I hope everyone is rested up well from our week off. It was great to see a few of you at FSOSS last week. We are gearing up for another round of Club Moz sessions to go until exam week in December. Just a reminder that we will be running sessions every Tuesday from 430-6pm in S2119, SEQ Building, Seneca @ York Campus.
This week we will be assisting the Mozilla community with their Bug Day. What is a "Bug Day"?
Come and find out.
Hope to see you there!
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Friday, October 26, 2007
FSOSS 07 - Day 2
Well, day 2 is over now. I must say this was truly a spectacular event. Many thanks and gratitude go out to all the efforts of Seneca staff, students, speakers and volunteers that made this even possible. I will definitely be attending next year. This event has only intensified my desire and passion for Open Source.
As with yesterday, the talks were divided into 4 tracks. Since I can only be in one place at once (I know...excuses!), I was able to attend 5 talks.
The first talk I went to today was a about using DHTML (among other technologies) to create open source, accessible, and rich internet applications. This talk was given by two of the accessibility architects for the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto, David Bolter and Simon Bates. I found this talk, and the accompanied demo, to be very interesting. It was pretty cool to see a dynamic menu on a web page being created by the click of a button (or key press) and witnessing a screen reader application effectively interacting with the dynamic menu control. The personal information management demo they provided, based on the DoJo Toolkit, was pretty cool to see as well (drag + drop, animated tree views, tabbed information, inline rich text editing, etc).
The second talk I attended was about the OpenOffice.org community. This talk was interesting because I was able to draw on my experience with Mozilla. Many of the challenges OpenOffice.org is facing in their community, and many of the areas of need that exist for them exist for Mozilla as well. In fact, I suspect, these are parallels that are reflected in many of the open source communities out there and are the needs of the Open Source community as a whole. It was reassuring to hear Louis Suarez-Potts, Community Manager and Chair of the Community Council for OpenOffice.org, talk about the importance of QA. From the outside looking in, I get the feeling that QA folks are the unsung heroes of the software industry. Having been on the inside however, I think we are okay with that; not that I can speak for everyone.
The third talk I attended was a very thought provoking and mind opening experience. It was a talk conducted by Jesse Hirsh, Canadian Internet Evangelist at large, about the "problems" with Open Source. Now this was not a negative talk at all; it was not about why closed source is better than open source or why open source is better than closed source. This was about what needs to be done to extend open source beyond the confines and barriers of the community. I really enjoyed this talk. If you watch any of the video clips on the FSOSS website (see below), watch this one. I won't spoil it for you.
Over the lunch hour, most of us took part in a conversational exercise put on by David Eavesand Mark Surman from the Shuttleworth Foundation. I really enjoyed this exercise. It started with everyone getting in a big circle and introducing ourselves by first name and a colour that described our mood at that point. We did this in turn until everyone had introduced themselves to the group. We then proceeded with the meat of the exercise. There was a line taped down the middle of the room. One end with a 'Y', the other with an 'N'. Each end represented how strongly ones opinions might be for or against an idea given to the group by David. People were asked to stand wherever on the line they personally felt about the idea. Then they were asked to explain why, which resulted in people moving up and down the line; thus, explaining why they moved. This was a really interesting activity in conversation, collaboration, and the exchange of ideas. After this exercise, the talks recommenced.
The fourth talk I attended was given by Bryan Kirschner, Director of Platform Community Strategy at Microsoft. This talk was Microsoft's community and Open Source initiatives. It highlighted some of the technologies that Microsoft is developing (ie. Silverlight) and some of their Open Source initiatives (ie. SharedSource). I found this talk fairly interesting. It was cool to see that Microsoft was making an attempt to reach out to Open Source. I am not 100% convinced that they are well intentioned or whether they are just trying to harness the power of Open Source to minimize profit losses in the face of competition. I do not like to judge a book by it's cover, so I will take this with a grain of salt and see how this plays out.
The fifth talk I attended was scheduled to be a talk by Marcus Bornfreund, Co-director of Creative Commons Canada about Creative Commons and the public domain. Unforunately, Marcus could not make it and had to cancel his talk. Fortunately, one of the FSOSS attendees had been doing research into copyrights and licenscing in an effort to improve the current system. He volunteered to give us a talk and open discussion surrounding these issues. It went real well, considering the impromptu nature of this talk, and actually stimulated quite a bit of honest and open discussion.
