FWN/Beats/PlanetFedora

Planet Fedora

In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide.

http://planet.fedoraproject.org

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General

Michael DeHaan responded to a post by Karsten Wade from a few weeks ago titled "Failure as the secret of success". Michael agreed and argued that it is usually impossible to build a piece of software that is 100% perfect for 100% of its users. "Failure is good. Chasing perfect is bad. Making any one aspect perfect or spending too much time on it tends to make other aspects of things bad. We need to get close enough and find some new challenge to work on, so we have more time to iterate and fail a few more times. We all need more time to fail."

Thomas Vander Stichele described "an approach to doing meltdown analysis". Also known as a post-mortem analysis, this is a useful process for "when we've gotten into a bad situation involving multiple people that we want to learn from and avoid next time".

Harald Hoyer summarized the results from the 20 Seconds Boot Feature Test Day and offered some suggestions for users and developers alike.

Matthew Daniels offered some ideas to improve the Fedora documentation by splitting the User Guide into three parts, Practicum, Theory and Appendices & Glossary.

Mark J Cox published a set of metrics that tracks security vulnerabilities and the time-to-fix versus their time of disclosure within RHEL.

John J. McDonough wrote an article about Fedora, the four Foundations of the project/community and how and why you should join.

Richard Hughes explained some of the issues currently associated with installing Applications as opposed to Packages (first by explaining the difference between the terms Application and Package). Along with some other folks, they published a proposed specification that is distribution-agnostic and should allow relevant metadata (including localized content) as well as icons to be efficiently and easily integrated into the local/distribution-specific software installation utility.

Scott Williams made The Case for Open Source.

Paul W. Frields announced that after working with the Red Hat legal department to revise the Fedora Trademark guidelines, a new version has been released. Among other changes the changes should make building remixes and unofficial spins easier.

Chitlesh Goorah posted about the goals of Fedora Electronic Lab (FEL) and also how the project bridges the Open Source software and hardware communities.

Education

Greg DeKoenigsberg started working on a Sugar activity for 4th Grade Maths called "Dungeons of Mongo". Remember, you too can potentially get a free XO as part of the Fedora Developers XO Program.

Chris Tyler announced that the TeachingOpenSource.org is open for business, "a neutral collaboration point for everyone and everything involved in Teaching Open Source".

Greg DeKoenigsberg congratulated Chris on the new Teaching Open Source community and provided some points that came up while visiting with people who are in the trenches trying to teach Open Source. Chris responded and suggested that anyone interested should join the mailing list.

(As a related sidenote, Teaching Open Source has its own Planet for those interested)

Karsten Wade described some of the issues associated with getting kids interested in computers, Open Source and issues with the US educational system in general.

Rangeen Basu Roy Chowdhury wrote about a "visit to a high school in a village located on the outskirts of Durgapur and made famous by the DGPLUG project . This project set up a computer lab in a village school where you don't even get proper drinking water and where none of the students would have never had a chance of so as to even see a computer if not for this project."