More Novell Open Audio Ideas

Rather than make it a blog post, I thought I’d put this one up to anyone who wants to help think some stuff out. So I put it in the Cool Solutions wiki.

If you don’t know much about wiki yet, but want to learn, come to Erin and my session at BrainShare, TUT275.

Looking for a Far Out Graphic Artist

[Update: Here's the final result.]

How to find the right person to make a killer design for my laptop…

If you’re going to show off the most exciting software innovations happening today, you have to have an equally exciting machine. So said my boss.

I compise this post from my new demo laptop. Dual core processor, gigantic 17 inch screen, upper-end Nvidia Geforce graphics, and some of the best sound I have ever heard from integrated laptop speakers. Tee hee.

Just one thing I need now: A custom paint job with a killer graphic. I know the company that does the custom painting…now I need a good artist.

I don’t know exactly what I want, but I have some ideas. Maybe a chameleon. Probably on mettalic green. Something electrically bright. Uber-hip. Imminently eye-catching. Something that beckons discussion.

So, if you know anyone who does great graphic novell art, airbrush or graffitti work, fun 3d renders, or anything like that, please let me know. I may have a commission job for them. You can always reach me as reverend at Novell dawt calm.

More on Prophylactics

Here’s the latest on my lecture on prophylactics from Socal Linux Expo:

• Jan Stafford at TechTarget/SearchOpenSource was extremely cool.
  • Not looking for a correction, I sent in a note explaining to Jan that I had dropped my subscription to their newsletter, and why. I essentially said that the innacuracies in their report on my talk had made me wary of anything I might read in their newlestter.
  • Jan took this very seriously, and published a correction to the desktop 10 beta announcement part of the report.She also corrected the dateline to Los Angeles.
  • Best of all Jan made the corrections with solid integrity. She noted what corrections were made to the original article in an editor’s pre-amble comment. Well done, Jan!
  • The only down-side is that Jan removed the prophylactic quote. While I was amused by its inclusion (and more than a little paranoid that I would soon be answering to the corporate police), I did not request that part to be removed. It was fair game for publishing. I said it; the reporter caught it; so, more fool me. But I guess it’s gone-daddy-gone now.
• When I notified Bruce Lowry, who heads up Novell’s PR team and has done tremendous work to help get officially-sanctioned blogs opened up at Novell, he laughed. After reading the articletold me that the AppArmor-prophylactic analogy was “imminently quotable.”
• Finally, Novell Chief Marketing Officer Bill Hewitt mentioned the article to Bruce. Bruce said that Bill actually liked the quote. I had not expected that from up at the C-level, but I guess I should know better. Bill has been a major supporter of Novell’s community program. For example, he’s the primary executive sponsor of Novell Open Audio.

Thus concludes the Prophylactic Incident. SearchOpenSource made good. The “corporate cops” ended up being pretty cool about everything. And I still have a job.

I wonder if I can find a way to use The Aristocrats in a presentation at some point…

I got Gored…Al Gored.

It usually starts out with a looooong, pointless story, like the time I went down to Shelbyville…

As I’ve said before, it’s good to have someone like Cap’n Dave Kearns around the Novell user community. Besides following the Novell beat day-in, day-out, Dave is perhaps one of Novell’s best historians. I use the word “best” not because he’s been covering Novell for a very long time–which he has–but because Dave has a way of remembering things, and of phrasing those rememberings, that makes reading his newsletters better than if were a mere report/analysis/update thing.

Let’s face it, if Dave were perfectly accurate in every detail of his reporting, his newsletter would have lost readership and died out long ago. But because you can occasionally factually disagree with him and have the utmost confidence in doing so, his newsletters are fun to read. Controversy is often far more interesting than straight facts. And, Dave takes the occasional correction from his readers in good grace, showing that he’s human and realizes it.

Since Dave’s readers are many of the people whom I serve–Novell technology professionals–I decided to give Dave a jumpstart on Novell Open Audio and our upcoming Cool Blogs program. (Ah, the vendor-press relationship…kind of brings a tear to the eye.) What I hadn’t bargained for was what I can only hope was an unfortunate typo.

Dave said that I started NUI:

…Novell Users International (formerly NetWare Users International), the worldwide users group that Haeger started last year.