This led into the final keynote of the event conducted by Dirk Riehle, Lead of the Open Source Research Group at SAP Labs. While I enjoyed Bob Young's keynote yesterday on a much more personal level, I found Dirk's keynote to be very informative. He talked about open source economics from the perspective of the stakeholder. It definitely gave me another window into the Open Source community.
I really enjoyed this entire event, even if it did mean getting up for 8:15am both days on my week off. I hope I can participate in an event like this again sometime soon.
I have added more pictures from today's talks. Feel free to check them out here. You can also see them using the fsoss2007 flickr feed posted yesterday.
All of the talks are online and available here. I have proposed to David Humphrey that we put these videos onto DVD format so that we can distribute the talks to folks who may benefit from them that do not want to sit through a lengthy download process. Some of the Mozilla folks that were unable to attend come to mind. Please feel free to comment to this post if you think this might be something of interest.
I would again like to extend a sincere thank you out to everyone who made this event possible. I cannot wait until FSOSS 08.
As with yesterday, the talks were divided into 4 tracks. Since I can only be in one place at once (I know...excuses!), I was able to attend 5 talks.
The first talk I went to today was a about using DHTML (among other technologies) to create open source, accessible, and rich internet applications. This talk was given by two of the accessibility architects for the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto, David Bolter and Simon Bates. I found this talk, and the accompanied demo, to be very interesting. It was pretty cool to see a dynamic menu on a web page being created by the click of a button (or key press) and witnessing a screen reader application effectively interacting with the dynamic menu control. The personal information management demo they provided, based on the DoJo Toolkit, was pretty cool to see as well (drag + drop, animated tree views, tabbed information, inline rich text editing, etc).
The second talk I attended was about the OpenOffice.org community. This talk was interesting because I was able to draw on my experience with Mozilla. Many of the challenges OpenOffice.org is facing in their community, and many of the areas of need that exist for them exist for Mozilla as well. In fact, I suspect, these are parallels that are reflected in many of the open source communities out there and are the needs of the Open Source community as a whole. It was reassuring to hear Louis Suarez-Potts, Community Manager and Chair of the Community Council for OpenOffice.org, talk about the importance of QA. From the outside looking in, I get the feeling that QA folks are the unsung heroes of the software industry. Having been on the inside however, I think we are okay with that; not that I can speak for everyone.
The third talk I attended was a very thought provoking and mind opening experience. It was a talk conducted by Jesse Hirsh, Canadian Internet Evangelist at large, about the "problems" with Open Source. Now this was not a negative talk at all; it was not about why closed source is better than open source or why open source is better than closed source. This was about what needs to be done to extend open source beyond the confines and barriers of the community. I really enjoyed this talk. If you watch any of the video clips on the FSOSS website (see below), watch this one. I won't spoil it for you.
Over the lunch hour, most of us took part in a conversational exercise put on by David Eavesand Mark Surman from the Shuttleworth Foundation. I really enjoyed this exercise. It started with everyone getting in a big circle and introducing ourselves by first name and a colour that described our mood at that point. We did this in turn until everyone had introduced themselves to the group. We then proceeded with the meat of the exercise. There was a line taped down the middle of the room. One end with a 'Y', the other with an 'N'. Each end represented how strongly ones opinions might be for or against an idea given to the group by David. People were asked to stand wherever on the line they personally felt about the idea. Then they were asked to explain why, which resulted in people moving up and down the line; thus, explaining why they moved. This was a really interesting activity in conversation, collaboration, and the exchange of ideas. After this exercise, the talks recommenced.
The fourth talk I attended was given by Bryan Kirschner, Director of Platform Community Strategy at Microsoft. This talk was Microsoft's community and Open Source initiatives. It highlighted some of the technologies that Microsoft is developing (ie. Silverlight) and some of their Open Source initiatives (ie. SharedSource). I found this talk fairly interesting. It was cool to see that Microsoft was making an attempt to reach out to Open Source. I am not 100% convinced that they are well intentioned or whether they are just trying to harness the power of Open Source to minimize profit losses in the face of competition. I do not like to judge a book by it's cover, so I will take this with a grain of salt and see how this plays out.
The fifth talk I attended was scheduled to be a talk by Marcus Bornfreund, Co-director of Creative Commons Canada about Creative Commons and the public domain. Unforunately, Marcus could not make it and had to cancel his talk. Fortunately, one of the FSOSS attendees had been doing research into copyrights and licenscing in an effort to improve the current system. He volunteered to give us a talk and open discussion surrounding these issues. It went real well, considering the impromptu nature of this talk, and actually stimulated quite a bit of honest and open discussion.
