Archive for February, 2011

Ntfsfix saves the day

Posted by Pierros Papadeas in Foss Life, Weblog on February 25, 2011

You have probably encountered that. An external hard drive that after many switch offs and switch ons (without safely unmounted it) refuses to mount with an error like this :

“Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 13: $MFTMirr does not match $MFT (record 0).”

The solution to that would be to run chkdisk on a Windows machine, but if you are like me (totally free of MS) then you are out of luck.. or not? Not! because you can use a handy set of tools that come be default in Fedora (namely the ntfsfix tool) that can help you repair the damaged NTFS partition. Just make sure you run it as root, appending the name of the drive (e.g. /dev/sdc1) that has the problem.

Remember that applies only for external disks formatted as NTFS and unable to be mounted due to trouble caused by abruptly switching them on and off.

More info can be found here

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ReMo empowering Mozillians

Posted by Pierros Papadeas in Foss Life, Weblog on February 24, 2011

Following up on William’s recent blog post introducing the ReMo program (aka Mozilla Reps), I’d like to elaborate a bit on what the responsibilities of a Mozilla Rep will be and how we are going to empower the Mozillians throughout the world. Let’s examine a few situations a Mozilla Rep will typically encounter.
Hosting an Event
Let’s say you are a passionate free culture advocate and supporter of the Open Web. You are in direct contact with many everyday users and developers in your region, and you want to pass on the spirit of Open Web, the spirit of Mozilla! Would it be nice if you could have direct access to resources in order to plan and host an awesome Mozilla promotional event?
Here comes ReMo. Enter the ReMo website, exchange ideas on hosting events and use the ReMo infrastructure to plan the actual event. This will entail requesting for swag, budget, having a planning page, preparing a presentation and asking for guidance. Then you go ahead and host the actual event (we are sure it will be awesome!). Finally you will post your experience on the ReMo planet so you can be praised (and get rewarded) by all the ReMos around the globe!
We are working hard on making sure this process will be steamlined and easy to follow :)
Participating in an Event
You know that there is an upcoming major technological (or not) event in your region and you know that Mozilla should be there!  As the official Mozilla Representative you are proud to take part in this event by holding a booth, or even giving a talk :)
To prepare for that you can go on the ReMo website, create a planning page for your event, coordinate you efforts with other regional Reps and request swag and/or budget. Also you might want to go through the talking points of the latest Firefox once again, and see who else can help you in the region.
All these and much more will be the functionality of the ReMo portal. A Hub for Mozilla core Enthusiasts, ready to spread the word around the globe :)
Mentor new contributors
A friend of yours, is inspired by your talk about Mozilla and wants to help in the project! As a Mozilla Rep you are familiar with the joining procedures of all the subprojects of Mozilla, and you will guide him through the whole process. You will know what suits him best and know key people in the project to get your friend started within Mozilla :)
Regular meetings keep you updated on the various projects within Mozilla and you are always the person-to-go for anything about Mozilla in your region!
Customizable Designs
You are an active contributor for Mozilla for a long time now, and you want to have your own ways to prove it! You log in on the swag-design creation website with your ReMo account and customize to your needs (name, event, locale) swag and material! (t-shirts, business cards etc)
These were some case scenarios of the everyday tasks of a future Mozilla Representative. Some of these are already here as functions, but we need to make sure that they are accessible and easy to use for every contributor willing to become a ReMo. Of course we are still drafting the whole processes and waiting for your feedback on this or other aspect of our project. You can see more planning information on our wiki page
Stay tuned for more ReMo updates and as always, if you have any questions, feel free to ask away!

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Fedora 15 ~ Ambassadors Schedule

Posted by Pierros Papadeas in Foss Life, Weblog on February 15, 2011

Background

We did the test last release, but things went not as planned. We tried to enforce a Schedule for Ambassador Specific activities in sync with the release of Fedora 14, but most of the tasks were not pursued in time. It is not time to point fingers so lets look for Fedora 15 Schedule of Ambassadors!

This time FAmSCo (and personally I , as chair) takes full responsibility of making sure the schedule will be followed as planned. After the election of the current FAmSCo (November – December 2010) we did a review [1] of the draft schedule from J.Poelstra (our previous schedule wrangler) and with help of Robyn Bergeron (our beloved current schedule wrangler) we updated it to meet Ambassador specific needs.

Also we have new naming of the tasks to help us understand the owner of task more easily (it was a problem on the old one).

