Where it comes to talking about all the technologies involved, I admittedly fell a bit short. I haven’t been keeping up on every TLA in the related technical spaces around oVirt and KVM, and I didn’t get through a full research on all the topics before the presentation. One of my strategies, though, is to just run this presentation to learn what is and isn’t appropriate for a presentation. So I told the audience it was a new presentation, thanked them for being beta testers, and acknowledged that some in the audience certainly know more on the topic than I do and I appreciate chiming in with answers.

Which happened a few times, thank ye gods and goddesses.

In addition, I chopped up the original 21 slide presentation in to 91 slides, with each slide covering one topic. This is similar to one paragraph for an idea when writing. The decision to do this came from a late-Saturday-night discussion with Josh Berkus, who has some fame and skill in presenting. (Once I learned that a slide of mine from a State of Fedora Lightning Talk had made it in to Josh’s deck-of-shame – slide 5 in this PDF -  I figured it was worth  a rethink-of-approach. Hey, we all make mistakes.;-D ) The 91-slide version was not optimal, but it was better than the 21-slide version.

Now, to help this slide show be more useful, I will do my part in filling out the notes sections where I actually know what I’m talking about. Jason Brooks is working on a consolidated deck that improves on this one, and I’ll get my notes in to that one as the canonical.

Although a brand-new presentation, I think this one went over pretty well. All of the material I know by heart and can speak on extemporaneously (i.e., for many hours on end). For this reason, my notes section is unusually (for me) empty. I’m going to work on filling out those notes – that makes it more useful for others to reuse, thus adding more fuel to the Creative Commons licensing – and I’ll make a generic version available in TheOpenSourceWay.org presentations directory.

This was a good enough talk that I think it can be useful again in other locations – it really does a good job of distilling a huge amount of the information you need to start, sustain, and grow an open source project. I’ll be submitting it other places, hopefully more people agree with Gareth and put me on somewhere!

• FOSS Mentoring on Friday, I talk at 3 pm.
• SCALE: The Next Generation on Saturday at 11:30 am, Malakai, Saskia, and Mirano are presenting for the youth event.
• In the Cloud and Virtualization track on Sunday at 11:30 am, I’ll give a second talk on oVirt.

So my Friday talk at 3 pm is,”How to start and sustain an open source project of any size“. I’ll be going through the start/sustain bits, and trying to do some actual work with the audience. I’m hoping some of the audience will be interested in starting a project, or already working on it, and we can do some work for their efforts as a group.

Also on Friday I’ll be attending the Fedora Activity Day (FAD) that starts at 10 am – I’ll be there to help and learn.

My daughters are joining their friend to give “Ultimate Boredom 2.0” at 11:30 am on Saturday as part of the SCALE: The Next Generation youth conference. I think the talk title is an allusion to how much they think they will bore you (ultimately), which must be greater than the two other times they have given a similar talk (2.0). In addition to talking about how they’ve participated in open source projects, they’ll cover some of their favorite free/open source software – last I saw the presentation covered GIMP, OpenShot, TuxPaint, and Hydrogen.

Finally, on Sunday morning at 11:30 am I’ll be giving, “oVirt – Infrastructure and management platform for the data center“. This is a general what-is-oVirt, how-did-it-come-to-be, where-might-it-be-going presentation, similar to the one Carl Trieloff gave at the start of the oVirt workshop in November 2011.

See you in LA!

If you are going to be at OSB10, I’m talking Wednesday 02 June from 1:30 – 2:15pm in Broadway.  I arrive Tuesday morning and am back out Thursday by Lunch, so a nice long window to talk free and open topics.

Presentation

Today’s plan

• 1950s to the present.
• Work on timelines.
• Build a circuit with a lightbulb.
• Break
• Construct electronic-parts art & play Dr. Frankenstein with components.

Videos

We’ll watch these to start:

• How a CRT works (~1 min) – a catch up answer from last week.
• 1946 ENIAC – Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computing (~2 min) – first digital computer
• The Computer History Museum (~4 min) – a short tour
• UNIVAC – Then and Now (~13 min) – perhaps while we work on timelines

These are videos that were interesting but were too long for class time:

• History of computers video collection on YouTube.
• A humorous history of computing and UNIVAC from 1960.
• Computer History Museum YouTube page.
• A visit to the Computer History Museum (~4 min)
• What is a Theramin and how to make one (series) – an fascinating early 20th century electronic instrument.
• Clara Rockmore plays “The Swan” on a Theramin.

Links

• Computer History Museum.
• Wikipedia electronics article.

Notes and timeline

Timeline drawn from The Silicon Engine – A Timeline of Semiconductors in Computers.

The 1950s and 1960s were the birthplace and time for modern electronics.  Much of what we use today is directly built on ideas and technologies developed in those decades.  In some cases, all we have
done is make them smaller and more powerful.

