FOSS Women

A couple of weeks ago I posted about fontasia, my new font-chooser app. It's gone through a couple of revisions since then, and Mikael Magnusson contributed several excellent improvements, like being able to render each font in the font list.

I'd been holding off on posting 0.3, hoping to have time to do something about the font buttons -- they really need to be smaller, so there's space for more categories. But between a new job and several other commitments, I haven't had time to implement that. And the fancy font list is so cool it really ought to be shared.

So here it is: fontasia 0.3.

My presentation "PC-BSD: An Easy to Use BSD Desktop" for next week's OLF is available on slideshare. If you're in the Columbus, OH area, drop by the BSD booth to pick up a free DVD of PC-BSD 8.1 and chat about all things BSD. Also, consider supporting BSD Certification by taking the BSDA exam at this event.

If I've been quiet lately it's because I was burning the midnight oil participating in the final technical and grammatical review for the BSD Professional Certification Requirements document. The document was published late Tuesday night and is a thing of beauty. From the announcement:

I’ve been reading some old papers about locking and MVCC in preparation for writing about MVCC in PostgreSQL, and for giving a talk at CouchCamp next week!

I just finished “Locking“, by Jim Gray. He discusses semaphores, and makes the argument for implementing a locking scheduler to handle errors and deadlocks (which he calls interlocks, or a “deadly embrace” – a term I’m sad we’ve stopped using).

An example from the start of the paper illustrates the power of MVCC:

The classic example is an accounting file. Processes reading the file may share it
concurrently. However, a process requesting write access to the file blocks until all processes currently reading have released the file.

A lovely thing about Postgres’ MVCC is that readers (SELECT) don’t require this type of lock, and most writers don’t block readers. For SELECT, the only statements that will block it are those that make changes to tables which move all rows physically around (VACUUM FULL, CLUSTER, REINDEX, TRUNCATE), or make changes to table structure (ALTER TABLE, DROP TABLE).

Have a look at the explicit locking docs for more detail on the lock modes automatically used by PostgreSQL.

Related posts:

1. Explaining MVCC in Postgres: system defined columns
2. Online aggregation paper from 1997 and PSU’s database reading group
3. ptop – meeting summary from last nights pdxpug

Expect Excellent Turnout of Women Speakers at OLF 2010

After spotting the silly pyromania on planet.fedora earlier today, I thought for a while; Am I on Team Evil, or am I on Team Stupid. Then, I decided.

I’m on Team Linux.

You?

This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question. Questions are still being taken this round.

This one came up on the Python Diversity list:

How can we gather data on the gender balance and other aspects of diversity at our conferences without asking attendees intrusive questions? Is having numerical data not that important? But without it, if our female attendance goes from (say) 150 to 180 or to 120, we might just eyeball the crowd and think, “Not enough”, not realizing that we’re doing something important right or wrong.

Skud, Terri and I had a conversation about this in comments last year, focussing more on making it optional than on doing it without questions at all.

Mary:

How do you suggest tracking the diversity of speakers? Gender can be approximated but not perfectly measured by looking at people’s first names (especially if you don’t have an ethnically diverse conference) but in general the problem we have with linux.conf.au is that we can’t see how to do this well without a demographic questionnaire, which women especially have repeatedly said they don’t want to see because they feel like they will then attend the conference as A Representative of Womankind.

Skud:

Yeah, that’s hard. Can you make the question optional, and link it to an explanation of why you’re asking it? Something like, “$conf supports diversity and is working on improving the mix of speakers at our event. To this end, we are trying to measure our progress. If you don’t mind, could you give us a few demographic details?”

If that’s still not culturally comfortable, you can get an approximation by just working off what you know. Eg. “Of the people we know, N are people of colour/from other countries/mid 20s or younger/whatever.” After the conference, you will know more of the people (esp. first-timers), and be able to adjust the figures accordingly.

We went on to discuss Australian/US/Canadian cultural differences, namely that Australians (linux.conf.au is an Australian conference) are used to, at best, much more limited demographic questionnaires from, for example, employers, grant funding organisations and so on than people in the US and Canada.

What do you think, folks? Do you attend events that use demographic questionnaires? How do they go down, culturally? Are they optional or compulsory? Is there a third way between that kind of measurement and educated guesses?

Apart from attending Ruby meetups, my main reason for visiting Japan last month was RubyKaigi 2010.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would it be all men in button-down dress shirts and pleated pants? Would I give my talk to a room full of blank looks? Would I be the one with the blank look when I went to a talk in Japanese? WOULD THERE BE FAN SERVICE??

No, no, no, and no. Thank goodness. It was one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended. Most of the talks were in Japanese, but they all had simultaneous translation in IRC (and IRC was projected onto screens at the side of the stage). My talk was translated into Japanese in IRC as I gave it, and the video was up the next day.

And people were interested in Jasmine and JavaScript testing (the subject of my talk), beyond just politeness. I helped Kohei Matsuoka (@machu), one of the contributors to tdiary, get going with Jasmine testing for their JavaScript. tdiary (also on github) is an open-source Ruby blogging system built on CGI.rb. It is OLD SKOOL. They are just now formulating a testing strategy (it’s in a branch of tdiary/tdiary-core, to be merged in soon according to @hsbt). It’ll be fun to watch it shake out.

The extra-curriculars were also fun. I clumsily made an origami ruby, with much help and encouragement from the instructor, who could clearly do more complex pieces. One of the Asakusa.rb guys gave me a fan from last year’s Ruby Kaigi that has an illustration from _why on it. I think it’s my favorite souvenir. I drank a lot, and went to a matsuri (street fair) where I saw weird dancing robots. I ate a lot of food that I probably would have refused had I known what it was. Most of it was great, though I did manage to go to the TGIFriday’s of Japanese food one night.

Oh – and there were other talks. They were great! I particularly enjoyed Yasuko Ohba’s talk on writing DSLs in Ruby. You can get the full set of videos – most of them are quite good. There were quite a few talks on scientific computing and numeric libraries in Ruby. I’m glad I don’t have to work with them, but I’m glad someone’s doing them.

Geek culture

I saw a lot of threadless tshirts and baggy jeans – geeks the world over dress the same. That goddamned “#shirt” shirt was everywhere too. I saw at least one Ruby committer packing his own (large) bottle of sake. I did a pair programming subevent, and was able to pair with a couple of Japanese programmers. It pretty much felt like pairing at Pivotal (that’s a good thing). Smart people, it seems, can communicate with each other even when there’s a language barrier. Particularly when there’s a common (formal) language.

I am already making plans to attend RubyKaigi next year. Thank you very much to Masayoshi Takahashi and Shintaro Kakutani, and all the other organizers and volunteers. Fabulous event.

So it’s been a while, a month really, since I’ve given you an update on the Fedora website redesign. Well, in the past month Fedora design ninja Jef van Schendel and I have been cranking out mockups and Sijis Aviles has been doing an awesome job making the mockups a reality and getting things into staging and building things out. So we’ve got quite a few things to go over here.

Too professional?

One piece of feedback we heard from several of you about the last mockup for the front page of fedoraproject.org looked a little too professional. “This looks like it’s trying to sell me something,” one of my colleagues told me about it recently, “this doesn’t primarily say community or freedom to me at all first glance.”

Well, crap. Freedom & friends are two main values of Fedora. If folks don’t get a feeling about community and freedom from looking at our website, we’ve got issues. How did this happen?

Well, when designing the first mockup and even when iterating through the header designs, I was reviewing many application websites for general formatting & conventions for some inspiration and to make sure that our website didn’t violate any conventions that would confuse users. If our website follows patterns users have experience with at other software-related websites that involve downloads, then they’ll probably be able to have a smoother experience since they’ll have to expend less active brain power on figuring out what the website is for and what they are meant to be doing with it. It was through this quick & unscientific survey that I figured out wording for the navbar items – I chose words I saw that were the most frequently used – “Download,” “Help,” etc.

I think this influence probably ended up giving a bit too commercial of a flavor to the resulting mockup. Whoopsie!

How to fix it?

Well, let’s take a quick peek at the “too commercial” mockup:

“How to fix this, how to fix this?” I stewed. First I tried to figure out, what might have given it the commercial flavor? I asked a couple of the folks who felt it was commercial, and they just couldn’t put their finger on it. So I poured over it and figured out a few things:

• While there are people on the page, the product itself stands out much more loudly than anything else.
• The color palette is mostly grey, and the main background color is white. Very conservative.
• There isn’t a single header on the page referring to community – the words “community,” “forum,” “people” are just not in the large and prominent headers on the page.

“All right, this is fixable,” I thought to myself, looking at the list of mistakes. Not many people featured prominently on the page? Add some. The color palette is conservative and grey? Make it more colorful! No prominent community-centric keywords? Add them! Not too hard, right? So here’s what we did:

• The main navbar is now a bright Fedora blue, buh-bye grey!
• The screenshot is backed by a colorful illustration rather than a plain dark grey gradient.
• One of the first things I see on the page is the photo of Tatica and Pedrito – the darkness of their clothing contrasts with the much lighter & brighter colors around them, I think making them stand out right away.
• The headers for the page are backed by a pale blue, and the media quotes under the banner are backed by a pale yellow. More color!
• “Community” has been added to the navbar and falls towards the center of the screen, much more prominent than the word was in the previous mockup.

The reveal

So this is the course-correction to attempt to mistakes of the previous mockup, hopefully making for a mockup that better reflects Fedora’s values of freedom & community. The initial feedback we’ve gotten on it has been positive; what do you think, does it work?

But wait, there’s more!

Once Sijis, Jef, and I finally settled on this mockup being something we could live with, Jef and I went ahead and started fleshing out more of the screens needed. Jef took on the “Community” page (which will be roughly equivalent to today’s join.fedoraproject.org). I fleshed out the features page and also filled our recently-updated download pages into the new template. Let’s take a look!

Features Mockup

For each of the five major feature areas (Collaboration, Entertainment & Media, Creativity, Office/Productivity, and Desktop Basics,) I wanted to highlight a major feature of the desktop or a killer app in that category. You know, there are cool features in Fedora that a lot of long-time Fedora users aren’t even aware of. Let’s let them shine, right?

