FOSS Women

The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD will be available February 28th.

Going further down the road of music masochism, I made my pick for this weekend’s bluesy-rock jam session with DJ and Ginneh. Here it is.

“Change the World” by Eric Clapton – now, we’re not going to go nearly as ninja on it as his group is here, but the potential for coolness of bass line and vocal harmony is definitely there along with a relatively simple chord structure that’s certainly attainable as a first-time song. In my utterly uninformed, wild-guess-estimate opinion. I may be proven wildly wrong when we start playing this weekend.

This song pending +1 approval from the rest of the crew, of course. I’m looking forward to seeing what songs the others pick. If we get another rhythm section player and I fix my busted electronic drum kit, I might be putting myself through a percussion crash course (pun intended) and playing that instead of piano/guitar on a song or two on Saturday.

I think it is relatively safe to say at this point that music is my sprinting for the month of February. I’m going from “what is this?” on the guitar to “ooo, let’s arrange some fingerstyle pieces, this is fun.” (Without ever learning proper chords, too – but I’ll fill them in later.)

Wheeeee!

Last year, over 3500 people pledged to support Ada Lovelace Day, the international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. Over 1200 people added their link to our map mash-up and we got lots of coverage in the national press and even appeared on the BBC News Channel. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We wanted you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, and you did. Thank you!

But our work is not yet done. This year we want 3072 people to sign up to our pledge and to write their tribute to women in tech on Wednesday 24 March. We have 197 signatories so far, we just need another 2875, which is where you come in. Please sign the pledge and let all your friends know about it.

It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, if you do text, audio or video, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited to take part. All you need to do is sign up to this pledge and then publish your blog post any time on Wednesday 24th March 2010. If you’re going to be away that day, feel free to write your post in advance and set your blogging system to publish it that day.

To keep up to date with what is happening:

The Pledge: http://findingada.com/
The Blog: http://blog.findingada.com
on Twitter http://twitter.com/FindingAda
on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=253179284089

Please, join us on Ada Lovelace Day. Together we can raise the profile of women in technology around the world!

Another post to Web Insecurity. This one is pretty much explained by the title:

Amex thinks shorter passwords without special characters are more secure

I was working on a background section of my thesis proposal and was talking about how some misconceptions regarding security policies can result in web sites being a lot less secure. But [American Express] takes security misconceptions to a new low...

(Read the rest. And weep. Or laugh. It's pretty terrible.)

I finished reading “Unlocking the clubhouse” on Saturday, finally. The book is only about 150 pages long, but it’s full of useful information about increasing participation of women in computer science.

The chapter that most stuck with me was chapter 6, “Persistence and Resistance: Staying in Computer Science.” I have said more than once, in a tongue-in-cheek way, that Code-n-Splode’s mantra for men who think that we should not have the “dude token” policy should be: “It’s just not about you.”

My feeling is that establishing a culture where female voices dominate, rather than are assimilated in, creates a social environment that’s fundamentally different. And that that difference is *good*. I wouldn’t say that the book totally supports that notion, but it points out situations where women found peer groups that did not conform to a male hacker stereotype, and that foundation of social support helped them stay in their course of study.

The students referred to in the paragraph are undergraduates at Carnegie Mellon University:

Women who accept the prevailing culture as the norm and who continuously compare themselves to this norm and find themselves coming up short are the ones who suffer the most.

The majority of women struggle to find a place where they can feel comfortable in the prevailing culture…

Ironically, it is in this area of relationship to culture that international women may have an edge. The international women do not as readily use the U.S. male hacker as their reference group. Since they are not fully part of this culture, their reference group is elsewhere. Many international students have alternative success norms and social bonds that protect them. Other priorities are dominant, and with these come other scales for self-evaluation.

So, rather than bringing their cultural norms to the hacker culture and modifying it, the international women have their own social structures which exist outside of the dominant culture. “Cultural resistance” was the title for this section, and it’s a great way of characterizing the lack of assimilation.

I have more than a few times heard women-specific groups discouraged because of they emphasize differences that the dominant culture feels should be unimportant. I’m interested in further research that discusses the effects of splinter groups, particularly when they are created for women.

The second interesting topic in this chapter concerned learning communities.

Former University of California calculus professor Uri Treisman (1992) believes that a supportive learning community is critically important for the success of minority students in math and science.

The story went on to describe Professor Treisman’s observation that Asian students tended to socialize *and* study in supportive groups, which tended to help students stick with the courses and get better grades. He established similar groups for Hispanic and African American students, and found across several universities and colleges that these groups helped retention. Our observations and the resulting user group for women mirrors that Professor’s experience.

There’s a special connection created when you live and engage with material in a supportive learning community. They take time to create, and are a bit harder to maintain outside of an academic context (where life, work and diverging interests can be a bit more challenging to coordinate).

Code-n-splode has been fairly quiet about its successes, but I think now is the time for us to start talking a bit more about how well the group has succeeded.

Photo courtesy of DrPantzo under a Creative Commons License.

Pledge to blog in celebration of Ada Lovelace Day

Books: no JRIs this week, just knitting stuff.

TV: this week's Caprica, Castle S1 "A Chill Goes Through Her Veins" & the movie Young @ Heart. I'll get back to Buffy soon.

Forrester has recently made a decision to limit blogging activities by analysts to Forrester branded blogs for any topics related to their research coverage area. Forrester analysts can continue to blog about vacations or other personal topics on their own blogs, but they will only be able to blog on the Forrester website for topics that they also cover as part of their role as a research analyst.

SageCircle has a more in-depth analysis of the issue, including an official statement from Forrester. According to SageCircle:

“Forrester CEO George Colony is well aware of that savvy analysts can build their personal brands via their positions as Forrester analysts amplified by social media (see the post on “Altimeter Envy”). As a consequence, a Forrester policy that tries to restrict analysts’ personally-branded research blogs works to reduce the possibility that the analysts will build a valuable personal brand leading to their departure. In addition, forcing analysts to only blog on Forrester-branded blogs concentrates intellectual property onto Forrester properties increasing the value of the Forrester brand.”

…

“Because there are relatively few analysts at Forrester and large firms that have personally-branded research blogs, this new policy will likely have relatively little short term impact. However, policies like this might hamper future analyst recruiting efforts limiting the type of individuals wanting a job at a firm.” (Quoted from SageCircle)

Given the current economic situation, I agree that this decision is unlikely to have much short-term impact on Forrester, but the long-term effects could be devastating. I suspect that several of their analysts will leave over this decision, although they may wait until the economy starts to improve before making the jump. I also think that they will have a hard time recruiting top talent. Very few people who have built active blogs in their areas of expertise will be willing to give them up. I know that I would never consider working for Forrester under these restrictions.

With that said, I understand why Forrester is making this decision, but I don’t agree with it. I suspect that it is in part an overreaction to several recent high-profile departures from Forrester, including people like Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li. While the desire to have all of the content written by Forrester analysts in one place is understandable, there are other ways to pull in the content than by limiting blogging on other websites.

I have been reading Jeremiah’s blog for a long time, and I frequently ran across Forrester research through his blog that I might not have found otherwise. Allowing people to continue to blog in places where they already have a following drives more people to Forrester’s research. Yes, their analysts continue to build a name for themselves, which also reflects positively on Forrester, but they also provide valuable exposure to the research outside of Forrester’s traditional channels. Dennis Howlett at ZDNet provides some more insight into the value that bloggers with an established following brought to Forrester in increased revenue over the past year or so.

It was interesting to read Augie Ray’s perspective. He recently joined Forrester as an analyst, and here are a few of his thoughts on the issue:

“Am I thrilled at the prospect of giving up Experience: The Blog, my personal/professional blog?  Well no—it’s become part of my digital identity and represents thousands of hours of time and effort.  But I also understand Forrester’s reasons for the changes.  There are obvious benefits to the company of aggregating intellectual property on Forrester.com, including Search Engine relevance and creating a marketing platform that demonstrates the breadth and depth of analysts’ brainpower and coverage.”

…

“I’ll be sad to see Experience: The Blog go, but I’m also looking forward to digging into the new Forrester blog platform.  There, I will continue to do what I’ve been doing for years on my personal blog:  Sharing news, offering insights, connecting with others, asking for input, and—most importantly—continuing to build my reputation within my field.” (Quoted from Experience: The Blog)

This decision is generating some high profile criticism, and I hope they reconsider this decision. These types of restrictions just aren’t practical in today’s environment where our jobs and personal lives are becoming blended, particularly through social content on blogs and Twitter.

Sharing is good

As you may have read earlier, Ryan Rix and I are doing a desktop switchoff next week: he’s going to go GNOME for a week, and I’m going KDE. In order to prep up for the week (…or more, if we decide we need a longer timesample to get a good evaluation period going) of fun, it seemed prudent to ask the metabrain for thoughts on…

Help with KDE: I have never used KDE before, though I’ve had a general idea that it was around and Did Some Things Differently, though I didn’t – and still don’t – know exactly what that means. I haven’t the slightest idea what I’m in for. KDE testimonials (or complaints), guides, cool-stuff-to-try – all are extremely welcome. (Why do you use/contribute-to KDE?) I’m starting with KDE’s “An Introduction To KDE” and Bruce Byfield’s “KDE 4.2: 10 tips for getting started” article (yes, I realize 4.2 is no longer the latest version, but I’m trying to grok whatever subtle paradigm shift is needed here) and have also found some general KDE reviews to peruse.

Help with GNOME: Same questions as for KDE above. I’m actually asking this for myself (although I’m sure Ryan will find it useful too ;-). I’ve been a GNOME user for several years now, having gone from enlightenment to xfce in high school to fluxbox and then GNOME in college, largely due to… well, to be honest, laziness and the path of least resistance. But I actually have very little insight into how the GNOME community works, what GNOME is all about, why it’s awesome, things to try with it, etc. Various places on the GNOME website seem like a good resource to start with for understanding this.

A list of use cases: This is something I should be adding to as the week goes by, but I’m trying to think of a list of tasks I’d want to be able to accomplish with any desktop, so I have something to compare with. I’m not sure how one goes about building a good list like this for comparing desktops, but that list is at least a stub where I’m attempting to start. Edits welcome. I’ll take notes on what it takes to complete each task in each desktop during the week of the test (and the first week I switch back).

Ultimately, I pretty much agree with Stormy: it’s not a GNOME vs KDE thing for me, it’s about trying to understand the uniqueness – and the richness – of both projects for what they are and what they’re trying to be, and getting a better feel for what is in the land of open source desktops, and why. I sometimes (er, often) feel far less informed about the various components of the stack I run than I should be, and this is one of many attempts to rectify a portion of that – and to learn stuff while having fun. It’s an experiment! We’ll see how it pans out.

As an upside, I’m also learning how people with very little context into a piece of software and its community start hunting for clues as to what that project is all about – and yes, I’ll blog about this for Fedora Marketing as notes pop up. We do have much to learn.

I'm setting up travel plans for the rest of the year. I'm about 95% certain I'm going to WisCon in Madison, Wisconsin in late May, although I need to find someone to room with (anyone have some spare floor at the Concourse?) and buy tickets. I submitted a talk to OSCON (Portland, Oregon, July 19-23) and I'll find out next month whether that got accepted. (OSCON is right after HOPE in NYC, which I really should check out.) I'm also thinking about going to WorldCon in Melbourne, Australia in early September, because I have a number of friends and acquaintances there, and when else will I have time plus multiple reasons to visit Melbourne? Since DebConf in early August is in New York City, I'll probably be there at least for the social bits.

