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UDS-Q in Oakland Day 1

Monday, May 7th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Being local to the Ubuntu Developer Summit this time I had the pleasure of meeting up with several friends prior to the summit. Enjoying dinner in Oakland on Saturday evening, picking up a first time UDS attendee at the airport Saturday night after BART stopped running. Then on Sunday a lovely brunch at EPIC Roadhouse with a couple of friends who were staying in San Francisco Sunday and then heading over with them to Oakland with their luggage.

Having a UDS that’s local to me is actually quite a surreal experience. The excitement of visiting a new place and all the travel that goes along with it has been part of the whole experience every time I’ve attended a UDS until now. This morning between walking to the station, waiting for the BART train and then walking to the hotel I spent less than 30 minutes getting there!

It has also meant that I’ve traded the exhaustion of travel for that of being a helpful local. This morning I quickly ran out of my 15 “I’m a local” pins I bought for Ubuntu California attendees and was giving out blank Clipper transit cards throughout the day (I still have some if you’re reading this and need one). There was also plenty of helping folks with maps and quick questions (“where is chinatown?” and the like). I really love the bay area and have enjoyed sharing that with my fellow UDS attendees.

The day kicked off with an introduction by Canonical’s Community Team lead Jono Bacon and a keynote by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. Quality and having a usable release throughout development were a major part of Mark’s keynote. As he mentions here the exciting part of the keynote was the unveiling of the first rack-ready 48-node 192-core ARM server from Calxeda. Some day I’ll get my sysadmin paws on such hardware!

From there, it was off to sessions.

– Community Roundtable –

We started off with introductions around the room and discussed some of our take-aways from Mark’s keynote. We also touched upon some documentation discussions that are scheduled or should happen during this UDS, including the proposed move to SUMO. Tomorrow we’ll be brainstorming a bit more for the Leadership Summit happening in the afternoon.

I’ve uploaded notes from the session here.

– OpenStack HA –

Having not kept completely up to date with OpenStack, but working with many of the technologies at work (HA clusters on Debian with pacemaker and corosync, drbd and application-level replication strategies), this was an interesting session for me. The discussion centered around what kinds of things should be handled by the OpenStack infrastructure and what should obviously be handled application-side, for several technologies in the stack, including MySQL, RabbitMQ, Nova, and with an eye out for what to do when Quantum comes out.

I’ve uploaded notes from the session here.

– LoCo Portal Content Review –

This session covered a lot of ground, but at the core it was a review of static text content itself on the LoCo Team Portal. Some action items were made for gathering photos for About Local Community (LoCo) Teams to make it more lively. I agreed to do some “wiki archaeological work” once a defined list of documents we want included directly on LTP is put together, as I’m quite sure all the text has been written at some point, it’s just hard to find on the wiki. There was also a fair amount of discussion about the severe lack of developers for the platform, which runs on Django, so a few folks will be reaching out to the community with some “getting involved” documents and blog posts to spark more interest – perhaps next UDS we can even add more features!

I’ve uploaded notes from the session here.

After lunch it was on to the plenaries.

First off was “How Ubuntu and Canonical work with OEMs” with Chris Kenyon. It was a very interesting talk that quickly dove into the adventure it’s been over the past 4 years to work with OEMs to learn the steps they need to take to get Ubuntu pre-installed at scale. A lot of the OEMs are exclusively geared toward Windows, so all their testing and automation is built around Windows. As a result, the Canonical OEM team has spent a considerable amount of time working with the professionals at the OEMs to develop these same tools to work on the rapid installation and testing required in this area.

The next talk was on “HP & Ubuntu” by Bdale Garbee. Garbee, always an excellent speaker, explained that HP is world’s largest IT company, and they have the opportunity to interact with hugely diverse market and get feedback. He discussed the Moonshot, Odyssey and Voyager programs and how they relate to Linux and Ubuntu. Then discussed Ubuntu on ProLiant story: 2006: support for Debian, 2009: broader support for “Community” distributions, 2012: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to be Certified and Supported. He also mentioned that they are doing a significant amount of work with OpenStack (not only technical content, but also hosting the build farm). The latest Ubuntu LTS is the core for HP Cloud offering, public beta begins May 10th.

