Ubuntu US and Pennsylvania updates

Monday, Sep 7th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Ubuntu US Teams

On August 26th the USTeams Project had a meeting:

Minutes
Logs

Huge thanks to everyone who attended! There were a couple of major topics that came up:

Visibility of the team itself, how do State teams know they can come to us for help?

Some thoughts that were floated including getting ourselves listed on the Solar System of Planet Ubuntu, blogging more about the team (oh, hi!) and making direct contact with some of the teams out there (this is something one of our former board members had begun to do)

Thoughts for the upcoming Ubuntu Global Jam, as a mentoring project, how do we help increase the number of US teams participating?

We’ve found that frequent issue with the quieter teams in the US is when you’re not near a major metropolitan area, you can feel isolated and “the only Ubuntu user in the area!” so we have suggested a participating element of Ubuntu Global Jam that you can do from home, and join #ubuntu-us and chat with us, and help your team: US Teams Wiki Doc “Day” 2009! During the Ubuntu Global Jam weekend we’re encouraging teams to fix up their wikis, inviting them to review and offer suggestions on the USTeams wiki, and do reviews of the LoCoTeams wikis in general.

For folks who don’t wish to use an IRC client, I’ve also set up a freenode chat gateway on our website so you can join the #ubuntu-us chat easily via your web browser:

http://ubuntu-us.org/chat

Along with the wiki page describing the event, I published a new article on Ubuntu-US.org. Amber Graner was also kind enough to contribute an article:

US Wiki Doc “Day” 2009
Cookies for Ubuntu by Amber Graner

Thanks Amber! We’re always looking for new ideas and submissions for articles on the site, so please email me if you have any suggestions!

Our next team meeting is scheduled for this Wednesday in #ubuntu-us: September 9th 2009 @ 10pm EDT, 9pm CDT, 8pm MDT, 7pm PDT

Ubuntu Pennsylvania

The Ubuntu Pennsylvania team is ROCKING! Events are scheduled just about every other weekend for the next few weeks, with ongoing projects like the collaboration with FreeGeekPenn starting to come together, and an LTSP project that Jim Fisher is leading up as a joint venture with the PLUG Into Hive76 crew.

I have to say that aside from having an awesome core team of motivated folks, getting into contact with other groups in the area has been the most beneficial thing to the Pennsylvania Team. We work with our local LUGs, hackerspaces, tech-related non-profits, conferences and local tech groups who don’t have for specific angle but will welcome Ubuntu demos and presentations. Of the upcoming events we’re having, only the Global Jam event is one we’re doing ourselves, and the fellow from the company hosting it one I met through the local LUG – and I asked him if the space was available during a LUG meeting.

So, upcoming events!

September 19: Software Freedom Day

We’ll be out at the Philadelphia Area Computer Society celebrating Software Freedom! The main event of the day is a MythTV presentation by David A. Harding. The rest of the team will be doing demos of Ubuntu and other Free Software, giving out Ubuntu swag and CDs loaded up with free software for Windows.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/EventsTeam/PhillySFD2009

September 25: PLUG into Hive76 imaging server training

Jim Fisher and I will be attending the next PLUG into Hive76 meeting to collaborate on running an imaging server. Well, actually, Jim will be graciously imparting his knowledge to me so I can go forth and share it with Free Geek Penn! Awesome example of LUGs working with hackerspaces working with LoCo teams working with non-profits!

October 3: MythJam

As a follow-up to our Software Freedom Day event on September 19th we’ll be hosting a “MythJam” where we bring in our Myth experts to help people build their Myth systems. We’re doing this event as part of the Ubuntu Global Jam, so we’ll also be participating in Bug Squashing and the US Teams Wiki Doc “Day”

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/EventsTeam/PhillyMythJam2009

October 17: CPOSC

The Harrisburg regional team is working with some folks making the trek out from Philadelphia to populate at able at the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference. Bret Fledderjohn ordered a Conference Pack and organized raising the money needed for a table. Thanks to donations from team members, we were quickly able to raise it.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/EventsTeam/CPOSC2009

Should be a fun month :)

Filed under: computers, events, philadelphia, plug, ubuntu planet

PLUG into Hive76, my PLUG Central talk and OpenHatch.org

Saturday, Sep 5th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Thursday the 27th we hosted the first real PLUG into Hive76 meeting! We had 15 people show up from the groups involved (Hive76, PLUG, Linux Meetup) and brainstorming plans went well. Dan posted a little info about the meetup on the Hive76 blog: PLUG Into Hive76 == Success!