And there are a metric zillion other events I'm at least somewhat interested in, from LibrePlanet to the Netbook Summit to QuahogCon to Open Source Bridge and the Community Leadership Summit. So this coming week I have to suss out what's quality, think up some strategy, and prep a bunch of talk proposals. If you want to suggest anything, please email or comment!

Right now I'm in Washington, DC, visiting my sister and enjoying the snow. Yesterday & today I accidentally visited ShmooCon because various DC-area geek women inveigled me into dinner, then some sort of "party," then oh Metro is closing early because of the snow, oh look, this person's hotel room has an empty second bed! And then breakfast and more hanging out and it's afternoon already? In more short-term travel plans, I'm hitting various promising sites to help me figure out whether I can get back to New York City tomorrow.

Q: why do baby clothes have pockets, but women's clothes do not?
A: bebe can carry my cellphone for me.

This is possibly the best idea ever: Peter Gabriel is releasing a CD of covers called "Scratch My Back" and each of the covered artists is going to record a Peter Gabriel cover for a subsequent compilation called "I'll Scratch Yours."

Participating artists include: Radiohead, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Paul Simon, Neil Young, Bon Iver, Arcade Fire, & Regina Spektor. I think my head just exploded.

American release date for the PG CD is March 2. More info: http://petergabriel.com/features/Scratch_My_Back/

Also, I can't find the article online, but the Birmingham News has a writeup this morning on highlights of the ASO's next season, and buried about 4/5ths of the way in is the announcement of the BCC becoming the ASO Chorus. More tidbits:

- Beethoven festival, May 13-21 2011, featuring performances of all nine symphonies plus the Choral Fantasy. Looks like the choral component is limited to the last day, and I've sung it all before.

- Mozart C Minor Mass, October 15-17 2010. On the one hand, that's awfully early in the season; on the other hand, that will give us more time to focus on Messiah than we had this year with a mid-November concert.

The rest of next year's dates should be announced before the end of the month, but it's nice to be able to start filling it in, especially since I was planning to be out of state the day before we would have to start rehearsing the Mozart with the orchestra. Eek!

ETA: Articles now online.
http://blog.al.com/mhuebner/2010/02/aso_in_2010-11.html
http://blog.al.com/mhuebner/2010/02/aso_in_2010-11_maestros_ball_m.html

Here are a few interesting things from this week that I wanted to share …

Gartner Reveals Five Social Software Predictions for 2010 and Beyond

Few Companies Have Policy for Employee Use of Social Networks

Filtrbox Plus Jive: Like Peanut Butter and Chocolate

The Social Customer Will Be Mobile

Mobile Internet Market to Eclipse Desktop Internet

Minding the Gap

Stanford Social Innovation Review: The Effects of Joining the Conversation

A beginner’s guide to building a presence on Twitter

Social Customer Case Study: OK Labs Hits 150% of Customer Community Target

Right and Wrong of PR Pitches

6 Ways To Spread Thought Leadership Content (Without Blogging)

Random rules for ideas worth spreading

You can find all of my links on Delicious.

Sharing is good

This post is so short that I figured I might as well copy the whole thing from Web Insecurity. Sorry about the full duplicate!

Barcodes for breaches

Barcode: <script>alert("test")</script>

I'm highly amused by the XSS, SQL Injection and Fuzzing Barcode Cheat Sheet. Who knew security attacks could look almost... pretty? It's just standard XSS and SQL injection test code translated to bar codes, so they could be used as injection vectors. I know I've scanned codes to grab an app I want faster on my phone, and I'm seeing codes popping up in the free daily papers, which I find somewhat interesting given that early attempts to get people to use barcodes have met with commercial failure and ridicule. Oh well, it's all ok now that we have smartphones, right?

Anyhow. This is still an entertaining attack vector. Maybe governments (such as my own!) will ban bar codes as hacking tools next?

If you read the literature on tricksters, you will confront a string of words that capture the moral quality and sensibilities of these figures, figures scattered across time and place and largely enshrined in myths and stories:

Cunning, deceit, lying, provocateur, mischief, audacious, thief, play, shrewdness, audacity, grotesque, over the top, appetite, shocking, fun, delight, wit, trap, subversive, ability, wanderer.

These figures, which include Coyote, Loki, Hermes, and Eshu, among many more, push the envelope of what is morally acceptable and in so doing, argues Lewis Hyde (in his tome on the subject), renew and revitalize culture, especially the moral stuff of culture. They are not only boundary crossers, they are boundary makers. As the title of his book so succinctly and masterfully broadcasts “Trickster Makes this World.” Or as he suggests with a bit more elaboration:

“I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be a space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on” p. 9

At the opening of the book, Hyde asks whether there are tricksters in modern industrial societies. His answer is a plain ‘no.’ The con man who might share some similarities does not qualify. For in fact what is needed is either a polytheistic system “or lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people, to instructions, and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly distributed” p.13 He does locate the spirit of the trickster in spirited individuals: in Picasso, in Frederick Douglass, in laudable figures who push certain boundaries and renew our world for the better but nonetheless fall short of the archetypal trickster.

I bet it is pretty obvious where I am going with all of this given my object of study: phreakers, hackers, and trollers. The trickster does exist across America, across Europe, really across the world and it is not in myth but in embodied in group and living practice: in that of the prankster, hacker, the phreaker, the troller (all of whom, have their own unique elements of course, but so does each trickster). Their relationship to other powers are many and can be located in terms of information, intellectual property, the government, language itself, institutions of power like the FBI and AT&T. The list is not short.

For a few years now I have been thinking about the linkages between the trickster and hackers as well as the troller but it was only in the fall when I found myself trapped in a hospital for a week that I finally cracked open the book by Hyde and devoured it. Within a the first few pages, it was undeniable: there are many links to be made between the trickster and hacking. Many of these figures, push boundaries of all sorts: they upset ideas of propriety and property; they use their sharpened wits sometimes for play, sometimes for political ends; they get trapped by their cunning (which happens ALL the time with tricksters! That is how they learn); and they remake the world, technically, socially, and legally and includes software, licensing and even forms of literature (think textfile, the Jargon File or most dramatically, ED).

But if the trickster generally resides in myth, and the trickster of the information age resides in practice, myth matters everywhere because there is a mythos created around these figures. Sometimes the mythos is propagated these groups (take a look of ED for example or Phrack in the past) and of course the media has played an undeniable role. And yet, unlike what is represented in the pages of Hyde, there are living, actual bodies in motion, in conversation, in transformation, a group that goes far beyond the other more controlled and bounded tricksters we might be able to locate in society, such as artistic/political groups like the Yes Men.

But the most shocking (or hard to think through) element lies less in the many associations one can make, but in the following curious fact. For the most part the trickster is enshrined in myth and stories but the tricksters I am referring to are in fact full-bodied, full-blooded groups of people who are actually engaging in all sorts of acts of trickery. This is culture not in the sense of art and myth but people and practice and this of course makes an (ethical) difference. What happens when you are the recipient not of a story offered an elder, but the recipient of trickery, an act of pranking or trolling, for example? What happens when you can trace all sorts of instances of boundary re-shifting and remaking, as with the GPL? I think this, even more than the linkages, is what makes this connection so remarkable and I trying to think through what it means to have a figure that we can find and talk to, as opposed to one embodied in myth and story.

For now I am going to leave this post short and in the next installment, will start raising some of the connections between trickery and variants of hacking and trolling.

Friday morning, I taught the seventh session of an 8-session (40 minutes per session) course on Inkscape at a Boston-area middle school. (For more general details about the class check out my blog post on day 1.)

Friday’s Class

Well, this Inkscape course is quickly wrapping up. One more class after this past one on Friday. The students’ work was due at the end of this class and they all did great work in prepping their designs for the printer. I handed out a sheet with the export instructions (available for download below.)

We weren’t exactly sure the best approach to gather up the files at first; Ken had set up a shared drive on the network for the students to save their work to, but on some of the Macs, Inkscape’s export bitmap dialog could not see the shared drive (and some could!) What we ended up doing:

• Have the students export their work out to the desktop – 300 dpi, PNG format.
• I asked them to use either their band name or their own name in the file so I could tell them apart.
• Then, ask them open up the appropriate network drive folder and drag both the exported file and original SVG into it from the desktop.
• I then connected to the shared drive, inspected all the files to make sure they had exported correctly (they had! If they hadn’t, I would have gone back to the students whose files had issues and tried to help them re-export them.)
• I then copied the files from the network drive onto a USB key.
• Immediately after I got back to the office, I went through the files carefully, adding the requested T-shirt size from the students’ filled-out T-shirt size sign-up sheet from day 5 of class. My naming scheme was the following format:
  

  01-studentfirstname-bandname-sizeS.png

• I then uploaded the files to a URL, both as individual files and bundled in a zip file for Walter’s convenience – then I emailed Walter the URLs.
• John called Walter from EmbroidMe Chelmsford up to make sure he had gotten the email (he hadn’t yet, so great thinking on John’s part) and Walter set out setting up the T-shirts that morning.

A few things we learned from this process I think you could take away in teaching a similar class to make it run more smoothly:

• Make sure you pass that T-shirt size signup sheet around early on, and keep bringing it back to class until every student has filled it out. Students are absent sometimes, especially in the winter cold season, and you want to make sure you’ve got each student’s size.
• We had one student absent this past Friday. We’ll get his file on the last day of class and get his T-shirt to him after the class is over. That being said, you may want to have the students save out to a shared drive throughout the class (we weren’t doing that, we were having them use their individual accounts) and in the days of class past the halfway mark of the entire course, ask the students if they are going to be there for every day, and if not would they like us to go ahead and print their files if they’re not there or to wait.
• Make it easier for your printer and put the students’ T-shirt sizes in the file name.
• Make sure you get the students’ SVGs as well as PNGs! Rendering PNGs from SVGs with a lot of blurs can take a long time! I was really surprised by this. The Whisp logo took the longest – a good 15-20 minutes to render! If you have the students’ SVG files as well and run out of time during class, it enables you to do the rendering on your own post-class to make sure the printer will get the files on time. It’s also good to have the SVGs in case you or the printer notice any issues with the PNG that might have been missed during class.
• Bundling the files into one compressed file makes it easier for them to download than individual files.
• If you’re on a tight deadline, don’t rely on email only – give your printer a call!

Many students were finished with time to spare, so they had the rest of the period to explore Inkscape on their own. They came up with some very cool sketches using the techniques they learned throughout the class:

You can see the full set of photos John took of the students’ work in the Flickr album for session 7. On Tuesday, if all goes well (fingers crossed!) we’ll hand out the T-shirts and do some fun exercises with Inkscape, so look forward to those photos.

Follow Along on Your Own

Here’s the lesson sheet we used for class on Friday:

Introduction to Inkscape Lesson 7

As always, the OpenOffice.org source files and the outlines for the entire course are at the course page on my website – but please note that’s a rough outline; as we progress through the class I’m coming up with the more-solid lesson plans based on how far the students get each session. By the end of the course I hope to have the course page organized much better.

By the way, if you’d like to follow all the blog posts about this class at one URL without getting the rest of my feed, I’ve set up a category in WordPress specifically for these posts:

http://mairin.wordpress.com/category/inkscape-class/

Enjoy! And please do let me know in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions

This course is sponsored by

Filed under: Inkscape Class

I had the opportunity to participate in a focus group on NASA's new "citizen science" project, called Moon Zoo, with a bunch of other fellow lunatics, amateur astronomers and lunar enthusiasts.

