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Misc computers, books, television and travel

Tuesday, Feb 8th, 2011 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

It’s been a few more days with the new Cr-48 and I’ve really developed quite a fondness for it, but there are a few nagging issues. I switched back to regular mode when I noticed that in developer mode it wasn’t sleeping properly and I had done most of the poking around that I wanted to do in the shell for now. The shell in regular mode is super basic but it allows ssh so I’m good to go. I hate the trackpad, when MJ tried it out he commented that it seemed like they were shooting for similar behavior as the Macbook Pro but I really miss having buttons, rather than the whole trackpad being a button. And since I’m switching between terminal and browser a lot centerclick is super important to me for copy/paste, and centerclick is supported with a three finger click but it’s very finicky. Using a little travel mouse alleviates this problem, but I wish it wasn’t needed, I miss the buttons on my netbook.

The sound issue I mentioned in my other post about the Cr-48 is discussed here: CR-48 sound is buggy since update. I have to admit that it was getting very frustrating, while reloading tabs or playing something else would generally fix it (no need to reboot, rebooting didn’t even occur to me) this isn’t fun when you adjust the sound in the middle of a show and your sound gets all screwy. The thread says that this is fixed in the latest build, and that update finally hit my Cr-48, so I’ve gone from Chrome OS 0.9.128.14 (Official Build ede4cb9c) beta x86-mario to Chrome OS 0.9.130.14 (Official Build ce79fb21) beta x86-mario. Here’s hoping.

It’s been relatively warm here in SF this week (sorry east coast friends) and I’ve found myself using this more than my netbook because my netbook actually gets hotter than the Cr-48. I also like watching pbs.org shows in bed, and the Cr-48 has a bigger screen than my netbook so it’s nice for that. It’s also impressive how well flash videos play full screen. I mentioned that I was sad that I couldn’t play music from my samba share, but for local content I discovered chrome://flags/ which shows some experimental options, including a media player and “Advanced File System” which offers USB and SD card support, I have more exploring to do to see how well these work. For now I’m listening to stations on last.fm.

But I haven’t just been playing with my new toy these past few weeks! I blogged that the release of Squeeze happened this past weekend (Announcement, Release Notes). We run exclusively Debian at work and two of my systems here at home run Debian, so I immediately dove into the Chapter 4. Upgrades from Debian 5.0 (lenny) of the release notes. Perhaps most surprising to me (as someone who doesn’t keep up with discussions surrounding Debian development) was the change in upgrade policy regarding aptitude vs apt-get: “The upgrade process for other releases recommended the use of aptitude for the upgrade. This tool is not recommended for upgrades from lenny to squeeze.” Apparently the improvements made to apt-get’s dependency tracking have made it a player again – good thing too, since I never did get used to aptitude and I’ve been happily (stubbornly) been on the apt-get bandwagon all along. I’ve now done 2 Squeeze upgrades, both of which went relatively smoothly even if the Upgrade to grub2 step in the process still scares me a little (but it has worked well so far…).

I’ve been reading too, and I am totally in love with my Nook. I used to have this crazy pile of books and magazines I’d haul around when I was in a reading mood, usually some tech book, a serious fiction book, a silly fiction book and some non-fiction book. The pile of magazines hasn’t changed, but my 4 books has been shrunk into the little Nook, much to my delight. I read Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher which was quite the treat. I picked up Cooking For Geeks (another cook book? Maybe this time I’ll start cooking more…) and am finally working on finishing Confessions of a Public Speaker and am re-reading Time Management for System Administrators hoping that more useful tidbits will sink in after a second reading. I’ve also snagged a few titles from Project Gutenberg but I have to be honest and say that after the piles of non-fiction and techie and science magazines I read, when I go for fiction I have been tending to prefer fluff rather than classics (I will finish Moby Dick some day!).

Television! I’ve been watching some. MJ and I watch a few shows together (Lie to me, Bones, House, Big Bang Theory, V, Star Trek: TNG, Star Trek: DS9, Law & Order: SVU) but on my own I’ve rediscovered Eureka and have been enjoying Fringe. I have to admit that it’s certainly more TV than I’m used to, but it’s a refreshing break after work, projects and events. Plus, thanks to video4fuze I have a simple way to convert shows to be playable on my little mp3 player to watch at the gym.

