Dearadh Oscailte Abú! (Open Design Forever!)

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Software Freedom Day Boston / Ninja Recruitment

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IMG_6753
Deb Nicholson, Asheesh Laroia, and the OpenHatch project organized this year’s Software Freedom Day Boston.
I gave a keynote presentation on how design bounties have worked for the Fedora Design team, and the steps to create your own bounty. You may have noticed our newest bounty was posted the morning of Software Freedom Day, and we’ve already got a ninja recruit working on it!
bounty presentation thumbnail

  • Download LibreOffice ODP (14 M)
  • Download PDF (14 M)
  • The presentation is provided here under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license. Please share and enjoy.

    • IMG_6746
    There were a lot of great talks by Boston-area community leaders. I was surprised to learn, for example, that the local python meetup in Boston is 1200+ members strong. I’m hoping to be able to make some time to get involved in the Boston python community in particular soon.

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.

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.

You must be this tall to ride: __

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I believe that Fedora and Linux in general need to reach and inspire a wider set of users. Free software affords us so many benefits we should strive to share, but there’s still a formidable bar in technical skill required to realize those benefits. What can we do to help expand the reach of free …