My SCaLE20x adventure

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but SCaLE conference is getting better each year. SCaLE is probably the best conference in North America that has a strong focus on the community and it is always a cause of joy to see such a diverse audience and attendees under the same roof and under the same sentiment of belonging. The success of the conference -the one that has made possible twenty editions of it-  doesn’t come free, there’s an enthusiastic group of incredible people behind it. Kudos and lot of recognition to each of them.

If I was asked to describe this year’s experience in SCaLE with a single word, I would say that is “Chances”. I’m going to go deeper into this ahead, but this conference made me wonder several times “what are the chances of this happening?”. One of the advantages of attending a nerds conference is that you may find someone who would actually calculate it. It reminds me of that Sheldon quote that reads “was that rhetoric or would you like me to do the math?”  LOL

Due to COVID pandemic (and probably other strong reasons), this year’s SCaLE was just eight months apart from last edition. It may not sound like a big deal but there are some factors that made a big difference: not the usual twelve months for planning, sunny hot summer weather versus rainy chilly winter weather and the chance of venue as well, this year the conference returned to Pasadena.

This time I arrived early enough to attend the conference from day one. Thursday is usually used for community events like Kubernetes Community Day, CEPH Day, PostgreSQL day, workshops,  etc. Since my flight landed at 6:00am I was able to practically use most of the day in the Kubernetes community day. 

I attended the GitOps workshop , big attendance to this event, found an empty spot and sat there for the development of the planned activities. While I was there, I couldn’t avoid noticing that the guy next to my was attending a few things on his company’s Slack, I approached to him and told him “I’m sorry but I couldn’t avoid noticing that you’re in Company X Slack channel, I just joined that company a couple of days ago as a contractor”. He was happy to see people of his own even though I wasn’t able to mention my teammates, my team manager, our team name and stuff like that since I was in the onboarding process and the only thing that I’ve done there was attending a couple of daily meetings. Anyway, he helped me identify a few things of my new team and together we completed the remaining activities of the workshops. What are the chances? Let’s not do that math 

We used the rest of the Thursday for setting up the Fedora booth. This year we had Fedora’s ambassadors Perry Rivera, Brian Monroe, Scott Williams from the Southern California area  and Iván Chavero and myself from México. Have I mentioned that this year I was the event owner for SCaLE?  I was and it was a bit challenging since I don’t live in the area and I needed someone local to receive the stuff and coordinate the local logistics like swag shipping. Brian was of valuable help in this and I got so much help from my friends that it didn’t feel like an overwhelming burden as I thought it was going to be. I’ll be happy to do it again if needed.  Booth was completed and it was time to call it a day.

On Friday morning they had the LA DevOps day    , a co-located event dedicated to the DevOps community and professionals who wish to improve the interaction and integration between the traditional silos of Development and Operations. The opening talk was delivered by John Willis  -author of several books on DevOps- and this time his talk was on their book “Investments Unlimited”. A great talk and a magnificent opportunity to hear from a big leaguer in DevOps like John.

The morning time flew fast and right after lunch it was time for expo floor. This year the attendance was bigger than last year’s, probably due to venue capacity and less covid cautions, anyway, as soon as the Pasadena Convention Center opened its exhibition floor doors, we happily started receiving the crowd. Talking to people at Fedora booth is not only part of my mission in the conference, but it is also one of my favorite parts. Fedora always have this attraction that people just stop by, even though our booth is community driven and may not appear too attractive at first glance. We had swag, sign in page for further contact and a QR code for getting the Fedora badge for the event. Our badge was awarded 22 times, in my opinion an important number since not everybody has a FAS account nor has the Intention to open an account just for this purpose

Friday was over, exhibition floor was closed and how long came Saturday. This day I wore my Fedora Mexico t-shirt just as a token of  pride and to recognize the work of the community in Mexico and honestly and mostly because I love it. This single fact caused an effect that I wasn’t expecting  , it attracted the attention of people that somehow have a connection with Mexico and otherwise I wouldn’t be able to identify.

I stopped by the New Relic booth because they had a challenge to create a dashboard that looked attractive, you complete the challenge and you get some swag (maybe a interesting idea to try for Fedora in upcoming events). Thing is that one of the New Relic guys asked me if I came from Mexico, yes, then what part, Chihuahua, and one question led to another, I know someone from Chihuahua, do you know Jane Doe?  My cousin is related to them and PUM!!  Your cousin is my wife’s aunt living in San Diego. Just by identifying me coming from Mexico turned out in getting to know a relative I wasn’t aware that even existed. What are the chances? Let’s not do that math

At noon we had lunch in the expo market, a convenient place inside of the exhibition floor to grab a bite. I took a seat at one of the shared tables and the guy next to me asked me if I was from Mexico. Dude was from Monterrey, Mexico. This is starting to look like a weird pattern.