This led into the final keynote of the event conducted by Dirk Riehle, Lead of the Open Source Research Group at SAP Labs. While I enjoyed Bob Young's keynote yesterday on a much more personal level, I found Dirk's keynote to be very informative. He talked about open source economics from the perspective of the stakeholder. It definitely gave me another window into the Open Source community.
I really enjoyed this entire event, even if it did mean getting up for 8:15am both days on my week off. I hope I can participate in an event like this again sometime soon.
I have added more pictures from today's talks. Feel free to check them out here. You can also see them using the fsoss2007 flickr feed posted yesterday.
All of the talks are online and available here. I have proposed to David Humphrey that we put these videos onto DVD format so that we can distribute the talks to folks who may benefit from them that do not want to sit through a lengthy download process. Some of the Mozilla folks that were unable to attend come to mind. Please feel free to comment to this post if you think this might be something of interest.
I would again like to extend a sincere thank you out to everyone who made this event possible. I cannot wait until FSOSS 08.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
FSOSS 07 - Day 1
Well today was rather interesting. It was my first FSOSS (Free Software and Open Source Symposium) and I must say I had a blast. For those of you the may be unfamiliar, Seneca College (based in Toronto, Canada) invites members of the Open Source community to a two day sharing of ideas and information. This year attracted speakers from Mozilla, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, the Shuttleworth Foundation, and even Rob Young (Red-hat father).
Since there are so many speakers, the event has to be divided into 4 tracks (A,B,C, and a workshop track). I attended talks about usability, Facebook's thrift framework, Open Education in South Africa, OpenKomodo, and of course the Keynote by Rob Young. All of them were very interesting, however I have to give the award of most entertaining speaker to Mr. Young. From looking around the room, I do not think his talk fell on any deaf ears. Everyone in the room gave 100% attention to him for the entire hour (especially when he was asked his opinion of Linux's alleged "patent infringements).
I was able to snap some pictures which can be found here. There is also a flickr feed of pictures from FSOSS. The tag is "fsoss 2007".
To top it all off, I won a ticket to see tonight's Raptor's game and they kicked ass! I have uploaded some pictures of that here.
A brilliant success for the first day. Thanks to the speakers and everyone who helped to organize this event. I cannot wait to see what tomorrow holds.
Stay tuned for my report on Day 2.
Since there are so many speakers, the event has to be divided into 4 tracks (A,B,C, and a workshop track). I attended talks about usability, Facebook's thrift framework, Open Education in South Africa, OpenKomodo, and of course the Keynote by Rob Young. All of them were very interesting, however I have to give the award of most entertaining speaker to Mr. Young. From looking around the room, I do not think his talk fell on any deaf ears. Everyone in the room gave 100% attention to him for the entire hour (especially when he was asked his opinion of Linux's alleged "patent infringements).
I was able to snap some pictures which can be found here. There is also a flickr feed of pictures from FSOSS. The tag is "fsoss 2007".
To top it all off, I won a ticket to see tonight's Raptor's game and they kicked ass! I have uploaded some pictures of that here.
A brilliant success for the first day. Thanks to the speakers and everyone who helped to organize this event. I cannot wait to see what tomorrow holds.
Stay tuned for my report on Day 2.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Club Moz - Tuesday Oct 16, 2007
Hey folks! Your friendly neighbourhood Club Moz President here. I wanted to let everyone know that we will be having our second Club Moz session on Tuesday Oct 16th in room S2119 from 430-6. The room will actually be open at 330, so feel free to stop on by early. I have class until 415, so I will show up shortly after.
We had a session last week, but I suspect that after oh so much turkey, most folks forgot that Tuesday Oct 9 was the first session. Unfortunately we only had one person show up. I take responsibility for that as I should have ensured there was an announcement up on the CS main page and My.Seneca. I am working to rectify this today.
Due to this poor showing, we are going to be using last week's agenda for this week: An Introduction to IRC, and Seneca Testday - An Introduction to Litmus via Firefox 3.0 alpha 9 pre.
Anyone who is not interested in these items is free to show up and find a project that they want to work on.
If you don't know how you want to get involved, but you do have certain interest areas, we will help find a project that is catered to what you want to do.
If you just want to come and hack away, feel free to stop by and hack away. All are welcome!
I hope to see some of you folks here tomorrow.
