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Touchy UIs and Xfce4

Monday, Mar 21st, 2011 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

It was interesting to see the Unity talks by Ted Gould at SCaLE9x last month, but I have to admit I’ve never really put much practical thought into UI design for touchscreen devices. I am not even a huge fan of the mouse, a touchscreen beyond that of my phone is that much worse! However, in the past week I’ve gotten to play with two touchscreen devices.

The first was at BerkeleyLUG where Jack Deslippe had one of the new Motorola Xooms running Android (the first device with Honeycomb!). On Wednesday I was at the Noisebridge Linux Discussion Night and I got to see the ExoPC Slate running Ubuntu 10.10, and took a couple pictures while we were booting it up after a fix to grub:

I have to say that while it was cool to see Gnome on a tablet, navigation wasn’t optimal. For the first time I really saw a place for the Unity interface, and while I still am skeptical about the decision to make it the default interface for 11.04, I am now excited about the direction the interface is taking Ubuntu in this world which has gone so mobile and touchscreen.

It was with all these dreams of the future of UI that I reinstalled my netbook this weekend, and realized I’m still quite the traditionalist (as if saying I don’t care for mice wasn’t enough of an indicator!).

My UI adventures with Linux started from day one. My boyfriend had introduced me to Linux running on his own machines in 1999 but it wasn’t until we moved in together in 2001 that I really wanted it on my own. in early 2002 I had my first Linux install that was all my own, running RedHat 7.2 with Enlightenment. My boyfriend was a minimalist and when he gave me Enlightenment it was without icons or visible menus. I booted into Windows and asked some of my Linux friends what to do (“Enlightenment? Right click anywhere on the desktop for a menu.” “OH!”). I primarily used Enlightenment through my switch to Debian in late 2002 and through 2003.


Enlightenment Desktop, November 2003

I also made a foray into Gentoo in 2003 and with it tried out Fluxbox. My love of Fluxbox has not waned over the years, I still use it today on the 2nd computer on my desk (a Debian box which runs my firewall, some Xen VMs and is plugged into my 2nd monitor for some web stuff) and on my old Debian laptop.


Fluxbox on Gentoo Desktop at work, February 2003

After a short stint with Window Maker, in 2004 I discovered Xfce and it was love at first configuration click. With Enlightenment and Fluxbox I had grown accustom to editing configuration files manually but it had become tedious. Xfce had the beautiful configurability of E and Flux, but simplified with configuration tools.


Xfce4 on Debian Desktop, November 2004

And so I happily have gone along with Xfce on my primary desktop for the past 6 years.


Xfce4 on Ubuntu Desktop, July 2010

In 2008 I was given my mini9 and it shipped with 8.04 and Gnome. I’ll be honest, for all my years of Linux I’d never given Gnome a fair shot. I kept Gnome and that 8.04 stock install on my mini9 for over two years, until yesterday when I realized that the pending EOL of the 8.04 desktop edition was coming up quickly and I should take advantage of some of the down time I had this weekend. I used dd to copy the disk image to an LV on my desktop (just in case 10.04 hated my netbook!) and made the major decision to not just reinstall with stock 10.04, but to switch to Xfce4 and use the Xubuntu iso instead. Gnome had done what I needed it to do in 8.04, but the changes in 10.04 were a bit much for me and with the great support that Xfce4 has for Gnome things in the panel there wasn’t a compelling reason for me to tough it out for the benefits.


Xfce4 on Ubuntu Netbook, March 2011

I made the right decision, I love Xfce and I’m glad to be using it on my netbook so that now my daily desktop environment and the one on my netbook are that much more in sync. Additionally, I’m delighted to report that everything on my netbook is working perfectly post upgrade. No problems with wifi, camera, special keys, suspend… I’m very happy! Hooray Xfce!

Filed under: computers, reflection, tech, xubuntu

Visiting The Marine Mammal Center

Sunday, Mar 20th, 2011 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

Yesterday, my cousin helped save a baby elephant seal.

He was out for a run and saw it on the beach near Crissy Field in San Francisco and with the help of a couple others they contacted the authorities and within a couple hours volunteers from The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito were there to pick it up. Another one of my cousins, his sister, was in town this weekend for a conference and we had tentative plans to go out this afternoon. She called this morning and mentioned the rescue and that they were thinking of going to the Center to visit the seal and asked if we wanted to go along. Of course!

