Czajkowski

Well we’ve arrived, met up with more Irish guys over here at FOSDEM, had waffles and lots of Kriek beer.  Six of us left Dublin yesterday from the Ubuntu Ireland LoCo, and we ended up finding a Debian guy on the place who lives in Dublin so he’s been with us on our wee journey. An early flight at 6:50am meant by the time we arrived, we’d been up hours and hungry, in search of waffles and coffee and checking into our hotels, we walked into the city dropping our bags off at different locations along the way. Who knew we’d find it so hard to find a place to sit down find coffee and waffles in the same place.  We ended up a little restaurant and folks got their coffee and food and we started to sample the beer, at 12 in the day….

Should note I’m going to create a quotes page based on the groups smart ass comments, we’ve ubuntu, kde, fedora and Debian folks with us this weekend, comments in good fun and jest are flying left right and centre and it’s proving rather entertaining. Last night we went to the beer event, just sitting down and chatting to random folks, it’s great. I got to put the faces to the handles of the freenode staffers and go out for dinner with them. So all in all a great day.

Today the talks have started, great buzz around the place and a few sore heads. Looking forward to the ubuntu dinner tonight.

In keeping with the Merry Chrismtas spirit and all, we’re going have an outing. For those who are interested, ICE SKATING, followed by some food and drinks in a local pub so we can laugh at who fell over and nurse our bruises!

Hope to see you all there! Bring along your kids if you like it’s not going to go on late!

Ice Skating in Smithfield Sunday 13th December Meet up the the ice rink for around 16.00, to start on the ice at 16:35.
Cost:
Adult   €12
Under 12 €8

Direction on how to get there:

Smithfield Ice Rink

Luas Smithfield Stop.

Dublinbikes. Smithfield Station

Pub: We are meeting at 18.00 at Pifko for some food and beer.

The Ubuntu-ie LoCo held our Karmic Koala release party on Saturday and had a massive turn out, thanks to all those who came.  We decided to go for a sit down lunch at Jimmy Chungs an all you can eat Chinese buffet and we definitely had our fill.

After lunch we went to Karma, and this was chosen by the LoCo team  with a poll and list of places to go. It also had free wifi and opened up for us when we got there soaking wet as it lashed rain and it wasn’t due to open for an hour, so thanks Karma After a few hours of showing it off, we clearly were very thirsty, and the rest of the photos are here

The Ubuntu Global jam is nearly here and hopefully will be even better than last year as we’ve a few new editions.  Global Jam takes place from Friday 2nd October to Sunday 4th October, instead of just focusing on bugs this year it’s going to encompas more. From Translations, to documentaion, to packaging for those who are up for it. I’ve even heard of some teams sping cleaning their wiki’s and getting rid of obsolete pages or typod pages.

So what is a bug jam and why should you do it?

A world-wide online and face-to-face event to get people together to fix Ubuntu bugs – we want to get as many people online fixing bugs, having a great time doing so, and putting their brick in the wall for free software. This is not only a great opportunity to really help Ubuntu, but to also get together with other Ubuntu fans to make a difference together, either via your LoCo team, your LUG, other free software group, or just getting people together in your house/apartment to fix bugs and have a great time

How do you do it, how do you take part ?

You need a place to meet, with a decent internet connection, as you’re going to be online most of the day! Either bring your laptops, or some live CD’s so you can work on Ubuntu, and great people to share the work.  I find the best place not only for net connection and also to get people involved is a University/College. It’s also helpful as many of them have language departments if you are looking to work on translations.

So when you have the venue sorted, what next?

Well this is where you need to sit down a couple of weeks before hand and work out the areas you and your team would like to work on.  You do not have to work on all of the areas! Work on the ones you can.  If it’s your first jam session, perhaps working on bugs and bug triaging would be a good start, next up some translations and take it from there. Another suggestion would be to have some talks that day, we did that last year by having someone explain how to log into Launchpad, how to find bugs, triage them and work on them. Try and cater for everyone, encourage people to get involved. Remember people may never have done this before and may be nervous doing it.

So a simple start may be some bugs – there are a lot there just sitting, not assigned to any package, have a look and see what you can do, maybe add a comment asking for further information.  Also try and reproduce the error, always a helpful one comment what you did to also get the same issue.

Translations work on areas as a team, I find working on one package at a time works so you can see you are making a difference and help one another when stuck

Documentation you don’t need to get too technical if you don’t feel you are able for this, however one nice way to help is clear up wikis that may have typos in them, or are duplicates due to misspellings.

Remember its a face to face meet up, you are working on the internet but do try and spend some time getting to mix with your fellow members, after it’s all done, maybe go for something to eat,  or take a break during the day and mingle and get to know one another, you are all working on the same project and it should be a fun day! The Ubuntu-ie LoCo took part last year and we’re doing so again!

Ubuntu-ie Global Bug jam

I’ve been rather busy lately and not had much time to myself, finally getting some me time. Between moving house and getting things back in order and been busy at work I’ve neglected a few bits and pieces. So some housekeeping is needed!

I’ve been working with JonathanD on freenode with Fossevents for the past few week and it’s taken some tweaking, yes the orange is staying but has been toned down a bit ( I was vetoed on brown).  I have to say that I’m well impressed with the uptake from so many different communities from around the world submitting events. There are many different events on there at present, from Geeknics, general meet ups to conferences it’s great.  We’ve had a lot of feedback, and RSS feeds and mapping facilities are coming along as soon as we can figure out some bits and pieces and maybe a plugin or two.

I’ve also been working on my own little pet project which went live and has seen some folks already sign up so I’m pleased with that. It does however clash with another event Bizcamp in Dublin on the same day at the same time in a different location so it does mean start up companies will miss out on hearing about how useful Open Source software is. Shame….

I was asked recently on channel about the links I post as I shorten them and I thought I’d explain a bit further.  Firstly I like to support an Irish service or product wherever and whenever.  I use pix.ie for my photos, Blacknight for my hosting and short.ie for my urls.

But shortie has a really nifty feature which is why I use it, well two actually, 1 I can personalise a url like www.short.ie/geeknic and secondly I can keep track of them and view the amounts of clicks it has received.This is called the public timeline and you can share it with folks. I just find it rather neat. And the majority of these services all use open source

Screenshot-short.ie - Laura Czajkowski's public links

I’ve also just had one of the most productive IRC meetings so far for our LoCo.  We changed the day around to mid week as we had been meting on a Sunday for the last few months and it was just harder and harder to get people due to  travels. So this evening a load more new people joined and took on board new tasks, which is awesome! We used to just meet up and have a drink on the 1st Thursday of the month, but we’ve now decided to try and have a short talk before hand and see how that goes.  This will give people a chance to hear about a new project they are working on and also people a chance to practice giving talks.