Over the past couple of years I’ve made a habit of doing quick trips on 3 day weekends. Last year over Memorial Day weekend I went up to Edmonton to see one of my sisters for the first time in 5 years. This time I realized that I needed a relaxing break and selected Phoenix as my destination, where I could stay and visit with my aunt and cousin and relax in nice weather by the pool.

I flew out early on Saturday morning and was in Phoenix by 8AM. I spent the day with my Aunt Elaine and cousin Chet, relaxing by the pool, enjoying grilled hot dogs and potato salad (my father’s recipe), reading a cheesy pulp novel on my Nook via loan from San Francisco Public Library and rounding off the evening by having dinner at a local favorite pizzeria. While enjoying the pizza dinner, my aunt mentioned that she was hoping to make it up to the Grand Canyon before her planned move in July and I proposed doing it the next day. A quick search showed that it was a 4 hour drive north and we headed back to her place to do some research online and make the proper arrangements.

Sunday morning we woke up at 5AM, by 7AM we were finished with breakfast, gassed up the car and were on our way north toward the Grand Canyon. The drive up was a beautiful one, the desert area of Phoenix giving way to the red rocks of the area around Sedona and then on to Flagstaff and beyond where you will find cooler weather and forests of pine trees. By 11AM we were at the Grand Canyon.

I had never been to the Grand Canyon before, but I had grown up hearing stories from my father about when he went with his family and they rode donkeys down into the Canyon. I remember him saying that you have to experience the Grand Canyon as photos don’t really capture just how huge it is. His great stories caused it to be on my destination list so I was delighted by this opportunity. Like most tourists visiting for the first time, we went to the south rim.

The views were indeed spectacular.

I also got to try out the panorama feature on ICS on my Nexus S:

We spent 3 hours exploring, and looking at the map, we walked over 3 miles around the rim before taking a shuttle back to the parking lot.

I’ve uploaded more photos here (but still only about 25% of what I took!): http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157629955730124/

We started the drive back shortly after 2PM and grabbed a late lunch on the way back. My aunt and I wrapped up the evening by relaxing in the hot tub under the stars and managed to get to bed around 10PM.

Monday was a pure relaxation day. My cousin made buffalo chicken on the grill and so we enjoyed sandwiches and veggies. My internet connection was quite poor, and I was able to resist the temptation to suffer through it to work on Ubuntu stuff – I was here to relax! I spent all afternoon and into the evening in the shade on the porch finishing the book I had started on Saturday and catching up on magazines.

The day wrapped up with dinner at Outback with my cousin before heading over to the airport for my 11PM flight back to San Francisco.

The trip was a great one. Relaxation! Grand Canyon! And stunningly beautiful weather for Phoenix in May, 80s and low 90s all weekend. I am happy to report that I’m feeling refreshed and once again ready to take on the world this week.

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

Last year I wrote Stuffed animal K, L, M, N, O… documenting the stuffed toys I had started collecting as LoCo booth/event decorations for each Ubuntu release. The stuffed animal tradition ended with P as I couldn’t find a stuffed toy pangolin, and I had similar trouble with our Quetzal. I ended up with the Safari Incredible Creatures: Pangolin plastic toy, and after much consideration I bought this trio of ornaments: Kurt Adler 4.5-6″ Animal Planet Resin Tropical Bird Ornaments with Metallic-Style Paint and Glitter: Lovebird, Macaw and Quetzal Set of 3, along with a 10″ Spiral Ornament Display Stand.

The quetzal is now enjoying a spot on my desk:

Looking forward to planning the first event this cycle where the quetzal can come along!

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

I am a firm believer in “crap technology” as Thomas Hayden defines it in his post Ixnay on the iPod: In Praise of Crap Technology. It’s not some ideological thing, and in fact I never had a name for it until hearing a segment with him on Marketplace, “Crap technology, not crappy, where he says:

Crap technology is basically stuff that doesn’t have cachet, you know? It’s not slick, it’s not cool, but it works. Crappy technology, on the other hand, is stuff that simply doesn’t work. That’s the sweet spot of crap technology: no cachet but all the functionality you’ll need.

Part of this certainly comes from somewhat limited financial resources for much of my life that caused me to get creative. As a kid in the 80s I was overwhelmed with excitement when my parents let me have the black and white TV that had previously been in their bedroom for the rooms I shared with my sister. I never had cable in my bedroom, but OTA TV wasn’t so bad. When an aunt and uncle sprung for an NES for us I spent weeks one summer scouring flea markets and garage sales with my mother for a cheap color television so I could use it in our bedroom while other family members watched TV on the livingroom TV. I found one for $75, the color was a mess and it sometimes required a smack on the side to get adjusted but I could hook up my NES!

