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Blogs on a Plane

Monday, Nov 16th, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

This American Airlines flight offers wifi, so I paid $12.95 to get it. Wince, I know, but the novelty! And really not so bad to keep me entertained during the flight. IRC on a plane, w00t! It’s actually pretty decent, my ssh sessions have been quite zippy. It’ll be nice when wifi on flights becomes more common… power outlets would be nice too, the mini9 will last through this flight but it wouldn’t make it on a trip to California.

I’m on my way to Dallas for the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Lucid Lynx. This will be my first UDS, and I’m very happy that it’s taking place in a city I’ve never been to and it’s for a Long Term Service (LTS) release. Should be a fun and hopefully very productive week, and I’m really looking forward to meeting a lot of people I’ve only worked with online so far and there should be some really great sessions on projects I’ve been putting a lot of work into these past few months.

Otherwise… between trips life has been pretty low-key lately. Doing a lot of Ubuntu project work, reading, working, zoning out in front of the TV (especially when I had a bit of a cold late last week and into the weekend, thankfully feeling much better today). I have a flight early on Saturday morning out of Dallas and I’ll be meeting MJ at the Philadelphia airport (he’s flying in the same morning!) so we can spend Thanksgiving week together, hooray :)

I could have sworn I had more to say, how on earth did I used to blog so often when I my life was less exciting than it is now?

Filed under: life, travel

Holiday Card Call!

Sunday, Nov 15th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Every year I try to send out a big ole batch of wintertime holiday cards to friends and acquaintances online. Reading this? That means you! Even if you’re outside the United States, I always end up sending at least a half dozen overseas, and that’s always fun :)

Drop me an email with your address if you’d like one: lyz@princessleia.com (Please put “Holiday Card” in the subject so I can filter it appropriately).

Typical disclaimer: No, I’m not a Christian even though I celebrate “Christmas” with trees and pretty lights, and the cards will non-religious in theme (they’ll probably be pink, or have penguins, or both…).

Filed under: holiday cards

“Issues of Women in Open Source” for Ubuntu Open Week, and “Why?”

Thursday, Nov 12th, 2009 by pleia2 | 18 Comments

Last week I did a presentation for Ubuntu Open Week on the Ubuntu Women Project covering some of the “Issues” that are involved in why many women feel discouraged within the community. Full logs of the session can be found here. Mackenzie Morgan followed up my session with one describing what the Ubuntu Women project is actually doing to address these concerns, full logs of her session are here.

Truly Mackenzie’s session was much more valuable than mine, and I’d like to do away with mine entirely when more people understand that there are challenges facing women who join F/OSS communities. Unfortunately each time we have one of these sessions we spend a considerable amount of time justifying the project to folks – why we exist and why we are so targeted toward women (rather than other groups who are poorly represented).

The sessions went well, the questions were good and engaging, and once again it’s nice to have such a supportive community.

After the session I was asked a question privately which seemed simple but really got me thinking:

“Why are you involved with promoting Women in F/OSS, did these groups actually help you? How?”

So to simply answer the second question first – yes, they absolutely helped me, I would never have made it this far without groups like Ubuntu Women and LinuxChix.

How did they help? I’ve wanted to write a long “How Women in F/OSS groups helped me” essay for quite some time now, but I never quite get around to it, so here’s the rough version:

When I started using Linux back in 2002 it was with significant help of my boyfriend at the time. I had a number of local friends who were supportive of my involvement, but I always felt like I was at least 20 steps behind all my friends when learning things, was too timid to ask questions in any public forums, and even with supportive friends at the local LUG meeting, I always felt a bit uncomfortable as one of the only women.

My boyfriend discovered LinuxChix in late 2002 and pointed me in that direction – suddenly I wasn’t alone anymore! In 2003 I worked with Samantha Ollinger to launch the Philadelphia chapter of LinuxChix so I could meet up with more local women using Linux. The local chapter and international LinuxChix lists provided a comfortable environment where we should share stories of success and frustration, get advice from each other on many issues, and simply geek out with other women who shared our interests. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have loads of fun with my male geek friends, but there is something vital to me about being able to commune with other women. Feeling less alone as a women in F/OSS made a huge difference for me.

