Tourist in Hong Kong

Tuesday, Nov 5th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

This week I’m in Hong Kong! It’s my first time in Asia so I wanted to make sure I got some tourist time in. I arrived via a Singapore airline flight on Sunday and spent the day catching up on some things and attempting to stay awake so I could adjust to the time zone. Sunday evening I met up with some of my colleagues for dinner and we made plans to go down to Kowloon on Monday.

A rainy Monday arrived as I met several colleagues for breakfast before splitting off into groups to head out for the day. I went out with Khai Do, Clark Boylan and Ghe Rivero down to Kowloon to check out their electronics street market.

I didn’t buy anything, but I did learn about the popularity of dashboard mounted cameras here. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen one prominently for sale in the US but they were everywhere we looked in the market. While we were wandering around the street markets I let my travel companions know of my quest for the day: tourist trinkets, post cards and to eat an egg custard (MJ told me I had to try one while I was in Hong Kong!).

First up was the egg custard, which didn’t disappoint:

We then hopped back on the subway and headed over to Hong Kong Central for my tourist goodies. While we were there we also found Ice House Street, for which the next OpenStack release is named after. We got the obligatory photo-near-the-sign (thanks to Ghe for taking our photo):

I found my post cards and tourist trinkets there and we spent a lot of time walking around Central (my Fitbit tells me we walked about 5 miles before going back to the hotel) and finally settled on a place to eat. I went with the soy chicken and rice and realized I’m terribly spoiled by boneless meat I usually have in Chinese food at home. Bone in is much trickier to eat! But the meal was enjoyable and really hit the spot after all the walking in the hot, soggy weather.

We wrapped up lunch around 2PM and headed back to the hotel and expo center, arriving just in time for the opening of summit registration at 3PM. I then swung by my room quickly to drop off my conference goodies before taking the train back down to Hong Kong Central for a Women of OpenStack boat tour of the harbor.

Unfortunately the rain had picked up a bit by the evening and we ended up with quite the soggy and choppy boat ride, but the boat was very cool and I had some nice conversations, in spite of my shyness.

The evening wrapped up with all of us heading to a small bar where we enjoyed small plates and drinks before splitting off for the evening. And that wrapped up my day! The rest of this week will be spent on the OpenStack Summit. I then have Saturday and much of Sunday to squeeze some more tourist stuff in before I fly home, I’d love to see the Tian Tan Buddha and if the weather cooperates it’s terribly tempting to go to Disneyland.

Filed under: food, travel

Cinematic Titanic, classes & events and upcoming travel

Thursday, Oct 31st, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

It’s been a busy month. Fortunately in that time my ankle has pretty much healed from the sprain I got last month and I plan on heading back to the gym full force soon.

I realized that I never mentioned it here, but I was interviewed on a podcast earlier in the month about Xubuntu, available here: Frostcast Episode 084. While the 13.10 release for Xubuntu didn’t quite make a big splash feature-wise, it was great talking about some of the work we did this cycle around XMir testing.

On October 19th I had the pleasure of going with my friend Steve (recently imported from Boston) to see a Cinematic Titanic double feature, which was sadly part of their farewell tour. It was a fun night and as Steve and I met in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 chat room years ago so it felt fitting as our first adventure together in this city since his move.

I also began taking an Islam and Judaism Course at the synagogue this month. Unfortunately of the six classes I’ve only been able to attend two so far and will attend the final one in a couple weeks, but it’s still been a fascinating class given my very limited knowledge of Islam. I missed the class that talked about the holy books specifically so I might need to do a bit more reading myself about the Quran (of which I’m now the proud owner of a copy of).

Last week I ended up with a cold that slowed me down for a few days, but after recovering over the weekend I was able to spend this week running around to events in the evenings. Monday it was off to the CNET offices to hear Lavabit’s Ladar Levison talk about the actions by the FBI that led up to him shutting down the Lavabit email service. Story-wise it was very similar to his recounting for NANOG earlier in the month that MJ attended (video here, worth the watch!), but it was good to get out and I had some interesting conversations that night. Tuesday as the Islam & Judaism class and then last night I attended an event put on by Double Union, the new feminist hackerspace opening up here in San Francisco. There were a lot of interesting topics throughout the night, and although I long ago realized that my own feminism is much more passive than that of many of these strong women at these events, I’m always happy to see folks working for equality.