• 1946 – ENIAC Vacuum tube or valve computer – first digital computer.
• 1947 – first solid-state semiconductor transistor
  • Because the material can be built with precise control of just how conductive, you can design many types of gates.  Precise flow of electrons is at the heart of computer calculations.
• 1950s – Age of the Transistor
• 1952 – first portable electronics were hearing aids and pocket radios that could run on a battery and were relatively small +  expensive.
• 1953 – first transistorized computers.
• 1956 – RAMAC first disk drive
• 1960s – Age of the Integrated Circuit
• 1961 – silicon beats germanium; most circuits are silicon based since then, leading to integrated circuits (IC) in 1962.  ICs put many small transistors in one chip, which makes it easier to produce lots of them at large scale.
• 1964 – Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (MOS), which is the dominate manufacturing technology.
• 1965 – Moore’s law
  • “Transistor density on integrated circuits doubles about every two years.”
  • Translation — every few years, computers get twice as small and twice as powerful.
  • Visual of this in action on Computer History Museum website.
• 1965, 1966 – First ROM and RAM.
  • Read-Only Memory (ROM) chips let you store programs and special data in a permanent (non-volatile) way that remains after the power is turned off.  This information is burned (written) to the ROM during manufacturing, although there are tools that can reflash a special kind called EPROM, invented in 1971.
  • Random Access Memory (RAM) chips store information that must be used accessed quickly and change often.  They are made to be read and written by a computer during usage, but the data they store is not-permanent – when the power goes off, it goes away.
• 1970s+ – Modern Electronics Iterates on 50s and 60s technologies
• 1974 – first system on a chip (digital watch)

(Updated with more links, videos, and notes.)

This is a follow-up to the successful CLS that occurred before the last OSCON in San Jose.  The idea was born at the first CLS to have additional, regional, and smaller CLS events in between an international, annual event.  Well, small was the idea originally, but it sounds as if CLS West has nearly as many people attending.  In addition, the Ignite session on Saturday night at Google HQ gives a handful of us a chance to bring a message to the assembled attendees and a few guests.  I’m planning to break out our new upstream project – an open content community book we’ve started and are ready to open for wider collaboration.

If you want to attend CLS West, there are still free tickets as of this writing.  If I know you and you want to come to just the Ignite event, I’ll gladly hook you up as my guest.  That, I believe, is first come, first served.

For those who’ve never heard of building automation systems (BAS) and the smart grid, you have my pardon to take a few minutes to go read up.  In essence, BAS controls lighting, heating/cooling, and power.  In some buildings, especially modern (last decade+) construction or recent reconstruction, there are smart(er) devices right down to individual fans or perhaps lights.  In some cases these end-devices have various embedded sensors that report data or have localized smartness.  For example, the heater, the boiler, and all the thermometers share data.  From a building management standpoint, there is a measurable savings.

Where these end-point systems are generally interoperable (they use the term Open Systems), the software that interacts with the devices, providing information and control to humans, is closed and proprietary.  There are also many end-point devices that only interact with a proprietary interface.

The problem of the controlling software is a chance for open source to significantly change the game.  Money and energy savings, just to start.  A way to improve the quality of life for people around the world.  It is even more interesting because of how potentially useful the existing on-site hardware is.  There are many end-point installations that can be controlled with open source-based BAS software.

The power grid is, in essence, a massive network already connecting houses and commercial buildings.  It is also fairly ubiquitous:  “You have an existing network in your house,” someone said to me, “It’s the bus bar in your electric box!”

Kent Hoskin, from Robinson Solutions, told me, “If there is one thing you take away to share, it is this – there is a new computer to program.”  This includes the 4 million+ commercial buildings in the US alone.

One project is Open Lynx, which a lead developer demonstrated before I spoke on the open source round table.  In the demo, we looked at monitoring from an installation in Washington, DC.  In a larger demo on the expo show floor the day after I was there, they were going to show control beyond monitoring.

The round table was enlightening for all of us.  Many people were engaged when I spoke, taking notes, nodding their heads, and asking questions afterward.  It was great to be able to bring a bit of “been there, done that” experience and mentoring.  At the same time, I learned a lot about the history and potential future of BAS, and the 1.5 hour conversation I had afterward with some attendees was one of the best I’ve had in a while.  I’ve made some good contacts and am looking at ways that I can help get together other like minded people, which is one reason for this article.

A smarter local grid gives an owner a way to smooth out some of the costs.  For example, a company might have three buildings at a large site, each on a separate connection to the power utility.  One of the buildings might have an unusual spike of power draw on Sunday mornings that sets the rate for the week, while another building has an unusually low power draw at the same time.  A smart system could smooth out, drawing power from one building to the other to compensate, and keep the rate set lower to a level closer to the actual power used throughout the week.  For various reasons, the disconnected systems situation is more common than not.

In further research during my travels home, I learned a bit more about where the mentality of this industry is.  For example, they have ISO standard networking protocols (BACnet) and there some a rejection, scoffing, or eschewing of IP as a protocol.  In one article, Sustainable Design of Building Automation Systems, the author makes a classic case where the best answer is “open source and open standards”, yet doesn’t actually draw that conclusion:

In conclusion, a sustainable BAS is achievable with proper initial design considerations that include the use of open protocols, standardized network management tools and open access to product and training.

