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Category Archives: Writing

Death to the postmortem, long live …

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Every release cycle in Fedora I see folks use the term postmortem to refer to discussions after the release that focus on analysing what happened during the release, with a focus on fixing mistakes and repeating successes.  This is a neologism borrowed from domains such as business. Humans are wordy people, and the effects of [...]

Filed in Community, Fedora, Writing | Comments (10)

Textbook released – Practical Open Source Software Exploration

Thursday, April 1, 2010

After months of work and a last-weekend rush of conversion from MediaWiki to DocBook+Publican, the Teaching Open Source writing team has released version 0.8 of “Practical Open Source Software Exploration: How to Be Productively Lost the Open Source Way“.  (HTML single-page and PDF.) This week, Dr. Tim Budd at Oregon State University (and member of [...]

Filed in Classroom, Education, FLOSS, Fedora, Free Culture, Open Source, TOS, Writing | Comments (2)

More on Publican

Thursday, April 1, 2010

When writing about the Practical Open Source Software Exploration textbook release, I had a bunch of extra thoughts about Publican that I wanted to separate out to its own post. My sense is that Publican is in good shape for groups to adopt and extend.1  For example, there was a recent discussion in a MeeGo [...]

Filed in Documentation, Fedora, Free Culture, Wiki, Writing | Comments (0)

Observe the operating room – wiki2xml sprint for FOSS textbook

Friday, March 26, 2010

There is a work sprint you might be interested in observing or participating in if you … Use MediaWiki for writing long works and want to see how it is to convert to DocBook XML. Want to know more about using DocBook XML and the Publican publishing toolchain. Enjoy watching people edit XML like mad. [...]

Filed in Classroom, Education, Fedora, TOS, Writing | Comments (2)

Confused aka not entirely an Ada Lovelace Day tribute but thanks anyway Lana

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

As soon as I decided to write an Ada Lovelace Day tribute to a woman in computing, I almost immediately stumbled across Lana Brindley’s post on computer engineer Barbie.  It was a nice serendipity.  This week Lana’s posts on technical writing were both inspiring and directly helpful in terms of supplying content to a textbook [...]

Filed in Community, Fedora, Writing | Comments (3)

Licensing my blog content as CC BY SA 3.0 Unported

Friday, February 5, 2010

I am licensing all of my blog content past, present, and ongoing under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported (CC BY SA) free content license.  This includes my content published by the excellent WordPress engine at iquaid.org, and my content at iquaid.livejournal.com (deprecated). This has been on my mind for a while, and in [...]

Filed in Fedora, Free Culture, Writing | Comments (2)

Off-Planet? A recap of recent posts …

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Seems I managed to get dropped from the Fedora Planet for a short time, perhaps I didn’t change my password in time and got my account disabled? Because I’m the kind of neurotic writer who is sure no one is reading, and is terrified when he finds out it is totally true!, I figured a [...]

Filed in Fedora, Writing | Comments (1)

Should we use the CC when it’s not truly freeing?

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

If you haven’t read the well-reasoned article on FreedomDefined.org about not using the non-commercial (NC) clause of the CC license, please do. Recently I saw Benjamin Mako Hill give a talk about free culture, and he showed some graphics that are several years old about the proliferation of CC licenses, especially which types are used. [...]

Filed in FLOSS, Fedora, Free Culture, Freedom, Writing | Comments (3)

Looking for a tech writing class to help

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Ready for some classic back scratchin’? (That’s where you scratch my back, and I scratch yours.) You are in charge of or part of a class in technical writing or documentation. We have an open project with tools, processes, and lots of great content to create and manage. In addition to using community-generated content to [...]

Filed in Documentation, FLOSS, Fedora, Open Source, Writing | Comments (1)

How to fish for new contributors

Saturday, February 23, 2008

One way … tell it like it is. Make it your mission. Be funny and poignant when you write about it: http://exitcondition.alrubinger.com/2008/01/15/wanna-do-my-homework/ I just started reading Andrew Lee Rubinger’s blog, or maybe he just began blogging? Not sure, but he has a polished, funny, irreverent, and clean writing style. In particular, I appreciate his thematic [...]

Filed in FLOSS, Fedora, JBoss, Writing | Comments (3)