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Ubuntu Lynx Stuffed Animal

Saturday, Jun 5th, 2010 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

On May 26th OMG! Ubuntu! published an article: Buy A Limited Edition Lynx Toy From Ubuntu & Help Save Real Lynx’s, Too! Neat!

From the store page:

Canonical will contribute a portion of each sale to the ‘SOS Lynx Foundation‘ as part of the Ubuntu One Music Store initiative up to a joint total of $1004.

I ordered one that day, it arrived in the mail today.

Shortly after taking this photo, my own resident Lynx Siamese came up on to my desk to investigate.

Want one of your very own (or so your kiddo stops snuggling that Suse lizard)? Hop on over to Canonical’s store to order one: Canonical Store: Ubuntu Lynx

Filed under: animals, tech, ubuntu planet

New monitor and LinuxChix meetups

Friday, Jun 4th, 2010 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

I’ve been wandering up and down the peninsula quite a bit this week. First was Wednesday night when I finally met Terri Oda! We met at Shiva’s Indian Restaurant in Mountain View with John Hawley and BJ Wishinsky, both of whom are also locals but I hadn’t met yet. It was a really delightful dinner, great conversation, even if I’m now feeling that much worse about not being able to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing yet again this year (so many conferences, so little time and money! Plus my birthday is smack dab in the middle of it).

Last night I headed down to Mountain View again to have dinner with MJ and then head over to MicroCenter to pick up a X203H bd 20″ Widescreen LCD Acer monitor which was on sale for $129.99. I like watching shows, DVDs and streaming media while I’m working on projects, but it’s been a bit tricky with just one monitor, and neither my laptop nor my netbook has a DVD drive, and neither of them are fast enough to suitably play hulu videos, so I was confined to just playing what was in my downloaded and ripped media collection. I tried a few solutions, streaming DVD via vlc from my desktop, sharing over SAMBA, ripping and DVDs and then watching them but none of these solutions were great and didn’t solve my Hulu problem and the laptop and netbook screens are so small anyway. I eventually resigned that I’d just need to get a 2nd monitor, then had to decide how it would work. Would I replace my graphics card on my desktop with one that could do dual head? Or maybe hook the monitor up to my firewall/xen server, which already has xorg on it from when I had it hooked up to my television. I went with the latter, and it’s working out great. Plus I’m able to finally use some of the power of this p4 w/ 3G RAM instead of having it sit here as just a firewall and xen-based dev box!

Tonight hopped on Caltrain yet again to attend my first Bay Area LinuxChix meetup down in Menlo Park. It was the first meeting in quite some time for the group and we had 10 people show up. It was nice to see some of the folks I’ve already met out here, and a pleasure as always to see some new faces. Plus, in spite of having to squeeze 10 of us at a table not nearly big enough for 10 people, the closeness to Caltrain, the atmosphere and ability to order food and drinks throughout the evening by heading up to the counter and ordering made Cafe Borrone a really nice venue for this kind of social meetup. I really hope we do more of these in the future!

Looks like tomorrow we’ll be running a lot of errands (including dentist appointments, meh, dentists). Sunday will be painting day.

Filed under: computers, life, tech

Priming!

Thursday, Jun 3rd, 2010 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

The installfest I talked about in my last post certainly took up much of my day on Sunday, but Saturday and Monday of this past holiday weekend had MJ and I busy with a project at home: starting to paint our storage units. We purchased three storage units in the building a couple months ago, all of them are unfinished concrete and drywall which makes for quite a dusty environment so we’ve been working to coordinate getting painters in and handling other tasks to prepare them. We also had some professional painters come by for some estimates on painting in the condo itself, which we’re looking to get repainted in a couple months.

