Fitness like a geek

I've read all kinds of storied about geeks finding new ways to fitness. My favorites are the stories about people building fitness devices that power their game playing. Treadmills that move WoW characters, bikes that power game systems. Its all about being healthier while staying true to your self.

Tonight I embark on exercising with my Xbox using "My Shape, fitness evolved". I loved the Wii fit, but pulling that balance pad out all of the time has gotten to be annoying. Now that I own a Kinect, its time to try out the camera for fitness. Desiree has already used it and its supposedly a very good workout. Here goes nothing.

VIVO in the Open

The VIVO project has always been "open source". However, as the project progresses we are moving from just "open source" to "open source open development". This is not a simple tasks, with openness brings concerns of accessibility. Many projects are open source and open development, but some lack the tools to enable passerby's to become engaged in their project.

What do we need to do to be open and accessible? Open information? A team at the UF Libraries is migrating data from Cornell's confluence and UF's redmine to the sourceforge wiki. The JIRA ticketing system used by the VIVO teams has been opened for anonymous viewing. Open Communication? VIVO has its an IRC channel on freendode, #VIVO. We also have open listsservs on sourceforge that are archived so anyone can read and search.

All of these open avenues help us as a project be more accessible, but that doesn't mean the information is easily accessible. It will be interesting in the next few weeks, months, even years as the project grows. What is required to make our project more accessible? Is it better organization, better tools? Only time will tell.

VIVO Harvester 1.0

The VIVO Harvester went live as 1.0 yesterday! Its been a long process going from a simple concept of ETL into a library of tools for moving data from various formats into a RDF data store. We still have a long way to go and many tasks on the table: integration into the VIVO GUI, inclusion of more National data sources, better disambiguation algorithms. Check out the release announcement.

The VIVO Harvester team is pleased to announce the availability of release 1.0 of the VIVO Harvester. The release is the result of alot of hard work on the behalf of our wonderful testers and contributors. Many thanks is given to all of your for help. This release brings a major rework and upgrade from the 0.7 series of the harvester. See the included changelog inside the package for full details. There is a growing set of documentation to be found on the sourceforge wiki. A great place to start learning more about the harvester can be found here:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/vivo/index.php?title=VIVO_Harvester
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/vivo/index.php?title=Harvester_User_Guide

You can find the tarball and debian package on sourceforge here; http://sourceforge.net/projects/vivo/files/VIVO%20Harvester/harvester-1.0.deb/download
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vivo/files/VIVO%20Harvester/harvester-1.0.tar.gz/download

As always, the team is available for questions and feedback via this list or IRC -- http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=VIVO&uio=Mj10cnVlJjQ9dHJ1ZSY5PXRydWUmMTE9MjM2JjEyPXRydWUe5y

Finally, if your curious about testing VIVO or the harvester without the hassle of setting up a new server, the updated version of the Virtual Appliance is now available. It contains both VIVO 1.2 and the VIVO Harvester 1.0.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vivo/files/VIVO%20Virtual%20Appliances/VIVO-v1.2-VirtualBox-Standard.tar.gz/download

Fitness and Stress Loss (Part 1)

Since my shoulder surgery and physical therapy I've begun to go to the gym in the mornings. No one should see the side of 6am I've been seeing, but if it reduces my weight, increases blood flow, reduces stress and overall makes work more bearable; I'll do it.

I've been out for a couple weeks due to the Cornell/Indiana visit and the cold I've been percolating. Monday I start back again and I thought it time to begin to document my progress. Documentation can be reinforcing and enlightening as I try to reach my goals. So today I take my weight, and throughout the weeks, each day I'll blog about my attempts at increasing my activity while fixing my diet (not dieting, two seperate concepts). Every so often I'll check the scale and see if there has been progress.

Today's starting weight: *cough*272*cough*

UDS-N +2

Its sunday after UDS-N and I thought I'd take the day to sum up the resources that were identified to me this past week in Orlando.

I found out about communication in the ubuntu community

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DeveloperCommunication

like the IRC groups

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InternetRelayChat

The mailing lists

https://lists.ubuntu.com/

and the BeginnersTeam

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BeginnersTeam/

Probably the most helpful session was one on Ubuntu and the Community On Ramp, http://pad.ubuntu-uk.org/tGmNOVtxk5. They talked there how to better explain how someone can become involved with Ubuntu and how to explain all the opportunities that are present. Some of the most helpful documents from that session was a couple sites that the community and Jono had been putting together. The first is the unity involvement site,

http://unity.ubuntu.com/getinvolved/.

It has a nice layout and resources that I've yet to review but look like they will be very helpful. The second was a site that I believe Jono was working on,

http://developer.recreantview.org/.

This site had recommended tools, tutorials, and a path to getting involved. It needed some work (the center graphic starts with develop, the matching links top and bottom start with create) but so far has been fairly helpful.

The another helpful session I went to was on PaperCuts, https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/other-design-n-papercuts. Every cycle/release the community picks 100 items that are small usability errors that are typically considered trivial. There was alot of great information about getting the beginners team involved.

I needed to leave early to get back to Gainesville so my wife and I could drive to a wedding. I happen to see a session about Launchpad and Bzr and I commented on it to Chris. By chance I made my comment while Chris was sitting next to someone from OpenStack. They have a tutorial on LaunchPad and Bzr on thier site at

http://wiki.openstack.org/LifeWithBzrAndLaunchpad

Products of UDS-N

First post in my blog for a long time. Lets be honest this was a place for me to try out blogging, nothing more. However, I have a new mission for my blog. To capture my attempt to begin helping and developing in the Ubuntu community. UDS has inspired me to become apart of this really amazing community. During one session about developer resources it was suggested that I write about my experience and tell people about it. I'm putting this little post in to remind me of my commitment and hopefully over the next few weeks I'll post about getting started.

RIP David Eddings

Early this week one of the greatest Fantasy Writers of our time passed away. You brought us Belgarion and Sparhawk and Athulus. You will be truly missed.