Projects and events! A week and a half ago we hosted Ubuntu User Days on IRC – 20 hours of scheduled chats on various user-facing topics. This was our 3rd event, and in spite of some no-shows (we’ll have to work better on covering those next time around) much of the day went well. I did a session on Desktop Environments: Gnome, KDE, XFCE with Mackenzie Morgan, and then filled in for a missing instructor to do a very fun Command Line Q&A with Paul Tagliamonte. Tomorrow night I’m hosting another Ubuntu Hour here in San Francisco, hooray for coffee, Ubuntu chat, and meeting new people! I’ve actually been a bit conservative about events lately though since I’ve really wanted to spend time at home catching up on project work. I’ve been working with some folks on Ubuntu Women project goals, we’re chugging away with website plans and recently launched some efforts to encourage more women to attend the Ubuntu Developer Summit by creating a UDS page on our wiki with some FAQ about the event and a UDS Stories page with several posts written by women in the project who have attended in-person and remotely. UDS also has implemented an Anti-Harassment Policy and the project as a whole is working on a Diversity Statement for the project (Matt Zimmerman has posted a draft in his blog here).

What else have I been up to? I’ve been much more disciplined about going to the gym lately, and am completely ruining that healthy gym-going by continuing to over-indulge in the awesome food and drinks that San Francisco has to offer (Beer! Pizza! Beer!). The scale is going in the wrong direction. MJ has a friend from back east visiting this week so over the weekend we all went out to the San Francisco Zoo on Saturday because the weather was nice and they have a baby giant anteater I was dying to see. Sunday I headed up to Heart of the City Farmers’ Market for some fresh fruit and bread, spent some time on the roof reading, got caught up on email and the three of us went out to sushi for dinner.

And in case I was getting sad about no air travel since November, MJ and I booked our flights to Los Angeles and hotel room for the Southern California Linux Expo later this month. We’ll be flying down after work on Thursday the 24th and coming home after the conference wraps up on Sunday the 27th. The Ubuntu California team will be hosting an Ubuntu booth at the conference so I’ve been working with other volunteers to get all the goodies for our table. I am really looking forward to this event, there should be a lot of awesome people there who I haven’t had the opportunity to meet in person and as always some folks who I’m looking forward to catch up with. As for other travel this year, my schedule hasn’t been firmed up but I’m planning on attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest in May. MJ has some work travel this year that I’m hoping to tag along with and a (working) trip back to Philadelphia sometime this year will probably happen too.

Filed under: computers, life

Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) Released!

Saturday, Feb 5th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Today Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) was released!

Congratulations Debian!

EDIT: Release announcement here

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

“Nothing but the web”? The Cr-48.

Thursday, Feb 3rd, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Today I went downstairs to pick up an Amazon package which had arrived, and to my surprise there were two packages waiting for me.

The second package, to my shock and delight, turned out to be a Cr-48 from the Cr-48 Pilot Program for Google’s ChromeOS.

Just showed up on my doorstep - CR-48!!!

Now before you ask, no, I’m not installing Ubuntu on it or doing other crazy rooting. I’m pretty excited about ChromeOS and the potential for the consumer market. Will people find a laptop which is barely more than a web browser sufficient? Could I? So it’s ChromeOS all the way for me.

From the pilot program site:

It’s ready when you are, booting in about 10 seconds and resuming from sleep instantly. There’s built-in Wi-Fi and 3G, so you can stay connected everywhere, and a webcam for video chat. The vibrant 12-inch LCD display, full-size keyboard and oversized touchpad let you enjoy the web comfortably. And at just 3.8 pounds with over eight hours of active usage and a week of standby time, it’s easy to take along for the ride.

What did we leave out? Spinning disks, caps-lock key, function keys, and lap burns.

The Cr-48 is available exclusively to participants in the Pilot program. Learn more

More information can be found here: http://www.google.com/chromeos/

I opened it up, hopped on the wifi and went through their great “Get Started with your Chrome notebook” introduction. Then I turned it off and switched it into Developer Mode.

