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Wallace and Gromit Exhibit at the Science Museum in London

Thursday, Apr 9th, 2009 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

This is my last post about England, I promise (until I go back! I can’t help myself, I loved it there).

The day before I left we headed back into London to go to the opening day of Wallace & Gromit’s World of Cracking Ideas Exhibition. Wow! Opening day of a Wallace and Gromit exhibit! I had a blast, I’m so happy that I was able to go! I documented the visit and uploaded a bunch of pictures to WallaceAndGromit.net:

http://wallaceandgromit.net/2009/04/09/wallace-gromits-world-of-cracking-ideas-exhibit/

And any trip over the pond would be incomplete without me snagging some Wallace and Gromit stuff, it’s just so hard to get here in the States! So I did. On the right of this photo are a Hutch backpack and a Shaun the Sheep CD holder (which now lives in my car), both of which were gifts. At the exhibit I picked up the t-shirt, pen and pink “thinking putty” and on my way out of the country I snagged the Gromit head magnet at a duty free shop. It’s so very novel to be able to buy Wallace and Gromit stuff in stores! Oh and in this picture there is also some yummy chocolate I brought home too, mmm Cadbury Crunchies.

Filed under: events, travel

UKUUG Spring 2009 Conference

Saturday, Apr 4th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On the 25th and 26th of March I attended the UKUUG Spring 2009 Conference.

The first day I was a bit apprehensive, because of public transportation. Getting from Liverpool Street station to Great Portland Street on the tube turned out to be easy, and the conference really was right across the street from the station. But getting from Great Portland Street to London Bridge for the conference dinner actually required changing tubes! And then getting back to the house would require two tubes and a train! Lucky for me public transportation in London is significantly easier than the guesswork involved in navigating the public transit in some US cities. I didn’t get lost at all :)

The conference went well. Somehow I managed not to get any actual photos of the conference, it simply didn’t occur to me very often. Oops. And in spite of my intense shyness, I was able to meet some people. Ended up finding one of the only other Americans at the conference and having a chat. When Google had the bursary applicants and winners swing by their table I was able to meet a couple of women who were also attending the conference (even with these bursaries, the number of women attending was disappointingly quite low). I ended up taking the tube with the other bursary winner and her sister who had come along, and we arrived a bit early for a great dinner at the HMS Belfast so we got to explore the ship a bit. I was convinced into being social and talking at the dinner, which ended up being good, met some cool people who I hope to keep in touch with.

The conference talks themselves? There were a few that stood out as being very applicable to things I’m currently working on:

  • System Monitoring Shootout – Nice overview, with closer inspection of HypericHQ, Zabbix, Zenoss and Nagios.
  • Managing networks and systems with Zenoss – Presented by Jane Curry, who I was later able to have a chat with regarding open source services business models, and quickly about Nagios and its graphing abilities via a couple of plugins (must try!). Plus, Nagios plugins and agent work with Zenoss? Cool! Seems like this i worth a look…
  • OpenLDAP Replication Strategies – The presenter was quite nervous, but I was able to snag some good tidbits. At work I’m about to tackle a replication project, I believe we used old slurpd in the past but these days it’s syncrepl that tends to be used. Plus I learned that the 2.3 to 2.4 replication should be possible, hurrah! Final testing almost complete…
  • Open Source Virtualization – An Overview – Great presenter. To be fair, I love Xen, I love the tools, I love how it works, it’s fantastic, but the dom0 host support issue was getting me down. Lenny has chosen to continue support, but Ubuntu had dropped it (they will still support their guest kernels). Lately I’ve had to defend my use of Xen but the presentation showed that it’s still quite a contender to KVM, and not just because Xen runs on hardware that lacks the hardware virtualization bit (still important for us!). The presenter also explored the future for both technologies, and mentioned that some Xen support getting into the kernel may be possible in the future, thus making it easier for distros to support it.
  • Servers on the Internet are exposed 24×7 to new and sometimes exciting threats. How can you limit your exposure to attacks – Wow, that’s a title! Much of the talk was “yep, we do that too!” which was a nice re-enforcement that we’re staying on top of the latest security tools out there, but as often the case with such talks, there are some things you learn or are reminded of. Nothing that can be implemented now with any of the infrastructures I help admin, but syslog servers, more complicated role-based access and config management (puppet? cfengine?) would certainly be worth considering on large deployments.

In all I’m very happy that I attended, it was a great opportunity. Oh and conferences are fun, I hope to be able to attend many more in the future!