Moon Zoo sounds really interesting. Ordinary people will analyze high-resolution photos of the lunar surface: find out how many boulders and craters are there. I hope it will also include more details like crater type and size, rilles and so forth, though that wasn't mentioned. These are all tasks that are easy for a human and hard for a computer: perfect for crowdsourcing. Think Galaxy Zoo for the moon. The resulting data will be used for planning future lunar missions as well as for general lunar science.

It sounds like a great project and I'm excited about it. But I'm not going to write about Moon Zoo today -- it doesn't exist yet (current estimate is mid-March), though there is a preliminary PDF. Instead, I want to talk about some of the great ideas that came out of the focus group.

The primary question: How do we get people -- both amateur astronomers and the general public, people of all ages -- interested in contributing to a citizen science project like Moon Zoo?

Here are some of the key ideas:

Make the data public

This was the most important point, echoed by a lot of participants. Some people felt that many of the existing "citizen science" projects project the attitude "We want something from you, but we're not going to give you anything in return." If you use crowdsourcing to create a dataset, make it available to the crowd.

Opening the data has a lot of advantages:

• People can make "mashups", useful sites that display your data in useful ways or combine it with other data. This can generate more interest in your project and more contributors.
• School groups can work on class projects or science fair projects, probably contributing more data along the way.
• It might help the next generation of scientist get started.
• It shows openness and good faith: witness the recent blow-up over the leaked IPCC emails and the debate over how much climate data has been kept private.

Projects like Wikipedia and Open Street Map, as well as Linux and the rest of the open source movement, show how much an open data model can inspire contributions.

Give credit to individuals and teams

People cited the example of SETI@Home, where teams of contributors can compete to see who's contributed the most. Show rankings for both individuals and groups, so they can track their progress and maybe get a bit competitive with other groups. Highlight groups and individuals who contribute a lot -- maybe even make it a formal competition and offer inexpensive prizes like T-shirts or mugs.

A teenaged panel member had the great suggestion of making buttons that said "I'm a Moon Zookeeper." Little rewards like that don't cost much but can really motivate people.

Offer an offline version

They wanted to hear ideas for publicizing Moon Zoo to groups like our local astronomy clubs.

I mentioned that I've often wanted to spread the word about Galaxy Zoo, but it's entirely a web-based application and when I give talks to clubs or school groups, web access is never an option. (Ironically, the person leading the focus group had planned to demonstrate Galaxy Zoo to us but couldn't get connected to the wi-fi at the Lawrence Hall of Science.)

Projects are so much easier to evangelize if you can download an offline demo.

And not just a demo, either. There should be a way to download a real version, including a small data set. Imagine if you could grab a Moon Zoo pack and do a little classifying whenever you got a few spare minutes -- on the airplane or train, or in a hotel room while traveling.

Important note: this does not mean you should write a separate Windows app for people to download. Keep it HTML, Javascript and cross platform so everyone can run it. Then let people download a local copy of the same web app they run on your site.

Make sure it works on phones and game consoles

Lots of people use smartphones more than they use a desktop computer these days. Make sure the app runs on all the popular smartphones. And lots of kids have access to handheld web-enabled game consoles: you can reach a whole new set of kids by supporting these platforms.

Offer levels of accomplishment, like a game

Lots of people are competitive by nature, and like to feel they're getting better at what they're doing. Play to that: let users advance as they get more experienced, and give them the option of doing harder projects. "I'm up to level 7 in Moon Zoo!"

Use social networking

Facebook. Twitter. Nuff said.

Don't keep results a secret

Quite a few scientific publications have arisen out of Galaxy Zoo -- yet although most of us were familiar with Galaxy Zoo, few of us knew that. Why so secretive? They should be trumpeting achievements like that.

How many times have you volunteered for a survey or study, then wondered for years afterward how the results came out? Researchers never contact the volunteers when the paper is finally published. It's frustrating and demotivating; it makes you not want to volunteer again. Lots of us sign up because we're curious about the science -- but that means we're also curious about the results.

With citizen science projects, this is particularly easy. Set up a mailing list or forum (or both) to discuss results and announce when papers are published. Set up a Twitter account and a Facebook group to announce new papers to anyone who wants to follow. This is the age of Web 2.0, folks -- there's no excuse for not communicating.

I don't know if NASA will listen to our ideas. But I hope they do. Moon Zoo promises to be a terrific project ... and the more of these principles they follow, the more dedicated volunteers they'll get and that will make the project even better.

btw, i won again.. i wouldn't mind being defeated by Jo, but couldn't let myself lose to mauricio.

It was my first evening out on my own since Casey was born - i was mega tired, and i had no time to prepare. basically had to make it up. sadly I missed out a bunch of stuff i wanted to say about OLPC and ACTA.

my summary of the other speakers:

Miraz: apple will take over the world
Mauricio: microsoft will take over the world
Me: robots will take over the world
Jo: non-geeky people will still not take over the world
Phillip: you're all predicting the obvious

this was organised by the ppl at http://up.org.nz, who alas haven't updated their website with anysummary 2 weeks later. there was someone filming the talks, but these never seem to make it to the web either.

so, you'll have to take my word for it

I don’t know who first said that if you aren’t embarrassed about your v1 product, you waited too long to ship. At Mightyverse, we repeated that to ourselves as we struggled to release the first version of our iPhone app. After 2 weeks, we hit 128 downloads and I enjoyed reading my co-founder, Paul Lundahl’s reflection on the process. Despite our misgivings, we continue to explore the painful edge of what may not yet be a minimally viable product.

Why do I persist in this belief that we are pursuing the right methodology when the release of this marginally useful app means that many early users may be frustrated and never come back?

• A mobile startup without a mobile app hasn’t reached the starting gate. At least now, we have a demo that anyone can see. No matter how many times I tell people that Mightyverse allows you to access native language video recordings, when I show the app half the people say “oh, so you are using video!” When you are introducing a new concept, people only hear half of what you say. Even when we speak the same native language, communication is hard.
• We are learning a lot from the app and the process. Now we know that we can get through the Apple App Store process. We understand the limitations of the iPhone video APIs. With a version of the iPhone app released we can consider whether another platform will allow us to create a better user experience, while still leveraging our early iPhone work to maintaining a presence on that platform.
• This open approach allows us to move more quickly toward our goals than traditional methodologies. Even if we are a bit embarrassed, we are also very excited. We are learning how to work together effectively to balance content and software development. We know that our 23,721 video recordings represent just a droplet of language and our software does not yet provide features which support any use case particularly well. Working in collaboration with language enthusiasts and other early adopters we have developed a process of continuous course corrections.
• Having an audience leads us to make hard decisions quickly and perform crisply. Since the audience is small, we are comfortable experimenting and allowing forward motion with a post-hoc review process. Moving quickly unleashes creativity. The process is inexplicably fun.
• Lastly, I expect that the people who will discover Mightyverse in the future will vastly outnumber the people who will use it now, so I am ok risking their displeasure. In fact, if we actually manage to stumble upon some people who hate it, perhaps that is an opportunity.

So, if you have an iPhone, download the app, join our experiment, and let us know what you think. After all, where else can you learn to say “I’m sorry. I speak the Japanese of a pre-schooler” ?

Stowe v Thomas (1853) where the court argued that a German translation of Uncle’s Tom’s Cabins did not constitute copyright infringement (quoted from Meredith McGill’s excellent bookAmerican Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853:

“Before publication [the author] has the exclusive possession of his invention. His dominion is perfect. But when he has published his book and given his thoughts, sentiments, knowledge or discoveries to the world, he can have no longer an exclusive possession of them. Such an appropriation becomes impossible, and is inconsistent with the object of publication. The author’s conceptions have become common property of his readers, who cannot be deprived of the use of them, or their right to communicate them to others clothed in their own language, by lecture or by treatise”

I'm no longer working with Collabora Ltd.

In the first several months after I joined Collabora in April 2009, I served as lead project manager, got the new website up, and started putting some new project management processes into place, especially in research and development. Then I shifted to personnel management, and created and began implementing a performance assessment system. All the while I gardened the wiki, aggregated and edited weekly internal reports to keep the company on the same page, blogged about our work, and generally gave people the information and the nagging they needed to make informed decisions. (In retrospect, I played facilitator, historian, and journalist a lot, plus mentor to 50+ Collaborans.)

Collabora's a different place than it was ten months ago; I helped move them from a startup to an enterprise footing. Management structures change as needs and capabilities become apparent, so the directors and new hires (including the awesome Martin Barrett) will carry this work forward, and I offer them my best wishes. I'm happy to talk more in detail about what I did at Collabora, especially if you're interested in what I can do for your organization.

In the near future, I'm taking some time to relax and take care of existing obligations before I incur new ones. Then, starting in late February or early March, I'll be volunteering fulltime on some open source/free culture projects for several months. I haven't yet decided which ones, or in what capacity, so feel free to recruit me.

• The business value of social networks
  An interesting look into the business benefits and value you can derive from social networking. Some interesting and unexpected use cases
  (tags: opengovernment socialmedia socialnetworking business)
• Of governments and geeks
  A great article linking open government, FOSS and open data together. Also covers briefly the attitudes to open government in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand. Nice work!
  (tags: foss government gov20 gov2au opensource opendata opengovernment)

It’s that time of the year again when we need to start thinking about awesome ideas for GSoC. I just prepared a page on the community wiki to collect them. The list needs to be finished by March 8th. Got a great idea for a nice project a student could be working on for the summer? Add it! If you are unsure or have any questions ping me or the team of the app you have an idea for.

Right now there are 22 release parties all around the world on the wiki and of course there will be one in southern Germany as well. Previously we always did them in Stuttgart but it’s time all those Stuttgart people get to see Karlsruhe
So if you are in or around Karlsruhe on the 13th around 20:00 then feel free to join us for our release party at Vogelbräu. Please put your name on the wiki page or let me know by email by Monday latest if you are coming so we know how many people are coming.
If you are not anywhere near Karlsruhe check out the other release parties or organize one on your own

(special thanks to Lemma for taking care of the venue)

The call for participation and registration opened for LinuxCon today signaling the beginning of planning for the 2nd Annual LinuxCon.

To recap on some of the highlights of LinuxCon 2009, which took place in Portland last September, we brought you:

• A fantastic line-up of speakers including Linus Torvalds, Mark Shuttleworth, Bob Sutor, and many more industry luminaries
• A packed program delivering content to a diverse audience of business, operations and developers
• A Technology Showcase & Lounge providing attendees and exhibitors the opportunity to network and learn from each other
• Exciting evening events including the Intel-sponsored LinuxCon/LPC reception and the Bowling for Penguins Fundraiser
• The added value of co-located events include the Novell SUSE workshop, LDAPCon and the Linux Plumbers Conference

Check out our video highlights of LinuxCon 2009 here!

How is LinuxCon different than other events?  In a number of ways.  This is an event specific to the Linux community, but within that, it encompasses all matters Linux.  Other events specifically target certain groups in the ecosystem, but LinuxCon is the only event that really brings together a diverse group of all types of industry leaders and contributors – from business executives and end users, to developers (both in the kernel and out), to the systems administrators and senior technology operations leaders. This is the one event the community can attend each year to meet face-to-face and collaborate with all the community players.  In addition to innovative technical content and a great mix of attendees, LinuxCon also offers an unmatched fun, vibrant and intimate atmosphere that is extremely conducive to attendee networking and collaboration.