CR-48 Going into dev mode

Once I had that I was able to boot into that mode (it deleted all my preferences though, so I needed to put in the wifi key again and create a new user account) and load up a terminal. Now I had the ability to ssh out to my server and to see the filesystem. Now I’m sure plenty of people have posted this information online already, but since I collected it for a couple of friends who asked, I’ve posted a bunch of stats here.

So, first impressions? It’s very nice to hold. As the description says it’s light and isn’t hot. The simplicity is very appealing. It has a VGA out, one USB port, headphone jack and an SD card slot. The SD card slot is particularly appealing for me because I can pop the one out of my camera, put it in here, and hop to a terminal to upload the photos to my server. Not sure how “normal” people would handle photos though, upload directly from their cellphone to some online storage and bypass their computer completely? The images in this blog post were uploaded from my Nexus One directly but I will want to take some pictures with a regular camera. The laptop is fast and I was able to run full screen with youtube and pbs.org videos without a hitch (although my first attempt at hulu failed, the sound sounded like a bunch of tin cans knocking about, oddly it seems to work now though…). The “always online” thing that they make so simple is pretty clever, the introduction proclaims that you can enable 3G via Verizon and get 100M free per month with sign up (they require a credit card to sign up), after which you can pay for access by purchasing a plan starting at $9.99/mo. I don’t care for the printing situation, you need a Windows machine to serve the printer for that (which I don’t have), but they say support for Mac and Linux are coming soon.

But what about privacy? What if I don’t want all my data in the cloud? If these are concerns of yours, you should stick to your current desktop. Personally I gave up privacy for simplicity long ago, my home address has been public for years and now my cell phone number is too. I adore Google Latitude and have location reporting turned on in Twitter on my phone. My princessleia.com email has been handled by Google since 2007. Whenever Facebook comes up with a new privacy invading policy I double-check my profile to make sure I’m still sharing as much as possible. I live a pretty public life by choice, but obviously not everyone is comfortable with that.

Do I think the common human will be able to use a laptop like this? I think the iPad is already looking in this direction. A lot of people use webmail already, if they haven’t given it up entirely for communication on Facebook exclusively. In the past when I’ve worked on computers for acquaintances, local data was rarely a concern when doing a reinstall. Their computer use was primarily for communicating and playing online games. There certainly are a lot of people who play installed games on their system and require other software, so obviously a laptop like this won’t work for them. It’s actually the same crowd that I typically wouldn’t recommend Linux to (need that 3D accelerated Windows game that will never play in WINE and the custom work VPN software for Windows? You’ll have to stick with Windows).

And do I think I will be able to use a laptop like this? I’ve only started using it tonight, but I have to say I’m optimistic, especially if they came out with one that was netbook-sized. I am puzzled that they are pushing ChromeOS and Android though. They strike me as shockingly similar and targeting the same market, slap a keyboard on any decent Android tablet device and you’re pretty close to a Cr-48. It’ll be very interesting to see how this all shakes out. I wrote this blog entry on the Cr-48 and I have to say that the keyboard is nice to type on. Oh, and I don’t miss the caps-lock key.

Disclaimer: I applied for this pilot program just like everyone else and am writing this just because I’m fascinated with where the internet is taking us application-wise (plus it’s Linux and a shiny new toy!), but my boyfriend does work for Google.

Filed under: computers, tech

Linux devices

Sunday, Jan 23rd, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Linux Journal has a “New Products” section of their magazine which frequently features (among other things like books and software) new devices that are running the Linux kernel. It’d be interesting to know if their job has gotten easier over the past couple years regarding devices. In addition to my traditional PCs running Linux, the following consumer-level devices which use the Linux kernel: Nexus One phone, B&N Nook, Samsung television and Samsung Bluray player.