Filed under: events, plug, travel, ubuntu planet

Another day in London and other things

Friday, Apr 3rd, 2009 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

On Thursday the 19th we headed down to London again for a day of walking around the city. The first stop was the Tower of London and Tower Bridge. Just prior to getting there we wandered past an ice cream truck and snagged a couple of 99 Flakes (ice cream on a cone w/ a Cadbury Flake). Yum! We decided not to go into the tower itself, but instead wandered around it, hit a souvenir shop for some postcards and ideas about where else to go.

From there we headed to Covent Garden where we saw a delightful street magic show and then wandered around the shops for a while. We then walked for a bit out of the neighborhood to find a place to snag lunch and ended up in a pub, where I got the most delicious pie and mash, along with a pretty good British ale.

Following lunch we ventured south toward the London Eye, which we had 4PM tickets for. Unfortunately after days of unusual sunny weather, the clouds came out shortly before our ride on the Eye!

Even with the clouds and fog, the view from the London Eye was pretty impressive.

As the evening wound down we decided to take a walk down to Trafalgar Square, which was a bit under construction, but one of the must see places in London. Then spent a bit of time wandering around the National Gallery for a little bit before heading home.

That wraps up the sight-seeing in the first week of my trip. The weekend was spent relaxing a bit (my feet were quite sore after so much walking!) and exploring the neighborhood. During my trip I managed to get some pizza, which was quite sub-par when compared to much of what I can get here in the States. Got fish ‘n chips a couple more times, which I never managed to finish, so much food! And had one of the most amazing Indian food dinners of Curry King Prawn and a stuffed naan from one of the five Indian places within walking distance from the house, chosen randomly. I really wish there were more Indian places in the US, a quick search showed the closet one is in King of Prussia, and they don’t even have a real shrimp curry! I also was able to hit a local shop and pick up a decent Bombardier Bitter, and a really fantastic Bulmers Cider, the ciders in the US tend to be a bit sticky-sweet for my taste, but this Bulmers was nice and crisp – yum! I also fell in love with National Confectionary Jelly Dinosaurs and Cadbury Crunchies. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t say I had good company during my whole trip :) Still have to post about the conference and the Wallace and Gromit exhibit…

Filed under: travel

Visiting Stonehenge

Thursday, Apr 2nd, 2009 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

On March 18th made the 1.5ish hour drove down to Stonehenge. We went on a Wednesday and it was still pretty busy (apparently weekends are really busy!). Even so, I was able to get a lot of photos of the stones that were relatively people-free.

We arrived and parked in the available parking lot. There is a tall fence around the stones, and you pay to actually go around the stones. You buy your tickets, grab your audio tour gadget and then head on a little tunnel under the road and up to the stones.

You can’t touch the stones themselves, they have a nice little trail that goes around them as you listen to your audio tour and take a million pictures.

And there were sheep!

After walking around the stones and listening to the full audio tour, we settled down for a picnic lunch of crunchy Italian bread and butter and salami, some tastey Blue Riband chocolates, and bananas. Yum! Except there was a big scary bird sitting on the fence near us.

We spent the rest of the evening driving around the countryside. It’s really beautiful down there. The day wound down and the parks closed so we headed back and I got to experience rush our traffic on the M25, which was just as bad at Philadelphia route 76 traffic at any time ;)

Filed under: travel

Arrival in England and first day in London

Tuesday, Mar 31st, 2009 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

I took a flight out of Philadelphia on the night of Saturday the 14th and arrived at Heathrow on Sunday morning. I tried to sleep on the plane, but a crying baby for most of the flight made that tricky. In spite of that, the flight was quite pleasant, I’ll certainly go with British Airways again when I have the opportunity. Sunday and Monday were spent settling in, and I snagged my first delicious, traditional taste of England – some fish ‘n chips!

First impressions of the country? All the cars are tiny and the combination of driving on the opposite side of the road and all the roundabouts made the idea of driving there a bit daunting. Luckily I didn’t have to, there are sidewalks (er, pavements!) everywhere, trips to the grocery store and getting take-out were all simple quarter mile (or less) walks. Once in the city, navigating the London Underground is pretty easy after I got over my generic fear of public transportation (hah!) and the regional rail services were pretty easy and frequent too, buses remain a mystery but walking everywhere there wasn’t a tube solved that. Also, it was warm and sunny. In spite of all the dreary England tales I heard, most days of my trip were of the warm and sunny sort, the first week was almost entirely sunny (except for the window of time that day we went up in the London Eye, of course!)

Tuesday was a whole day down in London! Took the train from where I was staying north of London, and from there walked and took the tube all over the place. We walked around Oxford Circus and Tottenham Court Road. From there we headed over to the British Museum. It was a really fantastic museum, I really enjoyed wandering around. Plus toward the end of our museum adventure I learned that the Rosetta Stone was housed there, so popped around for a look.

