Neomantra.org

Well, hopefully I can keep from getting lazy and make all of this happens.  I think partially I’m posting this entry now to be sure I put enough pressure on myself not to let that happen   So what is the plan?

Well I’ve got a good bit of free time during the day this weekend so I’ve lined up some items to work on for KDE.  First and foremost will be the continuation of my listserv cleanup.  The major task at the moment is to take the spreadsheet and populate columns which contain the moderator/admin contact info for each list that looks unused for greater than 6 months.  Then I’ll give it a few weeks to collect responses and we’ll move forward from there.

The next thing is that Troy Unrau posted a really nice article about this type of “fall cleaning” work and a related project to this listserv one that we wanted to work on is to also try and clean up some of the outdated/innaccurate KDE web sites floating around the web.  I think this might prove an even more daunting task than tackling the listservs so I’m happy that I’m not the only one interested in getting this done.

Outside of the geek world, I’ve got some last minute wedding planning things to take care of and also plans to see “!!!” (yeah, that’s the band name..no wonder they’re not famous, how could you find them online with a name like that? haha) at the Black Cat on Saturday night.  My music addicted concert going friend Brian assures me they’re a good act to see live though.  I’ll let you know how it turns out…though I’m worried that after all the awesome show at the Virgin Mobile FreeFest last weekend it might be hard for me to judge them fairly.

As I mentioned in my last post, the host I was using kind of died on us recently.  But I’ve finally gotten everything sorted back out for the most part and am ready to hit the ground running again.  Here’s a summary of what’s happened since then.

On the KDE front I managed to get a few things done.

• The listserv cleanup project I was working on sort of fell between the cracks for a while but I pinged the list again and we caught the attention of one of the sysadmins.  They asked that we check with the moderators of each list to get approval for deletion and also send a final “this list is closing” type of email to let users know it’s going away.  This is obviously going to take a little bit of time to do but hopefully not too long.
• I submitted my first “Dot” article (the official KDE news site).  It’s sitting in the queue for review right now but should be posted once the moderators have time to address any grammar/formatting issues if they find any.  It’s a fairly short piece discussing how KDE was the “featured phpBB Forum of the month” for August at phpBBHacks.coms.  Patrick O’Keefe, the admin of phpBBHacks.com, was also kind enough to take time out to answer some interview questions which I included.  I’ll definitely be posting a link here once it is officially released.

Everything else has been hectic.  We’re getting into the 11th hour for the wedding and have had a generally busy schedule even without that.  I’ve been to the dentist twice to get teeth drilled since my last entry on the site.  My car is falling apart on me (seems to be a leak in the power steering fluid lines somewhere).  The steering wheel makes an awesome grinding noise when I turn, haha.  In happier news, last weekend we hit the Freer & Sackler museums in DC on Saturday and I went to the Virgin Mobile FreeFest on Sunday.  I caught some of Weezer’s set and also some of Girl Talk, but for the most part spent the day in the dance tent listening to the DJs there.  The other guys were decent but hearing Pete Tong live was pretty awesome as he’s quite skilled and is easily one of the most famous DJs in the world these days thanks to the popularity of his BBC show and club nights in London and Ibiza.

Whew!  Anyways, I’m about ready to skip to the honeymoon now.  I need a vacation

So the host I was using had some hardware failure.  Recovery is in progress…hopefully will be back up and running again by the end of the weekend.

That’s right, KDE 4.3 was released yesterday. I’ve seen lots of different news sites, release announcements, etc posted all over the place so here is a consolidated list of sites you should check out relating to this release.

• Official KDE.org 4.3 Release Announcement – The official release announcement from KDE.org.  I actually got involved on the KDE-Promo mailing list in time to provide feedback to this announcement.  Be sure to scroll down and check out all the latest info, plus gorgeous screenshots (somehow the Oxygen team’s theme managed to get even more awesome in this release) along with the screencast that Jos Poortvliet put together.  Very cool!

• KDE.News Release Announcement – A nice write up from Sebastian Kügler explaining the driving philosophy of KDE 4.3 and the changes it brings

• KDE 4.3 on Digg – Go Digg this article to help promote KDE 4.3!  (digg.com’s entire site seems to be down for me at the moment, 2pm, so keep checking back)

• Show your appreciation – The official “thank you!” thread from the KDE Community forums.  Tell everyone who helped make this release happen how much you appreciate their time and efforts.