This mockup fleshes a couple of the six sections out. One piece of feedback I’ve gotten so far is that the text is just too long, “too long, didn’t read.” So it’ll definitely need to be tightened up a bit more.

One thing I think would be really sexy is to add a “download now!” button for folks already running Fedora. The kickass new Fedora PackageDB web application has this feature, so maybe it’s possible! Anyway, the mockup:

Download Pages Mockup

This mockup really isn’t anything remarkable; it’s just the recently-updated http://get.fedoraproject.org design in the new template. The mockup below is for the first page. There’s also other download mockups and they show the detailed options view and the download splash in the new template as well.

Community Page Mockup

Jef did a kick-ass job on this mockup, and he worked very closely with Sijis and me as he iterated on the design, posting revisions in IRC and discussing them with us real-time, then making changes based on our discussion and posting another iteration (so on and so forth.) He also picked the right color for it – magenta is the Fedora “friends” color. The green on the features page will probably have to be changed to “features orange” and the orange on the downloads page to “First green.” One cool component to this design is the idea of a watermark-style Flickr group/tag gallery behind the much larger, masked photo of Fedora community members. Jef also integrated the Fedora microblog feed, and made our current join graphics look a whole lot nicer!

Other mentionable items

fedoraproject.org redesign in staging

Sijis set up a staging environment for the redesign at http://stg.fedoraproject.org. Right now it has the base template with HTML & CSS Sijis and I worked on, but none of the new design meat I’ve showcased above… we’re working on it! (If you’re interested in helping… pop into #fedora-websites on irc.freenode.net and let’s talk!) So watch our staging environment; as we check in content it’ll appear within an hour or so of checkin.

Download splash system

Another cool development Sijis made was a functioning download splash system! This was a feature we had to drop in the http://get.fedoraproject.org redesign for Fedora 13 because there wasn’t enough time to implement. Sijis figured out a way to do it with Javascript, making it a much lighter and impactful feature – way to go! While there’s still some issues to be worked out as I understand from IRC today, you can try it out now by clicking on a download link at http://get.fedoraproject.org.

Embedded fonts!

We’ve got free and open souce fonts Comfortaa and Cantarell embedded in the page, so you’ll note all the mockups use Cantarell as the base font – and the feedback we’ve gotten on the use of Cantarell thus far, by the way, has been overwhelmingly positive.

And yet even more…

But it will have to wait for another blog post. We’ve got some really amazing updates on the fedoracommunity.org project, including some super-slick jQuery-based javascript from new Fedora design team member Marc Stewart!

Where the action is at

If you want to jump in on this project or just learn more about it:

• Our project page on the wiki is a great place to start.
• Pull up a virtual chair in #fedora-websites on irc.freenode.org and poke me (mizmo), Sijis (sijis), or Jef (Schendje) and chat us up!

Filed under: Fedora, Fedora Design Team, Websites

This post is being cross-posted on Mackenzie’s blog.

Given Terri’s recent post about the same few women always being speakers, I thought this would be a good place to write about how one conference I help out with, Ohio LinuxFest, has tried to expand their array of women speakers. For those interested in pretty graphs, I’ve been graphing women speaker proportions at various LinuxFests on the GeekFeminism Wiki. This post was co-authored with Moose J. Finklestein, the Content Chair.

Some conference organisers will say “we didn’t get any submissions from women” to explain the lack of women on their stages. As of two years ago, the Ohio LinuxFest was in that category. With a little outreach effort, and embracing diversity as a core value, the Ohio LinuxFest has successfully recruited more women to share their experience at OLF.

How’d we do? While last year only five of the speakers at Ohio LinuxFest were women, out of a total of 31, this year 14 of the 38 speakers are women. That’s a third of the conference speaking slots! One of the two keynoters is a woman. There were 107 talk proposals for the 27 general speaking slots. Before anyone tries to suggest that we simply took them all, it should be noted that a full 48% of the proposals for talks categorised as not assuming high levels of prior knowledge (making them suitable for the most attendees) were from women.

We believe that much of this success is attributed to community outreach. This year, we contacted Ubuntu Women, Debian Women, LinuxChix, DevChix, and the FSF’s Women’s Caucus mailing list about the call for presentations, and did it have an effect!

Recognising the various concerns women speakers can face, we tried to specifically address potential issues in the email sent to women-focused mailing lists. Some of these known issues include lack of confidence in new speakers, not being clear what the intended audience is, or the “imposter syndrome,” where someone doesn’t recognize that they are qualified to speak on a topic. The woman to woman dialog made the difference.

We wanted to make sure people weren’t refraining from submitting because they lack confidence in their technical abilities (an excuse we’d heard before), so we explained the attendees’ demographics, hoping to get more proposals that would fill the gap we had for user-aimed talks. Ohio LinuxFest has everything from home desktop users who started using Ubuntu a week ago (or even that day!) to seasoned system administrators who love Slackware, Gentoo, or NetBSD. Nevertheless, beginner proposals have tended toward introduction to development topics, not leaving enough for people who want to be users, not developers. We also made sure to mention that it’s a great crowd who is very welcoming of first-time speakers.

Women are involved with more than just speaking at the Ohio LinuxFest. Beth Lynn Eicher has been actively involved as a director for 6 years now, and the current staff, all volunteers, is about 35% female.

The Ohio LinuxFest takes pains to create a weekend conference friendly to all people, not just women. The diversity statement includes gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, and even operating system — folks who don’t use Linux are just as welcome as those who love it. There are regularly talks about or including BSDs, interoperability in heterogeneous environments, and cross platform free software.

Additionally, all speakers are instructed to keep the content of their presentations clean. The Ohio LinuxFest bills itself as a family friendly conference and aims to keep it that way. As an effort to make a positive effect with the community at large, the Ohio LinuxFest will host the second annual Diveristy in Open Source Workshop on September 12, 2010.

Looking at the growing trend of more female influence on the OhioLinuxFest we’d like to see it be the leader for more women to attend and become more involved with other free software interests.

Practical advice for rolling out your own community event.

A few days after we arrived in Japan, Sarah Allen and I went to the weekly hack night put on by Asakusa.rb, a meetup group in Tokyo founded by Akira Matsuda. (She blogged about it here.)

Asakusa is the neighborhood in Tokyo where we were staying. It was a fortuitous choice.

The first night we were there, my friend Iku and I walked to a sento – and old-style Japanese bath. (Note: bathhouses in Japan don’t have the same connotation that they do in the U.S.) It was incredibly relaxing, after 12 hours on the plane, to wash and sit in the hot water. According to Iku, who’s Japanese, traditional sentos are hard to find in Japan these days. Asakusa is evidently one of the few places in Tokyo you still can.

So I liked it a lot. The rest of Tokyo sometimes felt like an entire city made out of Times Square. Asakusa, on the other hand, is wonderful mix of residential zones, old-style buildings, and modern-ADD-blinky commercial areas.

The second afternoon we were there, I went out to find a grocery store and randomly stumbled across this gigantic gate, called the Kaminarimon. I did also eventually find the grocery store with its $5-a-piece peaches.

I posted the picture to Twitter, and Shintaro Kakutani saw it, recognized it, and invited me to their meetup. So Sarah and I took the subway a few stops down on Tuesday night. I brought my laptop, prepared to hack, but the schedule was more oriented towards the “meet” part of meetup.

• 19:45 Introductions
• 20:15 Drinking

Here’s the aftermath:

Akira Matsuda & Shintaro Kakutani BEER BEER BEER MEAT BEER

You guessed it... MOAR BEER

It was fantastic. I am told there is usually more hacking, but beer is a great social lubricant. I’m incredibly self-conscious about speaking Japanese, because I know I’m not very good. But somehow, when I have beer, I don’t care as much.

Aaron Patterson, in his RubyKaigi talk, said that people are interpreters with very forgiving parsers. As it turns out, he’s right! So even though I speak horrible Japanese, my meaning got through most of the time.

I’m eternally grateful to all the Asakusa.rb folks for not outright laughing at me whenever I opened my mouth and said something inappropriate or totally nonsensical. Which I’m sure I did often.

Sarah and I had such a good time, there and at RubyKaigi later in the week, that we decided to ask Asakusa.rb to be officially friendly with SF Ruby. Akira sort of had to say yes. After all, we gave him Ghiradelli chocolate.

So now we are sister meetups, and Sarah and I are official members of Asakusa.rb (we’re even on their twitter list). Next time: hacking and beer together. Hopefully in New Orleans.

Until then, ありがとうございます Asakusa.rb, for making me feel so welcome in a place that otherwise felt a little alien. Geek culture really does transcend the language barrier.

Caroline’s Identity Crisis

Remember Caroline Casual-User? After speaking with some of you after the last blog post, I think I may have misrepresented her in terms of Fedora’s target user. (The LUNIX joke was really bad, serving only to confound.) Hopefully folks from the Fedora Board who were involved in the creation of the target user base definition could also clarify what their original intention was in case I’m not understanding the intent or not communicating it as effectively as I could again. In either case, I would like to explore who Caroline is, and who she isn’t, in the hopes of at least bringing a bit more awareness that we’re probably not all talking about the same woman, if not to go so far as make it fairly clear who she actually is .

Caroline’s Origins

First, let’s look at the target user of the the default Fedora desktop:

This type of consumer is someone we think can immediately benefit from the usefulness and elegance of free software. This type of consumer is also someone who can be persuaded to participate or contribute to Fedora. Consumers who don’t fit this minimum profile, though, might very well be pleased with what we provide. We tend to favor consumers who are interested in taking a step toward collaboration. [...]

• Voluntary Linux consumer
• Computer-friendly
• Likely collaborator
• General productivity user

A slightly-different version of this statement from a mailing list announcement has also been widely-quoted, so let’s take a look at that too:

We found four defining characteristics that we believe best describe the Fedora distribution’s target audience: Someone who

1. is voluntarily switching to Linux,
2. is familiar with computers, but is not necessarily a hacker or developer,
3. is likely to collaborate in some fashion when something’s wrong with Fedora, and
4. wants to use Fedora for general productivity, either using desktop applications or a Web browser.

Okay. So we’ve reviewed the source material and it’s fresh in our heads. Now let’s walk through what I believe are some misconceptions about Caroline based on comments to my last blog post, and read them while referencing this source material.

