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Lenovo G575

Monday, Mar 12th, 2012 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

Back in 2008, on the tail end of a particularly rough year, a few of my friends got together and bought me the pink mini9. It was the first new portable computer I’d ever owned. That little mini9 is still chugging along and the only thing that doesn’t work anymore is the speakers (the wires are in the hinge going to speakers next to the screen, I think they’ve gotten worn over time, it can probably be fixed).

Yesterday I bought my first new laptop. When I reviewed the ZaReason Strata Pro 15 Laptop back in 2010 I discussed some of my computing habits and where a full size laptop would fit into it. Ultimately the reasons for getting one weren’t overwhelmingly compelling, but they did pop up every so often. During the holiday season in 2011 I began browsing Frys ads for a super cheap laptop. I don’t care about branding these days as I sadly don’t expect modern laptops to last more than a couple years, but I did want a processor with hardware virtualization. The search was fruitless until this week, when I saw this advertisement:

And since I assume the product page will disappear soon, uploaded a copy of the advertised specs here. Not bad! 2G of RAM, upgradable to 8G, AMD E-450 which does indeed have virtualization support and a good Ubuntu Friendly report.

I called ahead to make sure they had some in stock and them MJ and I made the trek down to Fry’s to check it out. Predictably I ended up coming home with one.

I loaded up the pre-installed Windows 7 when I got home to make sure everything came up as expected and then installed Ubuntu 11.10 on it. Everything was detected and the installation was a breeze even with the resize of the Windows partition (with 320G of harddrive space, it doesn’t hurt to keep it for now).

They keyboard is nice to use, includes a keypad (love!) and the the laptop isn’t too heavy to bother me when actually using it on my lap. The form factor makes the whole thing pleasant to work on. The display is beautiful (hooray for the popularity of backlit) and so far it’s all pretty speedy. If I were to complain about something it would be that I can hear the fan, but I think I’m just spoiled by my fanless mini9.

I think what struck me the most about it is how immediately comfortable I was using it. I spent all of yesterday evening getting my work done on it barely giving it a second thought except for the moments when I’d forget the placement of the PgDn key or similar. I rarely adjust to new devices this quick.

In addition to adding more RAM, I’ll probably swap out the current harddrive for an SSD, but for now it’s a great little machine and I couldn’t beat this price.

Filed under: computers, tech

Oakland zoo, street cars, Chumby and TV

Sunday, Feb 26th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last weekend we took advantage of the long weekend and MJ and I finally made it over to the Oakland Zoo. I’ve wanted to go for quite some time because they have some exceptional animals that the San Francisco Zoo no longer has… elephants!

But what actually prompted the visit at this time was the news of a new baby giraffe.

More photos from my visit are over on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157629413089059/

In spite of the short work week, I had a particularly productive one. I wish I could say the same on the volunteer work side, I’ve been catching up with a lot of things and a bit more focused on some personal projects we have going on.

On the local tourist side, when I first visited San Francisco MJ arranged our schedule one evening so he could take me on a street car. Love at first sight!

Several months back I developed a habit of snapping pictures of the street cars (collection here) and then began following the Market Street Railway blog. Finally this week I became a Market Street Railway Member. I guess that means I’m now a card-carrying train geek.

Last month Woot! had a Chumby on sale for $99 which I ordered and then used at the Ubuntu SCALE booth. Since coming home I’ve wondered what to do with it. Keep it in the box until the next Ubuntu booth? Hack it to run something else? I decided to start with checking out some of the apps available for it and eventually discovered that it can run, in rotation, a variety of zoo webcams. That’s how I discovered the San Diego Zoo Polar Bear Cam

It’s pretty much the best zoo cam ever. When I go to the zoo I frequently just see the bears sleeping, but when you have the cam running on your desk all day you can watch them eat, swim, run and be otherwise interesting. Polar bears are pretty awesome.

Polar Bear Cam on Chumby

Coincidentally I also listed to a Quirks and Quarks episode recently that included segments about polar bears (and dolphins in mirrors!), very worth the listen: http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/episode/2011/12/17/december-17-2011/

Long term I’m not sure what I’ll do with the Chumby. It makes a great Ubuntu booth accessory because it can rotate through images. Putting something else on it is quite tempting, so it writing an app or two for it if I can come up with something I think it’ll be well-suited for.

