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Want some Xubuntu or Ubuntu Women stickers?

Friday, Jun 22nd, 2012 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

I have fallen in love with custom printing. Over the past several months I’ve been experimenting with several companies that do it, including CafePress, Zazzle, MOO and VistaPrint. Based on the product I want, I’ve had varied success with all of them, but for laptop stickers MOO has come out my favorite.

As such, I now have over 100 Xubuntu and Ubuntu Women stickers. I give them out at events, carried around some for the Ubuntu Developer Summit in my TARDIS laptop bag (no time traveling, but it did seem bigger on the inside, pretty much any time anyone asked me for something I was able to oblige, except for having more “I’m a Local” buttons, which I bought from Zazzle and didn’t get nearly enough of!).

Stickers in action at a San Francisco Ubuntu Hour!

Now that I have all these stickers that I’d like to share with non-local Xubuntu fans and Ubuntu Women project supporters. Just drop me an email at lyz@ubuntu.com and I’ll reply with details on how to receive a sticker or two. If you’re in the United States, I’ll reply to you with my postal address and you can send me a self-addressed stamped envelope and I’ll ship you the stickers for free. If you’re outside the United States, I’ll probably just ship them to you out of pocket.

In the email I’ll need:

  • Subject: [STICKERS]
  • Which stickers you want (Xubuntu or Ubuntu Women)
  • Quantity (1, 2, or a reason why you need more)
  • If outside the United States, a name and address to ship them to

And since people have asked… yes, I’m doing this all out of pocket and I’m a community member just like you. If you want to help support buying more stickers and shipping outside the US, small donations to the paypal account linked to lyz@princessleia.com are welcome, but not expected or required.

Want to buy stickers directly from MOO yourself? I’ve posted details I’ve used to make both stickers on the wiki pages for each team:

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet, xubuntu

ACM Turing Centenary Celebration

Sunday, Jun 17th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Friday and Saturday I had the exceptional opportunity to attend the ACM Turing Centenary Celebration. I’ll start right off by saying it was an exciting and deeply intimidating event to attend. The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is actually quite an academic-focused organization in general, and while I read their Communications of the ACM magazine, I find myself struggling through some of the articles every month. At the conference itself, not only was I surrounded by 32 Turing award laureates (the best computer minds in the world) it seemed like a vast majority of the attendees were from colleges and universities as professors, researchers or students (both undergrad and graduate level). And me? I never went to college and I work in the industry doing systems administration. I quickly felt like a mere technician in this crowd. That said, the reasons for it being an exciting event were very similar, I was in the same room as Vint Cerf, Donald Knuth and Ken Thompson! My computer heroes!

The event schedule, full program and videos are all available if you’re interested in more comprehensive covering of the sessions, as I’ll just cover some of the highlights for me from the 6 pages of notes I took while I was there.

I was quite fortunate that the venue was not only in San Francisco, but it was a mere 2 blocks from where I live so I headed out around 8:30AM to find a seat for the 9AM start of the event. Opening remarks were made by John White and Vint Cerf.


Vint Cerf giving opening remarks

The first panel was titled Turing the Man. The panel had people who knew Turing or were intimately familiar with him and his work on some kind of personal level and the charming stories they told really set a good tone kicking off the conference. Next up was the Human and Machine Intelligence panel where they discussed some of the history of Artificial Intelligence, starting from Turing’s work on the subject and leading into some of the latest developments with Watson and Siri. They went through the basic definition according to Turing and his “imitation game” (or as it’s known now, Turing Test), which focuses on behavior of intelligence, rather than any kind of philosophical or religious definition of intelligence, and which builds the foundation of AI work today. They reviewed some of the key tenants of AI, covering assumptions about the world that AI scientists have to consider and the technical side of how to implement things like storage and search capabilities required for AI today and some of the challenges they continue to encounter. There was also talk about how AI can be used in searches to intelligently narrow down sections of material to do more precise searches on (an example was medical records). AI is one of those topics that make me wish I’d taken an academic route in life, the subject is infinitely interesting to me and I really enjoyed the positiveness and excitement of this panel.


AI Panel

Before lunch Butler Lampson gave a talk on What Computers Do: Model, Connect, and Engage where he covered key portions of what computers have done since their inception and what we’re looking forward to in the future when it comes to engagement in the physical world. Already we’re seeing some very interesting advances from the Microsoft Kinect technology which has already been applied far beyond the gaming use it was built for, the advances being made in self-driving cars and work being done with augmented reality. He also reviewed some of the challenges with all this new technology, including fault tolerance, agility, scalability and dependability.


Butler Lampson on What Computers Do

Since I didn’t know anyone at the conference lunch was a bit awkward at first, but I ended up talking to a woman from IEEE who, upon learning of my background and current work, was interested in my perspective on the practical usefulness of some of the articles in one of their publications. We exchanged contact information so hopefully I’ll be doing that review pretty soon.

The first panel after lunch was Systems Architecture, Design, Engineering, and Verification – The Practice in Research and Research in Practice where several Turing award winners discussed the work they had done that not only had significant impact on research, but were directly applicable in practice. The talks covered some history, their feelings on model checking and formal verification of industry software, some infamous software bugs and what led to them and more general rigorous software design. There was also discussion on what steps need to be taken to create a more stable software future, including increased collaboration between people who are not only able to see the practical concerns of security and proper testing methods, but also who can implement them well. Part of the panel also dipped into talking about where we see computing going in the future, including a speculation about terminal-based computing (no more desktop, just a screen that hooks into a network) and related concerns about data security and privacy in a network “cloud” based world.