The last plenary was about the juju Charm Store by community member Marco Ceppi. He quickly explained what juju is “apt-get for the cloud” and what Charms are (deployment scripts, or the “packages” in the “apt-get” analogy). Charms are submitted to the Charm Store, charms are reviewed for security, best practices and completeness. It’s a living archive, not frozen like you’d find with Ubuntu itself. And he gave demo of a juju deployment he just deployed a few minutes before the presentation. There is a charm browser at jujucharms.com

– Test Drive Different Tablet UIs – User Experiences –

I ended up in this testing room after some sessions got shuffled around, and I’m glad I did! There were several Exopcs on display running various operating systems and environments, including Gnome3, Windows 8 and Unity on 12.04. ZaReason also brought one of their soon-to-be-released Zatabs running Android. It was a popular room, but the traffic was flowing enough that it wasn’t too hard to get to see everything.

– QA community structuring and needs –

Aside from testing I did when I was maintaining packages in Debian, I’ve never actually done a whole lot of software testing until just this past release when I started to help test ISOs for the Xubuntu team. The session centered around analysis and proposals of changes which may need to be made to the QA community to raise effectiveness, recruit more volunteers (and not burn them out!) and in general leverage the resources they have to get the best results.

I’ve uploaded notes from the session here.

– App Developer Events –

Last session of the day! Ubuntu is seeking to get more developers to port (or simply write) applications to Ubuntu. I think the most interesting thing for me in this session was discussion related to some proposed “app contests” and how the discussion went from monetary and goods-based prizes to a more thorough analysis of what motivates people and is a compelling reward. It was generally agreed that something like recognition (ability to add to your resume “Winner of top app in Ubuntu for the month of July”) or prominent placement in the Software Center is going to be more valuable to a potential developer than a $100 gift certificate or goods (like a netbook) that may not be very useful to the developer who won it. There was also more general discussion about how we can better publicize app development for Ubuntu in general so potential app developers know it exists and have a clear path laid out to begin submitting apps.

I’ve uploaded notes from the session here.

After sessions I had several great hallway conversations before heading to the night’s meet and greet welcome event. I only stayed for about an hour, as I needed to head home to do some more preparation for the days ahead.

Filed under: events, tech, ubuntu planet, UDS

Simcoe’s April Checkup

Thursday, May 3rd, 2012 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

On April 28th we took Simcoe in for her quarterly checkup, the last one was on January 26th (I wrote about it here).

In general we felt she was responding well to the CRF treatment, activity level has been great and it seemed like she was even putting on weight.


Simcoe in the carrier before the vet visit

The physical exam went great. She indeed has put on a whole pound in the past 3 months, going from 7.1 to 8.1 lbs. This is up a significant amount from when she was just 6.06 lbs, but still a bit off her healthy weight of 9.1 lbs.

On Tuesday we got the blood work back:

BUN: 55 (normal range: 14-36)
CRE: 2.3 (normal range: .6-2.4)

So the BUN has increased a little (last time was 46) and CRE is down a little from 2.4. The vet suggested that we keep her on her treatment plan and check back again in 3 months.

She also again recommended that we start brushing her teeth regularly. We’ve since done it once… with marginal success. I’ll try again tonight. If anyone has some tips I’d be happy to hear them! We have been giving them treats that claim to help with dental health.

It’s also become increasingly difficult to give her pills, she is very sneaky. I’ll go through the whole pilling process, believe she’s swallowed it and then she’ll walk off and spit out the pill a minute later. On the recommendation of the petsitter we decided to try out Greenie’s Pill Pockets. It worked very well for the first few days, but now she’s trying to eat around the pills, the past two nights it took two tries.