We talked a lot during lunch, this was his first time for SCaLE but he was so looking forward for not being his last, he loved it and he was determined to coming back to it in the future. I told him that a few years ago, the community in Mexico was just a guy from his hometown and me, and today is a growing, active and enthusiastic community with several members, needless to say he was welcomed to join.  Again, just by wearing my Fedora Mexico t-shirt attracted a conversation that probably would not have happened otherwise. What are the chances? Let’s not do that math

A few minutes before closing Saturday I stopped by the Argo booth. I have tried Argo Ci/CD for POcs, labs and testing and I really love it. Guy in the booth looked at my shirt and asked THE question. Yes, I’m from Mexico. Which part? Chihuahua, in northern Mexico, we share borders with New Mexico and Texas, we’re located about 250 miles south of El Paso. Guy interrupted me and said “oh yes yes, my dad lives there, I’m very aware of it. What are the chances? Let’s not do that math

This day we also got interviewed by the Tux Digital guys. It was an informal talk, part serious part relaxed, in which we had the opportunity to talk about our role in Fedora project, what we like love about it, what makes us different, ways to get involved, etc.

Expo floor closed but Saturday is not over until game night is over. Even though I was beaten,  tired, I couldn’t miss game night because I know that is an important part of the social exchange and also perhaps the only space and time that I get to see old SCaLE friends that I may not see in the rest of the event.

And then came Sunday, usually a not too busy day as the expo is open just for a few hours, but one of my favorite days because they usually close with a keynote from a real Rockstar from the industry. This year was no disappointment and the closing talk was given by Ken Thompson himself!  There are not many opportunities to meet a personality this big, listening to him live and meeting in person is an experience that I cannot put into words. This is an invaluable gift that you get once in a lifetime. Contrary to what we all expected, he didn’t talk about Unix, or Go , or any of his big and well known achievements, instead he talked about a personal project that he’s been working on for 70+ years and it was delightful to hear. Not going to spoil it, see the recording for yourselves in the Conference’s YouTube channel.

Finally, just to put the cherry on the pie, on the event closure it was mentioned that we were awarded as the «Most Memorable Booth» !!! This is in recognition to the vendor with the most memorable experience for visitors and attendees. Worth mentioning this is something that attendees vote for while visiting the expo.

And so it ends, a magnificent conference this year. This time we’ll have to wait for another twelve long months compared to the previous few, but I’m sure that it will be totally worthed .

Participating at #Scale17x

Everytime somebody asks me about Scale I can only think of the same: Scale is the most important community lead conference in North America and it only gets better by the years. This year it celebrated its seventeenth edition and it just struck me: with me being there this year, there have been more Scales I have attended than I have not. This is my nineth conference out of 17.

The first time that I attended it was 2011,  it was the edition followed by FudCon Tempe 2010 which happened to be my first Fedora conference and it was also the first time I got to meet some contributors that I had previously collaborated with, many of which I still consider my brothers.

As for this time, I almost didn’t make it as my visa renewal was resolved on Friday’s noon, one day after the conference started. I recovered it that same day and book a flight in the night. I couldn’t find anything to LAX -as I regularly fly- so I had to fly to Tijuana and from there I borrowed a cart to Pasadena. Long story short: I arrived around 1:30 AM on Saturday.

That is water under the bridge, a few hours later I was prepared to start the activities for the day. I met my good Fedora friends Scott Williams, Brian Monroe, Perry Rivera and -making his first Scale conference- Ivan Chavero who is with Red Hat and has been very active promoting Fedora in my hometown, he’s not an ambassador but he has helped me a lot in all of the Fedora activities that we have in Chihuahua.

That day started up with the keynote by Hashicorp’s Mitchell Hashimoto speaking on the transformation of the company starting from a Dorm Room OSS project.

From there, it was all booth duty for the remain of the conference.

Perry Rivera was assisting Clint Savage with the install fest happening in a separated building, so for most of  that day it was only Brian, Scott and me in booth duty. Saturday is always the most active day in the expo floor, and this year it was not an exception. We had visitors continually and many Fedora users and enthusiasts approaching to us just to talk about how their Fedora experiences or with specific questions we were glad to clarify.  At the booth we had a sign up list and a card board in which users could write How they do Fedora, it was fun and gratifying looking at those answers.

