For the past few months I’ve been working on the LTSP-Cluster team at Revolution Linux. Today we’re releasing the website so that we can tell the world what we’ve been doing!

LTSP-Cluster is a set of tools and plugins for LTSP that allows you to extend LTSP so that it can scale up to hundreds of servers and thousands of LTSP clients. It has a nice web interface for your LTSP configuration, does load balancing between your servers and more. It can even connect your LTSP thin client to a cluster of Windows terminal servers or NX servers, if you’re into that sort of thing. If you’re deploying LTSP soon, you’d probably want to investigate LTSP-Cluster, and I’m not just saying it because I’m involved in the project

It’s licensed under the GPLv3 license and supported by the LTSP community, you can also get commercial support *wink* *wink* from Revolution Linux where plenty of very skilled people are ready for your LTSP related needs.

As Scott posted before, the Edubuntu Bug day went quite well last week. This coming Thursday (21 January) we’re doing a Wiki Hug Day to to focus our efforts on fixing things in the Edubuntu wiki namespace, it includes:

• Fixing broken links
• Removing horribly obsolete or broken pages
• Moving pages which are in the wrong place
• Prettifying pages
• Mark pages that may need to be on the Edubuntu website instead
• Any other improvements we can think of

We’ll officially be starting the wiki hug day from around 12:00 UTC to accommodate the time-zones of our current contributors. It will be co-ordinated in #edubuntu on the freenode network. If you’re familiar with Edubuntu and know a thing or two about wikis, feel free to join in and get involved!

Happy 2010 everyone!

I’m not sure how I’ll ever top the 2000’s, it was quite an action packed decade for me, it’s sometimes hard to believe that in 2000 I was still in school

I haven’t made any big goals or plans for 2010 yet, I guess I’m happy with the direction things are going at the moment,  in short I plan to:

• Stay in Canada for a few months (probably over 2 visits)
• Get my motorbike license (appointment is for 1 March)
• Up my Ubuntu involvement more. Revolution Linux gives me at least a full workday a week for Ubuntu related stuff so this shouldn’t be hard
• Continue getting fitter- been doing great at the gym recently and I’ve been going 3-4 times a week for the last 2 months

I feel very good about this year, hope it turns out great for everyone!

Edubuntu 2.0

I should really blog about Edubuntu more. The Edubuntu project initially kicked off nicely, but with time as things changed things ended getting somewhat stale. Earlier this year we decided to rebootstrap the project. Edubuntu Project 2.0 is real and we’re getting some really good momentum going. We now have a new Edubuntu Council voted in, of which I’m really happy to be part of again. Revolution Linux also gives me and Stéphane some time to work on Edubuntu related things which is really awesome!

Tonight we had quite a good meeting, I posted a dump of the notes to the edubuntu-devel list.

What’s happening for Lucid

• Scott Balneaves is working on parental control features that will be included in upstream Gnome (he is now an upstream Gnome developer as well)
• Stéphane and myself will be the release contacts for Lucid
• Live LTSP session for the Live DVD, if this works in time for Lucid then many packages can be dropped from the alternate installation
• Menu editor based on groups
• We’ll attempt at revamping the artwork for Lucid, if we can’t get nice artwork in time we’ll fall back on Ubuntu artwork rather than have outdated Edubuntu specific artwork
• Sabayon is now in a really good state, Scott has done lots of work on it and it’s teachers should now find it very useful
• Nanny has been uploaded to the archives in the last week, it will be used to implement parental controls in Lucid
• With the Ubuntu archive reorganization, there will be an edubuntu-dev group with upload rights for the appropriate packages. We’ll sort out most of this after the holiday season
• Netbook edition: We’d like the option of installing a netbook edition from the Ubiquity, which basically entails installing a few UNR packages such as maximus and the netbook launcher. I’ll write a spec for this in the coming week

Community

We’re planning some hug days! More details and announcements will follow on the Fridge, etc. For now write these dates in your diary:

• 12 January 2009: Edubuntu Bugs Hug Day
• 21 January 2009: Edubuntu Wiki Hug Day

We’ll spend some time specifically for documentation as well, most likely in February some time.

We want to extend to other projects more. Currently Stéphane is working with the Guadalinex-edu people. I’m going to be working with the Qimo project to get their packages in Ubuntu. Scott  is working to become a Skolelinux/Debian-Edu developer and David van Assche is an OpenSuse-EDU developer so we’re making some progress with our relationships to other projects. We need someone to liaise with the Sugar project, so if anyone is willing to get involved with that please give us a shout!