In 2006 I got involved with Ubuntu Women, which has been the only specifically geared group I’ve been a part of for encouraging women within a project. It’s been an important “safe place” for me to discuss things I encounter within the project, bounce ideas off of others, answer questions that folks ask about expanding involvement of women in their projects. What I’ve gained from this project through the support of peers is the confidence to be heavily involved in the Ubuntu community. I’ve made friends through the project who I know I can drop a note to when feeling frustrated and need a sanity check (am I overreacting to be offended by $this? how should I confront $situation without upsetting others?).

So now that I’m full of confidence and successful in F/OSS, why am I still so involved? Why do I choose to spend my time with this?

I’m involved because I feel that having as many people involved with Ubuntu as possible is important and I have the expertise to focus on women as a group to recruit from.

I’m involved because it still helps me, and encouraging and supporting others is very rewarding for me.

I’m involved because my success is not a solitary story, there are several women involved with the Ubuntu community who will state that they’ve been helped by the project or those involved in the project who have learned lessons through involvement and have striven to be more welcoming and encouraging to women in their projects and LoCo teams.

I’m involved because I’ve watched women who felt they couldn’t contribute, who people assumed were “just at an event because they’re someone’s mother/sister/girlfriend” blossom into active members of their LoCo teams because someone spoke to them to find out their interests and talents and get them involved.

I am hopeful that lessons learned within the Ubuntu Women Project regarding support and encouragement will continue become more and more a part of the Ubuntu community. Whether we’re focusing on recruiting more women, more people in our local communities, educators, our grandparents or anyone else, I feel support and encouragement for new contributors of all kinds to the project will remain important to the project and community.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Trip to New York for Ubuntu Release Event in Waterloo

Thursday, Nov 12th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

This past weekend I drove up to Waterloo, New York with my friend Crissi to attend the New York Team‘s Ubuntu Release Event.

We left Pennsylvania around 10AM on Saturday and headed out to NY, stopped at Friendly’s in Scraton for lunch and arrived in Seneca Falls, NY around 4PM. The weather driving up was great and the drive itself was an easy one. Upon arrival at the Hotel Clarence (named after the Angel from It’s a Wonderful Life since, as wikipedia reports: “Seneca Falls, New York claims that when Frank Capra visited their town in 1945, he was inspired to model Bedford Falls after it. “) we were greeted by a friendly staff who went out of their way to make us feel welcome – and not just in the traditional way that small, local hotels do! The concierge had been following me on Twitter (taken a cue from the email address I registered with, perhaps?) and the hotel receipt said “VIP – Envoy from Alderaan” – and boy did we feel VIP! The room was on the top floor and gorgeous, and that evening when some of the New York LoCo guys came out they brought out some chairs so we could meet up together in the ballroom that they weren’t using that night.


Meeting up with some of the New York guys Saturday night was fun, first to show up was Charles Profitt, who I’ve worked with on a couple projects within Ubuntu and most recently have been working with on the Ubuntu Community Learning Project. He wrote a charming (and funny!) post about meeting here. He couldn’t make it to the event the following day, so I took the opportunity to pick his brain about the presentations he’s done to less technical crowds (mostly educational groups). He had some really great points about the costs of hardware and software through the years, and was able to point me toward slides for a couple presentations he’s done on the subject. I was also able to finally meet New York Team Leader Jeremy Austin-Bardo who was a primary organizer of the weekend’s events. Also joining us that evening was my fellow presenter for the following day, Donald (Ducky) Newel who’d be doing an introduction to FOSS, so it was great to spend the time collaborating and seeing how my FOSS Involvement talk would fit in with his.

Going back to Seneca Falls was quite an experience for me. I didn’t really manage to stay in touch with anyone from when I lived there 9 years ago, so there wasn’t any visiting, but it was interesting to walk through the old town again. I was able to show Crissi where I used to work, where I used to live, and tell a bunch of stories I now fear were dreadfully boring from when I lived there (bless her for putting up with me, and the chilly weather!). My life then was quite different than it is now, I think going back allowed me to lay some feelings I’d been harboring about my time there to rest and properly say goodbye to that little town. Add in the super comfortable bed that evening and I slept like the dead that Saturday night!

