Consilience

From the always entertaining blog of Craig Maloney:

Ubuntu MI Global Jam 2012-03-03

The Global Jam (started in our great state of Michigan) is a chance for folks from around the globe to take part in activities to help smooth out the upcoming release. We’ll be meeting at SRT Solutions office in Ann Arbor (206 S. Fifth Ave. Ann Arbor, MI 48104) on Saturday, March 3rd, from 12-5pm. Bring a USB stick and a computer to work with as we poke and prod Precise Pangolin properly through it’s paces. (See what I did there?)

More information about the overall global jam can be found here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuGlobalJam

RSVP so we can get a decent head count here: http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/ubuntu-michigan/1526/detail

Looking forward to seeing you there!

For those of you paying close attention: yes, I did move to California in August, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still have a close connection with the good Ubuntu folks back in Michigan.

I’m a fan of how GNOME Shell is working out (mostly). At least enough for me to use it full time.

I also am afflicted with the same vertical pixel issue on my x220 many of us are complaining about. To combat this I already do certain things like use Tree Style Tabs in FireFox nightly and get rid of the gnome-terminal menubar when maximized (even though there is an annoying bug where Unity and GNOME Shell don’t play nice together).

One thing I just added, thanks to the pointers from Jonathan Palacek is to remove the redundant info in the title bar and top bar of GS. To do this you simply need to install a couple extensions and edit a text file.

The two extensions are:

• Extend Left Box
• Status Title Bar

To get rid of the window title bar when maximized is a bit difficult right now. I followed this guide to do it for Adwaita (GNOME Shell’s default theme) but since I use Ambiance I had to make some modifications.

Here’s the diff (since the whole file is pretty long):

greg@x220:/usr/share/themes/Ambiance/metacity-1$ diff metacity-theme-1.xml ~/tmp/metacity-theme-1.xml.ambiance
39c39
< <frame_geometry name="geometry_maximized" rounded_top_left="false" rounded_top_right="false" rounded_bottom_left="false" rounded_bottom_right="false" has_title="false">
---
> <frame_geometry name="geometry_maximized" rounded_top_left="false" rounded_top_right="false" rounded_bottom_left="false" rounded_bottom_right="false">
43,47c43,47
<   <distance name="left_titlebar_edge" value="0"/>
<   <distance name="right_titlebar_edge" value="0"/>
<   <distance name="button_width" value="0"/>
<   <distance name="button_height" value="0"/>
<   <distance name="title_vertical_pad" value="0"/>
---
>   <distance name="left_titlebar_edge" value="10"/>
>   <distance name="right_titlebar_edge" value="10"/>
>   <distance name="button_width" value="18"/>
>   <distance name="button_height" value="20"/>
>   <distance name="title_vertical_pad" value="12"/>
49c49
<   <border name="button_border" left="0" right="0" top="0" bottom="1"/>
---
>   <border name="button_border" left="0" right="0" top="1" bottom="1"/>

I may have done a couple extraneous edits in that file as I did this while on a plane and couldn’t look up documentation (or even that guide I used before); it was all from memory. If you see something wrong, please share!

Maybe this will help you out maximizing the scare vertical pixels on your new laptop.

I recently (end of November) bought myself an early Christmas present: a Nikon D3100. I did this mostly because our first child was due on December 10th (he came December 11th! – photos).

Now, as you imagine, as a crazy happy new dad, I’ve been taking a lot of photos. And I’ve been especially good about making sure they are all backed up. I have them on my laptop, my external RAID array, and now on my in a different state colo’d server.

But, since that D3100 is a DSLR I’ve been playing around with RAW images, and those can be pretty big. So far, just since I got this camera around November 30th I have about 17 gigs of photos already. My harddrive, which is an SSD, is going to fill up soon enough and it would be full now if I had imported all of my previous photos from my previous camera(s).

So, I’ve been looking for a smart way of dealing with large photo collections where part of it is on my laptop and part is ‘archived’ on an external harddrive or in the cloud or wherever.