We met up around 1 and headed over to Sausalito for lunch at Paradise Bay which had great food and a stunning view of the waterfront. From there it was over to the Marine Mammal Center!

I did know about the Center before today, I added it on my “to visit” list after watching Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home for the first time with San Francisco awareness (I’d seen it plenty of times, but hey – I live in San Francisco and this movie is in San Francisco!). There is no Marine Mammal Center in the film, but there is the fictional Cetacean Institute in Sausalito and I discovered the Marine Mammal Center while exploring the fictionality of the Cetacean Institute. It turns out the scenes with the Cetacean Institute were filmed at the Monterey Bay Aquarium (indeed, the logo for CI is actually MBA’s logo!), but there were never humpback whales in captivity there, or anywhere. However, in 2007 The Marine Mammal Center did help a mother and baby humpback whale who accidentally swam up the Sacramento River, Delta and Dawn. So, Kirk and Spock, don’t go back to the 1986 when you need your whales, 2007 is where it’s at!

The Marine Mammal Center is a truly wonderful place. Upon arrival we told the women at the information booth about the rescue of Chantal (the seal, named after the daughter of one of my cousin’s co-rescuers) and she contacted one of the volunteers who could help us figure out which pen they were keeping her in. Chantal turned out to be a he and we were able to peer into the pen where he was being kept from an above viewing area.

Chantal is one of 22 baby elephant seals they are currently caring for, most of whom are babies like Chantal who were separated from their mothers, typically due to storms or human interference of some kind. These pups are all around 85lbs, when they should be closer to 300 at their age when properly nourished by their mothers. The Center focuses on making them well and then releasing them as quickly as possible, which they said typically takes 1.5 to 4 months, depending on the seal.

I picked up a basic membership on my way out. If I ever get bored of all this open source stuff I will seriously consider volunteering my time here, their volunteer programs are quite impressive.


Brendan, Melissa and Lyz outside The Marine Mammal Center

Once we wrapped up there we headed to downtown Sausalito for some window shopping and ice cream. I’d never been to Sausalito before and the weather was beautiful, we had a really enjoyable time.

More photos are in this Flickr set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157626187172327/

It was after 6 by the time we got home this evening and I didn’t get nearly as much done as I wanted to this weekend but it was worth it to spend all this great time with my cousins, and for this seal adventure.

Filed under: animals, family

CR-48, Ubuntu+Debian night, fluffy Android, Zoo, SDForum panel

Sunday, Mar 13th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I was asked the other day if I’m still using the Cr-48 that I’ve now had for over a month. I sure am, it’s been interesting seeing where it’s landing in my mobile computing environment. Since it’s just a web browser + basic shell for ssh I’ve been primarily using it for writing blog entries and emails (fewer distractions), watching online videos and catching up on RSS feeds. My netbook is used when I need more desktop stuff – getting images off my camera and editing them, non-Google docs file manipulation, offline movies and music (samba share) and when I do want IRC to be a primary focus on my attention. I mentioned in my last post that I hated the trackpad, but it’s grown on me, I don’t have as much trouble with copy/paste now that I got the hang of it and I’m starting to get used to all the hotkeys (home and end do exist! It’s just a keyboard combo not marked on the hardware).

Wednesday night I hosted Ubuntu Hour and Debian dinner. We had 5 people show up at each with an overlap of 2 (so for both events, a total of 8 people). These have been going quite well, and it’s been interesting watching how the makeup of the crowd each time I do these determines the course of conversation and which distro we largely focus on. I’ll be hosting another dual event night the second Wednesday in May.


Ubuntu Hour!


Debian Dinner!

MJ has been gone since Wednesday morning for a week-long trip back to Philadelphia, I had to skip this jaunt back east but I’m hoping to come along during a trip in October. It’s always so lonely here when he travels, but Friday I received a box that contained the fluffy narwhal I mentioned in my last post and the squishiest Android! It’s slightly less lonely with Androids, narwhals and gnus to cuddle.

Yesterday I headed over to the San Francisco Zoo. The main reason for this trip down to the zoo was to see the new baby koala (zooborns.com also has some great pictures) who went on display on Thursday. There was also an irrational human need to go down to the beach which had been closed the previous day for the tsunami watch (fortunately all we got was an 8 inch storm surge during low tide, there are some great pictures of the little wave coming into the bay here and a video).