If you pick one Linux event to attend this year, LinuxCon should be it – you will not be disappointed!

While we could not have been happier with the overwhelming positive response from last year’s inaugural event, we are amped to step up our game and make this year’s LinuxCon a bigger and bolder experience for attendees.

In addition to fantastic, streamlined content geared again towards a variety of attendees (this is the conference for all matters Linux after all!), prepare yourselves for some exciting new speakers, a host of new attendees to network and collaborate with, and some fun additions to add to your conference experience!

Plus, we are happy to announce the co-location of a number of mini-summits/conferences this year, including KVM Forum, Linux Storage & Filesystems Workshop, Virtual Memory Mini-Summit, the Wireless Summit, Power Management Summit and the Linux Security Summit, plus more to be announced.

The registration fee is only $300 through April 15th, so REGISTER NOW.

Stay tuned for more information on all things LinuxCon – and get ready to have a great week in Boston this August!

Don't know what to write about? Maybe watching LinuxCon 2009 video archives will get you over that writer's block.

There’s only something like 2 and half weeks left for the women of all ages in all parts our community to tell us how they discovered Ubuntu for the International Women’s Day Competition.

That means that you really ought to get a move on!

The process is easy:

1. Women and girls email us (address and rules in announcement) a description of how they discovered Ubuntu. Whether it was at school, work, from a partner or because they were sleep-computing and woke up to the sound of drums — whatever!
2. In just over 2 weeks time, we put up the stories and let the community vote for their favourite
3. On March 8th, the favourite is declared, and we make Jono earn his keep by announcing it and drawing the second surprise winner from a hat on his ustream channel or vidcast or whatever it is kids call that funky video stuff these days.
4. Two lucky ladies get a share of this loot:

Amber describes the prize packs thusly:

***Prize packages are being sponsored by: Canonical, Linux Pro Magazine and Ubuntu-User Magazine. Package includes but not limited to: Ubuntu backpack, Ladies T-shirt, Ubuntu Key Chain, 1 year digital subscription to Linux Pro Magazine or a 1 year print subscription to Ubuntu User Magazine, and a copy of The Art of Community. Thank you all so much for your gracious support and sponsorship.

Help spread the word by telling all the women you know who use Ubuntu and by hitting up digg and /.

Gillius ADF is a sans-serif typeface, heavily inspired by the famous Gill Sans MT typeface by Eric Gill – who designed Gill Sans inspired by the Johnston typeface designed for the London Underground which Gill had worked on as an apprentice.

The Arkandis Digital Foundry created the Gillius ADF font under the GPL with font exception. There is an alternative version available too (that also needs packaging ) called Gillus ADF No. 2. Each font has regular and condensed variants, each with bold, italic, and bold italic versions. The coverage is not bad for extended Latin characters:

Gillius ADF is a nice, clean font that should serve you well both in regular body text in documents as well as for headings and logo treatments. It’s a versatile and very readable font, just like the Gill Sans typeface that inspired it. One thing you might want to be aware of when working with Gillius ADF – just as cultural context anyway – in the same way that Helvetica is used heavily in the United States, especially on municipal and transit system signage, Gill Sans is used heavily in the UK and recalls ‘mid-century’ type usage in the UK. Gillius ADF, since it refers so closely to Gill Sans, might carry a bit of a UK connotation to it.

(Btw, I purposely picked a word with a lowercase ‘g’ in it for my little type sample because I really like the ‘g’ in Gillius Sans. )

Gillus ADF is licensed under the GPL with Font Exception.

• Fedora Font Wishlist Entry:https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ADF_Gillius_fonts
• Upstream Homepage: http://arkandis.tuxfamily.org/openfonts.html

So, you want to package Gillius ADF?

Zomg! You’re sweet! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Joining_the_Fonts_SIG

Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Fonts_packaging

And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:

• https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fonts.

Last Week’s Font

Last week’s font was League Gothic by The League of Moveable Type. Nobody has picked up the font package request yet! Would you like to?

Filed under: Unpackaged Font of the Week

If you've tried to import a Drupal database dump with the cache table data still intact, you've probably at one point or another run into a "max_allowed_packet" error coming from MySQL. An easy way to address this is to increase the setting in my.cnf.

About a year ago I hit this issue, and came across this helpful blog post that explained how to copy one of the default my-XXX.cnf files into MAMP. I thought it was real cute how these files talk about servers with 64M-128M of RAM as being "medium" so I copied my-large.cnf or something in, tweaked the setting, and went on with my day.

Lately though, I've been getting out of disk space messages, which I've always found puzzling, since 99.9% of what I do on this machine is Drupal. And hey, I know jQuery UI is pretty massive, and I have a few Drupal 7 checkouts laying around, but what the heck? :P I started deleting things like old VMs I wasn't using anymore. But finally today I was down to about 200MB (?!?).

read more

I spent a morning wrestling with git after writing a minor GIMP fix that I wanted to check in. Deceptively simple ideas, like "Check the git log to see the expected format of check-in messages", turned out to be easier said than done.

Part of the problem was git's default colors: colors calculated to be invisible to anyone using a terminal with dark text on a light background. And that sent me down the perilous path of git configuration.

git-config does have a manual page. But it lacks detail: you can't get from there to knowing what to change so that the first line of commits in git log doesn't show up yellow.

But that's okay, thought I: all I need to do is list the default settings, then change anything that's a light color like yellow to a darker color. Easy, right?

Well, no. It turns out there's no way to get the default settings -- because they aren't part of git's config; they're hardwired into the C code.

But you can find most of them with a seach for GIT_COLOR in the source. The most useful lines are these the ones in diff.c, builtin-branch.c and wt-status.c.

gitconfig

The next step is to translate those C lines to git preferences, something you can put in a .gitconfig. Here's a list of all the colors mentioned in the man page, and their default values -- I used "normal" for grep and interactive where I wasn't sure of the defaults.

[color "diff"]
	plain = normal
	meta = bold
	frag = cyan
	old = red
	new = green
	commit = yellow
	whitespace = normal red
[color "branch"]
	current = green
	local = normal
	remote = red
	plain = normal
[color "status"]
	header = normal
	added = red
	updated = green
	changed = red
	untracked = red
	nobranch = red
[color "grep"]
	match = normal
[color "interactive"]
	prompt = normal
	header = normal
	help = normal
	error = normal

The syntax and colors are fairly clearly explained in the manual: allowable colors are normal, black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan and white. After the foreground color, you can optionally list a background color. You can also list an attribute, chosen from bold, dim, ul, blink and reverse -- only one at a time, no combining of attributes.

So if you really wanted to, you could say something like

[color "status"]
	header = normal blink
	added = magenta yellow
	updated = green reverse
	changed = red bold
	untracked = blue white
	nobranch = red white bold

Minimal changes for light backgrounds

What's the minimum you need to get everything readable? On the light grey background I use, I needed to change the yellow, cyan and green entries:

[color "diff"]
	frag = cyan
	new = green
	commit = yellow
[color "branch"]
	current = green
[color "status"]
	updated = green

Disclaimer: I haven't tested all these settings -- because I haven't yet figured out where all of them apply. That's another area where the manual is a bit short on detail ...

Libre Graphics Day - I was really pleased with the outcome of our efforts to create the first spin off event based on the hugely successful Libre Graphics Meeting that's been taking place in the northern part of the planet for the past 5 years. In the end we had a nice mix of sessions.  I had some nervous moments early in the day when I got word 2 of our speakers had been diverted to Auckland due to bad weather, but they arrived in time, did their stuff, and all was good.

After Jon Cruz kicked off proceedings with some background on the Libre Graphics gatherings and opened the day, Ralph Giles took us through Ghostscript's ICC based color architecture. It was great to hear about the history of this project which I so totally take for granted. He gave great insight into the complexity the developers contend with, and laid out the roadmap for how they're trying to streamline and simplify it for the future.

Vik Olliver took us through some Graphic Design Apps - Beyond the Pixel and talked about a range of open source tools that can be used to bring creativity to life and make it real. Famous for the RepRap Vik talked about the kinds of tools used to design 3D objects and some of the gotchas you need to learn first.

Jon Cruz stepped up to say Hello Scribus! on behalf of the Scribus team who couldn't join us. Time zones and internet connections were against us getting the finished slides on the day, but they are now up on the website. Jon talked to the outline notes, and Andy Fitzsimon demo'd some of the shiniest new features. I can't wait to try and create my next slide deck using Scribus, and give the transition feature a whirl.

After lunch Andy Fitzsimon got things rolling again with a madcap race through Die Flash Die, SVG has arrived. He showed us how live SVG on the web can be used with javascript to create some pretty impressive effects. I'm looking forward to really digging into this further.

Next up was Elizabeth Garbee who talked about how using FOSS graphics tools to pay for college, and more importantly, participating in the community that creates such tools, has prepared her for the serious task of getting into college, and applying for scholarships to help her survive once she's there. My take away from her talk is that when you use FOSS tools you have an opportunity to broaden your experience beyond getting the task at hand done, you also have an opportunity to engage with others, expand your horizons, and potentially contribute to the ongoing improvement of the toolset. Be a maker, not a consumer.

Arriving just in time to give his talk on Cairo Graphics - Intro and Future Thoughts, Carl Worth took us behind the scenes for graphics and outlined where this cross platform 2D graphics library fits in the scheme of things.

Following afternoon tea Lance Flavell gave us a whirlwind introduction to Blender 3D Modeling and Animation and somewhat demystified its inscrutable interface by providing the crucial clue that modifier keys are the secret!

Jon Phillips delivered something of a farewell to graphics talk as his energies switch towards status.net with All the Libre Graphics tasks I said I would do are DONE! - a pretty impressive list of achievements.

The day finished off with lightning talks from Andy Fitzsimon, Peter Lieverdink and myself - and a round of applause for all our speakers and participants. Good work. Great fun.

If Libre Graphics Day left you hungry for more - then you should set your sights on LGM in Brussels 27-30 May

The Winter 2010 Edition of the BSDA Study DVD is now available for a donation. Even if you're not planning on taking the BSDA exam, the DVD is a handy reference to have. It contains:

The latest initiative by the Ubuntu Women Project, is a contest to collect “How I discovered Ubuntu” stories written by women. The winner will be announced on March 8th, International Women’s Day.

One of the goals of this initiative is to try and answer the “How can I get $woman to use Ubuntu?” question that we often get by demonstrating that there is no single answer for it. Women get involved and interested in Ubuntu for all kinds of reasons, and without knowing anything about her there is really no way to know what specific spark will get her interested in involvement. (For what it’s worth, a much better question is “$woman is interested in $subject and is tied to Windows for $reason but doesn’t like it for $another_reason, she currently uses her computer for $thing0 and $thing1, do you have any suggestions as to how I can try and convert her to Ubuntu?”)

The contest also seeks to give inspiration to women who are interested in using and getting involved with Ubuntu. We seek to not only showing them that they aren’t the only female using Ubuntu, but that not everyone has to be a “typical male computer geek” to get involved.

