| Saturday at LinuxFest NorthWest |
[Apr. 28th, 2012|10:50 pm] |
It is hard to get any futher north and west than Bellingham. This laid back college town is the sight of perhaps the funnest Linuxfests in the country. Friday night I staked out a wall outlet for power and checked into the hotel where one package was waiting for me. So Saturday morning I set up the table with one Fedora Tee and some install media. Robyn arrived and asked where the table skirt was and informed me of two other boxes. A quick trip to the hotel yielded the table skirt and other swag.
LFNW is a free, family oriented event, so besides ubergeeks there are people who are just linux curious. That's fine by me, I can't answer many of the technical questions posed, but can easily show Gnome 3 and talk a neophite into trying the live DVD. We sat next to the Oracle booth and he would sent the linux curious our way. Here is my view of the wired and tired comments heard at the booth today.
OLPC is a blessing and a curse, it attracts people to the booth and is something for kids (and kids at heart) like to play with, (one child barely as tall as the table came by 3 times to play with TamTamMini). But it also gets questions like, "Is this for sale?", "Where can I get one?", and comments like "I've never seen one of these before". The answer to "Why is this here?" is, the OLPC runs a Fedora Linux Remix.
Gnome 3 brings up comments about Unity (nobody likes it), but Gnome 3 is not Unity. I wish I had learned all the keyboard shortcuts available in Gnome 3 to show it's versility.
The tired comment is "bleeding edge". There is no bleeding required to use Fedora. It is fully tested and quality controlled. Yes, Fedora is first with features that other distros will eventually use, so it is "leading edge". I really admire the way Robyn handles these questions and wish tha I could see her talk about Fedora on Sunday.
Saturday sessions end with "The World Famous Raffle". I won a small prize, but most of the books I was interested in where gone, I just got one book, on Closure, of the five allocated, as the books on GIMP, Arduino and Drupal were gone. The raffle pays for the After Party, featuring Free (as in speech) Beer. So if this post is a little disjointed, I blame the Dirty Blonde.
If you are at LFNW and would like a Fedora Tee, stop by the booth and tell me, "I'm a Fedora user and I would like a Fedora shirt". I was hesitant to give away the tee shirt I had Saturday morning, but after picking up the box with a bunch of XLs, no one asked for a shirt. So we have some tees, stop by and see me.
Pictures and more on Sunday. |
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| Linux Audio conference, Saturday |
[Apr. 16th, 2012|12:04 am] |
Today Dave Phillips gave the keynote speech. on the history of Linux audio from the development of OSS in 1992 to this, the 10th Linux Audio Conference. Dave literally wrote the book on Linux Audio & Sound and has been a long time contributer to Linux Journal with a monthly articles and created the Linux Audio website and maillist. Dave had interesting stories about the people who made Audio viable on Linux including Rt kernel developer Ingo Molnár, a RedHat employee, and fedora based PlanetCCRMA repository by Fernando Lopez-Lezcano.
More great talks on the technology including more Ambisonics, sound over UDP, resampling, the Faust library (this is really cool, I must learn how to use Faust) and a touch screen implementation.
The most interesting talk of the day was about the composition Rite of the Earth by Krzysztof Gawlas. This project is a great mix of the arts and computers, started with artists making ceramic instruments, drums, flutes, shakers, gongs, chimes and ocarinas. A sonic analysis of the instrument samples allowed Krzysztof to make a score of the samples using SuperCollider. The sixth movement of the piece was featured at the evening concert and was very beautiful.
The evening concert also featured some great live performances. Kevin Erste's piece Birches was preformed with John Graham on viola, a beautiful mix of live and computer processed sounds. Chris Chafe and Roberto Morales performed the piece Princesa Chontales using a the prototype cello made by Max Mathews, a daxaphone played by Chafe, and Morales played percussion, flute and piano with two Wii controllers rubber banded to his sleeves, to computer process the sound.
The music continued in the Coho coffee house with live performances of Miller Puckette on guitar, Zachery Berkowitzi on his mallet controller, Grant Brownyard played some computer game music he created and Harry van Haaren created some dance music with his Luppp program. |
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| Linux Audio Conference, Friday |
[Apr. 14th, 2012|09:20 am] |
Another day of interesting talks on speach recognition, ambisonics and Faust.
Ambisonics is a method of encoding sound locations and transforming that encoding to drive multiple speakers. The presentation on a Toolkit to Design Ambisonic Decoders discussed how they tuned the CCRMA listening room.
The 4 talks on Faust were all interesting, covering a graphical modeling environment for education, how to use faust with PD, an online faust compiler, and faust for iPod. Faust is used to program digital signal processing (DSP) diagrams into modules that can be used with many audio applications including SuperCollider and PureData
The demo of the Graduate Rhythmic Examination shows what can be done with open source software.
There were some great performances at the CCRMA stage. Two standouts for me were Densite by Benjamins O'Brian, a sampling of bells and chimes processed by SuperCollider, and Terra Incognita, and ambisonic work that had real and fantasy sounds flying around on the 16 speakers of the CCRMA Stage. |
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| Linux Audio Conference, Thursday |
[Apr. 13th, 2012|01:21 am] |
Eight great talks today at the Linux Audio Conference. Two programming standouts for me were the talks on Luppp a live loop personal performance program using a matrix arrangement of tracks and scenes like Ableton Live, and INScore an interactive live music score application (I know a composer who will be interested in this).