I think this year we got an excellent location within the exposition floor that allowed a lot of traffic coming through our booth. (See below)

It is always pleasant to say hello to our good friends and members of other communities. We could say hi to Jason Hibbets and Rikki Endsley from  OpenSource.com and Jennifer Madriaga, Brian Proffit and Karsten Wade from Red Hat among others.

 

#friends #features #freedom #fedora #SCALE17x @fedora @pvrconsulting @redhatopen pic.twitter.com/d1avKSGKOS

— Jen Madriaga (@JenInnovate) March 10, 2019

When expo floor closed, we still had a chance to attend a few talks, like Ivan Chavero’s «A Linux Engineer in Shark Tank» and also the Kubernetes BoF and the UpScale talks, always very fresh and informative.  We closed that day with the traditional Game Night where we had the chance to have a good time and continue networking with the conference attendees.

As for Sunday, March 10th, the Daylight savings started so the day «felt» a little weird. The exhibit hall opened at 10:00AM and we noticed a smaller attendance, this again is normal for the last day. The floor was open for only 4 hours on Sunday. This time it was Brian who helped on the Install Fest so for then it was only Perry and myself working on the booth. Still people approaching to us and it is always satisfactory when students show interest if Fedora. This year I could also notice an increase on the spanish speaking attendees, which is also formidable to help promote Fedora among them.

I leave you with a few pictures that I manage to take, but -as usual- they cannot get to describe the experience.

Would I make to Scale18th? Only God $DEITY knows

Do I want to attend it? You can bet anything that I do 🙂

 

 

 

Another year, another great Linux conference – Scale16x

From March 8th to  11th, 2018 the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) took place in beautiful Pasadena for the third year in a row, previous edition were held in hotels near LAX. This was the 16th edition of the conference -hence the #Scale16x hashtag that flooded social media those days- and my personal 8th.

I’ve been saying it for a while now that I think that the conference is just getting better by every year, but this year I heard several comments that this is one of the best and most important community driven conferences in the world. Rough estimations tell that there were around 3,000 attendees this year.

As a long time tradition now, the Fedora community held some activities in the conference, as well as a booth in the exhibition floor. This year, I had the privilege and pleasure of  promoting Fedora, answer question from people that showed interest in  (or are already users of) Fedora or simply saluting people that stopped by. I have to say that it pleasantly surprised me the growing number of spanish-speaking people that attended this year. I was accompanied in booth duty with long time Fedora contributors -but above all great Friends- Perry Rivera, Scott Williams and my newest Fedora friend Michael Singh. Unofficialy, but always willing to help, RedHat’s Tom ‘Spot’ Callaway was also supporting our booth and we always appreciate it and thank him for his work.

 

Speaking of Red Hat -if you were unaware, it is the company that sponsors our community- they also had a booth and some talks in the conference, so it was a great pleasure to say hello to old RedHatters Jen Madriaga, Karsten Quaid and Brian Proffit, just to mention some of the ones that I know for a while now.

By the way, thank you Jen for the photo 🙂

Be sure to check out the @Fedora booth at #SCaLE @socallinuxexpo! #Linux #opensource #friends #freedom @redhatopen @pvrconsulting @bexelbie @douglax pic.twitter.com/cXg0pzw7UA

— Jen Madriaga (@JenInnovate) March 11, 2018

Thank you also to my new friend Jennifer, who took this picture randomly and later that day I casually met her, as she was with a long time Scale attending group from Tijuana.

 

Also, it is always satisfactory to say hello to contributors and friends from  other RedHat sponsored communities like opensource.com.

There was for sure a pretty interesting schedule of talks and events for the conference, it can be reviewed here.  Unfortunatelly, we had few time to attend a lot of talks due to booth duty -not complaining about it though- but we still manage to attend a few that would not interfere with it. Of course, we couldn’t have missed RedHat’s Langdon White talk titled «Fedora Modularity: Lessons Learned, Next Steps & Demo«.  Langdon presented a new modular model for distributing applications that is getting maturity and will be available in future Fedora releases. After the talk, later that night we had a small discussion group with people interested in the subject.

The full presentation can be reviewed in the following link, around 5:08:00

 

Personally, I also had the opportunity to attend a Kubernetes Bird of Feathers with a bunch of interesting guys from top kubernetes contributing companies like Google, RedHat and Samsung. It was for sure a delightful and enricher experience.

Words never seem to be enough, SCaLE is such an important event for Free and Open Source Software and communities. I am so glad I had a chance to participate and I cannot stress enough how happy and proud I’m to be part of Fedora and I can’t wait for upcoming editions of the conference.

