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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

Philadelphia Bug Jam!

Monday, Feb 23rd, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Saturday the Philadelphia team of Ubuntu US Pennsylvania hosted our BugJam. PLUG member Art Alexion graciously offered us space at Resources for Human Development in great room with wired connections for the event, and access to a kitchen for our goodies.

People started arriving around noon and we got things set up, retrieved the Oreo Cake and sticky buns donated by Pechter’s Bread. We started things off pretty socially, answering basic questions and getting everyone online, with launchpad accounts. I had drafted up some handouts the night before and Jim Fisher supplied a bunch of printouts of the bug workflow charts. When people were finally settled in Connor Imes did a short presentation tour of the important Wiki pages and basics on how to find and handle bugs.

More photos were posted on our gallery: http://gallery.ubuntupennsylvania.org/main.php?g2_itemId=523.

We spent until 6PM there, a six hours that went by far more quickly than any of us had anticipated. All told, we had 9 people show up, 7 who were able to attend for the entire BugJam. We even saw some new faces, which is always a delight.

Great event! Awesome work everyone!

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

Extending London trip for UKUUG Spring Conference!

Monday, Feb 16th, 2009 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

As I’ve mentioned, earlier this year I decided to skip over to London for a week. After sorting out my plans to visit from March 14-22 I learned about the UKUUG Spring Conference from March 24-26, and perhaps more importantly, I learned about the conference bursaries. I put off ordering my plane tickets and checked with my boss to confirm that I could extend my trip if I was sponsored for the conference, got his go ahead, and applied.

I learned today that my application was accepted! Wow! Saying I’m excited doesn’t even begin to cover it, and while reviewing the topics today my boss said “where is my passport? I want to go.” Suffice to say, the topics are right up our alley at work and I’ll be taking lots of notes to bring back home.

Decided to purchase my plane tickets for March 14-29th, so I will be flying out late on Saturday 14th for an overnight flight and coming back Sunday afternoon on the 29th. I still need to sort out how to get there/back from the Philadelphia airport, what I’m doing with the cats (Michael wants to look after them, as usual, but settlement on the house is during that time so it might be tricky/impossible) and there some transportation logistics once I’m there to work out. But in all, things are coming together nicely, it should be a fantastic trip, and I’m delighted that I can take a full two weeks for my first overseas trip.

Yay!!! :)

Filed under: computers, plug, travel, ubuntu planet

UCP, US Teams, Ubuntu BugJam in Philly

Saturday, Feb 7th, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

As many of my local friends can attest, I spent much of my January as a bit of a hermit. I made it out for a PLUG North meeting (great talk on zsh by Paul Snyder), but otherwise spent a lot of time hanging in. February is shaping up to be a more active month.

I rang in February in Baltimore, where I was spending a weekend at an Ubuntu Certified Professionals course redevelopment sprint. I was able to meet Belinda Lopez and Nick Barcet from Canonical, as well as Adam Sommer (The Awesome), Dan Trevino, and others who were a real pleasure to work with. The weekend was a lot of fun, and hopefully just as productive :)

Wednesday night I headed down to the city for a PLUG Central meeting, where there was a talk on clustering and Lustre. Thursday evening I had dinner with a friend at Blue Pacific down in King of Prussia. Friday I had dinner with a former co-worker at Michael’s Deli in King of Prussia (diner+great beer, yay!) and then got home a bit late for another USTeams Meeting in #ubuntu-us. We defined the mentor qualifications for the team and the board will accept volunteers for the mentor positions soon. We’re continuing to move forward with revitalizing the team, I have a few tasks on my plate that I hope to get to this afternoon. Plus we were able to take some time to talk to a couple Global Bug Jam events that US teams are holding.

Finally, the Ubuntu Pennsylvania team has an event of our own planned in Philadelphia for the Global Bug Jam! We’ll be hosting it on Saturday, February 21, 2009 from noon-6PM, after which we’ll head out for optional dinner and beers.

Filed under: events, philadelphia, plug, ubuntu planet

Going International!

Saturday, Jan 24th, 2009 by pleia2 | 6 Comments

Every year the world seems smaller to me. Since I got online in ’98 I’ve had friends all over the world, but I think I’ve just gotten more involved with people worldwide, become more conscious of conferences I want to attend, things happening that I’d like to see and getting to know more people I’d like to meet sometime. For a long time I’ve been saying “I will travel more!” but so many things got in the way, whether it was work, money, life events or something else.

