As the tournament progresses I will update the master bracket for my program and brackets will be scored and ranked.

The deadline has been updated for the bracket pool — you need to get your brackets in to me by 20:00 UTC on Tuesday, March 13. (That’s tomorrow!)

• your FAS account name
• your bracket

You can send me your bracket in any readable format. Make sure you pick winners for the first four play-in games this week.

Brackets must be sent by 20:00 UTC on Tuesday, March 13 (one hour before the first play-in game).

I’ll score and rank brackets after each night of games and post them on my Fedora People space.

Want to take part but don’t have the time/knowledge to pick 67 games? Try the bracket randomizer (which you can also use to fill out your bracket even if you don’t want randomness).

Edit: I can’t read dates and times apparently. Brackets are due this Tuesday.

What changed?

• Removed the Fedora Talk number (long overdue).
• Removed fill-in-the-blank templates and added code to generate the SVG dynamically in Python. (This now lets us support any given business card size, with any given margin for professional printing.)
• Changed the fonts to Cantarell and Comfortaa.
• Made the business card generation modular so that you can create a non-Fedora business card with the same code that makes dynamic sizes and conversion to CMYK and PDF somewhat easier than doing it from scratch. (Feature request by Mel Chua, who told me she will write a Beefy Miracle module to test the new modularization support.)
• Made palette-based RGB to CMYK conversion actually sane.
• Various fixes.

Okay, so 1 visible change. I lied :)

What’s next?

• Potentially moving things around on the Fedora card layout
• Possibly renaming fedora-business-cards to something more generic due to its modularization
• Actually making a new release so that people stop accidentally printing Fedora Talk information on their cards

I’ll be driving this evening and flying tomorrow morning but you can easily catch me in between. If I’m not on IRC as ianweller, send me an email at phone@ianweller.org.

If you’ve got a spare 15 minutes or so today, please do the following:

• Open up the pages for this year’s FUDCon booklet
• Find errors and mention them on the wiki talk page
• Put in your FAS username in the “copyedit done” row in in the status table on the wiki page

Please especially look for:

• Misspelled words
• Broken links
• Incorrect page numbers or references to page numbers
• Incorrect information
• Use of straight quotes instead of curly quotes
• Ian finally losing it and filling an entire page with nothing but the word “shit”

Thanks! You’re all life savers, whether you know it or not!

Apart from my day-to-day stuff at Red Hat (making sure servers don’t catch fire, cleaning out spam traps, the like), I’m going to be working on a couple of projects over winter break.

FUDCon Blacksburg Booklet

Here’s the booklet pages from Tempe last year. We’re doing the same thing this year. It’s pretty much that simple.

What needs to be done:

• Map needs rendered. I’m going to try to use mapnik instead of osmarender this year because mapnik looks a gazillion times better.
• Recreate the schedule pages, possibly expanding the section to three pages (and moving the map into 1 page since we just don’t have that many things to label).
• Find a bunch of local vendors close to campus, their contact information and when they’re open.
• Figure out deets on a hack room and some other details that should go in the booklet.

The more things above that get done by volunteers, the less I have to do, and the more likely this booklet will be awesome. So please help if you’re bored! :)

fonts.fedoraproject.org

I have a new pet project, and hopefully something will come out of it this time.

There are a lot of freely-usable fonts in Fedora that you can install with yum/PackageKit. But the problem is, it’s very difficult to figure out what the fonts look like without installing them all and trying them out. You can’t easily tell what fonts have serifs, have support for the language you’re trying to write in, or actually looks good.

fonts.fedoraproject.org is a proposed website that does the following:

• Searches the yum repositories for a list of packages that provide font(*).
• From that list, determine which packages have TTF or OTF files.
• For each package, if the package is not cached, download the package and extract the fonts.
• Write web frontend to put it all together, using @font-face technologies. The frontend would be static HTML that is rendered once nightly if there are updates.

I’ve discussed the idea above with a few folks in Infrastructure and it seems to have fallen on good ears, so I’ll be continuing on with this project when I’ve got some spare time over winter break. If you’ve got questions or just want to discuss fonts.fp.o, shoot me a message on IRC, since I’d love to get new ideas or figure things out that I haven’t quite figured out yet :)

Oh, and also:

If you have any to offload, shoot me an email through the usual channels.

Because Max is in the van.

That is all.

If you’ve had an issue with Fedora Infrastructure or watched #fedora-admin and #fedora-noc during outages over the last year, you’ve probably seen Ricky on IRC; he has provided a major chunk of his time to the Infrastructure project.

You can read the interview with Ricky on our wiki.

As part of the scholarship, Ricky will receive $2,000 USD per year for the remainder of his college education (up to four years), as well as travel to the annual FUDCon in his region during those years.

I want to also thank the selection committee for this year’s scholarship, especially with me sometimes being last-minute and forgetful of actually getting things done half the time. :)