torsocks ready for review

Ever thought “hey, I’d like to use this with Tor“?  Well, I’m giving someone in the Fedora community the opportunity to review a package that will allow  you to do just that.  Torsocks provides a “usewithtor” functionality to allow many network-utilizing programs to go over the Tor network instead of exposing your doings to the public Internet directly.  As soon as the package has made its way through the review process I plan to push it out to EPEL as well.

Updated packages for gpredict and TuDu in Fedora and EPEL

Last night/earlier today I pushed updates to both the Gpredict and TuDu packages in Fedora.  TuDu also resides in the EPEL repositories for those running EL5 and EL6 and those repos were also updated.  If you are a user of either of these packages I’d appreciate you testing out these new packages to make sure they work.  Both packages are awaiting karma (and love) in Bodhi (Gpredict | TuDu).

I’m also going to start working on getting the necessary dependencies into EPEL so I can ship Gpredict there as well.

Build Engineer wanted…

My company, Citrix, is looking for a build engineer with experience in RPM, deb, ant, and Jenkins/Hudson.  Programming knowledge isn’t necessary but scripting in bash or python would be good.  Work with an open source project would also be a plus.

They would need to be located in our of our offices (Santa Clara California, Hyderabad India or Bangalore India).

If you are interested let me know and I’ll get you in contact with the people in the know.  They are still working on the job posting so there isn’t anything to look at just yet.

Announcing DocsGlue

Many Fedora Docs project contributors enjoy writing on the wiki using the WYSIWYG editor that is provided by MediaWiki.  This is great for contributors but not so much when we are trying to pull all this information into DocBook for formal release.  The solution was simple: Ian had to fix mw-render.

This all went down at FUDCon Blacksburg, just a couple weeks ago.  Ian and John got together to break, fix, or eliminate the tool we once used to do the conversion of MediaWiki text to DocBook.  Ian worked for several hours trying to piece code together to make mw-render work.  It did not, however, ever get off the ground despite his best efforts.  Several releases prior to the current version of mw-render the DocBook functionality was removed leaving it no longer useful for our needs.

Once it sunk in that mw-render was dead to us, we started looking for an existing solution.  We found many but none that would do exactly what we wanted.  Ian started drawing up plans for a replacement and we decided that if we were going to do the work to build a tool to do the conversions that we should really do it up right.

This brings us to the project of DocsGlue.  The current vision of DocsGlue is a program that will take MediaWiki text, turn it into DocBook XML, then open a ticket in Red Hat’s Bugzilla instance for a certain guide and add the DocBook XML text as an attachment.  The guide owner can then easily use the attached file as source for a guide that can then be translated and published.

DocsGlue will be usable from both the command line and the GUI.  This will make it easy for anyone to use no matter how they like to operate.

This will hopefully reduce the amount of time spent on moving data from the wiki into our guides and also make this information a lot more useful for users looking for answers.

Currently the project is hosted on Fedora Hosted where all the source code will be available.

Looking for a new Knowledge Base

I’m looking for FOSS knowledge base software that will integrate with SalesForce.  Already packaged for EPEL would be great but not required.  Anyone know of such a monster?

Southeast LinuxFest 2012 Announced

Southeast LinuxFest (SELF) 2012 will be in Charlotte, North Carolina, which is a much better option than Atlanta or wherever the other proposed locations were.  I am excited to see what talks will be offered this year.  I am also thinking of taking the train down the Charlotte.  From Richmond the train goes through the cities of Raleigh, Cary, and Durham, to name a few.  Perhaps we can have a hacking car on the way down!

FUDCon Blacksburg – Day 3

Ian hard at work.

Overslept.  The Docs Hackfest was supposed to start at 9A and run until noon.  I awoke to knock on my door… at 9A.  Luckily everyone knows how to gather and start without me.

We cleaned up all the Release Note Beats so that those pages, on the wiki, are ready for the F17 Release Notes goodness.  We also got two new contributors setup to contribute.

Unfortunately I didn’t get a lot done on Sunday.  I needed to leave around noon (actually drove away from the Inn at 12:45P) so I could get back home at a decent hour.

It was great seeing everyone, again, and I hope that everyone had a safe trip home.  Next up, Southeast LinuxFest!

FUDCon Blacksburg – Day 2

Jared explaining DocBook XML

Whew!  I forgot how tiring these FUDCon days can be with all the work that is getting done.  It is truly awesome to see so many people come together for a common cause.

The day started with photographs, bar camp pitches, and the State of Fedora talk.  I led a talk on the Documentation Project until lunch and then sat in on the DocBook and Publican talk.  After that I sat in on the design class where Mo was discussing Inkscape.

With all the instruction done for the day (for me) I attended the CAcert Assurance event and received enough points to be assured by CAcert.  Immediately following that event, I hosted, with Nick, the GPG key signing event where 35 of us all signed each other’s keys.

FUDpub followed with games, food, and beverages for all.  I bowled a horrible game (bowling is like golf, low score wins, right?) and watched the end of a football game while enjoying some food.  I left a bit early with Smooge and Smooge Sr and hung out with them working on a few projects until I decided to hit the rack.

All-in-all a very good day and one where a lot was accomplished.

FUDCon Blacksburg – Day 1

Nametags ready to be picked up at FUDCon registration.

It. Is. Cold.  It’s not really that bad unless you are facing into the wind.  And then there is the snow.  But what’s a FUDCon without a few bumps and ice?

This morning I lead an intrepid group of Fedorians from the Inn over to McBryde.  After checking in with registration, Ian and I escaped for food and returned to hack on the tudu package and determine that my laptop won’t work with external video because of my crappy nVidia video card.  I’ll have to hack on that later.

After lunch Ian, John, and I (I was just observing) hacked on mw-render to aid in the pulling of information from the Fedora wiki and putting it into the Fedora Release Notes.  This is just a use-case, mind you, and can be used to pull any information from our wiki and put it into any of our guides.  Helpful for those that want to use the wiki as a collaborative sandbox.

Infra discussed using two-factor authentication on servers for certain groups to help protect the infrastructure that runs Fedora.

Work on mw-render turned into the writing of DocsGlue: a program that will read a MediaWiki page, turn it into DocBook XML, and the submit it to Bugzilla as a patch to a guide.  Work continued into the night…

FUDCon Blacksburg – Day 0

Drove over to Blacksburg today and arrived at The Inn at Virginia Tech a little before 5P.  The drive was nice and uneventful.  In the lobby of the inn I found many Fedora contributors hacking and socializing.  I talked Ian into going to grab some food and we ended up at the Macado’s Restaurant & Bar.  After catching up, we made our way back to the Inn where I ran into Jared, his son, and Maria with their cameras ready to hit the streets to take night photos.  Invited, I grabbed my camera and we hit the streets.  The Virginia Tech campus is really beautiful at night and I was able to get quite a few nice photos.  Returning to the Inn I found Ian and we worked on the SPEC file for Tudu.

With snow beginning to fall I retired to my room to get ready for Friday’s activities.