We’re still working to handle different food for each cat. Caligula’s food sometimes makes her sick and we suspect Caligula has put on a little weight by sneaking her food. She’s also very picky about her soft food and I’ve had to sneak in the prescription food with the low-phosphorous over the counter food that she likes. On the bright side she hasn’t lost her appetite! She just walks around and meows when I don’t give her the food she wants.

I’m very happy that she’s responding so well to treatment, quite a change from the devastation we felt when she was diagnosed in December when we learned it was incurable and thought her prognosis was on the order of just a few months. From day to day she acts like normal pre-illness Simcoe!

Filed under: simcoe

I’m an Ubuntu Developer Summit local!

Saturday, Apr 28th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I have been to four Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS), and at all of them I found the advice of local Ubuntu contributors to be very valuable to my visit, the shining example of which was the culmination of being downtown in a city and having the support of the Hungarian LoCo team while we were in Budapest.

This UDS it’s my turn to be a local, and it’s once again being held downtown in a city!

From May 7-11th UDS will be held in Oakland, which is across the bay from me here in San Francisco. With the cities being so close I make frequent trips to Oakland for baseball games, to fly out of the Oakland airport, to visit their museums and zoo or to see shows. In the “Bay Area” of which Oakland is part of, there are many similarities in transit and other key things that make most anyone within the area a useful local at an event in Oakland.

The Ubuntu California team has been pretty excited about this, and we’ve been brainstorming some things to do on our wiki:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CaliforniaTeam/Projects/UDS-Q

And we have been moving confirmed evening events to the UDS wiki:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDS-Q/OtherEvents

We’ve also put together a public transit page for UDS attendees:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDS-Q/PublicTransit

Huge thanks to Eric P. Scott and Chris Peeples who have offered invaluable suggestions for this transit page, it was much smaller when I began!

We’ve also gone ahead and created “I’m a local” buttons which friendly members of the Ubuntu California team will be wearing throughout the week of UDS to help out with public transit directions, finding places to eat and more.

We welcome any UDS attendees to join us in our channel #ubuntu-us-ca on freenode or the ubuntu-us-ca mailing list with any questions about the area as you make your preparations to visit.

Several of us on the team have also cleared our schedules on the weekends surrounding UDS to spend time with visitors and are happy to help with details on bay cruises, museums and other “tourist stuff” which may be of interest in the area. On the Sunday before UDS I’ll be in downtown San Francisco (where I live) and would be happy to spend time with folks looking to do some shopping around Union Square. The Saturday following UDS I am thinking about taking interested folks over to the San Francisco Zoo and to see the Pacific ocean (too cold to swim, but it is pretty!), both accessible via light rail public transit. For both of these things people are welcome to drop suitcases and other items at my home downtown if it makes the logistics easier. If you’re interested, please drop me an email at lyz@ubuntu.com or grab me (pleia2) on IRC or track me down at UDS :)

Hope to see you there!

Disclaimer: I don’t work for Canonical and the work of the Ubuntu California team is not in any way a sponsored or included as part of the Ubuntu Developer Summit itself. If you have more general questions about UDS, your sponsorship or travel arrangements please follow-up with the contact at Canonical you’ve been working with.

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

12.04 Release Party: San Francisco Edition

Saturday, Apr 28th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Thursday night I hosted the typical Ubuntu California release party at Thirsty Bear Brewing Company in downtown San Francisco.

We had…

A thirsty pangolin!

A hungry penguin!

A guy in a Fedora shirt (hi Jeff!)!

And lots of people having fun!

All told we probably had 20 people who came and went throughout the night. As is tradition, we stayed until past closing and there were plenty of friendly “I haven’t seen you in a while!” to go around. It was really great to see so many amazing people together for this event, thanks again to everyone who made it out!

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

Orkney the Grey Seal

Sunday, Apr 22nd, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

This morning I dropped MJ off at the airport. To cheer myself up and enjoy the beautiful weather I decided to take a detour on my way home to visit the San Francisco Zoo.

If you read my blog you know that as a member I visit frequently. Took lots of pictures (set here) and was generally enjoying the visit. Slash the cassowary was out! One of the polar bears was posing for pictures! The grizzly bears were running around in anticipation for their breakfast!

