Chris Tyler's Blog

We're celebrating the release of Fedora 11 in Toronto on June 15.

Come and join us! Details on the Fedora wiki.

For the eighth year in a row, the Centre for Development of Open Technology at Seneca College is holding the Free Software and Open Source Symposium. This year's event will be on Friday, October 30, with optional hands-on workshops on Thursday, October 29. We're expecting around 300 open source developers, community leaders, business people, and students from Toronto, throughout Ontario, and around the world.

Are you passionate about an open source project? Do you have new insight into open source (or open content, or open formats)? Tell the world: we've put out a call for great presentation proposals on the FSOSS website.

Registration for FSOSS 2009 will open in June... and yes, we pronounce it "eff-sauce"!

The Fedora Board has been discussing a new mailing list policy: "be excellent to one another". Violators will be subject to moderation for a day (messages must be approved before they are posted), and repeat violators may be referred to the board for further action.

This has, of course, raised the question of what "being excellent" means. The phrase itself comes from the classic Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (make air guitar gesture) but to me, being excellent is defined by a much older text:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 1 Cor 13 [NIV].

Seen on a poster downtown:

Adobe, your Flash Player and Acrobat Reader products are complete and utter crap. I don't use other platforms enough to know or care, but the Linux versions are utterly, terrifyingly awful.

Adobe [Acrobat] Reader

• Available in several package formats. Not available from a repository, from which updates could easily be pushed to your customers; instead, we're invited to "Receive up-to-date information about new releases and security updates by registering your copy of Adobe Reader". How? "Please contact me via the following methods: (please check one or more): Mail / E-mail / Telephone". I'd much rather receive the security update and a phone call about the security update, thanks. Update: Gideon Mayhak noted in comments that AdobeReader is available in the same repository as the Flash Player. Somehow I missed that, Adobe -- probably because you make no mention of it on your website.
• The print dialog, which is fairly significant in a document reader, doesn't look like any other print dialog I've seen in a long, long time. Actually, a lot of the Reader user interface is non-standard (or perhaps just ancient?), but the print dialog takes the cake. Adobe, you made it up; it certainly isn't close to the standard Gnome or KDE print dialogs. It's a hideous monstrosity reminiscent of Motif dialogs from 20 years ago. But you do let people fiddle with the printer command line -- excellent for kiosk applications!
• When used as a plugin, Reader will consume 100% of CPU and ever-increasing amounts of memory when I close a browser tab containing the plugin. That's right: when there is no visible sign that the software is running, it's bringing the system to its knees.
• Reader does not uninstall cleanly. When AdbeRdr is removed from a system, the default handler for PDF files should revert to the pre-Adobe-Reader value, but it does not -- the system will forever look for the non-existant 'acroread' binary. I haven't yet figured out where the ghost lives.

• Available from a repository. Nice touch!  But 64-bits, anyone?
• Consumes massive amounts of CPU time when apparently doing nothing. By massive, I mean that it pushes the CPU temperature up until the fans switch into the turbo near-ultrasonic range. I mean that it brings normally-responsive multi-user systems to their knees. I mean it uses so much electricity that environmentalists weep publicly and small furry creatures pack their bags and move to other continents, if they haven't lost their sanity because of the ultrasonic whine.
• 32- vs. 64-bit issues: don't get me started.

Greg DeKoenigsberg's POSSE program -- Professor's Open Source Summer Experience -- is a week-long immersion in the world of community-based open source open to any professor teaching programming.

This is a fantastic opportunity to get up to speed on open source development: working (1) at scale, on large codebases used on production systems, and (2) in community, collaborating on a global scale and leveraging the network effects of an open source community.

The application deadline for POSSE is this Friday, April 3. Red Hat is picking up all costs except for transportation -- you just have to get yourself there. Don't delay: read the wiki page and send your application!