• KDE Buzz – Follow the word “on the street.”  You know…the one in your virtual hood

• Distribution packages – I don’t have links handy for every distribution but here is where you want to start for upgrading to KDE 4.3 on Kubuntu or to get KDE 4.3 on an OpenSuse Live CD

Hope this is helpful!  If anyone has anything else to add to the list feel free to leave a comment and I can make updates.

Well it’s been quite the hectic week.  Monday, Wednesday and Saturday we kept up with our regular Aikido schedule staying the full 2.5 hours on Monday and Saturday.  Lots of little things are clicking in my head now and I feel less clueless in class but most of the techniques we’re learning are still pretty challenging.  There’s always some subtle detail that can be improved upon.  At least I’m getting into much better shape as I’m learning, so every class is a victory in some respects.

The rest of the evenings were filled as well.  Tuesday we went to a cookout with some coworkers.  Thursday we got to see Tool in concert (one of my favorite bands of all time).  Friday we finally caught the new Harry Potter movie which I thought was pretty good…though I never read any of the books so I am far less critical than a die hard fan might be.  And last night a good friend of mine was down visiting the DC area for a conference so we went out for drinks.  It was quite an entertaining evening…though that’s to be expected given the crowd I was with.

In between all of that I did manage to do some productive/geeky things this week.  Both Celeste and I have been experiencing a terribly annoying bug with our mouse behaving erratically on our Kubuntu Jaunty desktop installations.  I’m pretty sure it’s best described here.  Towards the very bottom there is a comment that mentioned they had some success by changing the clocksource parameter for the kernel to “jiffies”.  I had read some other things on the web indicating that it’s best to avoid this clocksource setting when at all possible so I tried HPET instead and fortunately that seems to have helped on my machine.  On Celeste’s box HPET was not an available clocksource option and attempting to use jiffies caused X to fail so she’s still dealing with this problem.  From what I can tell it sounds like it’s better to use TSC (my original setting) anyways so for both of our sake I hope the root cause of this problem is addressed sometime soon.

In related open source work I got to provide some feedback to the KDE-Promo folks about the upcoming release announcements and web updates for KDE 4.3.  Mostly it was just grammatical corrections and helping them catch typos but it was a nice opportunity for me to be able to lend a hand.

Anyhow, it looks like this coming week will probably be equally busy and then my bachelor party is coming up this weekend (Atlantic City! woohoo!).  It’s pretty crazy being able to account for every weekend’s activities all the way up until the wedding day.  It’s finally almost here…apologies in advance if blog entries become sparse over the next few weeks!

I mentioned a couple posts back that I’ve been reviewing the status of all of the KDE listservs lately in order to weed out inactive ones.  I’m happy to say that yesterday I completed my review and have put together a spreadsheet detailing my findings.  Assuming I can sort out some email problems I’m having at the moment (more on that below) I will share the full list with the KDE-Promo listserv so that we can discuss how to take the appropriate actions to address the inactive lists.  I’ve compiled a short summary of some interesting statistics as well that I wanted to share here on my blog:

• KDE currently has 192 mailing lists (wow that’s a lot!)
• 42 of the lists have not been touched at all in 2009 (yikes! glad I looked through them)
• 9 lists have never had a single post made to them since they were created
• 12 lists required you to be a member of the list to review the archives
• 11 lists seemed to be in gray areas as to whether it would make sense to continue to maintain them or not (very low traffic, but perhaps still needed)

I’ve also noticed a couple other oddities with the behavior of the MailMan (v2.1.9) application which manages the lists.

• There were many pages which indicated that you had to be a member of the list to see the archives but in reality I was able to click and see those archives without being a list member in the majority of those cases.  As mentioned above, only 12 lists actually prevented me from viewing the archives without registering but I know the MailMan’s list info page said that in many other cases.
• A far more serious issue I’ve noticed is that both times I’ve tried to register new email addresses with a KDE list I could begin to view posts on the list almost right away but was unable to successfully send a message for others to see.  The first time I registered an address I asked around to see if perhaps there was some sort of moderation involved but was told that’s not the case.  Eventually that account “magically” started working the next day.  A couple days ago I registered another email address that I’ve setup specifically for KDE activities to use instead.  Again I’m having problems sending to the KDE-Promo list.  I’ve tried about 10 times in the last day or so.  I also went into the list settings and turned on the option to get acknowledgement from the server that my message was received so I’d know if it was going through at all.  To this point I’ve gotten no feedback from the MailMan system so it must be getting lost in cyberspace somewhere.  Hopefully this is a rare occurrence or else we could be losing potential contributors who try to contact a listserv but are not ever successful.