We had a painter scheduled to come in over the weekend, but they canceled on Friday. Oh no! Not impressed and unwilling to wait longer to get a painter scheduled since we’re paying for off-site storage until this is completed, we decided to do it ourselves. The last time (and first time) I had painted was back in 2004 at the house in Schwenksville, where I learned that it’s not nearly as fun as it looks on TV, but a passable job can be done if you have the proper tools. Luckily the fellow in the paint department of our local Lowe’s was extremely helpful, and when I pulled out my mini9 to show him some photos he recognised Ubuntu and we had a nice long chat about it! Excellent! Ubuntu aside, he got us on the right track paint and supply-wise and we were on our way.

Some photos of the walls in the larger units, concrete and drywall:

The first task (and the one which took about 16 hours over 2 days) was cleaning, taping and then putting on the priming coat. It all took considerably longer than anticipated, the first day was spent priming the walls of the larger units, and the second day was spent doing the small unit walls and floors, and the floors of the large units.

In the course of painting I also managed to stick my foot in a can of paint. I’m almost glad, we had quite a good laugh over that.

Did I mention that it was very difficult work too? The large storage units are not rectangular, so there are some tricky corners, plus some pipes that need to be painted around. It also turns out that concrete is more tricky to paint than drywall, and takes more coats of paint because it’s more absorbent and the surface is much rougher.

This Saturday we’ll be picking up where we left off and starting the formal painting of the walls in the larger units. I’m hoping it’ll go more quickly than this past weekend now that we have the process down and we won’t need to do so much cleaning and prep work.

Wow, a whole post about painting storage units. See, my life these days isn’t all about traveling and Ubuntu parties!

Filed under: life

Ubuntu California Installfest at Noisebridge

Tuesday, Jun 1st, 2010 by pleia2 | 8 Comments

On Sunday MJ and I spent the day at Noisebridge for the Ubuntu California Lucid Installfest. Unfortunately our scheduling ended up to coincide with Carnaval San Francisco 2010, but aside from traffic woes in the area it made for some lively entertainment outside and quite the view for attendees.

Leif Ryge was our gracious Noisebridge host for this event and spent a lot of time helping to debug issues and putting iso images on flash drives as needed. Thanks also our other volunteers, Grant Bowman, who brought a whole pile of 10.04 CDs, Jesse Zbikowski, Michael Paoli and several others who were eager to jump in and help with installs. Thanks also to Christian Einfeldt who has been working with Al Stoll, a local attorney who has been using Ubuntu and provided pizza and drinks for the event and has offered to also print up CDs for the team, Christian took the time to organize the actual delivery of the pizza (which was no easy task with the Carnival happening outside!).

The event ended up having over 20 people, all told. We did 6 Ubuntu installs, and 1 Debian on an old PPC Mac and did some serious debugging of two other machines which were having problems, one of which ended up being a failing harddrive causing filesystem corruption that made Ubuntu 8.10 “act funny” and cause her to bring her machine in to us, and the caused a reinstall to fail completely with I/O errors. I ended up installing Ubuntu on my old Compaq Pentium 3 with only 384M of RAM, I won’t be watching flash or doing lots of photo editing, but it’s a really decent experience in general.

I think the most noteworthy of the installs was one which had a RAM problem. The woman who brought the machine explained the problems she was encountering when trying to install 64-bit Ubuntu, and the problems were duplicated by our volunteers. Early on RAM was ruled out after memtest passed, but by the end of the day there was a matrix on the white board of her 4G of ram being swapped around the 4 slots. The result? The 4th RAM slot on the board was bad, she was able to head home with a fully functioning 10.04 install of 64-bit Ubuntu and a computer which was much happier overall now that the 4th slot was empty.


Photo by Christian Einfeldt, CC-BY-SA, originally published in his Picasa gallery: Linux: Lucid Lynx Installfest 5-30-10

A few more photos can be found over on my flickr account:

Ubuntu California Lucid Installfest May 2010

It really ended up being quite a fun event, even if we ended up running a couple of hours over. As always it was also a pleasure to meet more people using Ubuntu and learning what they use it for. It’s really not just for geeks anymore, almost all the folks bringing in systems had expertise in fields outside of technology and were using Ubuntu for reasons like openness, flexibility and the reason we always hear: tired of dealing with security hassles (worms, viruses, etc) on Windows.