 

 

 

 

Participation at Scale15x

A few days ago I returned -incredibly satisfied- from attending my personal 7th Southern California Linux Expo, which was the 15th edition of the event. I’ve read a thing or two about the beginning of Scale, and how it has grown by the years to become one of the largest and more important FOSS events, not only in the US but also worldwide. From my perspective I can tell that the event gets better by every year.

Reseña personal de Scale9x

Del 25 al 27 de Febrero de 2011 tuvo lugar la novena edición de la Exposición de Linux del sur de California, conocida en el argot como Scale9x, en el Hotel Hilton Los Angeles Airport. Tuve la magnifica oportunidad de asistir y comparto con ustedes una pequeña (quizás no tanto) reseña de esta experiencia.

El evento ha concluído con éxito y desde ya se deben estar comenzando los preparativos de la siguiente reunión. A manera de advertencia les comento que seguramente mis palabras no alcanzarán a abarcar la experiencia completa, mi capacidad narrativa tampoco ayuda mucho supongo, pero de corazón se los comparto.

Aquí está mi reseña

 

FUDCon Tempe 2011, yo estuve ahí :D

La convención de usuarios y desarrolladores de Fedora (FUDCon por sus siglas en inglés) se ha llevado a cabo este año en Tempe, AZ y reune a compañeros de la comunidad de Fedora de todas partes del mundo.

Durante tres días nos hemos reunido para intercambiar ideas y platicar sobre el futuro del proyecto y los logros que hemos tenido recientemente.

Este es mi primer participación en FUDCon y estoy verdaderamente encantado con el evento, no sólo por la agenda en si misma, sino por la experiencia completa: el viaje, la organización, el contenido, la sede y -adivinen- la comida. 😛

La Universidad Estatal de Arizona es de las mas grandes en Estados Unidos y ha resultado ser un excelente anfitrión, hemos estado en diversos edificios de la universidad y no hemos terminado de conocer -ni siquiera en coche- la totalidad del campus, solo tenemos una idea por la proporción del mapa.

Siempre hemos tenido conciencia de lo importante que es para el proyecto la diversidad cultural de sus integrantes y siempre lo vivimos en la interactuación diaria en el IRC, las listas de correo y las herramientas que utilizamos para comunicarnos, sin embargo, no hay nada comparable al intercambio y la convivencia directa. A pesar de la distancia y las complicaciones, habemos aqui 5 compañeros de la región latinoamerica del proyecto: tatica y gomix de Venezuela, Igor de Brasil, Neville de Nicaragua y nushio y yo orgullosamente mexicanos.
Aqui finalmente conocí en persona a mi gran amigo Larry Cafiero y a muchos otros que regularmente solo veo en el IRC y las redes sociales. Aqui me pateó el trasero Brasil en boliche y Suiza hizo lo propio en Texas Hold’em.

El formato del evento es bastante completo: Tuvimos el State of Fedora por parte del líder de la comunidad Jared Smith, barcamp, hackfest, FUDpub (el evento social oficial), game night y muchas otras actividades que nos han mantenido trabajando intensamente en estos 3 maravillosos días.

El próximo mes de mayo se llevará a cabo el FUDCon latinoamericano en la ciudad de Panamá y desde ya hace tiempo se comenzaron los preparativos, no sé si podré acudir pero lo que si sé es que será igualmente exitoso.

En horabuena para todo el proyecto!!

TweetDeck en Fedora 12 KDE

TweetDeck es un cliente para Twitter, Facebook , MySpace y LinkedIn bastante popular. Yo tengo un par de meses utilizandolo y la verdad me a gustado mucho su interfaz.

Cuando recién intenté instalarlo me encontré con que las ligas que vienen el sitio oficial de TweetDeck no funcionaron para mi desktop, pero tampoco voy a abundar aqui sobre la instalación, simplemente seguí estos pasos [EN] y funcionó de maravilla.

Lo que me ocupa en esta entrada es que hace un par de semanas cambié mi ambiente a KDE y me encontré con errores al arrancar mi cliente, y aqui quiero compartirles como pude solucionarlo.

El error específico que aparecía me indicaba que no podian encontrar los datos de mis cuentas, literalmente decía: «Ooops, TweetDeck can’t find your data. TweetDeck is having trouble using some of your passwords that are stored securely on your machine. Clicking Submit will clear this data so that you continue to use TweetDeck. Please note that you will have to add your accounts to TweetDeeck again. – OK»

Después de varios intentos de presionar OK la ventana finalmente desaparece pero luego sale un error, al parecer mas crítico pero por lo menos mas honesto: «Parece que tu computadora es una de las pocas que tienen problemas para correr Adobe Air» : «Sorry, Adobe AIR is having a problem running on this computer. It looks like your computer is one of a very small number of computers that don’t play well with Adobe AIR. We’re actively working with Adobe on this, and it would really help us if you would let us know that you’re having trouble by opening a ticket at http://support.tweetdeck.com/tickets/new – OK»

Después de esto solo aparece el marco de la aplicación, sus botones de menús (sin funcionar) y un gran espacio en blanco donde se supone aparecen las ventanas de TweetDeck, un zombie pues.