Cheers!
We had a session last week, but I suspect that after oh so much turkey, most folks forgot that Tuesday Oct 9 was the first session. Unfortunately we only had one person show up. I take responsibility for that as I should have ensured there was an announcement up on the CS main page and My.Seneca. I am working to rectify this today.
Due to this poor showing, we are going to be using last week's agenda for this week: An Introduction to IRC, and Seneca Testday - An Introduction to Litmus via Firefox 3.0 alpha 9 pre.
Anyone who is not interested in these items is free to show up and find a project that they want to work on.
If you don't know how you want to get involved, but you do have certain interest areas, we will help find a project that is catered to what you want to do.
If you just want to come and hack away, feel free to stop by and hack away. All are welcome!
I hope to see some of you folks here tomorrow.
Cheers!
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Club Moz Presentation
Well, I have to say, today was a great success. Even though the announcement did not go out to the Computer Studies website until it was too late, we still had about 15-20 people turn up. I would like to thank everyone that came out and hope to see you folks again on Tuesday.
I have received a lot of great feedback from faculty and enthusiasm from attendees to contribute. This is great. Armen, Cesar and I will probably continue giving this presentation to other classes throughout the year and perhaps do another large scale one as we did today.
If anyone missed the presentation today, no worries. Come out to room S2119 on Tuesday Oct 9th. We welcome all!
We were able to snap a couple post presentation photos. Here they are, for your enjoyment.
Dave and I
Armen and I
Cesar, Dave and I
Anyway, I hope everyone had a good time and I really look forward to where we are going.
Cheers!
I have received a lot of great feedback from faculty and enthusiasm from attendees to contribute. This is great. Armen, Cesar and I will probably continue giving this presentation to other classes throughout the year and perhaps do another large scale one as we did today.
If anyone missed the presentation today, no worries. Come out to room S2119 on Tuesday Oct 9th. We welcome all!
We were able to snap a couple post presentation photos. Here they are, for your enjoyment.
Dave and I
Armen and I
Cesar, Dave and I
Anyway, I hope everyone had a good time and I really look forward to where we are going.
Cheers!
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Club Moz presentation follow up
Just a follow up to yesterday's post regarding Club Moz.
Myself, Armen, and Cesar will be giving a presentation about Club Moz tomorrow (Thurs Oct 4th) at 3:30pm EST in room S1209 of the SEQ building at Seneca@York.
All Seneca students and faculty, and Mozilla Toronto employees are free to attend. There will be a Q+A session following the presentation as well as free pizza and pop.
I hope to see some of you there.
Myself, Armen, and Cesar will be giving a presentation about Club Moz tomorrow (Thurs Oct 4th) at 3:30pm EST in room S1209 of the SEQ building at Seneca@York.
All Seneca students and faculty, and Mozilla Toronto employees are free to attend. There will be a Q+A session following the presentation as well as free pizza and pop.
I hope to see some of you there.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Club Moz, FSOSS, and things to come
Well, it has been a while. I am still trying to settle into a groove here back in Canada. I am finding it to be increasingly difficult, however I am pushing on.
Over the last month, I have been working hard to get Club Moz started back up again. I am happy to say that Club Moz now has a member board organized, a dedicated computer lab and a pretty solid action plan. Here are some of the basics of that action plan:
- meetings every tuesday from 330-6pm
- every meeting to include a "Seneca Testday" or "Seneca Bugday" designed to both mirror and supplement the Mozilla test/bug days, as well as give students an introduction to the tools commonly used by QA. The first test day will be a general Minefield test day so students can wet their palette a little before diving deep into a certain feature. Thanks Tomcat for helping us out with this.
- workshops to introduce students to the tools of the trade. The first workshop will be an intro to IRC.
- provide students with the support and guidance they need to become involved in Mozilla projects
- provide students in the Open Source course at Seneca with a couple hours a week where they can get help and work on their projects
- show students that Mozilla is not just Firefox and help them pursue other "Mozilla-based" projects if interested (Songbird, Thunderbird, Flock, Joost, Miro, etc)
- show students that Mozilla is not just coding for Firefox (QA, Webdev, documentation, extensions/themes, etc)
This list is a work in progress. We will have a better idea, more specifically, of what we are actually going to be doing once we get started.
As far as promoting Club Moz and Mozilla at the school, the QA Flyer has finally been posted around the school. This was put up late last week and we are now preparing a presentation to be given at one of the theatre rooms at Seneca.