The choice of the Nexus One (well, more importantly, the G1 I had prior to it) was influenced by it’s Linux-ness. For all the negative press about the Android kernel being highly modified and criticism about lack of timely upstream merging of their changes, I’m quite sure that it (and Verizon’s advertising machine) has put Linux into the hands of more people than anything else ever has. That said, as far as smart phones go I probably would have gone the same way even if it didn’t have a Linux kernel – the Android platform allows for the flexibility I want and the culture of free (both beer and freedom) in the way applications are submitted to the Market and deployed appeals to me. Even the Android branding itself is Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License, allowing everyone from individuals on Etsy to toy companies to produce Android-branded products with ease. All of this makes for a very happy me! Especially when I see MJ walk through the door with a whole case of Android toys. I’m still gushing over these things.

You could say that the purchase of the Nook was influenced by it’s Linux-ness too, but the Kindle uses a Linux kernel too.

The TV and Bluray player? We didn’t even know they ran Linux until a few weeks ago when MJ was browsing through the TV menus and stumbled upon the open source licenses.

It will be interesting to see what the coming years bring with regard to the proliferation of Linux devices and where the desktop itself goes. I have to admit that I think Chrome OS (or the like) is going to become a cheap and compelling option for a lot of people as even more services move to the cloud.

Filed under: computers, reflection, tech

CLS West 2011

Saturday, Jan 22nd, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

If someone had told me 5 years that I’d be attending a “Community Leadership Summit” I probably would have laughed. As far as community leaders go I was a pretty reluctant one, I’m shy and an introvert, certainly not the poster child for charisma. I make my living as a Linux Sysadmin, not strictly a profession you associate with community leadership. But it turns out that for all my initial reluctance, I enjoy it and I want to be as good at helping the community as I am with deploying a new server cluster, so on the 15th I found myself at West Coast Community Leadership Summit (CLS West).

This was my first unconference and I have to admit that I had some skepticism about the format. Discomfort grew as everyone who introduced themselves to me worked as some kind of Community Manager for a living.

Luckily all this discomfort melted away as people proposed topics and the schedule quickly filled up to give us a full day of interesting sessions that I felt I could learn from and contribute to.

The first I went to was on “Lurker Activation” within communities. The discussion started out with some casual statistics about the overwhelming number of “lurkers” within any given community (defined as people who visit a community site regularly but don’t contribute by signing up and/or contributing content of any kind). Estimates were from 90-99% depending on the community. A major point brought up in the session was that getting a majority of the lurkers activated is impossible, the number will always be high, but there are a lot of things you can do to help make people more active, including:

  • Making project management transparent (no more of those private conference calls with core contributors, if you do most of your communicating on IRC – have your meetings there too, in public)
  • Remember that even as a community leader or manager, you are still a part of the community (top down dictators need not apply)
  • Have a clear mission and stick with it
  • Lower barrier to contributions as much as possible without sacrificing project/community integrity
  • Get rid of site-specific registration (use openid, facebook connect, and twitter and whatever else is popular)

It was also interesting hearing from a woman who is a self-proclaimed “professional lurker” who will read (and pass along information privately to friends) but won’t sign up and won’t reply to threads. Some of the features she said were appealing where things like the ability to up/down vote something without registration and things like Netflix’s polls which simply emailed you a link which you could quickly click on a reply to and have nothing else bother you (no additional clicking, no piles of text to read, just a simple “thank you” and you have the expectation that such a simple action was helpful).

The next session I went to was “Best Practices: Recognizing and Rewarding Community Contributors”

We were fortunate to have Randy Farmer in this session, one of the authors of Building Web Reputation Systems (you can get an idea of his book from his Google Tech Talk on the subject – I just watched it myself tonight). He helped the session start off on a good foot by defining the criteria of our discussion with three broad types of contributors: altruistic, egocentric and corporate. Different communities respond differently to different incentive systems so you really need to know your communities before seeking to apply one. It was fascinating to hear from others what their communities use and the success or failures they’ve had. One of my fellow Ubuntu California Team members was also there and we were able to talk a bit about the successes and failures thus far in the Ubuntu community with regard to reward systems (Travel sponsorships to summits and Ubuntu Membership with perks that have value in a technical community? Great! Launchpad karma? Not so much.). But perhaps the most interesting discussion for me that came out of this was the discussion regarding hiring practices. In some ways it’s encouraging to know that a company behind a community project hires from the community, but it can backfire when you over-hire (all of a sudden ALL the projects in the community are led by employees) or community members start feeling embittered and that they are entitled to jobs for doing the same work that their former peers are now being paid for.