The next talk was given by Alan Kay on Extracting Energy from the Turing Tarpit. The Turing tarpit is a phrase defined by Alan Perlis statement “Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.” Kay presented a different way of approaching this which turned the problem into more of an opportunity. But I think what fascinated me the most about this talk was learning about Sketchpad, which I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit I had never heard about, but was a revolutionary program for 1963 and helped lay the groundwork for not only CAD software of the future, but graphical interfaces in general, very cool. Following a break it was on the another panel, The Turing Computational Model and How it Shaped Computer Science. This is where the day started to get hard for me, my knowledge of the Turing Computational Model was not sufficient to do more than tangentially follow along with this talk, I’ll be doing some reading and hope to re-watch it when I’m better prepared. As someone whose math education ended with Functions, Statistics and Trigonometry (the class before Precalculus in my high school), the last two talks of the day were beyond me, the Lambda Calculus Then and Now talk being completely out of my grasp and The Computable Reals and Why The Are Still Important being one I only really managed to follow portions of. Phew!

The next day started bright and early at 8:30AM with a Computer Architecture panel. The panelists discussed some of their own work, including Ivan Sutherland’s work and predictions related to clockless computers (a Scientific American article “Computers without Clocks” gives a nice, human-readable version of his work). Fred Brooks went on to discuss how Turing’s hardware proposal of the Automatic Computing Engine weren’t actually all that influential compared to his peers due several factors, including coming a bit too late, not being collaborative enough in the work, having some peculiarities and, most telling, that he didn’t realize how important ease of programming would be for other people. The panel wrapped up with some discussion on how important a core of Math and Physics are in computer science, and a lament that there are many programmers who don’t have a fundamental understanding of how computers work, which impacts their ability to write efficient code. The next panel was Programming Languages – Past Achievements and Future Challenges. The panel began with a retrospective look at early work in cryptography and led into a history of how programming languages and compilers quickly became a part of Computer Science. There was a fair amount of discussion about how complicated the really good programming languages are and how this has led to easier, less powerful, languages being used it production and consensus from the panel that this was not a great direction to be going in. Barbara Liskov mentioned that she hoped a future language could provide the ease of writing and the power and important programming concepts required for really effective programs. Simplicity certainly was an underlying current in this panel, and there was some talk of domain-specific languages having a future because they offer the ability to reduce complexity.


Programming Panel

Then it was on to a panel on The Algorithmic Universe. One of the first observations from this panel was from Don Knuth who discussed the percentage of people who were “algorithmic thinkers” and how he believes this is increasing due to the needs of our modern world, and later they agreed that this type of thinking could be taught. Much of the panel focused on how algorithms are being used by natural sciences and how we need to make sure we don’t have a narrow view of what “computation” is when doing work beyond the Computer Science realm. The last panel of the conference was one of the most entertaining, Information, Data, Security in a Networked Future. They covered brokenness of user passwords for security, desire for universal identification systems and the failures of SSL (we all want PKI to work, but this is a major example of a PKI that has a lot of failures). They also covered a common failure with secure systems going back at least as far as cracking Enigma codes in WWII: overestimating the user, underestimating the computing power of an attacker. The talk then went to some of the politics that have been getting into the computing realm, and the panelists suggesting that more effort be put into groups who can educate the governments and officials who make decisions, or having computer scientists become some of these decision makers. There was also talk of social networks, concerns about popular ones currently being controlled by companies who have little to no assurances of data retention or portability and the consequences of their use not only by the people actively using them and their immediate social groups, but for anyone within camera range in public today.

The conference officially adjourned at this point, but many (myself included) stuck around for a screening of the short version of Codebreaker. As a documentary geek, I thoroughly enjoyed it, even if it was quite sad. I look forward to seeing the full version when it’s released on DVD next year.

I’ve uploaded more photos I took during the conference here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157630140487140/

I’m very glad I was able to attend, it was quite an amazing opportunity and I learned a lot.

Filed under: events, san francisco, tech

Conservatory of Flowers, movies and computer-y events

Thursday, Jun 14th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

This past Saturday was beautiful and the rest of this week hasn’t disappointed either. After services in the morning we ended up at The Elite Cafe on Fillmore for a great brunch. From there we headed to Golden Gate Park to visit the Conservatory of Flowers which we’d recently gotten a membership to.

I have to admit that it was the Plantosaurus Rex exhibit that tipped the balance in my decision for membership.

Step back in time … WAY back in time as the Conservatory of Flowers transports you to a real life land of the lost in its newest exhibition Plantosaurus Rex. It’s a prehistoric paradise of plants from the time of the dinosaurs when giant ferns, spiky horsetails, and primitive cycads grew in lush abundance and fed many of the monstrous reptiles that roamed the earth millions of years ago. Under a canopy of primordial conifers, visitors encounter model dinosaurs like the armored Stegosaurus foraging for the vegetation they loved best while learning about the symbiotic relationship between ancient flora and fauna. But beware — the predators have come to Golden Gate Park too! A giant T. rex has smashed through the roof of the Conservatory to look for potential snacks!

The exhibit was small and I wish some of the plants had been marked better, but quite fun overall and nothing beats the dinosaurs they included in the exhibit:

The rest of him is inside the exhibit, along with an Allosaurus.

They had a pond with real turtles swimming and enjoying the rocks, and of course a lot of plants and some beautiful flowers.

After the dinosaur portion, we took some time to peruse the rest of the Conservatory. It’s truly a beautiful place, and I suspect we’ll be dropping by more throughout the year as time allows.