Sunday morning we partook in the complementary breakfast there at the hotel and hung out in the hotel room all morning. We checked out around noon and headed over to the Holiday Inn Waterloo. After setting up Donald did his introductory talk, where he covered what F/OSS is and reviewed a number of applications that ship with default Ubuntu.

I then did a short presentation which I called “Who Uses and Contributes to Open Source Projects (And how you can too!)” which I wrote to both address the prevalence of F/OSS in production use in many industries and to explain how development of F/OSS is accomplished and how anyone can seek to get involved, my slides are online here. After the presentations we enjoyed pizza and soda, Crissi helped with demos in the hallway and we all hung around and got to answer questions and chat about Ubuntu! Jeremy has also blogged about the event here: New York State Release Celebration.

Around 5PM Crissi and I piled into the car and drove back to Pennsylvania. We made great time not having to stop and I managed to get home around 10PM. Thanks again to the New York Team for being such wonderful hosts for our stay!

Filed under: events, plug, tech, travel, ubuntu planet

Ubuntu Pennsylvania – Philly Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10) Release Party

Sunday, Nov 1st, 2009 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

Yesterday we held the Philadelphia Karmic Koala 9.10 Release/Halloween Party over at Manayunk Diner in Manayunk. We used this place for the Jaunty release party and once again it turned out to be a great venue, thanks again to Jim Fisher for securing it for us, even if he couldn’t make it out to the event this time around.

Huge thanks to everyone who came out, I had a blash, a few of us even dressed up!

Costumes

And a total of 13 attendees, including one fellow who joined us from the Ubuntu Maryland team since he was in town, and a couple who made the trek over from New Jersey.

More photos: http://gallery.ubuntupennsylvania.org/main.php?g2_itemId=857

We enjoyed lots of chatting about Ubuntu and Karmic, eating french toast and waffles, drinking milkshakes and beer, and indulging in decadent diner desserts.

When I got home last night I ended up taking the plunge on my primary desktop to Xubuntu 9.10 – so far? No issues, a couple “papercut” bugs from Jaunty have been fixed, and in general I’m very happy. Great job Xubuntu crew!

Filed under: events, philadelphia, plug, ubuntu planet

Hershey Park in the Dark and Scary Movie Week

Thursday, Oct 29th, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

On Sunday Stephen and I headed out to Hershey Park for Hershey Park in the Dark. It was fun, but I learned a very important lesson that day: I shouldn’t go on roller coasters if I have a sinus headache, for the first time in my life I got physically ill after a roller coaster and was pretty much down for the count fast-ride-wise after just two coasters. Bummer!

But before my headache and stomach barred me from further coaster fun, I did get to check out their brand new Fahrenheit roller coaster, wow – that was fun.

As the sun went down and knowing I was done with roller coasters, I joined the loads of other amusement park goers in the Halloween spirit and snagged a witch hat that had blinking lights!

As night rolled in, we headed over to the Zoo America portion of the park for some of the animal events they had lined up. One of them was getting to “meet” a bunch of animals, including an opossum! Later there was an indoor event with a “painting skunk” which meant a skunk was put into a pen with a keeper who had treats and was given treats so it would walk through the non-toxic water-based paint over paper on the floor. At least skunks are fluffy and adorable.

…whenever I think of opossums now I can’t help but think of the CAT FOUND! craigslist post that MJ posted to me a while back. Opossums are part Simcoe!

It was around 9PM when we headed out of the park to grab some dinner, I was finally home around midnight.

I didn’t get or carve pumpkins this year for the 3rd year in a row (kind of sad!), but I am celebrating the “Halloween Season” with some pumpkin bread, pumpkin spice eggnog and scary movie nights all week long! Monday was Amityville (original and remake) night, Tuesday was Johnny Depp night (From Hell and 9th Gate), Wednesday was cartoon night (Shaun the Sheep: Little Sheep of Horrors, Corpse Bride and Disney’s Sleepy hollow), tonight was B Movie night (The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, King of the Zombies and Atom Age Vampire). Tomorrow night? Considering Tim Burton night, but maybe I’ll get more creative before tomorrow night rolls around.

Filed under: life

Upcoming Ubuntu Release Parties: Philadelphia, PA and Waterloo, NY!