It reminded me of the way IT uses TCO as a way to calculate costs and savings when considering open source and open standards, but stops short of adopting the full open source methodology.  “Oh, let me take these open standards as given to me and swallow them without ever thinking I can affect the future here.”  I was happy that at least the people who attended the round table got a dose of how and why participation in open source is key to getting maximum potential and exponential value.

(Post updated to fix name and URL of Robinson Solutions.)

Tip – if you have an ISO image (DVD or Live CD) of the Fedora version base repository you are mirroring, use it to seed your repo.  I mounted the ISO and used `rsync -Pavz` to copy the files in to the directory while the mirror script was running.  In just a few minutes I had all the RPMs I needed to recreate the ISO I started from.

Awesome – yeah, you read that right.  If you have a Fedora DVD (or image), you can use that plus `pungi` to create your own customized Fedora distro in about 2 hours.  Most of that time is `pungi` composing the image.

The talk went just fine.  It’s a small LUG in an area that has a traditionally hard time of maintaining a regular LUG of any size.  Hopefully the energy in the San Lorenzo Valley continues; I know I’ll keep coming and bringing my girls with their XOs.

The call for papers deadline has been extended a week to 16 March.  If you’d like to get in front of potential contributors and help them to get to the next level in open source, then submit a talk in one of the ‘Summit or ‘World tracks.

In this country, there is a stark contrast between K-12 and the secondary schools, that is, college and universities.  K-12 educators are plagued by extremely thin resources, a load of rules and regulations enforcing standards that are a requirement to getting money, and a constantly changing landscape of a real world their students live in.  They remind me of a group of people constantly in start-up mode, doing amazing things with almost no money.

You would think that free and open source software is a perfect fit here, and everyone agrees who understands.  “We cannot get to 1:1 computing without Linux,” Steve Hargadon is saying to anyone who will listen. Unfortunately, getting the attention of the actual budget makers, the school districts and school boards, is much harder.  These are people driven by a higher set of regulations where techology is just a tool, but it must be the right tool from their perspective.  With school boards made up of local business leaders, the focus on what is the right real world solution for students ends up mirroring their business expectation.  Kids are taught to use PowerPoint because the perception is this is a useful life skill.

Due to laws such as the ironically named “No Child Left Behind” act there is a focus on testing and test preparation.  Teaching for this testing takes the path of least resistence, and the proprietary software companies have such traction here they are the apparently frictionless pathway.

But here at CUE are the actual people in the trenches, teaching students, providing techology solutions, so if there is anywhere a grassroots groundswell can start, it is as a revolution amongst educators.

Thursday afternoon I blew in to town a few scant hours before my talk, got settled at the hotel, and made my way to the conference.  My talk, “Using the open source two-way street in the classroom”, was held in the open source pavilion.  This was my first surprise.  Steve and other cohorts had worked over the years from being a small table in a corner to having a huge presence across the back of the conference.  The K12OpenSource.com email garden is running an LTSP cluster of Ubuntu, thanks to Revolution Linux.  The open source pavilion is another set of thin clients, in the same network but separated for control by iTALC, a classroom desktop session monitoring tool.

I got there just in time to listen to Megan from ISKME, which runs OER Commons, an open education resources clearinghouse — good stuff for finding, rating, and reusing open courseware from around the world.  Right away I was seeing there is a lot more support for open source and open content in the K-12 world.  Fortunately for me, Megan revealed that contributing back to the open stream is not as common of an idea, so my talk wasn’t going to be entirely old news.

In the talk, I started with a trick I learned from Max Spevack, to ask about the knowledge of the people in the room, then set the understanding about what open source and free culture are.  From there I explained how the skills used apply to many parts of life, and that contributing and collaboration are much more than code.  Then I gave some examples and ideas for how to turn a classroom from consumers to participants.  My main focus was on a low-barrier to entry open content tool, Wikipedia.  By working their way up from editing to authoring to owning pages in Wikipedia, a classroom can gain a collaborative underpinning while learning, reporting on what they are learning, and doing something that is going to live on rather than be in a shoebox in the attic.

So far, the best things have been having a good discussion with Steve about how Fedora can be involved with K-12 Open Source in other shows, such as NECC in Washington, DC on June 28  – July 1.  This is where the Fedora Ambassadors can choose our own agenda — if we want to focus on K-12 in the United States, we can.  I’m going to talk more with Steve this week, and invite him to come to a North America Ambassadors meeting soon to discuss how we can help him.

Another great conversation was with Benoit St. Andre, of Revolution Linux.  He showed me some of the slicker aspects of their LTSP clustering, and explained why they built in response to real school district needs.  For example, they have a district in Canada that has 5000 desktops running thin client Linux.  Standard LTSP tooling didn’t work at that scale.  Their clustering allows them to have 40 servers provide LTSP services to those 5000 desktops, a scalability otherwise unheard of in LTSP circles.  Fortunately, they are intimitely involve in the K12 Linux project, so all of that code is working its way upstream.

On Friday, I’m going to attend some talks, sit for a while in the open source pavilion, and talk to the many, many software vendors looking for those who are open source or who build on an open source platform.

(This post disappeared from my WordPress instance.  Very odd.  So I reposted it.  Thank you Fedora Planet for having a copy in your feed.)