Plus, Jim Fisher brought OREO CAKE!

We now have a formal wiki page up for the project, which we’ll be using to post project ideas: http://wiki.hive76.org/PLUG_Into_Hive76 and we’ll probably be using launchpad for the core project tracking itself.

We were also able to check out their new makerbot under construction:

The makerbot (3D-P0) is pretty cool, they uploaded videos of it in action this past weekend: 3dPO Lives!

I committed to my PLUG Central talk on Expanding Involvement of Women in F/OSS prior to pulling back from the debate and discussion on the issue, but I think the perspective I gained by being out of the trenches these past few weeks helped me craft a message with more impact. I quickly realized that my talk couldn’t specifically focus on women because that wasn’t actually my message. My core message was that F/OSS can be critical, intimidating, and downright mean sometimes, this is a culture that puts off a lot of people who could potentially be contributing, the fewer people in general contributing, the fewer women you’ll see, so work to increase the pool you draw from by being nice to each other! This is a culture I’ve seen be reversed in LinuxChix and often Ubuntu, which is where I draw my “positive solutions” from. So I kept the original name of my talk… for the first few slides, and then punked the audience by introducing a new title slide on slide 4:

My full set of sides are here. There are other solutions to the lack of Women in F/OSS problem, but focusing on involvement in general is where I currently feel my time is best spent. Which reminds me, I still need reviewers for my CPOSC talk on Contributing to Open Source, so please let me know if you’re interested! Other than that, my talk went pretty well, even if I’m still not quite a world class public speaker, this is a far cry from the near paralyzing shyness and anxiety I used to have.

I was also pleased to have Asheesh Laroia in the audience, a new Debian Developer (congrats Asheesh!) and more relevant to my talk, he’s the lead engineer of OpenHatch.org, a new open source involvement search engine. From their About page:

Our core product is an open source software involvement engine. For developers, we provide tools for them to demonstrate and grow their experience and expertise in the open source community. For businesses, we connect them with the code gurus who helped write the software they use to fix their problems or recruit ideal job candidates.

Our vision is to make the open source community better connected, more productive, and well rewarded for its expertise. By gathering the most brilliant, passionate minds in software development in one place and helping them collaborate with one another for love and for pay, OpenHatch will facilitate cross-pollination between open source projects and accelerate open source software development and adoption.

He did a demo of the searching ability to link up programmers to open bugs related to programming languages they are familiar with (it’s seems their major index at the moment is Launchpad bugs, but they also index some other bug trackers). Cool project, I’ll be mentioning it during my CPOSC talk.

Filed under: events, philadelphia, plug, ubuntu planet

Wedding, sick, Nessy, Xen server

Friday, Sep 4th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

The wedding I attended on Saturday for Jonathan and Crissi was very nice (photos by Andrew Keyes):

There was nommy cake!

And I told #plug folks once the wedding was done (I met Jonathan through PLUG):

Unfortunately, after arriving home after the wedding I was feeling a bit tired, later in the evening I started feeling achy. By Sunday it was a cold, Monday I saw my doctor because I was concerned about a cold with the ongoing sinus issues and the never-ending cough. Ended up being sick for much of the week, even considered finding someone to fill in for my PLUG talk on Wednesday, but I managed to load up on DayQuil and make it through alright. I’ll blog about that soon, and post slides. I started feeling better late Thursday, and today aside from a few side-effects from an anti-biotic (I’ll need to be very gentle on my stomach this coming week) I’m on I’m mostly recovered from the cold.

This afternoon I took my bike, Nessy, down to Tri-County Bicycles for some work on the gears. The guy at the shop was super-friendly and helpful, they will look at the gears over the weekend and reset them. Assuming I don’t need anything replaced, I’m also going to pick up a couple cheap hybrid tires that I can use on both my trainer and on roads – plus won’t be bad for the infrequent dirt trail biking I do these days, no more need to swap out tires when I go from trainer to outdoor riding!

