Sandro Mathys

As you may know, there’s pretty many ways to represent a date. For global communication, this might be a problem. Therefore, I ask the Fedora contributor community to react NOW, because I see mis-interpretable dates in the wiki, on the planet, on the mailing lists, on IRC and in other places all the time.

Let me try to explain why this is a problem and how we could solve it.

Problem
Little Endian (DD-MM-YYYY)
For today, you’d write 06.08.2008 in Germany, 06-08-2008 in Denmark and 06/08/2008 in India.
So far, no problem. We should be able to read the date no matter how the three parts are separated.

Middle Endian (MM-DD-YYYY)
This is used mainly in the USA. So, the date would read 08/06/2008.
Unfortunately, most people outside of the USA would read this as if it’s in little endian, i.e. 8th june 2008 – which is wrong and where the problem begins. Particularly, if you think about the wiki being dominated by the middle endian format, but a big share of the contributors coming from places where the little endian format is used (e.g. Europe, South America, India).

In both of these formats, the year can also be written as YY instead of YYYY, so we could also end up with 06/08/08 and 08/06/08 – even more possible confusion!

Big Endian (YYYY-MM-DD)
Of course, there’s also a third writing. Used in places like China, Japan and the Middle East.
The good thing here is, that the year is always 4 numbers long and therefore easy to identify. Even better is, that no-one on the world uses YYYY-DD-MM, meaning that dates starting with the year can’t be misinterpreted.
And there’s more to it: dates in big endian can be easily sorted in chronological order, if leading zeros are used (i.e. 2008-08-06 instead of 2008-8-6).

Solution
That’s also been the thought of the ISO, when they defined the standard ISO 8601. Well, the Wikipedia article about the standard explains it all. It’s pretty simple, but because it gives several options (e.g. YYYYMMDD or YYYY-MM-DD) I’d suggest to declare what to use within the Fedora contributor community.

My recommendations
Exact date: YYYY-MM-DD
Month: YYYY-MM
Year: YYYY
Time: hh:mm or hh:mm:ss or hh:mm:ss.zz
Date and time: YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmZ (or YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm UTC)
Date interval: YYYY-MM-DD/YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmZ/YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmZ
Date list: YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY-MM-DD

Important

• Times are always in 24hrs format (no AM/PM).
• Times are always in UTC (Zulu time).
• T and Z are not substituted. Example: 2008-08-06T13:50Z. While T is read like the single letter, Z is often called Zulu.
• zz are fractions of a second
• Never replace – or : by anything else.
• Never write out the name of a certain month – use it’s number.
• Always use the Gregorian calendar. But I think that’s clear to everyone.
• Use your local date/time formats in communication with non-contributors (e.g. users, press, your parents, …)

Benefits
Except for the benefit of everyone being able to correctly read and understand all dates, it would be possible to automatically link dates in the wiki in YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmZ format to that world clock thingy that is used for most meetings. So the wiki would read e.g. 2008-08-06T14:20Z – and everyone’s just one click away of his local time, without any thinking or confusion. Well, I didn’t check this possibility with Fedora Infrastructur, but it should be easily possible for them since the date/time is perfectly parseable and easy to identify (always looks like *-*-*T*:*Z and has a fixed length for every *).

Conclusion
I hope I’ve been able to explain this in a way that everyone understands the issue and the proposed solution to it. If you have questions, feel free to ask (or read Wikipedia’s entry on the ISO standard).

NOW: Feel free to discuss this in the comments, on the planet, on IRC, anywhere. As long as there’s some effort going on, we’re on a good way.
I’d also ask the Fedora Board to consider this suggestion and maybe give me/all of us feedback on this.

Note: If my information about the date format used in a certain country is wrong, blame my source: Wikipedia.

I ask all attendees of the FAD EMEA 2008 to update the wiki page with their current status. Particularly the first 2 out of these 3 steps are very important to the organization of the event and to everyone trying to arrange cheap traveling. I request that everyone updates his status on the wiki page ASAP (before Monday would be helpful).

1. a) If you can confirm your attendance (now, that the date and the location are fixed), move your name from Possible to Confirmed.
   b) If you can’t attend this event, please remove yourself from the list.*
2. If you drive to Basel or an airport by car and have some free seats available, make sure to add yourself to the car pool. We’re grateful for everyone helping out here as this reduces costs for you and others.
3. Feel free to add more topics you want to discuss to the Business Agenda.

*If you need financial help with your travel expenses, ask Max Spevack if he can help (unfortunately, our budget is very limited). Remember, that Max is currently on vacation and is returning on Wednesday, 2008-08-13.

For all other questions (or if you need some more time to figure out if you’re able to attend), either leave a comment or send me an e-mail.

While we first announced a deadline for everyone to state their preference on date/location, we already made the decision today. Everyone (without exception) voted for November and the votes on the locations were equally spread. It’s been very unlikely that this would change over the next few days until the deadline passed. Therefore, we decided to have the upcoming FAD EMEA 2008 from Friday, 2008-11-14 till Sunday, 2008-11-16 in Basel, Switzerland.

