hhhHHHhhholland!!!
I’m going to move to Holland!!
\o/ \o/
I haven’t written yet about this news, but now I’m finally doing it! I’m a little bit superstitious 
I have waited until official confirmation because this is a thing I really care of.
I’m going to move to Holland, in particular to The Hague, to work in a big and innovative project.
I’m so excited and motivated about it: the project will be development using Agile techniques (wo wo wo .-)) and this is a huge opportunity to grow, to meet skilled people and, last but not least, to leave Italy (despite this, I’m leaving part of my heart and my friends there).
By the way, I’ll start to work in this new project on June 15th. Right now I need two things: a flat and a bike
About apartment I have some requests for you, my readers (if you are from Holland): If you live in The Hague and nearby (Delft, Voorburg, Pijnager, etc.) and you have suggestion for renting apartment, just a medium flat with at least two bedrooms (for two people) don’t hesitate to contact me by mail, comments, and so on 
.
I have already took a look on some Dutch websites like funda.nl, www.pararius.nl, www.perfecthousing.com, but a direct contact would be better.
I’m happy and I want to begin as soon as possible. That all
Stay tuned, I’m going to break the last period silence (facebook is changing our habits, but I’ll fight against it) with some new articles, and news.
MemoByte 2009 – Mantova
MemoByte 2009 is an event organized by ARCO no profit organization and is focuses on both Computer and Electronic technologies. Basically is divided into two areas: an area like a market of old and new electronic devices (Radio, old computers, transistors, and so on) and an area dedicated to Computer groups and organizations like LUGMan (Mantova’s LUG), Fedoraproject, LUG Parma, and so on.
I brought with me two good ambassadors: Gianluca Varisco and Alexjan Carraturo. Really good choice! We had to travel a lot of kilometres from Milan to Verona and then down to Mantova but thanks to them, the travel was funniest and interesting (particularly funny when Gianluca and Alex discussed about ADSL vs Optical fiber).
The worthy part was our ability and opportunity to plan a lot of things about Fedora-it and fedora ambassador groups.
We brought some Fedora 10 CDs, some Fedora FEL ISOs and a lot of stickers left from FOSDEM (Thanks to Gerold who gave me) and two OLPC (which is always a star).
We met a lot of people that needs information about Linux, Fedora and Opensource software. And we come back with the opportunity of organize a big and (maybe) international event in January 2010 (stay tuned).
Mantova is a good place for fedora to grown, organizators asked me about Linux Day (in october) and the possibility to have gadgets: they are fantastic supporters and we must to invest in that area as much as we can.
June june, what a crazy month :)
June is going to be a bit heavy. All weekends are taken:
- 6th: Memobyte (Mantova): Event related on electronic and embedded systems, with a lot of companies involved in. I’ll be there to support Fedora FEL with some light speeches (during all the day) and a booth with gadgets, USB station. Thanks to Gianluca, Alexjan and Stefano who agreed to come with me.
- 13th: ConfSL & LUGConf (Bologna): I’ll be in Bologna as two role: as President of LOLUG (no profit organization about Linux) and as Fedora Ambassador. This conference is really important to give a structure and exchange experiences in local user groups. Of course I’ll be there as Fedora ambassador because ConfSL has a lot of ubuntu/debian supporter, so I have to bring some fresh air
- 19th-21th: Byte-code MeetUp (Bormio): The third annual Byte-Code MeetUp, a combination of sessions, talks, workshops, and hackfests in which contributors work on specific initiatives. This year will be some international VIPs
- 26th-28th: Fedora EMEA FUDCon (Berlin): Fedora user and developer conferences will include two days of hackfests and possibly some presentations, followed by a day of BarCamp.
Nominate Symbolic to Sourceforge community choice awards
Help us by nominating Symbolic on sourceforge community choice awards.
Symbolic is the FIRST OPENSOURCE datacenter management platform and cloud computing solution. Based on leading Opensource system administration technologies (Func, Cobbler, Puppet, and much more) permit to automate your enterprise environment, datacenter or cloud computing network.
Nominate it!
Symbolic 1.3.0 released
Finally, after three months Symbolic 1.3.0 has been release with new cool features and new website.
