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Puerto Rico: El Yunque Rainforest

Monday, Apr 18th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I have to admit when we arrived in Puerto Rico I didn’t know much about the island, so it was quite a pleasant surprise when I learned that there was a rainforest on the east end of the island. It’s the only rainforest [EDIT: that belongs to the U.S. Forest Service] and for about $50 I could get a ride up to and a tour of some of the highlights of the El Yunque National Forest.

The tour group consisted of 4 couples and me, which meant I got to ride shotgun in the tour van! The tour started with a drive through San Juan where the tour guide pointed out some features of the city and places we may want to visit. It was then off to the rainforest! It was absolutely stunning.

Even going there now, during the dry season, it was wet, green and blooming with all kinds of flowers. Our tour took us first to the visitor center, then up past a waterfall.

From there it was to the top of a tower overlooking not only the rainforest but on the far end the coastline looking out on the the Atlantic Ocean.

We then went through a few beautiful trails and even to a former (closed due to saftey concerns) public pool fed by spring water.

The forest was full of birds, frogs and reptiles of all sorts making all kinds of noise, but I only managed to see a couple of little lizards and a couple birds, the frogs, while loud, are small and difficult to spot.

Lunch was yellow rice and beans at a little privately-owned shop within the park.

It was certainly one of the highlights of the trip, my only regret is that MJ was stuck in a conference all day and couldn’t be there to enjoy it with me!

Filed under: travel

Heading to Puerto Rico

Friday, Apr 8th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Tonight at 10:15PM MJ and I are hopping on a red-eye to Charlotte and then on to San Juan, Puerto Rico!

Relaxation

I intend to take a proper vacation to clear my head and catch up on my reading. I’ll only be doing limited email checking.

A friend of ours is dropping by to check on the kitties throughout the week. We’ll be flying home on Saturday the 16th.

Filed under: travel

Another wiki.ubuntu.com Upgrade Update

Thursday, Apr 7th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Back on March 9th I posted a wiki.ubuntu.com Upgrade Update which outlined a tentative timeline for the upgrade of wiki.ubuntu.com. Today the Community Council received another update from Charlie Schluting of Canonical:

We have openid (with teams) working in the latest moin. A test upgrade (of another wiki) that we started working on this week has resulted in data migration scripts doing “the wrong thing” with some links. We’ve not gotten past that yet, but it’s actively being worked on right now, and should be a fairly quick fix.

I still want to upgrade some smaller wikis first, because the audience/impact is much smaller. I expect us to have at least a test environment for wiki.ubuntu.com up near Natty release time (a few weeks). When we have that test wiki.ubuntu.com up, I’ll be soliciting for help with testing!

Thanks again to the Canonical team working on this, and for patience of the community as they work through these problems!

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

SDForum Tech Women: Women and Open Source Panel

Thursday, Apr 7th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

About a month ago I was contacted by Sonja London, Chair of SDForum Tech Women, and asked if I was interested in being in a panel to introduce and discuss Open Source involvement with the Tech Women group. I was delighted at the opportunity!

The panel came together and ended up featuring Cat Allman of Google’s Open Source Programs Office, Alison Chaiken of MeeGo, Beau Lebens of WordPress, and was moderated by Janet Fouts of Tatu Digital Media. It was truly an impressive panel and it was quite an honor to be part of it. We had a conference call the week to prepare but otherwise Alison was the only person I’d met in person prior to the event.

So last Thursday I took Caltrain down with Grant Bowman, who I had invited along, and MJ picked us up at the train station. We arrived at Symantec around 6PM and were treated to some great snacks provided by the site host and given the opportunity to network with women attending the event. At 7PM the panel began!


Panelists! Photo by DJ Cline, see his blog post about the event here: Mar. 31, 2011 SDF Open Source Women

Janet was a great moderator and I quickly learned that I’m a big fan of the panel format as a presenter. The universal nervousness that accompanies a formal solo presentation wasn’t there and with a good panel the panelists really play off each others comments in a productive way, which is precisely what I experienced. Janet asked us questions about our involvement ranging from what our own definition and feelings around open source were to how we think mentoring programs play a role in expanding development. The questions from the audience were also really great, one person asking where the money in FOSS was – which I couldn’t help but answer with one of my most recent realizations: I totally take for granted my ability to learn how to handle complex virtual machine infrastructures by tossing up as many Debian installs as I want. No licensing concerns! So while my panelists covered the standard points of how there is money in FOSS I went down the “what you don’t have to pay for” path.


