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Archive for June, 2010


Posted on June 25, 2010 - by jono

Unity Love

Unity from our Ubuntu Netbook Edition. I absolutely love it.

You can try it out easily by just running:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:canonical-dx-team/une
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-netbook-unity-default-settings

It is also packaged for Maverick in the repositories, just install unity.


Posted on June 25, 2010 - by jono

Recording Dates Set For New Severed Fifth Album And Live Streaming

I am pleased to announce that from Wed 11th – Sun 15th August principle recording for the second Severed Fifth album will take place. Within the five day recording session, taking place primarily between 10am – 6pm Pacific I will be recording all the guitars, bass, and solos, and finalizing much of the drums, before going on to perform first-level mixes. The recording takes place in my home studio here in the Bay Area, California.

Not only is the recording session confirmed, but for the first time ever the entire recording process will be streamed live on the Severed Fifth UStream.tv channel where you can watch the recording and interact with me via the live web chat throughout the five-day session. This is a tremendous opportunity to take a glimpse into the studio, watch the recording process, and experience how a Severed Fifth album is put together.

Read more about the new recording here.

Dig the wallpaper at the top of this post? Grab your Severed Fifth wallpaper.


Posted on June 23, 2010 - by jono

Community Leadership Summit 2010 Is Near!

It is not long until the Community Leadership Summit 2010 from 17th -18th July in Portland and it is shaping up to be an awesome event! We have a wonderful collection of community leaders, managers and enthusiasts coming, and the event is entirely free to attend.

I just wanted to remind you of a few things:

  • Getting There – If you don’t know how to get there, see this page for all the details. We are in the same venue that OSCON will be taking place at.
  • Sharing Session Ideas – Please go and add ideas for session ideas here – this is a great way to share ideas and collaborate together on interesting sessions.
  • Attendee Gallery – We are starting to put together a gallery of folks who are coming – please head to the People Gallery and add yourself! If you don’t have a wiki account, you can click on the Register link in the left sidebar to get one first.
  • Spread The Word! – As ever, the Community Leadership Summit is nothing without us spreading the word and encouraging people to join us, so do spread the word and let people know the event!

I look forward to seeing you all there!


Posted on June 20, 2010 - by jono

Severed Fifth Update

I just wanted to provide you lovely people with another update about Severed Fifth my Creative Commons and Free Culture music project. There is lots going on, and here are some of the details:

  • I launched Severed Fifth Fair Pay as what I believe is the fairest way of providing an opportunity for Severed Fifth fans to help support the project financially. The idea is simple: if you enjoy the music or support the project, you can pay what you feel is fair and affordable, and if that means paying nothing, that is absolutely cool. With me needing to pay for rehearsal space for the live band, hosting, merchandise, studio equipment, and other things, every little helps.
  • This week I started auditioning musicians to join the Severed Fifth live band, and the auditions went really well. I will be writing up a detailed blog post about this soon, so stay tuned, but you also check out this forums post for more details.
  • I bought this new baby for getting out and doing some live shows with. It growls. :-)
  • I registered a new Severed Fifth MySpace page, so go and add us as a friend! This compliments our Facebook, last.fm, Twitter, and identi.ca pages, and my friends at libre.fm are helping to make the Severed Fifth libre.fm page rock.
  • The Severed Fifth Forum is continuing to grow, so come and join the community and get involved. We are particularly interested in growing Severed Fifth Street Team and bringing the free culture Severed Fifth love to your area. Come and get involved!
  • Thanks to the wonderful work of our Frets On Fire charters, the Frets On Fire: Severed Fifth Edition project is coming on in leaps and bounds, and nearly the entire Denied By Reign album is available ready for our first release. Rock and rolll! :-)
  • The second album is coming along really well, and is almost completed at the writing stages. It is sounding rocking. :-)

I think that is enough for now. More as it happens! :-)

Also, expect a videocast next week, so stay tuned to severedfifth.com for an announcement of the time and date. :-)


Posted on June 15, 2010 - by jono

Community Leadership Summit 2010

In just over a month the Community Leadership Summit 2010 will be kicking off in Portland, Oregon; taking place the weekend before OSCON. The event takes place on 17th – 18th July 2010.