Which brings me to this “I’ve been computing since…” longevity meme that is quite popular within F/OSS. Like many memes in F/OSS this is a competitive one that gives bragging rights for being the one who started with Linux or programming at the youngest age. This culture of competitiveness based on longevity has, without a doubt, been what has hurt me the most in tech. The sexist comments, the marriage (or worse) proposals upon revealing that I use Linux, the reaction of shock I receive when I tell people what I do for a living are all things I can quickly recover from (especially with a group of supportive folks in Ubuntu Women standing by!). Getting over the fact that I got into Linux in my early 20s when it seems like all my peers have been programming since they were 12 years old is significantly more intimidating and discouraging.

I’m certainly not the exception. In Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing the overwhelming message regarding the problem of women in IT I took from this book was that the traditional conditioning of girls to avoid “horn tooting” or “bragging” as compared to boys, combined with this longevity meme leaves many women who actually take the plunge into a computing degree feeling as though they’re alone, under-qualified and have little chance of success in the field. In reality, the book reports, these women work very hard and are just as qualified as the men in the class, and the ones who don’t switch degrees (a common response to constantly feeling under-qualified) go on to be successful in their careers.

So why is this longevity meme such a major problem for women in general rather than for men (where, admittedly, it still can be a problem)? As a society, at least in the United States, girls don’t tend to be pushed toward tech, and tech is frequently marketed in such a way that I don’t blame them (see: Of Geeks and Girls). While there are now several initiatives out there to get girls interested in technology at a young age, a lot of parents I know make a conscious effort to give their girls computers too, and to some extent the market is catching up, we’re not there yet. Statistically women in the industry still get involved at a later age than men and without considerable confidence the road ahead can be challenging.

So, do we try to kill the longevity meme? No way! We all enjoy a bit of bragging fun now and then. Instead we work to show that people who are involved with computers come in all kinds. This stories project seeks to be a start for addressing that for women in the Ubuntu community. I know some women who have been programming since they were 9 and relax with a pizza, mountain dew and an episode of Star Trek, I know women who work for non-profits and have whole-heartedly jumped on the F/OSS bandwagon, I know mothers who would call themselves non-technical get heavily involved in F/OSS community building, I know women who have stumbled upon F/OSS and with a background that has nothing to do with computing become highly skilled, technical contributors. It’s time to stop taking my word for it and getting these stories from the women themselves.

So, are you a woman, or do you know a woman who can submit a story? Email it to ubuntuwomen.competition at gmail.com by February 22nd!

More details on the contest are here: [UbuntuWomen] International Women’s Day — Competition!

Disclaimer: For all my talk of less geeky females here, I am a pretty hard core geek (I mean, I use a Star Wars handle! …and I just called it a “handle”!). Maybe I didn’t start using Linux until 2002, but in the 90s my mother did frequently wonder what kind of strange teenage girl I was for spending my time in my dark bedroom with pizza and a pile of 386s (oh no, I’m contributing to the meme!). My intention is not to discredit or ignore the geek females in our midst, but to acknowledge that we may be a rare breed and to really get more women involved we need to appeal to contributors from a wider population, just like the Ubuntu project itself does. I seek to encourage all women to contribute to this contest, even if they don’t feel like they have enough “geek cred” or whatever. Oh, and stories from hard core geek girls are completely welcome, those stories are inspiring too!

I recently read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's seminal work Flow. It's been on my list of books to read since I heard about it last summer, since I've heard for ages that the state of flow is the state in which we are most productive. And besides that benefit, it feels great to lose yourself in your work. So, the idea of finding out what we know about the conditions that produce flow is very appealing to me, and probably is to others as well.

I found that my own distinction of flow as being a state that one achieves only when doing knowledge-type work to be far too narrow. I associated the word "flow" with writing a paper and having the words just roll off the keyboard almost effortlessly, with losing myself in writing some code, with designing and problem-solving. Post reading the book, I see that flow can be achieved in many other contexts, such as in conversation with friends, when playing a sport or a game, or reading a book. In many cases, flow may be easier to achieve in conditions other than work.

Csikszentmihalyi's basic premise is that we are most happy when we are in flow, and that flow is produced when a person is engaged in a goal-directed, rule-bound activity that has ready feedback on how he is doing, and is faced with challenges that are suited to his ability level. Flow can occur spontaneously, but it is more likely that it is the result of a structured activity such as a game or work or of a person's ability to make flow occur. For example, surgeons often report that their work is a source of great happiness and optimal experience for them, and that they wouldn't give up being surgeons even if they weren't well-payed for it. A surgeon's job is practically designed to produce flow experiences. The surgeon has a very specific goal--to perform a certain operation, and has instant feedback as to how well he is doing. He has certain procedures that provide a ritualistic way for him to get in the mindset of concentration and allow him to forget external worries for the duration of the surgery. Flow activities "transform the self" by "making it more complex"—flow activities push us to higher limits and allow us to experience states of consciousness that we have never before experienced. In this way, they are more satisfying than diversions such as watching television, which capture the mind's attention and alleviate boredom but provide no challenge to the self.

While the structure of certain activities makes it more likely for flow to occur for those engaged in them, there are some sorts of people who are able to produce flow experiences despite their surroundings being ill-suited. Csikszentmihalyi says that these people have an "autotelic personality". These people are able to alter their own consciousness to produce flow, regardless of external factors. He gives examples of Nazi prisoners held in solitary confinement who were able to find growth and sanity by inward thought despite horrendous external conditions, and a blue-collar factory worker who was able to turn his assembly line position into a challenge where he was always trying to beat his previous speed records. While some people seem inherently better at being happy and finding flow in inideal situations, we can all improve our ability to control our consciousness and find flow.

One point that I found striking in the book was that, despite people generally feeling that when they are at work they would prefer to be home, people report more optimal experiences at work than they do at home. Sunday morning is the time that people are most likely to feel depressed. I can identify with this premise from experience--when I feel down it's most likely to be a Saturday or Sunday, or another day where I am excused from my normal daily routine and am less likely to leave the house or make the decision to commit myself to an activity. In our culture it is popular to view work as manacles on our freedom of choice, when in reality it provides structure and goals for us. While we can in fact provide this structure for ourselves, and thus have more control over what we are doing and who we are helping achieve their greater goals, work often does provide an easier way to achieve flow without having to realize ourselves how to create it.

Despite being as old as I am (it was written in 1988), I found Flow to be thoroughly informative and enjoyable. Its lessons are clearly still applicable, and not as widely known as they deserve to be.

Folks who follow my various social networking instances have probably figured by now that I am in somewhat of a peeved state currently, and mostly due to the way various things have been handled by the Ubuntu Community Council (as an institution, not any individual counsellor) over recent times. I’ve been involved in the Ubuntu Community for the past 4 years, and my motivation for staying has dwindled rapidly in the past 4 months.

This post is as much me getting stuff off my chest as it is about providing my perspective on what is wrong with the system. I’m going to work through all this in reverse order, as I think it will make more sense to others this way.

The appointment (it was not an election irrespective of what the process was called) of the UW Leader was the final straw. Seriously, please don’t get me wrong — my grievance is 101% with the CC here. Amber is a smart and wonderful person and will try her best and probably do an ok job of it, and we’re working on some really cool things together. However, I’m worried about the detriment of latency that a newcomer leading the team will bring about. I have been around the group for years in a passenger-seat role but my experience but was overlooked. I’m really quite terrified that despite working alongside Amber, it won’t be enough.

Approximately a month earlier saw the eventual (after months of inaction by the CC) appointment of a renewed IRC Council. There are now no original IRC Councillors remaining. I was one of the 2 remaining who put their hands up for another term, and after the CC decided they were unsatisfied with the applicants and staged another call, neither of us was appointed. This Council now lacks the benefit of prompt historical insight in to the evolution of the Ubuntu IRC-scape, the relationship with Freenode, and (in a big way) many troublesome chatters. I’m already seeing cracks showing thanks to this.

And this brings me to the final point. I was discussing all this with another individual on Tuesday following the realisation that the Asia/Oceania Regional Membership Board is nearing “election” time. After musing whether I’ll be permitted to continue with that role since (I feel that) I’ve been pushed from the other roles, and explaining my discontent with recent behaviour of the CC (as a whole, not individual members), the individual asked me “But if you’re unhappy with the CC, why weren’t you on this list: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/cgi-perl/civs/results.pl?id=E_f802a7d79840b58a“. After responding that actually, I had been nominated, but had been silently dropped in the cut down to 12, the response I got was “I’d rather have public nominations, and then have the incumbent CC select the new CC than the mess you expose.”.

I think that last exchange this week summarises my discontent rather neatly.

My opinion in criticism of the CC is, as far as some folk are concerned, moot. If you don’t run, you don’t get to criticise, right? Sure, fair enough. Except that since few people know I was nominated for and willing to hold a seat on the CC, this is the response I’m getting. That hurts. There was a lack of transparency from the CC, and it’s making my word worthless.

The IRCC went through a fightclub-esque appointment process because folks FUDwashed the CC, convincing them that the IRCC is corrupt and needs supervision. UW got similar treatment because dudes have been petitioning that the group is hostile because there’s not enough good stuff to outweigh the bad stuff.

Validation for non-elections for both groups has been given as a lack of definition of voting group and that is quite frankly, IMHO, nothing more than a convenience. Voting groups could have been defined (and funnily enough one has been defined for the UW scope vote), but in both cases doing so was refused for the leadership appointment processes.

I mean, people are aware that folks need to and do talk theories and things through privately. In all groups, especially governance groups like the IRCC. And that this is essential to the functionality of these groups, right? Right? At least, I’d hope so. Privacy doesn’t kill transparency — trying to eliminate privacy does.

And here is the clincher.

Who knows how the CC (as a whole) came to their decisions on these things? I don’t. It was private. I can only theorise (or ask and still theorise about the response). And to be perfectly honest, I can and do accept that at face value when I can trust the group.

What I cannot accept is that concurrently similar privacy within the IRCC and different (but not unique, see other unlogged social channels such as #ubuntu-offtopic and various LoCo channels) privacy in UW isn’t acceptable. And this privacy within the IRCC and UW are part of why these non-democratic faux-meritocratic appointment processes were so closed, and exist to begin with in the case of the latter. I cannot accept that hypocrisy, and it alters how I (and others) theorise this stuff. Drastically.

It kills my trust in the CC.

Most importantly. It kills my motivation.

I’m still on the Asia/Oceania Membership Board for another few months (and will be seeking re-whatevering), and I have a few things to do within Ubuntu Women still. Once those things are over with, I really don’t know where I’m going to end up. I do know that if the current trend follows, it is unlikely to be with Ubuntu.

In 2008 anthropologist Dawn Nafus delivered a short talk at OSCON on rapid social change and how the tech industry can jump ahead and be the leader in this industry. While I see action by the environmentalists to use more open source tech, I don't see a lot of action within the open source community to look at environmental problems. Am I not looking hard enough?

Here are three challenges Dawn identified:

There is definitely a difference in the types of actions that are available between the two components.

As far as I can see, rulesets offer actions of a greater scope than triggered rules alone, but triggered rules seem to pick up on and allow me to use form actions as launch points for conditions and actions. It also looks like Rulesets can be "embedded" almost like subroutines in larger rulesets.

However, I am curious. Can someone give me an idea of where and why you would use a ruleset vs. a triggered rule?

