If you are planning on attending Kohacon10 in Wellington later this year, please go to http://kohacon.appspot.com/2010/registration/ to register.
Registration is free but we do need to know numbers. If you wish to donate to help with running costs there is a paypal button as well. Space is limited so please register only if you are coming.
So after the great article by Eric Hellman on his blog about the copyright to Koha code I decided to learn about subtree merging so I could combine the old koha repo, with the new one. That way instead of having the stats broken into 2 different ones, pre 2000 and post 2000, I can generate stats for the whole of the history of Koha.
Github has a great tutorial that I’m not going to repeat here. But if you follow it, you will end up with a repository that combines as many other repositories as you need.
So here’s the stats report. Some interesting things:
So whatever might be happening elsewhere, main trunk development of Koha is as strong as ever. Tis good to see.
I had a great week last week at LCA2010, apparently there were about 650 attendees … which makes it one of the larger conferences I have attended.
Some of the presentation highlights for me
And equally as good were all the social (organised and unorganised) parts around the edges. I got to catch up with some friends, and make quite a few new ones.
Ok, bringing it back to Koha, I mentioned Mark Osborne before, he is the deputy principal at Albany Senior High School, and one of the best advocates for Free Software and Koha you are likely to meet. His school is Free and Open Source Software end to end, linux on the servers, linux on the desktops, Koha, Moodle, Mahara, Inkscape .. the list goes on an on. One of the more memorable quotes of the conference and one that resonates hugely with me was in his lightning talk. In New Zealand Microsoft and the Ministry of Education have a deal locked up that provides Microsoft software free of cost to schools (not free of cost to taxpayers of course), so Albany could have done the easy thing and just taken this, but instead they chose to empower their students.
Although there was Gratis we chose Libre
Mark actually spoke before me on Tuesday at the education Mini-conf, he did such a good job I was actually rewriting my talk as he spoke to take out all the points he covered.
I also bumped into the fantastic people from Technology Wise in Tauranga. They have installed Koha in a couple of schools and working on getting it into more in the Bay of Plenty area. Smart people, passionate about what they do. I am sure we will be talking much more in the future.
As Jo mentioned in her great blog post, I also got to spend some time with Bob Birchall of Calyx. We had some good talks and formulated some good ideas for the future.
There was also quite a bit of interest in Koha from attendees, and I learnt quite a few little tips that can be useful for us. I really do think 2010 is going to be the best Koha year yet.
And in the final (maybe) piece of Koha news today. I have just been voted in as the Release Manager for the 3.4 release of Koha. The next general meeting will include the voting for the other positions, such as Translation Manager, QA Manager, Bug wrangler etc.
I will be staying on as Translation Manager until a new one is elected and we hand over, and for the remainder of the 3.2 release (alpha due any day now) Galen is the release manager still.
I’m honoured that the community has placed this much faith in me, and I know I have a huge act to follow after Galen. It has been almost 8 years since I was last Koha release manager … there have been 83 new people who have committed to the Koha code base in that time, and a much larger pool of active developers. I will do my best to remain open in communication and to listen to all opinions. My proposal for 3.4 can be read here, it is of course not set in stone.
Some big news in the Koha world today, as well as the fantastic news that Biblibre and Bywater are partnering to offer services in the US comes the news that PTFS have acquired Liblime.
Over the last year PTFS has grown into a participating and valued member of the Koha community. Its developers are active on irc, the mailing lists, bugs.koha.org and the koha wiki. Patches are regularly sent from PTFS for bugfixes and new features. The fact that PTFS is an active member of the community leads me to treat the news of its acquisition of Liblime with great optimism.
I am hopeful that this will mean that previously unreleased code will be released and that the community can work together advancing Koha for the benefit of all. This quote from the press release
PTFS has supported ILS solutions for 15 years and is committed to resolving community differences and advancing Koha open source library technology
leads me to believe that PTFS understand that the way forward is to be part of the community, with all the benefits that brings.
Congratulations to PTFS and I look forward to it’s continued and increasing participation in the growth of Koha.
Some great news today, that ByWater Solutions and BibLibre have partnered to offer services to Libraries in the US. BibLibre is a long time member of the Koha community with a long track record of full, open and honest participation. I have known Paul for over 9 years now, and the other owners of BibLibre for nearly that long also. Not only have they grown into respected and trusted members of the Koha community, I am proud to call them my friends too.
ByWater, while a relative newcomer, includes within its ranks Nicole Engard, Koha documentation manager and champion of openness and freedom. Added to that, ByWater has already proven to be an asset to the community with Brendan and Nate active in all spheres of Koha development.
I am confident this partnership can only bring good things for Koha, and offer my congratulations to BibLibre and ByWater solutions.
Plain old CGI
Authentication successful
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Koha circulation benchmarking utility
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Benchmarking with 200 occurences of each operation and 10 concurrent sessions
Load testing staff client dashboard page 127347ms 1.57051206545894 pages/sec
Load testing catalog detail page 131230ms 1.52404175874419 biblios/sec
Load testing patron detail page 128608ms 1.55511321224185 borrowers/sec
Load testing circulation transaction (checkouts) 132053ms 1.51454340302757 checkouts/sec
Load testing circulation transaction (checkins) 132129ms 1.51367224454889 checkins/sec
Load testing all transactions at once 374410ms 2.67086883363158 operations/sec
mod_perl
Authentication successful
--------------
Koha circulation benchmarking utility
--------------
Benchmarking with 200 occurences of each operation and 10 concurrent sessions
Load testing staff client dashboard page 10578ms 18.9071658158442 pages/sec
Load testing catalog detail page 1450ms 137.931034482759 biblios/sec
Load testing patron detail page 10318ms 19.3836014731537 borrowers/sec
Load testing circulation transaction (checkouts) 16046ms 12.4641655241182 checkouts/sec
Load testing circulation transaction (checkins) 11541ms 17.3295208387488 checkins/sec
Load testing all transactions at once 38375ms 26.0586319218241 operations/sec
Circulation at least seems fine under mod_perl, I will do more testing but with a 1000% speed increase, this is definitely where we want to spend some quality testing time.
Apologies for the lack of blog posts, we haven’t even got around to doing a post about christmas yet. I think we are still in the post holidays haze, trying to get back into real life again.
I have a busy January and February coming up, with lots of Koha work to do, plus Linux Conf Australia, and Baacamp to attend. Should be fun and educational. Linuxconf.au is in Wellington this year, so will be home in the evening to help Laurel out with the kids.
Kahurangi starts at Kindergarten next week, which will be interesting, hopefully he settles in nicely. It is a really nice Kindergarten, brand new with great teachers so I think he will be fine. Te Po Atarau has 2 bottom teeth with more on the way so he is being a bit of a cranky pants, but apart from that he is mostly good.
We didn’t take many photos at all over the xmas break, so we are counting on some good ones from Laurels dad and brothers.
Well that’s about it from here for now, stay tuned for some good news about Koha in this part of the world in the near future. *Sneak Preview – Another Public library system is migrating to Koha in NZ*
Owen has done a fantastic blog post about the final run on Koha 3.2. This bit really caught my eye, and sums up my feelings also.
This is what working on an open-source project is all about: contributing our work to the project to make the best software we can. And the best thing about it is it�s a lot of fun
So we now have a venue (The Wellington Townhall) and we have dates:
October 25 – November 2 2010
The conference has a website http://kohacon.appspot.com/ which is pretty sparse at the moment but will be filled with more information as we get it.
If you blog, use twitter, identica or flickr … please use the #kohacon10 hashtag to tag you posts/pictures/tweets.
And as always any help offered, or suggestions gratefully received.
Kōrerorero 