In 1991 when I was 10 our home got our first personal computer, a IBM PC with an 8086 processor and two 5.25″ floppy drives (actually, it looked like this). I’ll probably never know exactly what it was, but the story is that my uncle pulled it out of his basement to give it to us, so in 1991 it was already a basement dinosaur. In 1994, when I was 13, my grandparents gave our family our first computer with a GUI, a 486 with Windows 3.11. From there, our story of family computers morphed into one of my father and I hunting through the computer shops of Maine for old software manuals and hauling that poor 486 to the computer shop each time we saved up enough money to upgrade something on it (harddrive, RAM). It was the most impressive 486 in history by the time we were done with it. I then spent summers saving up money to buy old computers from newspaper classified ads. In my world of 386 DOS systems, perhaps my greatest achievement was when I was 16 and bought an no name 586 for a couple hundred dollars, I could run Windows 98!

I wish I could say I learned a lot from all this young tinkering, but I wasn’t online until late 1998 and I didn’t have friends who were interested in computers. I rarely knew what I was doing or had goals, and most of my time was spent breaking things and playing with ridiculous old software. I think mostly what I learned was a love for technology and an appreciation for old technology that I kept around far past the point when most people had moved on from them. After all, it still works fine!

My mp3 player, digital camera, and pretty much every other piece of tech I own was inexpensive, non-trendy and pretty much lasts forever. I will admit that on the desktop computer side I have always had a pretty decent core desktop that I built with parts from a local computer store or Newegg. Every 4 years or so I’ll drop $400-600 and do a motherboard, RAM and processor upgrade, along with whatever else I need. My firewall is still a Pentium 4 though (and it makes me cringe to call it old, P4s are decent!).

When it comes to computers, laptops are where my real crap technology story is. In 2008 my laptop was a Dell Inspiron 7500. I’d say that where my fleet of old 386 systems were the computers of my teens, my fleet of 7000-series Inspiron laptops were those of my 20s (it topped out a 2 functioning, 3 total, seen here running Ubuntu 5.10 server + xfce4 packages). It didn’t plan the Inspiron fleet, they just kept falling into my lap for free (dumpster drive, old giveaway from work, a friend). However, in early 2008, the last of my beloved Inspirons got to the end of the line.

As old as the Inspiron was, I had gotten used to having a laptop. When I posted photos online a friend of mine offered to give me his old Compaq Armada E500. In exchange I bought him dinner, a burger and a beer, following a LUG meeting. At 800mhz and 384M of RAM it almost doubled the speed I had on my Inspiron and tripled my RAM. Best burger and beer investment ever! I also learned at that LUG meeting that there was another Inspiron 7000-series loyalist among us and I ended up giving him my final Inspiron for parts.

The Armada was my primary laptop for about 9 months, at the end of which several close friends pitched in (presumably taking pity upon me for having such an dinosaur of a laptop) and gave me my pink Dell mini9. I’m typing on the mini9 right now, this little machine better last forever because I love it so.

And the Compaq Armada? It became first a little development machine and I would also do some software testing on it. As those functions increasingly became virtualized I have kept it around and most recently used it for point to point openvpn and IPSec testing (it’s so much easier to plug a physical machine into my physical modem than to add the complexity of network virtualization to an already complex VPN setup).

However, if I’m perfectly honest, it’s not doing well and hasn’t been for a while. There are I/O errors now and then, I can’t plug in PCMCIA cards anymore without it causing a kernel panic, and Debian is the only operating system that I can install on it (it has run OpenBSD and Ubuntu in the past). In fact, I’m not even sure I could install Debian on it again if I wiped the harddrive. Every time I booted it up I anticipated a screen full of errors that would signal forced retirement.

So a couple weeks ago I installed Debian on my new Lenovo G575 (which, while new, was $299, and solidly in the “crap technology” camp). Yesterday evening after work I did a full backup of the entire disk on the old Armada and shut it down for the last time.

Mourning the final shutdown of my Armada has made me reflect even more about why, now that I have the means, I don’t just buy the latest shiny thing. Like most geeks I do love new toys and read up on the latest trends in tech. Amusingly I think part of it comes from my constant search for perfection, I have very specific requirements for the core devices in my life and once I have a device that finally fits those needs I don’t want to give it up. I also get quite emotionally attached to the things I carry around with me, so the thought of replacing something that still works fine in favor of some new features makes me a bit sad, I have to have a really, really good reason (that NOOK Simple Touch with GlowLight? So tempting! Cannot justify, my original Nook is fine and I’ll still need a book light for magazines anyway).

