On my journeys through Toronto on this fine evening, I ran across Megaman. Just doing what he normally does…protecting us norms from the evil doings of Dr. Wiley.
If you have time, digg it for me:
http://digg.com/odd_stuff/Megaman_in_Toronto
Oh yeah, I realize I haven’t posted in a while. I have barely had time to breath the last couple months. I promise a good post in t
As some of you may have noticed, #seneca now requires users to register their nicks in order to join the channel. I have posted a quick edit to the IRC Tutorial on clubmoz.ca to guide people through this process. If you are having problems, please review it and feel free to email clubmoz@gmail.com if you are having any further issues. I will try the best I can to help you work through the issues or direct you to someone who can.
Just a quick reminder that office hours begin this week. Drop on by ORI and see us!
Hey folks! As promised, I am here to give you a follow up to what was discussed last week in regards to Club Moz.
Things will be largely the same as last semester. We will still be testing, hacking, working on community involvement, providing support; basically being involved in the Mozilla community. I plan on continuing my testing efforts with Mozilla testdays and bugdays, as well as dogfooding the latest Songbird and Minefield nightlies. Others will be hacking away and working on open source projects for their courses. I may also write a tutorial or two for the clubmoz.ca. I encourage anyone else that wants to contribute to the community and clubmoz.ca to join our efforts.
The biggest change to the club this semester is that we will no longer be holding a weekly meeting. I feel that this model, which has been used since the club’s inception, has not been successful at drawing out more members from the student body. Instead, we will be holding office hours.
David Humphrey, has been uber-gracious and given us a few cubicles in CDOT (Centre for Development of Open Technologies), otherwise known as ORI (Open-source Research Institute). The plan is to have someone in ORI so that students can pop in whenever they want during the week to find out more, get involved, or just ask questions. Right now, we have enough people interested that we can cover the following hours pretty much every week:
| Monday | 10am – 5pm |
| Tuesday | 10am – 130pm |
| Wednesday | 330pm – 5pm |
| Thursday | 10am – 5pm |
| Friday | 10am – 1130am, 330pm – 5pm |
We will be starting office hours next week, Monday Jan 21, 2008. Please feel free to stop on by during these hours. There should be an announcement being posted on Seneca’s CS homepage this week reiterating this information. As always, we will also be available on IRC during these times. I also want to create a flyer to advertise the club and post a PDF version of the ORI floor plan (ORI can be a bit of a labyrinth the first time around).
Finally, here are a couple of the brainstorming ideas we had for the club…
** Disclaimer: watch out for some major spit balls! **
1. Expand promotion efforts to include York University
2. Make class room visits to 1st and 2nd year students to chat about open source and Club Moz.
3.Give another presentation promoting the club and open source; this time including some of the open source students (maybe even a guest appearance by bhearsum…don’t worry Ben, we aren’t committing you to anything :P)
4. Firefox 3 Release Party (hopefully it is released before exam week).
Anyway, I think this justly summarizes the meeting and gives you an idea about what we are thinking. If anyone wants to stop by this week, I will be unofficially holding office hours in ORI during my break periods. Just pop in…if I am there, I am there.
I would really appreciate some feedback into our new plans, especially the new office hours model. Feedback can be sent to clubmoz@gmail.com or just post a comment here on my blog.
Cheers,
Anthony Hughes
IRC: ashughes
Well it has been just over a month since my last post. What a crazy time. Starting with my trip back to the bay area for the weekend of Dec 1st.
I found out the hard way that I don’t like 8am flights too much and that I love the red-eye flight. Needless to say, it was a very tiring, invigorating and fun filled weekend. I had never flown 8000km in one weekend before. It was definitely interesting. The weather was a nice change of pace from Toronto too. Luckily, winter was here to welcome me back with a punch in the face and kick in the nuts.
After that trip set me back about a week for assignments and course work, it was time to hit the books…hard. Two weeks to finish 7 assignments, 4 labs, study for 3 tests and then go into exam mode the following week. Not fun, but mission accomplished. By cutting out sleep, I was able to complete all of my work and finish the semester with straight As, a 4.0 GPA and Presidential Honours.
So after a long battle of a semester, I decided to take the next three weeks to relax and stay relatively off everyones radar. Sure I still peppered some QA time with Mozilla and Songbird in there, but that’s because I am addicted. It’s like a chain-smoker of 50 years taking three weeks off of smoking.
Now I am back into another semester and thinking about what is to come for Club Moz for the next four months. All that I can say right now is that we are meeting this week on Thurday to discuss this very topic. So stay tuned for more details in the coming days.
On that note, I leave you with a simple haiku:
With a brand new year
Comes new opportunity
Club Moz’ers Unite
Cheers,
Anthony Hughes, Club Moz President
Good day folks.
Well, tomorrow is another test day. We will be running a series of tests against a release candidate for Firefox 2.0.0.10. While the event technically runs from 12p – 8p EST, feel free to stop by any time during Friday. Even if you want to just stop by and run a quick 5 or 10 tests. Every little bit helps.