I started organizing this event last year, and it was a great success, with an awesome collection of attendees.

The Community Leadership Summit 2010 is the second incarnation of the event and is designed to bring together community leaders and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community. The event provides an unconference style schedule in which attendees can discuss, debate and explore topics. This is augmented with a range of scheduled talks, panel discussions, networking opportunities and more.

The event provides a great opportunity to bring together the leading minds in the field with new community builders to discuss topics such as governance, creating collaborative environments, conflict resolution, transparency, open infrastructure, social networking, commercial investment in community, engineering vs. marketing approaches to community leadership and much more.

I am going to be blogging a lot about the event over the coming month, so be sure to join us, go and register, and keep up to date on Facebook page.


Posted on June 10, 2010 - by jono

Severed Fifth Updates

I just wanted to blog about some of the cool things going on recently in Severed Fifth land:

  • Severed Fifth Used In Video Soundtracks – one of the most wonderful elements of licensing your content under a Creative Commons license means that other creative types can use your content. It turns out a bunch of people are using Severed Fifth music in their videos.
  • ‘Frets On Fire: Severed Fifth Edition’ Announced – with the newly announced Frets On Fire: Severed Fifth Edition I had a call for transcribers to chart the songs and we are already seeing great progress.
  • Severed Fifth TV Begins – I have started doing a series of official videocasts and did the first one this week providing an update on the project, demoing ‘Frets On Fire: Severed Fifth Edition’, talking about the Street Team and more. Watch the recording here.
  • Street Team Begins – recently we have started seeing more activity growing in the Severed Fifth Street Team. It is still very much early days and there is lots to do, so get involved and tell us how you think we can make the Street Team rock. :-)
  • Second Album – finally, progress on the second album is going really well. Most of the songs are now written, and I will be releasing two cover songs on the new album too; one an Overkill song, and one an Iron Maiden song. Soon I will be announcing the recording dates for the album and be streaming the recordings live.

Want to find out more and join the fun? Check out the website, the forums, and of course the Twitter and identi.ca feeds.


Posted on June 8, 2010 - by jono

Frets On Fire: Severed Fifth Edition

Some of you may be familiar with the game Frets On Fire; a free equivilent to the rather awesome Guitar Hero series of games. For some time now I have dreamed about having a special Frets On Fire: Severed Fifth Edition version of the game, with all Severed Fifth songs available to play. Well, this weekend I started working on exactly this.

So far the game is looking pretty cool and all branded to look like Severed Fifth. It includes the familar artwork, the logos and other fun things. It also include a transcribed version of Edge Of Design from Denied By Reign. So far it looks like this:

To make this a reality I need help to get all the Severed Fifth songs transcribed into Frets On Fire format. If you are interested I have written up more details about the game and how to get involved and also kicked off a thread on the Severed Fifth forums to discuss this.

Thanks in advance to everyone who helps with this effort!


Posted on June 7, 2010 - by jono

Severed Fifth Part Two Begins

Today I am tickled pink to launch the brand new Severed Fifth website, hereby beginning the second phase of the project.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Severed Fifth, it was a project I set up to see how far an unknown musician (me) could take his music when releasing it under a Free Culture license; a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. To do this I wrote the debut Severed Fifth album ‘Denied By Reign‘; writing and performing all the instruments and recording it in my home studio. Just as the album was released, I entered one of the busiest times in my life – I was moving countries, getting married, work was hectic, and had just signed up to write The Art Of Community for O’Reilly. As such, time ran out and I didn’t have the mental bandwidth required to commit to Severed Fifth.

This changed about four months ago when I started working on the follow up album. As I edge towards the completion of the writing phase, I figured it was time to get the web presence and community kickstarted. Today I am proud to share the fruits of this work.

At www.severedfifth.com we now have a brand-new website, and this blog entry explains some of the key new features.

In addition to this I have set up a brand new Severed fifth forum. This will be the hub of the new Severed Fifth community, and I hope it will bring together fans of the music, Free Culture enthusiasts and community members who are keen to get involved with the Street Team. I will be blogging about the Street Team later this week.

Finally, I have also set up a Severed Fifth Twitter Account. It is a great place to keep up to date with the project and find out the latest about the new album.