So goodbye my old Armada! Simcoe says goodbye too:

…or she was cross about me taking a picture of a computer rather than her. The internet needs more cat pictures.

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

It’s been 2 months since I’ve done a general, non-topical update post, so here we go…

Several weeks ago I picked up the Limited Edition Kinect Star Wars Bundle. As cool as the Kinect is, I wasn’t really planning on buying an Xbox because we just bought a Playstation 3 a few months back and with my Wii would make is a 3 console house, but after seeing how cool it was and an offer from a friend who could hook me up with a discount, I couldn’t resist. The console itself is beautifully R2D2ed out, it even makes R2D2 noises when you turn it on or manipulate the optical disk drive. I’m not thrilled about paying for access to their Xbox Live service, but there seem to be deals you can find online that make it more reasonable. I keep joking that the Kinect Star Wars game is a very sneaky video game because you’re jumping around a lot as you play rather than traditional games where you’re stationary and can eat chips and pizza. I do love it though and am excited to see where this technology continues to go as improvements come out, for video games and beyond.

I’ve also become quite attached to my Nintendo 3DS. The social aspects they added to it are brilliant, I usually wouldn’t carry it around but the fun that comes with StreetPass makes me take it along even if I don’t anticipate finding time to play. As a result I end up pulling it out at all kinds of times to squeeze in a game of Tetris, a level of Super Mario 3D or a Pushmo puzzle.

Playing more games (particularly on the consoles at home) has meant I’ve had to shift time a bit in my day, which has almost all been getting rid of watching TV time. I’ve never been a huge TV watcher, but lately I’ve found myself bored watching TV alone and only really enjoy it when I’m watching late at night or on weekends with MJ. I’ve also been reading more lately, keeping a magazine or two more accessible throughout the day so that in spare moments I’m reading an article or two rather than doing all the things that time management experts will tell you are time sinks (like checking email every 20 seconds). Finally, I figured I’d check out one of the free online courses offered via Coursera. A couple people in the company I work for did a Stanford Databases course last fall, but at the time I was traveling a lot and couldn’t really make time for it. I’m still struggling a bit with time but I really wanted to see how these classes worked so I signed up for an easy one: Computer Science 101. Now before you laugh, it’s worth pointing out that while this class is obviously quite below me, I never formally studied Computer Science so it hasn’t been a complete waste of time for me. In addition to learning how the course structure works I’m learning a bit about how folks who went to school tend to be presented with these concepts and having them explained in a less practical setting has been a very interesting experience. I’m on week 5 of 6 of this class and am looking forward to doing another soon which will actually challenge me. I’ve also ordered some books in the past few weeks, which I’m hoping will help structure my learning a bit more on some of the less basic areas of Nagios and Puppet, the former of which we use extensively at work but I need to do some higher level debugging on, and the latter I’d like to see us moving to. Amusingly, I ordered the Puppet book just before going to a Salt talk and now I’m quite intrigued with how that will evolve.

On the health side I’ve been working through some mild issues.

The first is sinus-related. I was delighted to learn upon moving to California that my allergies had almost all disappeared. This spring has been different though, it’s been rainy and we even had a big thunder storm in April (very rare in San Francisco, they only happen every few years and I’d never seen one here). In February I ended up with a flu and then a fair amount of water retention in my right ear. I was also getting a lot of sinus headaches and waking up congested a lot, one morning so bad that my balance was severely impacted. Some targeted rounds of Sudafed and Claritin cleared up my ear trouble after a few weeks, but I had to go back for the other sinus problems. The doctor put me on Claritin D which I took daily for several weeks and I’ve now backed off to taking as needed. So it looks like spring is still a problem for me, but I’m hoping the worst if it is over this year.

Secondly, I’ve had trouble with heartburn since I was 14. Over the years this has mostly meant I always carry around antacid in my purse and am particularly aware of things that trigger it severely (tomato sauce, vinegar, spicy foods). About 5 years ago I developed a cough. My doctors first tried, unsuccessfully, to treat me for allergies to get rid of the cough. Once I moved to California and it was clear that allergies weren’t the cause, my doctor here saw the relation to my heartburn and put me on Lansoprazole to reduce stomach acid. It works wonders! My “smokers hack” cough that was causing me so much grief for years was gone! Unfortunately it’s now been 2 years since I started on it and my doctor had to inform me that “prolonged use is not as safe as we thought it was.” Darn. I’ve now started to get off of it, slowly reducing my amount of intake first by switching to every other day, and now by even lowering that dose. But then I’ll be left with the cough! So now it’s time to actually see if there is something we can do about it. I was sent to a specialist and on Tuesday of this week I went in for an esophagogastroduodenoscopy. It wasn’t very much fun, it left me with a sore throat, the sedation made me forget much of what happened and the following sedation-induced nap at home made me miss half a day of work. I can call this week for the results. I am really hoping they find something that’s fixable instead of giving me the line of “don’t eat stuff that gives you heartburn” because that’s pretty much impossible, while there are specific triggers for serious heartburn, food as simple as oatmeal can sometimes give me heartburn.