I have also been watching some TV. After seeing the advertisements on hulu I began watching Alcatraz. It’s a bit dorky, but I’m a sucker for shows based in San Francisco. It’s filmed in Vancouver but, like Monk, they do all these flyover and similar shots of actual San Francisco for appropriate scenes. One the other night caught my attention:

The Embarcadero, and hey, those pools on the right are the Golden Gateway Tennis & Swim Club where I go to swim and work out!

On the home front, this week we finally got someone in to finish the work on our new bathroom fan and overhead light done, now we just need to get the bathroom painted and the towel bars rehung. The same day we contacted a local lamp repair shop recommended by a representative from the lighting store where we buy all our specialized light bulbs. He picked up the lamps and we should have them back and running like new in a few weeks.

Finally, since SCALE there have been a couple articles come out where my talks were mentioned. The first was a passing mention on SCaLE celebrates a successful tenth year as a premier Linux conference and the other was an extensive report on my talk and another from the Open Source in Education track for LWN, SCALE 10X: The trickiness of the education market by Nathan Willis. Awesome!

Filed under: animals, life

Started wedding planning, news from my little sister and other recent life stuff

Sunday, Feb 19th, 2012 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

I had the flu earlier this month that I’m now living in the tail end of, my cough hasn’t completely gone away but I did make it back to the gym finally this week and am back to a reasonable sleep schedule. Aside from missing much of a day of work, I sadly also ended up missing a triage fest for Partimus (details of their work here). I am looking forward to feeling completely better.

MJ recently got a new phone so I now get to use his Nexus S. Along with the phone itself (running ICS!) he bought me a custom sparkley pink fitBAG, which I think is actually nicer than the awesome soft case the Nexus One came with. I am liking the phone itself more than I thought I would, I really loved the solid metal feel of the Nexus One but the Nexus S is quite nice, and so is ICS.

We had one of MJ’s friends from back east visit for a week, she visits the area a couple times a year and it’s always a nice excuse to do some tourist things and check out some new or interesting places to eat. Ended up with some amazing dinners at Waterfront Restaurant and Hillstone.

I made a trip out to the San Francisco Zoo once I started feeling better in order to get some fresh air, some photos from that trip here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157629212169667/

This past weekend was the calmest weekend I’ve had in a while. Went to a little party Saturday evening, got some laundry done, groceries, made dinner on Sunday. So far this weekend is shaping up to be a bit more productive. For breakfast today I enjoyed a very good bagel, which is quite the statement for San Francisco, it can be hard to find good bagels here. We discovered the place of delicious bagels at House of Bagels. They also have lots of yummy jewish pastries and Challah. This afternoon I need to do some shopping for a new light jacket to replace my fleece jacket when going to nicer places and events. Tomorrow the plan is to head over to the Oakland Zoo!

For Valentine’s day MJ surprised me with roses – including some pink ones! And we had dinner just a couple blocks from home. Good conversation and good company made for a lovely evening.

This past week MJ and I went to a Bay LISA meeting on OpenLDAP Backend Improvements by Howard Chu, chief architect of OpenLDAP. I last saw him speak about OpenLDAP at the UKUUG Spring Conference in 2009 (post here). This time he talked about the development they’re doing on the new OpenLDAP backend that they want to replace BerkeleyDB with: MDB (Memory-Mapped Database, some details here). It’s very cool, the benchmarks for reads were impressive and I like that they actually built something that is not OpenLDAP-specific, instead they built a database and then built a handler for it in OpenLDAP.

We started planning the wedding and are officially shooting for spring of 2013. I’ve reviewed dozens of venues and requested information from the short list. We’re planning on heading to Philadelphia some time in March so we can actually start visiting the venues in person to further narrow down our choices. It’s also quickly become clear how expensive this is going to be and how many sites there are giving terrible advice for cutting costs. We’re also going to scope out some caterers who aren’t tied to the venues. I need to get a proper to-do list together.

Speaking of major life changes, on January 11th my little sister Annette messaged me on Facebook (is that how we do it now?) to let me know she is pregnant! We learned this week that it’s going to be a boy. The pregnancy was a surprise and she will be a single parent and largely still lives with my mother, but she has decided against putting him up for adoption. We’re planning a trip to Maine in July and I expect I’ll be buying a fair amount of baby and child clothes in the coming years to help as much as I can from the other side of the country. I’m going to be an aunt!

