fucking the white bunny rabbit

Cerea is a small town, near Verona, characterized by a really huge exposition area, called AreaExpo, which counts a long series of events and expositions every year.

Before talking about the conference, I would like to talk a bit about the story of this event. Since I had the first contact and we got introduced to the possibility to have an active participation there, I was convinced on the importance of it. As Italian ambassadors we had to consider it as a key event.

Everything was possible thanks to Emanuele, friend and university mate, involved in some NPO of the area: LUGMan, Protezione civile, ARCO, etc. During MemoByte 2009, he introduced us to this fair and propose a huge Fedora participation.
I attended the Summer edition on August with Davide to have a look at the area and a better idea of the place. I was really impressed about it. Basically, the exposition area is divided into two parts: the exposition and the conference room with spots for 250 people.

The initial proposal and idea was to fill the conference room with talks during all the fair; I could say my best wish was to have Chitlesh Goorah speaking about Fedora FEL.

Unfortunately (and sadly) the Italian community didn’t answer very well (when I proposed it I got as answer only complains about the distance, the place, this and that…and so on…), so we (me and Emanuele) decided to do something lighter, less heavy (even for who organized) and with less resources required: a booth in the exposition area.

The (dream) team was composed by 5 people: Me, Alexjan, Marina, Davide and Lorenzo. The plans was to get there on Friday evening (I arrived on Saturday morning), stay there until Sunday evening. Due the impossibility to came back every night I arranged to sleep in an hostel near Cerea.

The exposition was really good, basically full of electronic, used stuff, radio amateurs, and various mixed booths. Indeed it was full of people; the organizations estimate around 10000 ~25000 people attended the event. We got also a really nice position, we were placed near the entrance, where all the people passed by after entering in the area.
A lot of people stop by and try the computers, ask questions and talk with us; statistically speaking most of them were above 40 years old, but I saw also some young people (not so many anyway).
The most common question people asked us were: “why not Ubuntu?” and “what are the differences?”; someone asked also “What is Linux?”. Next time I’ll bring a “fedora starter kit” with the most Frequently Asked Questions.

I really like the way we handle this event. My organization was a bit confused at the beginning because 1000Km distance are not handy but the team did and excellent job. In fact I cannot to say thanks to Stefano, who didn’t join us but did a fundamental job by helping me, like my right hand.
On my side, there are a lot of stuff that have to be improved, we manage successfully to get some CDs and DVDs (thanks to fedora) but due to some problems I couldn’t print the latest 4 foundation banner, we used the old Freedom, Voice and Infinity one.
Next time I want to design and try a new gadget concept. Instead of having CDs and DVDs I want to prepare and give a transparent plastic CD cover without a CD/DVD inside, but just information about:
• what is fedora
• how download and burn it
• how to join

Why this? Because, in Italy at least, most of the people who ask for CD/DVD don’t really need it, they need only the cover and the information printed on it.

Last but not least, this, for now, will be the last even I’ll organize in Italy. I’m now busy on FAmSCo stuffs and I still have to getting in and being more productive. Moreover the distance doesn’t help me, and I would like to see if the Italian community can walk without me.

I also decided to give my Ambassador polo, which is really big for me (I’ll get a new one two size less) to Alexjan. Like Max give to me for my involvement in Fedora, I’ll give to him because he is really doing good stuff for Fedora.
I have to congratulate with him and with all of the team, for the passion, the care and the effort they put on this event: I have to give my welcome to Marina, who will join our ambassador community.

In conclusion, this event was double worthy. Looking the relation with the outside world, we spot in a prolific (linux speaking) area and will give us opportunities to have at least two/three events per year. Looking internally we enhance our team, our relations, I believe having a face-to-face speaking was 10000 better than talking only via email and fortified your relation for present and future.

You can find additional photos from the event here.

Disclaimer/Story/whatever: I’m a fan of VOIP against IRC chatting and I’m trying to move the Italian community toward VOIP. I decided to write this article to help people to configure their Fedora Talk account (but of course, this article is general purpose ) (you can find some information on the official fedora Talk website)

Why VOIP? VOIP has pros and cons. On communication we get a lot of advantages: fluid discussion, lot of time saved, less typing, my brain while I have to moderate a IRC meeting, and so on. By the way VOIP is a pretty new technology and is not yet simple to use, crappy software, firewall issues are two of possible problems.

After a lot of time testing different account and software I found a possible combination that seems to work fine!

In Linux world we have basically two softwares: Ekiga and Twinkle. I used Ekiga for a while without great results. I though that twinkle was crappy, but after Paul Friedls told me it works fine, I tried and he was right! Despite Twinkle has an horrible – old 1999 style – Qt3 interface it’s faster and stable (and support pulseaudio!!).

Enabling VOIP account on Fedora Talk

Read here.

Configuring Twinkle with Fedora Talk account.

You can find the same informations on this useful video, made by Clint Savage.

When you start Twinkle first time, you can choose to use the wizard or the editor configuration.. Using the editor, you have to choose the name of the profile, then you arrive in a form to fill with information about the user (here the official guide).

In the User tab:

• Your name: insert your Fullname
• User name: your fedora username
• Domain: insert the domain, for fedora Talk use talk.fedoraproject.org
• Realm: leave blank
• Authentication name: use your fedora username
• Password: use your fedora voip password that’s different between your FAS password, you will find in your Voip FAS section informations

In the SIP server tab:

• Registrar: talk.fedoraproject.org

In the Presence tab, you can enable “publish availability on startup” (not sure is implemented in the fedora talk infrastructure)

Using

You can do some tests calling:

• 1001 (1001@talk.fedoraproject.org) that read you some sentences
• 1002 (1002@talk.fedoraproject.org) that’s a echo test service

For conferencing you can take a look here.