After this session we had lunch, which was a lovely spread of Indian food – if a bit on the spicy side for some of the attendees.

It was then on to “Building and Managing Communities of Minorities” for a fascinating look at the similarities that all communities of minorities face. In addition to having other women in tech representation (including the amazing BJ Wishinsky of the Anita Borg Institute and a representative from Oracle looking for tips for the Duchess women in Java community) we had folks from online and offline ethnic communities, an accessibility community representative and a champion of LGBT communities. We quickly discussed why these communities exist, the typical life cycle (serving our core first, and often later working beyond the charter to help other, similar groups), the challenges we face (including divisions and arguments within our own communities) that are remarkably similar across minority communities. Sheryl Sandberg’s TED talk Why we have too few women leaders was also mentioned during the discussion which I finally was able to watch tonight, very good!

The last session I attended of the day was “Hi, I’m an Introverted Community Manager” and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The session ended up being a bit funny because people who were open in other sessions let shyness show through. I have to admit not getting a whole lot out of this session (introductions ran a bit long), but it was nice knowing that I’m not the only introvert who is in the position of being a community coordinator/manager/leader. Now I just need to figure out how to tell my fellow Ubuntu friends how vital the lonely “recharge” time after each day at UDS is!

The evening wrapped up with a big community gathering at a loft on Mission. The acoustics in the venue weren’t great for quiet discussion, but I managed to have some awesome discussions, including lots of excellent geek talk with one of the MAKE bloggers. And it was a delight to finally meet and chat with Marsee Henon, the manager of the User Group and Professional Associations program at O’Reilly who I’ve worked over email for the PhillyChix since 2003.

Filed under: events, tech

Linux kernel on my TV and Nook, earthquake, Caligula and Ubuntu-Debian meetup

Tuesday, Jan 18th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

It’s hard to believe January is over half over already, it feels like just yesterday that MJ and I were walking home from the NYE fireworks!

Work has been busy, but I’ve learned a lot in the past couple weeks about debugging problems with multihoming in Linux and how the packets move around with IPSec. I absolutely need to brush up on my networking skills though, so I think we’ll take some time in the upcoming weekends (I’m on call next weekend, he’s on call the weekend after – lots of time at home!) to teach me more. I was also once again able to take advantage of an extra public IP address and my old laptop to do some internet-facing testing with some of the applications, which reminded me that I need to sort out the problems which remain with my current computer setup. I would really like to have a second virtualization-enabled system and a linux demo and CD-burning system to travel with. I thought about doing this all with a laptop, but while reviewing the great ZaReason laptop I realized that I have a very hard time using a big laptop. Instead I think I’ll end up replacing my firewall with something beefier, and just get an external CDRW for my netbook (thanks again to Norm for letting me know how much cheaper they’ve become!). As for demoing at events? If I don’t want to toss the latest and greatest on my netbook booting from USB should be a viable option.

While on the subject of Linux, MJ discovered that, perhaps predictably, our TV (Samsung PN58C8000) uses a Linux kernel. While looking up some model number information for the TV he noticed on one of the screens a line that said “Press Red Key to see Open Source License.”

Upon pressing the red key, you learn that there is indeed a lot of familiar software on the TV.

GPL software: Linux Kernel, Busybox, Binutils, wireless_tools, xfsprogs, iptables
LGPL software: Glibc, ffmpeg, smpeg, libgphoto2, libusb, SDL, libiconv, libmms

Plus, a full copy of the GPL that you can scroll through. Very cool, you’re doing it right Samsung!

On January 7th I felt my first earthquake: Magnitude 4.1 – NORTHERN CALIFORNIA. Woo nc71506865! I was sitting at my desk and felt a bouncing like someone was stomping down the hallway, but no one was in the hallway – oh! I’m in California, maybe that was an earthquake! So I ran to the window and looked down at the street, where I quickly realized I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to see, so I went back to my desk to see in #ubuntu-us-ca:

16:10 < akk> Woo, small earthquake.

And react (with a bit too much enthusiasm):

16:11 < pleia2> OMG!!
16:11 < pleia2> I FELT IT!!!
16:11 < pleia2> my first earthquake :D!!!