Thanks very much,

When I saw The Safety Dance: Helping End Sexual Harassment at Conventions, I was immediately transported back to one of my very first Linux conferences. A friend walked up to me and tickled me, and then was horrified when I told him that that was totally inappropriate behaviour out in public. Why was I so concerned? Because this story from ConFusion is exactly the sort of thing I feared that could follow:

Recently, I was talking about the convention with a young lady who related to me the story of a “a guy being inappropriate” with her. In this story, she was quick to point out at the onset that she was dressed somewhat sexier than normal—in pajamas that were a bit more risqué than those in which she is generally seen around con—so that, as she put it, is was a factor. She was standing, talking with two gentlemen (but, she points out, not flirting or anything, just talking) when this third person approached her from behind, grabbed her in a “grabbing, pinching, kind of tickling motion” on the ribs immediately below breast level, then continued on his way. This is not “a guy being inappropriate” for the record, this is assault.

And it happens. I’ve been picked up, tossed around, poked, and generally had people get in my face in a lot of geek settings. In my experience it’s worse in geeky settings: I can enjoy a rock show and only get hit with the odd spilled beer or drunken patron once or twice in a year of concerts, but if I want to take in an anime screening I can expect someone to do something makes me uncomfortable before the end of the night. I was appalled the first time someone tried to pick me up (like a sack of potatoes) at a Linux event, and now I choose my companions more carefully. I’ve written here about why I don’t often dress up in costumes for cons. But random inappropriate physical behaviour has never been limited to days when I’m dressed up.

Let me say this in no uncertain terms: there is no manner of dress or flirtatious activity that gives you the right to initiate unwanted contact with another member of the convention! This is behavior that is unacceptable, period. Full stop. End of sentence. No mitigating factors needed or even allowed. I don’t care if you have watched a young lady kiss every single person in the lobby on her way to you, when she gets to you, you do NOT have implied permission to initiate contact. You don’t get permission to touch, hover over, leer at, or otherwise harass her. I don’t care if a guy has been talking suggestively with you for the last hour, you don’t get to grab him without explicit permission.

And there’s the thing. I go to an event where I know people, of course I want to give out a few hugs. But if I let anyone initiate a hug with me, I never know if some random stranger is going to do it next. Now, I’ve got a pretty good tolerence for hugs even from strangers, but tickling? Keep your hands off. So even friends I otherwise trust will get slapped in public. Shut down loudly and publicly before someone takes “he did it” as an excuse.

I don’t think The Safety Dance is necessarily telling a lot of us anything we didn’t know, but apparently “don’t grab strangers” is news to someone (It seems to be a common rule at anime cons, and I’m sure there’s a reason.) So maybe it’s worth a little signal-boosting so we can see more cons providing and enforcing some basic rules to protect con-goers. I know this sort of thing would make me feel a bit happier about going to events I’ve previously shunned.

On Monday the 11th The Ubuntu Community Learning Project (UCLP) held a meeting to review our progress through and since the holidays.

The UCLP is attempting to make professional education course materials, because we believe that education is one of the biggest barriers to getting new users and increasing existing users abilities.

We are working to develop course material in 5 different segments, How to Use, Maintain, Develop, Spread and Teach Ubuntu. This material is structured in the form of classes that can be taught in real life classrooms, on IRC and/or via our Moodle site.

The team decided upon the licensing (CC:BY-SA) and to formally use AsciiDoc for core material (for rationale, see Martin Owens’ blog post: Document Formats for Learning Materials) and Nigel Babu has been working hard with the team to develop documentation for this. We now have a documented Course Layout for in-classroom classes and Charles Profitt has been working on the Moodle side for online learning.

So many avenues to explore! How do you contribute? First, Join the Team by swinging by to have a talk to us in #ubuntu-learning or engage us on the Ubuntu Community Learning Project mailing list (you’re also welcome to email me directly at lyz@ubuntu.com, please do!). We currently have people writing courses in .odt, on the wiki, in bzr using AsciiDoc and in Moodle, so there are a number of ways to get involved now. We also need folks who are interestied in doing peer review of the classes. Other tasks are outlined here.

Ready to write? Here’s the quick FAQ I tossed together based on the most popular questions that come up in channel.

1. How do I select/sign up for a topic to write about?

See Course Assignment

2. What is the layout I should follow?

See Course Layout

3. Where do I submit what I’ve written, what is the development workflow?

See Course Development

We’re still in the process of completing full documentation for our asciidoc+bzr procedure for contributions (I’m in the middle of writing my first class!) so if you have any questions, please ask us.

How do you take advantage of the materials we’ve created thus far? Martin Owens has already written several sysadmin classes:

• Command Line Basics
• Local Computer
• Networking
• Package Management
• Services, Processes and Daemons with Apache
• User Authentication
• Remote Access
• Virtualisation
• Network Infrastructure

Currently being developed and reviewed:

• Using Launchpad by Duane Hinnen
• Contributing to UCLP with Bazaar and AsciiDoc by Nigel Babu

You are also welcome to visit our Moodle site, where Charles Profitt has imported some courses and we’re actively developing others. And if you’re an educator, be sure to check out Charles Profitt’s Ubuntu Educators Ning Network.

Checking the Youtube embedding with Drupal. Here is a link to the original movie. Ah, and if you don't know Foulab, don't hesitate to visit!

Today was the last day to provide a submission and input to the Australian Government’s discussion report on “Access to Electronic Media for the Hearing and Vision Impaired: Approaches for Consideration”.

The report explains the Australian Government’s existing regulatory framework for accessibility to audio-visual content on TV, digital TV, DVDs, cinemas, and the Internet, and provides an overview about what it is planning to do over the next 3-5 years.

It is interesting to read that according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics about 2.67 million Australians – one in every eight people – have some form of hearing loss and 284,000 are completely or partially blind. Also, it is expected that these numbers will increase with an ageing population and obesity-linked diabetes are expected to continue to increase these numbers.

For obvious reasons, I was particularly interested in the Internet-related part of the report. It was the second-last section (number five), and to be honest, I was rather disappointed: only 3 pages of the 40 page long report concerned themselves with Internet content. Also, the main message was that “at this time the costs involved with providing captions for online content were deemed to represent an undue financial impost on a relatively new and developing service.”

Audio descriptions weren’t even touched with a stick and both were written off with “a lack of clear online caption production and delivery standard and requirements”. There is obviously a lot of truth to the statements of the report – the Internet audio-visual content industry is still fairly young compared to e.g. TV, and there are a multitude of standards rather than a single clear path.

However, I believe the report neglected to mention the new HTML5 video and audio elements and the opportunity they provide. Maybe HTML5 was excluded because it wasn’t expected to be relevant within the near future. I believe this is a big mistake and governments should pay more attention to what is happening with HTML5 audio and video and the opportunities they open for accessibility.

In the end, I made a submission because I wanted the Australian Government to wake up to the HTML5 efforts and I wanted to correct a mistake they made with claiming MPEG-2 was “not compatible with the delivery of closed audio descriptions”.

I believe a lot more can be done with accessibility for Internet content than just “monitor international developments” and industry partnership with disability representative groups. I therefore proposed to undertake trials in particular with textual audio descriptions to see if they could be produced in a similar manner to captions, which would make their cost come down enormously. Also I suggested actually aiming for WCAG 2.0 conformance within the next 5 years – which for audio-visual content means at minimum captions and audio descriptions.

You can read the report here and my 4 page long submission here.

Part 2 of linux.conf.au, in which I at least mention most of the talks I went to, occasionally link out; contains a brain dump of my thoughts on the conference, its organization, the social engineering of arduino hacking, and the unicorns of dooom!

Slides are going up on all the talks on the linux.conf.au wiki, if you want to look at what the talks were like. Every talk I went to was good and worth it. Also, by looking at the slides, you’ll get an idea of what you might like to propose for a talk next year and whether you’d fit into this conference. (Yes.)

There was a lot more to the Haecksen mini-conference: The radical geek artists from Eclectic Tech Carnival and feminist hardware DIY party people, Genderchangers; Elizabeth Garbee’s talk on being a teenage user of & evangelist for FOSS; and Karen Lisenfeld’s talk on email authentication. It was a cheerful overview of the situation, with major email hosts using authentication methods with various problems — but somehow it wasn’t the “DOOOOM” talk it could have been. The positive note of hope and the future were DNSSEC and STARTTLS. It wasn’t quite an antidote to Joh’s wry nihilism in her talk on the Sky Falling.

My ambition is to write up all these talks in detail, since I took notes and really learned stuff. It’ll have to wait! First, a brain dump!

On Tuesday I think I stayed in bed all day in my hotel, gently weeping about the pain in my knees, whining into my journal, and avoiding the task of fixing up my next set of slides. The jet lag, driving around for hours all over the island, wheeling uphill in the cold rain at the wildlife park and hitchhiking back to the hotel, the late nights, and the stress — even though I’m super extroverted — of meeting about 200 new people in two days caught up to me. After a really great nap, refreshed in spirit, I met Joh and Adam, went around the waterfront, saw baby ducks being rescued by a guy in rubber overalls, and then to the Speakers’ Dinner at Te Papa Museum.

This was fantastic! We stared at the weird “void” art and read about pounamu and greenstone. I’m afraid I had a nerd bitch moment as I out-trivia-ed someone about geological details. Greenstone is metamorphosed sediment from the sea floor usually from around subduction zones at the edge of tectonic plates. No one may contradict me when I’m in encyclopedia mode!!! I JUST KNOW. Don’t make me whip out the word “ultramafic”.

At dinner I ate lamb for the first time ever. The food was all really good. There were amazing performances of Maori haka and songs by a group whose name I didn’t catch. It felt slightly weird and colonial to be part of rather white crowd watching this performance not to mention possible improper gender crossing of doing the haka they were teaching, and pondering cultural appropriation, but I got the idea that everybody in NZ grows up learning a bunch of Maori culture, and performances are basically part of welcoming visitors. The concept of koha or gifting was also explained to me at some point by Kelly and Daniel – it sounds a bit like potlatch – but different. I learned at some point to say “The Treaty is a fraud” in Maori, an ironic commentary about the ongoing interpretations of the Treaty of Waitangi. But it’s nice to think that treaties might mean something somewhere, unlike in the U.S.

Meanwhile, the whole conference went by without anyone being really annoying, condescending, or hostile about access or disability. I never got sort of left behind awkwardly, which, not the end of the universe but a it’s a yucky feeling. People came with me en masse into freight elevators and moved chairs around in restaurants. So, everyone was nice and non-faily, and things were well organized and accessible. There was a RAMP to the stage where I was going to talk. That *never* happens. Weird! Linux people are SMART.

Wednesday I went to Denise and Mark’s talk about Dreamwidth’s developer community. They outlined a lot of ways that it’s been a success at bringing in people from diverse backgrounds. Yay! They do rock and it’s a pleasure to work with their hosted dev env (Dreamhacks) and the wiki that very clearly explains what to do to start contributing to the project!

Selena Deckelmann gave a talk that was a great overview of open source database projects. I didn’t realize there were so many – there are over 50 active free/open source database platforms. I liked her ways to organize thinking about what kinds of databases there are – how can we classify them and their features? What are they good for? So it wasn’t just “a list of some software” but taught me ways to think about databases and what they do. Useful and exciting.

Onwards to Claudine Chioh’s talk on open source humanities collaboration. She showed us stuff like Old Bailey Online, Valley of the Shadow, Perseus Digital Library, Index Thomisticus from 1946 that analyzed and processed text, and her own project built in Drupal, Founders and Survivors. After that, a keysigning, and the inspiring “Teaching FOSS at Universities” talk by Bob Edwards and Andrew Tridgell. It was great to think this will become more common over the next few years. At some point I thought, “Huh. Not only could I ace such a graduate course, I could make a curriculum for it and teach it quite well.” It would be a blast.