Filed under: computers, events, tech, ubuntu planet

Art and Baseball

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Yesterday MJ and I headed down to the San Francisco Fine Art Fair of Modern and Contemporary artwork over in Marina at the Festival Pavilion at Fort Mason Center. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect with this fair, which we learned about via our membership at the Asian Art Museum, and I was pleasantly surprised at the very interesting mix of galleries they had showing artwork. The venue itself is an interesting one, as the name suggests it’s an old military establishment which has now been converted into a national recreation district. The Pavilion where the show was held is a building on a pier on the bay.

My favorite work of the show was by Jenn Shifflet whose art was being displayed by the Chandra Cerrito Contemporary Gallery over in Oakland. A quick snapshot of which I took:

The rest of the day was spent running errands! But it was all very much needed, I didn’t really get anything done when I got home from Belgium and then last week I ended up with a nasty cold (which apparently wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, I hear a few folks from UDS ended up with respiratory infections that resulted in hospital visits, yikes!).

In spite of the cold, I was able to get out on Monday evening before the symptoms hit me Tuesday morning and joined Chris and Mark at an Oakland A’s game! It turns out that Mark’s grandmother has been a huge, season ticket holding fan for many years so he knows all kinds of people at the ballpark, and they were even at the recent perfect game pitched by Dallas Braden. As a result of this and it being a bit of a rainy game, we managed to get some amazing seats.

We arrived pretty early and were able to see them clearing off the field before the game.

Then we had the opportunity to get a ball that Mark brought along for me signed by 4 of the players and the team manager!


Photo from here in Mark Terranova’s photostream, “Lyz getting Kevin Kouzmanoff’s autograph”

My signed baseball:


Signed by Bob Geren (manager), Cliff Pennington, Kevin Kouzmanoff, Rajai Davis and Jake Fox


Photo from here in Mark Terranova’s photostream, “Me [Mark] & Lyz”

The game really was a blast, even with the intermittent rain. The A’s were playing the Mariners so I was able to see the famous Ken Griffey Jr. and Ichiro Suzuki play. Huge thanks to Mark for inviting me out and showing me such an amazing time. I can’t imagine ever snagging seats that good again, or having quite the experience as that first A’s game – and only my second Major League game ever! Next time I’ll bring the sandwiches.

Filed under: events

Your favorite scifi/fantasy books

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010 by pleia2 | 53 Comments

Today MJ and I were downtown visiting the Shanghai exhibit at the Asian Art Museum. The museum closed at 5PM but the San Francisco Public Library right next door is open until 6PM! So after the museum we hopped over there and signed up for library cards and headed straight to the scifi section and quickly realized I had no idea what I wanted to read. With so many amazing books in the world I really don’t want to waste my time with something I picked up because it had a pretty cover.

I’ve read most of the classics (Foundation, Dune, Lord or the Rings), pretty much everything ever written by Orson Scott Card, Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, read plenty of Bradbury, Clarke, Asimov, Gibson and Neal Stephenson, have a bunch of Neil Gaiman, Anne McCaffrey and Harry Turtledove books.

So, what are your favorite scifi and fantasy books and authors? What book do I absolutely need to pick up on my next trip to the library?

Filed under: books, ubuntu planet

Beer in Brussels!

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

I’ve wanted to visit Belgium ever since I had my first beer from Duvel back in 2001. The opportunity to go was unexpected this year, and as a result of the circumstances (attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Maverick Meerkat) I wasn’t able to spend my whole trip sampling beer and being a tourist, but I certainly wouldn’t let the primary purpose of my trip get in the way of some beer sampling while in the country where some of my favorite beers come from!

