Warm Up
Checking infrastructure
ready to go! 
Conclusions
I don’t have time for a report, however Gianluca Varisco’s report is good and enought. In few words: nice event.
First Symbolic version was released on 22/04/08. It was first open source project I never managed, we got some problem to start and to make a stable version. Now I’m releasing (aka uploading on sourceforge) the 1.1.1. version.
I want to write a bit on this project on my blog (improvements, bugs, solutions and so on), but before I need to explain a bit few word about this project.
What’s symbolic?
Symbolic is a web application written with grails and is written as a front end of FUNC (Fedora Unified Network Controller). Symbolic goal is to resolve a big problem when unskilled administrators have to manage huge number of machines (virtual or host); FUNC has sexy design and is written really good, but is a python API, so require a substantive knowledge and is difficult to be used by unskilled people.
Which features actually are implemented?
Symbolic is written using Agile programming, so there are a lot of feature which are implemented and removed because testing fails. Actually there are these implemented features:
)Right now there is a dirty method to call FUNC, using command line; I’m writing (very slowly 
) a FUNC extension to allow communication through network (now with XMLRPC but soon with socket). In this way FUNC provides a general interface which guarantee interdependency from back-end and front-end eliminating problems due different programming languages.
Who is working behind symbolic?
Francesco Crippa and Davide Panelli are project managers; me, Marco Mornati and Simone Pucci are developers, Samuele Storari is our Art Director. Last but not least, behind symbolic there is also FUNC community.
to be continued 
Update 15/06/08@09:53am Symbolic 1.1.1 has been released, downland here. Grails 1.0.3 is required (RPM here).
Byte-code meet up is a nice event aim to aggregate all employers and consultants who often work directly to the customers. Is a mix of social and education event.
This year (6 and 7 June), the event was located in Valsesia, a nice place in Piemonte region, behind Alps Mountains. A beautifull place: Sesia torrent is in Italy one of the best place to do rafting!!
Meet Up was divided into two main parts: the conferences part where some of us (me, Francesco, Simone, Luca, Marco, Davide, Raffaele and Antonio Leo, from Red Hat) did a talk about something we have developed, studied…or liked
Me during my speech about my thesis application
Marco, Sergio and Marco
Ready to speech
Dinner
The most interesting and funny part was, in fact, rafting, Saturday afternoon, there was the best weather condition and the water river was nice: it was a wonderful experience…
Do you think that people may be information guys? It was *great*… I want to say thanks to the organizators….
My last day, my plane hour was scheduled to 12:15am, I leave the fedora ambassadors group around 8:00am and I take two hours to have a short trip in the city.
I went with underground to Postdamme Platz, then I went by walking in the city towards Alexander Platz.
I saw the Brandenburg door, the parliament and some other nice and famous buildings.
When I reached Alexander platx, I caught train to go to airport
FUDCon, FUDCon, FUDCon…yep, Fedora Users and Developers Conference For us was the most important day within Linux Tag.
Max Spevak opened the FUDCon with a short introduction, after Tribalth North spoke about Fedora Electronic Lab project which aim to packages and provide some electronic application into fedora distribution. This project is interesting especially for schools and universities.
After him, the speech about FreeIPA was unfortunately suspended, so, to cover the hole in the FUDCon program Yakoov Nemroy did a short talk about Smolt.
You can read to the background of this phtos…what Smolt is
Smolt is a software which permit to users to send to central server configuration details about your computer, this software allow to understand and simplify information about linux compatiliblity.
Max Spevak spoke about fedora community and some interesting point of view about this project.
This is the best photo i never take in Linux Tag, is focused, impressive and expressive
Afternoon started at 15:00 with Paul Frields about “Fedora state of union”, continued with Francesco Crippa speech about Func, cobbler and puppet as huge network management solutions and ended with Jeroen van Meeuwen with a talk about revisor, a fedora tool used to make spins and custom fedora distributions.
In the evening we went to an Argentinian restaurant near hotel; we had three new people with us: Dag Wieers and Tim Verhoeven from CentOS, Lennart Poettering and another guy (my memory is a “groviera”, I don’t remember his name) from RH.
After dinner, we went to drink and had a lot of fun.
Paul tried Berlininen Waiss in both available colors: red and green (the red is the empty glass ).
Paul Frields
Me with Dag and Tim
and in the end of the night we make somestrange pictures
I don’t know what we are doing 
We woke up at 7am (!!!) and we left Hotel at 8am; the night and breakfast help us to recover energy.
I had to stay in booth from 9 to 11 and from 15 to 17, so, In the other moments, I visited other stands: I played (again) with FlightGears and, a bit, with Freets on Fire and TeeWars (amazing game!!).
