Chris Tyler's Blog

It's been an honour and a pleasure to host FUDCon Toronto 2009 at Seneca College.

A number of FUDCon attendees have asked me about the "Seneca@York" name and what it means, so let me introduce our school: Seneca College is Canada's largest College of Applied Arts and Technology, with over 20,000 full-time students and 80,000 part-time students. Seneca@York is one of Seneca's campuses and is located on the corner of York University; this campus hosts our School of Computer Studies, which offers 2- and 3-year diplomas as well as 4-year bachelor degrees and graduate certificates in software development and in system and network administration.

The School of Computer Studies has been teaching the use of open source software for over 15 years. In 2001, all of our labs were converted to dual-boot Windows and Linux, and we started introducing students to open source software during their first week of classes. Over the past three years, we have been offering professional option courses (electives) in which we take students into open source communities such as Mozilla and Fedora and teach them how to effectively collaborate with other contributors, using a model I presented at LinuxSymposium 2008. You can read about our courses and what our students are doing on our wiki and blog planet (where you'll see aggregated posts from students working at a number of different levels).

My warmest thanks to the Fedora community for making the trek to Toronto in the middle of a cold but almost snow-free December. Our doors are always open and we'd love to have you back for another FUDCon someday (or have some of you attend or present at our annual Free Software and Open Source Symposium). In the meantime, our faculty and students will continue to work alongside you in Fedora and in various upstream open source communities.

A few more notes for out-of-town FUDCon attendees:

• When you check in at the hotel, you will have the opportunity to buy breakfast buffet vouchers for $6 each. The breakfast buffet is usually $14.95, so this is a pretty good deal. In fact, it's so good that we won't be bothering with pastries and drinks at the event.
• To get to the campus from the hotel, cross the road on the west side of the hotel (not the larger highway on the north side) to the blue VIVA stop. Buy a ticket from the machine for the ride to campus ($3.25 in Canadian coins or credit card only) and hop on the next bus -- the wait should always be under 15 minutes. Travel 2 stops to the York University stop. When you exit the bus, turn to your left (south) and cross three roads to arrive at the SEQ building. To return to the hotel, simply board the VIVA at York on the east side of the road, opposite from where you got off the bus in the morning. (Google map). TIP: buy VIVA fares at the campus at 10/$26 to save money on future trips, and split the 10-pack with another attendee.
• There will be a hospitality suite/hack room at the hotel, suite 316, open on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday evenings. On Monday there will be appetizers and finger foods too.

What happens when you get 170+ geeks together? You melt the network, of course!

Two network-related suggestions for FUDCon:

(1) Disable IPv6 DNS support in Firefox by going to the pseudo-URL about:config and then changing the value of network.dns.disableIPv6 to true. This will prevent Firefox for waiting for IPv6 timeouts before trying IPv4, reducing page load times for sites such as the Fedora wiki to less than a second instead of a minute or more (we need to figure out why this is happening on networks that don't serve IPv6 DHCP information -- apparently this is an issue on Macs as well, where network.dns.disableIPv6 defaults to true as a workaround. This affects more than just Firefox -- it's an issue with curl as well (but not wget).

(2) Bring an ethernet cable. We will have wired ports available in some of the hackfest rooms on Sunday and Monday to lighten the load on the wireless network, so please plug-in if you're doing high-bandwidth work (video uploading, or rsyncing your laptop Fedora repository). Speaking of local repositories, there is a local private Fedora mirror, http://belmont.senecac.on.ca/fedora/, which the Fedora mirror system will automatically select for you when you're on campus.

Some general FUDCon packing suggestions are on the wiki.

For those heading to FUDCon Toronto: I've added a column to the pre-registration table where you can type one additional line of text for your badge -- this will be printed underneath your name. Please include your IRC nick or FAS username, and any other optional info you want on your badge, such as your area of participation in Fedora, where you're from, where you work, or whatever.

Please: (1) keep it clean! (2) don't change other people's Extra Info lines and (3) don't go much over 20-30 characters -- we're printing with glabels using the "shrink text to fit"option, so long lines will be in unreadable text sizes.

Badges will be printed on Thursday evening, so if you want extra text on your badge, now is your chance.

Alexander Larsson answered my Dear Lazyweb on finding a PID given a Window ID, to implement Richard Jones' View Source Button idea. I hacked up a tiny bash script to see what kind of info we could easily get about a window. Running that script and clicking on the Gnome calculator, I see:

$ show-source
Click on a window. Avoid clicking on a window border.
PID:             6272
Binary:          /usr/bin/gcalctool
RPM:             gcalctool-5.28.1-1.fc12.x86_64.rpm
SRPM:            gcalctool-5.28.1-1.fc12.src.rpm
Upstream URL:    http://directory.fsf.org/gcalctool.html
Fedora release:  12
Bugzilla search: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&classification=Fedora&product=Fedora&component=gcalctool&version=12
PackageDB page:  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/packages/name/gcalctool
Transifex page:  (None)

There's a lot more that needs to be handled -- for example, clicking on a script window reports the interpreter instead of the script, clicking on a window border reports nothing, clicking on the window of a consolehelper'd app fails on access to /proc/$PID/exe, and clicking on a terminal window reports the terminal program instead of the character-mode app that is running (obviously).

All of these can be solved fairly easily, and the idea looks workable! As I noted in a commend on Richard's original post, it would be cool to make this View Source applet capable of taking the user to the pkgdb page, a source code browser (I'm thinking DXR, once we get it indexing all of Fedora), a bugzilla search, the upstream web page, or the translate.fedoraproject.org page; or, if the user chose, the applet could download and install the .src.rpm.

As far as I know, there is no way to reliably get a process ID from an X window ID for local clients (to implement Richard's View Source idea). I would love to be wrong!

Questions:

(1) Did I miss something? Can this be done now?

(2) If this can't be done now, what would it take? Could we create an X extension so that the server can supply connection info for a window, and then trace that connection info back to a specific process?