Ivica Bukvic gave a behind the scenes look at L2Ork, Linux Laptop Orchestra. Besides sharing the internal functioning of the PD-L2Ork environment, he also spoke about the goals, bringing Arts to STEM K-12 education, creating more laptop orchestras, and building a music composition and live performance application.
The evening concert featured several "taped" pieces, though some as programs using random numbers are never the same twice, and concluded with a live performance, Composition in Loops #1 using PD and GEM by Zachary Berkowitzi.
Some of the European attendees and I rented bicycles to get around, and ended up riding back to the hotel in a storm after the concert. |
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| Linux Audio Conference |
[Apr. 11th, 2012|10:50 pm] |
If you are attending the Linux Audio Conference and want to talk about a Fedora Audio Spin, introduce yourself to me, I'll be the guy in the blue Fedora Ambassador's polo. |
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| Saturday at LinuxFest NorthWest |
[Apr. 30th, 2011|11:26 pm] |
First day of LFNW is going well. We gave away lots of CDs and DVDs. Lots of positive feedback on Gnome 3. Jesse, Adam, Tom and Robyn all stopped by to help. OLPCs were a hit. One of the cool thing about the OLPC was when a five year old complained about speak not pronouncing her brother's name correctly, I noticed her mother was speaking a foreign language, so I set speak to use that language and it pronounced the brother's name correctly! The mother got real interested in the OLPC and explored Scratch while her daughter moved on to mazes.
Some interesting questions came up. We had the OLPC speak program answering questions. One person asked what is inside a watermelon, and the OLPC answered, that which is not outside a watermelon. Kind of existential. There were lots of requests for fedora case badges, we didn't have any, and one request for a fedora hat (baseball style with a fedora logo), nowhere to be found on the web, do we have any?
The after party was fun as always. It is paid for by the world famous raffle and included free (as in beer) beer, make with linux controllers, I liked the dirty blonde the best. Food, friends, games and beer make LFNW a great event. With the salmon and rib bbq lunch served up by the Bellingham Tech culinary arts students, bring an appetite to LFNW.
Booth duty kept me away from the talks. Adam did the What's new with fedora talk with the speaker from gnome. Several people came by looking for Larry, who planned the What's new talk, but couldn't make it this year. Jesse's talk on development environment should be packed tomorrow. Jesse is preparing his talk while Adam looks on in the attached picture.
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| Preparing to LinuxFest NorthWest |
[Apr. 22nd, 2011|11:40 am] |
I built a new computer, in part for LFNW, and spent the last three evenings trying to get f14 installed. Using 4 different media the install would fail at the partition stage, set repository stage or in the application loading, usually at about 1000 of 1190, and got to the reboot stage a few times only to fail. Since I wanted to show off f15 beta and Gnome 3 at the fest, I tried installing it. F15 beta installed on the first try!
First impressions of fedora 15, boot up is FAST! The progress screen where the fedora icon fills just blinks on for a second before the logon screen appears, sweet! Gnome 3 is ... different. I played with it for just a minute and it seems intuitive, I was able to figure out how stuff works. While users entrenched in their current interface might be put off with the change, I think a lot of users will like Gnome 3, and it could be a selling point for new users.
Fedora will have a table at LinuxFest NorthWest, so stop by and check out fedora 15 and Gnome 3. Fedora is represented in several of the talks and I'll be running a Linux Musicians BoF. My new computer will be set up for Live UBS creation, with many flavors to choose from besides f15 beta, Sugar on a Stick, fedora design and fedora games live will be available. Besides Gnome 3, I will have KDE 4.6, XFCE 4.8 and the new Sugar desktop to try. So stop by and see us in Bellingham next weekend. |
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| Dr. Dobbs mentions Fedora 13 |
[May. 27th, 2010|07:10 pm] |
Dr. Dobbs on-line journal mentions the Fedora 13 release in this article. They cover features of interest to many developers; simpler installation and device access, accelerated 3D graphics using free drivers, virtualization enhancements, enhanced software development and debugging, and expanded Btrfs features. Thank you Dr. Dobbs. |
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| Planet CCRMA presentation |
[Apr. 25th, 2010|01:19 pm] |
My Planet CCRMA presentation had a full room, went without a hitch, except for the SuperCollider sine oscillator that started up a little louder than expected, and was well received. The S-video worked OK, except I had to bump fonts up to 20 point to be readable. Some people stopped by the fedora booth after with good comments and more questions.
We are waiting for Jesse's talk on fedora 13 preview. Today is a little quieter than Saturday, and the question are more sophisticated. For OLPC the most asked question is, are you selling them, and where can I get one. For fedora the most asked question is when will 13 be released, answer 23 days! |
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| LFNW Afterparty |
[Apr. 24th, 2010|10:31 pm] |
A room full of 200+ linux enthusiasts, plenty of food (including cheetos), and free beer (ol' dirty blonde made with linux automation) has all the makings of a great party. Met many fedora users from casual, to professionals who us it at work, to the anaconda developer. Looking forward to Sunday's sessions including Jesse Keating's fedora 13 preview. |
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