More photos from our visit here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157630028301243/

Sunday I headed out to BerkeleyLUG for a couple hours to enjoy some pizza and Linux company. I was really happy to get some time with Grant Bowman to review some of what we had installed for the Partimus website hosting account (which is provided free for our little non-profit from Dreamhost) and brainstorm how to move forward documentation-wise using both our existing docs that we’ve shared and an internal wiki. Sunday evening MJ and I finally got to see The Avengers Our schedule hadn’t really worked out to see it previously. Amusingly, after months of not seeing a movie, we’re also going out to the movies this upcoming Saturday to see Prometheus at Sundance Kabuki, my first time actually going to a movie in their cool auditorium with the balcony!

I’ve had quite the busy week. Monday morning my dentist’s office called to let me know they had a cancellation and were able to move my rescheduled appointment that conflicted with an upcoming weekend event to that morning. Tuesday I started work early and then it was off to my annual physical in the late afternoon, where I also got a tetanus shot (recommended since it had been 15 years since my last), my arm is still hurting from it. Wednesday evening I hosted the San Francisco Ubuntu Hour and then a Debian Dinner. It was great to see some new faces and have great conversations at both events, including some talk about how SSL for web is broken and some of the cool ARM boards and devices that have been popping up lately and what everyone is using them for (or planning on). After the meetings I ended up having more computer fun by finally applying the latest update for my CR-48 and was delighted to see that the new Chrome OS UI has made it down to the stable channel for it. It’s much more desktop-like, has a new interface for Netflix and crosh is now a separate tab in the browser rather than a separate window in the interface (which always seemed a bit hackish), I’m already liking it.

Tomorrow and Saturday I’ll be attending the ACM A.M. Turing Centenary Celebration here in downtown San Francisco. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while, even if I fully expect to have to take a lot of notes to do some research afterwards to get the most out of some of the talks. While on the topic of learning, I decided last night to sign up for the Stanford online Cryptography class, already the number of videos for the first week is a bit overwhelming (particularly with his introductory caution “I will go fast, pause and review content often”), so we’ll see if I end up having the time for it that will be required for a certificate of completion. This evening I need to run to the gym and I then think I’ll have to spend the rest of the evening catching up on email ad sifting through my todo list for tasks to complete before the conference takes over my life for two days.

Filed under: life, san francisco

Buckminster Fuller at SFMOMA and server reinstalls

Thursday, Jun 7th, 2012 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

My boss is a Buckminster Fuller enthusiast and over the years some of that has rubbed off in reading some of his essays and a renewed interest in geodesic dome structures. So when The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) I knew I had to check it out. I finally made it over there on Sunday afternoon.

Exhibit description:

The Bay Area has long attracted dreamers, progressives, nonconformists, and designers. Buckminster Fuller was all of these, and although he never lived in San Francisco, his ideas have spawned many local experiments in technology, design, and sustainability. The first to consider Fuller’s Bay Area legacy, this exhibition features some of his most iconic projects as represented in a print portfolio recently acquired by SFMOMA, Inventions: Twelve Around One. Along with Fuller inventions like the 4D House, Geodesic Dome, World Game, and Dymaxion car, the exhibition presents Bay Area endeavors — from Ant Farm’s 1972 domed Convention City proposal to a North Face tent, and from The Plastiki boat to One Laptop Per Child — inspired by Fuller’s radical idealism and his visionary designs informed by technology, ecology, and social responsibility.

The exhibit itself was made up of two sections, first being direct Fuller artifacts, showing off some of his key ideas and signed works. The rest of the exhibit focused on Bay Area projects that he inspired. I was delighted to see a very nice One Laptop per Child display!

I ended up getting a membership while I was there, so after wrapping up at the Fuller exhibit I walked through a couple more galleries before heading up to their statue garden and coffee shop. I was quite looking forward to the coffee shop visit, as I had seen some of the early experiments of their “Fuller Hot Chocolate” on the museum’s Twitter feed and wanted to see one for myself.

The description reads:

Fuller Hot Chocolate
Tcho chocolate, vanilla marshmallow, milk, house-made sea salt

“Proposal for a floating tetrahedral city in the San Francisco Bay”

It was delicious.

More photos from the exhibit and the museum here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157630049417808/

Since my last general updates post I’ve had a couple other adventures. A few weeks back I took Caltrain down to meet MJ after work for dinner, and took a detour to the Stanford Shopping Center to satisfy my curiosity and visit their Microsoft store. My first impression was that it was ridiculously similar to an Apple store, but upon closer inspection they actually offer an interesting selection of laptops from a variety of manufacturers, peripherals and they had a whole corner devoted to the Xbox 360. It was actually a lot more interesting than an Apple store. Of course this all comes from the Linux-using sysadmin who bought her last laptop at Fry’s for $300 ;) I also attended my first San Francisco Perl Mongers meeting at the end of May. I was a bit nervous being there, and it was compounded by I was the only woman and only non-programmer there, but everyone was very nice and the presentation on a web framework for Mason2 was interesting (I’ve helped maintain our Mason-based site at work). I spent pretty much all of last week after coming home from Phoenix slowly catching up on project work.