Our next Edubuntu meeting is on 29 December at 19:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting on the freenode network so if you’re interested in getting involved you’re welcome to join in. If you can’t make it, meetings times will be made available on the Ubuntu Fridge.

Happy holidays!

Last night I attended the Quarrelsome Quince Geekdinner (wow it’s the end of November already!?). It was ok. The talks were good, Adrianna Pinska (aka confluence) did very well on the kareoke slideshow which was titled something like “The Winners of Safety at Work” which was a bunch of funny slides of people improvising at work mostly doing dangerous things. She did a great job since the slides were almost too easy since they were funny on their own, but she managed to be really quick on her feet and make up some really good stuff.

The food at Cafe Max were great and Delheim sponsored the wine. Even though the food and wine was good, I go to the geekdinners more for the geek part than the dinner part. I spent some time catching up with Andy about everything from off-line Wikipedia, tuXlabs, Ubuntu-NGO, Quebec, Canada and the French. I also got some mini-photography lessons from Joe and played with his nice Canon camera (which is why I haven’t took too many shots) but I’m sure he’ll have them up soon. After the geekdinner was officially finished I sat with Jeremy, Simon, Adrianna and Michael a bit, we looked through Jeremy’s xkcd book which was quite cool, besides having all the strips from the xkcd site, it also has lots of cool little puzzles that all fit together. Not sure what happens when you solve them all, but I want one of those books too now! They also talked about some of the problems in their Pyweek game called Rinkhals and somehow listening to them talking about problems in Python is always interesting even when I don’t completely understand. I have a lot going on this weekend but I’ll try to get to the CTPUG meeting tomorrow, I’ve only been to two of the CTPUG meetings before but I’ve always wanted to get more involved.

Oops, drifting a bit off-topic there, the next Geekdinner is at the end of January and if you’re interested you can subscribe to the announce mailing list where the details will be announced. Thanks to all the people who organised it!

For the Karmic release, Ubuntu-ZA had 4 release parties that took place in Stellenbosch, Cape Town, Pretoria and Brandford, that’s 4 release parties in the country for one release- a new record for our LoCo Team! I attended the Cape Town event at UCT yesterday which took place in the Shuttleworth Lab. Michael Gorven talked about netbooks and the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, I briefly went through the new features page on the Ubuntu website and did a little demo on gnome-shell. Lots of ISO images and repositories were copied around from external hard disks, the LEG mirror and from the Freedom Toaster (which didn’t work so well anymore later when one DVD writer was hot swapped :p).

There were some people who expected a bit more of a product-launch type event. I guess we need to get more markety type people involved so that we’ll have more fanfare next time, overall it was nice to see some familiar faces and finally meet some people that I’ve only known on the IRC channels and mailing lists before. David Rubin, our newest co-leader has already volunteered to organize the next release party for the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) release. We had some chat about Lucid and people are generally happy about a release that is more focused towards bug fixes rather then new features.

One Year of Independence

A little more than a year ago I wasn’t very happy, I managed to get myself stuck in a job I didn’t like working for a company I didn’t like in a city I didn’t like. It had compound effects that caused me more problems, I decided to take the plunge and start my own company, giving me the freedom to work on the things that I want to work where I want to and when it makes sense to do so. Yesterday it was exactly a year since I’ve done that when I founded Zanix, and looking back it’s been the single best decision I’ve ever made so far. I won’t deny that it was incredibly risky, but I don’t have any dependents or very big responsibilities (well, beseides perhaps my homeloan) so it turned out a good time in my life to do so. There’s been some rough spots especially with the accounting side and in some cases payments taking long to get to me, but I’ve learned a lot and it’s been a great experience so far, so far 2009 has been one of the best years I’ve ever had.

Revolution Linux

Over the next year I think things will be even better, over the last few months I’ve been talking to the nice people at Revolution Linux, and we worked out something that will allow me to run my current business and work for them almost-full-time. From my perspective I think it’s a best-of-both-worlds scenario, I don’t have to drop any of my projects and have a steady job working on things I really enjoy at the same time. My job title is literally “Ubuntu Developer/Analyst”, and I’ll be working on all kinds of Ubuntu and LTSP related things. Their head office is in Sherbrooke, QC which is close to where the LTSP hackfests happen so I’ll be spending lots of time up there. You don’t have to live long in Canada to be able to apply for a residency, so I might even go live there for a while, it will certainly make traveling around easier than on a South African passport. Sherbrooke is also driving distance from NYC so perhaps I might even go to Debconf next year. I’m not sure exactly how much time I’ll be spending everywhere yet, but I’ll know more myself once I stay there a few weeks after my work visa is approved.

