Joe Terranova

On Tuesdays, I have a 3 hour night class, in which all the outlets don’t work, so I’m only running on battery. Two weeks ago, I hardly had enough battery for 3 hours on a full charge; today I came with 80% charge, which lasted the entire class, and still had some to spare. Looks like those intel patches are starting to pay off for battery life.

Gutsy includes Firefox 3 (gran paradiso) in universe. While I have noticed some strange rendering in places, and some strange crashes, it uses less memory, and starts in 2 seconds instead of 15.

Today I was using Valknut, a Linux Direct Connect client, but noticing some issues with downloads. I went to look for another client, and found that DC++ (for those unaware, the best windows DC client there is) was ported to Linux and in universe.

Lo and behold, works and works great (including those pesky downloads)

As for what I’m doing besides slacking off, I wrote a little script to solve sudoku (still needs a little work), I’m working on the approval application for NJ, I’ll be at CHLUG on Friday, and hopefully I’ll nail down plans for a release party very soon!

Update:

As markrian pointed out,  the sudoku script had a parse error! Shortly after my post, I fixed an sql injection problem, and accidentally introduced a parse error. Fixed.

Fabian asked  what the heck Direct Connect and Valknut were. Good point! Direct Connect is a file sharing protocol. It’s really popular at universities, as it’s very easy to set up local Direct Connect servers for the University LAN. DC++ is the most popular client for Direct Connect on Windows; Valknut is based off the linux project dc_gui, but never really worked well.

Hey people, long time no see.

Okay, first up is Software Freedom Day at PACS. The NJ LoCo Team helped out the PA Team with this event, and Dave Harding gave the main presentation. Pictures:

The rest are here.

Next up, the NJ LoCo Team was at the Columbus Farmer’s Market on Saturday. Farmer’s Market, you say? Well, we certainly talked to quite a few people who had never heard of Ubuntu (or linux) before, and we gave out at least 30 OpenCDs and 50 Ubuntu CDs (we never seem to count these things).

Pictures:

More are here.

As a follow-up to this, I figured I should post to let people know that I will not actually be posting a tally of expenses for September’s Event (though I will still be keeping a tally for myself). After talking to a friend, I’ve decided to table this line of discussion for now, as it’s causing more animosity than it should.

I’ve set an entry on my calendar for June 1st, at which point I will bring the issues — handling funds, handling liability, handling sponsors — up for discussion again. There will be disagreements, there will be long discussions, but — most importantly — there should not and will not be hurt feelings, accusations, falling outs, or any other behavior which has tainted current discussion. In 9 months time, we must have matured — both as teams and as team leaders — enough to be able to discuss issues larger than ourselves and our individual teams. If we haven’t, we’ll have larger problems than handling money.

I apologize if I’ve stepped on any toes. Expect a message from me on June 1st.

Update: apparently we’ll be discussing this at our next meeting, which should hopefully resolve this and help us move forward. Huzzah!

For those of you unaware, there’s been quite a bit of discussion recently in the US Teams Project about the possibility of starting a non-profit organization, to accept donations and to shield individual LoCo teams of liability; the main conclusion has seemed to be that having users sign waivers is good enough for liability, and that “teams have and are more than able to function without funding and without liability coverage” (see discussion here and here).

In response to this, this blog is going to have a fun recurring theme over the next few months: how Joe spends his money. I’ll be keeping you all updated on all the things I spend out of pocket (or other people chip in) for LoCo Team events, and I’ll accept suggestions for alternative methods which require 0 dollars. I will also be making requests to Canonical to fund all of these needs, and letting you know of the results.

I don’t mean to call people out, start a fight, or sound bitter; I’m quite happy with my team, and its situation. Other teams are attempting to get donations, and this strange notion that LoCo teams don’t need money for anything is holding them back. Let me make this clear: not all locations are donated, not all us of have Google, Sun, or Novell offices in our back yard, and not all of us are willing to have advocacy events in our basements. Not every LoCo Team can survive on t-shirts and CDs alone, and it’s time this is made clear to those who refuse to accept that notion.

I encourage other team leaders in a similar position to also keep us updated on what they’re spending money on. Expect an itemized list for our next event on September 22nd.

Last week I had set up ubuntu-us.org as a portal for US LoCo teams, since the page was previously a placeholder.

On Saturday the US Team Project met to talk about various things, including how to promote US teams. One of the things that came up was getting on the front page of Digg.

When I got into work this morning, I saw that jono was finishing up talking to US mentors about this article. Shortly after, it was submitted to Digg.

472 Diggs and quite a few new teams later, I’d say today was a great success for LoCo Teams in the US. I’d like to thank everyone who helped out in #ubuntu-us today, and good luck to all those new LoCo Team members!

As well, the New Jersey Team had a very productive meeting today to talk about what we’ll be doing for Software Freedom Day. Hopefully we’ll have more concrete details soon, but so far great progress guys!