What I see as a perfect work-flow for this is:

1. Take photos with camera
2. Import photos to Photo Management Software on your laptop
3. Process, tag, export, publish, etc
4. Repeat 1-3 many times
5. Use a ton of your computer’s harddrive space
6. Archive all photos except the last 60 gig/3 months (whatever) to an external harddrive, or nfs share, or cloud storage, etc
7. The Photo Management Software knows where those photos are, their metadata, and has a small thumbnail for them as placeholders in the timeline

The killer feature here is the Archive button. Admittedly, Google revolutionized webmail with that button (while getting tons of other things wrong with GMail*), who is going to revolutionize photo management with it?

Do any photo management applications out there do this without having to do stupid painful things like this (which makes me remove photos from one library and add them to a ‘backup library’ where I can’t see them all in the same Shotwell session).

* Like non-threaded email, non-standard IMAP server, etc

At last night’s regular IRC Meeting the topic of my departure from Michigan was on the agenda. I have been the leader of the LoCo since I moved to Michigan back in the summer of 2007, so about 4 years ago. During that time we started packaging/triage jams (back in November of 2007), became an approved team, and generally had a lot of fun (if I do say so myself). This team has been one of my main social circles while living in Michigan. I would even venture to say it was the most consistent and trustworthy of circles as well. So, my leaving Michigan, and the LoCo, is not without sadness. I’ll miss everyone at the in-person meetings. But luckily I can still hang out in #ubuntu-us-mi indefinitely :)

So, regarding the transfer of leadership: I’ll admit, I had someone in mind the whole time that I thought should take the reigns of the Michigan LoCo, but I wanted to make sure the team felt the same way. Luckily, Craig Maloney, one of the most active members of the LoCo (and also host of Open Metalcast and cohost of Lococast.net), has been helping lead the IRC meetings (ok ok, sometimes he leads them himself) and planning events for some time now. Everyone in the LoCo likes Craig.

So, last night, as my last duty of leader of the Michigan LoCo, I appointed Craig Maloney (snap-l) as the new leader of the Michigan LoCo. Long live the leader!

Please join me in celebrating Craig’s new position within the team and the undoubtedly great direction this will take the LoCo.

Tuesday night the Ubuntu Michigan LoCo took over one of the best user groups in the country, MUG (Michigan!/usr/group). But we did it with permission! Actually, we had to pay to do it :)

MUG, because it is one of the best groups around, brings in great speakers and hosts the meetings at quality venues. This means that it takes money to keep MUG going. You can become a member of MUG for $35 a year (which is a steal for the content they provide) but since MUG is an open event (anyone can come, paid members just feel better about it) and the fact that they recently moved to a better, but more expensive location, that isn’t covering all of their costs.

In response, MUG started a sponsorship program targeted at companies. A company can choose to sponsor a meeting for $150 where their sponsorship will be recognized and all of their employees will be full members for the year. The Michigan LoCo put out a call to raise funds to sponsor a meeting and we blasted past the $150 amount and ended up donating $185 to MUG.

What did we do with our meeting? We took over MUG for the night! We had SIX! (6!) awesome talks by these amazing members of the LoCo team.

• “Who we are / What we do / Why we do it” – Me
• “PPA’s: Personal Package Archives” – Rick Harding
• “Ubuntu 11.04: Latest release of Ubuntu” – Craig Maloney
• “Ubuntu Server, Oneiric Cycle” – Scott Moser
• “Ubuntu One” – Jorge Castro
• “Lernid” – John Gruber

Thanks to everyone who participated and especially to everyone who donated to such a worthy cause!

And don’t worry, there will be videographic evidence of the event posted later. We did take up about 1.5 hours for all of our talking, so it’ll be a bit before it is processed and posted online.

Its that time again! Time for another release of Ubuntu to hit the streets. This time our friend the Natty Narwhal will be making its debut the last week of April sometime on April 28th.

To celebrate we’ll be joining our energy with the already heavily attended event known simply as Penguicon. For those that do not yet know, Penguicon is a combination Free/Open Source conference plus Science Fiction convention. Not many other events can boast a past participant list that includes Cory Doctorow, Chris DiBona, Neil Gaiman, Jono Bacon, Jon “maddog” Hall, and Steve Jackson.

The Michigan LoCo release party will be taking place on Friday April 29th in the newly renovated hotel bar starting at 7pm. Come for the Ubuntu celebration but stay for the fun that is Penguicon.