Myths about Caroline

Caroline doesn’t care about technology

Caroline is supposed to be a “computer-friendly” person who is “voluntarily switching to Linux.” It may well be a flawed assumption, but I’m not sure folks who aren’t interested in technology even really understand what Linux is, nevermind would voluntarily switch to using it or describe themselves as computer-friendly.

Caroline isn’t willing to give back.

The Board’s definition and communications about it were pretty careful to point out this isn’t the case. Actually, one of the four key attributes of the target user is “likely collaborator.” The the user base definition says, “We tend to favor consumers who are interested in taking a step toward collaboration.”

“We found four defining characteristics that we believe best describe the Fedora distribution’s target audience,” states the the mailing list announcement, “Someone who [..] is likely to collaborate in some fashion when something’s wrong with Fedora.”

As Deb pointed out, “Today’s Carolines could become tomorrow’s Connies.”

Caroline only asks for mp3 and Flash support.

Well. I think do Caroline probably cares a lot more about her music collection and being able to be Rick-rolled and watch the latest Autotune the News rather than mp3 and flash technology specifically. (Although from my own guesses about Caroline, she may well be the type to write her own songs and share them or post video tutorials and video blogs – she doesn’t strike me as a straight-out consumer.) The Board-written, detailed description of her computer usage does include “locating and viewing/playing media.”

That being said, yes, Caroline has an issue if she can’t listen to her 50 gigs of music albums or see the new Snoop Dogg cameo in Katy Perry’s latest music video. The problem isn’t insurmountable, and Caroline is comfortable with computers and interested in technology, so I think she will probably find a (admittedly PITA) work-around to do these things before technologies like webm make this silliness unnecessary.

So just who is Caroline? Let’s play a game!

I think it might be helpful if we think through specific examples of places we may or may not be likely to find Caroline. So, are you ready to play……

---

Is Caroline someone you could easily meet……

• While attending LinuxCon?
• In between sessions in the hallway at GUADEC or Akademy?
• While eating lunch at FOSDEM?
• Waiting in line to pick up your badge at USENIX LISA conference?
• Sitting next to you at your local LUG meeting?

GUADEC 2006, my own photo

I think that the folks above are most likely to be in Pamela’s camp, and in some cases Connie or Nancy’s camp. Linux is a big enough part of these folks’ lives that they’ve taken the trouble to pay or find funding for a flight and lodging, they’ve taken time away from their family and perhaps even vacation time from work in order to spend at least a day if not a whole week at a conference revolving around it. (Or in the case of LUG attendees, an evening away from home missing dinner with the family once a month or weekly.) I just don’t think it is possible for these folks to be Carolines.

---

Is Caroline someone you could easily meet……

• Standing in line behind you at your local farmers’ market?
• At the Otakon anime conference?
• At the community center studio art class you take on the weekends?
• Shopping at the Sunday church flea market?
• At a Blue Hills Hiking Group meetup?
• At your local pub?
• Sitting next in the row behind you at the movie theater waiting for the latest movie blockbuster to start?

“Farmer’s Market” by Emily Prachthauser. Used under a CC-BY 2.0 license.

Isn’t it kind of a crap shoot? I know folks I would consider to be Carolines who each individually might go to one or two of these types of events, but I think I would be very lucky to have the chance to meet a Caroline just by going to any of these events. Unfortunately, I think maybe a lot of you came away from my last blog post thinking I meant to say that a Caroline could easily be picked out at any of these types of events.

---

Is Caroline someone you could easily meet……

• At the SXSW conference?
• Hanging around at PAX?
• Sitting next to you at a TED technology talk?
• Attending an ACM CHI conference?
• Building cool things at a MakerFaire?
• Chilling out at a hackfest at RailsConf?
• Through her awesome Vimeo channel, where she posts weekly Gimp tutorials?
• Browing the aisles of your local electronics store?
• Working as a technology coordinator at a local school?

“pre-panel get together” by Ed Schipul, taken at SXSW’08. Used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license.

Outcome likely, yes, IMHO. These are folks who are comfortable with computers, clearly love technology, but whose lives do not center around Fedora and/or Linux. (Instead, their lives and/or passions center around MakerBots or RepRaps, Adobe products (or Gimp!), Playstations or Nintendos, technology-related research, user interface design, blogging, building awesome web applications, maintaining computers for their students, etc. etc. ….) These are not folks who would identify themselves as Linux contributors, but whom are probably a far cry from needing instruction in how to use a computer mouse or what an MP3 is, and whom are very likely to value the freedoms using free software affords them. (They may already use free software!)

If you’ll humor me the effort, keep these folks in mind and then re-read Caroline’s yellow speech bubble at the top of this blog post. Maybe it makes more sense what I was trying to do… if you replace the “coffeeshops and parties” with Makerbots, Playstations, or building kick-ass web applications.

---

Who is getting left out?

So, at least in this blog post, we’re probably not talking about your grandparents’ friend Etna who stands behind you in line at your local supermarket, has three cats, and always confuses you with your younger sibling. We’re likely not talking about elementary school age children in a third-world country who struggle just to find clean water to drink. We’re probably not talking about the person who drives the subway car or bus that helps get you to work in the morning, or the woman who owns and operates your favorite neighborhood restaurant.

These folks are probably not Carolines. They’ll need a different persona. Whether or not we’re meant to or should consider targeting them, I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

What do you think?

Filed under: Fedora

Let me paint a picture here in words, because I haven’t done that in a while.

I’m in my apartment in Raleigh. It’s not the best apartment in the world (indeed, it has been described as a “student ghetto” – but the bathroom works now, really!) but it’s cheap and it’s a place to live and it’s got internet and I’m not usually here in any case. I’m in my bedroom with the door open and the AC off, with a half-eaten bag of shrimp chips in front of my keyboard and a pile of dishes to be washed beside me on the desk. A guitar book is open on the floor beside me; on the other side, also on the floor, my keys and wallet and a t-shirt lie in a pile. Housekeeping: not one of my priorities.

I’ve got a whiteboard (1/3rd of a giant sheet of melamine paneling from Home Depot – less than $11 for 3 big whiteboards!) leaning against the drawers with an October/November schedule and a partial to-do list on it. I’ve been cranking through that list all day. Then this afternoon I stopped, put on some 70’s music, and rummaged around the kitchen throwing things into and out of the fridge while I cranked out some gumbo (on the stove now, waiting for the rice to cook) and started defrosting tofu for a curry I’ll make probably this weekend when I finish eating the wok o’ gumbo. Until recently, I was sprawled out on the couch with a pot of spaghetti in one arm and a fork in the other hand, and I’m still going back to that pot and shoveling another forkful of spaghetti and tomato sauce into my mouth whenever I realize I’m hungry.

I also munch shrimp chips. Once in a while I leap up and walk to the kitchen and stir the gumbo so the bottom doesn’t scorch. In the meantime, I’m booking tons of travel for the fall – Cape Town, Rochester, Arlington, and more.

Ah, gumbo is done. I now have a giant wok o’ gumbo sitting on the stove. It’s not particularly elegant; frozen gumbo mix, canned tomatoes, rice, broth, seasonings all boiled in a formerly-nonstick wok that now requires oil and constant stirring not to burn things. The gumbo is spicy (of course it is; I cooked it, so I quadrupled the amount of cayenne pepper called for).

Wait, I’m not hungry any more. Put pasta pot in fridge, close chips, drink water (I am dehydrated). Tired, but not sleepy yet; even though I do have a sleep debt I’ve been catching up with, it’s barely 7:30pm and I know I won’t be able to sleep if I try to do so now. A giant to-do list stares me in the face, but I don’t have the ability to tell what’s important on it at the moment. What I need right now is motion. What I need to do right now is unpack the car.

Longer-term: I need to meet people here I can hang out and talk with – more than the few I already know from work. Or… dancing. Yes, dancing. Looks like there’s blues on Friday and swing on Saturday and Sunday here; good to know

Aha. I think I have enough of a backtrace on my brain now to know what to do next. Also, I found my cell phone charger! Braindumps… they’re sometimes good ideas.

I’m playing around with some diagrams for explaining MVCC that I’ll be posting here over the next few days. Not sure if I’ll end up giving up on slides and just use a whiteboard for the talk. I made an illustrated shared buffers deck to go along with Greg Smith’s excellent talk on shared buffers a while back. This is the beginning of a talk that I hope will emulate that.

Here are my first few slides, showing the system-defined columns. The next few slides will describe optimizations PostgreSQL has for managing the side effects of our pessimistic rollback strategy, and reducing IO during vacuuming and index updates.

Related posts:

1. Postgres mailing list traffic over time
2. FSM, visibility map and new VACUUM awesomeness
3. PgCon 2010 – PL/Parrot, Simulated Annealing, Exclusion Constraints, Postgres-XC

I am pleased with how these turned out. (The cookies, not the blurry photo.)



Hopefully they'll help us raise some money for Child's Play this weekend!

I was the first woman at any DrupalCON, the only woman in Antwerp. Until the brouhaha over the keynote, I never really thought about why I went there in the first place. But the decision to travel there was triggered by a tiny and important event, so I'd like to share it.

I had been communicating back and forth with Matt Westgate about some e-commerce functionality. At the end of one of his emails, he tacked on the following:

PS - You headed to Belgium?

This question wasn't a part of an outreach initiative to involve women in open source. I doubt he questioned that my interest might be affected by my gender. It was simply, "we're having an interesting conversation that would be even easier to have in person". Before I read that email, the thought of traveling to DrupalCON hadn't crossed my mind. But my response to that simple question was to make it happen! And thus my life was changed.

But five years later in San Francisco, when the number of women in attendance had risen from 1 to 300, I was settling into a BoF session when I was presented with another innocuous question:

This is a technical BoF. Are you sure this is where you intended to be?

This question was not intentionally harmful. It was an offer of help, in a tone of "hey, do you need some help finding your way to a session you might enjoy more?". But this "help" was based on the unconfirmed likelihood that I might not belong in a technical session. If I was new, I might have doubted my own aptitude and diminished my participation.

