News and Announcements

June 15, 2005 - May Newletter

Newsletter     English     (available in pdf)

May Newsletter
 
Update from BSD Certification Group
In the News
Upcoming Events
Web Stats
Rapid Prototyping with phpESP
May 13th, 2005 BOF at BSDCan 2005
Requests for Help
 
Welcome to this edition of the BSD Certification newsletter. While it was a quiet month on the mailing list, it was a very busy month for many of the Group members as they attended conferences, were interviewed and continued to work with the translation, website and survey teams.
 
 
Update from BSD Certification Group
 
The English version of the Task Analysis Survey has ended and the Group has started their analysis. Once all the surveys are complete, the random drawing will take place and the winners will be contacted via the email address they provided. Look for the published analysis of the surveys sometime in July.
 
We've received several well written white papers and offers to write others. We're a bit swamped with analyzing the survey results and attending events, but the Editor should be able to have these published around the end of June.
 
Those of you who have offered to assist with curricula, the Curricula Subcommittee should be contacting you around late July.
 
An internationalized website is in the works, as well as a revamp of the site itself to allow for more content. Upcoming changes to the website will also include additional mirror sites and increased DNS coverage. Look for an announcement in the next month or so as we bring additional servers online. If you would like to sponsor a mirror, and have adequate bandwidth and server resources, send a note to the BSDCert email list.
 
The discussion mailing list currently has 724 subscribers and the announce mailing list has 53.
 
The roadmap is finally coming! We're aiming for July 15th to publish a roadmap containing details regarding the certification and dates of projected milestones.
 
In the News
 
The chair of the BSD Certification Group was interviewed by Luiz Gustavo of OpenIT. The original interview was published in Brazilian Portuguese and is available here. Luiz also provided an English translation which is available here.
 
Jan Stedehouder published an article regarding BSD Certification in the Dutch Open Source Software magazine Livre. Jan's article, in Dutch, starts on page 33 of Livre 12 or the June 2005 edition which is freely available for download at the Livre site. An English version of his article which is available for download here.
 
 
Upcoming Events
 
Luiz Gustavo of the BSD Certification Group attended FISL, a major Open Source software event in Brazil. He handed out brochures and will provide an update in the next edition of the newsletter. Luiz also provided a Brazilian Portuguese translation of the brochure which is available for download here.
 
 
Dru Lavigne will be presenting a talk on BSD Certification on June 17 at meetBSD. The URLs to the paper and slides will be announced once they are available. We'll report on how the talk went in the next edition of the Newsletter.
 
The BSD Certification Group will also receive exposure at this year's Linuxtag in Germany. Alex Gruner, who will be manning the FreeBSD booth, will be handing out brochures.
 
Again, a big thanks to Chad Stewart of Balius who created the original brochure template and donated it for BSD Certification.
 
 
Web Stats
 
Here are the website statistics up to May 29th.
 
In May we had 6375 different visitors, which counted 67913 website hits and 856219 Kbytes transfered. There was an average of 94 hits per hour with a maximum hits per hour of 796 which was right after this post to the public mailing list.
 
Top 10 viewed web pages were:
 
1 67.59% /phpESP/public/survey.php
2 3.15% /
3 1.66% /surveys/BSDCertSurvey01_en.html
4 1.32% /cert.htm
5 1.20% /media.htm
6 0.83% /resources.htm
7 0.82% /surveys/BSDCertSurvey01_zh-cn.html
8 0.77% /about.htm
9 0.21% /goals.htm
10 0.41% /faq.htm
 
Top 10 Referrers have changed from the last month.
 
1 0.32% http://bsdzine.org/
2 0.30% http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2005/05/05/april.html
3 0.25% http://www.bsdzine.org/
4 0.23% http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/
5 0.17% http://www.freebsdbrasil.com.br/
6 0.15% http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm
7 0.15% http://undeadly.org/
8 0.14% http://bsd.slashdot.org/
9 0.11% http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/
10 0.11% http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/
 
 
 
Top 10 countries which visited us in May :
 
1 35.64% Unresolved/Unknown
2 15.95% Network
3 9.45% Poland
4 8.98% US Commercial
5 7.39% Brazil
6 5.05% Canada
7 2.98% Germany
8 1.22% Netherlands
8 1.07% Sweden
10 1.03% Australia
 
 
Rapid Prototyping with phpESP
 
Jim Brown has put together a series of tutorials on using phpESP1.
 
The BSD Certification Group survey was based on the PHP Easy Survey Package2, better known as phpESP (www.phpesp.org). One issue that came up with the package was the lack of scripting capability for rapidly creating and modifying surveys. By studying the way phpESP created and stored data used in surveys, Jim Brown was able to use some Perl and SQL to create a script
to rapidly create phpESP surveys. It worked so well that each language translation of the survey was created using the rapid scripting method.
 
Main Description:
http://sixshooter.v6.thrupoint.net/phpESP_proto/README.txt
 
Perl script:
http://sixshooter.v6.thrupoint.net/phpESP_proto/phpespmod.pl.txt
 
Modified mysql_populate.sql script:
http://sixshooter.v6.thrupoint.net/phpESP_proto/mysql_populate.sql.txt
 
Sample input file:
http://sixshooter.v6.thrupoint.net/phpESP_proto/input.txt
 
Sample SQL output:
http://sixshooter.v6.thrupoint.net/phpESP_proto/sql.out.txt
 
 
May 13th, 2005 BOF at BSDCan 2005
 
Several members of the BSD Certification Group attended BSDCan 2005 and were present for a Birds of a Feather session on BSD Certification. For those who missed the event, an audio recording of the BOF is available in ogg format via bittorrent. Note that the ogg is 29.3 MB in size.
 
You'll need a bittorrent client in order to download this file. If you don't have one, try ctorrent which is available for BSD, Linux and MacOS; FreeBSD and NetBSD also provide a package. Once it's installed, click here, save to disk and then issue the command
ctorrent bsdcertificationtalk.ogg.torrent
 
 
 
Requests for Help
 
Once the translated surveys are closed, we will need help on translating the comments back into English so they can be analyzed and incorporated into the results. Look for an announcement soon regarding survey comment translation. We're working out the details about how to get this done efficiently.
 
 
We are still in urgent need of survey translation to Japanese. If you can help please contact Patrick Tracanelli (eskffa AT freebsdbrasil DOT com) or Jim Brown (jpb AT sixshooter.v6.thrupoint DOT net). Also, any hints on good media outlets to help publicize the BSD Certification efforts are much appreciated.
1 Open Source PHP scripts to let non-technical users create and administer surveys
2 Additional phpESP references: phpESP - php Easy Survey Package




























































































































































































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