Filed under: family, life

Linaro Dinner, Ubuntu and Debian Evening and Saving Pangolins

Friday, Feb 17th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On February 5th several people from the Ubuntu California team headed over to Redwood City for dinner with Ubuntu-loving attendees from the Linaro Connect conference.

It was Super Bowl Sunday so we lucked out at a pizzeria that lacks a television – they seemed to be doing a brisk delivery service but the restaurant was pretty empty! Thanks again to Chris Johnston for contacting me prior to the event to arrange a time so I could find a venue and we could organize this.

I also hosted had another Ubuntu Hour and Debian Dinner evening the following evening. It was a lot of fun, even managed a small GPG keysigning at dinner.

Finally, I love animals, but I didn’t know what a pangolin was until Mark Shuttleworth announced Precise Pangolin as the 12.04 release name. He explains his selection of the pangolin:

Now, I’ve recently spent a few hours tracking a pangolin through the Kalahari. I can vouch for their precision – there wasn’t an ant hill in the valley that he missed. Their scales are a wonder of detail and quite the fashion statement. I can also vouch for their toughness; pangolin’s regularly survive encounters with lions. All in all, a perfect fit. There’s no sassier character, and no more cheerful digger, anywhere in those desert plains. If you want a plucky partner, the pangolin’s your match.

What an interesting creature! Now I haven’t yet met one (San Diego Zoo does have some tree pangolins, but that’s pretty far from here), but I have had a chance to learn about them over these past few months. The first thing that is abundantly clear is that they’re now endangered due to loss of habitat and poaching.

The SavePangolins.org site is an aggregation of information about pangolins and organizations that folks can donate to to help the preservation of them and other animals sharing their Asian and African habitats.

I bought a spiffy t-shirt, 100% of profits go to support pangolin conservation.

The pangolin toy came from Amazon.com, great for booths when people ask what a pangolin is!

Filed under: animals, events, LoCo, tech, ubuntu planet

Simcoe’s latest blood work and supplies

Saturday, Feb 4th, 2012 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

On Thursday the 26th we took Simcoe to a follow-up exam for her dental work. The visit went well, the site of her tooth extraction had healed. While we were there we decided to do some more blood work to see where we stood with that, as it had been a month since the last check.

The test results took longer than usual to get back, but vet got back to us today to report that BUN was down to 46 (normal range: 14-36) from 56 and CRE was at 2.4 (normal range: .6-2.4) from 2.9. It’s the best news possible for a cat with kidney failure, it means she’s responding to treatment and we’re hopeful she can remain in this stable state for a long time, I’ve now read reports of cats with her stage of renal failure and proper care living 5+ years.

Getting the supplies to maintain her treatment has been an interesting adventure. We managed the following:

  • Lactated Ringers Solution, DEHP Bags, Hospira: with a prescription through Walgreens, but we had to follow these instructions (thank goodness for them!). The box of 12 1000ml bags was $22.96 with the Walgreens prescription discount plan the instructions recommended.
  • Sub-q needles: with a prescription through Walgreens, easy! Even better, with the prescription discount plan we signed up for in the instructions given for the fluids they are only $11.99 for a box of 100.
  • Subcutaneous (S.Q.) Macro-Drip Fluid Administration Set: with a prescription through drsfostersmith.com (direct product link), we can probably shop around more for these but $3.99 each is quite reasonable and we got free shipping with our order of 12.
  • Nutramax Welactin Feline Soft Gel Caps – 60 Count: no prescription, just bought a couple bottles from Amazon.com (direct product link), bought two to qualify for free shipping.
  • Pepcid AC: easiest one on the list! We just bought OTC and picked up a pill chopper so we can cut up the appropriate dose (we had to do this will the pills from the vet too).

For now we’re still getting her food (Purina NF Kidney Function Feline Formula dry, and Hills K/D wet) through the vet, but we’ll re-evaluate that over time.

Throughout this whole process I was struck with how difficult it was. I suspect a lot of people just get the supplies exclusively through their vet so they don’t have the hassle, but I’m hopeful that now that we’ve figured this all out and have scripts and accounts on file with the appropriate vendors we won’t need to deal with much trouble in the future.

I haven’t quite worked out a system to manage where to store all this new cat stuff, but I’m working toward one.

Simcoe feeling better and getting into trouble again

So we continue her treatment and assuming things continue to go well we’ll take her back in for blood work in 3 months.

Filed under: simcoe

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Needs You!

Tuesday, Jan 31st, 2012 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

Today commemorates the release of Issue 250 of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter (UWN).