At some point as we talked about arguing on the Internet, braille input and screen readers, and Bob Brandon’s inferentialist theory of meaning, Jason sent me the David Sternlight FAQ, good for a laugh!

Angie Byron’s tutorial on Drupal had 30 or 40 people all guiltily and eagerly installing Drupal 7 alpha. It was easy to install on a Mac with MAMP – give it a try! The menus and the posting interface are much cleaner. We went through the steps to build a module to take input from users and turn it into pirate speak. Yarrr matey! P.S. We will replace you with CCK and Views. Also? Don’t. Hack. Core!!!!!!

Jon Cruz talked about Adaptive UIs. I upset a lot of people on Twitter by linking to the vi version of Clippy. From “what is adaptive ui anyway” we went pretty fast into specific ideas about coding architecture, datamodels, event driven asynchronous approaches to interfaces. I liked the bit about naming stuff after what it’s doing, not on what triggered it, and thought about that for a while, missing the rest of the talk.

Oh also! Geek Girl Dinner! OMG! It was nice! This and Haecksen meant that I never felt lonely at the conference. The hive vagina is mighty! Oh, how many gentle beardy men we mildly horrified and amused by using the phrase “hive vagina”! The lulz!

The best bit was getting to meet up with the tail end of the night of Arduino hacking. People who had gone to the Arduino miniconference on Monday were finishing up their Aiko/Pebble/Arduino kits at the U-Stay hostel (which I didn’t stay at because it was up a giant hill). There were no kits left but a wild haired dude sat next to me and threw out little bits of information which I flailed around to keep up with. It was a clever bit of social engineering on his part, so that just as a batch of people finished up their soldering, I was there to say “And here is how you install the stuff to tell it to turn on a blinky light.” Armed with this crucial knowledge and spreading it around, I felt wise and popular instead of out of place and like I had to quickly prove right away that I know how to solder, which I totally do so anyone who makes assumptions can suck it. What? A chip on my shoulder?

Arjen and I then figured out further how to flash the Aiko software into his Arduino and blink its lights, a moment which might sound trivial but when it works, you will LOVE THE WORLD.

The mad-haired dude turned out to be Andy from geekscape who wrote Aiko and brought all the Arduino kits. We had crazy conversations about the Internet of Things, overlays of information over everything, and the weird possibilities of embedded systems. Give me data or give me… um… privacy! Oh, never mind, just give me data!

(Andy is going to send me a kit! And I spent some time this week playing with Processing for practice. Supposedly grand language for Artists or something. Is actually just Java on a fake Commodore 64.)

I did my talk on Hack Ability, FOSS and the world of horribly proprietary physical objects, gadgets, mobility and accessibility devices. I gave similiar talks at Etech and Ignite OSCON, but this pushed further. The talk had a really nice writeup in LWN by Jonathan Corbett, (may be subscriber-only) which did the most amazing job ever of summing up the bones of what I said. I felt really honored that anyone would write it up in such detail, nicely linked. It was eerie to read the bare thoughts without the speaker-tricks and charm points, jokes and asides and audience reactions. It gets across that I have a fair amount of density of good ideas in talks. My other strong point is reframing and recontextualizing details into frameworks of big ideas. In short, my goal is to make your head explode immediately and then pack in more and more explodiness so that you go away thinking something new and sticky.

The Penguin Dinner on Friday had great food and wine and company. And more hakas! Nic Steenhout wrote up some thoughts on the crowd of people trying out our wheelchairs and geeking out over manual wheelchair hardware. I agree with him completely and always try to cultivate and encourage that hackery, curious, geek-out spirit of approach to wheelchairs and other accessibility/mobility stuff.

A last thought:

Please enjoy this video of the poetic beauty of blinky lights. The 8×8 LED opens up a universe of possibilities and will free your mind into a sort of dreamy state of hypnotic embedded empowerment.

Did you watch it? Go back and watch it. Trust me. I’m a poet.

Next up: DrupalSouth and hacks on a plane!

socraticomatic was enthusing recently about Rosie Burgess Trio, so we went to see them for their single/video clip launch at the East Brunswick Club.

First up, they were supported by Monique Brumby, which is a gig I'd go and see by itself. Melbourne is so crazy, where you can have people who've won like awards and stuff as support acts.

Seriously though, Rosie Burgess Trio were fantastic. I had so much fun. I laughed so much from their banter, I wanted to cry. If I were a music magazine, I'd probably describe them as dynamic. They were lots of fun. Also, any band with songs about veganism is awesome. <3 <3 <3 (I think socraticomatic's in love too).

Came away with 4 CDs (the new single was a freebie + one Monique Brumby + two Rosie Burgess). Both have new albums coming out too.

Finally, if you're in Sydney, the Rosie Burgess Trio is playing in Glebe next week. You should go.

I don't intend to post a lot of parenting stuff here, but I wanted to make some notes about breastfeeding activism ('lactivism') for the geekosphere, as Brenda Wallace has done in talking about her decision to do mixed feeding.

A couple of preparatory notes:

• The compulsory Mary notice: I am not looking for advice. I am not lacking personally for professional support for my breastfeeding difficulties. It is easier for me to rely on that support than it is to filter through the advice of millions of onlookers. Thank you for your concern!
• I am a whole week into parenting and have exclusively breastfed to date. I feel quite committed to continuing such to the recommended six months of age and then continue partial breastfeeding for some time thereafter. But. One whole week. And it's been really hard, actually, even with a good supply from me and a good suck from him and fairly good institutional support from my hospital. I've had a middle-of-the-night visit from a locum already to treat mastitis. One whole week. I'm not here to tell you how easy it is.
• I do not have personal experience of feeding-related persecution or even hassles. (I've hardly left the house, I could be not feeding him at all and no one would hassle me.)
• I really do not mind about your feeding choices for your infant or child, in the sense of exclusive breastfeeding, mixed feeding or exclusive formula. The hassling in the street goes both ways, and in many areas (especially, I gather, the US) the hassling from medical staff sure runs both ways too. I am generally uninterested in person-to-person shame advocacy. More on this later. It's demeaning, insulting and counterproductive. Lose, lose, lose. Feed your baby, I'll feed mine, who am I to tell you how?
• Purely as a terminology thing, formula feeding is not the same as bottle feeding: you can put human milk in bottles and many people do so. (It's not functionally equivalent to breastfeeding though, because it's harder to establish and maintain supply, and the correct handling of the bottles is a nuisance as Brenda notes.)

So, why lactivism, a kind of 101:

Consider areas without safe water supplies, that is, most of the world (and this includes major cities of Western nations in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, New Orleans was an example). Formula feeding, or anything other than extended exclusive breastfeeding, is really really dangerous without a safe water supply. Gastric illness kills babies. Lots and lots and lots of babies, many of whom would not have died if exclusively breastfed. Unless there's a safe water supply mothers with HIV are currently encouraged to exclusively breastfeed, as the risk of the baby contracting HIV is less than the risk of her or him dying of gastric illness related to substitution.

There are several problems with promotion of formula in such areas, or any economically disadvantaged area, a non-exhaustive list includes:

1. correct preparation of infant formula, including sterilisation of bottles and correct dosages is not trivial and not always (I suspect, not even often) communicated in a manner appropriate to, for example, illiterate people or even people literate 'only' in their local language
2. correct preparation of infant formula is expensive
3. weaning to formula creates dependency on the product, or at least on milk substitutes: women can restore their own milk supplies (at least sometimes?) some time after weaning to formula, but it's not especially easy. Without support they're stuck with a major hole in the household budget, or with dangerous feeding, ie, watered down formula or homemade milk-ish substances.
4. Per lauredhel here, for many women exclusive breastfeeding is the only reliable contraceptive they have access to (exclusive breastfeeding on demand is more reliable than you've been led to believe as a contraceptive) and the use of formula therefore imposes a potential burden of very closely spaced pregnancies.

Right upfront I'll note that I am far from the most ethical consumer in the world, I have not a shred of pedestal to proclaim from. But. Formula producers are involved in aggressive marketing in exactly these circumstances, in addition to marketing to new mothers in the Western context who are in the often difficult phase of establishing their desired breastfeeding relationship. I'll note again that in a Western context and in a proclaimed pro-breastfeeding medical environment, I have found aspects of establishing nursing hard. Really hard. If I'd had formula in the house last night it would have been very likely to have been used. (Again, not that there's anything wrong with that morally, but as a practical matter supplementing is not exactly helpful in further establishing nursing. Or for that matter in dealing with mastitis.)

So, I support very strong institutional focus on establishing breastfeeding in Western countries, and particularly strongly oppose marketing attempts to establish formula feeding as desirable in developing countries. That is my lactivism.

Now to the horrible shaming mothers thing. This sucks. My take on it is that it is two way, like a lot of Mummy Wars. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Telling formula feeding mothers that every breastfeeder [is] a better mother than any formula-feeder? Spew. Using the power of the state against breastfeeding mothers? Unspeakable.

I only wish Chez Miscarriage had left her archives up about (some) reproductive choices: no kids? selfish non-Mummy. biological kids? selfish narcissistic eco-raider Mummy. ART biological kids? selfish rich narcissistic eco-raider Mummy. adopted kids? selfish, also rich, Mummy. etc. (Incidentally, re reproductive choice, go be challenged, you'll gain more there than here.) None of that is the argument I want to have or the people I want to have it with.

Yesterday I made "Ghargey", a sweet puri made out of the very common red pumpkin or "lal bhopla" -- the same one that is used in sambhar and kootu or curry. Its very simple and easy to make.

Ingredients for Ghargey :

• 1 cup grated lal bhopla/red pumpkin
• 1/2 cup gud (jaggery). [If you dont have jaggery use brown sugar]
• 1 cup wheat flour (dont use maida)
• 1 tsp ghee
• 2 tsp oil
• salt (to taste)
• 1/4 tsp elaichi (cardamom) powder
• Oil for deepfrying

Preparation :

0. Warm the ghee in a pan and add the grated bhopla and stir well.
1. After a minute or so, add the jaggery and mix well. Remove all lumps. You can also smash banana (the elchi or the kerala variety) and add it to this. 
2. Cook them till the water leaves the sides of the pan. [TIP: do not overcook it into a hard lump.]
3. Off the gas and add the cardamom powder and mix well.
4. Cool the pumpkin mixture and transfer to a second vessel. Add 2 tsp oil and a pinch of salt. Slowly add the wheat flour and knead the dough. Try not to add water. Cover and let the dough rest for a few minutes.
5. Divide the dough into small portions and roll them out into round puris with a rolling pin.
6. Deep-fry them till golden brown, in medium hot oil. Enjoy hot, with shrikhand.

I know that folks expect pictures but the problem is the pooris got over very quickly

I returned from LCA 2010 on Sunday with an ecstatic grin, and tons of projects to work on for the rest of the year. I was lucky enough to have End Point send me to New Zealand! I knew a few of the organizers, and had high expectations. LCA totally surpassed them all.

Next year, LCA will be held in Brisbane, Australia. You should really go.

I’ll break it down for you:

* Content

The talks were really good. People went out of their way to talk about the technical issues they are facing without sugar coating it, dumbing it down, or resorting to lists of features.

