Wanted: A GSoC student

Wanted: A GSoC student

Perhaps it's a bit early, but Toshio and i have been talking about a couple of crazy GSoC projects that will require a bit of a warmup cycle. I'm looking for a couple of highly motivated students who are looking for Summer Jobs and want to do something very crazy and awesome. If you're looking for something to do this summer, leave your email address in the comments, or use my contact information on the Fedora Wiki.

The first project is a content delivery project. Lately we've been bumping into issues with Fedora's No Content policy where people want to deliver wallpapers, themes, books, documentation, Gimp brushes, and so on that are essential to adding value to the packages we provide in Fedora. Alot of this content falls into a grey area that makes it really hard to decide if it should belong in Fedora. In most cases, however, it really doesn't belong there. Faced with the decision to turn down content submissions, we'd like to create a repository where we can point people to instead.

The aim of this project is to put together a content database system and some delivery mechanism and standard to get content to people's computers. What the database is going to look like, and what kind of frontend is completely open to the student working on the project. In the coming months, the goal is to sit down and discuss how you want to solve the problem, and how you plan to go about doing that. We'll plan out what standards already exist to solve part of the problem, who is using them, how to handle licensing questions, how to store data to make it friendly to the systems involved, and what's the best way to locally 'install' it to the computer. A project like this can become very complex, and the biggest challenge is refining it into a 12 week project.

The second project is a bit simpler. We want reliable download statistics from mirrors who mirror linux distributions in general. If you are familiar with Smolt, this will sound very familiar. We're looking for someone to write some tools mirror managers can use to gather statistics on their machines and a way for the stats to be gathered publicly. The details of the implementation are left to the student, but since we're looking for the right umbrella organisation and place to host the project, we are also recruiting now.

Both of these projects will most likely lean heavily on Fedora for support, since we plan on making heavy use of both of them once they are production ready. Both projects will be under a different organisation though, and you do not need to be a Fedora contributor to participate. The only requirement i have is a couple of years of experience with Linux.

T minus FUDCon: FUDCon Live, all systems ready to go

T minus FUDCon: FUDCon Live, all systems ready to go

After a pretty uneventful flight over the Atlantic, along with our EPIC FUDPLane-ness, i've safely arrived in Canadia, that silly place where all the government offices have two names. Immigration was a snap, even if i did it in French. Maybe next time i'll go over to one of those bilingual booths just to see how far i could take it.

After waiting for the Belg, we made our way to the hotel and then the Irish Pub nearby for lots of deep fried food and beer. I also had one of the carrot sticks Paul ordered, just to balance it out. After only two beers, jet lag set in and thanks to the stressed out wireless i decided to just go to sleep. The nice part of jet lag is now i'm awake to make full (ab)use of the internet while everyone else is still asleep.

I took the time to get everything setup for FUDCon Live. I'll be making a quick (very quick) presentation on how to do this, where to go and what to do. Just so that we have all the information in once place, you can figure out what to do by doing two things. Read this blog post or consult the landing page for FUDCon.

To start, each room lines up to an irc channel, #fudcon-room-X where x is a value between 1-8. I've also squatted a few breakout sessions channels, but there's no zodbot there, so we would have to log them individually. If you need a breakout IRC channel, let me know so i can join. I will be logging the entire affair as a backup.

Second, if you are recording a session, check out this page, which explains what you need to do to help record. Secondly, once you record a session, please fill in the nitty gritty details on the wiki. The log can be found here. You need to fill out this page to get credit for transcribing. Credit means getting a drink. And we all like drinks.

At this point, i have all the channels setup with hotkeys, so i can keep an eye on the process. I really can't tell what the schedule is going to look like yet, but if i get a chance, i'll try to transcribe a session during the first block of sessions. This way if you're not totally sure what a good transcription session looks like, you can follow this one.

PS. I'll be wearing my Red Hat, so i should be easy to find if you have questions.