 88.9 FM Notre Dame, IN

Art Blakey Jazz Messengers – Live in Tokyo 1961 & London 1965 (2007)
1. The Summit
2. Dat Dere
3. A Night in Tunisia
4. Yama
5. Moanin’
6. Blues March

Herbie Hancock – Empyrean Isle (1999)
1. Cantaloupe Island

The Oscar Peterson Quartet – We Get Requests (1997)
1. My One and Only Love

Paul Bley – Memoirs (1997)
1. Monk’s Dream

Terry Gibbs with Buddy DiFranco – Chicago Fire (1987)
1. Sister Sadie

Horace Silver – Live at Newport ‘58 (2008)
1. Senor Blues

Thelonious Monk Quartet – Misterioso (1958)
1. Misterioso

Chet Baker – Live at Gaetano’s Pueblo, Colorado 1966 (1992)
1. ‘Round Midnight
2. On Green Dolphin Street/Luscious

Filed under: WSND , WSND, WSND-FM

Classical Cafe playlist, 11/18/2009 12:00-1:00 pm

Works played on WSND 88.9 FM Classical Cafe for November 18, 2009
Host: Pascal Calarco

Aaron Copland, Quiet City (9:48)
London Symphony Orchestra, cond. Aaron Copland
Sony Classical 1990 SM3K 46559

Francis Poulanc, Elegie for horn & piano (9:33)
Francis Poulenc, Sarabande for guitar (3:10)
Naxos Classics 1999 8.553614

Nicolo Paganini, Sonata VII for violin and Guitar
Moshe Hammer, Violin
Norbert Kraft, Guitar
Naxos Classics 1995 8.553142

Filed under: WSND , WSND, WSND-FM

NetworkedBlogs

Blog:

Pascal's Place

Topics:

Fedora Linux, Librarianship, Music

Follow my blog

Filed under: Uncategorized

Fedora 10 -> 11 upgrade experiences

Fedora 11 came out two weeks ago, and last Friday I decided to run
through the upgrade process to Fedora 11, after backing up local files
to external disk, of course. Prior to this version, I have always done
clean installs, not using the upgrade packages.

In Fedora 9 they introduced a preupgrade kit that basically updates all
of the RPM packages on the system, leaving the system to be up and
running. Since this has been in the distro for a few versions I decided
I would try it out with my Fedora 10 to 11.

On my Lenovo Thinkpad this actually worked flawlessly. It took about 45
minutes to download and update 1915 packages at which point the system
rebooted nicely into F11. The only thing I have found that doesn’t work
as expected so far were the ALSA plugins for pulseaudio, which were
preventing my Skype audio working properly; this is a known issue on the
ALSA side. Once I removed the ALSA-pulseaudio-plugin and related
packages, all was well.

Next I tried this at home with my Fedora 9 system. Here this wasn’t so
successful. There is a known bug in anaconda (the graphical boot loader
for Fedora, which was completely rewritten for this version), and I
apparently stumbled on one of the scenarios where anaconda didn’t handle
the drive setup very well. I tried to resize the partition sizes during
the install, and hadn’t done my homework to see that this is a known issue
(https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F11_bugs#Installation_fails_with_PartitionException:_Can.27t_have_overlapping_partitions)
The install failed and when I rebooted I found that my bootloader was
gone, throwing a grub error 17 (partition is there, but I don’t know
what kind it is).

I do have this machine dual boot with Windows Vista Business on the
second hard drive, so to fix this I just had to go into the BIOS, change
the boot drive priority order, and then run the Windows Rescue disk to
fix the bootloader. I did all this and was back up and running after a
bit of time.