Ending on a positive note, though we can always improve further, it’s amazing to see how vibrant of a community KDE is.  There are easily over 100 mailing lists that had ongoing conversations in the month of July alone which is a definite sign that lots of great contributions are being made even as you’re reading this!

It’s been an extremely hectic, but exciting week thus far thanks to the caBIG 2009 Annual Meeting.  First, some background on the situation before I explain the exciting part.  My focus within caBIG lies with the Imaging workspace which seeks to provide both open source imaging applications and freely available radiological data sets to their community.  A large chunk of my day job is spent working with their most mature tool which is called the National Biomedical Imaging Archive (NBIA).  The purpose of this tool is to serve as an indexed data warehouse for DICOM medical images and one of my major tasks at work is helping facilitate the accrual of scientifically interesting data sets into the archive for researchers to make use of.

DICOM is the standard for medical images these days, and they’re structured very similarly to how MP3 files are.  They consist of a header that contains a great deal of “tags” or meta data much like how you store the artist name, song name, etc for an MP3.  However in DICOM there are thousands of tags that provide information on a wide range of things.  Some of it is patient centric like patient name, height or weight to name a few.  There are also things like  modality, slice thickness, software version or hardware manufacturer’s name that provide details about the machine the patient was laying on top of.  There are lots of other types of tags but I would end up having to write a book if I got into explaining all of that and there are much smarter people like David Clunie who could give you better information on the subject.

So when these images are submitted to the NBIA the server parses the meta data found in a subset of these tags so that end users can then search based on that information to find the type of images they want.  The link I provided above points to the NBIA server hosted at the National Cancer Institute here in the United States, but thanks to caBIG’s federated grid structure institutions across the world can also setup their own NBIA servers and choose to expose subsets of their own data sets across the grid to share with each other.

Now, on to the new from the conference.  This year at caBIG’s annual meeting there were some great things announced regarding new advances in the devleopment of Imaging workspace applications as well as some interesting news about data sets being added to NCI’s NBIA server.  The most exciting centers around a project called The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).  Here is the official project summary from their site:

The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) is a comprehensive and coordinated effort to accelerate our understanding of the molecular basis of cancer through the application of genome analysis technologies, including large-scale genome sequencing. TCGA is a joint effort of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), which are both part of the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The overarching goal of TCGA is to improve our ability to diagnose, treat, and prevent cancer.

In order to support the vast amount of data accrual that has been occurring in support of this project the NCI established the TCGA Data Portal. While this has been a fantastic pilot project to this point one element that was not officially included in the data accrual at NCI was imaging.  However, over the past couple months the team I work on at the Cancer Imaging Program has been in constant communication with a few of the sites providing data to the TCGA project.  I’m proud to report that these efforts have paid off greatly, resulting in a partnership with both Henry Ford and the Univerity of California San Diego (UCSD) to retroactively obtain images for TCGA cases and load them to the NBIA here at the NCI!  This was a critical step and was the cornerstone in allowing the development of the new projects announced at this year’s caBIG meeting.

During the meeting it was officially announced that the Imaging workspace within caBIG would be starting a project of their own to add even more support to the TCGA initiatives via the addition of some new open source tools to enrich the data set.  The goal is to provide visualization and annotation tools to accompany the image data that would allow physicians/researchers to load up the images, make measurements of the tumors, record text annotations, and then store them back to a data service that could be queried by others who were interested in reviewing them.  This will be done by developing new plugins for two very popular existing medical image viewers and one NCI homegrown one.  The first is ClearCanvas which was developed for the Windows platform.  The second is Osirix (free, but I don’t think it’s fully open source) which was developed for Mac.  There is also a third cross platform tool called AVT created using yet another Imaging workspace product called the XIP Toolkit.  XIP was designed for rapid imaging application development and is based on QT which all of you KDE folks already know and love.

Hopefully I will be able to report back on some positive progress in these areas prior to the RSNA annual meeting which occurs at the end of November.  I believe the current goal is to have functional applications ready in time show off at that meeting!

Last week I did a review of the pathways towards involvement with KDE that are posted on the web and some of the problems I ran into.  In the process of writing that review I stumbled across the listserv home and so I picked the one that seemed most appropriate for addressing my concerns, “KDE-Promo“, and signed up.  Then I fired them a quick email pointing them to my post and also explaining how I’d like to get involved.  You can check the archives to see the details but I’m happy to report the results have been very good thus far.  I got several responses and some good advice about ways to get started.  For those who didn’t read through the archived thread, my current activities are:

1. Scan all the lists that have been setup for KDE and find the outdated/unused/dead ones so we can get rid of them
2. Review and document the public facing KDE web sites that look to be out of date (excluding historical/archived news type of things) so we can update or remove them

While both of these things seem pretty simple and mundane (and yes, reviewing things like this in detail is indeed mundane), I think they’re both critically important.  If the goal is to bring in new contributors and build the community it’s imperative we make it easy on folks to find their way to the door and that when they knock, someone is there to welcome them in.