Then I got to Orkney’s pool.

Orkney’s pool was empty. All his signs were gone. A zoo staff member was nearby so I quickly asked her about it and she conveyed the bad news, Orkney had passed away the previous month. There were some tears and she admitted that she had cried too when she learned.

From the San
 Francisco
 Zoo
 Mourns
 the
 Death
 of
 “Orkney” the 
Beloved
 Grey 
Seal press release on March 2nd:

SAN
 FRANCISCO 
– 
Today, 
San 
Francisco 
Zoo 
is 
sad 
to 
announce 
the 
loss 
of 
Orkney, 
an
 Atlantic
 grey 
seal 
that 
arrived 
at 
the 
Zoo 
in
 1970.
 He
 was 
42
 years
 old 
and 
considered
 the 
oldest 
grey
 seal 
living
 in 
any 
North 
American 
Association 
of 
Zoos 
and 
Aquariums’
 (AZA) 
captive
 populations. 
He
 was
 born
 in
 the
 wild
 at 
Prince
 Edward
 Island
 in 
Eastern
 Canada
 and
 was 
a
 favorite
 among
 staff
 and 
visitors. He
 shared 
his 
exhibit 
with other
 grey
 seals 
over the
 years
 and
 sired
 multiple 
offspring
 between
 1979
 and 
1983.




For
 the
 past 
several 
months,
 Orkney
 had 
been
 undergoing 
medical 
treatments
 as 
well 
as
 regular
 training
 sessions
 that 
allowed 
staff 
to 
monitor 
his 
weight 
and 
conduct 
visual
 exams. 
Yesterday, 
his 
keepers 
noticed
 that 
he 
was 
extremely 
lethargic 
and 
weak. 
They
 kept 
a 
close 
eye 
on 
him 
in 
hopes 
his condition 
would
 improve. 
On Friday
 morning,
 his
 breathing
 was 
deep
 and 
labored,
 and 
he 
showed 
no 
signs 
of 
engagement 
or 
interaction.
 After 
careful 
consultation 
with 
the 
Zoo’s 
Animal 
Care 
staff 
and 
the 
Chief 
of 
Veterinary
 Services, 
the 
decision 
to 
euthanize 
him 
was 
made.




“Unfortunately, 
we 
had 
to 
make 
the 
decision 
to 
say 
goodbye 
to 
Orkney,” 
Tanya 
M.
 Peterson, 
San 
Francisco
 Zoological
 Society
 Executive 
Director 
and 
President 
said. “He
 had
 been 
our 
own 
Lance
 Armstrong
 by 
beating
 the 
odds 
for 
so 
long. 
He’ll 
be 
greatly
 missed
 by 
staff 
and 
visitors 
alike.”


Orkney swimming in his pool, September 29, 2010

I love animals and it would be impossible for me to say what is my favorite, or even what general type is my favorite, but I do adore pinnipeds. I go up to Pier 39 to visit the sea lions regularly, I was delighted by the seal-covered beaches in Monterey and I’m a member of the Marine Mammal Center and have said “if I ever give up this open source stuff, I’ll go volunteer there.” When I joined the zoo in 2010 Orkney was the only pinniped (they now also have two sea lions, the blind rescues Silent Knight and Henry) and so I made a point to visit him every time to say hello. On my birthday I joked that I went to see him “to see someone older than me.”

The last time I saw Orkney was when I was last at the zoo on February 4th, soaking up the sun near his pool.


Orkney resting by his pool, February 4, 2012

I am glad he was able to live such a long life with the care he had, but I will miss him.

Filed under: animals, san francisco

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Needs You

Saturday, Apr 21st, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Back in August I wrote a post “News is hard, but we’re making it easier” regarding improvements to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter.