Last year I decided to not let this happen anymore. I finally got a passport and I started traveling more, and by taking some long weekends throughout the year I had a great traveling year outside of Pennsylvania:

  • Arlington, Virginia (weekend, D&D Experience)
  • San Francisco, California (long weekend, visited Google, went on a Sonoma County wine tour)
  • Washington DC (weekend, Smithsonians, Zoo)
  • Niagara Falls, Canada (long weekend 4th of July, my first time ever out of the US)
  • New York City, New York (weekend, HOPE conference)
  • Orlando, Florida (funeral, visiting family)

And even within Pennsylvania I finally hit several of the landmarks in Philadelphia, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Mutter Museum, Eastern State Penitentiary, Academy of Natural Sciences. WIthin Pennsylvania I finally wandered all around Lancaster and finally tasted shoo-fly pie, headed up to the Crayola Factory in Easton, went to the Pioneer Tunnel Coal Mine in Ashland, and went on a wine and cheese train ride at the East Stroudsburg Railroad. I finished off the year on New Years watching a giant fiberglass Peep drop in Bethlehem.

This year? Going international, but first I reviewed things in the past that made things so difficult.

Money. Always troublesome, but I’ve cut back in other places to afford trips, and while on trips kept to a strict budget. When it came down to it, I would rather go somewhere and be thrifty than not go at all. I really do know people all over the world, and I know loads of welcoming people who have extended the “If you’re ever in town and need a place to stay…” invite, which helps tremendously with expenses.

Work. I have a stable job with 2 weeks of vacation time, and now only my own work schedule to plan around. Plus, there is a chance I can go to a conference or two this year if I can prove it’s beneficial to my work (woo paid time off!). Ultimately I would like to have a job where I could work from anywhere anytime, I really envy the folks who have such flexibility. Even if I had to work 8 hours each day, I would love to do it telecommuting from a broadband connection in Belgium, Singapore or Peru and use the other 16 hours of my day and weekends to sleep and visit attractions.

Life Events. There is no avoiding these. I have lost three close family members in the past 5 years, and since I have to travel each time to see family it typically ate into my vacation time. All I can do is hope for the best and make the most of it when they happen.

So, with January almost over and all these grand plans in my head, where am I planning to head off to first?

For a week, from March 14-22 I’ll be visiting London!

And later this year? Lots of thoughts, keeping an eye out for Ubuntu Developers Summit locations and probably will do some more Europe traveling. Hoping firm up plans in the next few months.

Filed under: events, philadelphia, travel

New bike tire for trainer, tircd and rearranging desk

Saturday, Jan 10th, 2009 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

I didn’t get out much this week, ended up skipping PLUG on Wednesday when the weather got icy in my neck of the woods, and then Thursday I skipped movie plans with a friend after a tiring work day and need for an early start on Friday.

I did get some stuff done this week though. Finally managed to get down to Tailwind Bicycles to get a back tire for Nessy so I could use it on the trainer. They were very very helpful, showing me how to change the tire so I could do it myself next time, hurrah! Now I have it back home and all set up.

Yesterday I learned about tircd from Mike Greb. Back when I started using Twitter I used it with the official bot in bitlbee, so it all was great with my IRC-centric workflow. Then the twitterbot died and I’ve spent months fiddling with other clients, twhirl for a while, twitbin, then settling upon gwibber – until one of the dependencies broke in the PPA for hardy and made it unusable without snagging packages from Intrepid. So I was pretty excited when I learned I could get twitter back in IRC, so I installed it on r2b1 alongside Bitlbee, opened up the firewall to my server and connected my irc client to twit.cause.a.t.rainwreck.com (yes, there has to be a new subdomain for every service I run) and now I have tweets in IRC again.

I also rearranged my desk last night. I was getting tired of having the printer, test machine and firewall on the top of my desk taking up precious space. So I piled them all nicely on top of each other with my desktop and sparc and ran power and ethernet wires into my closet to power the printer which now lives in there. I still need another extension cord to get rid of that hanging power strip (nice huh?) but it’s much more workable than it was. The extra desk space is very nice.

And this weekend I’m hanging in. Working on some project stuff, hanging out with my kitties, chatting with a friend. It’s been snowy out today too, love snow, I think I’ll go make some hot chocolate.

Filed under: computers
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