The trip to the zoo was one of the best! I arrived just before 11AM so I was able to see the zookeepers prep and put the mother an baby into their exhibit – this means they were awake and moving around! Usually when I see the koalas they are sleeping. Most of my pictures didn’t come out, but this one of the baby clutching her mother wasn’t bad:

A koala on the open, tree side of the koala area was also awake and climbing through trees:

After all the squeeing was done (and giving my business card to a fellow with a huge camera, here’s hoping he remembers to send me a link to his photos!) I headed over to see if I could get a better look at the baby anteater… and I did! The last time I went to the zoo the baby was on its mother’s back and she wasn’t exactly showing off her infant. This time the mother was sleeping on the bottom of her carrier and the baby was happily sitting on her and grooming and doing other anteater things. It was so adorable.

The third critter I wanted to visit was the zoo’s new hippo! The last time I went to the zoo we arrived too late and he had already left his enclosure for the day. This time he was happily swimming and rolling around in his pool and I got to see him in his full hippo glory.

Did I mention the weather? It was gorgeous out yesterday.

Today is less gorgeous, but I am packing up to head down to BerkeleyLUG for some pizza and Linux talk.

Finally, I was contacted last week by an organizer of the SDForum Tech Womens Program to be a part of a panel on Women of Open Source on March 31st. While I’ve tired of the unicorn talks, an opportunity to present the virtues of Open Source to fellow techie women whose involvement is currently limited (or non-existent) is something I’m delighted to be a part of. I’m really looking forward to this.

Filed under: animals, life, tech

Stuffed animal K, L, M, N, O…

Saturday, Mar 12th, 2011 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

Last week Mark Shuttleworth announced the next release name, Oneiric Ocelot. My first thought? How do you pronounce “oneiric”? My second thought? Thank goodness it’s an ocelot, I can find a stuffed animal ocelot! It’s on order now.

I’ve been supplementing Ubuntu booth displays with the release animals since Karmic when I discovered that I already had a koala in my ridiculous stuffed animal collection. With Lucid an official toy came out (Ubuntu Lynx still available in the Canonical store). With Maverick we were fortunate that everyone loves meerkats, so it was just a hop down to my local toy store to pick up one of them.


Karmic Koala at the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, October 2009


Lucid Lynx at Picn*x19 in Sunnyvale, California, August 2010


Maverick Meerkat at SCaLE9x in Los Angeles, California, February 2011

Narwhal? Surprisingly difficult. There was a great one that went out of production in December of 2009 and several hand-made ones on Etsy, but it wasn’t until MJ showed me Squishable.com for Android stuffed toys that I found my Narwhal (which, along with a mini Android, ended up being a thoughtful gift from MJ!).

Natty Narwhal

OK, I’m ready for the Natty booths now!

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

SCaLE9x

Wednesday, Mar 9th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On the evening of Thursday February 24th, suitcases in hand, MJ and I headed down to the San Francisco airport for a quick flight down to Los Angeles for the Southern California Linux Expo. We arrived at LAX just after midnight and were checked into our hotel room by 1AM. I went right to sleep so I’d be reasonably well-rested for my 9AM talk the following morning.

Bright and early on Friday morning we got up and headed downstairs to the conference. I saw lots of familiar faces when I walked into the Ubucon room and finally had the opportunity to meet Ubucon organizer Nathan Haines and fellow Ubuntu California team leader David Wonderly.

First up for Ubucon was my talk on Finding Help in Ubuntu! The talk went well and I was delighted by the amount of audience participation so early in the morning. I have posted the slides here:

The next full presentation I went to was Jack Deslippe’s Developing Your First Ubuntu App with Quickly. Quickly is a pretty cool framework that brings together several tools for quick deployment of Python apps, and every time I see a talk about it I want to hit the books again to learn Python and write… something. For lunch a bunch of us Ubuntu California types headed over to the burger place across the street from the hotel. After lunch I went to Dru Lavigne’s Confessions of a Community Manager which gave a lot of basic guidelines for community managers within projects. The current popularity of community managers within open source projects is something that caught me somewhat by surprise and I’ve mostly worked in projects which were either too small to require such a role or otherwise really didn’t have a place for it and mostly thought Ubuntu an exception because Ubuntu it’s quite large. From there I spent the break at the Ubucon Q&A and then went down for the popular This is why you FAIL talk, which certainly was entertaining and hit a lot of the pain points I’ve seen in some projects. It was then back to Ubucon for Ted Gould’s Contributing to Unity presentation. The evening itself wrapped up with UpSCALE, an entertaining series of lightning talks. I have to admit being pretty exhausted at this point, so MJ and I grabbed some take-out at the hotel’s 24-hour cafe and headed up to our room.