Tonight, on Halloween, I’m staying in. I finished off the 13th episode of the Hammer House of Horror television series that I had expected to really campy, but turned out to actually be quite well-paced and good, particularly for a series produced in 1980. I’ve also spent some time lately going through the classic Doctor Who episodes on Netflix. Like many casual fans my age, I’ve seen all the new episodes, but my classic Doctor Who exposure came from the late night runs on PBS channels, and in my case my father’s interest in the show when I was young (hello Dalek nightmares as a kid!). As such I don’t remember a lot and I lack continuity. It’s been interesting watching the sampling of shows on Netflix in order, and setting me up for exploring beyond their collection in the future.

In free moments I’ve been making time for reading more. Carrying around my NOOK in my purse even when I don’t plan on reading has led to me reading things I want to rather than idlying checking Facebook/Twitter/G+ during spare moments, which has been a healthy change. My stack of magazines has a nice dent in it too, I hope to improve that further on some upcoming flights. I’ve also been watching the fascinating lectures from A Brief History of Humankind by Dr. Yuval Noah Harari. I’ll be loading up the ones I don’t finish onto my tablet to take along on my trip to Hong Kong.

Which brings me to Hong Kong! I’m leaving for the OpenStack Design Summit tomorrow night. It will be my first time in Asia so I’m really looking forward to it, even if there is some “new place” stress building up. I got a direct San Francisco to Hong Kong flight that will take about 15 hours, putting me in Hong Kong on Sunday morning. I have plans lined up for much of the time prior to the summit, which starts on Tuesday, including a Women of OpenStack boat tour on Monday. Here’s hoping the other-side-of-the-world jet lag doesn’t hit me too hard.

Finally, I’ve also booked my trip to Perth for linux.conf.au in January. In another first, this will be my first time in Australia. I’ll be speaking on Wednesday on Systems Administration in the Open and have also submitted proposals for short talks to two of the miniconfs on Monday and Tuesday so I can make the most of my trip there.

And now, time to finish up laundry and get packing!

Filed under: books, events, life, spirituality, xubuntu

ZHackers in the Ubuntu Software Center

Friday, Oct 25th, 2013 by pleia2 | 6 Comments

Last week I was approached by the author of the ZHackers series, David Jordan, to see if I wanted to review volumes 1 and 2 in preparation for the release of volume 2 in the Ubuntu Software Center. With his promise of “It’s got awesome geeks of both genders as well as downloading the linux kernel for the purpose of surviving the zombie apocalypse” how could I resist? He sent copies my way and I loaded the duo up on my NOOK.

They were both a lot of fun. I was very amused to see that the story takes place on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I just spoke for a conference. It was amusing to watch the characters navigate the reality of a zombie outbreak, as they are all aware of zombie popular culture and made many references to it, particularly during their struggle to convince people that it was real and in making plans (don’t go to the grocery store!). I absolutely did appreciate the geekiness of the volumes too, they’re using Ubuntu and have a very college geek way of handling themselves so I often found myself saying “why on earth would they…? Actually, that’s what I’d expect from college geeks.”

However it’s good to be aware that they aren’t complete stories, volume 1 will leave you wondering what happens next in volume 2 which continues the story, and volume 2 does the same. I did find some minor grammatical issues which made me wish the book had a bug tracker (hey, it’s a .deb!) but reporting directly to the author via email was easy enough. I’d also mention that as a geek I appreciated the technical references, and some were explained, but my average cousin wouldn’t know what to make of the phrase “Daniel logged off of IRC” even though it’s obvious to me.

You can purchase both volumes via the Ubuntu Software Center:

And they are generously licensed Creative Commons – Attribution Share Alike, so you can share with your friends!