In the OpenSolaris stand I spoke with a MySQL guy about past rumours and the possibility to have closed source part inside MySQL; as far as I remember he said: “Is impossible to say. I can’t say yes, but… of course, I can’t say also no”.
We spoke about the OpenSolaris community: management, development model and other stuff. I think is quite similar to Fedora community (but, of course, fedora community is better ).
During this day me and other guys enjoyed to see problems about biometrics controllers; Marco Ziesing tried to set up finger recognition but it didn’t work only for him! (LOL).
Software require to pass your finger on the sensor for three times, to allow it to memorize information: for me and other guys after third time, the cursor return and all goes ok, but for him, after third time, the program crashed….and he won also a set of kernel ops.
These are two OLPC in the Fedora booth, it’s a nice computer:
In the evening we went to a social event, organized by Linux Tag; all ambassador who paid EMEA fee receive a bathrobe as a gift. All EMEA member at Linux tag decided to dress their bathrobe to go to social event: simply wonderful.
Social event was located in a strange but nice place, maybe an old farm: unlimited drinks and meals, music, people etc..
and…shadowman appeared
The place was divided into two main parts: inside the building there was a big table full of food, and a place to sing and dance, unfortunately the temperature was warm, so some people went in the outside part. The outside part was a small garden with some tables and a place where people grill meal for us.
Nice day and evening
Linux Tag is the most important Linux event in Europe and is organized and played in Berlin. Linux Tag is characterized by an huge participations of people (expected ~10000), associations (Fedoraproject, Debian, Gentoo, GNOME, KDE, linux-gamers) and companies (IBM, Sun, Oracle…); in fact Linux Tag slogan is “when .org meet .com”.
My Fedora Ambassador participation was the first outside Italy; when I caught aeroplane I was a little bit scared because I didn’t travel outside Italy since exactly one year. I found a good environment made by nice people: great enthusiasm, great collaboration, great fun…
Wednesday 28/05
I arrived in Berlin at ~10:30 am, and I leave my luggage in my room (we lived in Film Hotel, with every room dedicated to an actor. My room was dedicated to David Niven, I don’t know who is, but Francesco was more lucky with Audrey Hepburn).
After arriving to Linux Tag in Messe Am, I met some fedora ambassadors and I took a look about stands of other associations/companies.
Fedora booth was wonderful: all people wear the official ambassador polo (my polo was a gift from Max, thanks again), two OLPC, one Asus eeePc, stickers, t-shirts and our powerful innovation USB stick creation station.
Fedoraproject stand
Our powerful USB stick creation station (thanks to Matteo Castellini for kobold).
Francesco e Matthieu while checking USB station
In the afternoon, after I attended the Aaron Seeigo’s talk about KDE 4 I stayed for about an hour near our booth to check USB station and OLPCs; I took a bit of my time to went to the stand in front of our: linux-gamers.
I loved that stand, there was two FlightGear’s stations with 3 monitors, cloches and pedals each one, connected by network as multi player game, in addition, the server was able to draw aeroplanes on the real world, using a google maps based application.
Me
Francesco
Freets on Fire with Guitar
At 16:00 I attended a talk on LVM. It was strange to see a speaker from Red Hat using an Apple computer (with Fedora 8 virtualized with VMWare), by the way this talk was interesting and showed a lot of stuff I didn’t know about LVM.
LVM Talk
After half of afternoon, my email addiction took over me and I needed to connect so I came on Development room (a room with tables and wired/wireless networking) with Francesco. In that room I found and meet other fedora ambassadors.
Francesco, Yakoov, Stefan, Andreas, Jeroen and Fabian
Gerold, Max, Paul, Yakoov and Sandro
We leave Linux Tag building at 19 and, after a pause in hotel, we went to an Italian restaurant and we ate pizza. I ever been thought Italian food is not so good outside Italy, I ate pizza without salt, I saw people mix pasta and ketchup (OMG!!!), however in that restaurant I ate good pizza so I decided to review my policy.
Fedora ambassadors after a wearying day are going to eat
(sorry but I forgot to change ISO, so I take photo using ISO 800)
Thibault and Pavel (my room-mate)
Matthieu and Stefan
After dinner, we stayed in that restaurant to speak and drink beer, I saw for the first time “Berliner Weiss”, a special drink from Berlin ().
About near 12am, me and Francesco returned in hotel but while we was on street, we decided to made a short trip in the quarter close to us; we travelled for about 15/20 minutes until we reached the old church devastated by second world war bombing and kept original as after war.
I took a lot of photos in this day but criteria like Ubuntu’s policy…high quantity, low quality so more than 70% was deleted
During those days I understood the level of my english, so I decided study it to arrive to FUDCon and other events a bit more skilled
[to be continued...]