Wednesday, Oct 21st, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

I’m all geared up for the Karmic release, and luckily my scheduled worked out so that it’s possible to attend two release parties, in two different states!

First is the one at my beloved Ubuntu Pennsylvania Team on Halloween. Karmic! Costumes! Cake! Should be a lot of fun

More information about the event is on the wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/EventsTeam/PhillyKarmicRelease

While speaking of the Pennsylvania Team, it looks like there might be one held in Pittsburgh too.

The second release party is up in Waterloo, New York. It’s about six hours from here, so while out at a conference planning meeting last week I mentioned that I wanted someone to join me and my friend Crissi was interested. So we’ll be driving up the morning of Saturday November 7th, spending a night at Hotel Clarence in Seneca Falls, catching some drinks with some of the NY folks who are in town, then attending their release party on the afternoon of the 8th before driving back to Pennsylvania.

I’ve been wanting to meet the New York folks for a while now, but as an interesting aside I used to live in Seneca Falls. It will be quite the adventure to lurk around the old stomping grounds again and hopefully meet up with some folks I’ve lost contact with (assuming I can get back into contact!).

Filed under: events, plug, travel, ubuntu planet

CPOSC 2009 wrap-up and an interview

Tuesday, Oct 20th, 2009 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

On Saturday I attended the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference 2009 as a table sponsor (for Ubuntu Pennsylvania) and a speaker.

We arrived at CPOSC around 8AM to meet up with Jonathan and Crissi Simpson who had also come up from Philly the evening before, and to finally meet Bret Fledderjohn!


Bret did an amazing job with the table, bringing along a demo machine running Kubuntu, a the tri fold foam board to display various Ubuntu-things on and tweaked slides from the Ubuntu Colorado Team for rotation on a computer at the table (ended up on my mini9) giving information about Ubuntu. I added a few things to the table as well, rounding things off nicely at our table for the day. Other tables looked great too, there were some local Fedora Ambassadors, I was able to have a nice chat with the CEO of Anteil and got to kick back a bit with the Zenoss guys (photographic proof!).

Slides from my talk on Contributing to Open Source can be found here. The talk itself went very well, except for being a bit short partially due to my inability to do the demo I had prepared because I lacked internet access in that room (I did preload some pages, but the actual demo I had was interactive). I was able to answer a number of questions from the audience in the free time I had and after the core of my talk and I was approached directly afterwards by several people discussing more questions and ideas about contributing, my slides should be expanded! And how I could I forget volunteer sysadmining in my slides? That’s one of the things I do! It’s ashame my talk was so late in the day (last time slot), I fear I cut some conversations short due to the need to head back to the table and pack up and then head out.

Afterwards a bunch of us headed out to Appalachian Brewing Company for some after conference chatting, food and beer. Great day, thanks to everyone who helped out at our table, and to all the conference organizers for making it such a success. And also big Thank You to my boyfriend for flying out to San Francisco to support me at my first conference speaking engagement, his support and later constructive criticism of my presentation was awesome :)

I’ve uploaded more photos to the Ubuntu Pennsylvania Gallery (direct link here) and I also put some up on flickr to join all the other cposc tagged photos on flicker.

Unrelated, I discovered this morning that along with Sebastian Kügler, my interview primarily covering my involvement in Ubuntu Women for the Pardus-Linux E-Zine conducted by Hüseyin Sarıgül back in August had been published. If you speak Turkish (or if you’re curious!) you can check it out here.

Filed under: events, plug, ubuntu planet

Ubuntu Code of Conduct v1.1

Tuesday, Oct 20th, 2009 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

First off, Happy 5th Birthday Ubuntu! I first installed Ubuntu on a machine on March 12, 2005. Impressively precise date, huh? That’s because I signed up on ubuntuforums.org the same day.

In an interesting coincidence, this morning I had the pleasure of attending my first Ubuntu Community Council Meeting as a Council Member. And we don’t start small with our new council! The major topic was ratifying revisions to the Ubuntu Code of Conduct, version 1.1. The rationale behind the changes can be found here and the full text of the revised Code of Conduct is here.

So here’s one of your birthday gifts, Ubuntu, a shiny new Code of Conduct!

Ubuntu Code of Conduct v1.1

This Code of Conduct covers our behaviour as members of the Ubuntu Community, in any forum, mailing list, wiki, web site, IRC channel, install-fest, public meeting or private correspondence. Ubuntu governance bodies are ultimately accountable to the Ubuntu Community Council and will arbitrate in any dispute over the conduct of a member of the community.

”Be considerate.” Our work will be used by other people, and we in turn will depend on the work of others. Any decision we take will affect users and colleagues, and we should take those consequences into account when making decisions. Ubuntu has millions of users and thousands of contributors. Even if it’s not obvious at the time, our contributions to Ubuntu will impact the work of others. For example, changes to code, infrastructure, policy, documentation, and translations during a release may negatively impact others’ work.

”Be respectful.” The Ubuntu community and its members treat one another with respect. Everyone can make a valuable contribution to Ubuntu. We may not always agree, but disagreement is no excuse for poor behaviour and poor manners. We might all experience some frustration now and then, but we cannot allow that frustration to turn into a personal attack. It’s important to remember that a community where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a productive one. We expect members of the Ubuntu community to be respectful when dealing with other contributors as well as with people outside the Ubuntu project and with users of Ubuntu.

”Be collaborative.” Collaboration is central to Ubuntu and to the larger free software community. This collaboration involves individuals working with others in teams within Ubuntu, teams working with each other within Ubuntu, and individuals and teams within Ubuntu working with other projects outside. This collaboration reduces redundancy, and improves the quality of our work. Internally and externally, we should always be open to collaboration. Wherever possible, we should work closely with upstream projects and others in the free software community to coordinate our technical, advocacy, documentation, and other work. Our work should be done transparently and we should involve as many interested parties as early as possible. If we decide to take a different approach than others, we will let them know early, document our work and inform others regularly of our progress.

”When we disagree, we consult others.” Disagreements, both social and technical, happen all the time and the Ubuntu community is no exception. It is important that we resolve disagreements and differing views constructively and with the help of the community and community processes. We have the Technical Board, the Community Council, and a series of other governance bodies which help to decide the right course for Ubuntu. There are also several Project Teams and Team Leaders, who may be able to help us figure out the best direction for Ubuntu. When our goals differ dramatically, we encourage the creation of alternative sets of packages, or derivative distributions, using the Ubuntu Package Management framework, so that the community can test new ideas and contribute to the discussion.

”When we are unsure, we ask for help.” Nobody knows everything, and nobody is expected to be perfect in the Ubuntu community. Asking questions avoids many problems down the road, and so questions are encouraged. Those who are asked questions should be responsive and helpful. However, when asking a question, care must be taken to do so in an appropriate forum.

”Step down considerately.” Members of every project come and go and Ubuntu is no different. When somebody leaves or disengages from the project, in whole or in part, we ask that they do so in a way that minimises disruption to the project. This means they should tell people they are leaving and take the proper steps to ensure that others can pick up where they left off.

We pride ourselves on building a productive, happy and agile community that can welcome new ideas in a complex field, and foster collaboration between groups with very different needs, interests and goals. We hold our leaders to an even higher standard, in the Leadership Code of Conduct, and arrange the governance of the community to ensure that issues can be raised with leaders who are engaged, interested and competent to help resolve them.

In the coming days the old CoC will be updated with version 1.1 in all the relevant places on Ubuntu sites.

Filed under: plug, ubuntu planet

Getting ready for CPOSC 2009

Friday, Oct 16th, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

This evening MJ and I will be heading out to Harrisburg to spend the night out there prior to the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference (CPOSC). The Ubuntu Pennsylvania team has a table (eep, I need to do some handout printing!) so if you happen to attend, be sure to drop by and say Hi!

In the 3:40PM time slot I will be speaking on “Contributing to Open Source Projects“:

Want to contribute to an Open Source project, but not sure where to begin?

This talk will seek to answer this question and cover: skills which are valuable to open source projects, how to go about getting involved, considerations to be made when getting involved, some of the expected behavior of contributors and what kinds of benefits can come from involvement.

I’m pretty excited. Hooray for small (~150), local open source conferences!

Filed under: events, plug, ubuntu planet
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