This past Saturday I finally reinstalled the server that hosts the Ubuntu US, Pennsylvania and California websites. The server is a Linode that was donated to the Pennsylvania team back in July of 2008 and at the time they had added 64-bit support so I decided to install Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit on it. Since then it’s become quite well-known that the memory footprint of 64-bit is higher than that of 32-bit and that on a server with 512M of RAM, 64-bit wasn’t the wisest of decisions. I upgraded it to 10.04 at some point and decided that when 12.04 came around that we’d do a full reinstall with 32-bit. I keep regular backups, so all I had to do was check the consistency of the MySQL backups and do a quick refresh rsync to grab any changes before bringing down the old machine. Getting services up again was pretty quick, Ubuntu Pennsylvania’s gallery2 install having the longest outage at a little over an hour since it took a while to rsync all the images back up, but I planned accordingly and made sure this was the last site on my list. All told I spent maybe 3 hours working on it and had backups reconfigured, old user accounts and other “cruft” cleaned up and had Nagios monitoring reporting all green before noon. It was that morning that I also decided to take a look at RAM Host‘s relatively new KVM offerings. I use my RAM Host openvz box to give friends shell accounts and it was the development platform for both the new Xubuntu website and the new Ubuntu Women wiki, so it’s not quite as locked down as my own Linode (where only my sister and I have active accounts these days) but I really did miss having iptables and there were some other openvz quirks that I’ve never been all that thrilled with. I got my login details for my new KVM host on Tuesday and tonight I finished up some of the last of my migration from the openvz system to the KVM one and I’m hoping I will have all my users moved can shut down the old (and stop paying for it!) by this weekend.

Filed under: life, san francisco

The Grand Canyon and Phoenix trip

Wednesday, May 30th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Over the past couple of years I’ve made a habit of doing quick trips on 3 day weekends. Last year over Memorial Day weekend I went up to Edmonton to see one of my sisters for the first time in 5 years. This time I realized that I needed a relaxing break and selected Phoenix as my destination, where I could stay and visit with my aunt and cousin and relax in nice weather by the pool.

I flew out early on Saturday morning and was in Phoenix by 8AM. I spent the day with my Aunt Elaine and cousin Chet, relaxing by the pool, enjoying grilled hot dogs and potato salad (my father’s recipe), reading a cheesy pulp novel on my Nook via loan from San Francisco Public Library and rounding off the evening by having dinner at a local favorite pizzeria. While enjoying the pizza dinner, my aunt mentioned that she was hoping to make it up to the Grand Canyon before her planned move in July and I proposed doing it the next day. A quick search showed that it was a 4 hour drive north and we headed back to her place to do some research online and make the proper arrangements.

Sunday morning we woke up at 5AM, by 7AM we were finished with breakfast, gassed up the car and were on our way north toward the Grand Canyon. The drive up was a beautiful one, the desert area of Phoenix giving way to the red rocks of the area around Sedona and then on to Flagstaff and beyond where you will find cooler weather and forests of pine trees. By 11AM we were at the Grand Canyon.

I had never been to the Grand Canyon before, but I had grown up hearing stories from my father about when he went with his family and they rode donkeys down into the Canyon. I remember him saying that you have to experience the Grand Canyon as photos don’t really capture just how huge it is. His great stories caused it to be on my destination list so I was delighted by this opportunity. Like most tourists visiting for the first time, we went to the south rim.

The views were indeed spectacular.

I also got to try out the panorama feature on ICS on my Nexus S:

We spent 3 hours exploring, and looking at the map, we walked over 3 miles around the rim before taking a shuttle back to the parking lot.

I’ve uploaded more photos here (but still only about 25% of what I took!): http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157629955730124/

We started the drive back shortly after 2PM and grabbed a late lunch on the way back. My aunt and I wrapped up the evening by relaxing in the hot tub under the stars and managed to get to bed around 10PM.

Monday was a pure relaxation day. My cousin made buffalo chicken on the grill and so we enjoyed sandwiches and veggies. My internet connection was quite poor, and I was able to resist the temptation to suffer through it to work on Ubuntu stuff – I was here to relax! I spent all afternoon and into the evening in the shade on the porch finishing the book I had started on Saturday and catching up on magazines.

The day wrapped up with dinner at Outback with my cousin before heading over to the airport for my 11PM flight back to San Francisco.

The trip was a great one. Relaxation! Grand Canyon! And stunningly beautiful weather for Phoenix in May, 80s and low 90s all weekend. I am happy to report that I’m feeling refreshed and once again ready to take on the world this week.

Filed under: family, travel

Quetzals and Pangolins

Wednesday, May 30th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last year I wrote Stuffed animal K, L, M, N, O… documenting the stuffed toys I had started collecting as LoCo booth/event decorations for each Ubuntu release. The stuffed animal tradition ended with P as I couldn’t find a stuffed toy pangolin, and I had similar trouble with our Quetzal. I ended up with the Safari Incredible Creatures: Pangolin plastic toy, and after much consideration I bought this trio of ornaments: Kurt Adler 4.5-6″ Animal Planet Resin Tropical Bird Ornaments with Metallic-Style Paint and Glitter: Lovebird, Macaw and Quetzal Set of 3, along with a 10″ Spiral Ornament Display Stand.

The quetzal is now enjoying a spot on my desk:

Looking forward to planning the first event this cycle where the quetzal can come along!

Filed under: animals, tech, ubuntu planet

Retirement of the Armada

Thursday, May 24th, 2012 by pleia2 | 9 Comments

I am a firm believer in “crap technology” as Thomas Hayden defines it in his post Ixnay on the iPod: In Praise of Crap Technology. It’s not some ideological thing, and in fact I never had a name for it until hearing a segment with him on Marketplace, “Crap technology, not crappy, where he says:

Crap technology is basically stuff that doesn’t have cachet, you know? It’s not slick, it’s not cool, but it works. Crappy technology, on the other hand, is stuff that simply doesn’t work. That’s the sweet spot of crap technology: no cachet but all the functionality you’ll need.

Part of this certainly comes from somewhat limited financial resources for much of my life that caused me to get creative. As a kid in the 80s I was overwhelmed with excitement when my parents let me have the black and white TV that had previously been in their bedroom for the rooms I shared with my sister. I never had cable in my bedroom, but OTA TV wasn’t so bad. When an aunt and uncle sprung for an NES for us I spent weeks one summer scouring flea markets and garage sales with my mother for a cheap color television so I could use it in our bedroom while other family members watched TV on the livingroom TV. I found one for $75, the color was a mess and it sometimes required a smack on the side to get adjusted but I could hook up my NES!