I also recently snagged a small NVidia 8400 GS PCI card for my Xen server. Unfortunately I didn’t do my research first, it was a cheap impulse buy. After hours of struggling with this silly GeForce, I was still having overscan problems (they yanked overscan fiddling support from the linux driver after the 7xxx series, overscanning isn’t too bad so I’ll live with it), video tearing (annoying, I need to try harder to fix this) and I learned that the proprietary nvidia driver doesn’t play nicely with Xen kernels – so I have to boot into a non-xen kernel to watch movies on my TV. I am not impressed, should have gone with a cheap ATI. Still, even with these issues it’s a much better connected-to-tv system than my old Inspiron 7500 laptop, which served me well but really was too slow to be a reasonable player. I’m also considering tossing Nagios3 on the Xen server, now that it’s always turned on either as my Xen testbed server or as my media PC I figure it’s a reasonable machine to run my currently non-existent monitoring infrastructure from.

And now, bedtime!

Filed under: computers, events, health, life

Movies, friends, attending wedding soon

Saturday, Aug 29th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I’m glad I started keeping a calendar last year, I don’t think I’d be able to live without one now. My task list is still an issue though, am currently trying out a few solutions to this, Goog Calendar now has tasks built into it, hmm.

Last week I had a lovely dinner with Crissi, followed by seeing Julie & Julia. Not my typical movie, but I think part of me enjoyed it that much more because it wasn’t. It was a nice evening out, I got to hear about the madness that ensues a week before a wedding (she’s getting married today, I’m leaving for it soon, this will be the first wedding I’m attending since the divorce) and just kick back with a couple of drinks and a new friend. I really should do this more.

This past weekend my boyfriend was in town. It was a bit of a whirlwind of a trip, as his trips out here tend to be. Meeting up with friends, family, and getting things done. We did manage to spend a nice chunk of quality time together though, a couple of nice dinners alone, including one over at Melting Pot, yum! We also were able to see District 9, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but we saw it in the theater down the street from me, which is a bit old and they didn’t fully dim the lights during the movie (maybe this is a Carmike Cinemas thing? The last time I went to a Carmike my experience was similar). Our next visit is in September, over my birthday weekend. I’ll be flying out to SFO on the 25th and returning to PHL early on the morning of the 30th. I have to admit I’m looking forward to it like nothing else.

Wednesday evening was spent shopping and catching up on a lot of things that I let pile up over the weekend. Thursday evening was spent at the first real PLUG into Hive76 meeting, which I’ll expand upon in another post (with photos! there was cake!). And last night I had Michael over for a bit, he brought some delicious Indian food and we chatted as he played with the cats for a bit and we watched some Metalocalypse.

And in the midst of all this stuff were various Ubuntu meetings on IRC and event planning to do. After the wedding today I’ll probably be diving into a lot of that, and tomorrow will be set aside for the same. I also have my PLUG presentation on Wednesday to prepare for, it’s mostly written, just need some practice and review.

Now, off to get pretty for the wedding! …I’ll be wearing a nice dress, around people I met through PLUG. Oh my! Clashing of worlds!

Filed under: life

Road Trip to New Orleans!

Tuesday, Aug 18th, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

The 5 minute conversation between Brent Saner and I last Monday went like this:

< bts3685> pleia2: come to new orleans with me on saturday!
< pleia2> bts3685: too hot :(
< bts3685> my car has a/c!
< pleia2> bts3685: you’re driving down?
< bts3685> yes
< pleia2> haha, wow
< bts3685> and i can give you a plane ticket back
< bts3685> but i’m moving, remember?
< pleia2> cool
< pleia2> yeah
< bts3685> i need SOMETHING to pull the trailer, and i don’t think the airlines would let me hook it up to a jet
< pleia2> that would be lulzy
< bts3685> yeah it would
< bts3685> so? roadtrip? whaddya say?
< bts3685> IF YOU COME I CAN SHOW YOU THE TRANSVESTITES ON BOURBON ST!
< pleia2> cool
< pleia2> I’d need to figure out a way to get home from PHL
< pleia2> when I fly back, Sunday night?
< bts3685> whenever you want
< pleia2> and driving down all in one shot on Saturday?
< bts3685> yes but it’ll be fun
< pleia2> hehe
< pleia2> well, I have never been to NOLA before
< bts3685> \o/
< pleia2> ok, sounds fun :)

And the rest was history! I’ve been taking advantage of every opportunity to travel this year, and a free weekend trip to New Orleans is perfect. Oh, and interesting side note, a road trip together is sure far from our first interaction back in 2007. Hahaha!

Brent picked me up at 8AM on Saturday morning and we began the drive down. We took 81 so it was pretty much the same trip I took earlier this year to the Southeast Linuxfest. Taking the diagonal route through Virginia was the longest leg of the trip, toward the end there was plenty of “please Virginia, let me out!”