Posted on June 4, 2010 - by jono

Project Maintainers Required

Yesterday I announced that the new Severed Fifth website is launched on Monday, and with it will begin the second phase of the project and the build-up to the second album. For the first album I ran out of steam as I had just signed up to do The Art Of Community for O’Reilly and this sucked up all of my spare time. I don’t want to make the same mistake again.

As such, I am keen to hand over some of my projects to new maintainers who can be sure to give them the time and focus that they deserve. Today I want to share some of the next next steps I would ideally like to see to provide some food for thought, and appeal for volunteers to take the reigns in these projects:

Acire

Acire is the project I created to produce a solid library of Python Snippets to make it easier for new developers to get started with the platform. The project has been pretty popular and I am keen to see it continue to grow.

Right now Acire has a good feature-set to browse and run snippets, but I would love to see it continue to develop and include the following:

  • Dependency Checking – when running a snippet that requires a module that you don’t have installed, Acire should tell you and provide a one-click installation of the required module(s). Ed has a branch that he started, and this seems like a good start on this solution.
  • Async Documentation Checking – right now when Acire loads documentation links it stalls due to it’s non-async loading of the docs URL title. This causes significant problems if you are not connected to a network. It would be good to use GIO to solve this.
  • Better Searchability Of Snippets – I would love to see (a) a search box to do a text search across all snippets and (b) see a better taxonomy of snippets. There are two cases here: (1) I want a snippet that is part of a specific module, and (2) I want a snippet to help me with something (such as playing music). Today you can only search by category (which is mainly categorized by module name). This could be greatly improved.
  • Multiple Language Support – while I love Python, I would love Acire to be able to support multiple languages. I think the most elegant way to do this is to have a language pack for each supported language. Today you get Python content with the python-snippets package, but I would love to see c#-snippets as an example.

Would you like to take the reigns with Acire? If so, drop me an email to jono AT ubuntu DOT com.

Python Snippets

For Python Snippets I would like to grow a team of reviewers. Right now I approve all merge proposals and merge them into the branch (which is used to generate the daily PPA), but I think it makes better sense to distribute this work across a number of contributors that can communicate via a mailing list.

If you are interested in joining this team, drop me an email to jono AT ubuntu DOT com.

PyJunior

PyJunior was a project I wrote in a few hours while on vacation. The whole point is to make programming for kids much easier, and although simple, the program is off to a good start.

PyJunior really excites me. It holds so much potential to really introduce kids to Python and all the fun you can have with it. Some plans I have had for PyJunior include

  • Integrated Kid Friendly Docs – I have a dream for the documentation in PyJunior. You click the Help button and a window displays a list of Recipes. These are tutorial documents that outline how to do something fun such as make a calculator or a game. Each recipe not only explains how to write the code in simple kid-friendly steps, but also includes a button next to each code snippet that will paste it into the editor. I think it could be awesome to have a PyJunior Docs Team that produces these docs, and that the Recipe Browser would grab them off the Internet to save having to ship them with the app. This could really open up the world of programming for kids.
  • Sharing Programs – I includes a Share button in PyJunior that is switched off by default, but the goal was to create one-click way in which you can share a program with your friend. Kids need to be able to easily help each other with programs and this would provide a means for one kid to share his/her program with their friend who can then help them do something or fix a problem.
  • Interactive Tutorial – I would love to have written an animated interactive tutorial (like the first level of a modern game that explains how the controls work) that explains how the interface works.

Would you like to take the reigns with PyJunior? If so, drop me an email to jono AT ubuntu DOT com.

Moving On

If any of these projects sound exciting to you, do get in touch. I want to make sure that each has a competent maintainer who has the time to commit to the project, so I will go through a short evaluation for each. Thanks in advance to everyone who volunteers to help. :-)


Posted on June 4, 2010 - by jono

Severed Fifth II

For those of you who are curious about the next steps for Severed Fifth; my Creative Commons music project:

  • On Monday I launch the brand new website.
  • Writing for the second album is nearly complete and I will be streaming the entire recording sessions live.

I have created a new Severed Fifth Twitter account, so go and follow it to keep up to date with the latest. :-)