18 Feb, 2008
Today (after a week-end with low GRPS mobile bandwidth), I ran python script for stats for all entries in Ambassadors Country List (on high performance connection). It takes more than an hour :-/
Now, you can download:
Script (a wiki reg-ex crawler) may contain bugs (for example I’m not sure about some sparse “dot” on the wiki page). But I hope this open the way to make more significant stats for Fedora Project.
For the moment I’ve publish the first draft of this script (very “quick and dirty”). During next days I’ll try to package this actions into a pythons module, to make more reusable and more readable this kind of object. I hope to see something like:
import FedoraStats
foo = FedoraStats.Ambassadors()
foo.save_to_csv("/tmp/bar.csv")Here you are the current draft:
Read the rest of this entry »
16 Feb, 2008
Today I’ve spent some hours to write a very “quick and dirty” python script to create some automatic statistics to show how Fedora ambassadors grow up fast.
For the moment script produce a simple command separated value file, useful to be opened with OpenOffice and make some charts.
Here you are a simple chart that shows number of ambassadors during last 10 months.
The script (for the moment) produce a table with months as rows and world area as columns. It takes data from fedora wiki.
Here you are some examples:
And here you are a chart only for South Europe Area:
As soon as possible I’ll write some classes to produce chart directly, without need to pass through OpenOffice, and (of course) put all scripts online. 
13 Feb, 2008
Only two days ago I blogged a post to tell to the world about my new RHCA Certification, and today, Alberto Trivellato (a friend of mine and one of my best colleagues), takes Sun Java Enterprise Architect certification (the full name of cert. is quite long: “Sun Certified Enterprise Architect for Java Platform Enterprise Edition Technology”). It is the highest certification in Sun Java panorama as well as RHCA is the highest certification in Linux panorama.
I’ve spent a lot of my time into java environments and I know how hard this certification is. So, I’m really proud to work with Alberto and it’s for me an honor to join with this kind of high-skilled people.
Congratulations Alberto! I hope to follow your way as soon as possible 
…and now it’s time to buy an expensive Italian wine and make a party!
11 Feb, 2008
RHCA is one of the most interesting certification I’ve never seen in information technology marketplace. To pass all exams you’ve got to DO what you have to know, not only make a check into multiple choice questions.
It was hard, but I’m happy because yesterday I received the result of my last exam: passed!
Today, I am RHCA!
For the first time I think to have a “valid” certification to show my own skills In Italy it’s pretty unusual. University degrees, certifications and so on are usually not related to practically experiences: you can have a master degree in information technology or computer science without know how using your mouse…
Changing this point of view is hard, but I think it’s not impossible. RHCA is a reality. I hope other companies will follow RedHat way. I think it’s the right way.
7 Feb, 2008
An entire night dedicated to Fedora next February, 19th!
The event is organized in collaboration with LOLUG (Lodi Linux User Group). After a short introduction about Fedora, we’re going to talk about:
- How does fedora live? The community behind fedora
- How does fedora work? Building Processes and Tools to deploy and deliver fedora
Here you are some links to obtain more information about where and where:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/FedoraByNight
http://www.lodi.linux.it/
Enjoy!
25 Jan, 2008
Murphy never makes a mistake!
In a project with tons of “overhead complexity”, what do you expect after hard months of work? When you’re so near to the goal… When you can feel it on your fingers…
…simply new architecture. x86_64? Itanium? PowerPC?
Too simple (…and too smart…).
Just i386…
…with 16Gb RAM machines…
…with full x86_64 yum repositories (with custom rpms for WebSphere and other strange things)…
…with complete puppet and puppet-team 64bit config support…
…we now have to rebuild all provisioning and configuration management subsystem in order to support “new” i386 machines…
So, we never forget the past. Never.
Amiga500, I’m waiting for you next upgrade!!!
19 Dec, 2007
Wonderful evening spent in “Boccon Divino” during last “Byte-Code” Christmas Party.
Food was very very very very good, but it was really really really too much for us… I’ve never left dessert for ages, but there’s always a first time After last cheese I couldn’t eat anything else. I won’t be able to be hungry for (at least) next week…
But food was not the main topic of the party… alcohol’s, wine and “grappa” were the really leaders of the evening. Please, have a look of my flickr shots to see what happened
1 Nov, 2007
If you have to install Zimbra on a single machine with a public IP, your life will be easy and relaxing.
But, if you have to install Zimbra on a server with private IP behind a public reverse proxy with mod_security (and other funny security stuff), and you don’t want to use external relay MTA, your life will be fully of terrible pains!
Obviously Byte-Code has this kind of internal mail server… so this week I’ve made a strange thing to made possible using Zimbra behind a reverse proxy
Here you are some suggestions:
- Remove some mod_security rules not compliant with Zimbra:
- SecRuleRemoveById 960010 950006 960015 960017 970903
- On Zimbra internal server setup some aliasing IP addresses, with real public ip (don’t worry. It’s only for localhost communications)… one for each real server configured (this is the key of the post! with this useless configuration you can cheat Zimbra about MTA server)
- On Zimbra control panel check “DNS lookup” on both “Global Settings” and server panels.
1 Nov, 2007
Here you are a very interesting post about “harm reduction” and some reasons in order to implement this kind of concept in Fedora 8:
http://www.linux.com/feature/120703
23 Oct, 2007
Today Luca sent an interesting post on mugshot.
It talks about “ITÂ crowd”, potentially divided into two different sides (from iBanjo blog):
- 20% side programmers: called “alpha†programmers — the leaders, trailblazers, trendsetters, the kind of folks that places like Google and Fog Creek software are obsessed with hiring…
- 80% side programmers:Â folks make up the bulk of the software development industry. They went to school, learned just enough Java/C#/C++, then got a job writing internal apps for banks, governments, travel firms, law firms, etc.
The post is really useful, but comes up with a strange point of view…. It said:
…While DVCS dramatically lowers the bar for participation in a project (just clone the repository and start making local commits!), it also encourages anti-social behavior. I already wrote a long essay about this. In a nutshell: with a centralized system, people are forced to collaborate and review each other’s work; in a decentralized system, the default behavior is for each developer to privately fork the project …
Now, just a couple of comments:
- All “private” projects I’ve seen is not useful for the other projects. It’s just for the customer. No way to reuse any components or subsystems… (not only for license reason, It’s basically for technical reasons)
- Most of “private” projects I’ve seen are very closed to the team leader and not to the developers. When the team leader leaves the project, it fails…
- All “private” projects I’ve seen uses a lot of “the 20%” code and frameworks (not viceversa)
- On the “80%” projects the developers have to rewrite the software for any new releases. It’s quite strange to see a software written “step-by-step”. Usually, after a cycle of develop, you have to clean all and rewrite from scratch…
Most of opensource projects have “20% side” programmers, but a few of them has “80% side” programmers (ex: Zimbra, JBoss, Hibernate, Compiere, Alfresco, Porta+ and so on…)
What do you think about the future of opensource software build with “the 80%”? Is possible to keep this software live for ages? Or sometimes they’ve got to be rewritten (maybe with a different name and different developers)?
Why Linux has more then 10 years of develop (and now it’s base on GIT with thousands of developers) and Hibernate has no road map for the future?