Changes in involvement in CLUG and Ubuntu-ZA

I’m stepping down from the CLUG committee and also as co-leader of the Ubuntu-ZA loco team, since I’ll be traveling a lot next year and probably won’t be around that much, I’ll still be around virtually on the lists and on IRC and contribute here and there, but I’d rather leave the leadership roles to people who are active locally. Ubuntu-ZA elections are currently taking place on Launchpad and the CLUG AGM is taking place later this month where a new committee will be elected.

Just a few minutes ago, I finally became a MOTU! MOTU is short for Masters of The Universe (which is also the name for the old He-man comics and TV series, if you can remember that) and it’s the team that maintains the universe component packages in Ubuntu.

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Karmic I got renewed energy to persue my dreams to become a MOTU and had lots of encouragement. I spent some time with Stéphane Graber who showed me LTSP Cluster. It’s an impressive set of tools that he’s been working on that the company he works for develops. He said that I could maintain the LTSP Cluster tools in Ubuntu which should help a good deal towards me becoming a MOTU, I was thrilled and made it my goal to become a MOTU before Karmic was released. Little did I know that I would become a MOTU on the actual day that Karmic is released. At least I won’t forget when I became a MOTU

Thanks to all the MOTUs who have been helping me along the way, Stéphane and also for Jordan who taught me plenty of acronyms (not only for MOTU but also for Debian) and all the people who would answer my questions on #ubuntu-motu (especially ScottK, persia, RainCT, Soren, Hobbsee, \sh, sorry if I left someone out) and also Oli and Daniel who helped me a lot as I got started.

I’ve always had lots of plans for ‘one day’ when I become a MOTU. The timing is quite good so I hope to deliver a number of nice things in universe for Ubuntu 10.04!

The Return of Edubuntu

Edubuntu 9.10 has landed! For the past few releases, it has been an add-on CD to Ubuntu. Our users have have made overwhelming requests for a full-blown installation CD again and we have listened. Edubuntu 9.10 is now a DVD that contains a full Ubuntu installation plus the Edubuntu packages and the LTSP Server packages. Read the Release Announcement to find out how you can get Edubuntu!

The move to a DVD also forms part of larger plans so that we can fit more content and software on the system, and looking forward to Lucid (10.04) we may also be shipping a Live LTSP system which has been in high demand recently.

A Big Thank You to Jordan Mantha (LaserJock)

Without Jordan, the past few releases wouldn’t have been possible. He has resigned from Edubuntu recently effective as todays release. He has been involved in every aspect of Edubuntu and has done great mentoring work to many people that has been involved (including me).  Jordan has resigned to pursue his career that has been demanding more attention recently. We’ll be having Edubuntu Council elections soon, we’ll announce the details through the usual channels (The Fridge, UWN, etc) so please stay tuned as Edubuntu Project 2.0 continues to evolve. We’re always looking for new contributors and growing our community will be a focus over the next 6 months. Feel free to join in and get involved!

Story time! (Warning: Ramblings and emo ahead)

The only white guy in the room

About two years ago, I thought that it would be a good idea to join the classes at the gym for group sessions rather than just doing all the solo stuff. I checked the available classes, and one class promised to be an extremely fun freestyling dance class (or something like that) with lots of cool music. In my head, that got translated to people doing breakdancing, there being like, a little moshpit somewhere, lots of hot sweaty girls jumping around and into everyone else… well, more like what you’d imagine in a club than at a gym

The next day I showed up for the class and just as it started I noticed that I was the only guy there. Besides that, the music was *very* female targeted. I think that’s the most Westlife, Boyzone, *NSYNC, etc (at least it was before Jonas Brothers were around) I ever had to hear in such a short amount of time. Also, there was nothing freestyle about it! It’s like they all knew very specific and elaborate dances and I couldn’t keep up at all and it was mostly embarrassing. Some might find it ammusing, but the most intimidated I’ve ever been was in a room full of women younger than me in (mostly) pink dancing clothes.

Quite often, I’ve been in situations where I’m at a meeting or gathering where I’m the only white person there. This might be when I visit a library in Khayelitsha to help them with their computers, or previously when I did some government work. I’ve never actually had a negative experience in cases like these, but sometimes you become a bit paranoid (and I’m not a paranoid person to begin with). Sometimes I’ve had thoughts like “I hope that comment wasn’t directed at me” and you tend to fine-comb everything that is being said.