Saturday! It was the first day of the expo booths so by 9AM I was downstairs delivering fliers to the Partimus booth and a whole suitcase of goodies for the Ubuntu booth. Before the expo opened we even got a quick shot of the Partimus booth:


Beth Lynn Eicher, me, Mark Terranova

The booth was staffed by Beth Lynn for most of the day on Saturday and Mark was able to take over on Sunday, my contributions to the booth amounted to a coffee run and infrequent staffing as needed.


Ubuntu Booth by the Ubuntu California team!

Fortunately the first talk of the day wasn’t until 10AM – ah conferences catered to geeks! It was the first keynote of the conference, Hackerspaces and Free Software by Leigh Honeywell. Leigh is an excellent speaker and her excitement and passion for hackerspaces is infectious. From there I headed back downstairs to spend an hour at the Ubuntu booth. At 12:30 several of us met up for an Ubuntu Women lunch.


Ubuntu Women lunch

After lunch the plan was to attend the talk by Owen DeLong of Hurricane Electric on IPv6 Basics for Linux Administrators, but I wasn’t the only one who wanted to attend. The talk was standing room only and overflowing into the hallway. Seeing as my interest was primarily academic (I already am using IPv6 on one VM and sadly the datacenter we inhabit at work still doesn’t have an ETA on IPv6 deployment) I decided not to attempt to push my way in and MJ and I took the opportunity to explore the expo floor and take another shift at the Ubuntu booth. At 4:30 it was off to Securing web applications for system administrators. I have to admit that in my day to day work I don’t have to deal with a lot of “random insecure webapps installed everywhere” that many service providers have to, and I’m thankful for that. The talk covered a lot of the basic security precautions (mod_security, snort as intrusion prevention) but reminded me that I have to expand my toolset since there are always places we can make improvements should I be in a position to support such an environment in the future. I wrapped up the talk day by going to Behind the Scenes of Google Project Hosting. It was interesting seeing the thought process involved in their offerings but I have to admit that I’ll probably always use launchpad for projects because of the integration with Ubuntu and use of bzr (Google Code still just offers Mercurial and svn, they had no comment when pressed for the possibility of git support).

Sunday morning I headed down to that day’s keynote by Canonical CEO Jane Silber, Cloud for Human Beings. She’s a good speaker but the talk itself was completely review for me since I’m already familiar with the Ubuntu cloud options and the technologies behind Open Stack. From the keynote I headed to Mark Burgess’ The Future of Open Source Configuration Management. I had my reservations about attending this one (almost went to Bond, Ethernet Bond) because I’ve gone to a couple of pretty mediocre configuration management talks in the past year and have been continually unimpressed with the current centralized configuration management options for the needs of a small company like the one I work for – we have enough servers that a management system beyond shipped files in a Debian package may be nice, but too much variation for current tools to be worth the time (no two webservers I manage look the same!). Plus, the talk seemed to be on the academic side, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m quick to tire of academics when I want to get something done. End result? I’m delighted that I went. While no technical solutions were concretely put forward, the presentation was excellent (not just because it has dinosaurs and other earth and biology science references) and it brought to the forefront the discussion I’d been seeking but hadn’t been having yet regarding current problems with systems of configuration management. It was one of my favorite talks of the weekend.