So, overall, a pretty nice experience, certainly with less downtime than
in the past, but I encourage everyone to first look at the known issues
wiki page to see if you might run into anything:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F11_bugs

Filed under: Uncategorized , fedora

OLE Indiana Workshop, April 22nd

Yesterday I attended a follow-up Open Library Environment workshop for Indiana academic libraries, at IUPUI in Indianapolis. We started off our day by meeting at the Hesburgh Library at 6:30 am and arrived a few minutes before the 10:00 am start time, which was due to run until 3:00 pm that day. 28 librarians and staff were in attendance, the bulk of which represented various libraries at Indiana University Bloomington and Indianapolis campuses, Purdue University Libraries sent a team, an attendee from Taylor University who was also representing the Private Academic Libraries of Indiana (PALNI) consortium, and then five of us from Notre Dame, from Library Information Systems, Digital Access & Information Architecture, Monographic Acquisitions, our Librarian-in-Residence and our Data Services Librarian.

The day started off with welcomes from the Library Directors of IUPUI and Indiana University, some introductions of all attendees, and then a presentation by Robert McDonald, Associate Dean for Library Technologies for the IU Library System.

The goal of the OLE Project (http://oleproject.org/) is to specify and design, co-develop, build and implement a community source, next generation business system for libraries. In the past this has been known as the “Integrated Library System (ILS)”, which comprised the lifecycle management of physical items (books, journals, videorecordings, music, etc.) that a library typically purchases for their user community. With the explosion of electronic information that libraries have been acquiring in the last 15 years, the scope of these systems have been increasingly antiquated and less able to meet the needs for libraries to manage these effectively. This has resulted in a variety of other systems growing up around the ILS to handle these new needs, including citation linking, federated search services, electronic resource management and most recently, separate enhanced resource discovery interfaces that address some of the shortcomings with the web interface used by end users of these systems.

The library systems market is a small one globally, and the academic research library market an even smaller niche. The North American and European installed base of ILS software provided by the four main companies in this market is perhaps 4000-5000, which is tiny by most mainstream software comparisons. Two of these companies are held by private equity firms, another is family owned and privately-held. Recent consolidation within this market and the maturity of the installed current generation of software have made this a fairly flat growth market for these vendors, and McDonald guessed that the market would consolidate further down to perhaps two vendors within the next 2-3 years. The only company so far that has addressed a five year plan for coming up with a ‘next generation ILS’ thus far has been Ex Libris, so McDonald thought that they would be one of the companies that survives, but was less confident of the others.

The OLE Project has held a variety of regional workshops to engage about 350 participants from 175+ libraries in North America and Australasia, and the next part of the day was spent reviewing the OLE Reference Model and outcomes of the business process modelling activities that participants have contributed to. This, along with a two-year activity study done on the work of libraries by the National Library of Australia, has resulted in OLE to be able to define the major functional categories of business activity in academic libraries. These functions will be developed and exposed using Service Oriented Architecture, a software development approach that allows functionality to be exposed to other computer programs in a modular and granular way to allow for flexible, extensible and scalable software that can be plugable and easier to integrate with other external systems, most notably enterprise academic systems such as financials, human resources, student information, identity management and digital repository functional areas.

Ex Libris is busy defining their next generation ILS, code-named Unified Resource Management (URM) at this point, representing the vended application choice. The OLE Project represents the community and open source development along these lines.

OLE is looking to identify build partners for the second phase of their request for grant funding to Mellon, which will be due into Mellon in July 2009. This includes a commitment of up to two years from at least part of a programmer from a build participant institution, and some other cost sharing up front. With the economic downturn, Mellon is expected to be able to contribute only two years funding support instead of three, and Mellon expects the Project to be able to demonstrate that the effort is sustainable with a governance model and robust community developing around the project to see it forward into the future.

There was also some time spent on discussing the Kuali Foundation (http://kuali.org/), which develops, maintains and governs a variety of open source administrative enterprise software for higher education, and which could serve as a non-profit organizational home for the OLE Project.

We wrapped up the day with some discussion on ‘blue-skying’ opportunities and where the group thought we could stop doing some current activities and start doing new things to address the rapid change in higher education, commodity search services like Google in relation to libraries, and related issues.

The OLE Project certainly has a good deal of momentum around it, and it will be very interesting to see how the vended and community source options develop over the next two years. This will certainly be a pivotal time in library systems and services, and it is certainly good to engage in both areas to influence and educate ourselves and the institutions we work for on these developments.