It was also cool to see that volume 2 came with some bonus features, including a 3D version of the cover and a short story. It got me thinking a bit more about self-publishing in the Ubuntu Software Center and how it’s been opening doors for niche authors and given opportunity to expand content that’s shipped with an ebook.

Filed under: books, tech, ubuntu planet

A Little San Francisco 13.10 Release Party

Friday, Oct 18th, 2013 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

I was finally in my home city of San Francisco for an Ubuntu release (why are Octobers so crazy?) so I was able to put together a small event for the release of Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander).

The night before I pulled out the nail polish and nail decals from System76 to get into the spirit of things.

At 6:30 I arrived at Panera Bread to get set up.

I brought along my pair of salamanders, one of which would be auctioned off, I also brought along a copy of the Official Ubuntu Book to give away.

In all we had 5 total attendees, which made for the smallest turnout I’ve ever had for a release party, but made for a great number for conversation. I was able to show off the features of the new Smart Scopes in Unity on my laptop and verbally share some updates from the world of Xubuntu. We also got to learn about some of the latest improvements in MoinMoin from a developer who joined us and about some of the other recent projects being worked on by attendees.

Saucy got a birthday cupcake

It was also great to see interest in the Ubuntu Phone from a couple of folks who happened to be having coffee nearby. They asked us about the progress of the Ubuntu Phone codebase (released today!) and we commiserated over the inability of Ubuntu Edge to reach the funding goal.

For 14.04 we hope to do something bigger, we’re seeking to partner with one of the many businesses in the area tat use Ubuntu to do more hands on demos and more formal demonstration of the new features. Stay tuned for updates on that coming in the spring.

Filed under: events, LoCo, san francisco, tech, ubuntu planet

Code Review for Sysadmins talk at BALUG

Friday, Oct 18th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On the heels of my trip to Illinois to speak at ACM Reflections | Projections on building a career in open source, I had the opportunity on Tuesday to speak at the Bay Area Linux Users Group (BALUG) on the system the OpenStack Infrastructure team uses to do systems administration. It was a happy coincidence to be the presenter on Ada Lovelace Day and gave me a fine opportunity to promote the work of the Ada Initiative.

The talk was an updated version of the one I gave at OSCON in July (video here). I was able to update the talk to include our use of gearman and multiple jenkinses, elasticsearch, the new git.openstack.org and some of the latest things I’ve learned as we continue to refine our infrastructure and ability to share it with other projects and organizations.

It was also great to have an engaging audience and have my comments on the merits of code review changes to the infrastructure echoed by attendees who also have experience with it in their day jobs. There was also discussion about the general lacking of fully public, open source-based software testing in the open source community and people were quite pleased to see OpenStack leading the way here. It’s certainly something I’m proud to be a part of.

Thanks to everyone who came out!

Slides here: Code Review for Systems Administrators

Filed under: events, LUG, openstack, san francisco, tech

ACM Reflections | Projections Conference 2013 wrap-up

Wednesday, Oct 16th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last Thursday I flew out to Urbana-Champaign to speak at a conference put on by the ACM at the University of Illinois, Reflections | Projections.

On Thursday evening and Friday I was able to spend time catching up with my Ubuntu colleagues Nathan Handler, who was staff at the conference, and Paul Tagliamonte who was a fellow speaker. Friday evening wrapped up with a couple of talks.

Saturday was the big day of the conference for talks. The day started out by attending Paul Tagliamonte’s talk: Getting started with Debian development: The missing guide

It was a great exploration of some of the collective knowledge of folks in the Debian community that isn’t always fully communicated to newcomers, including exactly how the internals of uploading a package works with a look at different queues and paths in the system for finally delivering a newly uploaded package to a variety of different users.