Who will enforce it?
FAmSCo will make sure the owners of each task have whatever they need to make the action

How will we report back and review schedule?
The Schedule will be part of our weekly FAmSCo calls so feel free to drop by to raise an issue. If this is not possible raise the issue on the mailing list of Ambassadors.

Is the schedule flexible?
We are human beings and sometimes we cannot meet some deadlines :) This is totally understandable and FAmSCo will be there to help out, and in extreme cases reform schedule to meet some updated needs.

Is this the final form of the schedule?
Although we tried to deliver a schedule that took into consideration all of our needs, we understand that the schedule will need some reform and fine tuning for our next release (e.g. Fedora 16). After the Fedora 15 release is over we will gather all available feedback and discuss it to make the appropriate adaptions.

Where is the Schedule anyway?
The schedule can be found here :

http://rbergero.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-15/f-15-ambassadors-tasks.html

along with the rest of the Fedora 15 schedules

Is this schedule describing all Ambassadors Tasks?
Of course not! This schedule is only for release-specific Ambassador tasks (i.e. tasks like Release Parties, media production etc). Feel free to host events and make action out of the schedule as always! But if your actions are release-specific please help us meet the guidelines.

Feel free to comment (as always) and step up on specific regional tasks. I will post and nudge on the mailing list towards the adherence to the schedule :)

[1] http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-ambassadors/2010-12-30/ambassadors_schedule_discussion.2010-12-30-15.48.html

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FOSDEM 2011 ~ Day 1

Posted by Pierros Papadeas in Foss Life, Weblog on February 6, 2011

As expected, FOSDEM this year was so exciting and busy on the same time for me :)

Today we had our first day, and from the morning everything went great : we set up early the Fedora booth (full of swag and at last with a nice tablecloth) and we had a busy booth throughout the day! Special thanks to Zoltan, Cristoph, Jared, Marios, Gent and Max for making sure that our booth was rocking all the time! (You are stars guys!)

On devrooms side, I followed some interesting talks (especially the M.A.D. one and the keynote) and also did some time on the Mozilla one (fully packed as always)

After the end of today’s FOSDEM, we had our Mozilla Meeting to catch up with everyone and play some laser tag! Unfortunately I had to leave early (sorry Kadir) cause I needed to attend the Freedentity meeting, where we had nice chatting over Identity issues on the emerging globalization and how open web can be part of the solution (I guess a thorough post on that will be needed).

Tomorrow I will try to spend more time on Mozilla Booth, helping out Milos on keeping our booth perfect :)

ps. cannot write any more.. so tired and need some sleep to be in perfect shape tomorrow…
ps2. photos and more details just after FOSDEM :) (sorry mom :P )

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FOSDEM 2011 ~ Day -2

Posted by Pierros Papadeas in Foss Life, Weblog on February 3, 2011

Ha! How refreshing this can be? FOSDEM 2011 is only 3 days away :)

I am leaving tomorrow just to be in time at Brussels to catch up with as many guys as possible! Laptop – check, cellphone – check, cloths – check I guess I am ready :) But once again I had some swag to bring with me to enrich Fedora booth!

I did some initial testing on printing on cd sleeves and after a few tries I ended up with a quite acceptable result! Zoltan will fill them up with Lightscribe discs (thanks Zoltan!).

This year FOSDEM trip will be more than busy for me. I will help on both Mozilla’s and Fedora’s Booth, have a few meetings and try to attend as many talks as possible. Really looking forward to see the joined session by Fedora Project Leader and Debian Project Leader (our future sounds promising). There seem to be a lot that we can learn from each other and we could also share some practices in the future. For one thing, this connection can really work on technicalities of our projects.

On Mozilla side, we have a full schedule for our Dev room and many star contributors will present their latest work on SuMo, L10n, Jetpack and Firefox 4! Can’t wait to catch up with all guys :) On booth I am prepared to stand up to the standards Milos will set! In Mozilla, this year’s FOSDEM marks a turn on our approach to it. I believe we did the right thing by now shipping *everyone* to FOSDEM so we can save resources to have *everyone* attending our next MozCamp Europe. Besides FOSDEM is meant to be a meeting place among communities so we had to focus on our outreach and connection and not to our internal meetups.

Spoiler : we are baking some nice news for you so stay tuned… (one word : ReMo)

On personal side, 3 other people will occupy my room on a joined Fedora-Mozilla mission. Christos Bacharakis (senior Fedora Ambassador), George Fiotakis (long time Mozilla l10n contributor), and our crazy Fedora photographer Nicu! This is a sample of his everyday life in hostels:

ps. told ya!

ps2. as always expect daily updates from FOSDEM and many photos!

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