Once out of VA we trekked through Tennessee, where we stopped for gas at this awesome travel plaza:

You can see Brent’s car hooked up to the trailer there too, but there is a better picture here. The poor little v4 Saturn held up impressively well during the trip though, even if gathering speed and climbing hills was sometimes a challenge, and the gas mileage was terrible. No breakdowns! Not even any scares! The weather was beautiful too, while Philadelphia was steeped in 90+ degree weather, the south was only in the 80s, with the breeze much of the trip was comfortable with just the windows rolled down a bit.

Around midnight Brent needed some sleep and I took the wheel for the first time during the trip. My leg of the trip took us through the northwest corner of Georgia (the first time I’d been to the state since I left as a baby! Over 25 years!) and through much of the Alabama leg of the trip. Most notable about my drive? Lack of light pollution! While driving I could look up in the sky and see so many stars! In spite of growing up in an area with very little light pollution, these past few years it’s been far too infrequent that I’m in such places. As much as I love cities and see myself living near (or in!) them for the foreseeable future, I do miss the stars.

Brent took over again after about 4 hours when we needed gas and I proclaimed exhaustion. Luckily that seems to have been plenty of time for him to sleep, as he was wide awake for the rest of the drive into NOLA and I was able to get a couple hours of sleep.

He woke me up as we approached NOLA. There were some crazy clouds (ok, not so much crazy as – so many different kinds at once!):

That was taken just a few miles before getting on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. Wow. I love bridges. And this one? Just, wow! It’s huge! And apparently the second largest in the world. Very cool. Oh, and crazy-wild clouds cause random downpours. Most of the sky was blue, but several times during the day a few of the clouds decided to rain, what a place.

Once over the bridge we navigated to the Tremé neighborhood where Brent’s new home is! He’s living with a few others at their newly purchased House of the Rising Son, I took a lousy sun-mangled photo of it (and Brent standing outside it):

So we got there around 8AM, which means we’d been on the road a good 24 hours. Google Maps says the trip should take less than 20, but when you figure in a trailer that you’re not supposed to go over 55MPH with? Yeah, that added a few hours.

Shortly after arriving his house mates showed up and we unloaded the trailer, chilled out for a bit and then ventured down to the French Quarter. The plan was to hit Cafe du Monde for some beignets, but since it was a beautiful Sunday morning the place was packed. I am now a bit disappointed that I missed out on it, but at the time I was so tired I didn’t care much where I got breakfast. Instead we ended up at EnVie espresso bar & cafe, where I got a yummy eggs, bacon, buttermilk biscuit and homefries breakfast (and didn’t come close to finishing it!).

From there we did a little more wandering around the French Quarter and then made plans for my departure. So soon? Alas! My flight was at 3:20PM. So we dropped off the trailer and headed up to the airport. I will say now that flying out of the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (MSY) was a wonderful experience. I was through security in just a couple minutes (no line!), everyone was friendly and courteous and they had free wifi! I had a layover in Fort Lauderdale and was back in Philly by 9:20 (Southwest had us there a full 30 minutes early, well done). My friend Mike from NJ was nice enough to pick me up from the airport and swing by Wawa on the way back to my apartment so I could get some food before crashing into bed. Thanks Mike!

This road trip and the exhaustion that followed on Sunday does mean I got almost no project stuff done this weekend, and very few emails replied to. I’m hoping to get through much of my backlog this week, but I’m going out with a friend to see a movie Tuesday night and then MJ is visiting for a long weekend (squee!), so some stuff might have to wait until next week.

Filed under: travel

Upcoming talks, photos from Virtualization Roundtable

Monday, Aug 17th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I have two upcoming open source talks:

“Expanding involvement of Women in F/OSS” at PLUG Central on September 2nd. I’ve spoken on this topic before, and committed to this one prior to my retirement from the subject in the public arena. I considered changing topics, but the folks at PLUG are a good bunch and I don’t anticipate too much stress regarding the topic. The talk has been outlined and I just need to flesh it out, keeping with my commitment of positivity and progress rather than focusing on the past. I probably will include some “yes, sexism exists, here is a link” slides in case the questions come up, but won’t take it beyond that.

