Sun, 25 Jul 2010
The middle of FISL
Day 1 of the exhibition floor of FISL had us very busy at first giving out lots of media. we quickly changed tactics to make sure we had enough to get us through the 3 days, plan 1 was to not just give them out but to engage folks, and give them out then, We also had pens and stickers. Part of our engaging people was to give some quick 30 minutes of so presentations on Fedora Topics.
Toshio gave a talk on the process of joining fedora as a packager. he gave it in English and had a person translating it. to me it felt a little choppy. As a result I decided i had to give mine in Portugese. I sat down with new Fedora packager Rafael Aquini and we translated my slides from english to Portugese. the result can be found Here It was certainly not easy to give a talk in a language i do not speak, but it seemed to go over well. Toshios talk was on Thursday mine on Friday. they were just in the booth. I need to send a massive Shout out to Marillia from Red Hat Brasil who did an amazing job on the booth design. We Spent alot of our time trying to talk with folks and doing whatever we could to help.
Overall FISL went well, We Had fun, Made some freinds, and it was reinforced how big a deal Langauge is I dont know about Africa. but at least in south and Central America there is very little English, and it seems to be the same in Asia. A big take away for me is finding ways to lower the language Barrier. how can we communicate and engage folks who do not know English or even people who only understand a small amount of it.
I'll have a wrap up soon of my trip to South America.
posted at: 22:52 | link | | 2 comments
Sat, 24 Jul 2010
FISL 2010 the start
Following on from FUDCon in Chile, Toshio and I flew to Porto Alegre for FISL 11, this is my 3rd time in Brasil for FISL. the conference is a big thing here. and it continually reinforces to me the need to have documents and support in languages other than English. So many people in South and Central America do not speak a language other than Spanish or Portugese.
Toshio and I arrived in Brasil Monday afternoon. Leo, Marcello and Douglas were kind enough to pick us up from the airport and take us to the hotel. We checked in and parted way with the guys, Toshio and I went and found some Brasilian cheeseburgers, and washed them down with 2 litres of guarana (yummy softdrink), Tuesday We met up with Leo for lunch at the buffet, and walked around the down town area of Porto Alegre. there is a nice mixture of old buildings and newer ones, We explored a local market lots of fresh fruit and veggies, as well as meat and fish. We headed back to the hotel to meet up with Wolnei and Lenno who were flying in. they were delayed a few hours so i tired to catch up on email.
When the boys got in we went and got some pizza for dinner, along with more guarana. followed by a early night
Wednesday We meet up in the hotel, and made our way to the university. We found an amazing half completed booth.
We spent the rest of the day planning how we were going to run the booth and getting it setup in its final configuration
posted at: 13:14 | link | | 0 comments
Wed, 24 Jun 2009
Day one of FISL 10
Im once again at FISL in Porto Alegre, Brasil. I feel much more comfortable here this year. I understand some portugese but not alot and speak very little. Communications this year are better. Also in attendance are Fedora ambassadors from other parts of Latin America, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Mexico, and elsewhere im likely forgetting now. there is a mixture of English, Spanish and Brazillian Portugese.
its nice to see that Fedora makes the press in Latin Aerica
I gave my talk on spacewalk this morning. There was a good turn out. I had hoped for more questions. But i guess i either answerd them all, they did not have them at this point in time. or i just confused them all. Im hoping it was the first two options. I did have positive feedback.
posted at: 18:45 | link | | 0 comments
Thu, 22 May 2008
Greg Labeled
And the winner is.....
Big thanks to Mo for making the art work for me. The winner is Alex with "Fake Bench. Real Linux". Thanks to everyone who put in an entry.
posted at: 04:26 | link | | 1 comments
Fri, 25 Apr 2008
Label Greg
This needs a label
The person that comes up with the best label for this picture of Greg will get themselves a shiny Fedora T-Shirt.
posted at: 02:24 | link | | 26 comments
Sun, 20 Apr 2008
Chicken Heart Cheeseburger
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We went to a little trendy restraunt here in Porto Alegre tonight and Greg ordered the Chicken Heart Cheeseburger. The above pictures tell the tale. spot and I ordered the Chicken Cheeseburger. They were delicious. Just not quite what is a typical cheesburger for the parts of the world that i've been to. Today was the last day of FISL. I really enjoyed my time here. The Fedora Ambasadors as well as the OLPC Activity developers have all been wonderful, they accepted us warmly and showed us a good time. I have really learnt alot this week.I definetly want to come back to FISL next year, 7000 people registered, the place was packed and people were doing really neat things with little resources. I will be more prepared and learn some portugese so that communications is a much smaller issue than it has been this time. We worked things out and ive started picking up and recognising some words. One thing that I found different here to when I was in Italy was that the people in Brazil were much more polite, even appologising that they did not speak very good english when it should have been me speaking to them in their native tounge. I was the visitor here and was welcomed like a long lost relative. Thank you to all who helped make it great. I have learnt a lot and hope that I can help to make it better. |
posted at: 03:04 | link | | 4 comments
Sat, 19 Apr 2008
FISL Day 2
yesterday was the middle day of FISL, I went to a talk given by one of the Fedora Ambassadors Rodrigo Padula de Oliveira, it was entitled XO / OLPC - Ele é verde, bonitinho e roda Fedora (XO/OLPC - It is green, beautiful and runs Fedora) while in Portuguese, I was able to follow parts of it. I had helped Rodrigo earlier in the day setting up his laptop to show sugar during his talk. he was trying to use sugar-jhbuild which really needs to be rm -rf'd from everywhere. Things would not build because they needed patching for gcc-4.3 (he is running rawhide :) ) and the build process wipes away your patches (Thanks spot for trying) so we yum installed suagr and telepath-salut telepathy-gable (Still some packaging issues to be fixed) I grabbed some .xo bundles and put them in /usr/share/activities and he was able to log into sugar from gdm, out of the box. you can also run sugar inside your regular desktop by running sugar-emulator. I need to finish getting some changes into the activity packaging guidelines so that we can package up sugar activities as rpms they you will be able to run "yum groupinstall sugar-desktop" and get a working sugar environment, perfect for your kids to use, or for developing activities.
