Community Weekly Review (Nov 26-Dec 1)

OpenStack Community Newsletter –December 1, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

OTHER NEWS

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

  • Activity on the OpenStack repositories, lines of code added and removed by the developers during the past week.
  • Top 10 monthly committers to the repositories (by number of commits)

This weekly newsletter is a way for the community to learn about all the various activities occurring on a weekly basis. If you would like to add content to a weekly update or have an idea about this newsletter, please leave a comment.

 

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Hacking on Ebooks

Gentlemen prefer PDF, according to Tim O’Reilly’s data from Rough Cuts five years ago. At OpenStack we see some preference for PDF, though there are three times as many visits to the HTML version of our Compute Admin manual. Still, the PDF version of the guide is downloaded about five times a day. I do believe that gentlemen prefer PDF or some sort of book-like reading material. When asked, readers cite portability and search scope as two benefits to the form. However, as David Cramer, our doc tools developer put it at our recent hackathon, “PDFs are like cement.” With the boom of mobile and tablet screens, a stretchy and flexible screen-reader format like epub fills a need – we need content that works well on the 200 plus devices that fit into one hand.


So on 11/11/11, in the Austin Rackspace office, we did some hacking to be able to create epub output from our DocBook source files. I blogged about it for the OpenStack Planet blog from my blog, DocBook, ePub, Hackathon, what more could you ask for? prior to the event, talking about some of our prep work.

I’m pleased to show you the results – we did get output for epub and also tested the Mobi output on a Kindle, all in one day, with a team of about seven hackers including developers, writers, and testers.

We first tested the process using built-in epub transforms that ship with Oxygen, our XML editor, who supports open source projects like OpenStack by donating licenses to documentation contributors. Thank you Oxygen! We were able to use that output to start testing. Here’s our white board with the list of bugs.

While the writers and testers were hacking on output, programmers were working on ensuring we could get the epub output through Apache Maven, our build tool. By the end of the day, we could output epub through our automatic build process also!

As happens with hackathons, there’s some cleanup work to do – for example, our neat-o dynamic SVG cover page that takes in variables like the book title doesn’t output a cover for the epub. Also, most “real” epub output workflows convert tables from text to image (I know, crazy huh, when you think about the loss of search capability), but the tables in epub output act a little funky when resizing. Also, mobi, the Kindle format, has a problem with the way lists are marked up, but these are fixable and on the bug log.

I haven’t decided yet whether the epub output is high quality enough to offer it for download for every book on the OpenStack docs site, nor do I know if there’s much demand for the output, but I’d like to offer the OpenStack Starter Guide as an epub download. The team at CSS OSS works hard on this content, and I’d like to see it get spread onto many devices. Let me know how well it works for you and if you think epub has a place as a regular output for OpenStack documentation.

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Community Weekly Review (Nov 11-18)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – November 11, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

  • A new format for the community statistics: the gallery below shows the activity on some of the OpenStack repositories, lines of code added and removed by the developers during the past week. Let us know what else you would like to see on a weekly basis.
This weekly newsletter is a way for the community to learn about all the various activities occurring on a weekly basis. If you would like to add content to a weekly update or have an idea about this newsletter, please leave a comment.

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Community Weekly Review (Nov 4-11)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – November 11, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

  • New weekly graphs of commit activities on OpenStack main repositories
  • The OpenStack wiki now accepts Launchpad ID for login (thank you, Chmouel)
  • OpenStack packaging coordination effort hangs out on irc.freenode.net #openstack-packaging
  • The OpenStack devroom was accepted at FOSDEM 2012: shine your passport, meet developers in Bruxelles, Feb 4-5

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

  • A new format for the community statistics: the gallery below shows the activity on some of the OpenStack repositories, lines of code added and removed by the developers during the past week. Let us know what else you would like to see on a weekly basis.
  • Contributions to swift week 44
  • Contributions to nova week 44
  • Contributions to manuals week 44
  • Contributions to keystone week 44
  • Contributions to glance week 44

 

This weekly newsletter is a way for the community to learn about all the various activities occurring on a weekly basis. If you would like to add content to a weekly update or have an idea about this newsletter, please leave a comment.

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Community Weekly Review (Oct 28-Nov 4)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – November 4, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

This weekly newsletter is a way for the community to learn about all the various activities occurring on a weekly basis. If you would like to add content to a weekly update or have an idea about this newsletter, please leave a comment.

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Great Turnout at the first Austin OpenStack Meetup

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Last Thursday, a number of us Austin OpenStack fans decided to get together and talk OpenStack, Diablo, Crowbar, and more.

We had a fantastic turnout of almost SEVENTY people who came out that night – almost at near capacity for our venue, Tech Ranch Austin.  A number of startups where represented, as well as a number of notable OpenStack partners like Rackspace, Canonical, and Dell (the company I work for), who sponsored this first OpenStack meet up in Austin.

This meetup coincided with the Rackspace Cloud Builders OpenStack training, being held at the Dell campus that entire week, so a number of OpenStack students from that class, many who had flown in for class from out of town / state, were able to make it as well.

It was a great pleasure for us here at Dell to sponsor the first Austin meetup for OpenStack, and I look forward to our community growing as other partners help us sponsor future meet ups.

You can get more details on what was discussed at the meetup at Rob’s blog – www.RobHirschfeld.com.

If you’re in the Austin area, and are interested in joining the OpenStack Austin meetup group, join us at www.meetup.com/OpenStack-Austin.

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Community Weekly Review (October 21-28)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – October 28, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

This weekly newsletter is a way for the community to learn about all the various activities occurring on a weekly basis. If you would like to add content to a weekly update or have an idea about this newsletter, please leave a comment.

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A team for the OpenStack International Community

With so many people interested in OpenStack that new user groups start regularly. A list on the community page mentions groups in Egypt, Japan, China, and more but we know it’s partial. There are more OpenStack groups and more people are interested in forming one. We’ve established a new OpenStack team, the International Community team on Launchpad with the objective: To help user groups around the world to advertise their existence, to share best practices, announce local events and coordinate activities. And have fun meanwhile.

If you run an OpenStack user group, a meetup, want to host an hackaton join the OpenStack International Community team and subscribe to the mailing list.

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Community Weekly Review (October 14-21)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – October 21, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

  • zns to set “Maintainer” of keystone (identity) project
  • swift will be continuing the previous path of releasing as needed and not necessarily following the nova milestones
  • Thierry calls for completing blueprints to communicate your goals and completion targets outside your project, like https://blueprints.launchpad.net/keystone/essex
  • Untriaged bugs decreased after last week’s call for help. Thank you http://webnumbr.com/untouched-nova-bugs

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

This weekly newsletter is a way for the community to learn about all the various activities occurring on a weekly basis. If you would like to add content to a weekly update or have an idea about this newsletter, please leave a comment.

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Community Weekly Review (October 7-14)

OpenStack Community Newsletter – October 14, 2011

HIGHLIGHTS

EVENTS

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY

GENERAL COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

This weekly newsletter is a way for the community to learn about all the various activities occurring on a weekly basis. If you would like to add content to a weekly update or have an idea about this newsletter, please email [email protected].

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