This post is not about lambasting the BoF guy or calling out the similar encounters we encounter every day, such as asking if I'm on the documentation team, a designer, or just there with my partner. This happens regularly and quite cordially, usually perpetrated by someone who you wouldn't call 'sexist'. But good or bad, tiny exchanges make up our community as a whole, and have a much broader impact. What if Matt, without any derogatory judgment, questioned my interest in showing up in Antwerp? What if he hadn't bothered to ask? Five years later, would I be contributing to Drupal, running a company that employs other Drupal contributors, and helping to support the local Drupal community?

More importantly, what if more people reach out to others in similar ways? How many others would there be out there doing more good for Drupal? Setting aside the topic of what is/isn't "offensive", how do we focus on being more inspirational, and asking questions instead of making assumptions?

Wow. Working in an office is… awesome. (In some ways, at least!) You run into people! They talk with you! You can print and scan things at decent machines, and there’s water and snacks and meeting rooms and really big whiteboards! The AC always works and there’s fun stuff going on and you can turn around and talk to people.

I ran into Mike Esser on the way to my car this afternoon and he told me about his trip to Utah to film the Open High School. Max turned around several times during the day and just commented on things and I heard them. There were bananas in the snack room! My desk has a keyboard tray! People walk by and wave!

Oh. And editors? They’re awesome. Bascha Harris took my opensource.com article on POSSE and did things to it, and the tiny tweaks make all the writing so much better (and grammatically correct). I’ve never had a real editor before. My writing will probably dramatically improve since I’m now writing an article for opensource.com at least every two weeks.

I sound more excited and less exhausted than I feel right now, to be honest – trying to write the stuff I’d like to think about in order to stay somewhat focused. Tomorrow I’m going to start by working from my apartment, without being on IRC and such, in order to stay focused and crank out some big things (POSSE-related) that need to get done before I catch up on all the little stuff (which is what I did most of today; I feel like I’ve gotten a sense of things again now).

I write in order to regain my equilibrium.

I’m excited to speak tomorrow at the Bootstrapper’s Breakfast, a monthly event held in SF and other bay area cities.  There’s a lot of talk about fund-raising and venture-backed business these days, but there are also a lot of people just making their businesses happen with a series of small steps. I’ll give a very short overview of my startup experience and what I’m up to now and then I understand we’ll spend most of the time in Q&A.

My first startup business was CoSA, the Company of Science & Art, begun with the goal of melding art and tech in the form of interactive multimedia delivered on CD-ROMs.  It was 1990, we thought this cutting edge tech would change consumer habits of reading magazines or watching TV.  We were naïve and dashed headlong into a unproven market with competition from the likes of Time Warner who could afford to lose a few million dollars on producing a CD-ROMs that might not sell.  When our initial funds ran out, we consulted using the tools we had developed and self-funded ourselves to create shrink wrapped graphics software.  We pivoted a few times and ended up creating After Effects, for which the company was acquired by Aldus, and subsequently Adobe.

My newest venture is Mightyverse (originally founded by my partners Paul Lundahl and Glen Janssens). As with CoSA, I joined pre-product launch and arguably we’re still at that point.  Last year we made our database of native language videos and translations available on mightyverse.com — our belief is that the business needs to be on mobile platforms, but with a web service as a necessary component, the website made sense to release first.  We’ve been doing what I call “use case testing” for about a year using a beta iPhone app.  Just last week, we’ve kicked off a series of market tests starting with MightySushi a mobile app that works on iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

With Mightyverse some distance from profitability, I’m growing an engineering team inside Blazing Cloud, a software development consulting company where we build products for other people.  We do training, as well as mobile and web development.

Tomorrow I’ll talk a bit about what I’ve learned over the last year, why I think it is a good idea to keep the consulting business separate from the product business, what worked, what didn’t and my daily struggle to make good decisions on how and when to spend time and money and still have fun.

We always need to keep in mind that every choice and every decision that we make, no matter how sound, will please some people, but not everyone. “You can’t please everyone” is a saying that you hear all the time, but I remember being in high school when the impact of this statement really hit me. At that young age, I vowed to think about decisions in a different light with a component of any decision being to understand which people I cared about pleasing, and more importantly, which people could jump in a lake if they didn’t like my decision. This dynamic applies to everyday life and isn’t unique to community managers, but it does come up often when making decisions on behalf of the community.

A few tips:

• Think about the impact of your decisions on the most important contributors in your community. Don’t let trolls and chronic whiners who will never contribute in a meaningful way dictate solutions.
• When a few people want a change, make sure that the change would benefit the community as a whole. Don’t let a vocal minority push a decision that isn’t in the best interest of the whole community.
• Look past your preferences to embrace solutions that benefit the community, even if they aren’t your personal favorites. Do the right thing for the community, not the individual (even when that individual is you).

Additional Reading

• Involve your members in decision making
• Musings on Community Ownership
• Maintaining a Successful Corporate Community

Part of a series of community manager tips blog posts.

Photo by Zen Sutherland used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

Sharing is good

I’ve known Dan Mosedale a long time. He was already at Netscape working in the browser realm when I arrived in the fall of 1994. In fact, of all the people working on Mozilla and browsers in the world today, I think Dan was probably the first. Not the person with the longest continual history (Dan has taken some breaks), but the first chronologically.

I got to know Dan well when we both joined Mozilla full time in 1999. We had both been working on Mozilla part-time since before its founding, Dan on the IT/infrastructure side and me on the MPL and organizational aspects. We both joined Brendan at Mozilla full time at the same time in early 1999, as did Mike Shaver. In that era the very small group of us managing the project were known as “mozilla.org staff.”

In the next few years mozilla.org staff (which also came to include Myk, Asa and Marcia) made a number of decisions about the Mozilla project that we know put our jobs at Netscape/ AOL at risk. Each time we would all look at each other and make sure we understood what we were doing. We would plan how to keep mozilla.org up and running. In this we had support from many other long time Mozilla contributors who are with Mozilla today, including Chris Hofmann who ultimately became the liaison between mozilla.org staff and Netscape/ AOL after our decisions did cause me to be fired (technically “laid off”).

A couple years ago I mentioned to Dan that I had decided to learn to ice skate, since there’s a skating rink near my house. Dan suggested I try hockey, that despite its appearance it can be much less risky and worrisome than figure skating. I recall vividly his comment that once he has all his gear on, falling became mostly irrelevant. I’ve remembered this each time I’ve fallen without pads — the ice can be hard. Not every fall hurts, but the idea of falling is inhibiting.

Saturday night was Give Hockey a Try Day, with a session at the local rink. The Northern California Women’s Hockey League, a volunteer organization focused on getting women to play and enjoy hockey, takes this seriously. Members donate their gear for the session. They invite women of all skill levels and all ages. (One current coach had no idea how to skate when she started.) Members come with their gear, members come to help neophytes get dressed, member coaches come and get everyone out on the ice. In two hours you go from never having worn hockey skates or held a hockey stick to passing and scrimmaging. Poor quality scrimmaging for sure, but also sometimes hysterically funny as a result. The great thing is that once you’re thinking about the puck, you stop worry about the skating.

In Dan’s honor I rammed myself into the wall to make myself fall. He was right — it was barely noticeable, and not remotely inhibiting.

The NCWHL folks were universally positive and supportive. They end the event with a gear sale so that newcomers can get somewhat worn-out gear for very little money and get started in league play without a lot of expense. I travel too much and have far too little time to add anything structured to my life but still love the sense of racing around the ice not worried about knees and elbows and jaws.

The evening also reminded me of how astonishing people can be when they love what they are doing. As Esther Dyson keeps reminding me, a vibrant civil society is an awesome thing.

This post entitled Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men was making the rounds when I got back from camping yesterday. It's a "just do it" rallying cry, which is not unreasonable (more women trying will likely result in more succeeding) but one that's made a bit blindly, unaware of some of the barriers that those who try are facing.

There's already an excellent response out there which says most of what I wanted to say: Too Few Women in Tech? Stop Playing the Blame Game. Basically, quit trying to blame it all on men or women or society or math test scores and try working together to create solutions. All of these things (and more) are to blame, but pointing it out isn't nearly as helpful as finding work-arounds.

But there's still one thing I'd like to pull out of the original article:

We beg women to come and speak. (...) And you know what? A lot of the time they say no. Because they are literally hounded to speak at every single tech event in the world because they are all trying so hard to find qualified women to speak at their conference.

Let me tell you a story. One year, it was announced that one student in my department was going to get a special job. Over the months afterwards, I heard a lot of grumbling. The problem was not that said student couldn't do the job: the person was an excellent candidate. The problem was that the student had been the only candidate. The university had quite a number of other talented students, and they had not been made aware of the upcoming position or given a chance to apply. The person who got the job was the same person regularly nominated for special scholarships, invited to special events, seemingly given first right of refusal in many other projects. The upper academia equivalent of a teacher's pet.

The problem was that the university saw themselves as having a single exceptional candidate, when in fact they had probably 10, 30, or more.

I think this is what's starting to happen when it comes to women in tech. Sure, there might not be enough of us. Sure, it's no where near the 50% of the population. But that doesn't mean you get to ask the 5 women you know or have seen speak before and then sigh and say "it's too bad no women want to participate." Like the university, you're probably missing at least 10 times as many who are qualified, but haven't been quite so heaped with honours so they're harder to find.

If all the women you're asking are all busy, it's not necessarily a sign that all possible excellent candidates are busy; it could just be a sign that you're looking in the same place as everyone else.

Because I interact with a lot of other techcnical women, I know there are many good people who just don't hear about speaking opportunities. And others have so many requests they can't handle them all.

So in the spirit of being useful, here's some wider places you should look if you're trying to find some great women speakers. Maybe not all of them have given keynotes and been interviewed a dozen times, but they're still interesting people who could enhance your event:

• The Grace Hopper 2010 schedule includes a many women speakers on a number of topics. (I'm on the open source track!) I found the calibre of speakers at GHC 09 to be especially high, so it's a great place to start when looking for a great speaker. Feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of candidates? Talk to @ghc and ask for help making the right connections.



• Geekspeakr.com is intended to help events find technical women speakers and vice versa. You can search by keywords or just browse around. These folk have all signed up saying they're willing to speak!



• My university Women in Science and Engineering group ran the Carleton Celebration of Women in Science and Engineering last spring, and I was especially impressed with the the technical speakers during the day (i.e. before 5pm) because they were presenting graduate level research and ideas in ways that were accessible and fascinating. These women are definitely a cut above when it comes to science communicators!
  