At the time I defined some todo list items, which I now have updates on:

  • UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter wiki
    • Make sure workflow is properly documented DONE
    • Confirm team contact information has been updated DONE
    • Review instructions for how to get involved DONE
    • General clean-up for clarity DONE
  • Train additional releasers INPROGRESS
  • Redefine team structure and leadership DONE

I think one of the most exciting things about this reorganization is the formal decentralization of a single editor in chief running the whole thing. Unfortunately this is largely in name only, as there are still only 2 people who can complete the full publishing routine and if I’m unavailable I need to plan accordingly to make sure we have volunteers available to coordinate the preparation. I’d really like to move past this because it’s not sustainable.

We need more volunteers doing summary writing and editing so we can complete the newsletter in a timely manner each week (and can actually complete it to our highest standards, last week we had to forgo summaries on two full sections of the newsletter because we didn’t have enough people to write them). We also wish to have a wider pool to draw from when it comes to experienced folks to train on the release process as most of our volunteers have very limited time to contribute.

See this page for details of each and how you can help out: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Join

Email me at lyz@ubuntu.com if you have any questions, comments, suggestions or anything. Feel free to drop by #ubuntu-news on chat.freenode.net if you want to get a feel for the team or ask other questions (as always with IRC, please be patient when waiting for replies, we’re a small team and not always around to reply!).

Finally, huge thanks to everyone who is currently involved with the team and recently joined. We recently had Matt Rudge join us as a wonderfully thorough editor, Charles Profitt stepped up while I was traveling to collect links and has been working on summaries, Amber Graner is reliably available for releasing when I’m not, Chris Druif has been maintaining our Ubuntu Flavors meetings section, Jose Antonio Rey recently started maintaining a Spanish translation and Benjamin Kerensa (who also works on Dev news) has stepped up to be trained on releasing. And of course our hard-working summary writers (and sometimes editors!) Nathan Dyer, Neil Oosthuizen, Emma Marshall, Unit193 and others who don’t explicitly put their name in the credits.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

12.04 Presentation for Bay Area Linux Users Group (BALUG) and upcoming SF Release Party

Wednesday, Apr 18th, 2012 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

Last night, as announced here and mentioned here, Grant Bowman and I did a presentation for the Bay Area Linux Users Group (BALUG) on Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin).

When I arrived a gentleman I’d been corresponding with over email had his netbook set up for me to look at. He couldn’t remember his password and I had a USB stick with Ubuntu ISOs on it, so resetting the password just took a few minutes. We then headed into the dining room for the typical BALUG family-style Chinese offering.

The presentation followed dinner and was very casual, meeting in the bar area of the restaurant rather than the upstairs room (there was another event going on). Michael Paoli graciously printed out handouts that I put together in lieu of projector+slides. People asked questions throughout and we had very engaging discussions about virtualization technologies on Ubuntu these days (KVM, Xen, VirtualBox), kernel changes (PAE, the 64-bit as default discussion), OpenStack and more. The improvements in Unity to keyboard navigation where a huge hit, as was the new shortcuts menu you get by holding down the Super key, there were a few people who mentioned they would “give Unity another shot in 12.04” after the demonstrations.

We wrapped up the evening by answering a few final questions and passing around our identical Lenovo G575 systems running 12.04 so people could play with Unity and gnome-panel versions.

Much of the content from the handouts came from the Alpha and Beta release announcements. The handouts themselves are available, licensed CC BY-SA, so you’re welcome to borrow for your own presentations:

In other 12.04 news, next week the Ubuntu California team will be hosting a release party in San Francisco!

Date: Thu, 26 April 2012
Time: 7:00 – 9:30PM PDT
Where: Thirsty Bear Brewing Company, 661 Howard Street, San Francisco, 94105 (Map)
RSVP: http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/ubuntu-california/1615/detail/

This will be a pretty informal get-together where we enjoy tapas, optional craft brews and chat about Ubuntu. This is a restaurant so all ages are welcome and there are non-alcoholic beverage offerings. On and off-street parking is available and the venue is just a couple blocks from the Montgomery BART and MUNI station.