In order for you to arrange your travel as early (= as cheap) as possible, you need the location, the dates and the arrival/departure times. It was our target to fix thos ASAP because of that. You can find the preliminary schedule on the wiki page.

You will notice, that the event takes a little longer than it did last year. This is because we wouldn’t like to see the Sunday “wasted” (i.e. only breakfast and then traveling back already) and because we’d like to add some more leisure time and fun between all the hard work.

Next thing we want to do is look for a good location. If you have an idea, make sure to let me know! Also, we’re still collecting ideas for fringe/fun events. Last but not least, you’re still very welcome to add topics to the business agenda.

Please re-add yourself to the list of attendees if you can join us for the FAD and add a quick note if you need to arrive later/leave earlier. If you can’t come because of the travel expenses, let Max Spevack know and he’ll try to hep you out with our budget. We’ll also try to sponsor the accomodation and the dinner on Saturday evening. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to pay for everything else too.

If you go to Basel by car, make sure to list on the wiki page if you’re able to take some more people with you, where your journey starts and where you could fetch more passengers.

Thank you for your help to make this a great event!

I’ll also try to get this announcement to the mailing list as soon as possible, since I have no access to it right now.

While I didn’t have the time for it, Max wrote a reminder on the “Call for Involvement” for the FAD EMEA 2008. I think he’s said all the important stuff so I’ll just “forward” (i.e. copy & paste) his mail from the ambassadors list to the planet (since non-ambassadors are welcome in participating as well).

As you all know, we are working on getting the logistics of the Fedora Ambassador Day EMEA 2008 finalized.

FAD is meant to be a strategy and planning weekend (including some fun events) for the Ambassadors who want to volunteer to form the core leadership team for Fedora EMEA in 2009.

There are 15 people signed up right now, which I think is a great number.

However, only 13 people have indicated a preference for location, and only 10 people have indicated a preference for the date.

I’d like the people who have signed up for the event, but who have not indicated their preferences for location and/or date, to please do so by Sunday July 27.  Beginning next week, we want to start to make arrangements for lodging, which means that we will have to finalize dates and location.

Thanks!!

Go to the wiki page and get yourself involved! Once this deadline has passed, we’ll look into your opinions and where the attendees are from together with some other things to take into account and then we’ll fix the date and location ASAP in order to allow the people arrange their travel.

Side note: This deadline for involvement applies to the date and the location only. You’re still welcome to help us with ideas for the fun agenda and to add yourself to the list of attendees later on. We’ll set up a deadline for those things when we need to.

The vote on the Fedora 10 release name has begun. Everyone who’s a Fedora contributor (i.e. have signed the CLA and are member of a non-CLA group) is eligible to vote!

The proposals one can vote on are:

• Cambridge
• Famsworth
• Mississippi
• Nile
• Nitrate
• Saltpetre
• Terror
• Water
• Whiskey Run

Personally, I gave the highest vote to Cambridge and I totally can’t understand how “Terror” did make it for a proposal. Fedora Marketing really should get more involved in the choice of proposals, even though it’s meant as a privilege to the developers.

Update
I forgot to add: Voting ends 23:59 28th July 2008 UTC.

I already blogged once about the upcoming FAD EMEA 2008. Since then, the wiki page has evolved quite a bit and a few people listened to my “call for involvement” so far. I already asked for everyone’s involvement in my previous blog post (only shortly), at the last ambassadors EMEA IRC meeting, on the ambassadors mailing list and now I repeat it here (including the planet) again.

There’s that FAD EMEA 2008 upcoming, to which everyone’s invited, with a special focus on EMEA people. Even though “ambassadors” is the A in FAD, any non-ambassador contributor is welcome too! But remember, that we’re mainly talking about ambassador and maybe marketing topics.

So everyone who’s interested in attending, go to the wiki page and add your name to the lsit of attendees. If done so, don’t forget to state your location and date of preference. Also, you’re welcome to add your ideas to the fun agenda. Ideas that don’t fit on the wiki page are welcome too – answer to the thread on the mailing list, send me a private e-mail, answer to this blog post, try to catch me on IRC or Jabber, send me a letter, visit me for a beer or two or a drink….it doesn’t really matter how you let me know of your fantastic ideas as long as you just tell me what you’ve got!

The last FAD EMEA was good for efficient planning of the year 2008, good for establishing new and tighten already established relations, good for team building, good for some fun, good for hacking (some guys even created some new rpms incidentally), good for tasty food, good for just so many reasons! In short: it’s been a great event.

But we’d not be the Fedora ambassadors, if we’d not made it even greater this year. But in order to do so, we need the help of everyone who’s planning to attend the FAD EMEA 2008. So please, answer this call for involvement. Go to the wiki page, add yourself and your opinions and drop me a line or two. Thanks!

The FUDCon Brno 2008 in Brno, CZ has been announced a while ago (previously as being located in Prague, though). But only just yesterday, some basic facts were confirmed, after a short planning meeting on last Tuesday.

So, the facts so far are:

• It will take place from Friday, 2008-09-05 to Sunday, 2008-09-07. Saturday, 2008-09-06 being the most important day, since people will probably travel there/back on Friday/Sunday.
• It will take place at some university in Brno, CZ and we’ll have a hotel near the university which we’re told will not be very expensive.