Right after Paul’s talk I was up for my talk, A Career in Free and Open Source Software. I’m deeply passionate about open source and being able to do this for a living has made me quite happy, so I was excited about this talk and hope that my enthusiasm was recognized by the audience. Afterwards I had some great chats with attendees. There was also a section of my talk where I spoke about being shy and how important it was to attend and speak at conferences anyway, which I was delighted to hear really resonated with one of my fellow speakers.

Huge thanks to everyone who came out and also to those who asked questions throughout the talk, it’s always a pleasure to have such an engaging audience. Slides from my talk are available as .pdf here: ACM-Career_in_FOSS.pdf

After lunch we met up with a staff member to leave the conference area for a bit and head across town to visit Blue Waters, “the fastest supercomputer on a university campus anywhere in the world.” I love visiting datacenters, and visiting a supercomputer is extra fun. Most of the photos I ended up taking over the weekend were from our trip to this facility.

Meeting Blue Waters!

I was particularly impressed with their raised floor that gave staff a full 6 feet of room to work. It was also super cool to see that they were using Ubuntu in the control center:

I went to a couple more talks later in the afternoon before heading back to the hotel. The thing that really made my weekend was getting to hang out with Paul and Nathan, it was really great to see them both again and geek out over our current projects and work.

Nathan Handler, Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph, Paul Tagliamonte

Sunday morning started off with a speakers brunch before we headed back over to the conference to watch the results of the MechMania coding competition and then a final talk by Peter Norvig on The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data. I didn’t know what to expect from this talk, but was delighted as he dove into how they use data at Google to solve tough problems like identifying things (cats!) and people in photos and putting together “good enough to be very useful” translations and other tools.

As things wrapped up I was fortunate enough to be able to meet up with Wendy Edwards, who I virtually met years ago via Systers and who happens to work as a research programmer at the university. It was great to finally meet her in person and chat about our work and projects over coffee before taking a quick detour to a fantastic used book store on the way to the airport.

More photos from the weekend here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157636561910325/

Thanks again to the organizers of the conference for inviting me and putting on such a great conference.

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

Sharks, Androids and Debian

Thursday, Oct 10th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On October 10th of 2012 I embarked on my journey to Ghana. Today I was at the San Francisco airport for another trip, to Illinois, so I can speak at the ACM Projections | Reflections conference on my career in Free and Open Source. While it may not be as exotic as Africa, I am excited about this conference and my talk on Saturday.

Since the trip over my birthday weekend I’ve been keeping pretty busy. Last week a lot of Mozilla folks were in town for a Mozilla conference, so I was able to meet up with my friend Nigel Babu and convince him to get the iconic photo-with-cable-car.

I also attended my first NHL hockey game last week, on opening night for the San Jose Sharks! It was a fun evening, even if I was pretty clueless about hockey. Fortunately for me, the rules are pretty simple and the pace of the game keeps things interesting. I’d like to go again some time, but I still prefer baseball.

More photos from the game here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157636193528914/

After the game, we made a short detour to Google so I could see the latest addition to their Android sculpture garden, the Kit Kat!

It’s also been hot. October in San Francisco is pretty much when summer hits with 80 degree weather and all of our homes without air conditioning. It gets pretty hot in our condo on these days and the ceiling fan is of little use. The roof deck has been nice lately though, so I’ve been taking chunks of time between 3PM – 8PM, when it’s the hottest in the condo to head up to the roof and work from there. The view’s nice too.

On Sunday MJ headed off to a conference, so we made the most of the weekend with a couple of nice brunches on Saturday and Sunday and generally keeping things low key. I’ve kept myself busy this week in his absence after work each day by refining my talk for Projections | Reflections, undertaking a massive organization effort in the condo (it looks so much better!) and adding too many things to my todo list (wait, shouldn’t I have been taking them off?). On Wednesday night I also hosted an Ubuntu Hour and a Bay Area Debian Dinner.

And now I’m on my flight connecting in Chicago. I’ll be at this conference through Sunday, coming home pretty late Sunday night. By Tuesday I plan on being recovered enough from the trip to do my Code Review for Systems Administrators talk at BALUG. And then? That’s my last talk until participation at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong in November!