While we won’t be occupying our normal room at Seneca, you can always stop by #clubmoz and #testday on IRC. I will be hanging out there most of the day running tests and writing some howto articles for clubmoz.ca. If you want to pop in and find out what test days are all about, or if you need someone to guide you through the process; don’t be shy, just ask. I am more than willing to help out anyone in need. There are also many people on IRC that can surely help you out as well.
Test days, in my opinion, are one of the easiest ways to get involved with the Mozilla community and to allow yourself to be bitten by the Mozilla bug.
I hope to see you there.
Anthony Hughes,
Your Club Moz President
Update – 22 Nov 2007 1410 EST
I have added forums to the Club Moz website. Go to www.clubmoz.ca/forum to check them out.
Well folks, it’s that time of the week again. Time for another Club Moz session. This week we will be meeting in our usual spot; room S2119 in the SEQ building at Seneca@York. I will be there from about 430 until 6. Do not worry if you cannot stop by. You can always make an appearance remotely by using IRC to connect to irc.mozilla.org and join the #clubmoz channel.
We do not have any set agenda this week, however there are some activities that you may want to take a part in:
I will personally be working on a Litmus and Bugzilla tutorial in a similar fashion that I wrote the IRC tutorial. If you want some help with the Bugday, I will be more than happy to provide you with assistance. So don’t be shy. Stop in and see what we are all about.
On Friday we will be taking part in the Mozilla Testday for the upcoming release of Firefox 2.0.0.10. While we won’t be in a room on campus, we will be available on IRC in #clubmoz. Feel free to come online and run a few tests. I will be posting more details about the testday later on this week.
See you then, and happy testing.
Well, after many hours of work, Club Moz now has our own web space. The purpose of this site is to provide a way for members to collaborate when they are away from the school and to give us a portal to communicate what is happening with the club. Since we have had a slow following of members to come out, I am planning on trying to get people to come out virtually. What I mean by this is to let people know that they do not have to come to the class room if they do not want. If they are either too busy, or cannot make it to the class room, then I want to let people know that they can hang out remotely on #clubmoz. This way they can still collaborate, contribute and get support for whatever they want to work on. I am hoping that clubmoz.ca can be used as another tool to help with that. I discussed the idea of having virtual members with Dave Humphrey and he expressed concern about people not knowing IRC and being a little scared to dive in. To help combat this fear, I will be putting up detailed and simple tutorials on clubmoz.ca.
Some of the content that we have set up so far is a news aggregator for RSS feeds. So far it is only set up for feeds from my blog, but it could certainly be expanded easily to get a broader range of community blogs. This feature will make announcing to the community what we are doing a lot easier. I have also added an Important Links section, where I have posted a handful of useful links. Finally, I have added a Tutorials section that will be used for guides and walkthroughs which should be helpful for our newest members. There is already an IRC guide posted.
This is just the beginning. I am hoping to expand the functionality of the site as the club matures. I encourage any feedback.
I would like to thank Tiago, Club Moz Financial Officer, for providing the domain and getting the skeleton site set up for us. I would also like to thank Dave Humphrey for all the guidance and advice he has given me in taking the club to where it is today. Finally, I would like to thank everyone in the Mozilla community who has supported me and pushed me along. Without any of you, both myself and the club would not be where we are today. Thank you.
Stay tuned for weekly Club Moz updates.
Cheers!
Anthony Hughes, your Club Moz President.
I hope everyone is rested up well from our week off. It was great to see a few of you at FSOSS last week. We are gearing up for another round of Club Moz sessions to go until exam week in December. Just a reminder that we will be running sessions every Tuesday from 430-6pm in S2119, SEQ Building, Seneca @ York Campus.
This week we will be assisting the Mozilla community with their Bug Day. What is a “Bug Day”?
Come and find out.
Hope to see you there!
Well, day 2 is over now. I must say this was truly a spectacular event. Many thanks and gratitude go out to all the efforts of Seneca staff, students, speakers and volunteers that made this even possible. I will definitely be attending next year. This event has only intensified my desire and passion for Open Source.
As with yesterday, the talks were divided into 4 tracks. Since I can only be in one place at once (I know…excuses!), I was able to attend 5 talks.
The first talk I went to today was a about using DHTML (among other technologies) to create open source, accessible, and rich internet applications. This talk was given by two of the accessibility architects for the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto, David Bolter and Simon Bates. I found this talk, and the accompanied demo, to be very interesting. It was pretty cool to see a dynamic menu on a web page being created by the click of a button (or key press) and witnessing a screen reader application effectively interacting with the dynamic menu control. The personal information management demo they provided, based on the DoJo Toolkit, was pretty cool to see as well (drag + drop, animated tree views, tabbed information, inline rich text editing, etc).