From there we ventured over to see the Big Ben tower! It was high on my list of things to see in London, so important to see early on. Right near there is also Westminster Abbey, which was beautiful in both the day and night!

From there we walked over to Buckingham Palace!

Big Ben is also quite a nice sight at night (London Eye in the background).

My feet hurt from walking at this point, I’m such a wimp! So it was time to wander to the tube station. We ended up at King’s Cross, which I’ve mentioned in the past I’ve heard of “Because that’s how you get to Hogwarts”. Indeed! They even have a Platform 9 3/4! Squee!

Then finally the trek back to the house. A really great day, so much to see!

Filed under: travel

Talking about the Lenny release in Linux Format

Friday, Mar 27th, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

I received a direct message from RoboNuggie (thanks!) today letting me know that he’d seen me in a piece in the May issue of Linux Format Magazine discussing the Debian Lenny release. Very cool.

Ok, so this didn’t come as a total surprise to me, as Juliet Kemp asked me a few questions (and for the photo that ended up in the article) a couple months back. Mostly it’s just neat/exciting/fun to learn that it’s been printed, and aside from a quote of mine being in a tech book catalog once, this is the first time I’ve been in print! Go me :)

I don’t have a copy yet, but I’m hoping it’s hit the shelves and I can snag a copy in London tomorrow when I hit the Science Museum for the opening of their Wallace and Gromit Exhibit (we all know how I love Wallace and Gromit, I’m crazy excited about this too). Otherwise I’ll have to see about paying a bit more to get it state-side when I get home.

Filed under: computers, plug, ubuntu planet

Having a blast in England!

Saturday, Mar 21st, 2009 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

I arrived in England last Sunday morning. The week has been full of sight-seeing, relaxing (first week-long vacation for me in over 2 years!) and partaking in delicious English treats (fish ‘n chips, pie & mash, pub ale, Cadbury chocolates!). I can’t believe almost a week has gone by already.


Houses of Parliament, seen from the London Eye

Next week I’ll be working from here Mon, Tues and Fri, with Wed and Thurs being UKUUG conference days.

More details and more photos will be posted once I get home, but for now I’ve posted the photo highlights on flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157615495696005/

Filed under: travel

Ubuntu Women Project Status – Early 2009

Thursday, Mar 12th, 2009 by pleia2 | 6 Comments

The last time I posted a status update on the project was June 2008.

Ubuntu Women

We just had a meeting on March 4th (minutes and log here) to discuss project status. It was really great to hear from some of the more active women within the Ubuntu community, and get their take on our goals and purpose. Plus there were some great ideas floated at the meeting that we have decided to act upon.

What is our current state?

The key points:

  • Mailing list has primarily been used to inform each other of events and plan real life meet ups.
  • IRC channel tends to be social, but also provides a “safe” place for rants and discussions about the community. The friendly nature of the channel makes it a vital resource to the project.
  • Forums still have not been fully integrated within the project, but serve as an important spring-board for gaining new members and encouraging women who are active on the forums to become more involved.

Major project-wise we were stalled. Our mentoring program hasn’t taken off beyond being able to match up women with volunteers who we personally know within in the community. We missed a couple months of Full Circle contributions and a meeting hadn’t been held in several months.

However, the reason for this stall is significant – all of the key women involved with Ubuntu Women are also heavily involved with other projects within Ubuntu and upstream. We’ve had less time for Ubuntu Women advocacy in the form of Projects as we dive into bugs, development, support and all kinds of other roles.

There was also consensus during the meeting that the key points mentioned above were the real meat of the project, not our sub Projects. And in my opinion, having more women in key, visible roles within the core Ubuntu project itself goes further to encourage more women to contribute than any Mentoring or Classroom initiative.

Where do we go from here?

If we did have the time for advocacy, where is our time best spent? During the meeting we did some brainstorming and came up with a few ideas.

  • Provide more encouragement to women to speak at events and be visible within the project
  • Launch a “Women Behind Ubuntu” interview series for inclusion in Full Circle Magazine and on ou wiki
  • Revitalize the website

The first point was all about what I mentioned above. For me, while I adore my male role models and friends who have encouraged me along the way, being exposed to other women who are involved with Linux was vital to having enough courage to make the leap into contributing to F/OSS. I was able to gain this exposure through involvement with LinuxChix, but I think it would have been really valuable to me early on to have seen more women visible within the community who were making serious contributions. In order to achieve this goal we decided that we should make a regular (bi-annual?) nudge to the list to remind list members of our resources, and enforce that there are several of us within the project who are willing to help with conference talk submissions, review slides and in general give advice to the “I have these skills, what conference should I attend?” questions. We also want to encourage more women to participate in the Ubuntu Women Planet, and once they become Ubuntu Members to encourage them to post to the official Ubuntu Planet (fear of flaming or negative reaction still does make some shy away from this).