Filed under: OLE, travel reports

One Laptop Per Child presentation at Notre Dame

Chuck Kane, OLPC President and COO and ND ‘79 grad, came to talk to a very full room at the Eck Center last night, and I think he was quite successful. OLPC is starting a program this summer to recruit college students to help with OLPC deployments in two locations in South America and one in Africa, which is pretty exciting stuff. The talk was sponsored by the Center for Social Concerns on campus here, and about 80% of students at Notre Dame participate in some service project over their undergraduate experience, so the interest in this project is not too surprising.

There was some discussion about the fallout with Intel which was interesting to me, since I hadn’t followed much of the story. Powerful videos of photos taken at many many OLPC XO deployment locations and the look of joy and excitement and hope on the faces of these kids as they explored computing for the very first time, many of them not even have ever been exposed to an electrical device let alone a sophisticated information device such as a laptop. I was amazed that they have been building this effort through a total of 23 employees. Hundreds of volunteers in the linux and application community, hundreds more working on deployments worldwide, and then multitudes participating in Give 1 Get 1 and other donation campaigns. The second generation XO looks gorgeous too — that is pure engineering beauty. What a powerful 90 minutes!

As a librarian and educator, I’m particularly interested in the content we can build for the OLPC programme. I’ll certainly be exploring this with my other colleagues here at ND and across the great swath of community involved in the dream to provide a better education for this planet’s 1 billion children.

As a Fedora enthusiast and Ambassador, I now have a better understanding of the critical value that’s added by the community supporting and enhancing Sugar, the user environment that comes with the OLPC XO. From here on out, the Fedora and Sugar communities are 100% responsible for the operating system, UI and applications within the XO. That’s a great responsibility, but also a wonderful opportunity to get directly involved in further development of the OLPC!

Filed under: fedora , fedora, olpc

Open Library Environment (OLE) Chicago workshop

I, along with two other colleagues from Notre Dame, attended the OLE workshop at the University of Chicago last week. Perhaps twenty-five people from 10-12 institutions were there, and OLE has been very aggressive with lots of momentum behind them in having many of these workshops.

The OLE project is a Mellon-funded project led by Duke University to build a requirements document for a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) open source ILS (sans OPAC) suitable for the academic/research market. Mellon is also funding the eXtensible Catalog project, a resource discovery environment remarkably akin to Primo. I wonder if they might next fund development of an open-source ERM to complete the library stack they are funding development on . . .

The purpose of the meeting was to collaborate on identifying areas that today’s ILSes do a good job and a less good job, and then to identify what core functionality OLE should/might consider as they build their requirements document for an open-source ILS to meet academic needs. We ended off the afternoon by doing some business process modelling in the groups we were split up in: acquisitions, cataloging, circulation, serials/ERM.

The full reports and output from the workshop are available at:
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/staffweb/depts/ils/projects/ilsreplacement/OLEUChicworkshop.htm

A couple things struck me about the meeting:

1) Participants were mostly concerned about building a better system with much of the same scope of functionality; there was much less discussion and focus around re engineering workflows and such compared to similar discussions at IGeLU for Ex Libris’ upcoming URM system, for example;

2) SIRSI and a surprising number of Voyager sites were fairly dissatisfied with the functionality set of their current ILSes. Perhaps Aleph does a better job in general with consortia functionality, which is the perspective I was approaching this from. I pointed out to the circulation group I was in where Aleph could handle certain functionality well where the others could not.

3) I found out an interesting metric: Equinox is reportedly supporting 270 libraries on Evergreen for a total (yes, total for all 270) of $200,000. Granted, 250 of these 270 are small publics in the state of Georgia, but that is an impressive total cost of ownership.

4) If there are many libraries that perhaps won’t be able to afford to buy/migrate to URM within the next few years due to the economy, there may be an opportunity to save some Voyager defections by offering to move them to Aleph, and for other SIRSI/Horizon, etc. customers to move them as well. I wonder if Ex Libris has done functionality gap analysis between Voyager and Aleph to any extent?

Filed under: travel reports , Aleph, Ex Libris, ILS, OLE, open source, SIRSI, URM, Voyager