Photo by DJ Cline

The event did get me thinking a lot about how FOSS projects go about testing. Testing is a HUGE thing in the Ubuntu community. We have events around doing testing, a whole infrastructure around iso testing and always the encouragement for members of the community to test Alphas, Betas, and submit bug reports. However, a lot of projects don’t do this very well. A vast majority I’ve been involved with require you to be able enough to install the software from a revision control system and compile it yourself, and this doesn’t fit your average user who either installs their software from a simple package manager, or end user of a web application who may never have to handle installation at all. I think projects would really benefit from making this easier, there are a lot of folks who are willing to do software testing as a way to get involved and have expertise in the market their software targets but who are overwhelmed by the technical steps involved. I think I’ll do some experiments.

Filed under: events, tech

SFMOMA How Wine Became Modern Exhibit

Monday, Apr 4th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Saturday, when we should have been doing responsible things like filing mail and preparing for our vacation next week we instead decided to catch How Wine Became Modern exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which is closing on the 17th (so this was our last weekend to catch it).

It’s almost laughable that we hadn’t been before, it’s very close to where we live. How close? This photo is taken from the roof sculpture garden at the museum, the brown building in the back is ours:

A view from our roof deck into the sculpture garden: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/5584276418/

I will be the first to admit that the mention of “modern art” makes me cringe slightly. Unlike MJ (who is a fan of modernism) I am a fan of giant, old, wooden, classic things. Paintings and sculptures that are of and look exactly like actual things and places make me smile. My perfect place in the world? A personal library room with a big plush couch and pillows, huge wooden bookcases, a fireplace and some old oil paintings of woodsy scenes on the walls. Bonus points if said personal library is a log cabin in the woods next to a river. Modern art need not apply.

However, I do enjoy a nice glass of wine. A wine exhibit could get me into a modern art museum.

It ended up being an enjoyable little exhibit. In addition to fun wine memorabilia they had a lot of data regarding modern wine production and the export/import statistics of wine since 1976, and it really is extraordinary how the market has grown from being almost completely dominated by Europe to what we see today with California wineries being held in such high regard and wineries popping up in South America and Australia.

From there we walked across the floor to see Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870, a much larger exhibit and had some really fascinating pieces.

I’ll admit it, I really enjoyed the museum and I want to go back soon. Thursday nights from 6-8:45 (closing) tickets are half price, so I may need to take advantage of this (or just get a membership).

Filed under: san francisco

Berkeley Natty Global Jam

Monday, Apr 4th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Sunday I met up with 4 other members of the Linux community in the area as Ubuntu California Team teamed up with BerkeleyLUG for an Ubuntu Global Jam.

I arrived just before noon, Jack Deslippe had already arrived and ordered a pepperoni and jalepeno pizza! I unpacked the goodies I had brought for the event:

Soon James Ouyang dropped by and while Jack was doing an upgrade on his laptop James and I got to work on the Xubuntu LiveCD tests. We got a bug filed and was even able to spend some time debugging it with Xubuntu Technical Lead Lionel Le Folgoc (mr_pouit) on IRC. While working on this Grant Bowman arrived and much discussion (and bug reporting by Jack) was done about Unity. Another BerkeleyLUG member also dropped by in the mid afternoon and was able to give Unity a try for the first time by booting his netbook off one of the USB sticks.

We ordered a second, this time very veggie pizza, as we continued to work. I began some content review of Xubuntu.org (Looking to help? Several sections are out of date content-wise, help me fix them by finding them and reporting bugs!).

Using the USB sticks for all the ISOs was a new experiment for me. I’ll be honest – I had never even booted from a USB stick until a few weeks back when I reinstalled my mini9 and was introduced to usb-creator-gtk. The multiple isos on one stick was a whole different beast, and I used rww’s Booting ISOs from GRUB 2. You install grub2 on the USB stick and then copy the raw isos over, from there you just add the entries to the grub.cfg and you’re good to go!

We wrapped up the jam around 3PM. Following the event Grant posted to the ubuntu-us-ca mailing list with rww’s link and other tips for ISO handling: ISO Handling Tips

Filed under: berkeley, events, LoCo, tech, ubuntu planet, xubuntu

Weekend food and California Academy of Sciences

Tuesday, Mar 29th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

There was much delicious food this past weekend, I feel like I need to eat salad for a week. Friday I was lurking in the Shimmer Project channel when the conversation drifted from shimmery things and on to the subject of beer. Being a Friday this meant that I then had to go out for an evening of delicious beers at La Trappe Cafe. I was delighted to learn that they had just tapped two sours and was eager to give them a try.