That’s not much yet, but I think the most important things are fixed: When to travel and where to travel.

Now it’s up to you, add your name to the list of attendees and participate in the weekly planning meetings on Tuesdays, 13:00 UTC in #fedora-meeting on Freenode.

I’ll try to keep you updated with more information if anything of importance happens/changes/gets fixed/…

Update:
Okay, this post should now finally go to planet.fp.o :) In the hurry, I missed to add it to my Fedora category, which is the only one that goes to the planet. Later on, I noticed, that I wrote this as a page instead of a post. And the third problem was, that my feed wasn’t working for no obvious reason, but I was now able to fix it.

In the meantime, Max Spevack did a similar post on this topic.

According to the mirrorlist activity map, there’s quite a bunch of Fedora users all over Japan (mainly Tokyo/Kyoto area I think). That’s quite interesting, because we have no ambassadors in Japan at all. Well, we have hardly contributors there at all.

The wiki shows up 4 contributors when I search for “Japan”. All of those four did not yet migrate their userpage to the new wiki. One of them is involved in the Fedora JP Project, which seems to be out of business now (last news was the release of F8). To me, it seems all 4 guys are inactive. If they’re not, they seem to to translation work which is needed – F9 was translated to Japanese to only 84% according to the translation team’s website.

I also joined #fedora-jp (obsolete) and the newer #fedora-ja, to find no more than 3 users.

I also checked the FedoraEvents page in the wiki: no events in Japan. I also googled around a little, but didn’t really find a Linux/FOSS event in Japan (might be due to my problems with the Japanese language) that has more than 100 attendees. Are there no such events in Japan?

Why are there hardly any contributors from Japan while there’s quite some downloads? What are we doing wrong there? What could we do to get them involved?

At LinuxTag 2008 I was asked if I’d be able to organize the next Fedora Ambassador Day (FAD) in EMEA and if I’d like to do it. Well, I said ‘yes’ to both and so I’m now the responsible ambassador for it.

As you can see on the event’s page, everything’s still to be dated (TBD). I encourage every ambassador (within EMEA) to tell me what they’d like this FAD to look like. Where do you think would be a good place to hold it and why do you think so? What would be a good date for it and why? What tasks do we definately need to do there?

What did you like / not like about the last FAD?

My ideas so far:

• Location: Most probably somewhere near the German-Swiss border, not too far away from the EuroAirport, with useful connections to public transports. Maybe just the same location as last year?
• Date: early December. Someone pointed at, the 1-2 months earlier would be better because it’s just before FOSDEM otherwise. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to have it just after FUDCon Prague 2008. Additionally, the Schengen association agreement is planned to become effective in Switzerland in early November 2008.
• Tasks: plan 2009’s events in EMEA (+ swag), web shops, get the usual overview by country, …?
• Fringe events: have 2 dinners together off work (maybe some local speciality?), do something interesting/for fun on Saturday morning

My next task is to speak with Max Spevack about the budget.

Any comment, idea, help, a.s.o. is very welcome! Leave your message her in my blog, send me an e-mail (red at fp.o) or reach me over IRC (nick’s red_alert).

Not long ago, just before I went to LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin (end of May), I submitted my application for the FHNW’s “Business Information System” Master program. Last Friday, I was invited to a interview with the dean of that program taking place this Tuesday. I went there, being very unsure about my business and English language skills but everything was ok. The interview itself remembered me quite a lot of one for a job application, but that’s just a plus as I’m used to them.

So, during the interview I was told that even though I have no certification/diploma on my skills of the English language, I’m speaking it well enough in order to attend the lessons, which are all given in English. I still hope, I can – as a side-effect – improve my English steadily throughout the studies.

At the end of the interview, I was told that I most probably will get notice about being accepted or not at the end of next week. But since there’s over 30 applicants to check it might take a little longer in the worst case. Therefore, it’s been an even bigger surprise to find a letter from that school mailbox when I came home today!

So, the letter reads: “… We are pleased to inform you that you have been awarded a place on the new Master of Science in Business Information Systems programme, which will start on the 16th September 2008. …”

I’m in! A student again, pretty soon – less than 2 years after receiving my first degree. And I’ll be a student for at least 2.5 years since I’ll join the program in part-time only, leaving me time to work (and earn money) for about 80% (and 100% during term breaks). This also means, that I’ll study on one weekday plus Saturday morning. Plus self study, anyway.

Since I graduated on a program featuring mostly computer science and only a little business economics, I’ll have to fetch up a little. According to the dean I need some more knowledge in “process management”. Therefore, he recommended a book (available in both, English and German) to study before the semester begins. Well, the book has 700 pages – I can only hope I know much of it already or that will be a though task. Oh, I’ll have to take (and pass) an exam on this subject too.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to have the possibility to improve my business skills while not leaving the computer science completely behind. It’s always been one of my passions to learn more. In my eyes, studying’s one of the best ways to learn a lot.

Unfortunately, this will cut of quite a lot of my free time – not that I had too much of it yet. It’s very likely that this will have consequences on my commitment for Fedora, too. We’ll see…