  
• There are many women's groups around you can ask. I'm a member of Systers (originally for women in SYStems, now a more general women in technology group) and Linuxchix (a group for women and allies interested in Linux or other open source). But there's lots more such groups.

And that's only scratching the surface of places I'd look if I wanted to find good female speakers. Need some more help? Just ask!

Earlyish this morning I arrived in Melbourne, Australia. For once I was aware and intent on the window as the plane nosed down through the cloud cover, then past it. Jewel green hilly checkerboard; I wanted to caress it, feel the moist fuzz of the moss under my fingers.

Danielle was kind enough to pick me up from the airport about sixteen hours ago. It's now 11:55pm and I haven't napped yet today, so I may yet beat jet lag on this trip! Factors: at least two prior weeks of uneven and inadequate sleep (I slept nearly the entire first, 5-hour flight), alcohol and melatonin (for something like 8 hours of sleep on the second flight), and caffeine (a "short flat white" coffee thingy around 10am).

Also today: ate a great "vego brekky" (vegetarian full-English-style breakfast) and some nice Thai curry, met Steph, bought a Lebara SIM card so I have an Australian mobile number, and tried to veg out and catch up on internetting while sitting in a warm living room, looking out at a wide winter sky. Pale blue shaded into bright, ridiculously fluffy clouds moving to and fro when I wasn't looking, over rooftops and brick.

It sounds so simple once I say it, that paying intense attention to external sensory stimuli (light, sound, wind, touch, colors, hush) opens me up so I can hear my internal sensations too, physical and emotional, raw. It aligns me. But how did I not know this till this summer? Or how did I forget?

Tomorrow I aim to hang with Danielle & her pals, and walk around the city a bit on my own. Wednesday, a pre-Worldcon pub crawl in the evening is my only plan. A few things a day, no hurry. I aim to circumvent the Fear of Missing Out, Fear of Missing Something. My bigger fear is missing the experience I'm having by skimming along it, hydroplaning in haste. No control, direction by default, and seeing only my own reflection along a surface.

Almost every time I talk to Esther Dyson about Russia, she speaks of the importance of building civil society, of developing a world where people don’t look to government and formal “non-governmental organizations” for all the answers. Here’s a paragraph she wrote about civil society in an article about the Feb 2010 US State Department Tech Delegation to Russia:

Civil society is not just politics: it is a restaurant giving unused food to the poor. It is a for-profit company such as Twitter providing its service free to rich and poor alike (even though advertisers will focus on the rich). It is successful entrepreneurs mentoring start-up entrepreneurs, and NGOs engaging not just with the government, but also with commercial outfits to get support for activities that will address vexing social problems such as maternal and infant mortality.

I was reminded of Esther’s focus on civil society at the CrisisCamp event Friday night.

There are a lot of barriers to helping from a distance when a disaster strikes. Today information technology, the marvels of the Internet, and new tools focused on crowdsourcing and crowd-sourced data provide some new mechanisms. And so there are groups of people trying to develop actionable data out of the heartbreaking SMS messages (a partial example: “village of 200 houses, 100% destroyed. 100% crops destroyed. Village still flooded.”)

There’s no official government involvement. There’s not necessarily any direct connection between the people working at this and the villages or individuals affected by the floor. There is however civil society in action: see a problem, do something. Form an association (Ben Franklin formed a surprising number of associations), virtual or formal. Build a tool — or a product. Reach out. Don’t wait for government to set up a special official organization — plunge in and do things.

The degree to which citizens believe they can, can, and do affect their own lives and the lives of others is a pretty potent marker of the nature of a society.

Aw man, as soon as I say no more library books, I realize the new Last Apprentice novel is out, and my local library has a copy.

THAT's the last one this year, I SWEAR.

Also, mackatlaw took me to his favorite comic book store today and I got Serenity: Better Days... because I'd already bought things for everyone else in my family today. I should get a little something for myself occasionally. Right?

Speaking of reading, I'm supposed to start tracking the number of minutes Will reads every day on a calendar and send it to school with him every Monday. Hoooo boy.

I ordered a copy of The Hunger Games through his Scholastic Club. Hopefully his teacher will realize I'm not getting it for /him/.

Robby just finished the Percy Jackson series. He seemed to like it. :)

August is almost over: reality check time.

Books: I just finished Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, bringing my JRI count for the year up to 6. In the next four months I have to read six more to reach my original goal, or 12 more to reach my revised goal.

TV: There is no way I'm going to achieve my original goal of finishing Season 3 of three different TV shows, so right now I'm just going to focus on finishing up Season 3 of Doctor Who before the end of the year. I've got seven episodes to go.

I did watch one movie this week - the Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line. I ought to incorporate my film viewing into my goals for next year as well.

Voting is open to elect the new committee of Linux Users of Victoria.

Members may vote online at http://members.luv.asn.au/

This is the 2nd post in my Elections series.

[The first, was about my voting intention in the recent federal election. A week after the election we still don't have a government. The Australian Labor Party continues to govern in caretaker mode despite losing the majority it won at the last election. The hung parliament now consists of 4 independents and one representative from the Greens.

Seems my vote 'counted' more than it has before, as Melbourne is now officially a marginal seat, and the outcome was decided on preferences. It is no longer one of the safest seats in the country.  Does this mean we might finally get some attention? A bit like Denison, Melbourne has suffered from a lack of attention. Whilst we do have more than our fair share of hospitals, we also have a tv / telecommunications blackspot in North and West Melbourne, but not being 'Rural' it was pretty hard to get anyone to notice. Maybe that will change. ]

Anyway enough of #ausvotes - it's now time for some #luv election drama.

The Candidates

Office Bearers
 President: No candidate
 Vice President: Daniel Jitnah
 Treasurer: Wen Lin
 Secretary: Jiri Baum
Ordinary Committee members:
 Donald Douwsma
 Daniel Jitnah
 Kathy Reid
 Ben Sturmfels
 Hamish Taylor

I did not accept re-nomination for President. Unfortunately, neither did the other nominees, Ben Sturmfels and Ben Dechrau. This means we can nominate someone from the floor at the AGM, or the committee can elect a chair to be President from amongst themselves. Constitutionally, I'm not sure which is required, but perhaps someone can advise on the night.

The Annual General Meeting takes place at 7pm on Tuesday 7th September, at the Evan Burge Lecture Theatre at Trinity College, University of Melbourne, Royal Parade, Parkville. For full details, including a map, see http://luv.asn.au/2010/09/07

President's Report v0.1

For the record, I first became involved with Linux Users Victoria in 2005 when I heard they were bidding for linux.conf.au to come to Melbourne. I volunteered to help, but in the end, the winner was Sydney. I'd vaguely heard of LUV before that, but never been to a meeting. At LCA2006 in Dunedin I spoke to a few people and 'took over' organising a bid to win LCA for Melbourne. There was no resistance. The rest is history. We went on to win LCA for Melbourne, and in 2008 staged one of the most successful conferences in the event's history. Later that year, I was nominated for the Presidency of LUV, and elected unopposed and was re-elected last year. I'm sorry and disheartened I have failed to enthuse anyone enough to take my place in 2010.

Beginners Workshops

But I am deeply satisfied by our efforts to bring about the LUV beginners workshops. They are not perfect, and there is more that could be done to make them better.  Nevertheless, it's a fun place to go on the third Saturday of the month to help out, to learn something, to share what you know or just hang out with others interested in open source software. Many come seeking more structured activity - so setting up a computer lab, with hands on tutorials could be something to look at for the future. Scheduled introductory talks aimed at beginners,  have been well attended.

Library of LUV

Major Keary has continued doing book reviews, and these are now regularly posted to http://luv.asn.au. We have turned this bonanza into a distributed Library of LUV by encouraging people to return the books that have been gifted to us by publishers for review.  This may need to be streamlined in future as the 'auction' is now getting quite long. Major Keary has indicated he won't be able to continue reviewing books, and the publishers have indicated they'll be providing more e-books and less hard copies in the future. Volunteers interested in receiving free e-books for review should contact the committee.

Mailing Lists

I had hoped to see our mailing lists migrated from drstrange to our new server, tainted. However this still has not happened. The hardware is aging, and this needs to be given priority by the new committee. We also intended to migrate from Sympa to Mailman, because those now willing to invest time moderating and managing the lists were more familiar with mailman. This becomes an issue for the new committee to decide.

My failure to improve the culture of the mailing lists is personally disappointing. I do acknowledge there were more who felt no need for change, than there were those who did. In this case, my resistance was futile.

What's wrong with the lists? The quality of the lists for technical assistance and opinion is highly valued, or so I'm told. However it is the culture of superiority, and belittling those who write imperfectly, or do not follow the 'rules' and established list etiquette that I find offensive. In some cases the topics themselves have left me wondering why I'm involved in a community that tolerates and sometimes even encourages that kind of discourse. Recent threads in luv-talk reinforced my decision not to continue as president.

I do not wish to participate in the LUV mailing lists. I turn elsewhere for help with linux and other free software I use.

Software Freedom Day

Linux Users of Victoria has participated in Software Freedom Day from it's very beginning. In 2004, former president Andrew Chalmers co-ordinated CD burning and orchestrated a walk through Melbourne's streets handing out Free Software on Software Freedom Day. The walk continued into 2008.  We've been involved with events at ComputerBank, the East Melbourne Unitarian Church, twice at Melbourne's Town Hall, the Docklands community hub, and last year at the Melbourne PC club rooms at Chadstone Shopping Centre.

This year, in just a couple of weeks time on Saturday 18th September we'll be celebrating Software Freedom Day at the State Library, in the heart of Melbourne's CBD. This looks like being our biggest, most successful event to date. We have a great program of talks, workshops and short sessions lined up, as well as our Market hall bazaar of community groups sharing their schtick with each other and the public.

We need volunteers to help out on the day. http://www.sfd.org.au/melbourne/

Contact sfd_melb at identi.ca or twitter, or leave a comment here :)

So long, farewell.

