I sadly have to admit falling behind on the Cryptography<\/a> Coursera class, July was too busy and quite honestly I want practical usage and theory of cryptography, not the mathematical and theoretical foundation that will prepare me to write my own ciphers. Instead, at MJ’s recommendation, I’ve started watching the 4 part “Theory and Practice of Cryptography”<\/em> series of Google Tech Talks from 2007 and they’ve turned out to be much more on target (available here: 1<\/a>, 2<\/a>, 3<\/a> and 4<\/a>). I did start another Coursera class, this time Internet History, Technology, and Security<\/a>. So far it’s been quite enjoyable, the instructor and folks he interview have a very “storytelling” format and I love that it’s filling in the gaps I have in my brain’s Internet History timeline.<\/p>\n The week before last, on Thursday, the alpha3 of Ubuntu was released. Given the limited availability of some of the other key Xubuntu project members, I ended up stepping up for this release with testing and making sure we had everything lined up for the Xubuntu alpha3<\/a>. It was an interesting experience, and certainly closer than I’d been in the past to the release process. That Friday was System Administrator Appreciation Day<\/a> and a member of one of the teams who uses a server I manage was generous enough to paypal me some money for flowers as a thank you! They were very nice flowers:<\/p>\n Over the weekend one of my cousins was in town for the San Francisco Marathon<\/a>, which she’d be running with her brother, who’s a local. We ended up meeting up a couple times, Saturday for dinner and then Sunday after the race to head out to the pool for a couple hours. It was really nice to catch up with her, and I really should see about spending more time with my local cousin too!<\/p>\n I spent a considerable amount of time this week catching up on projects and apparently giving myself even more work (todo list hasn’t<\/em> shrunk!) but I’m feeling good about the progress. I finally got back to my gym routine this week after lots of traveling and being otherwise busy (so I had lots of excuses, bad bad).<\/p>\n On Tuesday evening I went to a Long Now talk by Cory Doctorow on “The Coming Century of War Against Your Computer”<\/a> (summary and audio download available in that link) which was a really interesting talk. It also started off with the fun San Francisco [TBS@USA 13\/13] video<\/a> from a little drone flying all over San Francisco.<\/p>\n As far as upcoming stuff goes, I have plans to do some Partimus<\/a> work tomorrow as we just received a donation of notebooks<\/a>! And while on the topic of Partimus, Robert Litt, one of the teachers we work with was recently interviewed for an article: How One Teacher Built a Computer Lab for Free<\/a>.<\/p>\n Finally, you’re probably all sick of hearing about it, but following the O’Reilly award I was Interviewed by Muktware<\/a>, an online Open Source magazine and on Thursday my boss issued a press release about it<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was pretty cool visiting both Portlands in July, but it sure managed to make my July fly by. I can’t believe it’s August already. At work I recently published 5 things about FOSS Linux virtualization you may not know following up with a conversation about virtualization tools I had at SCALE back in January. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6570"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6605,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6570\/revisions\/6605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/princessleia.com\/images\/journalpics\/082012\/sysadmin_flowers_2012_sm.jpg\")
<\/a>
\nSysadmin flowers!<\/small><\/div>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/princessleia.com\/images\/journalpics\/082012\/longnow_cory_doctorow_and_stewart_brand_sm.jpg\")
<\/a>
\nCory Doctorow and Stewart Brand at Long Now Seminar<\/small><\/div>\n