Operation RE: NUI update

I’m absolutely giddy about the results from the logo contest for Novell Users International (NUI).

To catch you up: we ran a community competition in order to get concept ideas for a new logo for NUI. This “involve the community” approach was well received. Several NUI members, including some of our chapter presidents, sent us emails to extol our prudence, virtue and wisdom. Okay, maybe not so much on the virtue.

At the end, we came up just shy of 5,000 community votes to select the best concept design. The winning submission, coming to us all the way from a member in Indonesia, looks kind of like this:

With the concept logo identified, we ran the logo through the brain of a sharp graphic designer*. The designer’s revision adds a substantial amount of polish, but does a great job holding to the concept. I can hardly wait to unveil
the final version.

If you’re a NUI member reading this, here’s what you can expect:

• The NUI team is building a style guide for use of the new logo. Once that is completed, we’ll send it off to the NUI board. (We do like to show off.)
• Next, the NUI website will get a complete overhaul. The updated site will focus on doumenting plans and strategies for finding, building and running your Novell User’s Group. We have tons of ideas on how to make this extremely cool and useful for our NUG chapters. (That’s right, here at NUI, thoughts are measured in tons.) For example, to enable our NUG chapters to share knowledge, we’re looking into implementing the site as collaborative wiki. More on these plans later…
• We will will unveil the new logo when we launch the new NUI site. Timeline, you ask? We’re shooting for the end of February, but we are pushing up against BrainShare 2006**…so it might be a pinch.

That’s it for now. As always, you can send your thoughts, ideas and feedback to reverend -AtSymbol- novell.com

*No, not me. Far from sharp, I’m still mostly working with Crayola.
**Shameless company plug: you must go to BrainShare. But bring some extra footwear. This one’s gonna knock your socks off.

Heading to Los Angeles

I’ll be presenting at Southern California Linux Expo. This is going to be a fun gig for more than one reason:

1. I get to talk about what Novell is doing on desktop Linux. And if you’re wondering how the next enterprise Linux desktop from Novell is shaping up, I just might be showing off the beta at my talk on “Desktop Innovation on Linux at Novell.”
2. I’m on right before His Jiggyness Jono Bacon. Besides being a regular press guy on the Linux beat and an author for O’Reilly, Jono is one of the guys on LUGradio, which is by far the best (and most irreverent) podcast available for Linux and open source material. But of course, my interest in finally meeting up with Jono sources from my life-long love for Rocky and Bullwinkle. To be precise, it’s an extremely obscure couple of lines from an episode of Peabody and Sherman.
3. I’m from California! And I miss it every day. (Okay, I’m from one of the Californias. Northern California. Sure, San Jose only has a few of LA’s cool amenities–like smog–but it still feels like coming home when you’ve been abroad. Or in my case, in Utah.) Anyway, I’ll be on a total California high while I present! (Um…just to clarify: No, not that kind of “high.”)

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, be sure to come up and say, “Hi.”

(See? I got the final homonym correct.)

Resurrecting a Dead Banshee

One of the open source projects for which I have extreme anticipation is Banshee, the Mono-based music player for Linux desktops.

From the Banshee wiki:

With Banshee you can easily import, manage, and play selections from your music collection. Banshee allows you to import CDs, sync your music collection to an iPod, play music directly from an iPod, create playlists with songs from your library, and create audio and MP3 CDs from subsets of your library.

For me, anticipation is dangerous, because I want something today won’t get here until tomorrow. That means I have to force things. Anticipation makes me break stuff.

The good news for hungry OSS enthusiasts is that the latest build of Banshee…version 0.10.2…now can be built and updated on SUSE Linux with a lot more ease than before because the guys working on this project have updated the instructions for doing the build.

There was still some cryptic stuff for me, but I managed to sleuth out all the required packages and get them installed. I’m all about shortening adoption curves, so I posted what I learned as a step-by-step on the Banshe wiki.

See? I still got my tech.

Update on Operation RE: NUI

The fist phase of the NUI logo contest has gone off splendidly. We received about 70 different logo submissions from some 50 different members. Sure, there were obvious “just give me a T-shirt” submissions. One person sent us an Excel spreadsheet on which they had colored in certain cells in order to form the letters NUI in black and red. But overall there were enough quality concepts to propel us into round two.

We held a quick meeting to select the top submissions, and now Brent Sharp is working with a graphic designer to refine these concepts into a common quality level. On January 9th, we will post the refined graphics and open up voting to the community.

Pick a winner!