I mentioned a couple of beers I tried when I first arrived, in my first blog post about the summit I mentioned the Belle-Vue Kriek:

And that I had a Delirium Tremens:

I also mentioned the Waterloo Tripel 7 Blond and Mort Subite lambics in my second blog post about the summit – with pictures! I also snapped a picture of the back of the Tripel bottle:

But now on to beers I didn’t talk about! Wednesday night was a trip into Brussels where I committed the very strange act of ordering a belgian lager, a Piedboeuf Jupiler. It’s the most popular beer in Belgium and at the restaurant where we were at the choices were pretty limited, and I’d already had the Leffe varieties on the menu stateside. My take? I don’t much care for lagers, but it was one of the better ones I’ve ever had. Plus the glass was huge, and that was fun.

From Drug Opera Restaurant we walked over to the precious beer hall that is Delirium Cafe. I love Delirium Tremens, it’s one of my favorite beers in the world. Learning that there was a bar named after it which had over 2000 beers and was The Place for beers in that district of Brussels was so exciting.

Me at Delirium Cafe!

And inside, with my first beer!

And the Delirium bottle wall going to the downstairs bar!

I carefully selected this first beer from the menu in their upstairs bar:

It was a Chouffe Houblon IPA. Chouffe does IPAs? I’ve had their strong pale ales before, but the IPA was a new and wonderful experience. My love for IPAs and standard Belgian ales is about equal these days, I really really enjoyed this beer.

From there I went to the Mongozo Mango, which in spite of enjoying two of I didn’t get a picture of it. This was a really delicious beer! As far as lambics go it had a nice tart taste to it, while retaining an appropriate amount of sweetness, the same of which couldn’t be said for the banana lambic I had a taste of later in the evening – way too sweet! I also had more than my fair share of someone else’s Bourganel Bière à la Verveine Velay, which was just strange, green color aside it was can’t-put-my-finger-on-it mentholy-minty, or something. The strangeness of this beer kept me sampling it.

I wrapped up the evening with a good ole Delirium Tremens, you kinda have to at Delirium Cafe!

Thursday night we made our way back down to Brussels for some previously mentioned waffles and chocolate. Following that and some sightseeing we ended up back at Delirium Cafe (turns out it was a public holiday, so our choices were limited).

This night I started off with a Floris Cactus. Huyghe Brewery‘s (same brewery as Delirium Tremens and Mongozo) Floris isn’t actually all that hard to find in the US, but I hadn’t had either of the ones they had on tap and the ones that I’ve had stateside were pretty sweet – the apple was almost undrinkable because it was so overwhelmingly candy-like. I’m happy to report that the Cactus was a delight!

Then it was on to the Floris Mirabelle… which I haven’t been able to find information online about (help?). This was another delicious lambic.

Not to let lambics rule the night, I also wrapped up this evening with a beloved Delirum Tremens.

My last beer of the trip was on Saturday morning (hey, it was night in San Francisco! that means it’s ok, right?) at the airport when my flight was delayed and I had one last Belle-Vue Kriek.

I had to admit being pretty heavy on the lambics this trip, but as a “working trip” I needed to avoid beers which would land me with a nasty hangover the next morning and render me useless during the busy summit days. My next trip to Belgium I will be less delicate and more adventurous! But this was certainly a fun start.

Filed under: beer, travel

UDS Maverick Day 5

Sunday, May 16th, 2010 by pleia2 | 5 Comments

Last day of UDS!

– Community Roundtable –

It was discussed that the LoCo Council will be formally deprecating the unmaintainable LoCo Team List wiki page in favor of loco directory. We also did some reviewing of good sessions throughout the week.

– Ubuntu Women UDS-M Goals –

The Ubuntu Women team has a full RoadMap for the future over on the wiki: http://wiki.ubuntu-women.org/Roadmap-M but in this session we focused on three major places:

Mentoring Program: We’ll be rewriting our documentation to reflect the real program as it stands now, and working to reference existing programs within the community that we can point women to who want to get involved. Penelope Stowe will be leading up the effort to rewrite this documentation and I volunteered to be the primary reviewer.

Redesign Logo: Vish is the driver for this one, working to make a new logo which is consistent with the Ubuntu branding guidelines (even if I am still quite fond of our current logo! Times change…).