The mailing list cleanup seemed like the simpler of the two tasks so that’s where I started.  Though now that I’ve started digging in I’ve found that it’s taking more time than I anticipated.  I spent a good chunk of time already making a spreadsheet to categorize “active” versus “inactive” and recording the last active thread date for each list.  I’ve reviewed 70 lists to this point and of the lists I’ve reviewed 24 of them look inactive or were never even used from what I can tell.  It’s unfortunate that so many existing lists aren’t being used, but at least it makes me glad I’m taking the time to check on this stuff.  Just 122 more to go now Once I’m done I will provide the full spreadsheet back to the KDE-Promo list for people there to review and take action on (if they agree with my findings).  It’s been a little difficult determining exactly what “inactive” should be in some cases, but for the most part lists are either really active with tons of posts every month or they haven’t been touched in over a year so there are not a whole lot of gray areas so far.

Once that’s all done I’ll move on to the web site review.  One thing that’s become more clear to me as I’ve gotten some feedback from others is that keeping all the web pages up to date is generally a thankless job and is more work than casual contributors can deal with.  With that in mind I think my goal as I perform the web site review will be to simply eliminate as many of them as possible much like I’m doing with the mailing lists rather than trying to build a list of ones we should update.  The more clutter that is out there the harder it is to find things…especially when they’re not being kept up to date.  If we can slim down the number of sites we’re trying to maintain that should improve the chances that everything is kept current as well.  It was also mentioned on the list that there is some movement towards trying to get more wiki pages going rather than static HTML content so they can be more easily modified collectively by the community.  I think this will help a lot as well.

One final thing I’d like to do in this area is to make sure there are places on the sites that point people to the corresponding listservs and IRC channels for whatever the topic of that page is.  Getting involved seems like a really daunting task until you find an active list where there are people around to help show you the ropes and give you a friendly nudge in the right direction.  If we can get people to the proper list or IRC channel before they get frustrated digging through old web content I think we’ll be more successful in roping in potential contributors.  In addition they’ll meet people and begin to get to know the community which is what KDE is really all about!

The past week I’ve been spending a fair bit of time thinking about how much I enjoyed Akademy and how I’d like to find some ways to get involved to help improve KDE.  On KDE.News there was a nice article written the other day which gave me some ideas about where to start.  The post was about some work going on between QT and OpenBossa to promote development in Latin America, more specifically in Brazil. There is enough information listed to let people know that these groups are looking for developers in the area but then there isn’t any detail about how to actually get involved. At the bottom in the comments section someone from Brazil indicated they wanted to help. The first response was “join the appropriate mailing list”. I posted a response asking for someone involved to provide more info. Eventually I found the home of all the KDE listservs and linked the URL for the person inquiring but they’ll have to guess which listservs might be able to help answer the question and hope someone can get them some specific info.

As this was happening I thought to myself, this is exactly the type of experience that I’ve encountered in the past which leads to a hard time getting involved in open source.  I’ve been to a couple conferences and have met a whole host of people who are constantly asking me how I contribute and what projects I’m working on. Thus far I’ve had to respond saying that  at this point I just use KDE but I’d love to help if they could point me in the right direction. The response always seems to be “oh but there are so many things we need help with” followed by a few generalized suggestions. It sounds so easy but then when it comes down to it I still haven’t had anyone tell me exactly what I should do to get started.

The fact that no one I’ve talked to has been able to easily point me to a good starting point got me wondering if this type of information is just hard to find or if it doesn’t even exist.  So I thought maybe I’d start poking around to see what is out there.  I’ve done this half-heartedly in the past but this time decided to take a deeper dive.  Here is what I found:

