Dearadh Oscailte Abú! (Open Design Forever!)

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Delicious Inkscape mockup export script

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Thanks to Ray’s bash scripting prowess and help, I am now in possession of a delicious script that makes exporting multiple PNGs from one master mockup Inkscape SVG file easy.
Further development might involve automagical wiki uploading, perhaps based on a wikipage name you input into the script..? 🙂 ?
I documented it pretty well so I it speaks for itself. I guess the only thing I’d add, is to give the frames in your Inkscape SVG an id, you need to right-click the object you’re using as a frame, and select ‘Object Properties’ for the menu. You don’t need to right-click and select the ‘Object Properties’ item for each and every frame—you may simply keep the ‘Object Properties’ dialog open and click on each frame object as you go.

Making Fedora easier to use & the Installer UX redesign

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(Inkscape SVGZ source)
If you want people to try Fedora so they can use it and so they can eventually become a FLOSS contributor, they need to be able to find and download it in the first place. The Fedora websites team and design team, with the website redesign project, hopefully made it easier for our user base to find the right download and to obtain it via our website.
Helping our user base access the installation media isn’t enough, though. They have to be able to make it through the installer to the other side! Those gaps in the diagram – each of those is a bail-out point. If they can’t make it easily through the installer, a member of our user base may well give up on Fedora.

Making Fedora easier to use & the Installer UX redesign

on


(Inkscape SVGZ source)
If you want people to try Fedora so they can use it and so they can eventually become a FLOSS contributor, they need to be able to find and download it in the first place. The Fedora websites team and design team, with the website redesign project, hopefully made it easier for our user base to find the right download and to obtain it via our website.
Helping our user base access the installation media isn’t enough, though. They have to be able to make it through the installer to the other side! Those gaps in the diagram – each of those is a bail-out point. If they can’t make it easily through the installer, a member of our user base may well give up on Fedora.

Version-controlled, automagical backup and file sharing system with Sparkleshare and Fedora

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The Burden of files

Okay, there’s a lot of problems:

  • Backing up your files is a pain in the butt.
  • Every time you upgrade your system, either in-place or a fresh install, it is a royal hassle to restore your files.
  • That file looks great on your laptop, but how do you show it to a colleague not sitting next to you easily? Ughh.
  • You upload files to a random directory on some web server you have some space on, quickly to show an idea to someone. Fast-forward some time, and you’ve got disorganized, poorly-named files scattered across multiple shell / other accounts all over the web, and you’re not sure what you have a copy of where, or which ones are being referred to from other places, so you’re terrified to delete any of them.
  • Well, crap. You’ve made a mistake. You can’t go back, can you? No version control…

I think we all know these problems pretty well. I’ve built a solution using Fedora and Sparkleshare – completely free and open source software – that over the past week has addressed all of these issues and has substantially improved the quality of my computing life. It backs my work files up to an internal corporate server and it backs my Fedora files up to a Fedora-maintained public server. I’m planning to configure it to back up some personal files to my Dreamhost account and some to my NAS at home.

Ideas for a cgroups UI

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On and off over the past year I’ve been working with Jason Baron on a design for a UI for system administrators to control processes’ and users’ usage of system resources on their systems via the relatively recently-developed (~2007) cgroups feature of the Linux kernel. After the excitement and the fun that is the Red …

SXSW Expo Day 2

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Booth Remodeling We’ve remodeled our booth after some ethnographic research on user patterns yesterday. 🙂 Penguin Prep Lots more photos here, I’ll be updating as the flaky network connection allows so keep checking back.