So first off, congratulations to everyone who has worked on UWN since the first issue in 2006!

Secondly, we need help. The current bus factor of UWN is 2. Both of us have full time jobs, travel a lot and have a variety of other commitments throughout the Ubuntu community and beyond. If Amber Graner and I are at a conference at the same time? You better believe the UWN release for that week is going to be late or rolled into a 2 week newsletter the following week.

So here’s what we need:

Summary writers. Summary writers receive an email every Saturday (sometimes Sunday if we’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 it’s easy to improve as you go on. Interested? Email editor.ubuntu.news@ubuntu.com and we’ll get you added to the list of folks who are emailed each week and you can help as you have time.

Core volunteers. We need to improve our bus factor. We need folks who will make a commitment to the newsletter, who are interested in spending time with us in #ubuntu-news on irc.freenode.net, getting familiar with our community and processes, pitching in with summaries and editing as needed and eventually lending a hand with release procedures. Interested? Join #ubuntu-news, introduce yourself, and help out where you can!

We’re still working to improve our team wiki pages, but the current burden UWN on our core volunteers has caused this to go slowly. I’m hoping this call to the community will help reduce this burden so we can more forward.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

SCALE 10x

Sunday, Jan 29th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I spent last weekend at the the Southern California Linux Expo. I flew down to Los Angeles Thursday evening.

Friday morning I gave my Ubucon talk on Getting Involved with Ubuntu. To accompany this talk I had handouts that gave a bunch of URLs to resources within the project that I covered in the talk. I particularly enjoyed the Q&A where people took the opportunity to ask specific questions about areas they were interested in getting involved with and I ended up having several follow-up discussions with folks. I’ve uploaded the materials for my talk: slides, handout.

Next on the Ubucon schedule was “Audience Introductions and Lightning Talks” which, with such a big crowd, ended up being long introductions with stories woven in. It’s always inspiring to learn all the things people are working on in F/OSS that aren’t well-publicized, and the session was great for figuring out who you should have a chat with later.

Next up was Ralf Pieper’s Meet the Cloud session. He didn’t really cover the rapidly evolving ecosystem that is the Ubuntu cloud community today. Instead his talk was more general, giving an overview of what “cloud” is and information about the open source resources available, as well as covering proprietary SaaS, PaaS and others provided by companies like Google and Sales Force.

After lunch was Jorge Castro’s The Power User’s Guide to Unity. Most people know through my involvement with Xubuntu that I’m not a Unity user and I’ve only ever really used Gnome in passing. However, I found myself quite interested throughout this talk! He didn’t cover customization, but instead his whole talk was demonstrating some of the key features of Unity that increase productivity but people may not know about. He based much of his talk on a post he made of the same name The Power User’s Guide to Unity in which he collects resources from questions and answers on askubuntu.com.

Ubucon audience

From there I departed from Ubucon to head over to the juju Charm School. Over the past few years there has been an explosion of configuration management, quick deployment and other systems administrator tools to make the lives of us sysadmins easier when it comes to rapid deployment. Puppet is the only one I’ve explored recently with any depth, and even that we’re not yet using in production at work. The juju toolset is more of a quick deployment and service relationship management tool, although configuration can be included or used in collaboration with an existing system like Puppet. I had seen juju demos floating around the online Ubuntu community previously, but this charm school was a good opportunity to hear from fellow sysadmins about what they thought of the tools. It was an interesting session and the presentation finished with handing out juju t-shirts to attendees, including ones in women’s sizes. Now, I was the only woman in the room of 30+ people and a joke was made that the box of women’s t-shirts was brought just for me, but I went out of my way to thank them for the consideration. It really, really meant a lot (read more about why here).

I then went to Richard Gaskin’s Customizing Unity talk. It was another very demonstration-oriented talk where he explored the Unity Plugin section of the CompizConfig Settings Manager. He’s a really great speaker who had the audience laughing at several points, particularly when he kept impressing upon us that “I didn’t tell you to do this, it’ll probably break your system” with every change he made.

Congrats to Nathan Haines and the rest of the volunteers at Ubucon for making it another great event this year. There were a few sessions throughout the day that had standing room only!

Friday evening 11 of us ended up going out with an Ubuntu California (and friends!) dinner at a nearby diner.

Ubuntu California dinner

Saturday morning I was up bright and early to start putting together the Ubuntu booth on the expo floor.