Then twitter was… atwitter with everyone else in the bay area talking about it too.

Then on January 11th Nova did a special on Deadliest Earthquakes which was thoroughly scary and made me wonder why we keep building our cities on major fault lines (then I remembered that California is astonishingly beautiful) and made me marvel that there isn’t more devastation when a big quake hits.

We brought Caligula and Simcoe to the vet on Saturday the 8th for a checkup. Simcoe got a clean bill of health, but the vet was concerned about Caligula’s teeth so she recommended a teeth cleaning and did a panel of blood tests to confirm that he’s healthy enough to go under anesthesia for the cleaning. Unfortunately the blood results came back with high levels of some proteins, so we decided to do a more thorough protein levels check to try and confirm that these levels were simply due to inflammation related to dental problems and rule out cancer as a possibility for those levels. Thursday the vet called me with results the, they couldn’t rule out cancer so the vet had a meeting with an oncologist Friday morning to review the results. I was pretty worried at this point, giving Caligula lots of hugs and confirming that the pet insurance we have would cover it (it will). Friday the vet called back with good news from the oncologist, the results ruled out certain types of cancer and it’s still possible that the elevated levels are due to his teeth problems. So we went ahead and scheduled a series of x-rays of his chest and abdomen for this upcoming Saturday, and planned that if those look good they’ll go ahead with the teeth cleaning the same day. Then on Saturday night he stopped eating. Caligula is a big cat and eating is one of his favorite things! When he still hadn’t touched his food come Monday morning I scheduled an appointment for that evening. He got his x-rays (look good so far, waiting on a more thorough review) and was sent home with some bland diet food, having been given anti-nausea medicine and antacid. He finally started eating again last night. We had to cancel his teeth-cleaning entirely to wait until his stomach settles down, but hopefully we’ll get that sorted in the coming weeks. Assuming all of that goes well, we’ll go for some follow-up blood tests in the coming months. What a worrying week! But things are looking positive for my big kitty.

Last Wednesday I hosted another Ubuntu Hour + Bay Area Debian Meeting. The Ubuntu Hour fizzled out on account of the coffee shop closing early, so the 4 of us who showed up just hung out on the sidewalk for 30-45 minutes. We had 7 people come out to the Debian Meeting (dinner) at Henry’s Hunan. Lots of good discussion about Debian and Ubuntu and I got to talk about some of my multi-homing adventures of earlier in the week. Photos were taken and my excitement for the upcoming release of Squeeze was captured:

(Which reminds me, they just announced today that they now have a target release date: the weekend of 5th and 6th February!)

Plus, two things of note came out of this meeting. The first was that one of the attendees mentioned that they saw my name in the The Official Ubuntu Book (5th Edition). Really? Neat! So when I got home I had to check, and it indeed was the case:

How exciting!

The second was that we had a great discussion about ebooks. I’ve been on the fence about ebook readers for a long time and when fellow Ubuntu California Team member Robert Wall picked up a Barnes and Noble Nook the other week I asked him for a review, which I got at that Debian dinner. His praise (which included discussion of how useful the Calibre ebook management software in Linux is) tipped the scale for me, on Sunday we headed down to Barnes and Noble and I got a black and white wifi Nook. I love it already, and I plan on finally finishing some of the great ebooks I have (most notably, Confessions of a Public Speaker, which is delightful but reading on a computer screen just doesn’t do it for me). I’m also the newest fan of Project Gutenberg, I will finally get to finish Moby Dick! As far as Linux compatibility goes the device is great, it mounts as standard usb device so you can simply copy files over, or use Calibre to send to the device (which it correctly sees as a Nook). And finally, I’m delighted to have another Android device – Linux kernel on my TV! Linux kernel on my ebook reader! Now I just need to buy a sturdy carrying case so I can travel with it.

Filed under: animals, life, tech

2010

Thursday, Jan 6th, 2011 by pleia2 | 3 Comments


Philadelphia (from Camden)

2010 began with New Years in Philadelphia with MJ, on his final visit before my move, and our friend Nita.