We’re going to try and meet around the high tables opposite the bar, but in case we’re not there just look for the people with the Ubuntu shirts. Please note that this is not a sponsored event, so it’s pay-for-what you eat/drink and we’ll be closing the tab throughout the evening so we don’t end up with a big bill at the end.

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

Pet sitter

Friday, Apr 13th, 2012 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

MJ and I travel a frequently, last year was my biggest travel year ever for me with nearly 50k miles of airline travel. For long trips last year we have a couple of friends who were happy to drop in to feed and water them every few days. Then, when Simcoe was diagnosed with CRF in December we learned she’d now need special food, special attention to her behavior, daily medication and subcutaneous fluid injections every other day. How could we travel now that we had a sick kitty to care for?

It quickly became clear that we had three options:

  1. Stop travelling
  2. Board Simcoe at the vet while traveling
  3. Hire a petsitter to come in daily while traveling

While I have learned that many folks with CRF cats selection option 1, it wasn’t practical for us. I don’t anticipate as much travel this year as last, but travel is an important part of our lives from work to family. The second option is not optimal given how stressed out Simcoe gets at the vet, to leave her at a place that makes her so upset for a whole week without Caligula? So sad! We were apprehensive about the third option because it required giving keys to our home to a stranger and trusting them with the security of our home and lives of our cats. We spent several weeks going over our options.

The topic of traveling came up on one of the cat care lists I’ve joined since learning of Simcoe’s diagnosis and someone recommended searching for a sitter on the National Association of Professional Pet Sitters (NAPPS). It was there where I found The Petsitters here in San Francisco. We met with the owner, Elaine, and her assistant who would be accompanying her on visits and could take over in the event of an emergency. We spent almost an hour answering questions about the cats and going through details of their care, everything from their favorite toys and treats to the specifics of Simcoe’s particular care routine. They have considerable experience with administrating the subcutaneous fluids, giving pills to pets and caring for sick animals in general. At the end of our meeting I was satisfied with the interaction and felt comfortable going on our trip.

Our trip to Philadelphia last month was the first trial of this petsitting experiment. “No news is good news” is their policy, but took an opportunity to call once during our trip just to check in to confirm all was well – and it was! I was able to keep my worrying to a minimum.

When we returned home the cats where happy and healthy and Elaine had left a detailed note talking about their care while we were gone. In all, an excellent experience that we will repeat the next time we go out of town for more than a couple days!

While on the topic of Simcoe, she’s been continuing to respond well to treatment, largely acting like her old self again and even putting on a little weight (which is unusual for CRF cats). We’ll be taking her in for blood work soon to make sure her levels are all still looking good and to adjust care as needed.

Filed under: caligula, simcoe

Joining a synagogue

Friday, Apr 13th, 2012 by pleia2 | 5 Comments

About a decade ago I wrote an article My Spiritual Path To Atheism, I last updated it in 2004. The too long; didn’t read version: I was put off by hypocrisy, bigotry and cruelty of the Christian church I attended as a teenager, dabbled in other religions and followed history back to learn why certain religious things exist and eventually came down with the conclusion that in my world view there was no place for God.

Now, I don’t actually have a problem with religion in general. I haven’t found a connection with it in my own life but I respect much of what it provides for others and understand that a lot of people have deep cultural ties that include religion. I am deeply offended by religion being used to justify pain being inflicted upon others, but I find that a fair amount of that is painful interpretations by people who are just looking for a justification for the cruel behavior they were going to engage in regardless.

Upon reflection, some of this is deeply cultural for me, or lack there of. While looking for “the truth” on the question of religion I checked in with my relatives and ancestors. My immediate family has dedicated secular humanists, Catholics, and Christian Protestants of all kinds. Going back a several generations they were some kind of Christian like much of Europe, go back further and my ancestors were all kinds of pagan, go back further… where do I stop? And even if I were to stop, does sheer passage of time mean something is truer than another? If so, why would my ancestors have given it up for a new belief system? Clearly this isn’t the way.