Filed under: life, san francisco

Who is the Ubuntu Community Council?

Friday, Oct 4th, 2013 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

As we come up on just a few more days left to submit nominations for the Ubuntu Community Council, I thought I’d take a few minutes to write about my experiences on the council for the past 4 years (and 2 more if you’ll have me!) and why I highly encourage others to nominate themselves of folks in the community who they feel are qualified.

First up, here’s the call for nominations, for context: Community Council Call for Nominations

For this nominations call I grabbed FAQ I received during the last nomination period 2 years ago and I am hopeful that it does a decent job of setting expectations.

The Ubuntu governance page gives this description of the Community Council:

The social structures and community processes of Ubuntu are supervised by the Ubuntu Community Council. It is the Community Council that handles appointments to and elections for official project boards and councils. The council is also responsible for the Code of Conduct and tasked with ensuring that community members follow its guidelines.

The council is ultimately responsible for dispute resolution, should it be required. For example, in the past, we have helped to resolve conflicts in LoCo teams and in the Ubuntu forums – both very important parts of the community that have their own leadership structures carrying authority delegated by the Community Council.

The Community Council meets every two weeks on Internet relay chat (IRC). You can propose an item for discussion at a council meeting on the Community Council Agenda page on the Ubuntu Wiki.

Golly, impressive! But at the heart of it, we’re just community members who care about Ubuntu and the Ubuntu community and have decided to dedicate time and effort to helping both in our roles as Community Council members and in our projects in the wide Ubuntu community.

Only one of us has been to space!

We’re a mix of people’s parents, sisters, sons and spouses with jobs and very different lives, but a shared passion for Ubuntu and track record in the community. The diverse perspective of council members allows us to have great discussions (sometimes contentious, but always civil) about the direction of Ubuntu and how we can help and make ourselves available to the community through changes and announcements that come out. Among our ranks have always been a nice mix of Canonical employees and those of us employed elsewhere, members who are development-focused and not so development-focused, contributors to LoCos, marketing, translations and more.

It’s a great opportunity to work closely with these other strong community members and seek wisdom for each other. Our regular sync-ups keep each other up to date with various parts of the project and having Mark available to talk to has led to some great triage work by the council when issues do crop up.

So, want to join us? Nominations details here: Community Council Call for Nominations

Once we have collected all nominations, Mark will review them and set up a poll so all Ubuntu Members can vote.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

32nd Birthday in Squaw Valley

Thursday, Oct 3rd, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Friday MJ and I left to head toward Tahoe to spend the weekend at The Resort at Squaw Creek to celebrate my 32nd birthday on Sunday. With my still recovering sprained ankle I wasn’t as mobile as I generally like to be for a mountain adventure, but the weather was cooperating for some nice enjoyment of their heated pools and the suite we booked had a fireplace. I prepared for a weekend of recreational swimming and reading by the fireplace.

We got a late start after work on Friday night, so it was after 3AM by the time we made it to the resort. Upon arrival I promptly enjoyed 8 hours of great sleep.

Rising at noon meant it was lunch time! We headed down for lunch at Sandy’s Pub where I indulged in a steak sandwich and a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale – perhaps a boring classic, but I could resist ordering a Sierra Nevada while in the Sierra Nevadas.

Then pools!

The temperature was only in the low 60s, so it wasn’t balmy but it was quite decent for an enjoyable afternoon.

Dinner was at Six Peaks Grille where I enjoyed their scallops appetizer, the surf and turf entree and wrapped up the meal with lava cake and a very grown up hot chocolate.

Sunday was my birthday! Started off with room service pancake breakfast, then more reading and casual catching up with some Ubuntu work. I’ve been doing a lot better these past several months of taking time off when I need it, so it wasn’t stressful for me to squeeze some work in – indeed it’s gone back to being largely an enjoyable activity.

The rest of the day was more of the previous day, enjoying the pool, reading by the fire as I enjoyed the view of the mountains and the sunset. Bliss!