Symbolic 1.3.0 has three key features:
- Cloud computing support (virtual machines management over Cluster)
- Machines provisioning with cobbler
- XEN console connection through VNC protocol.
you can see it in action on videos published weeks ago:
As usually, any suggestion and/or proposal is welcome!
Document Freedom Day
“Document Freedom Day” is an event, promoted by the Free Software Foundation, whose aim is to spread free documents formats and the Free Software culture. Last Wednesday I attended the Italian DFD 2009 in Opera (near to Milan, where in 2008 was organized “Liberamente“).
Me and Gianluca Varisco proposed a talk about the core values of the Fedora project, whose aim is to spread the meaning of the 4 foundations in general, and Fedora’s policies around codecs and firmwares in particular – thus covering a wider subject matter, not only documents.
Fedora gadgets
However, I couldn’t stay there all the time because it was a workday. I came during my lunch break and brought an OLPC (the byte-code one), some Fedora stickers and gadgets with me. Stefano Frontori, my colleague at byte-code, accompanied me and he was the official photographer (you will find some photos attached to this post). He’s a very good photographer but he has only one defect: he’s a Canonist (yep, this is a neologism “A person who uses a Canon” )
Fedora attenders
The initial plan was to do a two-people speech, but unfortunately Gianluca was unable to attend, due to last-minute-problems. I want to thank him: he took care all boring pre-event tasks: put together an abstract, contact the event owners and so on. There weren’t many people, but some interested students (better than 100 bored and inattentive people). I had only 30 minutes for my speech so I tried to do it in a more interactive way, people could interrupt me, ask questions and so on. At the end there was an important question about Fedora hardware support, about the community, and Fedora/Ubuntu comparison.
Me and my talk
I want also to point out the spirit of the FSF, in this case FSF Italy. Where the hell were they? FSF choose the most ugly day to organize this event (it was a workday, how can you expect a wide audience?), and didn’t send any FSF person.
Fedora ambassadors
Last but not least, many thanks to every voluntary people who organized this event. Special thanks to Alexjian Carraturo who allowed Fedora presence to this event.
My first HDR photos experiments
This afternoon I was bored in my room so I decided to start to learn how to create high dynamic range photos.
What is high dynamic range photos?
“The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.” (from wikipedia)
More theory informations here and here.
The main task is to take (at least three) equals pictures (better if raw, but it works also with jpeg) with only different exposure levels ( usually +3 EV, 0 EV and -3 EV, but you can choose your own settings) and combine it with particular software.
I started to use qtpfsgui that help you to align photos, combine with various techniques and obtain your HDR result. To be sure today I used it like monkey user: I got all default settings. After alignment I adjusted Tonemapping and I chose only mantiuk algorithm by trying to change saturation.
Here my results:
Puppets in England
Puppies in England /1
Puppies in England /2
Puppies in England /3
Puppies in England /4
Puppies in England /5
My old street
My old street /1
My old street /2
My old street /3
My old street /4
My old street /5
Not so bad but not yet good
Stay tuned!
Moving Fedora-it on rails
I’m 2 month late to write this post, but on the other hand, I adjusted my thought with last three months experience and give you a better perspective.
When I think about Fedora-IT community origin, I start smiling. I remember clearly when on #fedora-it IRC channel were only two (me and Matteo), and two Fedora Ambassador (Francesco & Francesco). Today we are officially a community. We are about 10/15 people on IRC and 5/7 active Fedora Ambassadors. This is nothing respect to French and German communities but for now is enough.
Since 2009 I have been decided to enhance the community by add short regular activities:
- We have to do at least one meeting for month (no matter who is the owner or who ask for it, it’s important to keep in touch regularly, have brainstorming, discussions and involving all interested people.
- We have few localized pages on fedora wiki to keep and track internal informations:
- Event page with a list of Italian events where we my participate (for example LinuxDay, Document Freedom Day, Software Freedom Day ,etc). This page has multiple goals: track every event may be interesting for us, give to Ambassador people the possibility to choose which event they want to attend, Today this page is incomplete but next year we will have a really valuable event list.
- Inventory page collects gadget location and owner, this page exist because gadget are distributed all around Italy. This list give you the possibility to know what is available and who ask to.
- Meeting page with transcript and summary meeting.
I think we are on the right way.Stay tuned!