It’s not too well-known, but Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet. He actually said, “created the Internet.” [Emphasis mine.] Clever campaign managers from his opposition figured out that create and invent can act as synonyms, and spun Gore’s statement. Gore had his words paraphrased and misconstrued, then stuffed back into his mouth. Today he is the butt of one of the most venerable wisecrack-referenceable stories in high tech.

Relevancy? Though my community, and my visibility in it, are much smaller than the national stage upon which Al Gore stood, my ability to serve that community lives or dies by the credibililty I have within that community. Last thing I need is to be attached wild, raving, unsubstantiated claims elevated to Messiah-Complex proportions. So, I’m feeling a bit of chagrin, if you must know.

See? You gotta love Dave’s newsletters…

Afterthought:
NUI started in 1986. I was in high school at the time. Seriously. There’s no way I could have even thought about inventing a NUI. I was too busy wondering why girls didn’t like me.

Next Steps for Novell Open Audio

Getting our Novell technical podcast up and online was a rocky road. My goal of making a technical podcast that is driven mostly by our technical user community created enough oddball feature demands that we faced delay after delay. At a certain point one of the old saws of open source demands heeding: release early and release often.

Feeds and Formats
Yes, I know that we currently have only MP3, a proprietary format. For a show called “Open Audio,” there would be no small amount of irony if we planned to keep it that way.

• Ogg Vorbis: An alternate RSS feed will provide Ogg Vorbis soon. I hope before we do our second edition goes online.
• Other feeds: We’re still uncertain about whether we have the audio quality versus file size trade-off right yet. Ultimately we may need to have high and low quality feeds. What I don’t want is to introduce so many feed options that we create an unmanageable feed mayhem.
• Streaming: A couple early listeners have asked for us to provide a streaming option for the show. I’m not sure this will happen, so we’re monitoring feedback to see whether we should implement something.
• Email Notification: We had one request for an email notification service for when new editions go online. I’m still not sure whether this has broad value, or if the listener just doesn’t know about the virtues of RSS yet.

Show Format
We’re still examining and tuning the show format.

• Why a Show? To be honest, we took a lot of inspiration from the guys at LugRadio. These guys do one of the best Linux shows out there. Their show is something like the result of a genetic experiment gone wrong in which an attempted cross of Spinal Tap with Monty Python had produced geek offspring. But they get that the single droning voice of a podcast is dull.
• Correspondents: I’m also a big fan of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. We lifted the idea of having correspondents straight from there. I hope that this will bring in a few different personalities to make the show less about me and more about the tech and the people who love it.
• Show length: General responses to the survey indicate that people prefer shorter shows and more of them, and perhaps with longer interviews. We’ll probably experiment with format just after BrainShare. Right now, we’re trying to get out as much pre-BrainShare content as possible, so we’ll stick to the “2-3 interviews in an hour-long show” format for now.

Website
The website for Novell Open Audio is about half-way done. Here’s what we still have to add:

• Correspondents: Caitlin Jans, technical support uberbabe and Lee Howarth, longtime identity services product management dude (uberbloke?) will soon be added to our about us page.
• Show archive: Of course, we need shows to archive first, but we plan to have a sortable archive of past shows. Besides being able to sort shows by rating and subject, I have asked the Novell web team to consider enabling our audience to put tags on shows. Chances are that no categorization system I could come up with alone would be as good as the one our community would make.

Music
One respondent to our survey asked about the music (with eager approval). Funny story. My orginal plan was to use the opening from Reverend Horton Heat’s “Spend a Night in the Box.” I’m a big Horton Heat fan, but since the band never responded to my queries…

• Music clip: The music we use was done by a Novell employee. Jeff Price, one of our extreme technical sales geeks out of the midwest, and his band made that cut for us. I think that’s even cooler than having the Heat cut that I wanted. Besides being a serious technical geek, Jeff has toured with 80’s metal hair bands like Cinderella. Jeff has been promising me a re-take of the clip that resolves a bit quicker so we don’t have to do the fade out as we start the show.
• More Cowbell: Several people have asked what we mean by more cowbell. But those who know understand what kind of fever I have.

That’s all I can think of for now.

