By RangerRick, on May 4th, 2008%
So if you’ve followed my blog for a long time, you might have noticed me mention that I have, on occasion, written music.
I’ve finally found some time to really work on getting everything set up again so I can write more music (and, in fact, I’ve got a guitar on the way as a birthday present from my wife!). This past month, I’ve worked really hard to do something I’ve meant to do for a long time: release an album.
Now, my music has always been freely available, it’s a part of the demoscene culture, not to mention my open-source roots, working with OpenNMS, Fink, and tons of other stuff. One thing that’s very hard to do, however, when writing tracked music, is get that “finished” sound.
I’ve spent the last month going through my catalog, dumping everything to Garage Band and ProTools, and re-mixing, remastering, and all-around cleaning up my tracks.
Without further ado, I announce my first single, Pointillize, available immediately on Amazon MP3 download, and soon on iTunes, Rhapsody, and other music download services.
On May . . . → Read More: And Now For Something Completely Different — Raccoon Fink Music
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By RangerRick, on April 23rd, 2008%
So I’ve been slack in posting to my blog, for any number of reasons, but I’ve been busy busy with lots of crazy stuff.
First, I’ve been spearheading the OpenNMS involvement in Summer of Code. Aside from one unfortunate incident things have been going well. I’m really looking forward to getting to know our students and seeing what they can come up with. It will be a learning experience for all of us. =)
We’re also starting to gear up towards another beta on the road to OpenNMS 1.6. We’ve already got a bunch more bugs finished off, but also plenty to do still.
If you haven’t noticed, my blog looks a little bit different. I’d been limping along with pretty much unchanged templates from upgrade after upgrade of Movable Type since version 3.1 or so. It’s a testament to their software that everything’s worked swimmingly without any major surgery for all of that time, but I’ve been itching to take advantage to the much cleaner HTML and CSS they’re using in newer default templates, and other spiffy features which I have not been able to . . . → Read More: I’m Not Dead Yet
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By RangerRick, on March 26th, 2008%
I’m in the lucky position that I get to work on open-source software for a living. Not only that, but I work with a group of people who really believe in open-source software as more than just an alternate business strategy — it’s a philosophy that benefits everyone involved.
OpenNMS is completely open-source. There’s no whacky $50-per-node “enterprise” version with extra features — we put it all out there, and we stake our reputations on being the people you contact when you need something more than community support on the mailing list. The code is open, and anyone can become an OpenNMS consultant if they want. To survive as a services company, we have to be good at what we do, and not just keep the code hostage and force customers to go through us to get things done. We have to work our butts off to remain the go-to experts on OpenNMS.
That’s what makes it frustrating when we see our code, and the code of lots of other contributors appear to be misused. The whole point of the GPL is that everyone benefits from improvements made to the . . . → Read More: When “Do No Evil” Is Not Enough
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By RangerRick, on March 14th, 2008%
I am honored, giddy, and totally stoked to announce that OpenNMS was accepted into the Google Summer of Code 2008!
The student application process starts next Monday, March 24th, so there’s still time to get prepped, and suggest some ideas for projects on our wiki, or even get a head start on getting involved in the community and working on code.
Thanks again for everyone who’s offered to mentor, come up with ideas, and volunteered their time!
In other news, we’re gearing up for a 1.6 beta1 release hopefully sometime this week. We have a list of bugs we’d like to knock out before the beta, but many of those will probably fall through to the next beta milestone. Look forward to a release, there’s a lot of good stuff getting cleaned up and fixed since 1.3.11!
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By RangerRick, on March 4th, 2008%
So Tarus posted about Cittio and their potential GPL violations last night, and it made Slashdot this morning. Once again I was reminded why I haven’t read Slashdot comments for a number of years. 😉
It all boils down to a bunch of people saying:
“OMG Get a lawyer!!!!” “It’s the GPL, you’re not a customer, they don’t have to tell you anything! Shut up!” …and… “DUDE. They totally say they use OpenNMS RIGHT HERE!”
Yes, they do mention OpenNMS on that page. They also say they use OpenNMS 1.0.2 which is either unfortunate for them, or very likely modified in a way that doesn’t appear to be communicated to customers.
By the time I posted a response clarifying things, it was too late and it’s buried way deep in the comments, so I would like to reiterate it here:
“So what’s all this then?”