Redesign Ubuntu-Women.org website: I’m leading up this project, handling most of the logistics and defining what portions of the site need to be worked on and Melissa Draper will be looking into the design direction. In the coming weeks I’ll also be moving much of the static content to the wiki.

I suspect we’ll tackle more of the goals in this cycle, but with the Leadership Election coming up and an evaluation of the success of our new IRC channel infrastructure we wanted to have really attainable goals.

– Unity design –

In this Unity session they discussed some common netbook problems, drag and drop is tricky, so are complex mouse gestures, single click launching is not great for netbooks since accidental clicking happens frequently for most users, but single click launching does make sense for touchscreens. The work to develop a theme that works well on both netbooks and touchscreen devices is a more complicated problem than I had anticipated as intuitively I think “they’re both small screens” but in reality there are differences in usage, including things like behavior of window “edges” and other expectations.

It was then off to lunch, followed by Lightning talks. There were several great little talks, but I particularly enjoyed learning about the the Chamilo E-Learning and Collaboration Software, which they claim isn’t a competitor to Moodle but does look like it is. Will be interesting to check out. I also enjoyed watching the presentation by Chris Johnston on ClassBot, which we tossed the slides together for just a couple hours prior to the presentation. I’ve been involved with Classroom for several years now, and ClassBot really marks a nice advance in how we handle sessions with all it’s automatic handling of things, it also gave us an opportunity to ask for folks to host classes in #ubuntu-classroom




– Community Team Process Improvements –

This session focused on consolidating the wide variety of community building documenation into a generic pool. Currently there multiple wiki pages which are similar and information is a quite spread out, making it challenging for teams to find the right, good documentation. I think this ties in well with the LoCo initiative to tie together best practices documentation, indeed, LoCo Council member Laura Czajkowski has volunteered for a number of action items on both projects.

– Ubuntu News Team –

Joey Stanford and Amber Graner lead this session to discuss some lingering issues with the structure of the news team and the future, including their current status of the 4 launchpad teams currently set up for the team. I found this session to be primarily valueable because it really gave me a clear look at the history, goals and intents of both the Ubuntu Weekly News and Fridge Editors teams (the latter of which I’m a contributing member of) and they were able to make decisions and look to what needed to be discussed within the community.

The day wrapped up with a presentation by Robbie Williamson of Canonical on the release schedule to meet Mark’s proposal of releasing on 10-10-10, he outlines this in a blog post: A Case for Modifying the Ubuntu Release Schedule. Then the team leads for each session gave some wrap-up information, including that they’ll be shooting for a 2.6.35 kernel and that they’re planning on moving to just i686 for 32bit (so, dropping i386-i586) for Maverick so they can take advantage of i686 optimizations, yay!


Once this wrapped up it was on to dinner and Allstars. I spent much of the evening outside chatting with people (sun sets so late there!) and enjoying the cool air, I was able to get to bed by 12:30 so I could be up for my flight the next morning.

Saturday it was finally sunny out, but we had to fly home! My flight was delayed by a couple hours which didn’t seem like a problem at the time since I naively thought that since my flight had the same number all along in spite of stopping in Chicago that the second portion of the flight would wait for the first – not so! The ash delay in Brussels caused me to miss my connection in Chicago so they booked me on a flight the following morning. Luckily they let me try to fly standby on a couple of overbooked flights that evening and I managed to catch a 5:30PM flight out of Chicago, phew! Good thing too, since I had already re-checked my bag after customs.

I finally got in to SFO around 8PM and MJ greeted me at the airport with flowers! My checked bag had fortunately (somewhat miraculously) made it on the same plane as me so I was able to get home pretty quickly, order some Chinese and finally relax after the fantastic whirlwind that was UDS!