Details:
When: Friday April 29th at 7pm
Where: Troy Marriott
Penguicon? http://www.penguicon.org
RSVP and Directions on the LoCo Directory Event Page.

We did it!

A great big thanks! goes out to all of the wonderful people who responded to the call to show their support and contribute to the Ubuntu Michigan LoCo’s sponsorship of a MUG meeting. We raised more than the amount needed before our deadline of May 1st. Thanks to the contributors the Michigan LoCo team will be donating $185 to MUG to support its efforts bringing high quality Free/Open Source and Linux-focused events in the South East Michigan area.

What next?
Next, the Michigan LoCo team will source a couple presentations from our group to give at a MUG meeting this summer. Let me know if you want to present on a topic! And of course, it is time for a huge influx of Michigan LoCo members at that meeting.

Thanks again to all of the contributors!

Last week I was interviewed (.mp3) for the very awesome, very fun Lococast hosted by the always enjoyable Rick Harding and Craig Maloney. We hit on many of my various interests including: copyright, open data, open educational resources (OERs), Creative Commons, community management, the Michigan LoCo team, and Ubuntu more generally,

It was great fun sitting down with Rick and Craig for about an hour; they always make it enjoyable.

[tl;dr: The Michigan LoCo team is going to sponsor a MUG meeting! Help us raise money by contributing to greg@grossmeier.net on Paypal!]

Background / About MUG
As many of you may know, one of the best linux related groups in Michigan is MUG, or Michigan!/usr/group. They hold monthly meetings in Southfield, Michigan. Many Ubuntu LoCo team members have been attending MUG meetings for a long time and I highly recommend checking them out if you have a chance. In fact at their last meeting, March 8th, our very own Craig Maloney (snapl on IRC) presented on how to create a podcast. As many of you know, Craig and Rick Harding are the co-hosts of the awesome Lococast. And the Ubuntu Michigan LoCo/MUG intermingling doesn’t stop there. Many other LoCo members have presented in the past include Jorge Castro, Rick, and myself.

MUG also brings in amazing out of town speakers and can do that because they help pay the travel costs as much as possible. The room they use for the meetings is also something they have to pay for each time. Thus, to put on such great events with such great content requires some money. This is why they have yearly membership dues of $35. I know that some LoCo members are also paying MUG members.

The Proposal
MUG has also recently started a new program where a business or group can sponsor a meeting.

Basically, what this means is that we could, as a group, raise the $150 to sponsor a MUG meeting where we could then have an Ubuntu-themed meeting and any member of the Michigan LoCo will be considered a full member for 2011.

Really, the best part is contributing to the success of MUG and having an Ubuntu-themed MUG meeting.

The How
Lets raise that required $150 as fast as we can! We’re already about half-way there, but the deadline is May 1st. I will be accepting contributions to my Paypal account (greg@grossmeier.net). When we hit $150 I’ll send a note to our team’s mailing list, my blog, and let the MUG Board know.

Also, in case anyone has any reservations about giving money to me to then give to MUG, I will log into my Paypal account for any LoCo member who attends a MUG meeting and show the contribution information.

The next part is the best: Our sponsored meeting.

Our Meeting
We shooting to have our sponsored meeting in either June or July. Since it’ll be Ubuntu-themed we should have one or two great Ubuntu-related talks. These can be anything from a how-to to a case study of your use of Ubuntu in some really interesting situation (run 1000 Ubuntu servers in a cluster? Tell us about it!).

Let me or the list know if you have a topic that you would like to present!

Questions?

Let me know if you have any questions about this fundraiser or MUG in general.

I had a great time at the Michigan LoCo team’s event for the Natty Ubuntu Global Jam. We had about 20 people show up, including the famous Jason Smith. We all gave Natty a spin, made things crash, reported bugs, triaged others, and gave user testing feedback (loosely).

Also, a big thanks to Ben Rousch for bringing the Founders, Arcadia, and New Holland beer from the west side of Michigan; we loves those breweries!

The rest of my photos, some from Jorge Castro, and more from Craig Maloney. If you were there and took photos, let me know!