• Googling “how to help kde” turns up http://www.kde.org/jobs/ as the number one hit.  After looking at the page this seems to be a general guide for how to perform various tasks if you decide to write software to be included in KDE.  It also has information to help developers who already have an idea of what they want to develop decide whether they should write a new application or consider contacting maintainers of an existing one.  Pretty useful tool if you’re a developer and already have some ideas on what type of application you want to build.  However if you’re just looking to get involved with something simple it’s kind of a daunting thing to encounter with so much documentation to dig through.  At the bottom of the page there is a link that takes you to a list of “open tasks”.  I got excited when I saw this as this is pretty much exactly what I was looking for.  Unfortunately the list doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2004.  (maybe I can help by trying to get this list back up to date!)
• There is an email address at the very bottom of the page pointing to howtohelp (at) kde (dot) org.  I will trying pinging this address to see what type of response I can get.
• From that page I saw a link to something called the KDE Quality Team (http://quality.kde.org/).  This page is another wealth of general information about how to contribute in various ways.  However this one also contains some more detailed information on specific avenues for contribution such as communication, promotion, documentation, coding, etc.  This is helpful, yet not quite what I was looking for in the same way as the KDE Jobs page as there is not any specific list of projects/tasks waiting on assistance.
• Additionally they provide a mailing list on which you can join for the KDE Quality team.  I’m going to join it and if I don’t get a response from the prior email address I mentioned I will try posting there as well.  However, looking at the archives of the past 6 months there has been only one other offer to help and the rest of the threads were misguided inquiries that should have been posted to various other support or development lists instead.  If nothing else, it seems there needs to be better promotion of this list’s existence if there was only one email from a person trying to get involved in over 6 months.  Unless maybe people are just finding other ways to get in the door?
• Towards the very bottom of the KDE Quality Team page there was another promising set of links which were supposed to point to open tasks and statuses for various projects.  Again I was hoping for a specific list of needs, but all of the links are broken.
• Saving the best for last, I also found http://www.kde.org/getinvolved/ from the main menu on the KDE.org homepage.  This seems to be more up to date than the other areas I stumbled upon and had some well organized subsections providing info on how to get in touch with people in each area, background/history, mentors you can contact and even specific tasks in some areas!

Looking at the information I’ve gathered here I think I might have just killed two birds with one stone.  I’ve familiarized myself with the basics of what is going on with the marketing and promotion of KDE and I’ve pretty much decided that’s what I want to help with going forward.  I’ll post back here with status updates as this topic continues to unfold.

From “Echoplex” during their Lights in the Sky tour (courtesy of nin.com)

Trent Reznor has always been one of my musical idols.  I started listening to Nine Inch Nails’ album “The Downward Spiral” in 7th grade and then enjoyed my way listening backwards and forwards many times over through the rest of his record catalog ever since.  The thing I find especially interesting about him though, is that he continuously finds ways to push boundaries, whether it’s by providing fans with the source tracks of his albums to contribute back remixes of his work to the community, orchestrating an amazing visual experience to accompany a live show or by giving away his albums for free with the only option to pay being for “limited edition” perks to test the changing climate in the music industry.

Just the other day he posted a nin.com forum link via Twitter and I was pleasantly surprised once more with his creativity and honesty with his fans.  What’s in that post?  A road map for the budding artist in today’s turbulent world of music.  A reality check if you will.  Here is a quick excerpt:

The point is this: music IS free whether you want to believe that or not. Every piece of music you can think of is available free right now a click away. This is a fact – it sucks as the musician BUT THAT’S THE WAY IT IS (for now). So… have the public get what they want FROM YOU instead of a torrent site and garner good will in the process (plus build your database).

By database he is referring to a database of contact information for your fans to let them know about your tours, record releases, etc.  He goes on to explain that he believes the best way to make money as a musician these days it to build relationships with your fans by giving them your music for free and then allowing them to support you via other means (t-shirts, limited edition record prints, etc). I’ve watched him test this using his recent album “The Slip” and also in seeing how other artists such as Radiohead followed a similar model with “In Rainbows”.  I’ve generally heard mixed commentary on the success of these distribution methods but this post from Trent seems to indicate his feelings that its been somewhat successful.

However there’s another aspect of this that I think he’s missing – “music as a service”.  This is where all the music in the universe exists in “the cloud” that is the Internet and you can search for and then stream exactly what you want to hear whenever you want.  Artists get paid to contribute their music to the service and consumers pay for the convenience of having all of this at their fingertips, cleanly indexed and ready to use on demand instead of having to download, store, and sort it all themselves.  It’s kind of the same model that most successful open source software companies use.  Sell the value added from a service (support, customization, etc)  and don’t worry about trying to sell the original content itself.  But until things like Real Rhapsody completely take over the world as the dominant model and everyone has handheld internet devices with broadband speeds (which we’re approaching quickly), I think the things Trent is suggesting in his post are pretty solid advice for most musicians.