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

UDS Maverick Day 4

Sunday, May 16th, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

And on to day 4…

– Community Roundtable –

First off, Laura Czajkowski explained the LoCo Council healthcheck, a series of monthly Q&A sessions on IRC where the LoCo Council is available to answer questions from the community. The rest of the session was spent on smaller topics, including calendars on fridge, the idea of documenting “what they should be doing” with regard to monthly reporting, team meetings and other things that Approved teams are expected to do.

– Maverick LoCo Directory Plans –

On the LoCo Directory currently it’s a bit difficult to find specific events near you since they are all just in a big list, so we discussed some soon to be released improvements and other mechanisms for handling this. Also discussed were ways to make the team information page richer, perhaps having photos/flickr feed and an easy way to visualize special events the team is participating in (release parties, global jams, etc). There are also a lot of loco-directory bugs out there which have great ideas. Jono also proposed having a map on the front page to quickly get people to a list of teams in their continent. I’m really looking forward to all of this, the loco directory has a lot of potential to make things considerably easier for teams and attendees.

– Maverick Governance Changes And Needs –

The session began with a quick generation of the list of expiring members during the Maverick cycle so we could schedule restaffing. There was also a lot of discussion about handling leadership mailing lists since it’s a tedious process to keep them updated after restaffing and the way in which voting is handled within the community, as launchpad voting is pretty basic and the current methods of extracting information from launchpad for use in 3rd party voting software are not easy for a typical user.

– Maverick IRC Council Plans –

Jussi Schultink lead this session which began with a review of the Lucid RoadMap where he discussed the progress made in that cycle. I’ve been really impressed with the transformation of the council in this cycle and their willingness to tackle the tough problems out there, it was a pleasure to see every one of my questions regarding their status answered in a positive manner where they had either solved a problem or had plans in place. For Maverick they’ll be focusing on the issue tracker (they are asking for volunteers to help), working through the logistics of a “core ops” team and a policy on factoid changes. There was also a lot of discussion about bots, and the following were mentioned/proposed: Reminder that all Ubuntu bots should be added to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IRC/Bots (including LoCo bots – oops, this needs to be done for California!), a request to be issued that all approved LoCo teams have an official log bot, and a discussion to begin on the policy of having all #ubuntu-* logged (with case by case exceptions). In all, a very productive session.

After lunch I attended the Plenary talk by the new Debian Project Leader, Stefano Zacchiroli, titled “Collaboration with Ubuntu (from the Debina point of view)” (video). It was an excellent talk and he was really keen on seeing the collaboration issues pointed out, discussed and resolved. Hurrah Debian!

I then had to scoot out to be interviewed by Amber Graner, the video is now up up the blip.tv site: UDS-M Interview Elizabeth Krumbach Community.

After the interview I headed back to the auditorium for the group photo, a “quick version” of which has been posted here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kwwii/4610334160/.

– Ubuntu LoCo Manual –

A couple of really key things came out of this session which was led by Alan Pope and Laura Czajkowski. The first that quickly became clear was that the wiki has a wealth of information which even key members of the community have a tough time keeping track of, discussions would begin and then someone would pull up some old wiki page which would begin to outline the ideas being discussed. This information will have to be found and improved upon. The second important thing that came out of this session was the need for a “Best Practices for a LoCo” which would be a simple checklist outlining the expectations for teams who are approved or seeking approval, since a lot of teams end up getting stuck at a “We have our LoCo set up, now what are we supposed to do?” position.

– Maverick LoCo Council Plans –

This session covered some of the work the LoCo Council has been doing in the past cycle, including embarking upon reapproving teams (which is planned to be done every 2 years). They also discussed the way that news is delivered to LoCo teams, as currently the information is sent to loco-contacts to be shared with teams, but not all LoCo leaders are not sending along that information. Possible solutions were proposed including more direct engaging of LoCo contacts with direct mailing (a lot of work) or having a LoCo Council email address which can email all LoCo team lists (could be controversial). In all, the LoCo Council is doing very well, it’s not easy resolving issues within the community and getting folks to sit down together and talk through problems, but they have been quite successful in finding positive resolutions.