“Contributing to Open Source Projects” at Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference in Harrisburg on October 17th. I received the email saying my talk was accepted last night and I’m pretty excited about it. I’ve done a few PLUG talks and some impromptu speaking for the Pennsylvania LoCo Team never spoken at a conference before. This talk is written and I just need to practice it and tweak it for further clarity. I’ve already had a couple folks review it but a few more pairs of eyes might be nice in the next couple weeks (this is your invitation to volunteer :)).

Finally, here are a couple of photos from the Virtualization Roundtable I hosted at PLUG North last Monday.

My CLI demonstration of Xen xm commands, (photo by Andrew Keyes):

Lee Marzke talking about VMWare:

I’m really looking forward to the next time we do a meeting in this format!

Filed under: events, plug, ubuntu planet

Travel, Time, TV, Chromium browser, Linode upgrade

Friday, Aug 14th, 2009 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

Gosh, my blog has been full of work, work, work and seriousness these past few weeks.

I did mention my jaunt off to San Francisco a couple weeks ago to visit MJ (yay!). I stayed in last weekend and worked on projects, but this weekend am doing another insane-weekend-trip and am road tripping down to New Orleans with my friend Brent on Saturday, who wanted company during the 20 hour drive down. Sunday I’m taking an evening flight from NOLA back to PHL. It’s a good thing I enjoy flying! Sleep? I’ll find some time to sleep, but I’d also really like to check out NOLA for a couple hours too since I’ve never been there. Yeah, I’ll sleep on the plane.

I neglected wallaceandgromit.net again, but this past weekend I managed to get through the backlog and post two entries:

It’s sad that I have been so lousy at keeping it updated, once I get going with an update I have fun but motivating myself to doing it has been tricky. So I have a new strategy! 3rd Thusday of the month is now on my calendar as my wallaceandgromit.net update evening. Speaking of which, I’ve started getting much better at budgeting my time. I am not sure I’m actually getting more done with better time management, but I am feeling less stressed and much less guilty about taking breaks to zone out and watch X-Files.

X-Files! I’ve been snagging the series DVDs as they go on sale (can frequently find each season for $20, selling their TV shows so cheap is one thing FOX really has done right, I couldn’t justify the cost at all otherwise, you know what I’d do instead? Torre…. uh, not watch them at all, of course!). So I now have up through Season 5, and the movie, on DVD and am currently watching Season 3, I forgot how much I loved this show. There is something so comforting about the government conspiracies and aliens of the 90s. Considering stopping here with my collection, the show certainly went downhill after the movie, even if Season 6 was still watchable, 7th was a disappointment. And after Mulder left? Sorry, terrible.

Also on my watching-radar is MST3K. They’ve released a lot of the episodes on DVD, but there were still gaps in my collection which I’ve now filled. Exciting! All MSTs at my fingertips! I’ve seen most of them already, so I’m having it on in the background while I’m working on other things, watching them all from the KTMA era, pausing frequently to enjoy. I’ve also been watching the new season of Bullshit! and have Burn Notice queued up to watch soon.

I’m in love with the Chromium browser. I never tried any of the Linux builds because of their “this is unstable and crashes all the time” status, but lately I’ve heard a lot of good things about the Ubuntu Chromium Daily Builds. Given the smaller memory footprint of FireFox and my limited needs there I decided to give it a go on my Mini9. I was quickly pleased with the similar behavior to FireFox keybinding-wise, nothing new to learn here and after giving Opera a chance again recently I learned that I’d grown to accustom to the FireFox addressbar smart completion that I can’t live happily without it – the Chromium browser build has it! So I could hit the ground running with use, but what really stole my heart? It’s light and FAST. Even in XFCE the tabs are smooth, popping tabs out into new windows is easy. I have over 100 labels so I’d grown used to Gmail being a bit sluggish in FireFox on my mini9, so used to it that I didn’t quite realize it was slow until I saw how fast it was in Chromium browser. So this morning I hopped on my desktop for work and was quickly annoyed with how slow FireFox was. Wow. As of this evening Chromium browser is now running on my desktop too.

I upgraded my Linode from a 360 to a 540 today. For the extra $10/mo I get an additional 180M RAM, 8G of HDD space and 100G of transfer. It was the RAM that was causing my heartache. I’ve been fiddling with the Apache2 configuration file to keep Apache running within the 360M limitations, but as I add more services to my Linode it quickly became apparent that it would be much less trouble and I’d get better performance from biting the bullet and going up to 540M. The process was easy, I submitted a ticket and my Linode was only down for about 10 minutes while the data was moved, it all came back up perfectly like nothing happened. Hooray Linode!