Shortly after we arrived we were informed that they were out of mussels, my default dish and one of my all time favorites so I went with a burger with Chimay cheese. Fortunately the beers that I came for were available! First was Le Terroir, a Dry Hopped Sour. Dry hopping and sour are two of my favorite things! And the beer was up to the challenge, it was my favorite one of the night. Next up was La Folie, a Flemish Red Sour that I hadn’t tried yet and was quite good. We wrapped up the meal with a Belgian Waffle and I ordered a simple Cherish Raspberry Lambic, I know I’ve had the Cherry before but I think it was my first time for the Raspberry and it was a lovely way to end.

Saturday ended up being a pretty gloomy day, we stayed in and the day flew by far too quickly, much of it being taken up by booking my trip to Edmonton and exciting chores like taxes (well, mostly, MJ doing them and me grumpily grabbing supplemental documentation here and there while working on my own things).

Sunday we headed over to the California Academy of Sciences. I’ve had a membership since September and this was the first time we had made it back. We started our academy trip with lunch at The Moss Room where I finally got my mussels (and clams, and pasta), the only disappointment being that they had run out of scallops right after tempting us with them as the fish of the day. It was a nice place, downstairs and away from the busy Academy Cafe upstairs.

Following lunch we headed straight for their indoor rainforest.

I feel quite fortunate to live in a city with so many stunning museums with exhibits like this. It was really an amazing collection, plants, birds and butterflies, a whole basin with fish in it! And scatters throughout the exhibit were mini-exhibits with lizards, frogs, spiders and all kinds of other small critters.

The rainforest exhibit ends at precisely the place we wanted to be – the aquarium.

It’s a really nice aquarium, and the first I’ve been to in the bay area (there is also Aquarium of the Bay at Pier 39). We stayed until closing and I snagged a peek at their albino alligator before heading home. We were back in time for the bi-weekly California Team meeting on IRC where we discussed the upcoming Global Jams. Today I headed out and picked up a couple 4G USB sticks for the test Xubuntu images.

I wrote most of this blog entry (and did a bit of reading) on the roof deck today. It’s been so rainy and chilly lately that I haven’t spent much time up here in a couple of months so these past couple of days I’ve been taking advantage of the sunny (if not super warm yet) weather. A request has also been made to the HOA to ask about the cost of adding wireless internet from Webpass (available in our building, and provided for free in our lobby) to the roof. Here’s hoping, it would be lovely not to have to tether through my phone while up there.

Filed under: animals, life, san francisco

Ubuntu Global Jam in Berkeley on April 3rd

Monday, Mar 28th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Sunday, April 3rd, several of us from the Ubuntu California Team have teamed up with BerkeleyLUG and will be heading over to Bobby G’s Pizzeria in Berkeley for an Ubuntu Global Jam!

Global Jam Berkeley

Location: Bobby G’s Pizzeria, 2072 University Ave, Berkeley, CA
Date: Sunday, April 3rd, 2011
Time: noon – 3PM
RSVP: LoCo Directory or email me at lyz@ubuntu.com

RSVP is not required, but it helps me know how many CDs to bring. As far as getting there it’s very close to BART (that’s how I’m getting there!).

So, what’s a Global Jam anyway?

The Ubuntu Global Jam is an incredible opportunity for the Ubuntu community to unite together around the weekend of 1st – 3rd April 2011 to work together to improve Ubuntu. Everyone is able to contribute to the Jam, and everyone is welcome and encouraged to get involved. Curious about how to make a real difference to Ubuntu? This is a great chance to make that difference. — Ubuntu Global Jam wiki page

The first Beta release of Ubuntu 11.04 happens on March 31st (See full release schedule here) and we’ll be focusing on Testing and Bugs during this Jam – but we’re welcoming everyone with an interest in contributing to Ubuntu to come by, ask questions, and work on whatever you’d like.

For testing I’ll be burning some Xubuntu CDs and USB sticks for Xubuntu Live CD session testing and we’ll be answering questions about the basics of Bug Triaging and Ubuntu involvement in general.

Plus, they have my favorite pizza in the Bay Area. So even if you’re unsure about the Jam itself feel free to join us to just eat pizza and talk about Ubuntu!

If you’re not available Sunday, Jono Bacon is also hosting one in Walnut Creek on Friday, April 1st. Not near us? See here for a full list of events around the world!

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

Optimism, Atheism, Alberta and Zelda

Sunday, Mar 27th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

My boss, CJ Fearnley is a member of The Long Now Foundation which sadly for him in Philadelphia but fortunately for me here, hosts all their seminars in San Francisco. The latest seminar was Matt Ridley’s “Deep Optimism” and it was hosted just a block away from where I live at the Novellus Theater at Yeba Buena Center for the Arts.

