Ric Wheeler is the File System Group Manager at Red Hat, and Jeremy Allison caught up with him at LinuxCon in Sao Paulo, Brazil earlier this month. Ric tells Jeremy how he got into file system development as a grad student, then how he progressed into building storage arrays, eventually becoming a Linux advocate. From there, Jeremy and Ric talk about the direction that Linux is headed and the future of desktop computing. At the very end of the video, you can even hear about Ric’s brush with Hollywood!

Thanks to Sergio Victorino for operating the camera.

By Ellen Ko, Open Source Team

The Wave in a Box project is shaping up well and we’re now posting regular progress reports to the group forum (the most recent is here). We’ve also created a list of starter projects, easy tasks for developers to get started contributing to the codebase. You can chat with some of the Wave engineers at the upcoming online office hours (in Google Wave). The next one is on Monday (Tuesday down under) – details are in the forum.

To bring the developer community together we are hosting a Wave Protocol Summit in San Francisco, November 2010. Through the summit we aim to grow the Wave developer community, share technical knowledge, and discuss the future of Wave technology and its community. The summit will be targeted towards technical people interested in using, contributing to, or building on Wave technology. Content will include:

• technical talks on specific aspects of Wave technology,
• problem solving around open technical issues,
• discussions about project organisation and governance, and
• group coding sessions (fun!).

The summit will be three days of talks and discussion (November 8 – 10) followed by two days of coding (November 11 – 12) on Wave in a Box and federation. We’re still working out the detailed schedule, so stay tuned to the forums for further details (and give your feedback).

If you would like to join us, you can request a seat (due to capacity constraints, we’ll confirm your seat in the coming weeks). To help improve the summit, please also suggest or request session content of particular interest to you.

In the meantime, see you on the forums!

Posted by Alex North, Google Wave team.

The following is from Brandon Walsh of Robertson+WalshDesign. A new SketchUp Pro user, Brandon provides some outstanding documents, all created in LayOut, showing the power of the software and the advantage it gives him due to its seamless integration with SketchUp.

I started working with Aaron Gasper and Andrew Kroh; they were the ones who encouraged me to work entirely in SketchUp Pro. We started work with LayOut on July 5th (right after the holiday) and by July 23rd we were fine-tuning the 95% set for permit. Within one month, we learned how to create a construction model in SketchUp (not just a loose design model,) learned LayOut completely, and printed the permit set. It was approved in September.

SketchUp Pro has proven to be very fast, effective, and frankly a better program when it comes to both designing and documenting projects – and we’ve figured out this program in less than a few weeks. We’re going to throw CAD out the door! The process of labeling and dimensioning in LayOut was far superior to CAD; was easier to see and faster to complete for us. There’s no way we’ll be picking up any of the typical CAD software again any time soon – we’ll be using SketchUp Pro. Any engineers we work with will receive exports right from our SketchUp model. It works beautifully.

Our documents have led to requests from contractors to do 3D imaging of projects they’re working on. Being able to see things in 3D helps clients understand interior spaces, which in turn helps them make decisions so things can move forward.

SketchUp Pro is going to help grow our business significantly: On our next project, we’ll be creating a model, turning it into drawings, and setting up a “construction site laptop” that everyone can reference during construction. We can do things faster, communicate ideas more easily, create a better construction drawing set, and complete our projects more efficiently by referencing the model directly. Contractors will be able to navigate the model easily; we’ll create saved views that correspond to what they’ll need. Clicking on the scene tabs is all they’ll have to do to get the relevant information. If I’m not mistaken, this is a form of Building Information Modeling – having the model on a laptop on site is going to be fantastic.

Thanks for your enthusiasm, Brandon. Congratulations on some really amazing work in LayOut.

Brandon Feltman, SketchUp Sales Team