In 1991 when I was 10 our home got our first personal computer, a IBM PC with an 8086 processor and two 5.25″ floppy drives (actually, it looked like this). I’ll probably never know exactly what it was, but the story is that my uncle pulled it out of his basement to give it to us, so in 1991 it was already a basement dinosaur. In 1994, when I was 13, my grandparents gave our family our first computer with a GUI, a 486 with Windows 3.11. From there, our story of family computers morphed into one of my father and I hunting through the computer shops of Maine for old software manuals and hauling that poor 486 to the computer shop each time we saved up enough money to upgrade something on it (harddrive, RAM). It was the most impressive 486 in history by the time we were done with it. I then spent summers saving up money to buy old computers from newspaper classified ads. In my world of 386 DOS systems, perhaps my greatest achievement was when I was 16 and bought an no name 586 for a couple hundred dollars, I could run Windows 98!

I wish I could say I learned a lot from all this young tinkering, but I wasn’t online until late 1998 and I didn’t have friends who were interested in computers. I rarely knew what I was doing or had goals, and most of my time was spent breaking things and playing with ridiculous old software. I think mostly what I learned was a love for technology and an appreciation for old technology that I kept around far past the point when most people had moved on from them. After all, it still works fine!

My mp3 player, digital camera, and pretty much every other piece of tech I own was inexpensive, non-trendy and pretty much lasts forever. I will admit that on the desktop computer side I have always had a pretty decent core desktop that I built with parts from a local computer store or Newegg. Every 4 years or so I’ll drop $400-600 and do a motherboard, RAM and processor upgrade, along with whatever else I need. My firewall is still a Pentium 4 though (and it makes me cringe to call it old, P4s are decent!).

When it comes to computers, laptops are where my real crap technology story is. In 2008 my laptop was a Dell Inspiron 7500. I’d say that where my fleet of old 386 systems were the computers of my teens, my fleet of 7000-series Inspiron laptops were those of my 20s (it topped out a 2 functioning, 3 total, seen here running Ubuntu 5.10 server + xfce4 packages). It didn’t plan the Inspiron fleet, they just kept falling into my lap for free (dumpster drive, old giveaway from work, a friend). However, in early 2008, the last of my beloved Inspirons got to the end of the line.

As old as the Inspiron was, I had gotten used to having a laptop. When I posted photos online a friend of mine offered to give me his old Compaq Armada E500. In exchange I bought him dinner, a burger and a beer, following a LUG meeting. At 800mhz and 384M of RAM it almost doubled the speed I had on my Inspiron and tripled my RAM. Best burger and beer investment ever! I also learned at that LUG meeting that there was another Inspiron 7000-series loyalist among us and I ended up giving him my final Inspiron for parts.

The Armada was my primary laptop for about 9 months, at the end of which several close friends pitched in (presumably taking pity upon me for having such an dinosaur of a laptop) and gave me my pink Dell mini9. I’m typing on the mini9 right now, this little machine better last forever because I love it so.

And the Compaq Armada? It became first a little development machine and I would also do some software testing on it. As those functions increasingly became virtualized I have kept it around and most recently used it for point to point openvpn and IPSec testing (it’s so much easier to plug a physical machine into my physical modem than to add the complexity of network virtualization to an already complex VPN setup).

However, if I’m perfectly honest, it’s not doing well and hasn’t been for a while. There are I/O errors now and then, I can’t plug in PCMCIA cards anymore without it causing a kernel panic, and Debian is the only operating system that I can install on it (it has run OpenBSD and Ubuntu in the past). In fact, I’m not even sure I could install Debian on it again if I wiped the harddrive. Every time I booted it up I anticipated a screen full of errors that would signal forced retirement.

So a couple weeks ago I installed Debian on my new Lenovo G575 (which, while new, was $299, and solidly in the “crap technology” camp). Yesterday evening after work I did a full backup of the entire disk on the old Armada and shut it down for the last time.

Mourning the final shutdown of my Armada has made me reflect even more about why, now that I have the means, I don’t just buy the latest shiny thing. Like most geeks I do love new toys and read up on the latest trends in tech. Amusingly I think part of it comes from my constant search for perfection, I have very specific requirements for the core devices in my life and once I have a device that finally fits those needs I don’t want to give it up. I also get quite emotionally attached to the things I carry around with me, so the thought of replacing something that still works fine in favor of some new features makes me a bit sad, I have to have a really, really good reason (that NOOK Simple Touch with GlowLight? So tempting! Cannot justify, my original Nook is fine and I’ll still need a book light for magazines anyway).

So goodbye my old Armada! Simcoe says goodbye too:

…or she was cross about me taking a picture of a computer rather than her. The internet needs more cat pictures.

Filed under: computers, life, tech

Gaming, learning, health and other life updates

Sunday, May 20th, 2012 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

It’s been 2 months since I’ve done a general, non-topical update post, so here we go…

Several weeks ago I picked up the Limited Edition Kinect Star Wars Bundle. As cool as the Kinect is, I wasn’t really planning on buying an Xbox because we just bought a Playstation 3 a few months back and with my Wii would make is a 3 console house, but after seeing how cool it was and an offer from a friend who could hook me up with a discount, I couldn’t resist. The console itself is beautifully R2D2ed out, it even makes R2D2 noises when you turn it on or manipulate the optical disk drive. I’m not thrilled about paying for access to their Xbox Live service, but there seem to be deals you can find online that make it more reasonable. I keep joking that the Kinect Star Wars game is a very sneaky video game because you’re jumping around a lot as you play rather than traditional games where you’re stationary and can eat chips and pizza. I do love it though and am excited to see where this technology continues to go as improvements come out, for video games and beyond.