Mark Burgess and one of his talk’s dinosaur slides

Lunch was brought to me by MJ as I manned the Ubuntu booth and did a quick interview about the booth for a friendly guy with a camera. The booth had been busy all weekend and we certainly weren’t seeing a slowdown. At 1:30 I headed back upstairs to see Ted Gould’s Unity: Why does it matter? So, why all these Unity talks? The only place I use Gnome is on my netbook because I don’t require a lot of flexibility in the UI and it has the indicators I want behaving properly, my desktop has XFCE and the 2 Debian boxes (one is an old laptop, another is my firewall + 2nd desktop) run fluxbox. For me, Gnome is either not flexible enough to do what I want with ease (can I have 3 clocks with different timezones in my panel? XFCE says “sure!”) or way too overboard for my basic window drawing needs (the fluxbox systems). So, if Gnome isn’t configurable enough for me, what is Unity? Really, really not configurable enough for me, I probably will even stick to Gnome classic on my netbook once I convince myself to upgrade it beyond 8.04 ;) So why, why do I care about Unity? Because it will be the default in 11.04 and I think I’d miss a good opportunity if I avoided learning about it. This Unity talk was particularly interesting because of the extensive Q&A session where Ted fielded some great, tough questions from the audience about usability choices and behavior. Kudos to the audience for the grilling, and to Ted for handling it all with such grace.

From there it was downstairs for my last shift at the Ubuntu booth and then expo breakdown at 4PM. The last talk MJ and I attended was CEPH: Petabyte Scale Storage for Large- and Small-scale Deployments and then it was time to head toward the airport.

More of my photos from the conference are in a couple sets on flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157626044725255/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ubuntu-us-ca/sets/72157626169907536/

In all it was a really excellent conference and as always it was a delight to meet a number of people who I’d only previously communicated with online. The only downside of the whole thing was something we brought home with us: a horrible flu. MJ came down with symptoms first, I was bedridden by Thursday, the fever came and went for 3 days. Today is the first day I’m close to feeling normal again, but the cough and fatigue are lingering. SCaLE good, SCaLE flu bad!

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

wiki.ubuntu.com Upgrade Update

Wednesday, Mar 9th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Dozens of teams use wiki.ubuntu.com daily for their projects, and if you’re one of those projects you’ve no doubt encountered slowness and errors when saving pages with increasing frequency these past few months.

Well, there is good news! There is a team working on it and they are making progress. Charlie Schluting of Canonical has passed along the following updates to the Ubuntu Community Council this week:

“Our latest attempt to upgrade met with yet another openid bug/problem (python errors due to incompatibility with the latest moin). I’m talking to the maintainer (it’s an internal plugin) about it, and hope to have an ETA on the fix to report soon.”

and:

“An update: we have developers dedicated to fixing this, starting next week. We’re currently estimating it’s 2 weeks of work. Afterward, we will attempt another test-upgrade!”

Thanks to Charlie and the team for putting so much work into this. The wiki is a vital resource for the community and I’m really looking forward to seeing the upgrade and performance boost that comes with it.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Thinking About Ubuntu Developer Summit Attendance and Sponsorship?

Wednesday, Feb 23rd, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I have to admit, when I attended my first UDS (for Lucid in November 2009) I wasn’t sure what to expect session and format-wise. How would sessions be organized? What sessions should I expect to attend? Would there be talks or are there strictly work sessions? I had a keen interest in Debian and Ubuntu collaboration (as I still do Debian work and manage a lot of Debian systems at work) and I do a lot of community work so the community track was of major interest to me. I ended up overwhelmingly pleased with my experience but more information early on would have helped ease some of my initial concerns.

As these summits have grown, work has been put into development of summit.ubuntu.com where, as of Lucid, you can easily check out schedules of past summits:

This can be super helpful when you’re trying to determine whether attending the summit is right for you.

If you’re interested in reading about my experiences at the summits I’ve attended, I have created a Category here on my blog that contains all UDS posts: http://princessleia.com/journal/?cat=26

For UDS-O coming up in May in Budapest, Hungary Jono Bacon reached out to the Ubuntu Women and Ubuntu Accessibility teams to work toward Improving Diversity at UDS. We’ve had three meetings since he first reached out, February 10th (minutes, log), February 17th (minutes, log) and finally one on February 22nd (logs).

Out of these meetings we identified a lot of challenges that women, minorities and folks with accessibility considerations face and were able to make real progress as far as making improvements. In addition to the typical encouragement we offer each other every UDS to apply for sponsorship, the Ubuntu Women team has put together our own UDS page and a team of application reviewers (including myself, lyz@ubuntu.com) who women can email if they want their application reviewed first, this can be found at wiki.ubuntu-women.org/UDS. The UDS organizers will also make their best effort to make sure the venue has accessibility considerations from food allergies and restrictions to wheel chair access taken care of. We’ll also be making it easier for teams and individuals to plan evening events with a clear contact for advertising these events and by providing literature to make sure their event can appeal to the widest possible audience should they choose to. We don’t want anyone to feel left out of all evening activities, and as someone who is quite shy but otherwise able these changes will certainly help me be more inclined to look for events to attend in the evening. This UDS also marks the first to have a formal Anti-Harassment Policy, which also includes venue-specific details for incident reporting, authorities to contact for emergencies and taxi services.