In spite of the proximity, I’d never been to this theater and I was delighted at the opportunity to see such an interesting lecture at this venue. I headed over to YBCA around 5:30 and picked up my tickets, then walked across the park to the Metreon to get some dinner. I ended up with a steak sandwich from Buckhorn Grill and settled down in the blessedly quiet food court and ate while enjoying a book on my Nook (switched between two books actually – love the Nook). Around 7 it was back over to the theater. Almost instantly upon arrival I was delighted to run into Ilsa Bartlett, who I know from a couple Linux users groups in the area, it turns out that she’s a member of Long Now as well (plus a big Bucky fan).

Prior to attending I had seen Matt Ridley’s TED talk When Ideas Have Sex and the introduction to this lecture covered many of the same points before he gets into his reasons for long term optimism. I had a pretty good feeling going in that I’d be the choir for this talk, and I was right on. While I may not see hope around every corner personally all the time, I am an optimist when it comes to humanity, life, the universe. I’m constantly amazed at the accomplishments of humanity, even more so when I look into our past and see the creativity and brilliance that went into our creations long before we had the technology that we have today. I avoid extremism whenever possible but always conceded that it was required for progress, and this is something that Ridley discussed in his talk by pointing out that the major success and progress in humanity is largely made by the optimistic and successful, not those who are driven by fear and pressure. He is certainly more optimistic about the free market solving the ills of the world than I am, but he did concede that government regulations do sometimes help avoid catastrophe, even if he doesn’t think they are the biggest motivators for change since the correlation statistics don’t back that up (he argues that the long view of changes often don’t coincide with when laws were put in place). In all I really enjoyed the talk and to know that there are others who share my overall optimism about things, and that I truly do have reasons to be optimistic. Humans are clever and adaptable, we’ll be fine.

On the subject of world view, I finally picked up The God Delusion. While wandering around my thoughts on agnosticism and spirituality in my mid 20s I quickly encountered Douglas Adams whose interview about atheism that appeared in Salmon of Doubt was truly eye-opening for me. From there I learned of Richard Dawkins, The Center for Inquiry and beyond. Dawkins quickly became a hero, I watched the The Root of All Evil? with much interest and excitement. Then, just as I was ready to reach for The God Delusion I became one of those in the camp of I’m an Atheist, BUT… that Dawkins finds so depressing. While I am whole-heartedly an Atheist I can’t bring myself to impose my own world view dictated by science and secular reason upon others (and I expect the same respect from others). Instead I live my life ignoring the religion question and cheerfully living within a code of ethics that boils down “Be nice, and help, don’t hurt, other people” and hoping my life offers a good example to others who are questioning the need to be a part of an organized faith. I’ve now come back to this and am looking forward to reading the book with an open mind on the subject. I suspect I will have to go back to ignoring the question out of respect for others in a culture which feels religion needs respecting except in cases where the “respect” is misused to hurt others (and I know it has been), but I am interested to know if there is something I’m missing.

Travel! My sister Heather (middle of the three of us) lives in Alberta, Canada with her husband. I haven’t seen her since my grandfather’s funeral in 2005 and I’ve never met her husband, so since moving west I’ve been toying with the idea for a quick trip up to visit. I’ve decided to finally make that a reality in the end of May. Yesterday we booked a flight up during Memorial day weekend, so I’ll fly out of SFO for Edmonton on the evening of Friday the 27th and come back the evening of Monday the 30th. My sister and her husband will be driving down to Edmonton and we’ll be staying at the Hilton Garden Inn West Edmonton and spending our 3 days at the epic West Edmonton Mall. Wikipedia tells me that this is the biggest mall in North America, among other things they have an amusement park and a penguin colony, need I say more? It should be a fun trip, it’ll be nice to see my sister and her husband, and I’ve only been to Canada once and that was just over the border to Niagara Falls a couple years ago.

Finally, I rediscovered video games this week. Over these past few months I’ve been struggling with the crash time after work and gym when I’m too tired to jump right into project work, but really not in the mood to watch TV. I’ve been playing Angry Birds, but there are only so many levels! It wasn’t until I was having a chat in the Ubuntu California channel this week about Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2 that I was reminded of my love for computer and console video games and was inspired to pick up my Nintendo DS.

I went with The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. I bought this game around the same time as my DS and had forever let it sit on my shelf collecting dust while I focused on more direct puzzle games (Brain Age, Tetris, Scribblenauts) and didn’t want to get into another epic storyline. Now it’s time! It’s been the perfect solution to the problem, a half hour of Zelda leaves me ready to get back to project work.

Today we’re heading over to the California Academy of Sciences. During our last visit I didn’t get the opportunity to explore the Rainforests of the World exhibit or the Steinhart Aquarium so I’m really looking forward to seeing both of them.

Filed under: family, life, spirituality

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
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