Well, that link says they’re running OpenNMS 1.0.2, which, given the questions Cittio employees have asked on the OpenNMS mailing lists in the past, seems very unlikely (although technically possible). If they *are* using 1.0.2, they very . . . → Read More: On the Potential of GPL Violations
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By RangerRick, on February 21st, 2008%
It has been 3 years and 10 days since the last OpenNMS development cycle closed and a stable version was released, and the OpenNMS landscape looked very different then.
There had not yet been a Dev-Jam. The professional services company for OpenNMS had only had more than 1 employee for about a year. The codebase was half the size it is now. Most importantly, the community was really only getting started.
Tarus took a big chance going off on his own to continue the OpenNMS codebase when the now-defunct Oculan Corporation discontinued their open-source services business and continued on developing a closed-source network management appliance, and it takes a long time to gain the trust of userbase. There is plenty of open-source software out there — but while most open-source software has users, plenty of projects never develop a real community.
OpenNMS has grown a lot in 3 years. Not only has the general userbase bloomed, but the Order of the Green Polo (the “subject matter experts” of OpenNMS) has grown to a whopping 19 people. Considering it’s a codebase that (at least at the start) was . . . → Read More: OpenNMS is Accelerating
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By RangerRick, on February 14th, 2008%
Had a good time at SCaLE — seemed like a lot of folks were interested in OpenNMS there. Of course, we found a bug in 1.3.10 as soon as it was out the door so I actually did another release during the conference. Fun!
Also fixed a long-standing bug with kdepim building on leopard; It should work now. If there are any other KDE3 build issues on Leopard, please let me know. I’m in the process of updating the packages to the upcoming 3.5.9 release.
Also, I see qt-copy is now a 4.4 snapshot so hopefully if I can get another snapshot build going, we’ll have native QuickTime audio. (woot)
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By RangerRick, on February 2nd, 2008%
So today we’re trying our first Bug Day at OpenNMS. It’s a chance to do a big push to get things verified/closed for the upcoming 1.3.10 release, which is shaping up to fix quite a few annoying bugs as well as add a number of new features.
If you’re interested in helping out, just join #opennms on irc.freenode.net and check out the Bug Day page for a few pointers on getting started.
You don’t have to be a coder, you could help with documentation, help other folks install OpenNMS, or verify bugs still exist, or that they’re fixed as they’re fixed.
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By RangerRick, on January 25th, 2008%
If there’s one thing I know about people who are involved in network management, it’s that they’re stats junkies. Case in point. (Hah, I mean, how cool is it to poll the weather in OpenNMS…) I put that to the test in the last week, most definitely.
I got slashdotted (and ars technica’d, and dugg) a few days ago, and despite being under the weather, it fired me up to do 2 things.
First of all, it got me excited about working on KDE more. I had a great time at the KDE 4.0 release event and for the first time got strong feedback from KDE folks on what I’ve been working on. I got a little bit of that at aKademy but I also still felt quite a bit like the outsider there. This time around there were a number of people who gave me great feedback, encouragement, and all-around made me feel like a part of the community.
As a result, the thing I’d hoped would happen most after getting the press did happen — the kde-darwin IRC channel is hoppin’ with . . . → Read More: Stats Junkie
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By RangerRick, on January 16th, 2008%
digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/xbox/KDE_Mac_4_0_Snapshots_Available’;
Just in time for the KDE release event (grin) — a new KDE/Mac snapshot is available. I will be demoing it at the release event, thanks to Google and the KDE release coordinators for arranging free lodging, and my employer, OpenNMS, for covering my travel!
On to info about the snapshots.
Qt is updated to 4.3.3, and my build tools have been updated to use the KDE 4.0 branch now that 4.0.0 has been tagged. This does mean that kdepim and kdevelop are no longer being built (for now). Also, I’m not building Amarok right now since it has some compile issues, and I need to get with the Amarok folks to figure out what to do about some architectural issues (no Plasma on OSX).
Nothing huge code-wise has changed from a Mac point of view, other than all of the general updates that have gone on in the KDE codebase since the last snapshot. It appears that kdeinit4 and kded4 both have some crashing issues related to something deep in Qt, I will be investigating it when time permits. . . . → Read More: New KDE/Mac Snapshot
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