I’ve also become quite attached to my Nintendo 3DS. The social aspects they added to it are brilliant, I usually wouldn’t carry it around but the fun that comes with StreetPass makes me take it along even if I don’t anticipate finding time to play. As a result I end up pulling it out at all kinds of times to squeeze in a game of Tetris, a level of Super Mario 3D or a Pushmo puzzle.

Playing more games (particularly on the consoles at home) has meant I’ve had to shift time a bit in my day, which has almost all been getting rid of watching TV time. I’ve never been a huge TV watcher, but lately I’ve found myself bored watching TV alone and only really enjoy it when I’m watching late at night or on weekends with MJ. I’ve also been reading more lately, keeping a magazine or two more accessible throughout the day so that in spare moments I’m reading an article or two rather than doing all the things that time management experts will tell you are time sinks (like checking email every 20 seconds). Finally, I figured I’d check out one of the free online courses offered via Coursera. A couple people in the company I work for did a Stanford Databases course last fall, but at the time I was traveling a lot and couldn’t really make time for it. I’m still struggling a bit with time but I really wanted to see how these classes worked so I signed up for an easy one: Computer Science 101. Now before you laugh, it’s worth pointing out that while this class is obviously quite below me, I never formally studied Computer Science so it hasn’t been a complete waste of time for me. In addition to learning how the course structure works I’m learning a bit about how folks who went to school tend to be presented with these concepts and having them explained in a less practical setting has been a very interesting experience. I’m on week 5 of 6 of this class and am looking forward to doing another soon which will actually challenge me. I’ve also ordered some books in the past few weeks, which I’m hoping will help structure my learning a bit more on some of the less basic areas of Nagios and Puppet, the former of which we use extensively at work but I need to do some higher level debugging on, and the latter I’d like to see us moving to. Amusingly, I ordered the Puppet book just before going to a Salt talk and now I’m quite intrigued with how that will evolve.

On the health side I’ve been working through some mild issues.

The first is sinus-related. I was delighted to learn upon moving to California that my allergies had almost all disappeared. This spring has been different though, it’s been rainy and we even had a big thunder storm in April (very rare in San Francisco, they only happen every few years and I’d never seen one here). In February I ended up with a flu and then a fair amount of water retention in my right ear. I was also getting a lot of sinus headaches and waking up congested a lot, one morning so bad that my balance was severely impacted. Some targeted rounds of Sudafed and Claritin cleared up my ear trouble after a few weeks, but I had to go back for the other sinus problems. The doctor put me on Claritin D which I took daily for several weeks and I’ve now backed off to taking as needed. So it looks like spring is still a problem for me, but I’m hoping the worst if it is over this year.

Secondly, I’ve had trouble with heartburn since I was 14. Over the years this has mostly meant I always carry around antacid in my purse and am particularly aware of things that trigger it severely (tomato sauce, vinegar, spicy foods). About 5 years ago I developed a cough. My doctors first tried, unsuccessfully, to treat me for allergies to get rid of the cough. Once I moved to California and it was clear that allergies weren’t the cause, my doctor here saw the relation to my heartburn and put me on Lansoprazole to reduce stomach acid. It works wonders! My “smokers hack” cough that was causing me so much grief for years was gone! Unfortunately it’s now been 2 years since I started on it and my doctor had to inform me that “prolonged use is not as safe as we thought it was.” Darn. I’ve now started to get off of it, slowly reducing my amount of intake first by switching to every other day, and now by even lowering that dose. But then I’ll be left with the cough! So now it’s time to actually see if there is something we can do about it. I was sent to a specialist and on Tuesday of this week I went in for an esophagogastroduodenoscopy. It wasn’t very much fun, it left me with a sore throat, the sedation made me forget much of what happened and the following sedation-induced nap at home made me miss half a day of work. I can call this week for the results. I am really hoping they find something that’s fixable instead of giving me the line of “don’t eat stuff that gives you heartburn” because that’s pretty much impossible, while there are specific triggers for serious heartburn, food as simple as oatmeal can sometimes give me heartburn.

On the home side, we have just a couple more tasks that need to be completed before scheduling the painters! We had a couple of our free-standing lamps sent out to a lamp repair shop recently and aside from the price (turns out that restoration of vintage lamps, including pickup and delivery, isn’t cheap) I’m really happy to have the lamps repaired and functioning – hooray for light! I’m trying to find a good strategy to get the rest of the tasks we need to do done, weekends are far too short to get non-work things done and find time to relax a bit.

And tech stuff! I upgraded my G575 to max it out at 8G of RAM and gave my old RAM chip to a friend with an identical laptop. Having this full-size laptop has been an interesting experiment, I’m still exclusively using my mini9 out of the home, but the laptop has mostly turned into my “sitting on the couch and computing” system, in addition to being the one I put test installs on. It’s currently quad-booting Windows 7, Debian 6.0 (as a replacement for my Pentium 3 laptop that I’m never sure will boot), Ubuntu 12.04 and Xubuntu 12.04. I upgraded my netbook to Xubuntu 12.04 just before the Ubuntu Developer Summit and found myself quite dismayed to discover upon plugging it in to a projector that it didn’t work, it’s always been very reliable! I’ll have to investigate what went wrong. After work on Friday I also finally upgraded my desktop to Xubuntu 12.04 in probably the smoothest upgrade I’ve ever experienced.