Now I need to get to sleep.

Filed under: computers, life, travel

Philadelphia area Linux Users Group Virtualization Roundtable Summary

Thursday, Aug 13th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Tuesday night we hosted a Virtualization Roundtable at PLUG North meeting. To be honest, it started out as a bit of a filler event because we didn’t have a speaker, but upon mentioning the possibility the response I got was very positive. I started planning the event last month, gathered a few experts who I communicated with via email prior to the event to plan the basics and bounce questions off each other. Lee Marzke, our VMWare expert, was particularly helpful with planning, deploying a shared plone site for us to post our screenshots and notes on. Thanks Lee!

The announcement outlines the basics the event. Aside from experts on VMWare, Xen and VirtualBox, the plan was to have a guided discussion on virtualization basics, the benefits, challenges and downfalls of implementations with frequent breaks for general Q&A about virtualization.

The result? Success! Not only did we have a very impressive turn out of 25 people (our standard meeting for that PLUG chapter is about 10, our biggest meeting until Tuesday night was 14), the discussion was very lively and engaging and I’ve received several positive emails post-event saying that it was enjoyable and they intend to attend talks in the future.

Here are my notes from the event, for my own reference and in case someone else wants to run something similar:

1 hour is not nearly enough. We nudged past the 1.5 hour mark and it still was a bit rushed in places and didn’t cover everything I wanted to cover. Next time shoot for 2 hours and make sure the moderator is able to keep things on track.
Even though it’s a discussion, we did have a structure:

Introduction to virtualization, general questions, what are people attending interested in?
Introduction to VMWare, Xen and VirtualBox, demos and questions
General discussion – success stories, failures, standard dos and don’ts

Slides! The slides I wrote are very basic, giving me a visual focal point for introducing the roundtable, giving people an overview and in general driving home “this is an all level roundtable – speak up, participate, no question is dumb” etc. Our roundtable was so successful activity-wise that we stopped using the slides after the introduction, but if this wasn’t the case it would have been useful to have them to refocus the discussion.
I had intended to only devote 5 minutes each to a quick intro to VMWare, Xen and VirtualBox, but after questions were added and two of us ended up doing live demos, this turned into 10-15 minutes each! Oops, plan accordingly next time.
I’m confident that my choice of VMWare, Xen (.org – not Citrix) and VirtualBox for the showcased applications was spot on. On the surface they are competitive virtualization technologies, but upon closer inspection they really serve different segments of the market. It was fascinating during the discussion to see what different people were interested in, the modern hardware requirement and monetary investment in VMWare with all the bells and whistles certainly was of interest for some, while others cheered when I admitted that my first Xen server was hosted on a Pentium 3.
The roundtable format was great since it gave us the opportunity to invite free-form questions from people completely new to virtualization as well as welcome virtualization industry leaders like Mike Greb of Linode to offer their expertise.
The roundtable format was less great because you really need a good moderator guiding discussion and making sure all the vital points were hit upon. This was my first time hosting something like this, so I think there were a couple of tangents and I probably could have handled some of the transitions more gracefully. Oh, and going over by a half hour wasn’t fantastic, but people did still seem engaged and interested in talking even that late.
Have fun and be positive! I’m a huge believer that excitement is infectious. I totally geeked out over the usefulness of CLI Xen commands and the flexibility of the technology. Our VMWare expert was equally as excited and confident about the product he was presenting on.

Finally, a huge thanks to CoreDial for being such a great host (for a year now!), and this time a specific Thank You toKevin McAllister who took over being the CoreDial employee host this month from Danita Fries. He spent lots of time and effort finding and bringing in chairs for all the people who ended up showing up and squeezing into the conference room. Thanks Kevin! And thanks to everyone who attended and participated.

Filed under: philadelphia, plug, ubuntu planet

Ubuntu Community Learning Project and Ubuntu US Teams

Thursday, Aug 13th, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

Ubuntu Community Learning Project

Due to my involvement in the Ubuntu Classroom project, I became involved with the Beginners Team Education Focus group earlier this year. The #ubuntu-classroom channel began hosting Beginners Team classes. From there the Ubuntu Community Learning Team was born.

Over the past several months the team has been working through licensing choices, Moodle deployment (theme still to be completed), governing and user infrastructure. We’ve begun working with teams within the community and have met with the Canonical Training folks to discuss materials and overlap of services.