Speaking from a strictly cultural sense I have a grandfather who deeply identifies with his Irish heritage and my other grandfather went as far as working with others to publish a newsletter celebrating German heritage. I spent time going down these paths too, but as as a 3rd generation American-born child in a family that has embraced the culture here and after doing some traveling in Europe, I have learned that in truth I am deeply American.

So here I am, an American atheist. I actually have come to identify with Secular Humanism because I feel that I’m more defined by my compassion for others than the fact that my world view does not include any god(s). My moral code is quite simply “don’t hurt others” and I do a workaholic level of volunteer work now that I’m in a position in my life where I can. When looking at all this, the fact that I don’t believe in god(s) seems incidental.

Now, my fiance is Jewish, wishes to get married by a Rabbi and to raise any children we may have in the Jewish tradition.

I’ve taken a lot of time to think about how we could handle this. I’ve come to the conclusion that when it comes to values and culture, I care about American culture, helping others and advancing the freedom of information and learning. This doesn’t conflict with Judaism (indeed, it’s compatible with most religion), so as long as I’m free to express my feelings about these things in our life and to our children I’m happy to be part of a household which observes and respects Judaism as well.

This week we joined a synagogue together that recognizes and respects non-Jewish partners like myself who aren’t currently interested in conversion. I was relieved to learn that the synagogue also offers classes and tips for parents who are not the same religion because it’s so common here in California. My intellectual curiosity about Judaism abounds, and I’ll start attending Judaism classes hosted by the synagogue this fall so I can learn more about the culture and religion. I also put together a little page tracking the tools I’m using to help me learn about Torah here.

This past Saturday I attended my first Seder.

Looking forward to a whole year, and more, of firsts!

Filed under: reflection, spirituality

Unity

Thursday, Mar 29th, 2012 by pleia2 | 6 Comments

Happy Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) Beta 2 everyone!

I’ve been an Xfce user since 2004, this post from last year documents my UI adventures. It’s been my Desktop Environment of choice for my whole professional career as a systems administrator and I’m very set in my ways configuration-wise at work. These days I help out with the Xubuntu team on marketing, website, release notes and testing. I really love Xfce and I’ll continue to use it and contribute to Xubuntu (we had our beta2 today too, and formal release of our new branding!).

That said, I wanted to take some time to give a respectful nod to Unity.

I recently tried Ubuntu 11.10 with Unity on a new laptop. I have to admit that I found it a bit cumbersome (point: I also called Gnome2 cumbersome). There were little things about it that felt unfinished, like gaps where just using keyboard navigation didn’t quite cut it. I also quickly realized that pretty much all of my favorite tips Jorge Castro showed off in his The Power User’s Guide to Unity talk at Ubucon at the Southern California Linux Expo back in January where specific to the newer version of Unity in 12.04. I grabbed the daily build on March 13th and loaded it up alongside my Xubuntu 11.10 and 12.04 daily installs.

Installing Ubuntu 12.04 on my Lenovo G575

Unity in Ubuntu 12.04 is really quite impressive.

As a long-time fan of minimalist desktops I like it when the UI stays out of my way. I am a total sucker for keybindings, I use keybindings for everything. The new Unity has patched up the gaps in support for keyboard navigation to make the whole experience very smooth. Holding down the Super key (usually has a Windows logo on it) will pop up a cheat sheet for keybindings that I immediately fell in love with. The “display all windows” option (shift alt up arrow) for seeing all open windows on a screen is super useful when you have multiple windows of the same type open doing different things, like terminals. After sitting on my couch with my laptop for an hour I was quite comfortable with the new interface and had started working on some project stuff.

Showing all windows with shift alt up arrow

In all, Unity in 12.04 is significantly more polished than previous versions and I think finally presents a solid implementation of the vision that the designers had for it. Bravo! If anyone was put off by Unity in the past I highly recommend giving it another shot with this new release.

On Tuesday, April 17th, Grant Bowman and I will be doing a presentation on 12.04 at the Bay Area Linux Users Group (BALUG) where I’ll be showing off some of the nifty tricks I’ve learned.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet
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