I then had my final weeks in the Philadelphia area. This final Philadelphia winter turned out to be the snowiest winter in recorded history. What a send off!

In February my apartment was converted to box land and on February 16th, MJ, the cats and I bid farewell to Philadelphia and flew to San Francisco.

My life with MJ in San Francisco these past 10 months has been amazing. Insert all the mushy stuff here :) I miss Philadelphia and certainly miss my friends, but I haven’t for a moment regretted my decision to move out here to be with him.

Conferences! Surprising to many these days, I hadn’t actually been to a tech conference until the spring of 2008. In 2010 I went to 4.

  • Open Source Business Conference (San Francisco)
  • Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (San Francisco)
  • Ubuntu Developer Summit (Brussels, Belgium)
  • OLPCSF Collaboration Summit (San Francisco)

Plus various Geeknics, LUG meetings, Ubuntu Hours and other Linux events. I’ve never been so active in a local community, and while I have to admit that it was a lot of fun, by the end of the year I was seeking to reclaim some of my free time to get back to core project work. Finding a balance is challenging when there is always so much cool stuff going on, but it’s certainly a wonderful problem to have.

Travel! I hit Silver on the USAir Dividend Miles program. While travel has always been on my list of things I wanted to do, it’s always taken a back seat to more pressing needs. This year I was exceptionally fortunate to get sponsorships and other opportunities that allowed me to travel quite widely and modestly (sponsorship to Belgium, hotel paid for in Dublin).

  • February: Philadelphia to San Francisco (one way – the move!)
  • May: San Francisco to Brussels
  • September: San Francisco to Philadelphia
  • October: San Francisco to Dublin
  • November: San Francisco to Las Vegas
  • November: San Francisco to New Hampshire

For a total of almost 40,000 miles. I have come to the conclusion that (in spite of crazy TSA stuff) I love to fly and I find no shame in being a tourist. Plus I’m infinitely grateful that I’m finally in a position to travel, having the monetary means (including sponsorship opportunities) and flexibility with work so I could travel outside the constraints of typical “2 weeks per year” American vacation time allotment (the conference in Brussels? I was able to use PTO, not vacation time. Philly trip? I worked from the hotel all week.). We also took advantage of a long weekend over the 4th of July to drive to Las Vegas.

When we weren’t traveling or doing local Linux things, we were playing the tourist in our own beautiful city. I love San Francisco, I fell in love when I first visited here in 2008. I love the climate, I love that it’s such a tech mecca, I love the touristy nature of it, I love the food, I love the cable cars, I love the Giants and the A’s! Loving all of this probably means I’m not nearly cool enough to be here, but I do feel at home here. And without a doubt, nothing beats being near an ocean again. The Pacific on a crisp day brings me back to when I found solace in late night walks to ocean in Maine as a teenager and I find a peace that has been elusive for years.


San Francisco (from Alcatraz)

2010 was, without a doubt, one of the best years of my life so far. May 2011 be just as grand.

Filed under: EOY, life, reflection

Under the sink organization

Tuesday, Jan 4th, 2011 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

I have to admit, going out and doing things all the time hasn’t left us a lot of time to get down to getting the condo done, we still have boxes around and there are a few major tasks we need to complete before we can call it “done” (as “done” as any home ever is). I’m aiming for the end of February to have the important things done, or at least scheduled, here’s hoping for a box-free March.

Over the holidays we did get one thing tackled: under the sink organization. The Container Store launched their 30% off elfa sale and we took advantage of it.

First we tackled under the bathroom sink. We went with the Cabinet-Sized elfa Drawer frames with baskets, a narrow and an extra narrow 4-runner fit perfectly under the sink. I wish I had a before picture, but it looked something like this: #$#%^$#^%. I could never find anything!

Then it was sorting out under the sink. We actually did the trash can a few weeks back, and as I mentioned then we went with the 8 gal. Undercounter Pull-Out Can. We also needed something for the recycling, so during the elfa sale we also picked up and extra narrow Cabinet-Sized elfa Mesh Easy Glider. The top of the runner easily comes off with the basket, making it super easy to take out the recycling. Win!