Now, we need you! Martin Owens has also posted about it, so if you’re interested and haven’t yet, have a peek at that post as well as he outlines some of the skills we need. Essentially, we need brains! Your expertise in your given area of Ubuntu, as mentioned on our wiki page we have 5 categories:

We have a Moodle infrastructure deployed, but we’re also working with Classroom to host IRC-based sessions and we’d like to see course material (within Moodle or not) being worked on for live sessions that LoCo teams can give to their own users (on spreading Ubuntu, perhaps?) and to the public (Intro to Ubuntu classes? Server classes?). Martin’s also started developing Server courses and releasing them on his blog and linked to the Maintaining Ubuntu wiki page which will probably be incorporated into the Moodle infrastructure. I’ve volunteered to help start writing and the Ubuntu Pennsylvania team will be teaching some of the first Desktop classes.

Don’t think you can contribute to course development yourself? We also need expert reviewers and less experienced folks who can take a look at the coursework to give us feedback about how friendly it is to someone no familiar with the subject matter.

So, interested in finding out more and joining us? Browse our wiki for project details, or just drop by #ubuntu-learning on chat.freenode.net and ask us questions directly. We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for people to join the team, simply drop a note to the Ubuntu Learning Mailing List or introduce yourself in #ubuntu-learning. Please don’t be shy about an introduction! We ask people to introduce themselves so we can get a better idea of what kind of talent we have and need within the project, whether your talent is “brilliant sysadmin and experienced teacher” or “student who is interested in testing our material” we need and welcome you!

Our next meeting is scheduled for 8pm EDT August 17th / 00:00 UTC August 18th in #ubuntu-meeting so please feel free to join us.

Ubuntu US Teams

Another project I’ve been working with lately is the US Teams project. This is the mentoring team for all the the US teams and this year we reorganized the project and elected a new board and mentors. I worked with Dan Trevino to launch our new US Teams Planet for aggregating the news feeds for teams in the US (it’s been a great way to see what other teams are up to!). And we tapped the Drupal talents of John Crawford to launch a new version of our website.

The latest team news? We’re now publishing articles on our new website! There is a lot of LoCo documentation out there, but it can sometimes be tricky to find really useful stuff. Having identified the vital resources, our articles have the following purpose:

Identify the documentation that we reference most for US Teams, write short articles highlighting where to find this documentation so it puts it on the radar of more people, and contributing back to the main documentation as we can
Come up with new ideas, write articles about it, contribute back to the main documentation
US News – approvals, sharing successful new ideas
US-specific tips about running a LoCo in this country

Thus far we’ve published two articles on the site: Joining a US LoCo Team and Congratulations New York!, and so far have we’ve snagged the talents of Dan Trevino and Amber Graner for at least 3 more articles in the pipeline. Have an idea for an article you’d like to read or write? Please let me know!

Our next team meeting is scheduled for August 26th 2009 – 10pm EDT, 9pm CDT, 8pm MDT, 7pm PDT in #ubuntu-us – join us then to discuss the project, or drop by #ubuntu-us any time to get help with your US-based LoCo, share experiences, request a mentor or just shoot the breeze with other folks in the US who participate in LoCo teams.

Filed under: plug, ubuntu planet

Sweet Home 3D

Tuesday, Aug 4th, 2009 by pleia2 | 12 Comments

This past weekend I flew to San Francisco to visit my boyfriend and help him start getting settled into the gorgeous new condo he recently purchased and I had yet to see.

Upon arrival, I felt like I’d been there before! This was partially due to the photos and raw floor plans he sent me, but was also was greatly helped by the Sweet Home 3D software that I used to help him plan the furniture layout prior to the move.

I’d never actually used any kind of floorplan software, and honestly I didn’t have high hopes when I went out looking for what I essentially wanted to be Google SketchUp, but runs in Linux while still being cross-platform. I was delighted when I discovered Sweet Home 3D and even happier when I found it was actively maintained (last release, version 2.0, was on June 6th of this year), was simple to install (I just used the Linux Installer which had bundled java), was relatively easy to use (even for me!), and had great documentation. The FAQ even answered all the questions I had. What a brilliant project!

So I set off turning the floor plans into a real model. It took a few hours, and I’m still no expert at use since this has a lot of features that I’ll probably never use and I didn’t do fancy things like add windows and flooring, but I ended up with a pretty decent, usable result at the end: