September 8th Ubuntu Global Jam at the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco

Thursday, Aug 30th, 2012 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

Last year, prior to the Natty release, I headed up to BerkeleyLUG to host an Ubuntu Global Jam event focused on testing, I wrote about it here: Berkeley Natty Global Jam. It was a lot of fun and at the time I was really just helping people go through some basic Xubuntu testing documents and hadn’t yet gotten familiar with any form of the ISO Tracker.

This time I plan on being even more organized and have a more structured event. I sent a mail to the Ubuntu-QA list earlier this month asking for some advice on what to bring and have since fleshed out more ideas. Plus, instead of hanging out in a pizzeria we’ll have a more formal venue this time around. I met Andrew White, one of the IT Directors of the Wikimedia Foundation, at a BALUG meeting last week and he got us set us up at the Wikimedia Foundation office in downtown San Francisco!

Three Types of Strawberry Jam photo by Migle Seikyte, CC BY-SA

As the date approaches I hope to post more details about what I’m bringing and I’ll do a wrap-up post afterwords that I’ll be sharing so we can hopefully make it easier to host events like this in the future.

Happen to be in San Francisco next weekend? Join us! Event details:

Date: Saturday, September 8, 2012
Time: Noon – 4PM
Location: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 149 New Montgomery St, Floor 6, San Francisco, CA 94105
Cost: Free (I’ll be paying for the food out of pocket)

For this event we will be focusing on ISO testing.

What is ISO testing?

Disk images for the upcoming Ubuntu release, 12.10, need to be tested throughout the development cycle and bugs filed. You can do LiveCD tests, install tests on hardware, install tests in virtual machines and application testing. In the first hour or so we will teach you how to run the tests and then how to report the bugs.

I’ll bring some testing handouts, copies of the latest working versions of the daily images on DVDs and USB sticks, a spindle of blank DVDs and the iso files themselves in case we need more.

If you wish to do testing, you will need to bring a laptop which can boot from DVD or USB and do one or all of the following: LiveCD testing, test installs on the laptop hardware itself or tests on virtual machines.

If you don’t want to do testing at the event itself or don’t have a laptop you can bring, you’re welcome to join us to just learn about the tools used for testing and eat some pizza.

RSVP here: http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/ubuntu-california/1918/detail/

If you have trouble logging in to RSVP (or don’t have/want a Launchpad account) please just let me know you’re coming so I can give the folks at Wikimedia an accurate attendee count prior to the event.

We will be ordering cheese, veggie and meat pizzas to arrive around 1:30, so please let me know if you have any further dietary restrictions/preferences.

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

Some *nix events and an evening at the SF Zoo

Monday, Aug 20th, 2012 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

While Matti was in town we ended up at brunch one morning talking some about Tom Limoncelli’s excellent Time Management for System Administrators book, so I ended up rereading it last week. I’ve actually adopted a lot of the things discussed in the book, but I still have work to do when it comes to handling email efficiently. And as good as I am with time management at work, this week I’m also going to attempt to schedule some of my projects at home, errands and gym visits a bit better so I can get an idea of how much highly productive time I really have after work (I seem to be quite delusional about this).

On Wednesday morning I got up at 8AM for the latest Xubuntu project meeting (minutes here). It was a good meeting, we’ve actually got a marketing blueprint now and progress is finally being made on our documentation rewrite (Pasi Lallinaho writes about it here: Working on the Xubuntu documentation rewrite). I’m also in the process of planning an Ubuntu Global Jam here in San Francisco on Saturday, September 8th, where we’ll be doing QA ISO and application testing (and training for that testing) for Xubuntu.

Wednesday evening I headed out to Noisebridge for their weekly Linux night. Spent some time debugging some gremliny wifi issues and had some nice chats with a few of the regular attendees.

Thursday was BayLISA and for the first time it was up here in San Francisco rather down in Silicon Valley! It was hosted at Joyent, within easy walking distance from where I live. The topic as advertised was “Solaris Themes” and as the updates for the event came in it was clear that they were narrowing in on a specific variant of open source Solaris derivative, SmartOS. I knew nothing about SmartOS when I walked in, but when I walked out I wanted to go home and play with it. It’s a hypervisor that’s small enough to run in memory (after booting off a USB stick or PXE) and uses ZFS and Zones to house the VMs. Suddenly I felt embarrassed about running all my VMs on top of full Debian installs (even if they are pretty stripped down!). Slides and the full video of the talks on UStream are available over on the SmartOS blog: BayLISA Visits Joyent.

Friday night I headed to the San Francisco Zoo!

They were hosting their Noc’Tails event, the first public after-hours event. I’ve long wanted to see them open later, at least for special events, so I jumped at the opportunity to attend this even though I didn’t manage to find someone to bring along with me. The first interesting thing on the list for me was visiting the aye-ayes! In spite of my many trips to the zoo, I didn’t even realize they were there. Apparently during regular days they have scheduled times for tours. Being one of the earlier arrivals for the event, I ended up getting a private tour. It was quite dark, so you first sit for a few minutes to let your eyes adjust to the light, and then slowly you start seeing movement in the direction of where the aye-ayes live. Once adjusted it’s still a bit hard to see them, but there is no mistaking those eyes or the big tail.

Couldn’t take a picture of the aye-ayes, but here’s an aye-aye painted on the column outside their exhibit!

The only part of the zoo open for this event was the primate area, so I spent the rest of my stay there hanging out with the monkeys and lemurs.

I did have my headset for music, but I left before the actual dancing and “party” portion of the event. I really was there to see the critters and having gone on my own I didn’t feel very compelled to stay for more than a couple hours.

Before catching the MUNI Metro home, I walked up to the beach to enjoy some of the sunset.

More photos (more monkeys!) are up here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157631128784850/

Matti was in town through Saturday and I spent much of the weekend in project, study and research mode. I don’t know that I actually managed to make my todo list smaller but I did make progress on several things. I’m happy to say that all pending maintenance work on my servers (even the CentOS one) is now complete and I got a development version of the LoCo Team Portal with Django running on my desktop (which was no small feat since I’m running 12.04 and the production site is on 10.04, we had to s/python2.6/python2.7 everywhere and one of the devs had to put in a patch to fix the enviornment). I’m working to pin down a location for a San Francisco Ubuntu Global Jam which will focus on QA testing of ISOs and applications for Ubuntu 12.10 (which is amusing, since I’ve said in the past “I hate testing”). I also got a number of errands and house tasks done.

This week I’m planning on heading out to BALUG on Tuesday and down to Mountain View on Thursday for their Ubuntu Hour – which fortunately for once doesn’t conflict with BayLISA! It’ll be great to see all the Mt View Ubuntu folks again. I have a lot on my plate right now, but I’m making a serious effort to get out of the condo each day even if it’s just to go to the gym. As much as I love working from home and really want to use all the time I have project-wise, I’m much happier and have more energy if I break up the day by getting out for a couple hours each evening.

Filed under: animals, computers, events, life, san francisco

Outside Lands Festival 2012

Thursday, Aug 16th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

This past weekend I took Friday off from work and MJ, his friend Matti who is in town visiting and I headed over to Outside Lands 2012 for the 3 day music festival. We took public transit most of the weekend, piling on to the overflowing MUNI Metro to get across town each day, so that certainly was an interesting beginning to our weekend adventure.

As for the festival, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not really my thing. The attendance estimate was 65 thousand people, which is quite the crowd! And while I enjoy music, I find my attention waivers for bands I’m not all that familiar with. Fortunately we timed each day well so we didn’t spend an overwhelming amount of time there each day and were able to see the bands we wanted. First up that I wanted to see on Friday was the Foo Fighters!

Saturday’s big draw for me was Metallica. I’m not a metal fan, but I have a soft spot for Metallica, and a friend of mine who is into metal sent me piles of music that led me to have a greater appreciation for it, and we went to see both Iron Maiden and Trans-Siberian Orchestra live, both of which put on spectacularly theatrical shows. Seeing Metallica was a pretty big deal, and their show was great. And it had fire. And fireworks.

Plus, San Francisco’s Golden Gate park is a fog machine so their laser show looked awesome:

We spent the most time at the festival on Sunday, when we arrived in time to see performances from Franz Ferdinand, Regina Spektor and Jack White, all of whom I knew exactly one song from but we hung out in the concert field and enjoyed the music… and food:

I swear that funnel cake was the worst thing I ate all weekend! I only managed to finish half of it and my stomach was angry at me for it later, but it was so good.

The last performer of the evening on the big stage was the legendary Stevie Wonder. I didn’t quite realize how many hits he had until he got up on stage and started rattling them off. It was very cool to see him live.

As the evening wore down we also caught a bit of Skrillex, but exhaustion had crept in for me by then and we called it a night pretty quickly and headed home.

More photos from the weekend here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157631020948548/

It was quite an interesting experience to see so many people gathered in Golden Gate Park for such a big event, and I’m very glad we were able to attend this year.

Filed under: events, san francisco

San Francisco Ubuntu Hour and Debian Dinner Wrap-up

Friday, Aug 10th, 2012 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

On Wednesday night I hosted an Ubuntu Hour and Debian Dinner in downtown San Francisco.

We have our Ubuntu Hours here in San Francisco once a month, and it was November of 2010 that I decided to start tacking on a Bay Area Debian Dinner every other month at a restaurant across the street. Over the past couple of years it’s been interesting to see the crossover between the two meetups and how the success of the Debian Dinners has actually bolstered attendance at the Ubuntu Hours. There tends to be a lot of overlap between the two distributions, and it’s common for conversations to spill over between the two events.

This month we were happy to have good turnouts for both, 7 people coming to the Ubuntu Hour.

And 10 to the Debian dinner!

Thanks to everyone who came out, it was great to see some new faces, made for a fun evening!

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

Recent Partimus work

Thursday, Aug 9th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last Friday Christian Einfeldt put a call out to the Partimus Discussion list asking for some help moving the laptop donation from Intuit from his office (where they were delivered) to the school. I volunteered.

I picked up Christian around 12:30 at the KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy and drove out to his office. The laptop boxes were huge, and I think we bent the laws of physics in our efforts to get them into our 2-door car along with 2 flat panel monitors and the cart we used to carry them.

The laptops are all Thinkpads, a mix of X61s and T43s. The hardware could do with some cleaning up due to some dust buildup, but it should be no problem to get Ubuntu running on them. I grabbed two of them to give to James Howard who is working on setting up an imaging server using Ubuntu 12.04 rather than the old 10.04 which we’re still using on many of the systems at the schools, free education on free software!

I took a quick picture of the two laptops while they were staying at my home this week:

After dropping the laptops off at Creative Arts Charter School we ordered a pizza and headed back to KIPP. At KIPP we finished running the ethernet cables and applying updates to the Ubuntu 10.04 systems in a 5th grade math classroom. I was delighted to learn that the computers in that room are in part being used to view Khan Academy Math videos.

It was 5PM by the time we finished running the cables and doing the system updates and we had to leave the building. In all a very productive day. Christian also wrote about it over on the Partimus blog, along with work last weekend that I couldn’t help with (other obligations last Saturday): 30 hours of work in just a few days.

Filed under: partimus, tech, ubuntu planet

Simcoe’s August Checkup

Thursday, Aug 9th, 2012 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

On July 28th we brought Simcoe in for her quarterly checkup, the last one was on April 28th (I wrote about it here).

Just as with last time, Simcoe has been responding well to the CRF treatment. No unusual behavior activity-wise, vomiting has not been frequent and we were hopeful that she’d put on even more weight.

The physical exam went well, except disappointment from the vet that she couldn’t obtain a urine sample. We learned she is up to 9 pounds! Up from 8.1 last time. 9 pounds is her healthy weight so this is great news.

Last Tuesday we got the blood work back:

BUN: 45 (normal range: 14-36)
CRE: 2.6 (normal range: .6-2.4)

BUN went down since last time (was 55) and CRE has gone up a tad, previously at 2.3. Her phosphorous levels remain within normal ranges and her red blood count looks good. We then booked an appointment for the following Saturday to bring her in for the urine analysis, which we were happy she cooperated with this time and we were able to be out of the vet in under a half hour. This Tuesday the vet called us with preliminary results and recommended that we do a further culture to rule out some protein issues that the preliminary results were hinting at, so we ordered that test too. Happily we got the results back today and everything looks good!

She continues to be picky about her food. While at the vet we took the opportunity to pick up a few more cans of prescription wet food to see if we could find one that she would eat. We’ve relied upon US Canned Cat Food Data on Tanya’s Comprehensive Guide to Feline Chronic Kidney Disease site to pick a variety of low phosphorus over the counter canned foods so she keeps eating. We did have to switch her dry food a couple months ago, since that is still a bulk of what she eats and she stopped eating the Purina NF Kidney Function Feline Formula, she’s now on the Prescription Diet k/d Feline Renal Health.

Simcoe acting like her normal self, preventing me from reading

We’re very glad to have such good news all around. The vet recommended that we do another checkup in 3-4 months to make sure she stays on track.

Filed under: simcoe

Since Portlands

Saturday, Aug 4th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

It was pretty cool visiting both Portlands in July, but it sure managed to make my July fly by. I can’t believe it’s August already.

At work I recently published 5 things about FOSS Linux virtualization you may not know following up with a conversation about virtualization tools I had at SCALE back in January. The most interesting bit of feedback I’ve gotten from this article was from a fellow sysadmin who was tired of watching people “fall over themselves over cloud” and he was happy to see an article addressing the kind of bare-metal private clusters that he’s still deploying. I have to admit being in some agreement there, cloud is cool and I’m excited about the developments in open source in this area, but business is still booming in the VMWare world.

I sadly have to admit falling behind on the Cryptography Coursera class, July was too busy and quite honestly I want practical usage and theory of cryptography, not the mathematical and theoretical foundation that will prepare me to write my own ciphers. Instead, at MJ’s recommendation, I’ve started watching the 4 part “Theory and Practice of Cryptography” series of Google Tech Talks from 2007 and they’ve turned out to be much more on target (available here: 1, 2, 3 and 4). I did start another Coursera class, this time Internet History, Technology, and Security. So far it’s been quite enjoyable, the instructor and folks he interview have a very “storytelling” format and I love that it’s filling in the gaps I have in my brain’s Internet History timeline.

The week before last, on Thursday, the alpha3 of Ubuntu was released. Given the limited availability of some of the other key Xubuntu project members, I ended up stepping up for this release with testing and making sure we had everything lined up for the Xubuntu alpha3. It was an interesting experience, and certainly closer than I’d been in the past to the release process. That Friday was System Administrator Appreciation Day and a member of one of the teams who uses a server I manage was generous enough to paypal me some money for flowers as a thank you! They were very nice flowers:

Sysadmin flowers!

Over the weekend one of my cousins was in town for the San Francisco Marathon, which she’d be running with her brother, who’s a local. We ended up meeting up a couple times, Saturday for dinner and then Sunday after the race to head out to the pool for a couple hours. It was really nice to catch up with her, and I really should see about spending more time with my local cousin too!

I spent a considerable amount of time this week catching up on projects and apparently giving myself even more work (todo list hasn’t shrunk!) but I’m feeling good about the progress. I finally got back to my gym routine this week after lots of traveling and being otherwise busy (so I had lots of excuses, bad bad).

On Tuesday evening I went to a Long Now talk by Cory Doctorow on “The Coming Century of War Against Your Computer” (summary and audio download available in that link) which was a really interesting talk. It also started off with the fun San Francisco [TBS@USA 13/13] video from a little drone flying all over San Francisco.

Cory Doctorow and Stewart Brand at Long Now Seminar

As far as upcoming stuff goes, I have plans to do some Partimus work tomorrow as we just received a donation of notebooks! And while on the topic of Partimus, Robert Litt, one of the teachers we work with was recently interviewed for an article: How One Teacher Built a Computer Lab for Free.

Finally, you’re probably all sick of hearing about it, but following the O’Reilly award I was Interviewed by Muktware, an online Open Source magazine and on Thursday my boss issued a press release about it.

Filed under: life

It’s alive! Egg-Bot + Xubuntu logo

Wednesday, Aug 1st, 2012 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

I mentioned previously that the good folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories gave each of the recipients of the O’Reilly Open Source Award this year an Egg-Bot kit.

In spite of my enthusiasm, it wasn’t until Friday night that I finally carved out some time to begin assembling mine:

…and assembling…

On Saturday morning I fired up Inkscape, the loaded up the Egg-Bot Extensions and hooked it up to my netbook. I was off! …to practicing. My first couple ping pong balls are a bit messy.

I grabbed (begged) Pasi Lallinaho, the artist for the Xubuntu logo and Xubuntu project lead, away from what surely were actually important tasks for the task of creating a line-art version of the logo as an SVG so I could use it with the eggbot. I plotted it on the recommended 800×3200 SVG image, it’s available here: xubuntu-eggbot.svg.

I’ve spent time the past couple days working on getting it properly aligned and doing tests on ping pong balls to get a nice demo put together. My first logos were a bit wobbly, getting a circle right took some work.

But tonight I ended up with a pretty good one:

Video of it being created:

Direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKcKes6OidI

Much fun! I think my next experiment will be created a filled in version. Then maybe larger ones and tracking down some artists so I can make some more interesting patterns :)

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet, xubuntu

Issue 275 released, thanks Ubuntu News Team!

Wednesday, Jul 25th, 2012 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

On Monday the Ubuntu News team released the 275th issue of Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter!

I did a quick grep through the archives, and the following individuals have been included in the credits[0] since issue 250:

Chris Druif
Liraz Siri
Vikram Dhillon
Emma Marshall
Benjamin Kerensa
Unit193
Charles Profitt
Neil Oosthuizen
Nathan Dyer
Matt Rudge
Jose Antonio Rey
Jasna BenÄiÄ‡
D. Can Celasun
Mathias Hellsten
Bojan Bogdanovic
Feyisayo Akinboboye
mikewhatever
Mathias Hellsten
John Kim
Stephen Michael Kellat
Nathan Handler
Leon Marincowitz

Thanks everyone! Every article collected, summary written and grammar fix helps us get the newsletter out the door each week.

But I would like highlight the work of a couple individuals I’ve really come to depend upon each week:

Jasna BenÄiÄ‡

Jasna got involved several months ago and immediately started both adding links each week and writing summaries. More recently she’s also started helping with editorial review. I can rest assured that she will pick up articles I miss and on weeks when I’m traveling a lot we stay in touch to pick up any loose ends.

Thanks Jasna!

Matt Rudge

Matt has been a remarkably diligent and dependable editor each week. Even on weeks when we’re scrambling to meet the release-on-Monday deadline I know I can expect that wiki update email with his name attached.

Thanks Matt!

Even with these exceptional volunteers, we always need the following:

Summary writers. Summary writers receive an email every Saturday (sometimes Sunday if weâ€™re running late) with a link to the collaborative news links document for the past week which lists everything that needs summarizing. These people are vitally important to the newsletter. The time commitment is limited and it is easy to get started with from the first weekend you volunteer. No need to be shy about your writing skills, all summaries are reviewed before publishing so itâ€™s easy to improve as you go on.

Editors. Our editors receive an email every Sunday (or Monday morning, depending on our timing and your time zone) with a link to the wiki page ready to be reviewed. Editors check for grammar, spelling, formatting and other consistency issues. Good written English skills required.

Interested in either of these? Email editor.ubuntu.news@ubuntu.com and weâ€™ll get you added to the list of folks who are emailed each week and you can help as you have time. Please specify whether you are interested in summary writing or editing when you contact us.

[0] The reason we add “And many more!” at the end of each newsletter is only those who wish to be credited are listed in the credits (they add their name themselves)

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Tourist in the other Portland (Oregon)

Monday, Jul 23rd, 2012 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

After OSCON wrapped up on Friday I took the opportunity of a free afternoon to play the tourist in Portland. It occurred to me as I booked this trip that I managed to visit both Portlands this month, this one had less lobster though. And I will take this opportunity to say that I was really impressed with Portland’s (Metropolitan Area Express) Light Rail service. I had planned on taking a taxi as needed, but the light rail ended up being quite sufficient for everywhere I needed to go, from getting downtown from the airport for a reasonable fee ($2.40) to getting to the conference each day (which was free!).

My first stop after getting back to the hotel was Voodoo Doughnut, which I’d heard all about from friends who had visited Portland.

I waited in line for about a half hour to get my precious few doughnuts, but it was worth it for the adventure and the delicious treats that result (like this guy). Writing about it now makes me want more.

I dropped off the box at my hotel and then went off to the next destination on my list, Powell’s Books. I didn’t actually know about this place until I came to Portland, and then was delighted to learn that their massive bookstore was just a couple blocks from my hotel. The bookstore was wonderful. I ended up with several books from their main store, and then went across the street to Powell Books 2 (formerly Powell’s Technical books) to enjoy a paradise of Science, Computer and Engineering books, including a whole section for trains (which includes street cars and cable cars!), I thought I would never leave, but I did… with some books about trains, street cars and cable cars.

Dinner was some slices from Sizzle Pie (conveniently located near the hotel).

The next day I met up with my friend B.J. Brown. I met B.J. online via a Mystery Science Theater 3000 IRC chat we both belonged to, so we’ve probably known each other for over 10 years, this was the first time we had the opportunity to meet in person.

Our first stop was a Rogue Ale House. There is also one in San Francisco, but this is a Rogue in Oregon, where Rogue was born! We both ordered a sampler to go along with our lunch, I predictably went very hoppy with the exception of the Dead Guy Ale, which is a long time favorite.

After lunch we hopped on the MAX and headed out to the Oregon Zoo.

I didn’t know much about the zoo when I arrived, but it turned out to be one of the better ones I’ve been to. The layout was quite natural and I really loved their whole “Great Northwest” section.

The weather was nice, but the temperature crept up as the afternoon wore on and I think a lot of the animals ended up hiding. No lions or tigers to be seen! They were also closing early for an event, so I only got a quick look at one of their elephants and we had to skip the zoo train, a 35 minute trip around the zoo and surrounding park. I was very happy that B.J. was willing to put up with my zoo dorkiness, we ended up having a great time.

We wrapped up at the zoo and headed back downtown to meet up with another friend I’ve known online for many years, Chris LaPlante. Unfortunately by the time we met up it was getting late and we only really had time for him to drive me to the airport. Even so, we had a good half hour to talk and that was fun.

More photos from my trip are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157630699644634/

And that ended my short Portland trip! I hope to go back at some point, it’s a nice city and there is more downtown to check out, plus OSCON will be there again and I would like to attend again in the future, perhaps for a whole week next time.

Filed under: animals, beer, travel

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