Last note is that I interviewed Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe yesterday. It was my first time meeting him or speaking to him, but from some of his answers, it seems like he already gets the Novell technology landscape pretty well. We’ll have that coming up in about a week or so.

Why Linux for Kiosks

Times Square. ‘Nuff said:

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FOSE 2006, or Mr. Haeger Goes to Washington

I’m heading to Washington D.C. in early March to help out tux.org with FOSE 2006.

Any of my readers who would like to meet up with me while I am in the area? Drop an email to reverend at Novell.

The Prophylactic Incident

Yes…I did say something to this effect at my Socal Linux Expo presentation.

Under the version 10 release, AppArmor — which Haegar [sic] called a “prophylactic for your applications” — will create an application profile of standard commands and files based on what the application is supposed to do.

Back when the quote was still in context, I think it was couched with some apology for the comparison. It’s still really the best analogy available. AppArmor is very cool stuff.

I restate that I do not know whether Novell plans on a public beta for v10 of our enterprise Linux desktop. When asked about whether the next desktop’s were available in beta, I explained that they were not, but that the pure open source SUSE Linux 10.1 code was publicly available. I conjectured that if a public beta of enterprise desktop were to happen, it would be around or after Novell BrainShare in March. More fool me. Never postulate when there are press people about.

The one saving grace is that the reporter was wrong on other important details…such as what city she was in. The dateline claims San Diego.

By MiMi Yeh, Assistant Editor
15 Feb 2006 | SearchOpenSource.com
SAN DIEGO — Novell plans to release a beta for its Linux Desktop 10

We’ll see if I still have a job next week.

SUSE at FOSDEM in Brussels

If you were ever looking for a great way to get deep into SUSE Linux, and you have the means to get to Brussels next week, then you should know about this.

The sixth Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) is an annual 2-day event hosting talks, tutorials, and booth for the free software/open source community. Access to all parts of FOSDEM is free of charge, and Novell/SUSE engineers will be there in force presenting a compendium of SUSE-related sessions.

My tip: if you are a hacker/developer, you will certainly want to catch the sessions on the openSUSE Build Service. Based on some recent discussions I have had with Sonja Krause-Harder, developer evangelist for openSUSE, it looks like openSUSE Build Service can hugely accelerate your ability to build and test your software,

Also, Michael “the Meekster” Meeks (of OpenOffice.org and Linux desktop fame) will be speaking there. Oh, and don’t miss Crispin Cowan, formerly of Immunix (and coming all the way from Portland, Oregon). Crispin’s AppArmor is one of the most ingenious Linux security tools I’ve ever seen.

After looking at the schedule, I think it’s safe to say that FOSDEM will be the SUSE developer event for any hacker based in Europe.

I’m thinking of shutting down this blog…

…more on why later.

[This was from my blogger.com-hosted blog, which I finally moved from. Cool Blogs at Novell was where I thought I would end up. Instead, we will probably feed a category from this WordPress.com-hosted blog up to Cool Blogs.]

Bacon and Eggs

Presentation went well today. Besides showing Xgl, I presented f-spot and camera synchronization. LUG Radio’s Jono Bacon was not aware that this photo would be used in a demo later in the day. I should hope that Mr. Peabody’s creators would be proud.

Lots of cool people here in Southern California at Socal Linux Expo. Tomorrow I intend to meet some of the people from the Linux User Groups.

Xgl demo at Southern California Linux Expo

Yesterday’s announcement about Xgl drove a huge amount of traffic to Novell’s web site. I heard a couple people mention that they could not download the video. It was in a lot of demand.

So, looks like a demo is in order. It’s on my list of cool stuff to show at SCALE 4x. Here’s the speakers schedule.

I’ll also speak to the minority opinion about advanced graphics not being important for Linux. Such silly dissent needs to be addressed.

–Rev

P.S. Yes, jngilman, I would be happy to meet with you at the Expo.

Community Call to Action

Tom Adelstein has posted a highly-scientific survey asking people to submit what Linux distro they prefer for a desktop.

It is being conducted as a forum thread. Personally, I loathe such vapid methods of collecting data, since it proves nothing other than that a well-networked community can boost their company of choice.

Speaking of well-networked communities…well, you know what to do.