The booth really came together nicely, the banner and tablecloth from Canonical make a huge difference in how things look. And Eric P. Scott had the clever idea of M&Ms put into dishes that make the Ubuntu logo:

The candy was quite the hit at the booth

Once the booth was set up I ran off to give my second talk of the conference, Bringing Linux into Public Schools and Community Centers. Unfortunately it was at the same time as the keynote on Saturday and in a room that wasn’t on the map because it was on a different floor than the rest of the talks, but I did manage to have a great audience of 40-50 people. In this talk I gave examples from a deployment at a community center that Ubuntu Pennsylvania worked on in 2007 and a couple of the public charter schools Partimus.org works with. From there I expanded upon several of the lessons we’ve learned as an outside organization getting involved in learning centers and charter schools. I knew there were educators and tech professionals in my audience who had worked on deployments like ones I’ve worked on, so I actively encouraged audience participation throughout my talk, and I’m very glad I did. The audience participation was spectacular, drawing from different types of deployments, I even was able to divert answering of some of the questions to some audience members who had more experience than I do in certain areas. I also ended up having several discussions after my talk and throughout the weekend with others interested in schools and was able to swap contact info with people from organizations similar to Partimus. I’ve uploaded the materials for my talk: slides, notes.

Thanks to Richard Gaskin for taking pictures during my talk

I spent much of the weekend at the Ubuntu booth, the EXOPC Slate running Ubuntu that Akkana Peck brought to demonstrate Ubuntu on a tablet ended up being quite a popular demonstration.

Huge thanks to all our Ubuntu California booth volunteers: Jess Bermudes, Mickey Lyle, Philip Ballew, Eric P. Scott, Nathan Haines and Jack Deslippe. Also thanks to Eric Hammond and David Wonderly who brought along a bunch of materials that were vital for the booth. It was a great couple of days, gave out over 400 Ubuntu CDs (thanks to Canonical for shipping us the a conference pack and pressed CDs for the conference!).

As for other talks at the conference, I ended up going to one about the current state of OpenStack by Jesse Andrews (might load up the DevStack version that is easily installable on Ubuntu 11.10). I tried to go to Alison Chaiken’s Automotive: the Next Frontier for Mobile Linux but by the time I wrapped things up at the booth for the evening the room she was presenting in was already spilling over into the hallway. Sunday I went the Selena Deckelmann’s great keynote about how to “plan for the worst, minimize risk and recover gracefully from failure” before heading to a quick little Ubuntu Women meetup. I also went to Cat Allman’s Fundraising 101 (or “Free as in Freedom So Who Pays for the Beer?”) talk, where I picked up some great tips for handling money for non-profits. After packing up the Ubuntu booth I wrapped up my weekend at SCALE by going to the Ceph distributed storage system talk by Sage Weil, Ceph is very cool stuff.

In all? Awesome weekend! Kudos to the SCALE folks for pulling off another amazing conference!

More photos from Ubucon and SCALE here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157629015857079/

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

Simcoe’s Dental Visit

Monday, Jan 16th, 2012 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

When Simcoe was diagnosed with Chronic Renal Failure (CRF) they also identified a badly infected tooth that needed to be cared for.

She’s now been through a number of tests and since we decided to hold off on the kidney transplant for now we went ahead and scheduled her dental work. We picked up some antibiotics last week and had been giving them to her since Saturday. Unfortunately they caused her to vomit twice, which we reported when we dropped her off at 8:30AM this morning.

We were all pretty apprehensive about the dental work, and I was worried about her all day. Fortunately her vet has been really great and worked with the anesthesiologist to make sure she was given as little sedation as possible to make it through. With renal cats there is always a major worry about uncontrollable blood pressure drop during procedures, which can be fatal. They also decided to take some x-rays during the procedure and do a full cleaning to reduce the chances that we’d need to bring her in again for dental work in the near future.

Around 3PM I got the call from the vet letting us know she was waking up and doing ok. Hooray!

The infected tooth ended up being worse than they thought, with the tooth showing severe infection but the roots remaining buried deep in her jaw so it took a considerable amount of work to get everything out. Fortunately the x-rays showed no more damaged teeth, and aside from a drop in blood pressure that was controlled with fluid treatment she did well through the procedure.

They sent her home with a new form of antibiotics that we hope will be easier on her stomach. She’s also on Buprenorphine for three days to handle pain from the extracted tooth.


Simcoe Medicine!