Troubleshooting

Here some information about some problems that con occurs:

Flash: Ensure flash and adobe s**t is not running before you start twinkle/ekiga or a call. If yes, you will not be able to use the audio device and (my proposed solution).

Microphone

Remember to enable the microphone. Some computers, in particular laptops have two input channels: mic and front mic (the jack mic and the embedded laptop mic respectively). To enable it you should use (i use and it works) alsamixer, but with pulseaudio when you launch it, you see only the pulseaudio channel. To see the below layer (ALSA layer) you have to use:

alsamixer -c 0

and, using TAB key go to Capture tab and modify input source from mic to front mic or vice versa. You can modify also input volume and other settings. enjoy!

Linux TAG: when .org meet .com., the most important opensource event in Europe.

Linux TAG is the first event I attended with Fedora project. My participation, this year was short, just the weekend, for the FUDCon.

As usually FUDCon was interesting and funny I met a lot of new people (the world is small but the people are many) and of course I don’t remember all their names

I arrived Friday night to – I discover the day after – Tegel Airport (instead of Schoenefeld) and I reach the other guys that were exactly in the same place of one year ago “en passant”, and of course Italian Restaurant.

The FUDCon was introduced by an interesting, as usually, keynote of Paul Frields then Barcamp sessions started. I wanted to present something but the schedule was decided the day before when I wasn’t yet arrived. Too bad.

I attended QA and git for hackers, fedoracommunity, Design for F12, Symboli 2.0 and Simon sessions talks.

I have to say thanks to Mairin to change the abits of people and bring us far from “en passant” (of course we need more woman). Sorry guys but I like to change restaurant sometimes

I also discovered why is not a good idea to say “I have a flickr account” to dutch people.

You can get some photos from my “yahoo photo” account.

This morning Francesco published his report so, right now I’m the last one…

This time was my first attendance to FOSDEM and I was really impressed how many geeks was participating.

I went to FOSDEM with some byte-code colleagues: Francesco, Davide and Marco.
We arrived on Friday at about 22:00 and we missed the social event (which was scheduled for 18:00 (!!!), a bit early for a beer event in a place where is not possible to eat – Delirium cafe).

We decided to eat something near hotel and then we had a beer in the nearest random place in Luxemburg square (near European parliament).

On Saturday we met other ambassadors for breakfast and went to University by cab.
We performed some ordinary set-up tasks: fixed posters on walls, distributed Fedora CDs on other booth’s tables (Jens rulez), prepared stickers, and so on.

I stayed to the booth until 11AM then I had a brainstorming about symbolic future, although we are colleagues in the same company, we usually don’t work in the same place and this meeting was a great opportunity to meet each other by person.

At 17:00, after my speech about Func and Symbolic I met a lot of people. From Italy I met Emanuele, who was my colleague in University, he is really interested in Fedora Electonic Lab and I will take care to give him technical support, gadget, availability for talk, to help him to spread about this fedora spin and bring it in some interested high schools. I met also Robert Lazzurs and Jasper Capel who are working on Func and Cobbler (and they did a really nice Cobbler speech), Stephane and Louis who are working with us on Symbolic.

On Saturday night was planned to go to Churchill’s pub but when we arrived, it was late and no Ambassadors was present inside. we followed again the “nearest-place-to-eat/drink” algorithm, and entered in a really sad and ugly old place. Fortunately the beer was good

On Sunday I attended Drupal 7, IPA, Cobbler talks.

The most valuable and important thing in this day was a short experience and opinion exchange with some French ambassadors about community; in my opinion theirs community is the biggest and strongest Fedora community in Europe, so why don’t learn from them?

We Italian are growing but we need to change our infrastructure (I mean our website, which is *null* right now). I have in my TODO queue a post about this argument. Promise.

Francesco, Davide and Marco returned in Italy on Sunday afternoon, I stayed in Brussels until Monday afternoon. On Sunday night me and Lorenzo met Kostas and Pierros and some Greeks guys and went to Delirium cafe (I missed the social event on Friday but I knew it was a really cool place) and we had a really nice evening.
We drank a bit without eating anything, so my remembers was a bit confused
We left Delirium cafe and went to eat, on the way Me and Pierros had to “push out some liquids”. After hard searching (there wasn’t “safe” places) we decided to use the FCFS algorithm, so we pissed on a (small) tree in a square near the Bourse (and of course we did a contribution to their grow), then we reach the other in a kebab shop. What a crazy night!

On Monday I had a trip in Brussels and I visited the whole city. Some photos will be available on my flickr profile.

When I was in Brussels Airport, I got a coffee at Starbucks and I sat near two girls and I guy (sat in separated tables).
I heard that two girls spoke about “woman stuff”: girls, men, sex, and so on… They was Italian and, of course, I masquerade my nationality and continue to drink my coffee and listen It was really interesting.
The funny thing was to saw their faces when discovered that me and the other guy were Italian: priceless.

I went home at 23:00 and I felt asleep in about few minutes.

PS: My english is not perfect, if you find “english error”, and you will, write a comment, I wont publish it but I use it to learn and fix my post

I wrote this post a week ago, but wordpress ate it while publishing and I published only the title..

By the way, I decide to organize meeting on 2009 planning activities, opened to all Italian fedora contributors. We discusses (and discussion is still in progress) about:

• Sponsorship: find guidelines to define fair and clear get-give process
• Fedora release parties: how to improve it, how to make it more interesting?
• Fedora lab: It was on agenda but who had to speak about it (I prefer to maintain secret his identity), felt asleep during the meeting

This meeting was more a brainstorming, to have a starting point.
Stay tuned

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….