I hope to redirect some of the energy I've invested in LUV over the past 5 years or so towards Drupal Melbourne and ComputerBank, and be able to join the LinuxChix at pre-luv meetups without having to worry if the projector is working or the speakers have turned up. You'll still find me on the LUV beginners list, but I'll be unsubscribing from LUV-talk and LUV-main after the AGM.

Linux Users of Victoria needs to address the fact that open source has won. It needs to find a way to meet the needs of it's long time members who've been with Linux since the beginning, but also help new users who are not also developers or sysadmins. We need to find a way to help them contribute to the community too.  Our meetings are well attended, our mailing lists are busy - our identi.ca group is small, and we have a few followers on twitter. New ways to grow our membership, and facilitate communication amongst our members is something else for the new committee to consider.

I hope I leave LUV a little better than I found it, and wish the new committee all the best as it continues to serve the association into the future.

There are reports of errors in the Wii's latest firmware update (4.2 to 4.3) around: that the Shop channel will tell the user that they need to do a System Update, and then the update will stall at about three-quarters done, and error 32022 will be reported.

32022 is supposed to be the error for not being able to reach the Nintendo servers, and the usual solution is to wait an hour or so for either their servers to come back up, or your connection to become stable. But in June/July a lot of people started reporting complete inability to upgrade due to this error. It hit us last night.

There are all kinds of arcane solutions to this around (check out AUDISIOJUNIOR's solution for arcane) but reports are that Nintendo tells people it's your ISP's fault. As best Andrew and I can tell Nintendo is right, it is your ISP's fault, at least in a way, although they aren't being very specific. There is a problem with the update (or perhaps with the update if it failed the first time) when you are using a transparent HTTP proxy. Most likely this is something your ISP set up.

Since getting your ISP to turn a transparent proxy off for you is usually something of a pain, you will probably find it fastest (although still very annoying) to connect your Wii to the 'net using a different provider.

While trying to work out what was up with Wii error 32022, I was seeing if using our Exetel 3G dongle (rather than DSL) would let us update. This means that I got reasonable working PPP chatscripts for Exetel 3G.

/etc/ppp/peers/exetel-3g:

/dev/ttyUSB0
ipparam exetel1
230400
noauth
defaultroute
connect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/chatscripts/exetel-3g"

/etc/chatscripts/exetel-3g:

ABORT 'BUSY'
ABORT 'NO CARRIER'
ABORT 'ERROR'
"" AT
OK AT&F
OK ATD*99***1#
CONNECT ""

These are an unholy combination of ideas from Ubuntu Living and etbe, since I am about 5 years too young to have had to learn the Hayes command set as a requirement to get on the 'net. (Well, a year too young perhaps, Andrew knows it.)

Setting up network address translation is left as an exercise for the reader.

A couple of weeks ago in my Fotoxx article I discussed using Fotoxx to create panoramas.

But for panoramas bigger than a couple of images, you're much better off using the Linux panorama app: Hugin.

Hugin is very impressive, and much too capable to be summarized in a single short article, so I'm planning three. This week's article is a basic introduction: Painless Panorama Stitching with Hugin.

(This is a guest post by Asheesh Laroia of OpenHatch, an “open source involvement engine.” OpenHatch is a website and ongoing project to help new contributors find their place in free software projects. A few months ago, he imported some bugs in KDE’s bug tracker into the OpenHatch volunteer opportunity finder. I invited him to write about it for my blog. OpenHatch has its own blog, too.)

KDE is doing something wonderful with its Junior Jobs. These are issues (often small feature requests) that are appropriate for a first-time contributor. When maintainers create these opportunities, they take information that would otherwise be trapped in their head — how easy or hard an issue is — and make it available as hint to new contributors. Conveniently, creating a “Junior Job” doesn’t take any special work: maintainers just have to find the relevant bug in KDE Bugzilla and add the junior-jobs keyword.

But KDE Bugzilla isn’t necessarily a friendly welcome mat. Probably everyone reading this post can remember a time when Bugzilla seemed like a difficult, arcane tool. Bugzilla works well (enough) as an interface for project maintainers to share the status of what they’re working on with each other.

But imagine you are a prospective contributor. Aim your web browser at the list of junior jobs. (To get that link, I went to KDE Bugzilla and clicked the “Junior Jobs” link on the left side.) This is what I saw when writing this post:

Here are some questions I might have as a new contributor (and some commentary as myself):

• What do “wis” and “UNCO” mean?
• Who is JJ? (Maybe that’s a person’s initials; maybe he or she plans to fix it.)
• What project are these bugs in? (I can guess from the assignee….)
• Where do I get the source code? (The wrong answer might lead the new contributor to submit a patch against the most recent release; that patch might not apply against trunk.)
• If I get started on this, who can help me when I get stuck? (Otherwise, a new contributor might make an effort, become confused by something, and fall away.)

I like to joke that bug trackers say lots of information about what the problem is, but they don’t provide any information on how to solve it.

We at OpenHatch noticed that a great number of projects were in a similar situation: they label bugs as “easy”, “bitesize”, or “Junior Jobs” and point first-time contributors straight at the bug tracker. So we created what we call the volunteer opportunity finder to help people find something to work on. It wakes up late at night to download issues from bug trackers representing hundreds of projects. (Since OpenHatch is itself a free software project, we also import the bitesize bugs from our own bug tracker.)

When you browse the available issues, you can click on the project name and see its page on OpenHatch. (We make one for every project that someone says they’ve contributed to, or where we’ve imported bugs for it.) The pages showcase the people who have listed themselves as possible mentors. Contributors can also write instructions or suggestions for how to get involved; for example, the page for Gally does a great job of answering “Other than writing code, how can I contribute?”

If you don’t know how to get involved, you can also browse opportunities by programming language, the kind of help you want to give (such as writing documentation) or flip through a few projects you might want to work on. You can narrow your search to just the ones we call “bitesize” (“Junior Jobs” in KDE, bugs labeled as “easy” in the Python programming language, and so forth).

So OpenHatch is a project to think through how people join free software communities and to build technical tools and social structures to make that better. This browsing tool is one thing we’ve built. It’s a community project, so you can help out! Say hi on IRC or email if you want to join in.

I’d like to hear (in the comments on this post) from you guys and gals: What do you think about our “volunteer opportunity finder”? What works about it for you? What would you change?

If Lydia invites me back, I plan to write about getting non-coders more involved in free software projects. During the weekend I first met Lydia and Jeff Mitchell of Amarok, I had a crazy idea for something you can build on top of OpenHatch. If you want to stay in touch until then, join our IRC channel or subscribe to us on Identi.ca/Twitter/RSS!

My first World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) and my first trip to the Southern Hemisphere! I plan to be in Melbourne, Australia from August 30th till September 14th for AussieCon 4. The WorldCon is September 2-6, so I'm there for some extra time before and after for decompression, hanging with Danielle and her friends, tourism, and maybe meeting you, if you're there!

I don't have any particular plans during WorldCon and my schedule is fairly free after as well. So please drop me a line or comment with suggestions. I love meeting open source geeks, using and seeing public transit, looking at beautiful bits of nature, seeing unique theatrical cultural events, eating vegetarian food, and walking around walkable neighborhoods.

Bjoern Zeeb has provided a summary regarding the completion of the funded portion of the FreeBSD Jail Based Virtualization Project:

I am happy to report that the funded parts of the FreeBSD Jail Based Virtualization project are completed. Some of the results have been shipping with 8.1-RELEASE while others are ready to be merged to HEAD.

Jails have been the well known operating system level virtualization technique in FreeBSD for over a decade. The import of Marko Zec's network stack virtualization has introduced a new way for abstracting subsystems. As part of this project, the abstraction framework has been generalized. Together with Jamie Gritton's flexible jail configuration syscalls, this will provide the infrastructure for, and will ease the virtualization of, further subsystems without much code duplication. The next subsystems to be virtualized will likely be SYSV/Posix IPC to help, for example, PostgreSQL users. This will probably be followed by the process namespace.

Along with the framework, debugging facilities, such as the interactive kernel debugger, have been enhanced so that every new subsystem will be able to immediately make use of these improvements without modifying a single line of code. Libjail and jls can now work on core dumps and netstat is able to query individual live network stacks attached to jails.

For the virtual network stack, work was focused on network stack teardown, a concept introduced with the network stack virtualization. The primary goal was to prototype a shutdown of the (virtual) network stacks from top to bottom, which means letting interfaces go last rather than first and still being able to cleanly shutdown TCP connections. Good progress was made, but a lot of code over the last two decades was never written in a way to be cleanly stopped. Work on this will have to continue, along with virtualizing the remaining network subsystems to allow long term stability and a leak and panic free shutdown. As a side effect, users of non-virtualized network stacks will also benefit, as other general network stack problems are identified and fixed along the way.

I am happy to see more early adopters, former OpenSolaris users, and people contributing code or reporting problems and would like to encourage people to further support this project.

My special thanks go the FreeBSD Foundation and CK Software GmbH for having sponsored this project, as well as to John Baldwin and Philip Paeps for helping with review and excellent suggestions.

I feel like I need to centralize a public discussion on what's been going on today, as a lot of people weren't there and are wondering what happened.

In Dries' keynote yesterday, he was talking about how Drupal might look in 2020. He was making some silly scenarios, you can watch the keynote if you want to hear it all. One of the scenarios was that maybe we'll be big enough by 2020 to have Druplicon involved in a sex scandal (and a slide that was a little racy, but on the comedic side). But then he said (and I believe this was an ad lib) something to the effect of: that we'd better get some more women involved by then to make that possible (paraphrased - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjAyIXGNN7o 6:07 onward for the actual segment).

Of course, I instantly sighed partly because I was surprised and disappointed that Dries would say something like that in his keynote, but partly because I also have seen how these things escalate.

The thing is, I am 100% confident that Dries did not have any intent on alienating the women community members, or members of the Drupalchix Solidarity Committee and Allied Auxiliary Service (ie. male allies). I don't actually think Dries is really sexist, and I know for sure how much he values the women contributors in the community.