Today the community sponsorship for attendees from the community was announced and we’re now encouraging anyone interested in attending to apply. Instructions for applying for sponsorship can be found here: http://uds.ubuntu.com/participate/sponsorship/

Jono Bacon has written a great post about sponsorship here: Ubuntu Developer Summit Sponsorship Now Open!

I have confirmed the time off from work in to attend, I think it’s time for me to apply, and you should look into it too!

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Ubucon at SCaLE9x in Los Angeles

Sunday, Feb 20th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

SCaLE9x

Ubucon

Can an Ubucon be put together in 2 weeks? The intrepid Nathan Haines thought so and has succeeded in bringing together 6 speakers from across the Ubuntu community, plus himself for a Q&A session, to participate.

Ubucon at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) will be taking place this Friday, February 25th.

I’ll be doing a talk on Finding Help in Ubuntu starting bright and early at 9AM!

The full schedule is now available here:

http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale9x/special-events/ubucon

The Ubuntu California Team will be having a booth at SCaLE during the expo days of Saturday and Sunday, so drop by and say hello if you’re attending, or sign up to volunteer if you’d like to help out! Details for the event are coming together on the team wiki page for it:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CaliforniaTeam/Projects/Scale9x

This will be my first trip to Los Angeles, MJ and I will be flying out Thursday night with a suitcase full of goodies for the Ubuntu booth, including a 42 inch inflatable penguin.

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

Caligula teeth, Buena Vista, Streetcars, V-Day, Interview and Puerto Rico

Wednesday, Feb 16th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Saturday morning we finally dropped Caligula off at the vet for his teeth cleaning.

The bad news: His teeth were very bad, worse than the vet had anticipated. 3 of his 4 canines had to be removed and he’d already lost 3 of his lower incisors! Poor guy!

The good news: Dental disease like this is common, particularly in purebreds, and he’ll do fine without those those teeth. Plus the vet is confident that his abnormal blood levels are a result of the dental disease and we should see an improvement now that his teeth are clean.

Home with recovering Caligula

Unfortunately Simcoe had just started snuggling up to him again on Thursday and now she’s back to hissing and growling at him as if he’s a stranger, sigh! Mostly he seems to be handling it all well though. He goes back to the vet on Saturday for a post-op checkup and for us to get a lesson in brushing his teeth.

For dinner Saturday night we met up with some of MJ’s friends for dinner at the famous The Buena Vista Cafe. I had never been so I went straight for what they were famous for, their Irish Coffee and a Hot Pastrami Sandwich, both of which were delicious and worthy of their fame. We took the cable car home, which is good because cable cars are one of my favorite things in the world and we don’t ride them enough.

Irish coffee at The Buena Vista

Sunday we headed out to Ferry Building for some lunch and for a quick browse around the San Francisco Railway Museum. The Railway museum is small (just a single big room) but it’s a charming little museum with lots of neat little gifts and is free. It’s run by the Market Street Railway non-profit, which does preservation work for the street cars that MUNI runs.

The bay from ferry building

Monday was Valentine’s Day! MJ greeted me in the evening with beautiful flowers and we spent the evening enjoying the Valentine’s Day menu at Absinthe Brasserie & Bar. Now to schedule that spa day…

Flowers :)

I mentioned in my last blog post that Ubuntu was working on a diversity statement, and this resulted in me being approached to do an interview for a Linux Pro Magazine blog: Ubuntu Increasing Its Diversity. As I mention in the interview I’m pretty happy that the community is embracing diversity in such a formal way.

Finally – more travel plans! Today I just got the green light from my boss to take a week long vacation in April. MJ is going to a four day conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico and we’re taking the opportunity to go together and enjoy the whole week there. I’ve never been to the Caribbean so I’m super excited about this trip.

Filed under: life, san francisco

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
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