When you’re the only one, or in a very small minority that is obviously different from everyone else there, you naturally become a little bit more sensitive. I guess it’s just human nature.

E-Mail

In the late 90’s and early 2000’s, e-mail was a great way of communicating and staying in touch. I also found mailing lists quite handy and learned that because people can’s see and hear you directly, that it often happens that people read it incorrectly, and what might seem like an innocent message may be interpreted as hostile to others. I learned to keep my messages as short as possible and keep the tone as neutral as possible, especially on mailing lists and messages that are sent out to many different people. This didn’t work so well at work though. I’ve had collueges complain before that my e-mails are too formal, and that it makes them feel uncomfortable. It was even mentioned in a performance appraisal on year! I learned that some people, it seems especially extroverts (in the Myers-Briggs kind of way) are much likely to respond faster if you through in a joke or perhaps even mention something non-work related. My style of e-mail drastically changed depending on who I sent it too, and people were generally more happy with me. I drew the line when our marketing person told me that it’s become company policy to send out all e-mails in the font “Arial”. I told him that he’d have my resignation before I ever send out an e-mail in Arial which resulted in a bit of an arguement. He didn’t take it too well. While I didn’t succeed in changing the company policy (I had too many other things on my plate at the time to worry about that) regarding the Arial e-mails, we ended up at least getting permission for our team to send out our e-mails in plain-text.

For some people, receiving an e-mail with formal style and wording is perceived as a kind of passive-aggressiveness. For some people, sending out what is really just a text message in HTML (and especially with a font like Arial) is perceived as clean and proffessional, where anyone with some technical skills will dismiss it as being wasteful and stupid.

Saying Hi

I’ve often heard people (and more women than men) complain that their boss isn’t polite enough. It’s usually something like “When I used to work at Company A, our boss would always come into the office and greet everyone and once a month he’d get everyone together in the office and we’d eat some cake and he’d provide us with some motivation”. In one office space I worked in, our manager was specifically very quiet. It was sometimes so quiet in the office that it made lots of people (including myself) very uncomfortable. Most of the time it didn’t bother me so much, but in that extreme case I could understand what the other people were on about, who were more vocal about the problem. He later had some bad performance reviews from people complaining about his leadership style and he left. He actually did a really good job, his biggest failure was really not saying “Hi!” and “How are you doing?” often enough.

When you’re in a leader position, or a high profile person, people look up to you and they want guidance and reassurance. It’s why we have phenomenons like Bradgelina (the combined name for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) who some people obsess about. When you’re such a person, the slightest negative or positive thing you say can have a *huge* impact on all of those who follow you. I don’t think these people should censor themselves, but they should actively keep in mind that their word hold lots of weight, and that they should use them responsibly.

Mark and the girls

I read on Matt Zimmerman’s blog entry “Explaining to the Girls”. It’s about a comment Mark Shuttleworth gave at LinuxCon I got the video from a comment and his exact words were  “If we can really approach it from the perspective of saying how do we make this just awesome for users, then we’ll, uh, we’ll have have less trouble explaining to girls what we actually do”. If I personally heard it like that for the first time, I would certainly interpret it as a very sexist remark. Someone mentioned that he actually meant it as “the girlfriend” or “significant other”. After listening to it again today, I can see how he probably just meant that.

Mark reminds me of that manager I had that didn’t say hi to the other employees. It’s not that he’s a bad person, but I guess it’s kind of hard to dedicate some brain CPU cycles to consider others when you have billions of dollars in the bank to worry about, when you get to travel by personal plane, when you get to take on huge projects such as Ubuntu, etc. When you get to that stage I think you just live on an entirely different level than most other people. What might be a big deal for most becomes trivial and unimportant, the set of problems you have to deal with changes and are on a totally different scale.

I think what he said was quite insensitive, regardless of his intentions. I can imagine a young woman who might have given up a more comfortable career to risk working exclusively on free software, doing the effort to come to LinuxCon just to hear that girls are slow to understand stuff. If Mark just said “We’ll have less trouble explaining what we do to our significant others”, it would already have been a major improvement and he’d also be able to get his message accross better. In my opinion it will probably do Ubuntu some good if he at leasts makes some kind of public statement about this.

From my perspective, it comes back to saying hi, or perhaps more specifically, acknowledging people. Once you’ve done that it’s already easier to keep them in mind and not saying things that are mean and insensitive.