The second talk I attended was about the OpenOffice.org community. This talk was interesting because I was able to draw on my experience with Mozilla. Many of the challenges OpenOffice.org is facing in their community, and many of the areas of need that exist for them exist for Mozilla as well. In fact, I suspect, these are parallels that are reflected in many of the open source communities out there and are the needs of the Open Source community as a whole. It was reassuring to hear Louis Suarez-Potts, Community Manager and Chair of the Community Council for OpenOffice.org, talk about the importance of QA. From the outside looking in, I get the feeling that QA folks are the unsung heroes of the software industry. Having been on the inside however, I think we are okay with that; not that I can speak for everyone.
The third talk I attended was a very thought provoking and mind opening experience. It was a talk conducted by Jesse Hirsh, Canadian Internet Evangelist at large, about the “problems” with Open Source. Now this was not a negative talk at all; it was not about why closed source is better than open source or why open source is better than closed source. This was about what needs to be done to extend open source beyond the confines and barriers of the community. I really enjoyed this talk. If you watch any of the video clips on the FSOSS website (see below), watch this one. I won’t spoil it for you.
Over the lunch hour, most of us took part in a conversational exercise put on by David Eavesand Mark Surman from the Shuttleworth Foundation. I really enjoyed this exercise. It started with everyone getting in a big circle and introducing ourselves by first name and a colour that described our mood at that point. We did this in turn until everyone had introduced themselves to the group. We then proceeded with the meat of the exercise. There was a line taped down the middle of the room. One end with a ‘Y’, the other with an ‘N’. Each end represented how strongly ones opinions might be for or against an idea given to the group by David. People were asked to stand wherever on the line they personally felt about the idea. Then they were asked to explain why, which resulted in people moving up and down the line; thus, explaining why they moved. This was a really interesting activity in conversation, collaboration, and the exchange of ideas. After this exercise, the talks recommenced.
The fourth talk I attended was given by Bryan Kirschner, Director of Platform Community Strategy at Microsoft. This talk was Microsoft’s community and Open Source initiatives. It highlighted some of the technologies that Microsoft is developing (ie. Silverlight) and some of their Open Source initiatives (ie. SharedSource). I found this talk fairly interesting. It was cool to see that Microsoft was making an attempt to reach out to Open Source. I am not 100% convinced that they are well intentioned or whether they are just trying to harness the power of Open Source to minimize profit losses in the face of competition. I do not like to judge a book by it’s cover, so I will take this with a grain of salt and see how this plays out.
The fifth talk I attended was scheduled to be a talk by Marcus Bornfreund, Co-director of Creative Commons Canada about Creative Commons and the public domain. Unforunately, Marcus could not make it and had to cancel his talk. Fortunately, one of the FSOSS attendees had been doing research into copyrights and licenscing in an effort to improve the current system. He volunteered to give us a talk and open discussion surrounding these issues. It went real well, considering the impromptu nature of this talk, and actually stimulated quite a bit of honest and open discussion.
This led into the final keynote of the event conducted by Dirk Riehle, Lead of the Open Source Research Group at SAP Labs. While I enjoyed Bob Young’s keynote yesterday on a much more personal level, I found Dirk’s keynote to be very informative. He talked about open source economics from the perspective of the stakeholder. It definitely gave me another window into the Open Source community.
I really enjoyed this entire event, even if it did mean getting up for 8:15am both days on my week off. I hope I can participate in an event like this again sometime soon.
I have added more pictures from today’s talks. Feel free to check them out here. You can also see them using the fsoss2007 flickr feed posted yesterday.
All of the talks are online and available here. I have proposed to David Humphrey that we put these videos onto DVD format so that we can distribute the talks to folks who may benefit from them that do not want to sit through a lengthy download process. Some of the Mozilla folks that were unable to attend come to mind. Please feel free to comment to this post if you think this might be something of interest.
I would again like to extend a sincere thank you out to everyone who made this event possible. I cannot wait until FSOSS 08.
Well today was rather interesting. It was my first FSOSS (Free Software and Open Source Symposium) and I must say I had a blast. For those of you the may be unfamiliar, Seneca College (based in Toronto, Canada) invites members of the Open Source community to a two day sharing of ideas and information. This year attracted speakers from Mozilla, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, the Shuttleworth Foundation, and even Rob Young (Red-hat father).
Since there are so many speakers, the event has to be divided into 4 tracks (A,B,C, and a workshop track). I attended talks about usability, Facebook’s thrift framework, Open Education in South Africa, OpenKomodo, and of course the Keynote by Rob Young. All of them were very interesting, however I have to give the award of most entertaining speaker to Mr. Young. From looking around the room, I do not think his talk fell on any deaf ears. Everyone in the room gave 100% attention to him for the entire hour (especially when he was asked his opinion of Linux’s alleged “patent infringements).
I was able to snap some pictures which can be found here. There is also a flickr feed of pictures from FSOSS. The tag is “fsoss 2007”.
To top it all off, I won a ticket to see tonight’s Raptor’s game and they kicked ass! I have uploaded some pictures of that here.
A brilliant success for the first day. Thanks to the speakers and everyone who helped to organize this event. I cannot wait to see what tomorrow holds.
Stay tuned for my report on Day 2.
The B-log 