– Ubuntu Manual, Docs Team and Learning project collaboration –

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this session since we weren’t sure of the dynamics of the audience going in, and had a backup plan if the members of the Doc Team were unable to attend. To our pleasant surprise, not only was it a full room of folks interested, we had Doc Team representatives present! Currently there are three visible projects within the community seeking to write content for users, in three slightly different formats. It’s been difficult to sync these efforts and this session lead by Learning Materials Team member Martin Owens was a step in the right direction. Phil Bull from the Doc Team joined us via IRC and we discussed a proposal for a “content pool” which includes material from all projects written in the format the Doc Team releases in (currently DocBook, but Phil indicated that they’d probably be switching to Mallard, following Gnome). The Learning Materials project is seeking to continue development on tools for this content pool, primarily being Martin’s Ground control and a collaborative editor for materials, and I’ll be converting the current Learning Material documents to the new format once the Doc Team confirms their position on DocBook vs Mallard. The Manual project will be focusing on a content delivery system for the content they’re releasing in the form of the support and learning center that was discussed earlier in the week, this system will include infrastructure for easily accepting contributions. I have to say that I’m really excited about this collaboration, first because it’s so nice to see the teams starting to work together, and secondly because of the great potential these projects have to help each other.

The day wrapped up and we decided to head down to Brussels for waffles! We took one of the shuttles down into the city center and began our journey by stopping at a couple chocolate shops, yum! I was so close to buying to Duvel made out of chocolate (decided against it since it was unsealed and I wasn’t sure how I’d get such a thing home, darn!).

Then it was off for the actual Belgian Waffles! I ordered mine with strawberries and chocolate, but Martin Bogomolni ordered his with some liquor that was lit on fire when presented at the table, and two other guys followed his lead, and I took a video of it Wow, nice!

Afterwards, we too a walk through the Royal Galleries of Saint-Hubert, a long shopping arcade where everything was closed for the evening but the place was beautiful. Then I hit a local tourist shop for some little gifts and then headed over to get some frietes! I sure did look like a tourist at this point, much to the entertainment of my fellow travelers.

Where now? On our way to get beer I passed a shop window where they had a stuffed toy Delirium elephant, oh how cute! But the shop was closed! Martin gave me some tips on finding one in San Francisco, so we’ll see how that goes. We then got to see the Grand Place where I got some surprisingly good night photos from my trusty little pink handheld canon.


Sufficient number of photos taken, we then made our way to Delirium Cafe – yep, the same place we had spent the last night at. I had a couple new lambics, including the Floris Cactus, but I’ll cover beers in their own post.

We got back at the hotel by shortly after midnight – quite a bit more reasonable than the previous night!

Filed under: beer, events, tech, travel, ubuntu planet, UDS

UDS Maverick Day 3

Thursday, May 13th, 2010 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

Day 3!

– Community Roundtable –

Once again started my day in the Community Roundtable discussion. Not much noteworthy to the outside world came of this, mostly just administrative loose ends that needed to be tied up, including touching base with Canonical about some things, changing some of the scheduled sessions (oh no, conflicts!), making sure the lists.ubuntu.com mailing list creation workflow was being handled properly (it’s still a bit slow – but it’s much better than it used to be!), and chatted a bit about loco events and meetings as far as calendaring goes.

– Promoting LoCo Testing Teams –

The core of this session began with a great presentation by Paolo Sammicheli discussing the test case of Italy as a team who got heavily involved in ISO testing during the last cycle. Details from the Italian team’s initaitve are outlined on their wiki: http://wiki.ubuntu-it.org/GruppoTest, including results compiled from their big testing push in 10.04. Their main findings? It’s a good way to get new contributors, several of the people contributing in the Italian team test were new to contributing to Ubuntu. It seems that it gives just enough techincal work to keep new contributors engaged (bug filing and such), while also having a low enough barrier to entry that it’s not a problem for newcomers to give it a try. There were also suggestions from other folks in the room regarding how we motivate teams and individuals to do testing. Something like a 5-A-Day but for testing? Hooking Launchpad Karma into it (Karma is not a great metric, but people like it)? Perhaps being able to somehow tag tests with a loco team name so folks could see which locos are more active than others.

