BSDCan Trip Report: Ivor Prebeg

Recently, the Foundation sponsored Ivor Prebeg from the University of Zagreb to attend BSDCan and the FreeBSD Developer Summit. Ivor had this to say about his experiences at the conference:

I managed to make contacts and find commiters who might be willing to review and eventually commit patches I have. I had the chance to chat with Bjoern Zeeb (bz@) about VIMAGE stuff and how are we going to proceed with merging the code into HEAD and after that. Had a really great time with nice people who made me look forward to working with and meeting them again.

Besides multicast routing virtualization and IGMP snooping extensions, I learned a lot about other areas of *BSD development that I had no clue about, like packet scheduling, ClangBSD branch, mesh networks... I was also thinking about joining the ClangBSD team if I have enough free time.

I had a great time hanging out with Roman Divacky, Ed Schouten, Alexander Motin, Gavin Atkinson, Bjoern Zeeb, Marc Balmer and all the other wonderful people that made my stay in Canada even more delightful.

Open Source Foundations

Gabor Szabo recently did a series of blog posts on various open source foundations. His entry for the FreeBSD Foundation is here.

For comparison purposes, he also wrote entries for the GNOME Foundation, the Python Software Foundation, and the Apache Software Foundation.

BSDCan Update

The Foundation is pleased to have been able to provide travel grants for 13 developers to attend BSDCan. Travel reports are starting to come in and we'll post them here as they arrive.

The Foundation also raised $845.24 in cash donations at the booth during BSDCan. Thanks to all who dropped by the booth to donate.

We're at BSDCan

Most of the Directors of the FreeBSD Foundation are here at BSDCan. If you're attending, drop by the FreeBSD Foundation booth to say hi, look at the cool swag, and/or make a donation.

User Thank You

Brandon Gooch, a system administrator at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, recently wrote the Foundation to express his gratitude towards FreeBSD developers in general and the recent wireless work in particular. The Foundation is always looking to collect appreciations and success stories, as well as pain points, that if addressed, could assist in FreeBSD adoption. When was the last time you pinged a developer on IRC or sent them a quick email to let them know how much you appreciate their work? It only takes a minute to let someone know that their hard work is being put to good use by others.

With Brandon's permission, his email text is re-posted here:

I'd like to thank Rui Paulo and Bernhard Schmidt, and Sam Leffler SO much for working so hard on the 802.11 stack and driver support. In my observations, wireless networking support (or lack of) from the OS seems to be one of the biggest deal-breakers when people I know try FreeBSD (from Linux or even Windows).

Driver support in general is a Good Thing and when one of my co-workers installs FreeBSD and his or her wireless card "just works" -- it looks really good for the project.

I'm sure there are still many issues left to resolve and still more features to implement. I believe that even better support is on the way. I also know that an OS can't be "all things to all people", but the solid code and great support from the developers and community make it a real pleasure to take part in the FreeBSD ecosystem.

I'm also very proud of the efforts of the FreeBSD Xorg devs (Robert Noland in particular) and the VirtualBox devs (Bernhard Froehlich and Co.). They have helped me implement several FreeBSD-based solutions at work due the the excellent features and performance of both Xorg and VirtualBox.

I look forward to opportunities to evangelize the FreeBSD project both in my professional and personal life. Thank you for making that task much easier.

FreeBSD Lectures Captioning Project Complete

Murray Stokely has completed his captioning project, which was funded by the FreeBSD Foundation, and provides the following update:

A pilot project to improve the machine generated captions of technical conference lectures from the BSD Conferences YouTube channel has been completed. The 73 videos in this channel have been viewed over 200,000 times since the channel launched in late 2008, and the addition of human-edited transcripts to some of our most popular videos makes this content more accessible to people around the world.

In addition to the benefits to the hearing impaired, captions are very useful for international viewers as well as for the improved discoverability of this content by search engines. The improved quality of the English language transcripts also improves the quality of the automated translation of the captions into over 45 different languages. It is also now possible to search for words and phrases in the audio transcripts and get a link directly to videos that contain spoken content of that word or phrase.

For example, try searching for a famous line from one of Dr. Kirk McKusick's FreeBSD Kernel Internal Lectures. The above link will take you to the Google Video Search Result page where one of Dr. McKusick's lectures containing the phrase as long as dinosaurs and mainframes is the first result, along with a snippet of the transcript from his lecture, just as you would see the snippet from text content on a web page. A dozen of our most popular videos of FreeBSD technical content are now captioned and fully indexed allowing users to search for very technical terms and get access to lecture material from BSD Conferences.

The captions were improved by two passes of human editing paid for hire through Amazon Mechanical Turk.

New Director

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Erwin Lansing has joined the Board of Directors. For those of you who haven't met Erwin, here is his bio:

Erwin previously worked for an rapidly expanding webhosting startup and now holds a position as Network Systems Engineer at the Danish incumbent ISP, TDC. He joined the FreeBSD Ports Development Team in 2003 and has been a member of the Ports Management Team since 2005. He is mainly working on the package building cluster, creating and distributing ready-to-install binary packages of 3rd party software for FreeBSD, in addition to regression testing the integration of FreeBSD with 3rd party software projects.