Today we received the replacement for the light/fan combo for the bathroom, which we hope to get installed in the next couple weeks. Tonight we’re heading down to Ikea to look at some stand-alone under desk drawer options. Tomorrow morning we’re having an upholstery guy come out to take a look at one of our chairs. Woohoo progress!

Filed under: life

Looking for a quick way to help Ubuntu Weekly News?

Monday, Jan 3rd, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter has been in a state of flux since the Editor in Chief had to step down. I worked with Nathan Handler over the weekend to get Issue 218 out the door today covering much of December and it gave me a taste of how challenging and time-consuming the task was (and made me hugely thankful that the former Editor so thoroughly documented it all). It also made me realize that it could be more succinctly divided up into small sections that volunteers can take – we just need to do a better job of documenting that so we can give pieces out easily when volunteers come along.

But until that documentation is complete, what can you do today? You may not have noticed, but we had to drop the “In The Press” and “In The Blogosphere” sections for this latest issue because those weren’t so easy to read back for the past month and find. Here’s where you come in.

See a great or interesting blog post (outside of Ubuntu Planet) or news article about Ubuntu?

Add it here: http://pad.ubuntu-uk.org/UWN-Ideas

You may also drop by #ubuntu-news on irc.freenode.net and give us links, or send an email to our mailing list at ubuntu-news-team@lists.ubuntu.com (emails from non-subscribed addresses are moderated, but we check the moderation queue regularly) or send an email to editor.ubuntu.news@gmail.com

Feeling even more energetic? Include a blurb about the article that we can use in the UWN!

Thanks everyone!

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Ubuntu Hour, Ubuntu upgrades at CACS with Partimus

Saturday, Jan 1st, 2011 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

On Thursday I wrapped up work and MJ and I headed down to Palo Alto for an Ubuntu Hour at Antonio’s Nut House.

It ended up being a great venue for the meeting, we got a booth right near the door, it was relatively quiet, the food was good and we had plenty of space for our attendees (8 of us in total, but we had room to expand should we have had more). I had the opportunity to finally meet Jessica Ledbetter, who has recently joined several projects in the Ubuntu community that we work on together. It was also worth noting that of the attendees, half of us were women, and among those ranks we had a sysadmin and two programmers.

Palo Alto Ubuntu Hour

Friday I had the day off from work, so I got up bright and early to meet up with Christian Einfeldt and James Howard of Partimus at the Creative Arts Charter School on Turk Street here in San Francisco.

The plan for the day was to complete the installation of Ubuntu 10.04 on the 31 lab computers which were running 8.04. James had the PXE server which hosts the installation isos for the lab systems prepped (including the required ldap and nfs configurations), and had made the appropriate changes in gconf so the files in the home directories on the NFS share would not cause problems between gnome versions.

Our first step was to boot up all the machines in the lab to confirm they were all working and then grab a replacement for the one machine which wasn’t booting properly. From there we brought them all down and then booted them off the network to launch the installers in batches of 4.

Installers running:

While the installers ran Christian had a couple of folks come by who had an Ubuntu system at home which was failing. It turned out to be the harddrive but the system itself was quite old so Christian had a new system prepped for them. I was able to use DSL (available via PXE from James’ server) to get the drive mounted on the old machine, and luckily was able to salvage the user data.

I also took the time there to use the tools above to salvage another computer from the storage closet and get it prepped with Lucid to be a drop in replacement should any other systems fail. It was then that I realized that I need to rebuild my travel toolkit… until I remembered that I already did, I just need to remember to bring it with me! My friend, and fellow old hardware salvager, Jim Fisher also had some suggestions for a couple of cheap kits that will do the job and be even easier to manage, including this 27-Piece PC Tool Kit w/Pliers, Screwdrivers, Nylon Zipper Case.

I ended up heading out around 3PM after the Lucid upgrades were complete. One of the things James implemented during the upgrade was switching from Firefox to Chromium as the default browser for the lab systems at the request of one of the teachers. He’s also going to be seeing about getting more RAM (most of the machines have 512M, they’d like to increase that to 1G) and 10 or so graphics cards to use in some of the spare systems which need new cards from one of the local hardware recycling groups.

In all, a very productive day!

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