Finally, travel and events. The Ubuntu Developer Summit is always an exhausting event and I managed to replace exhaustion from traveling with exhaustion from being a good local host. It was totally worth it though, I got to spend a huge amount of quality time with my Ubuntu colleagues and got a lot of great feedback about how helpful the work of the California team had been. For Memorial Day weekend I’ll be flying to Phoenix to visit my aunt and cousin and relax by the pool. In June I’m delighted to have secured a spot at the ACM A.M. Turing Centenary Celebration on the 15th and 16th. Then from July 4th through 9th MJ and I will be flying to Maine to visit my mother, sister and hopefully my nephew who is due on July 1st.

But right now, I’m heading up to the roof deck to get some fresh air and not look at the solar eclipse. The roof deck is getting a makeover in the next few months with new furniture, but for now I’m happy with the old chairs, fresh air and wifi.

Filed under: health, life

UDS-Q in Oakland Day 5

Sunday, May 13th, 2012 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

Last day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Quantal! It’s always a bittersweet day, we’re all so terribly exhausted from the week but it’s also the last day for many of us to see people we only see once or twice a year. Like other days, my day started off with the Community Roundtable.

– Community Roundtable –

Started asking about UDS for first timers and what changes we can make to make it easier for them, clearer instructions about reimbursements, travel arrangements and scheduling. Then there was some discussion about using Etherpad Lite next time with chat integration rather than IRC. Quickly touched upon what kind of statistics are available for determining how many systems are out there using Ubuntu, there were several types of statistics discussed (iso downloads, updates, support resource usage) and wrapped up by taking a look at the Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report – Operating Systems.

– Expanding the isotracker testcase management capabilities –

The session started off with a review of the current capabilities of the Ubuntu Testing Tracker, it’s used for ISO testing and links to a wiki for test cases. Reviewed some of the technical details of changes (database schema updates, where to allow modifications, test case ids). There was also some discussion about permissions, who can add test cases (including representatives from other flavors) and do other limited tasks.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– IRC Workshops –

We have one of these during each UDS to plan out Ubuntu Open Week, Ubuntu App Developer Week and more IRC workshops. This session was a bit different as we discussed ways to expand this beyond the medium of IRC into other formats. There have been some experiments in the past with ustream and the like for a class on Inkscape, but now with the launch of Google Hangouts On Air for everyone we’re really excited about the possibility for making one of the workshop days into one where we use that instead. I still prefer IRC myself as it’s low-bandwidth, has searchable logs (rather than just an archived youtube video) and can be glanced at while at work, but it’s certainly not for everyone. It should be an interesting experiment this cycle.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

Lightning talks, including Partimus and Accessibility installer.

– Accessibility Community Team Plans –

Reviewed some of the successes of the Precise release, including accessible strings on the indicators, ability to determine wifi signal strength and installer improvements. In this next cycle they would like to focus on improvements to Unity 3D since development of Unity 2D is very likely to be discontinued. They are seeking new contributors throughout the Accessibility project, including in testing and bug triage. I volunteered to help via Ubuntu Women and there was some brainstorming about how to get other people without disabilities can become attracted to contributing.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– Etherpad Lite Summit integration –

In this session the proposal to use Etherpad Lite was put forward and there was a test instance running for us to to try. This new etherpad has built in chat, so it could potentially be what is projected by default in each room rather than a full screen IRC window, so you would be able to see chat in the etherpad and the etherpad too. Much of the session focused on logistics of replacement of the current Etherpad and access controls (log in to summit?). The demonstration showed that the mobile access was event quite usable on Android. We also had someone from IRC come on via Google hangout on the second screen in the room to show off what we could do since we’re not using a screen for IRC and a screen for the etherpad.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

Sessions wrapped up at 5PM and we all headed to the final wrap-up talks for the summit by the track leads. Then it was off to the “California Dreamin’ Beach Party” themed end party. In a change of pace, instead of having attendees handle entertainment they ended up bringing in an outside band to do it, The Spazmatics. It was a lot of fun, and MJ came out so I was able to introduce him to a bunch of people.

And with that, UDS was over for another 6 months! I had a really great time being a local, talked to lots of people I wouldn’t otherwise talk to. Thanks everyone!

I’ve uploaded my photos from the week here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157629702430040/

Filed under: events, tech, ubuntu planet, UDS

UDS-Q in Oakland Day 4 and Ubuntu Women dinner

Friday, May 11th, 2012 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

Phew, Thursday! I was moving a bit slower today due to not getting a whole lot of sleep last night, but it was quite the busy day for me.

– Community Roundtable –

We picked up discussion from the day before about announcements from Canonical, it was generally agreed that the community is less bothered by announcements which don’t impact them or require them to do a considerable amount of work, or makes work completed feel useless or ignored. It also seems like there may be missed opportunities to get the community involved in improvements. We then discussed the Unity Distilled list proposal, and compared it to the value that separating ubuntu-devel and ubuntu-devel-discuss has brought to the development community. With regard to UDS, I suggested that Canonical reach out to LoCo teams when planning so we can be more engaged. The session wrapped up by discussing UDS sponsorship and timing of announcements for venue and sponsorship, at this point timing-wise the contact for the next UDS hasn’t been signed. They’ll be working to open sponsorship earlier.

