Febuntoo News Generator

Like many of the releases before, the end of Fedora 13 is sneaking up on us.  Huge thanks to James Laska, Adam Williamson, Jesse Keating, and others who have gathered for several Fridays to beat down the blocker bug lists.  Several of these meetings have lasted hours and without their help and dedication we wouldn’t in as good of shape as we are!  Thanks also to all the fine package maintainers who have made the needed bug fixes.

Our final freeze starts on Tuesday, May 4, 2010, and the release candidate (RC) is scheduled to be created on Thursday, May 6, 2010, with a “Go/No-Go” decision scheduled for Tuesday, May 11, 2010.

In order for this sequence of events to go down smoothly the most important thing that must happen now is to address the open Fedora 13 Blocker bugs.  In order to build the RC and start testing it, all of the Fedora 13 blocker bugs must be in a state of MODIFIED, ON_QA, or CLOSED.

A quick perusal of the Fedora 13 blocker list shows 67 bugs currently open.  You can help by retesting bugs in MODIFIED or ON_QA and helping to track down requested information and reproduction steps for bugs in NEW and ASSIGNED and adding new bug comments as applicable.

Fedora 13 Schedules: Key Milestones and Team Schedules

Filed under: Fedora

I previously posted about my ongoing studies on the WMA Voice codec. A basic implementation of the actual codec was submitted and accepted/applied into FFmpeg SVN. Speech codecs work at ultra-low bitrates (~10kbps and lower) and suffer from obvious encoding artifacts, leading to “robotic” output sounds. Also, depending on the source (imaging a phone conversation in a mall), samples often have considerable levels of background noise. These types of artifacts are common to all speech codecs, and there are a variety of postfilters meant to reduce their effects. In fact, most speech codecs use the exact same filters. Imagine the smile on a developer’s face if a common proprietary postfilter can be implemented by calling no more than 3-4 already-implemented functions (as was the case with QCELP, another speech codec).

This was almost the case with WMAVoice, with one exception. This was the first time we saw an implementation of a Wiener filter. The purpose of the filter is noise reduction. Clearly, if noisy signal = signal + noise, then signal = noisy signal – noise. Sounds simple, right? The math is actually a little complex, but fortunately this is quite well-documented in the scientific literature of signal processing. The idea is that noise has lower signal strength than the intended signal. By increasing the contrast between the strength of these two, you decrease noise and thus enhance perception of the signal itself.

Here’s what the filter does:

• Take FFT (“frequency distribution”) of the LPCs (“time-independent representation of signal”);
• Calculate a power spectrum of these, which is basically a representation of the strongest power/frequency pairs versus the weakest ones, along with the desired level/strength of noise subtraction, as quasi-coefficients;
• turn these into actual denoising filter coefficients using a Hilbert/Laplace transform;
• apply these to the FFT of the “noisy” output of the speech synthesis filter.

The resulting patch was applied to SVN trunk last week. Thanks to Alex (hm, old…) and Vitor (hm, no blog…) for helping me understand! Time for something new, I guess…

“Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.”

According to Michael Lewis, Shane Battier is the unmeasurable glue that makes the teams he plays on better (and knowing squat about basketball I’ll take his word for it – but I can think of many examples of such players in other sports). And so goes the dilema for anyone in management, whether sports, software development, or any other. There are certain teammates that defy statistical measurement, other than wins (in the case of sports teams), but that none-the-less these people indisputably make the team better (ie more likely to win, or create a great product, deliver a great service, etc).

In the end success, at least the elements the team can control, comes down to the individuals – each beautiful unique snowflake – what makes them tick, how they can contribute, how they work together as a group, etc. Unfortunately most large organisations that I’ve seen (both for- and non-profit) treat employees and/or volunteers as interchangeable cogs in a big machine, recruited against some cookie cutter arbitrary job spec, and measured every year against equally arbitrary and abstract performance criteria. Re-org’d, re-shuffled, and re-assigned at random intervals.

Most smart managers of high performing teams subvert, either directly or indirectly, consciously or subconsciously, the status quo and find smart people by any means possible, help them find them interesting & challenging things to do (unlocking the third drive), and build a structure for them to contribute, grow, and eventually leave. Smart companies treat people as individuals from the start – Zappos and Netflix come to mind, also Best Buy as a ROWE.

While there are always anomalies, teams ultimately dissipate over time – high retention rate could equally be a sign of stagnation rather than perfect team alignment and assignment. Your teams performance in 2+ years time will be defined by this year’s recruiting class – if you can keep them that long (aparently 20-somethings switch jobs every 18 months)

Who says management is boring?

The Travel Committee received 61 sponsorship requests (13 more than the last year). The information has been cross-checked (speakers, GSoC students and mentors, travel costs, arrival dates, etc.) and now we are working on the accommodation costs.

Statitics

7	Females
54	Males
18	Speakers
11	Google Summer of Code students
6	Google Summer of Code mentors
39	Members of GNOME Foundation (4 GSoC students)
7	Requested only accommodation
5	Requested only travel fare

In total, we were requested US$49,578.- for travel fares. However, we will not sponsor the train from Amsterdam (Schiphol) to Den Haag because it costs €7,60 (one-way) and we think it is an affordable amount of money. Hence, we can save €15,2 per every travel request (~US$1,100.-), which might help us to sponsor more people.

Having that in consideration plus better airfares we were able to find, we would need US$41,738.- instead of US$49,578.-

On the other hand, we would need around 28 double rooms. However, the accommodation costs this year are higher than the costs when the bid was presented. It would not be a big deal for 1 or 2 people, but it is different when you are booking for 55 people (5/6 nights each).

Every euro/dollar counts.

There was created a small entry for Plymouth theming in fedora-art.org.

I’ve seen some pretty nice Plymouth themes around from independent artists. Guys please share your work through OpenDesktop platform and help improving the notoriety of our brand, not to mention in providing more work for Plymouth which is a very fine piece of FOSS Engineering from our sponsor Red Hat.

Our user base will appreciate it.