Here are some of the highlights of the presentation:
- My Mozilla Journey
- Cesar's Mozilla Journey
- What is Club Moz and what do we do?
- How can you help?
- Other Mozilla project demos (Thunderbird, Songbird, Flock, Joost, Miro)
- Networking, Experience, Academic opportunities of becoming involved
- Testdays, Bugdays, Hackdays
Since we submitted to the Seneca Student Federation (SSF) for official club status, I am hoping that we can get some free pizza for the presentation. I also have some swag available for handing out to people that show up.
It should be stated, that while I am targeting this presentation toward students and perspective members of Club Moz, I will be welcoming faculty members to come out to see the presentation so they can see what we are doing.
The Club Moz board is having a meeting tomorrow evening to finalize on the details of the presentation and start a couple day promotion plan. This will most likely include passing word around to faculty of Seneca to pass onto their students as well as posting announcements on the school's website.
I am really looking forward to getting this started up. All of the Club Moz board members have put in a lot of planning, personal time and effort to get to where we are today. This should be less taxing on us once we get the ball rolling.
I hope to see some of you folks at FSOSS this year. It takes place on Oct 25th and 26th at Seneca College and I will be volunteering, so I hope to see some of you there!
As far as the future, I will be using this blog for Club Moz updates, so stay tuned. If any Mozillans want to stop by for one of our sessions to see what we are doing or to lend a helping hand, I would be very interested in talking more about this. Just ping me on irc (ashughes).
Anyway, I have neglected my homework for far too long tonight.
Cheers!
Over the last month, I have been working hard to get Club Moz started back up again. I am happy to say that Club Moz now has a member board organized, a dedicated computer lab and a pretty solid action plan. Here are some of the basics of that action plan:
- meetings every tuesday from 330-6pm
- every meeting to include a "Seneca Testday" or "Seneca Bugday" designed to both mirror and supplement the Mozilla test/bug days, as well as give students an introduction to the tools commonly used by QA. The first test day will be a general Minefield test day so students can wet their palette a little before diving deep into a certain feature. Thanks Tomcat for helping us out with this.
- workshops to introduce students to the tools of the trade. The first workshop will be an intro to IRC.
- provide students with the support and guidance they need to become involved in Mozilla projects
- provide students in the Open Source course at Seneca with a couple hours a week where they can get help and work on their projects
- show students that Mozilla is not just Firefox and help them pursue other "Mozilla-based" projects if interested (Songbird, Thunderbird, Flock, Joost, Miro, etc)
- show students that Mozilla is not just coding for Firefox (QA, Webdev, documentation, extensions/themes, etc)
This list is a work in progress. We will have a better idea, more specifically, of what we are actually going to be doing once we get started.
As far as promoting Club Moz and Mozilla at the school, the QA Flyer has finally been posted around the school. This was put up late last week and we are now preparing a presentation to be given at one of the theatre rooms at Seneca.
Here are some of the highlights of the presentation:
- My Mozilla Journey
- Cesar's Mozilla Journey
- What is Club Moz and what do we do?
- How can you help?
- Other Mozilla project demos (Thunderbird, Songbird, Flock, Joost, Miro)
- Networking, Experience, Academic opportunities of becoming involved
- Testdays, Bugdays, Hackdays
Since we submitted to the Seneca Student Federation (SSF) for official club status, I am hoping that we can get some free pizza for the presentation. I also have some swag available for handing out to people that show up.
It should be stated, that while I am targeting this presentation toward students and perspective members of Club Moz, I will be welcoming faculty members to come out to see the presentation so they can see what we are doing.
The Club Moz board is having a meeting tomorrow evening to finalize on the details of the presentation and start a couple day promotion plan. This will most likely include passing word around to faculty of Seneca to pass onto their students as well as posting announcements on the school's website.
I am really looking forward to getting this started up. All of the Club Moz board members have put in a lot of planning, personal time and effort to get to where we are today. This should be less taxing on us once we get the ball rolling.
I hope to see some of you folks at FSOSS this year. It takes place on Oct 25th and 26th at Seneca College and I will be volunteering, so I hope to see some of you there!
As far as the future, I will be using this blog for Club Moz updates, so stay tuned. If any Mozillans want to stop by for one of our sessions to see what we are doing or to lend a helping hand, I would be very interested in talking more about this. Just ping me on irc (ashughes).
Anyway, I have neglected my homework for far too long tonight.
Cheers!
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