Successful Hack-In, 01 Mar 2012!

DreamHost has a new core set of cloud developers now based in Atlanta, and a new Meetup group to go with that :-) Today there was a global OpenStack Hack-In, and I just posted a summary to our Meetup discussion page, but since I desperately need to do some blogging, I'm republishing here :-) (with some minor tweaks...)

We had fun in person, there was good chatter on IRC with the Colorado and San Francisco teams, and we had a great time digging into OpenStack some more.

Technical highlights include:

• testing out development deployments of OpenStack using Vagrant (some successes, some blockers)
• testing out dev deployments of OpenStack using VirtualBox directly
• filed some bugs for issues in horizon regarding error feedback to users and how the documentation is generated
• dug into issues with logging and inconsistencies in datestamps
• uncovered some weirdness with the usage of gnu screen and hanging services/partial devstack installs due to sudo assumptions (devstack assumes a passwordless sudo, and will label an install as failed if it gets hung up on the apache log tail, waiting for a password, even if the install was successful and all the services started correctly)
• Doug Hellmann made his first commit upstream to OpenStack

On the non-technical, fun side:

• Thanks for Zenoss for the fun swag today (the Zebras are still staring at me... I think they're going to be making an appearance in ToyStory 5)
• Even more thanks to Zenoss for the offer to become an OpenStack Atlanta Sponsor (food, drinks, and swag)!
• Thanks to DreamHost for the AMAZING coffee and danishes from The Village Corner Restaurant/Basket Bakery. Seriously. That was the best coffee I have ever had. In. My. Life.
• Also, thanks DreamHost for the pizza and the sweet potato pies!

We took a couple snapshots of the event, and I'll be posting those soon on the Meetup page, but for the super-impatient, they're up on Flickr right now

http://www.flickr.com...

Packt: A Publishing House for the Future

Since I first heard of them several years ago, I've viewed Packt as the underdog in the world of technical book publishing. In the past year or so, Packt seems to have gained greater and greater influence: their catalog continues to grow, they are attracting talented and knowledgeable engineers as authors, and their titles are things that I'm actually interested in.

Two examples of this are the books Expert Python Programming and Zenoss Core Network and System Monitoring. I received a copy of the former and blogged about my take on it. For the Zenoss book, last year I agreed to be a technical reviewer and am currently preparing a blog post on my pre- and post-publishing experiences.

In both cases, I agreed to work with Packt based solely on the technical merits of their works. However, my experience as a technical reviewer with them was so positive (I have had consistently excellent experiences with their staff over extended periods of time and on long-running conversations) that I have not only agreed to review more titles, but have read up on Packt themselves a bit. Here are some highlights from their wikipedia article:

• They published their first book in 2004 (the same year Ubuntu started!).
• Packt offers PDF versions of all of their books for download.
• When a book written on an open source project is sold, Packt pays a royalty directly to that project.
• As of March 2008, Packt's contributions to open source projects surpassed US $100,000 (I would love an updated stat on this, if anyone has a newer figure).
• They went DRM-free in March 2009.
• Packt supports and publishes books on smaller projects and subjects that standard publishing companies cannot make profitable.
• Their stream-lined business model aims to give authors high royalty rates and the opportunity to write on topics that standard publishers tend to avoid.
• Bonus: they also run the Open Source Content Management System Award.

These guys have some keys things going for them:

• They've got what appears to be a lean approach to business.
• They know how to effectively crowd-source, keeping their overhead low.
• They are rewarding both the authors as well as the open source projects.
• Their titles continue to grow in diversity and depth.
• The have an outstanding staff.

Oh, and I really like the user account management in their website! When I log in, I see a list of owned books, source code links for them, clear/clean UI, very easy to navigate. I can't emphasize this enough to vendors, service providers, etc.: if you want a loyal user base:

1. make a good product that lasts a long time;
2. make simple and great tools that enhance the experience of those products, that truly improve the experience of your users.

All in all, Packt really appear to be leaders in publishing innovation, taking lessons learned from the frontier of open source software and applying that to the older industry of publication production. I would encourage folks to evaluate Packt for themselves: if you like what you see, support them in readership and authorship :-)

I, for one, will continue to review titles that appeal to me personally and that I think others would enjoy as well. I have two books in the queue and three pending blog posts for the following titles:

• Zenoss Core Network and System Monitoring
• Python Testing Cookbook
• Python 3 Web Development Beginner's Guide

And who knows, if I feel like writing a technical book at some point, you may see me in the Packt catalog, too ;-)

Call for Testing: nVidia Cards in Ubuntu Natty

I was supposed to write this blog post early yesterday morning, since the first results from community testing are going to be examined today... but we're still going to need on-going data. So not all is lost :-)

We're working very hard with chip vendors to make sure folks are getting the best experience possible running Unity in the forth-coming release of Ubuntu (Natty). Jean-Baptiste Lallement has posted to the QA mail list, asking for committed volunteers to test the nVidia drivers in Unity on a weekly basis. You can read his email here:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-qa/2011-March/001484.html

Jean-Baptiste links to detailed instructions in his email. The QA Tracker for this effort is here (but please be sure to read his email and follow the instructions that he links to):

http://xorg.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/test/5154

We look forward to hearing from you!

Photo Credits: jackyalcine (slightly modified)

Canonical and Codethink at Bostom GNOME Summit

Today is the second day of the Boston GNOME Summit, and the second day of Canonical providing morning sustenance for the hackers here. Codethink and Canonical coordinated these efforts, with Codethink sponsoring food later today. It warms my heart that we can do this sort of thing.

Yesterday Cody Russell and I held a session about getting a gesture API into GTK 3.x. There were a great many questions about the uTouch framework, how we're handling multi-touch in the absence of MT support in X (coming in XInput 2.1), and what sort of dependencies would be needed (none! if GEIS is present on the system, gesture support will be added at build-time). At the end of the session, there was a consensus for Cody to present his plans to the GTK developers list and then to start getting branches reviewed for merge. We're hoping to make it for GTK 3.2.

In this vein, Cody and I have been hacking on libgrope for GTK compatibility, and this is serving as the sandbox for the GTK 3 gesture API development. My efforts have been focused on creating the GTK 2 Python C extension for grope. Given that the last time I coded C was in 1989 (and then a bit later in the mid-90s, when I had to hack a slackware driver to get ethernet working), this has been quite an effort. However, after a night and morning of hacking, I've got a handle on C extensions and am using the example code I wrote as the basis for pygrope. I've even managed to rope Barry Warsaw into reviewing the C extension code for us, to be sure we're not doing anything too crazy :-)

The Python C extension will be of immediate use to us in our test harness for gestures and exercising the stack. We will be creating a GTK app for recording user gestures for later playback and inclusion in test suites.