There is alot of Activity development here in Brazil. Some of them we see. I met the team that developed paint last night at the Mozilla 10th Birthday party. A lot of the activities we dont see. a problem we have is having a way for activity developers to know where and how to post information on the activity. I think a great project for someone would be to write a TurboGears app like Fedora's Package Database that we could use for tracking activities. something that would let people find out about the different activities that are out there.
Fedora is a great place for people to get involved in OLPC, the OS on the XO is based on fedora. Fedora is a great development tool. with sugar shipping in fedora, its a great tool to develop activities for sugar. If you have kids and want to give them the sugar experience then fedora is also great for that. OLPC and Fedora have a lot that they can gain from each other. We really need to work better together. PLease contact me if you want to help in any way shape or form. It really does not matter what part of the world you are in.
posted at: 15:09 | link | | 0 comments
Fri, 18 Apr 2008
FISL Day 1
Yesterday was day 1 of FISL, spot and I waited in line for an hour and a half to get our passes and bags full of phamplets and a magazine. There is over 6000 people registered
this was part of 2 of the 5 lines. they were sorted by First name which really wasnt clear and seemed odd. But we got though ok.
I went to Scotts talk on OLPC. there was a good turnout though Language was a barrier that kept others away im sure. There is alot of interest in OLPC and Fedora here. The line up of people for fedora cds was quite large. People were happy to wait
I really want to see us work out how to overcome langauge issues. I think thats its something that is a must
we finished up going to a dinner at a Brazilian Steak house. It was a river of meat. Guys with skewers that looked like swords walked around serving up all sorts of deliciousnes. there was a entertaining show put on that involved lots of danging and swinging around some kine of ball on a chain. im pretty sure that it would violate all sorts of rules in both the US and Australia
Greg suggested after talking about when I played football that I needed to put up a new hackergotchi picture on my Planet Fedora feed. so now there is a picture from when i represtented Australia in the firstever world cup of American Football in Palermo, Scicily, way back in 1999. Yes I used to play american football. I played 10 years of Middle Line backer for the Gold Coast Stingrays. It was playing football that initially brought me to the USA, its is also because of it that I met my wife and that im where I am today. I have been very fortunate to be able to do the things and see the places around the world that I have. I really am thankful for what I have.
posted at: 21:34 | link | | 3 comments
Thu, 17 Apr 2008
Sight seeing in Brazil
So day 2 in Porto Alegre, We met up with David Barzilay, He is a Red hat guy who does alot ofr fedora ambasators here in Brazil. We went over some of the things that we would like to see from FISL. One Big thing I want to see is Fedora and OLPC helping each other more. The ambasators here do an amazing job. They published a magazine can be found here. One thing that I naively expected was that younger people would know both Portugesse and English, just as most of europe does. I have also learnt that fedora suffers from one of the same thing afflicting OLPC, a need to translate software into all languages. a takeaway that I have from this it that we need to come up with a way to translate from one language to another, not just from english to language foo. People who know Spanish and Portugesse need to have a way to be enabled to translate. I also se the importance of doing different language spins. I think though that a team of native speakers should do the spins and that they should be primarilary hosted in the country that they are intended for. Say for instance a Brazillian Portugesse spin should have hosting in Brazil. Many countries have good internal infrastructure but it is expensive and slow to use international links. We need to remove this road block and get local people making live cds that suit the local needs.
We did a little sight seeing we went to some local museums they were all free entry. One was a art museum, it was largely local art which was good to see. The history museum was a little hard to follow as it was largely words. while i dont undertsand portugesse i was able to make out some words. finally we went to a cultural museum, there was alot of interactive flash based activities, that made me kid of sad. I ama big beliver in using free and open source software wherever possible the short film entitled "Last Hippie Standing" was in English and somewhat entertaining.
posted at: 22:22 | link | | 1 comments
Wed, 16 Apr 2008
I'm in Brazil
I arraived in Bazil yesterday afternoon, I'm here for FISL where im going to represent OLPC and Fedora. I've been looking forward to this for awhile now. I was really honoured when I was asked to attend. So far I've not seen alot, Spot and I are going sightseeing this arvo. I need to break out the phrase book and really try harder to learn some portugese. I fluently speak Aussie and American English, I speak some British English, and nothing else. For awhile now ive been wanting to learn spanish. I really need to just make it happen.
Not sure if many people care much, but i tend to be very queit about what im doing, I tend to just do things and get them done.. I'm going to really try harder to be more vocal about it. Mike McGrath is a great inspiration in this regard he has an amazing ability to both get stuff done and to let people know whats going on and how to help. Kudo's to Luke, Toshio, and Ricky you guys Rock, you always deliver and get stuff done.
posted at: 15:22 | link | | 1 comments