The reason several of the women responded (mostly via Twitter) to this was to speak out on the impacts of those kinds of comments (there was also a stereotype about moms being less technically inclined, which some people also found inappropriate), and that it's important to be more aware of what statements like that can do. I think webchick's comment on chx's post from today sums it up quite well, so I won't bother reiterating. (Addi's post from a couple years back also addresses this sort of stuff well) - and if you have a bit more time, webchick did a fantastic talk on women in open source at OpenWeb Vancouver last year: http://webchick.net/files/videos/women-in-open-source-owv09.flv

But where it went wrong is where a few people in the community turned this molehill into a mountain by telling us we were overreacting or being ridiculous, telling us how dare we speak, and worse things...

I hope indeed that this can be seen as a learning experience for community leaders of all levels, and not as an opportunity to attack people in the community for speaking out about what standards they believe the leaders should be held to, as well as how they feel when they make mistakes.

Everyone is human and allowed to make a faux pas now and then, but I personally would rather push them to learn from it and not repeat the mistake, than to be silent and internalize my disappointment. What I don't accept is people telling me and my colleagues that we don't have the right to speak our opinion, and spewing hate towards us for doing just that.

Last night, Sarah Mei (@sarahmei) and I attended a Tokyo Ruby Meetup, asakusa.rb.  It was the 63rd (ish) meeting of this group of Rubyists that meets every Tuesday.  There are about 10 ruby core committers who attend this group, along with other developers who gather weekly to hack Ruby code.  This special meeting had an agenda that went something like:

• 17:45 introductions
• 20:15 drinking

During introductions, Akira Matsuda (@a_matsuda) who founded the group, put pins on a google map for new people and scrolled and zoomed to find repeat visitors. Here’s a photo from @kakutani of me introducing myyelf:

There were many who will speak at Ruby Kaigi and several Ruby Kaigi organizers who attended.  I wish I had the whole list!

After introductions, we enjoyed the warm hospitality of the Rubyists with much drinking and conversation.  I had technical issues with my phone and couldn’t manage to take photos till the very end of the evening, but I will always remember this first evening with Japanese Rubyists where I felt we had more in common than we had differences.

Django and Pinax common steps

(I've got Django 1.2, Pinax 0.9a1)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

• Tips for Handling Information Overload: Too Much Content
• Stress Reduction Tips

Linux.com

• MeeGo: Where Are We Now?

MeeGo.com*

• LinuxCon and MeeGo Review
• MeeGo Community Update and Metrics for July
• Signup Now for the MeeGo Conference!
• MeeGo Conference Session Proposal Deadline Extended to August 27 at 11:59PM Pacific Time

On Video (OK, not really blogging, but I thought it was fun anyway)

• LinuxCon 2010 Interview: Dawn Foster, MeeGo Community Manager
• Hands-on: MeeGo for Netbooks

*Disclaimers:

• GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily: I am a paid blogger for the GigaOM network.
• MeeGo: I am a full-time employee at Intel and contributing to MeeGo is part of my job.

Sharing is good

The KDE Community Working Group members (that would be Jeff, Anne, Ingo, Rich and me) would like to invite you to our first (of hopefully many) office hour. We’ll be on IRC to answer all your small and big questions about community, help you with problems and give feedback on ideas you have.

Please join us on Saturday, 28 August 2010, 18:00:00 UTC in #kde-cwg on freenode.

We’re currently considering doing this on a monthly basis if there is demand for it.

PS: We will of course continue to be available via email and private chat for urgent/sensitive matters.

On Saturday I got up bright and early to catch a 9AM ride with Grant Bowman to the annual Linux Picnic (Picn*x19) as they celebrated the 19th anniversary of the Linux kernel. We arrived on site to help with setup shortly before 10AM. Shortly after arriving Mark Terranova and Robert Wall also showed up and we were able to set up the canopy, Ubuntu California banner and the tables.

Huge thanks to everyone who helped out, especially Grant for bringing lots of freebies in the form of magazines, and to Mark for his tactful cross-advertising of other cool projects at our tables (Geeknics! Free Geek!) and the beautiful flowers which really added quite the touch to our table, we even had a volunteer who brought Ubuntu cookies she had made!

So, what does one do at a Linux Picnic?

Well, there were robots!

And food (meat and veggie)!

And lots of people to talk to Ubuntu with! We ended up moving the canopy over one of our tables during the afternoon to give us some shade, so we could hop online (wifi for the picnic was graciously provided by the Silicon Valley Wireless Users & Experimenters (SVWUX)) and actually see our computer screens. All afternoon people were dropping by our table with Ubuntu raves (and a couple rants) and to get more information about getting started with Ubuntu and generic release questions (What’s an “LTS”?). One of the most interesting conversations I had was with a fellow who swears by Wubi not as a transitory step between Linux and Windows (as it’s frequently touted as), but as an real solution for some folks who want the best of both worlds. I was also interviewed about Ubuntu and our setup by a local Amateur Television group that was covering the picnic.

The event organizers did a fantastic job, I was able to meet Ian Kluft early in the day, and got a great photo with coordinator Venkat Venkataraju and his friend Naomi who does event planning for a living and is interested in helping out next year!

In all, a very successful event for the team and I met some really awesome people.

For more photos, check out my flickr album for the event:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157624782020058/

Mark also posted some here: http://picasaweb.google.com/tuxwingsgroup/LinuxPicnic

I ended up with a sunburn again (I swear, the sun is brighter in California!) but I’m already looking forward to the Linux Picnic next year! Plus we’re planning another Geeknic for sometime in September.

DebConf launched with a bang—the day I arrived by bike I was up until 3am meeting and greeting in the basement lounge of the Carmen Columbia dormitory, where I was staying. No idea how I managed to be so awake for that.

The rest of the week alternated between hacking like crazy on code for my talk and spending a lot of time socializing with Debian folks new and old.

For the day trip to Coney Island, I joined the dkg-led bike expedition which ended up running to nearly 30 miles, which was a bit more than expected. The fact that this was all in actual dense city really drove home the scale difference between Boston and New York (I'd never been to NYC before this). We took several breaks to lounge around and eat and drink, so it took quite a long time even given the distance. I hadn't planned on seeing the baseball game that was a part of the trip, but I ended up going anyway and it turns out that a bunch of geeks at a minor league game is actually quite a lot of fun! I hope someone else will put some pictures from the bike ride and game online soon, since I didn't really take any myself.

This was the first DebConf where I gave a talk, which resulted in me skipping almost all of the other talks, because my talk was on the last day and I reaaally wasn't ready at the start of the conference due to the rest of life being pretty crazy this summer. I missed some things I would have liked to see because of this, but ultimately I think it was worth it. The good news is: it went well! I was nervous until I actually started talking (never given a talk at a conference before), and then it was fine. If you missed it, the talk video is on the web in low and high quality; slides are here.

The audience was great—there were excellent questions and people were excited and interested in the project. I couldn't have asked for a better reception. After the talk finished I spent some time aisle-chatting with some folks, and totally failed to recognize Joey despite having met him before, because he'd shaved off his hair.

DebConf was, like usual, both inspiring and exhausting. I haven't managed to follow up on much that happened during the conference yet. I definitely plan to do so, though, now that real life is calming down again. I'd hate to waste the post-conference buzz about SD. My todo list includes:

• Working more on the SD debbugs bridge to make it more stable.
  • I ran into Jesse soon after coming back and now have a better idea of how I'm going to handle a lack of history properly.
• Getting my patch to the Debbugs SOAP interface merged.
• Looking into the read-write SOAP interface work that was done as a Summer of Code project.
• After talking with Jesse I also kind of want to hack up a RESTful interface that could be used alongside the SOAP interface. It seems like doing so will make development of and using the Debbugs web API less painful in the future. This may be a rabbit hole that I don't actually want to jump down, but it's an idea.
• Maybe other help on Debbugs proper!
• Fixing SD bugs and generating more documentation.
• Thinking about and thanking people for talk feedback!
• Playing around with monkeysphere for authentication on my personal machines.
• Watching videos of talks I missed (this includes basically everything that didn't have to do with bugtracking).

I am leaving for Ireland tonight, first to attend this Anthropology conference in Maynooth–a seemingly sleepy college town– and then on the 28th I head to Dublin to hang with a very good friend of mine. I plan on doing some travel and sightseeing in and around Dublin, so if anyone has any suggestions about what they love, love, love about Dublin (and anywhere within a few hours of Dublin), they are welcome. Dato is going to help me gather some Debian folks for an evening out as well, so I look forward to seeing anyone in town!

I never realized until recently how insensitive and condescending this statement is.

It always comes on the tag of "I hate people who..." type statements. When you point out to someone that they have offended you, they grant you the special magic wand exception from their hate.

In the late '80s I worked with a guy who had very strong and loud opinions. We would have very interesting and detailed private conversations - they had to be private, and we would warn people who came near us, as we were risking someone overhearing us and filing harassment charges for some of our topics.

For a while our group had a rotating pile of administrative assistants. I'm not sure if our insanities drove them all away or they found better offers, but we rarely kept one longer than 6 months for about 2 yrs. One of these was a man who was very openly gay, in the stereotypical flamboyant way. He was extremely friendly and excellent at his job.

One day he came upon Mr Opinionated and me having one of our outside, in the corner conversations and asked if we minded his company. We told him he was welcome but pointed out that the conversation topic was rather sexually explicit and that it might be offended, and that's why we were away from others. He replied that, "Nothing you can say will shock me, don't worry." So I turned back to Mr Opinionated and asked a further question about how his health issues were causing erectile problems. Mr Admin Assistant went pale, muttered something like, "Sorry, gotta go," and scurried off.

After Mr O and I were done giggling, Mr O said to me, "You know, I hate fags, but that guy is OK."

Mr Opinionated had 20 yrs on me and I've always been one to give a little wiggle room for people older than me, who may have come from a longer time with biased beliefs. At the time I thought something like, "Let him like one "exception", maybe he can realize that if one is ok, they can all be ok."

Now, let me be clear here: There really is no group of people who are all good and all bad. The Late Great Robert B Parker's "Spenser", when wanting to point this out, that "Hitler liked dogs". (To Spenser, through Parker, there is something wrong with people who don't like dogs.)

But that's the point. We're people. We're more than our gender, our sexuality, our religion, our marital status, our studies, our politics, our race, our heritage, etc. These are just things that make up who we are. In the end, we are people. When we start lumping people together to love or hate them we lose the basic part: That we're people.