We ended up moving forward with the second idea as well. Myriam Schweingruber has taken the reins and will be interviewing women within the Ubuntu community about their contributions. Our first interview was submitted to Full Circle this month! And we’ve put together a wiki page to track the project.

The website revitalizing project is really the only one we’ve let hang on the vine for now. The content is valid, and last year we reorganized the resources a bit to make them more accessible. While I new design would be exciting and fun, we simply lack the resources right now to make it a reality, and don’t feel that it’s a high enough priority at this time.

So that’s where we are at! For more information about the project itself, hop on over to our website, which is now accessible at either ubuntu-women.org or women.ubuntu.com.

Filed under: plug, ubuntu planet

Philadelphia Flower Show

Sunday, Mar 1st, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

Yesterday morning I met up with Stephen, Alisa and their mother to head over to the Members Preview day of the Philadelphia Flower Show. We hit Sam’s Coventry Diner prior for some breakfast and headed down to Philly around 11.

I’d never been to the show before (which is billed as the biggest indoor flower show in the world), so I was pretty excited, and just HAD to snag one of the official flower show bouquets for myself on my way out. The theme of the show was “Bella Italia”, which made for some really amazing Italian-themed exhibits – a lot of Rome! Plus loads of delicious looking wine/pizza and pasta/food themed presentations.

I took something like 150 pictures as we wandered around the show, I uploaded my favorites to flickr and this directory.

There was quite a lot of variety to the show, primarily being whole landscapes made of flowers and plants, but also displays of individual flowers, trees… a really spectacular show, which I should have taken Benadryl prior to! My allergies hit harder than I expected, and while it was totally worth it, the sinus headache I came home with was a bit unpleasant.

The crowds weren’t too bad, and toward the end of the day we were able to happily browse the vendor stands, where I acquired a cactus and some dried flowers, along with the show bouquet. The show closed up for the day at 3:30 (earlier than the rest of the days this week, since it was the preview), and we headed out of Philly then and I was home by 5PM.

Filed under: events, philadelphia

Clutter

Sunday, Mar 1st, 2009 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

I moved in to this apartment with a lot of books and stuff. I think the pack rat part of me took comfort in being surrounded by my things, especially now that I’m living alone for the first time. I moved three times last year with all of this stuff, never going through any of it, most of it staying in piles and boxes.

For a while I had “Ikea bookcase” on the shopping list, until I finally realized that I don’t need more bookshelves, I need fewer books. This realization follows a long period of “I’ll get around to reading that” and the ever growing bedside reading pile. I used to read all the time, but these days so much else fills my days, between work, projects and stuff I read online (including long articles and ebooks). Last weekend I went through my large storage closet and my bookshelves. I have a pile of tech books I have no use for, so I’m giving them away at PLUG and TCF next month. A full three boxes of primarily fiction books was carted up to Gently Used Books in Douglassville, where they’ll be giving me store credit for what they can use, and donating the rest to local charities (yes, I could have sold them online and made a few bucks, but there simply isn’t enough money in used books these days to make it worth my time).

In addition to books, I was also able to go through the mountains of other stuff clogging up my closet, piles of paperwork and documents I haven’t had the heart to go through and cull until now. Unfortunately it needed to be done, I wasn’t able to find anything (where is my birth certificate?) and I kept stumbling upon things randomly that made my heart sink (oh, here’s my father’s death certificate! sigh…). I’ve now got all the vital documents sorted out and filed, threw away loads of junk and no longer have bags of books littering the floor of my bedroom closet, everything has a shelf. I then moved on to my piles of stuffed toys, thinking that I didn’t actually need over 100 beanie babies (certainly not ALL of them are important to me!) but quickly stopped my purge there, I can’t part with them right now, and parting with things prematurely will only hurt. Clothes are next on my list, I don’t have much that I don’t wear anymore, but now that winter is wrapping up (snowstorm this evening notwithstanding) it’s time to go through my closet and take inventory of what I actually wore this year, and what I’ll probably never touch again.

The purge extended beyond physical things though, and made it onto my wordpress blog, which is about as stripped down as I ever see myself going with a blog ever. My mirrored livejournal has similarly undergone transformation, as has twitter. Catch a theme yet? Bright and simple. Here’s to new beginnings!

Filed under: life
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