– IRC team meeting and IRCC review –

Generally good feedback about the status of the IRC Team and IRC Council. Quickly went through the process for operator recruitment, it has gone well and they’ve started syncing up calls for operators with the release cycle. They are seeking to clean up some of the access lists to better sync up with the launchpad lists, but won’t make changes where there aren’t problems. The IRCC only has 4 members, they’d like to fill their remaining seat so have added an agenda item to the next Community Council meeting and we’ll get that process started at that time. Reviewed no idling policy of -ops channel and agreed to explore some options moving forward. Wrapped up the session by discussing how IRC is used at UDS, newer versions of etherpad support a chat option which may improve interactions being noticed in the session, tomorrow there is a separate session about exploring this further in summit.ubuntu.com.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– Community Council – Code of Conduct Review –

The message of the Code of Conduct has changed with the merging of the Leadership Code of Conduct. The main reason we wanted to do this is that we’d rather not like to persist the separation between community members and “Leaders” since we want to encourage all of our community members to strive for and be empowered to take leadership positions as their roles grow. We also wanted to integrate a diversity statement, which is now in this 2.0 version. The session clarified some of the reason for the changes, including protecting leaders (and potential leaders) from non-constructive and sometimes abusive backlash from other contributors when they have to make a tough decision, instead encourages more healthy engagement. We also discussed that we may want to make it simpler to sign, rather than using a PGP key, but still make it some kind of process so it doesn’t become a “Terms and Conditions” type document that people just click through. We also had a lot of great participation in the room to point out some changes we’ll need to make before we send out a more final revision for review, so thanks to everyone who came out and spoke up during the session. My fellow Community Council member Charles Profitt wrote a blog post about the session here.

– Ubuntu Women UDS-Q Goals –

I started off this session by reviewing some of the work we’ve done in the past cycle and will continue to do like Career Days and Full Circle Magazine columns and we brainstormed some about how to keep these going and who we can contact to encourage to participate. An action item was taken to take some of our older Full Circle Magazine posts and start posting them on our blog (with “originally appeared in FCM Issue # in $year…” etc notes). There were also some ideas about how visible the project was on some of the more core Ubuntu resources and within about an hour of our session a note about the project was up on edubuntu.org (thanks Jonathan!). We’ll also be reaching out to projects like OpenHatch and other groups that do very targeted mentoring. Finally, we’ll be taking a look at our leadership structure and electing new leader(s) this cycle.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

I was sorry to miss the Edubuntu plans for 12.10 and Ubuntu LoCo Council Items for the Quantal cycle sessions due to conflicts, so I’ll have to catch up with notes and participants later.

The first plenary session after lunch was on QA and focused on a series of FAQ around Ubuntu Automated Test Harness (UATH) and then a demonstration. Calexeda presentation about some of the facts and challenges of massive scale datacenter deployments, including power, space and cluster management and then noted that hardware hasn’t kept up with the demands of software and data. On the Ubuntu side Calexeda began getting involved at UDS-L in Dallas in 2009 and then Linaro was founded in 2010 to accelerate ARM and Open Source work. In the 11.10 release Ubuntu shipped with ARM support, and in 2012 they are seeking to deliver a complete solution and they anticipate an aggressive adoption of ARM servers and the rate and pace of innovation. The next plenary was on the current state of OpenStack. I saw a talk of the same name at SCALE in January and it was great to see how different this one was post release of Ubuntu 12.04 which shipped with Essex and will have an option to update OpenStack throughout its supported life. A list of known deployments was also shared, which includes HP Cloud, NASA Nebula, Rackspace and private clouds at Sony and Disney. Also reviewed some specific states and goals of the separate pieces of OpenStack. Wrapped up with note that all major Linux distributions have signed up to be founding members of the OpenStack Foundation. The last plenary was about MAAS (Metal as a Service), where there was a quick review of the history of the project and then did a live demonstration.

– Leadership Summit –

Started off with a couple lightning talks by some of the community leaders. Charles Profitt spoke about Tuckman’s stages of group development. Jorge Castro talked about AskUbuntu governance and conflict handling, since it’s a StackExchange site they go by their “A Theory of Moderation” and they use the Questions and upvotes mechanisms for site policy and even electing new moderators.

Then shifted into Q&A with the Canonical Community team. Led to a discussion about some of the collaborative meetings the team has, including regular one on ones, a public IRC meeting and some private casual meetings. Then moved into a discussion about the relationship between community and Canonical which led into a discussion about perceptions outside the project about the relationship. We then discussed some of the challenges as the LoCo communities grow and we expand beyond traditional contributors to companies and users with very different needs, motivations and interests. We also asked what other innovations could be made in the community moving forward.

After the break we picked up the Leadership Summit by discussing whether there are some core details that community members can focus upon. A proposal was made to get together some “more official” slide decks for some of the generic presentations (new features in $release, introduction to Ubuntu, introduction to getting involved). Leadership handbook was mentioned, the resources are available if someone wants to pick it up. We then continued the community lightning talks. Jono Bacon spoke about team planning and organization strategies. Then discussed some about getting through rough or lonely portions of projects, then on to the Learning team example – good to be clear about goals and expectations and being concise about making decisions.

– Drafting testcases for ubuntu flavors –

I ended up leaving the leadership summit to attend this session as the Xubuntu representative. We reviewed what the different flavors were already doing application QA-wise and discussed what the flavors teams need QA-wise. The Xubuntu team will be moving our Short and Long tests over to the QA wiki and there is a session Friday I’ll attend on Friday about expanding the isotracker’s test case capabilities.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

After all the sessions I sat down with Jose Antonio Rey to talk about the somewhat defunct Ubuntu Learning Materials and make plans to move forward so he can get some materials to a teacher of his who wants to teach about Ubuntu in his classroom.

I then met up with some folks from the Ubuntu Women Project to head over to my place in San Francisco for an Ubuntu Women Project dinner.

We had food!

And fired up a laptop with a Google+ Hangout so we could bring in some remote attendees as we sat around my livingroom and talked.

Ended up being a really fun night, 7 people came over, 3 participated remotely, and we wrapped up around 10:30. Thanks to everyone who came out! And for putting up with my over-friendly, chair-stealing cats :)

Filed under: events, tech, ubuntu planet, UDS
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