When you take that lump of people and then start making exceptions here and there, you're stating that only the exceptions have the right to really be people, and that you are waving your special magic wand to grant them this exception. It's a condescending, "There, there, it's ok, I don't think YOU are bad, too!"

The next time you realize that you think "I don't like people who are X, but Joe Blow is OK", remember that Joe Blow is still in that X group. Instead of hating groups of people lumped as gays, conservatives, Muslims, women who get divorced, or even people who don't like dogs, take issue with the concepts behind them.

There is a world of difference between, "I am uncomfortable with the idea of homosexuality" and "I don't like gays." You can disagree or dislike parts of a religion without lumping all the people who believe in it as bad.

Please think about it.

Back in December while starting to scurry about to pull together the competitions framework which I was hoping would make a few splashes, I was already thinking ahead to after the competitions, thinking of ways to kick the mentoring programme in to gear through which the target audience attention could be catalysed to participation.

A few weeks ago, as Alan Bell was poking me wondering about the code we’d used for the competition voting polls, it dawned on me. The result of that epiphany is my new pet project, Pollka, a php project that aims to build a quickly deployable, standalone, simple polling web application.

Pollka is not part of Ubuntu, and is not an Ubuntu project. It is however a real project which intends to partner with the Ubuntu Women Project to mentor interested members in the purposeful use of tools such as bzr, launchpad tools and packaging, and concepts such as reporting bugs and documenting. The aim being to give prospective women contributors a chance to gain confidence in methodologies that will ease their integration path in to activities that are considered “contributions to Ubuntu”.

I believe this real world project sandpit concept is a missing link in the current UW mentoring structure. Jumping straight in to a massive project with commercial responsibilities like Ubuntu is daunting, especially so for inexperienced people who feel an extra burden in proving themselves. I want UW to be able to help interested women break out of that self-fulfilling prophecy cycle.

I am proposing that a mentoring partnership framework be established to compliment the current UW mentoring pathways, and I intend to use Pollka as a proof of concept partner project. I’ve added the blueprint to the next UW meeting agenda and hopefully we can use this as a deliverable for the Natty cycle.

Last week at LinuxCon, we presented a lot of great content for business leaders in the world of Linux and open source. (Al Gillen of IDC, Jeffrey Hammond of Forester, among others.). One of my favorite sessions was from Jean Staten Healy, Director of IBM Worldwide Linux Strategy who looked at Linux in the minds of CIOs and how it’s changed.

Remember ten years ago, IBM made a $1 billion bet on Linux, and in so doing, helped create the momentum for Linux in the enterprise data
center that we all enjoy today.  Back then, IBM concentrated on three areas:

- Making Linux better – providing contributions to help improve Linux with respect to reliability, availability and serviceability

- Enabling IBM products – both across major server lines and throughout the IBM middleware portfolio

- Extending Linux into new opportunity areas – Helping to expanding the total addressable market for Linux (e.g. Real-Time, HPC, SoNAS)

Jean shared data from IBM’s 2009 Global CIO study. The survey had over 2,500 interviews of CIOs worldwide spanning 78 countries and 19 industries. Some interesting findings:

– Today’s CIO spend 55% of their time on activities that spur innovation

– The remaining 45% of their time is spent on essential, more traditional tasks related to managing IT

– Cost effectiveness was at the top of the CIO list for much of the last decade of Linux, but that is no longer the primary driver for today’s CIO in their adoption of Linux.

– They are choosing Linux for strategic reasons: they see Linux as helping them keep up with demand and be flexible and nimble. This trumps cost. It’s about time to value and innovation now.

– Linux’ virtualization capabilities and inherent flexibility are helping CIOs get the most out of their existing IT investments.

The questions CIOs are now asking: “How fast can I get this deployed? Will it grow with me as my business changes? Can I find talent for
this platform?”

This is good news for Linux. I’ve always tried to downplay the role of cost as a driver for Linux adoption. Cost certainly matters but it’s not the
end game. I’m pleased to see IBM’s data back up our assumption that Linux is helping CIOs and companies remain nimble, deliver faster time
to value and get the most out of their existing investments. Innovation is the driver in the minds of CIOs now, and Linux is well positioned ten years after IBM’s $1 billion bet.

On Monday evening we had an Ubuntu US Teams over in #ubuntu-us on freenode (logs, minutes) where we did final discussion on the relaunch of our website. We were running Drupal5 on a Linode (thanks again for the donation, Linode!) running Hardy and I’ve been eyeing an upgrade to Lucid. While considering this I spoke with other writers on the site who tended to prefer the WordPress workflow to that of Drupal for blog/news style sites, considered the RAM limitations (Drupal is a bit heavy) and the upgrade path. In the end it was a number of things that pointed in the direction of WordPress being the proper option, so I tossed together a test environment last month, kept the mailing list informed along the way and took time at the meeting to take final considerations on the site.

I was able to launch the site Monday night.

Thanks to everyone who helped out, the Washington DC folks for forwarding along the redevelopment effort to their list and offering to help find a theme to suit our needs, Paul Tagliamonte, Nathan Handler, Robert Wall and Neal Bussett who offered constructive criticism of the design and offered design tweaks. Now we just need more volunteers to write articles! Amber Graner has been doing a great job with the interviews but we could always use more content creators. If you’re interested just drop me an email: lyz@ubuntu.com

On Tuesday I approached Martin Owens to ask if he’d be willing to put together a flashy generic Ubuntu advertisement that we could print and display at the Linux Picnic (Picn*x 19) this weekend at the Ubuntu California Team tables. Lucky for me he was happy to assist and came up with this excellent design:

You can grab the image and the source over on spreadubuntu:
http://spreadubuntu.neomenlo.org/en/material/poster/reasons-love-ubuntu

And be sure to check out his blog post about it: http://doctormo.org/2010/08/18/reasons-to-love-ubuntu/

Today I headed over to the local copy shop and got it printed up along with one for the California Team:

I also received the Ubuntu California vinyl banner in the mail today (thanks again Neal!) and we’ve got Grant Bowman and Mark Terranova bringing other items. We’re almost set for the picnic! If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area and want to help out at our table, or are just interested in hanging out near our table while we eat some burgers and vegetarian goodies, check out the Ubuntu California Picn*x19 wiki page and be sure to RSVP for the picnic to be sure you get some food!

"It is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future."

Clay Shirky

This morning Twitter suggested I follow Clay Shirky. And I did. And I read his blog post on the collapse of complex business models, which ends with that quote.

It seems self-evident and yet, when so much needs to change, we still seem to struggle with bureaucracy. We strive to learn the rules first, and then play the game, rather than playing the game and learning the rules as we go.  We have become too averse to mistakes. Is this because the punishment is severe? Or the risk of failure is high? That the dangers are too many, to unpredictable, too catastrophic. Do we have too much too lose?

In many ways, it's another version of Anaïs Nin words...

And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to Blossom.

So as winter loses it's grip on Melbourne, that seems a fitting thought with which to walk into the world.

We live in a world of abundance, a fact which scares silly anyone whose business relies on scarcity. Predictably, we now frequently see attempts to recreate scarcity, many of which are absurd (cf. most newspaper efforts) and some of which are smart.

The use of limited editions to create a desirable object available for only a short period is, in my opinion, a smart move. When it comes to content, we are swamped by choice. Something needs to make objects like books, CDs and movies special enough for us to take a punt and buy them. It ceases to be simply about the story or the music or the film, but also about its form. So I’m totally up for limited editions. It is, in effect, what I’m doing with Argleton.

But limiting editions does not mean you have to limit access to the source material. Indeed, limiting access to the content, rather than just the object, is counterproductive as it prevents new fans from experiencing your work and reduces the number of people who eagerly await your next release.

UPDATE: What was going to be my case in point, Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software, has now instead become proof that if your shop design sucks, people will think things are sold out when they aren’t. The limited edition is sold out, the trade edition isn’t. *headdesk* So, er, slightly truncated blog post due to inability to comprehend Subterranean Press’s UX. Sorry about that.

I’m going up to Sheffield in November to speak at Interesting North, a day-long conference where people talk about their passions (rather than their work). I, for one, will be going way off piste:

Suw is a writer, collaboration strategist and lapsed geologist.

Earlier this year she followed, in considerable detail, the exploits of Eyjafjallajökull, The Little Volcano Who Could (Close Airports Around Europe On A Whim). Part of a community of vulcanologists and lay enthusiasts, she watched for earthquake swarms, monitored live webcams, and attempted to interpret interesting yellow blobs on the volcano’s infrared cam.

For your delight and delectation, Suw will be attempting to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull live on stage, as well as pointing out some of the more interesting aspects of the eruption.

Sound like fun? Then get your tickets before they sell out!

 

On Wednesday I’ll be running the first Freebase meetup since our acquisition by Google. It’s at Google’s San Francisco office, on Spear St (near the Embarcadero). Talks include:

Freebase 101 I’ll be giving an overview of the various parts of Freebase and how they fit together, from Freebase.com to MQL to our API, Acre, Gridworks, and more. If you’ve ever felt unsure what it’s all about, or just need a recap, this will help you put it in perspective. [NB: highly recommended if you're unclear on what this Freebase thing is all about or why you should care!]

Gathering human judgements with RABJ Shailesh Kochhar will give a brief primer on RABJ (Redundant Array of Brains in a Jar), which Freebase uses to gather human judgements and do data QA. If you’ve ever played one of our “data games” like Genderizer, you’re using RABJ. Soon, you’ll see even more RABJ in our public data tools.

Open source Acre and Freebase.com We’ve been working on making the Freebase.com website more open, and in this talk Michael Masouras will be talking about our latest steps in this direction, including open sourcing the Acre platform itself.

The talks run from 5:30-7pm then afterwards we’ll be adjourning to Gordon Biersch (right downstairs) for some beer and food and general Freebase/open data/etc chat.

If you’re interested in coming, you should RSVP at meetup.com. It’s important to let us know you’re coming, as we need to give a list of attendees to security so you can get into the building.

See you there!

This is one of the best descriptions for utopia I have come across. You may not be able to reach it–and it is good to know this–but it can certainly inspire movement, action, and lead at times to a better, even if not perfect, world.

She’s on the horizon… I go two steps, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is utopia? That’s what: it’s good for walking. — Eduardo Galeano