Ted Ts’o’s talk on EXT4 development was amazing in this regard. I came thinking that he’d give a laundry list of features, how it differed from EXT3, when he thought they’d be “production ready”. What I got instead was an incredibly detailed accounting of the failures in testing and systems analysis that filesystems developers had encountered over many, many years. The new development effort had its own fair share of bug creation, but they also found long standing bugs in EXT3. He went so far as to break down effort in terms of new feature creation, bug fixing and two other tasks (i wish I had a copy of the slides already!). Anyway, interesting talk, great advice for those who work with concurrency-sensitive applications (most of us these days) and very interesting case studies in failure.

Paul Gunn, an engineer at Weta Digital, gave a detailed talk on his experiences scaling their data centers. Much of the lessons there were fairly well understood by data center engineers (hot/cold aisles, raise the temperature to save some dollars!, don’t cram stuff under the floor where air is supposed to flow!, use high ceilings to sink heat). It’s always great to see companies sharing their practical experiences with developers.

Another fun project I learned about was Sheepdog – an EBS replacement developed by a team from NTT. The whole project looked fantastic – providing snapshot, cloning and thin provisioning, and a reasonable looking GUI. This could be a fundamental building block of free clouds.

I also was inspired by Cucumber-nagios, a relatively new project from Lindsay Holmwood. He and others have been talking about “behavior driven infrastructure“, a great bit of syntactic sugar on systems automation work that started with cfengine in the early ’90s. I look forward to playing around with these tools. And I really like that he leveraged nagios’ existing interfaces rather than inventing something new. This type of collaboration between projects is a breath of fresh air for sysadmins, who (if they’re anything like me) struggle to make awesome new tools talk to the awesome old ones.

I spent some time in an Arduino intro class, soldering and hacking on a temperature probe for a few hours. I ended up with a working temperature monitor and an appreciation for how easy to use the tools are.

* Hallway Track

There was a fantastic common area filled with people hacking on their talks, having conversation or maybe just hanging out to see what would happen next. IRC was full of hilarious chatter, and people connecting to see new babies (my god, so many people have had babies!).

There were also some couches, and a nice courtyard that often filled up with people. The common spaces in a conference seem to determine how well people can connect once they’re not just sitting in front of a speaker.

Another convenient and wonderful aspect of the location was the food. Excellent restaurants at reasonable prices were within a 5 minute walk of the conference venue. This made impromptu coffee breaks and relaxed but productive lunches very easy and enjoyable. I really, really liked this.

* Inspiration

Three keynotes by Biella Coleman, Benjamin Mako Hill and Glyn Moody were inspirational and subversive. All three were rallying cries for a hacker mentality – the drive to tweak, tinker, create and share. All three spoke to the pleasures and joys of software development.

Biella Coleman brought up the origins of the Free Software Foundation, and even played a video of a very young Richard Stallman talking about his frustration with not being able to modify source code. She also discussed the responsibility leaders in free and open source have to be transparent in their management of their projects (and how we remind ourselves of that in amusing ways).

Benjamin Mako Hill gave a rallying talk about antifeatures, and how their existence is a competitive advantage for free and open source software. Pia Waugh gave a detailed description of the talk, and the categories of antifeatures – protection money, market segmentation, securing monopolies and protecting copyrights. A memorable quote was “I have yet to meet a free software DVD player that respects the unskippable DVD track.” Mako reminds me that humor is the best medicine for something that’s seriously broken.

Glyn Moody went a slightly different route – talking about how sharing and openness are leaking out into the rest of the world. The Human Genome Project and Project Gutenburg were two of several examples he used, and to briefly cast a glance at what was at stake if public ownership had not been achieved – in particular with the Human Genome Project. He managed to convey a sense of urgency and importance that is often missing.

What free software actually gets used for and why are critically important stories. We all need to get better at telling compelling stories.

* Friendship

Free software is built on friendships. Trust, willingness to make mistakes in front of each other, and a desire to build on top of others work to make something better are the traits I see among those who collaborate with each other. Building free software can be a painful process – long nights, tedious bugs, no recognition for the work that went into it all. Conferences like LCA are a tremendous affirmation of the work that we all do.

From the scripted get-togethers, to the spontaneous hackfests and anti-scripted gatherings (the un-professional networking session!), all events are attempts to connect to the other people who know what it’s like to live inside of free software. And we relax around each other, make jokes and enjoy for a few days the knowledge that we’re doing something really cool.

I met so many people for whose time and attention I am incredibly grateful for. And, for those Kiwis who took me out for great food, shopping and long walks along the pier in the sunshine — thank you so much for taking the time. I miss you all.

I’m reviewing the security of a web app built with Ruby on Rails, so I put together a checklist for a security audit. This isn’t a bank or high security situation, but there were a number of engineers and quite a bit of open source code, so I thought a few checks were in order.

Here’s the list I came up with that I thought other folks might appreciate as a starting point (special thanks to the sfruby list, Mike Gunderloy, and Scott Bronson for feedback):

0) Make sure your Rails and gems are up to date for latest security patches (see rails security mailing list for recent advisory notes)

1) Active Record audit:
  A) SQL injection:
    (i) whole word search for “find”, “first”, and “all” then visually inspect all instances of ActiveRecord find calls for potential SQL injection vulnerability (also search for “sql” not whole work search to find find_by_sql and “execute” to find cases where raw sql is executed.
    (ii) search your models for “named_scope” and check :conditions
  B) check for mass assignment Either disable mass assignment as Eric suggests in his article, or audit its use. If doing an audit, check every model to make sure it declares which attributes are settable with attr_accessible. (While attr_protected may technically work, a white list approach is recommended by security experts and the rails security advisory on this topic)

2) Scripting attack: search all eRB files for <%= and ensure that if dynamically generated text was originally entered by the user, it is HTML escaped. Consider rails_xss

3) Secure Access: If some of the site does not have public access, check controllers and ensure that public actions are specifically allowed and that protected access is the default

4) search for “eval” (whole word) and verify that usages are safe (assume javascript eval is ok)

5) search for “forgery” (not whole word), make sure that
config.action_controller.allow_forgery_protection = false
is only disabled in test config
protect_from_forgery should be in the ApplicationController, unless there is a good reason for it not to be

6) check user auth and review that controller actions are limited to expected use

7) passwords: not saved as clear-text in the db, not logged

8) check that private data is not stored in cookies

I think I am trying to do something fairly basic, but it is proving enormously difficult to find the documentation, or examples to accomplish it.

On submission, I simply want to send the nid of my CCK form to my url and send that on to another page. I have been trolling, working through the API, trying php snippets, reading, experimenting, buying Lullabot videos, going through tutorials, trying, installing, uninstalling, reinstalling - to the point I'm ready to go find a nice, quiet job at McDonalds.

My users have a uid, the node they have just submitted should have an nid - I hope to end up using those values to
display a view. And I know that they can be somehow passed into the View - but I have to get them from the original page first. It seems
that in Views things just sort of "magically" appear in the Preview section in the videos and tutorials... they don't get into the
tricky bits...No one ever talks about how you get that Preview to work in "real life" with a real URL coming from someplace unknown to the View.

To clarify:

1. My users fill out a CCK form and hit Submit.
2. From there they go to a View, where they can make a further selection.
3. If they ever, please God, get that far - they will end up on a third page where they will make a final selection. After that,
4. An email will be sent off to the proper authorities and I will collapse in a mixture of bitterness and desire for revenge on whomever talked me into this...

Nid into the URL. Sent to the next page where it can influence what is shown.

If anyone could help me, I would be beyond grateful.

If anyone needs further clarification - I will be happy to give it - right after I finish spraying the house with aerosol Valium. :-S

Thanks in advance.

The Linux community is a pyramid. The base is comprised of millions of
Linux users and system administrators. The second level is programmers
who work with Linux; some of those developers contribute to the
kernel, many do not. The top rung of the pyramid is the thousand or so
kernel developers and maintainers who actively contribute to the
kernel or other projects that make up a distribution. These are the
leaders whose code and ideas shape the system that users and sys
admins work with everyday. One of the goals of the Linux Foundation is
to make those people on the top rung accessible to the base.

You see it with many of our programs: LinuxCon, Linux.com, the Japan
Linux Symposium and our training program. Today we are pleased to
announce an expansion of that program and the launch of a free webinar
program that connects Linux users, developers and sys admins to the
leaders of the Linux community. Users can now receive free Linux
training on such topics as the new Linux filesystem Btrfs, Git or
Linux performance tuning.

While these developers are always accessible via the kernel mailing
list, this format gives a different kind of access and learning
opportunity. Let’s face it: not all users and developers can attend
in- person events or pay for a training course.

The free Linux training webinar series features notable technical
leaders from the Linux community. Confirmed webinars include:
• “An Introduction to Git,” by kernel maintainer and TAB chair James Bottomley;
• “Linux System Troubleshooting and Tuning” and “Linux Administration
101,” by Linux author and community manager Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier;
• “How to Work with the Linux community,” by LWN.net editor and kernel
developer Jon Corbet;
• “A Linux Filesystem Overview,” by kernel developer Christoph Hellwig;
• “Btrfs: An Intro and Update” to the new file system for Linux, by
project lead and TAB member Chris Mason; and
• “Linux Performance Tuning,” by North America’s first kernel
developer Ted Ts’o.

You can sign up here. We are lucky that these leaders are taking time
out of their busy schedules to do this.
I’m also happy to announce we have expanded our training offering with
new classes and new geographies served. Our training program is
exploding right now, just like the demand for Linux talent. (Obviously
not a coincidence!) We hope you take advantage of this new program.
Please send me feedback on topics or instructors you’d be interested
in hearing from.  You can reach me at amanda at the domain above.

During last week’s LCA, Jan Gerber, Michael Dale and I gave a 3 hour tutorial on how to publish HTML5 video in an open format.

We basically taught people how to create and publish Ogg Theora video in HTML5 Web pages and how to make them work across browsers, including much of the available tools and libraries. We’re hoping that some people will have learnt enough to include modules in CMSes such as Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress, which will easily support the publishing of Ogg Theora.

I have been asked to share the material that we used. It consists of:

• HTML5_Tutorial (611KB)
• the example videos (328MB), and
• HTML5 video exercises (3.4KB).

Note that if you would like to walk through the exercises, you should install the following software beforehand:

• oggz-tools
• oggvideotools
• apache2 or a Web server of your choice
• ffmpeg2theora
• firefox3.5+
• firefogg plugin
• firebug plugin
• vlc, mplayer, totem or xine
• kino or pitivi or another video editor that exports Theora, e.g. iMovie with XiphQT

You might need to look for packages of your favourite OS (e.g. Windows or Mac, Ubuntu or Debian).

The exercises include:

• creating a Ogg video from an editor
• transcoding a video using http://firefogg.org/
• creating a poster image using OggThumb
• writing a first HTML5 video Web page with Ogg Theora
• publishing it on a Web Server, with correct MIME type & Duration hint
• writing a second HTML5 video Web page with Ogg Theora & MP4 to cover Safari/Webkit
• transcoding using ffmpeg2theora in a script
• writing a third HTML5 video Web page with Cortado fallback
• writing a fourth Web page using “Video for Everybody”
• writing a fifth Web page using “mwEmbed”
• writing a sixth Web page using firefogg for transcoding before upload
• and a seventh one with a progress bar
• encoding srt subtitles into an Ogg Kate track
• writing an eighth Web page using cortado to display the Ogg Kate track

For those that would like to see the slides here immediately, a special flash embed:

Enjoy!