We checked out in the late evening and made our way to the town of Truckee where we had dinner reservations at Cottonwood Restaurant where we enjoyed another exceptional dinner. Their Caesar salad was excellent and I really enjoyed the filet I ordered. Dinner wrapped up with a birthday brownie and some decadent salted caramel ice cream.

And then it was time to head home! Wonderfully relaxing birthday weekend complete :)

Filed under: beer, events, life, travel

CodeChix OpenStack workshop wrap-up and materials

Wednesday, Sep 25th, 2013 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

As I announced in a previous post on September 22nd I ran a CodeChix workshop in Palo Alto on OpenStack.

In the weeks leading up to it I worked with my session assistants Ryan Lane and Anita Kuno to hash out our plans for the workshop. Ryan was able to put together an image for VirtualBox that had all the DevStack dependencies pre-cached, so students only needed to run stack.sh without having to download everything on the shared network.

We also drafted the following prerequisites for the class:

A laptop that has at least 2G of RAM available to allocate to a virtual machine.
At least 10G of harddrive space to allocate to disk images
VirtualBox installed
If you wish to contribute to OpenStack, a basic understanding of Python is necessary, but this class will also be useful to folks who are interested in using it

In retrospect I should have thought about system architecture as well, my assumption had been that everyone would be running 64-bit, but thankfully Anita suggested getting some 32-bit images prepped as well just in case. So Ryan, Anita and I spent Saturday evening working through final testing and spinning up of the images, and I was able to copy them down to 10 USB sticks containing 64-bit and 32-bit DevStack images to bring along to the workshop.

We arrived at the workshop venue, Groupon, around 11:30. This gave us time to scope out the room (need power strips!) and enjoy some catered lunch before attendees arrived. From noon – 1PM attendees trickled in, had lunch and we began passing around the USB sticks so everyone would have the images before we began the more formal portion of the event.

At 1PM Rupa Dachere, founder of CodeChix, kicked off the event by talking about CodeChix and what they do. She then handed things off to Shraddha Ladda who was handling coordination of this specific event so she could do introductions.

Then it was our turn! As I got my laptop set up with the projector Anita had the opportunity to talk to the attendees about the GNOME Outreach Program for Women that she participated in. I’m really glad we were able to find time for that, as several of the attendees had expressed interest in a more formal program for getting involved with OpenStack and open source in general.

Anita then passed me the mic and I did an introduction to OpenStack talk using the GenericPlatformDeckMay-23-2013.pptx slides from the openstack.org/marketing page, which worked out really well since a poll of the room only showed a couple of people really familiar with OpenStack.

Thanks to Rupa for this photo!

In addition to the images on the USB stick, attendees also got a .pdf copy of the OpenStack Operations Guide which I was able to talk about some in my presentation.

Our next step was getting everyone loaded up with their DevStack images. This is where having Ryan and Anita there with me really made a huge difference, we had a room of 50 people and a few hiccups here and there with the installs. They were able to work with attendees to get the issues quickly worked out so we could move on. It did take a while though, so I think next time I run one of these I’ll try to come up with some exercises for folks who have faster systems or didn’t run into any issues.

For the workshop I also handed out printed copies of a short documentation sheet (also a .pdf version from the USB stick): CodeChixworkshopOpenStackDocumentation.pdf

It gives some basic OpenStack Documentation links as well as the core basics of what we walked through in the class, both in the dashboard and at the command line. Attendees were able to bring up a basic VM via the dashboard and see it and the details of the VM by issuing a few basic nova commands.

Around 3:30 I wrapped up the workshop by giving a quick crash course into the Gerrit Workflow for those interested in contributing. We’re hoping to host a follow-up session in the coming months to do a more in depth dive into contributing specifically.

It was really a pleasure to present this workshop with Anita and Ryan. It was clear how much work Rupa and Shraddha put into preparation for this workshop, so I’m really thankful for their coordination. Rupa also took the time to present each of us with a beautiful personalized plaque in appreciation for our participation in the workshop – wow!