La inspiración -no la razón- por la que escribo esta entrada es sobre lo increiblemente simple que es la solución, claro una vez que la conoces. La solución para mi caso específico se presentó en dos pasos, aunque quizás para otros casos pueda resolverse solo con el primero.

1) El primer paso es correr kwallet , crear una cartera y dejarla abierta mientras arrancas TweetDeck
(Alt+F2) para invocar ejecutor de comandos y luego teclear kwallet
Creas una cartera
Arrancas TweetDeck de la manera habitual

2) Si lo anterior no funciona, recurrimos al segundo paso que es eliminar los archivos donde se almacenan las llaves de las aplicaciones, ELS o Encrypted Local Storage de Adobe AIR

[user@host ~]$ ps aux para identificar la instancia de TweetDeck que está actualmente corriendo
alex 6804 7.7 2.3 323420 83636 ? Sl 20:40 0:23 /opt/TweetDeck/bin/TweetDeck

[user@host ~]$ kill 6804 para terminar el proceso

Borramos el directorio de ELS de Adobe Air
[user@host ~]$ rm -rf ~/.appdata/Adobe/AIR/ELS

ArrancamosTweetDeck de manera habitual y Voilaaaa !

Discurso del Presidente Lula durante FISL 10

Comparto a ustedes el discurso que dio el Presidente (me quito el sombrero) Luiz Inazio Lula da Silva de Brasil durante la clausura del Festival Internacional de Software Libre.

Publicado originalmente aqui y traducido al castellano por su servidor

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Bien, de hecho, Dilma ha hablado por parte del Gobierno Brasileño. No había necesidad de que yo dijera absolutamente nada aqui el día de hoy, porque creo que el haber cruzado ese «Pasillo Lustrado», el cuál atravesé para llegar aqui, vale por lo menos cuatro discursos. Pero quería felicitar a mis camaradas del Ministerio quienes están aqui con nosotros.

Quisiera felicitar a los diputados federales, a nuestros senadores, al Gobernador Olivio Dutra, al alcalde Fogaça. Quisiera saludar a un invitado especial quien llegó tarde aqui, nuestra camarada Lourdes Munhoz, de España, una congresista de Barcelona quien aconseja al Presidente Zapatero sobre Software Libre. No le veo el rostro porque ella no se ha presentado aún. Párese por favor.

Leer discurso completo …

Hoy actualicé mi Firefox con Presto

A solo unos días de que salió Firefox 3.5, hoy lo actualicé desde los repositorios de Fedora.

Eso por si solo es genial, pero lo verdaderamente magnífico es que al tener instalado Presto, me ahorré el 81% del tamaño del paquete, y por consiguiente, en tiempo y ancho de banda al descargarlo. Presto es un plugin para yum que permite bajar únicamente las diferencias entre las versiones de los paquetes sin necesidad de bajar todo el paquete completo. Esto se logra mediante una base de datos de repositorios Delta que mantiene la información de las versiones.

Inmediatamente después de que instales ó actualices  a Fedora 11, te sugiero que instales Presto. Esto te ahorrará mucho tiempo en el futuro.

yum install yum-presto

Posteriormente solamente tienes que instalar ó actualizar tus paquetes de la manera que regularmente lo haces y -that’s it- empieza la magia. Igual de lindo es que las dependencias de los paquetes que instales se actualizan con Presto

yum update firefox

Size of all updates downloaded from Presto-enabled repositories: 4.9M
Size of updates that would have been downloaded if Presto wasn't enabled: 25M
This is a savings of 81 percent

Amo a Firefox y amo Presto !!

Leonidas ruge y reina a partir de hoy

Reign !!

Fedora 11 impulsa la evolución de la computación de código abierto

La distribución del código abierto demuestra el poder de la innovación inspirada en la comunidad ofreciendo el conjunto de funciones más amplio hasta el día de hoy, una virtualización superior y un novedoso portal para la participación de la comunidad.

Raleigh, Carolina del Norte – 9 de junio de 2009 – El Proyecto Fedora, un proyecto de colaboración de código abierto patrocinado por Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) y con respaldo de la comunidad, anunció hoy la disponibilidad de Fedora 11. Leer mas ….