The Fedora Engineering Steering Committee election is over, and the members for the 2007/2008 FESCo are (in alphabetical order):
The first meeting for the new FESCo will be July 26, at 17:00 UTC in the #fedora-meeting IRC channel.
Voting is now open for the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee elections. All 13 seats are up for election. The candidates are (in alphabetical order):
For details and some future plans of these fine people see:http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/SteeringCommittee/Nominations
Anyone who has signed the Fedora CLA, and has an addition account (like ambassadors, art, cvs*, fedorabugs, l10n-commits, web, etc.) in the Fedora Account System is eligible to vote.
Voting will end at July 22 23:59:59 UTC.
To vote, please go to https://admin.fedoraproject.org/voting/
If you have any questions or problems with voting, don’t hesitate to contact me.
Just heading out the door on my way to the airport. Hope to see everyone at FUDCon!
Technorati Tags: fudconboston2007
Earlier this week I received my iAudio U2 that I ordered off of Amazon.com. I’ve been looking for a while for a portable music player that played nicely with Linux, and also handled Ogg Vorbis files, since most of my music collection is in this format. The U2 meets both of these criteria, and also is real small to boot. Sweet. The only downside I’ve experienced so far with it is a limitation of 50 folders to sort music. This isn’t that big of an issue for me since I went with the 1 GB model.
Technorati Tags: iAudio
Boy, been awhile since I posted anything here.
The Evens
Saw The Evens on Monday night at the Chop Chop Gallery. It was a pretty cool show, and a lot more intimate setting than the last time I saw Ian play. I’m guessing there were probably 70 or so people max.
For those interested, it looks like someone posted a couple of videos from the show to YouTube:
Cryptonomicon
Finally got around to finishing Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. It was as good as everyone has said it was, but I have a hell of a time actually sitting down and reading a fictional book anymore. It must have taken me over two months to get through it. 
Technorati Tags: Neal+Stephenson, Ian+Mackaye, Amy+Farina
Biking
Spent most of my weekend riding, since I finally got my rear wheel back from my local bike shop. I pretty much stuck to the Olentangy Trail on Saturday and Sunday, since we had a lot of rain this week and Alum Creek needed time to dry out. Still, it was a pretty good time, and I ended up riding around 80 miles or so.
On Monday, I went out to Alum Creek and for the first half of the ride it was a blast. That came to a screeching halt on a downhill, where I caught my handlebar going between two trees and bit it hard. I ended up slicing up my knee a bit, but for the most part was unhurt. My front wheel on the other hand wasn’t so lucky, as one of it spokes broke in the fall. Pretty crappy luck, considering I just got my rear wheel back from the shop on Thursday. The rest of the ride wasn’t nearly as fun, since I had to disconnect my front brakes to be able to ride out of the trail system. It did give me a chance to look at some of the new stunts that have been built this year on the trail.
Last-Exit
I also spent some time working on a RPM package for Last Exit, which is a music player for Last.fm. Unfortunately it can’t go into FE, since without mp3 support it’s not really functional. Also, if I remember correctly, it doesn’t work with the current version of gstreamer that comes with FC5 (I’m using GStreamer’s FC5 repo). Regardless, it’s a pretty cool application.
Bike
The weather here in Ohio has finally turned nice, so I’ve been spending a lot of time on my bike the last month or so. Unfortunately on Friday, I misjudged how big a drop-off there was on the trail, and ended up landing so hard that I broke one of the spokes on my rear wheel. Crap.
Mono
I packaged SportsTracker last week for FE. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of contributors familiar with reviewing Mono packages, so I’ve created a Mono SIG to hopefully help with the reviewing process. If you’ve got any interest in packaging Mono applications, please consider joining the SIG, which can be found here.
Martyn released a new version of Gossip today. My patch for libnotify’s 0.3.2 API made it in, but unfortunately since FC5 is gonna ship with libnotify-0.3.0, I’ll have to hold off on enabling this for FE. I did manage to finish a patch for the notify-daemon that removes it dependency on libsexy, so we should see an update of libnotify sometime in the near-future.
The announcement for Gossip with a list of changes can be found here: http://lists.imendio.com/pipermail/gossip-dev/2006-March/008604.html
Riding in March
It’s surprisingly warm here in Columbus today, so I figured I would try to go out riding this morning while I had the chance. Since it’s been raining almost constantly also, I decided I’d break out my BMX bike since it’s a heck of lot easier to clean than my Voodoo Bokor. I haven’t ridden it in around a year or so, and had forgotten just how heavy it was. My arms and shoulder are definitely gonna feel sore tomorrow. Still, it is pretty damn fun to jump with.
I was able to ride for an hour or so before it started to rain. Considering it’s the middle of March I’ve got nothing to complain about, especially when you compare the weather here to what my brother experienced while racing yesterday in California.
Beagle
Finally got fed-up with Beagle enough, that I removed it from my system today. It really didn’t live up to all they hype that seems to surround it, especially considering what a resource-hog it is.
Martyn released a new version of Gossip today, so I spent this morning working on pushing this out in FE. It should be available later today, since FE is in the midst of a massive rebuild due to the upcoming FC5 release.
What else has been going on? I’m about half-way through writing the GStreamer backend for the Nautilis-Flac-Converter. Ross Burton pointed me to a project (Sound Converter), that is similar in use, for examples on how to implement it. Unfortunately, since it was written in Python, I wasn’t really able to use any code from it. It did help me figure out the pipeline I needed to use in GStreamer to convert the FLAC file, though. For example, to convert a FLAC to an ogg vorbis file with gst-launch (a tool that builds and runs basic GStreamer pipelines), I would simply run:
gst-launch filesrc location=02-Rebirth.flac ! flacdec ! audioconvert ! audio/x-raw-float,rate=44100,channels=2 ! vorbisenc name=enc quality=0.6 ! oggmux ! filesink location=02-Rebirth.ogg
Basically, in the extension I’m just recreating this pipeline, which will allow me to switch parts of the pipline with the approriate elements for encoding. I’m using large chunks of code from Sound-Juicer, so the work so far has been fairly minimal. Depending on how much time and motivation I have, I’m hoping to finish this up in the next couple of weeks.