Aside from the basic ISO testing info, couple other links mentioned during the session for teams looking to do similar work may be helpful:

http://ubuntutesting.wordpress.com/

https://launchpad.net/testdrive

Looks like this could be a really valuable thing for more teams to take a part of.

– Conference Planning –

Ubuntu at Conferences! I really enjoyed this session. It turns out that the link I just referred to hasn’t been updated in 2 years, which means a couple of things: 1) Amber Graner and others in the community had some really great tips about how you can submit the best application for a ship-it request, like including additional information about the conference itself 2) The conference packs haven’t changed all that much in 2 years. The former was only the first of several ways that Amber has come up with teams doing better at conferences in general, all of which will be released as a document in a few weeks. The latter also sparked a great conversation about how the Conference Packs could be better, Jane Silber (CEO of Canonical) was in the room during this discussion and said she’d be happy to hear a proposal from the LoCo Council on this, excellent! The session also discussed the types of conferences that teams get involved with, and the consensus was that we really don’t want to isolate our booths to just tech events, we want to present at events at schools and universities, attend events like SciFi conventions, and the North Carolina team has really run with this idea by planning to promote Ubuntu at a goat festival, an idea which came up after somewhat unrelatedly working with an organization involved with it to get their systems switched to Ubuntu.

– Community Maverick Mootbot –

Writing meeting minutes is a tedious and often thankless job, so the Scribes Team wrote MootBot. Alan Bell and the UK team have done some really great work based on the current MootBot to develop one which makes friendlier-styled logs like this which is output as wiki syntax for immediate placement in the wiki. There were a lot of great ideas during this session, like requesting the ability to change the chair in the middle of a meeting, automatic posting to wiki following the meeting, ability to process old logs, and further automate chairing a meeting. The decision was also made to convert the bot from an eggdrop to a Supybot.

– Plan for Moodle, schooltool and sugar in Edubuntu –

This session was a really interesting one to catch up on the health of these packages in Ubuntu (and Debian). Moodle turned out to be a tricky one since the current version in the repository is getting old and the Moodle team is needing some help with packaging and patching for security and bug handling. SchoolTool‘s status was considerably better, they have a PPA and they’re shooting for getting it into Maverick. The final one discussed was Sugar, and they’ll be following up with the Ubuntu Sugar Remix team, which has an active PPA and mailing list discussions.

– Community Track: Fridge and News Team –

This was probably the most productive session of the day from my own workload perspective. The Fridge will be moving to WordPress from Drupal and in a couple months we’ll have a test instance up. The Design Team has some time set aside for theming and we had a volunteer in the session who said she’d help with mockups. Amber and I will be doing content review and we’ll all be playing with workflow and are planning to set up a trial for non-editors to submit news directly to the Fridge. The calendar was also discussed, as the project has grown so much that we now have several heavily populated community calendars and the team wants to somehow display and link these to /calendar. I’m really excited about this redevelopment, should be an excellent cycle for the news team.

– Maverick Ubuntu Global Jam –

In this session we primarily focused on best pratices for Global Jams where we all related stories about our own successful Jams. Then there was a lot of discussion about how to better spread the word to teams about jams. Some of the ideas tossed around was direct emailings to loco mailing lists (may be a bit spammy), better promotion of loco contacts mailing list, getting into direct contact with contacts, a facebook group.

Once the day finished up we all met up to head down to Brussels for the Ubuntu Women dinner at Drug Opera Restaurant. We took the bus to the Metro station which we took into the center of Brussels.

Dinner was enjoyable, but ended up taking quite some time and we had to change our plans to the evening since we couldn’t get back to the shuttle on time.

From there we headed to Delrium Cafe, which was amazing, but I’ll have to write about that later.

On to UDS day 4!

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