We picked up a prescription for her Lactated Ringer’s solution and the needles to go with it as we’ll be continuing the subcutaneous injections every other day, I’ll head over to the pharmacy tomorrow to place the order for the first case.

The next vet visit is 10 days from now as a routine follow-up to the dental work.

She’s clearly in pain tonight, very restless, but she’s been trying to eat and drink so we’re hopeful she’ll recover quickly.

Filed under: simcoe

Ubuntu Hour, SCALE 10x and Ubuntu User Days

Thursday, Jan 12th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last night I hosted the monthly San Francisco Ubuntu Hour. We had a last minute change of venue due to the coffee shop we meet in deciding to close early without warning (ah, the joys of local small businesses), but fortunately we were able to use the lobby one door over and people managed to find us. We got an install of an eeePC going for a new user who had previously been using the Xandros install that shipped with his system, but was finding it increasingly insufficient since support went away for it.

Afterward the Ubuntu Hour one of the members of the Ubuntu California team showed off his clever plans for an Ubuntu-themed candy display for our booth at SCALE 10x next weekend. I’ll be sure to take lots of pictures.

SCALE 10x. I’m flying out on a 6:47 PM flight on Thursday evening, putting me at Los Angeles shortly after 8PM. This is much better timing than my late flight last year that didn’t get us to the hotel until after 1AM, and I had a talk at 9AM. Unfortunately with all of Simcoe’s medical stuff going on we decided MJ will have to skip this one to take care of her (in the future we hope to medically board her, but we’ve put her through a lot this month already). This year my SCALE schedule is quite packed, I once again have the 9AM Friday morning slot at Ubucon, this time doing a talk on Getting Involved with Ubuntu. Saturday morning at 8:30AM we’ll be putting together the Ubuntu booth and then coordinating with volunteers to keep it staffed through Sunday evening. Later that morning I’ll be giving my Bringing Linux into Public Schools and Community Centers talk for the Open Source in Education track of the conference. Sunday morning at 11AM several of us are meeting in the lobby for an Ubuntu Women gathering. Throughout the conference I’ll be at the Ubuntu booth as needed. At 5:30PM we pack up the Ubuntu booth and head to the airport for my 8PM flight back home. Should be a fun, if exhausting, weekend.

But before SCALE is this weekend, when we have Ubuntu User Days! I’ve worked primarily with the Ubuntu Beginners Team to recruit volunteers to present at this event, so huge thanks to them for being such an enthusiastic group of folks. It’s all on IRC (joining in instructions here) so while helping run the day I’ll also be doing final prep work for SCALE and catching up on project work and email.

Full schedule can be found on the User Days wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UserDays including the schedule with links to the UTC time converted to other time zones.

Filed under: events, LoCo, tech, ubuntu planet

Community Council Begins Ubuntu Mailing Lists Review

Thursday, Jan 5th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

At the last Ubuntu Developer Summit it was brought to the attention of the Ubuntu Community Council that lists.ubuntu.com had become quite crowded. There was concern that it was overwhelming for new contributors looking for a mailing lists to join and they may find it confusing or discouraging if they join lists which are inactive.

As a result, the Community Council has been working with Canonical IS to get activity details on mailing lists so we can do a more thorough review.

The following lists were identified as candidates for deletion, reasons in the parentheses:

The following emails (with $list and $reason filled out) have been sent to the list owners of these lists:

You are being contacted as the list owner for $list.

At the last Ubuntu Developer Summit it was brought to the attention of the Community Council that there were many mailing lists with little or no traffic whose presence on lists.ubuntu.com only served to discourage and confuse new contributors. Your mailing list was identified as one which we’d like to move forward with deletion because $reason.

Please reply to this email if you have any objections (quiet time in project? plans for it in the future?), otherwise we will be closing this list in approximately two weeks.

Thank you for your time.

Elizabeth Krumbach,
On behalf of the Community Council

If you are a member of any of these teams and wish to speak on behalf of the mailing list to prevent deletion, please contact the Community Council at community-council@lists.ubuntu.com within the next two weeks.

Please take note that this review is by no means a judgement on the teams who use these mailing lists or a withdrawl of support. If a team with a low-activity mailing list wishes to keep their list they can. We are simply seeking to make it easier for new contributors to get involved with active mailing lists they for projects they are interested in. Also note that LoCo Team and Translations mailing lists are exempt from this review as we understand that traffic on these fluctuates greatly over time.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet
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