On the home side, we have just a couple more tasks that need to be completed before scheduling the painters! We had a couple of our free-standing lamps sent out to a lamp repair shop recently and aside from the price (turns out that restoration of vintage lamps, including pickup and delivery, isn’t cheap) I’m really happy to have the lamps repaired and functioning – hooray for light! I’m trying to find a good strategy to get the rest of the tasks we need to do done, weekends are far too short to get non-work things done and find time to relax a bit.

And tech stuff! I upgraded my G575 to max it out at 8G of RAM and gave my old RAM chip to a friend with an identical laptop. Having this full-size laptop has been an interesting experiment, I’m still exclusively using my mini9 out of the home, but the laptop has mostly turned into my “sitting on the couch and computing” system, in addition to being the one I put test installs on. It’s currently quad-booting Windows 7, Debian 6.0 (as a replacement for my Pentium 3 laptop that I’m never sure will boot), Ubuntu 12.04 and Xubuntu 12.04. I upgraded my netbook to Xubuntu 12.04 just before the Ubuntu Developer Summit and found myself quite dismayed to discover upon plugging it in to a projector that it didn’t work, it’s always been very reliable! I’ll have to investigate what went wrong. After work on Friday I also finally upgraded my desktop to Xubuntu 12.04 in probably the smoothest upgrade I’ve ever experienced.

Finally, travel and events. The Ubuntu Developer Summit is always an exhausting event and I managed to replace exhaustion from traveling with exhaustion from being a good local host. It was totally worth it though, I got to spend a huge amount of quality time with my Ubuntu colleagues and got a lot of great feedback about how helpful the work of the California team had been. For Memorial Day weekend I’ll be flying to Phoenix to visit my aunt and cousin and relax by the pool. In June I’m delighted to have secured a spot at the ACM A.M. Turing Centenary Celebration on the 15th and 16th. Then from July 4th through 9th MJ and I will be flying to Maine to visit my mother, sister and hopefully my nephew who is due on July 1st.

But right now, I’m heading up to the roof deck to get some fresh air and not look at the solar eclipse. The roof deck is getting a makeover in the next few months with new furniture, but for now I’m happy with the old chairs, fresh air and wifi.

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

Last day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Quantal! It’s always a bittersweet day, we’re all so terribly exhausted from the week but it’s also the last day for many of us to see people we only see once or twice a year. Like other days, my day started off with the Community Roundtable.

– Community Roundtable -

Started asking about UDS for first timers and what changes we can make to make it easier for them, clearer instructions about reimbursements, travel arrangements and scheduling. Then there was some discussion about using Etherpad Lite next time with chat integration rather than IRC. Quickly touched upon what kind of statistics are available for determining how many systems are out there using Ubuntu, there were several types of statistics discussed (iso downloads, updates, support resource usage) and wrapped up by taking a look at the Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report – Operating Systems.

- Expanding the isotracker testcase management capabilities -

The session started off with a review of the current capabilities of the Ubuntu Testing Tracker, it’s used for ISO testing and links to a wiki for test cases. Reviewed some of the technical details of changes (database schema updates, where to allow modifications, test case ids). There was also some discussion about permissions, who can add test cases (including representatives from other flavors) and do other limited tasks.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

- IRC Workshops -

We have one of these during each UDS to plan out Ubuntu Open Week, Ubuntu App Developer Week and more IRC workshops. This session was a bit different as we discussed ways to expand this beyond the medium of IRC into other formats. There have been some experiments in the past with ustream and the like for a class on Inkscape, but now with the launch of Google Hangouts On Air for everyone we’re really excited about the possibility for making one of the workshop days into one where we use that instead. I still prefer IRC myself as it’s low-bandwidth, has searchable logs (rather than just an archived youtube video) and can be glanced at while at work, but it’s certainly not for everyone. It should be an interesting experiment this cycle.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

Lightning talks, including Partimus and Accessibility installer.

- Accessibility Community Team Plans -

Reviewed some of the successes of the Precise release, including accessible strings on the indicators, ability to determine wifi signal strength and installer improvements. In this next cycle they would like to focus on improvements to Unity 3D since development of Unity 2D is very likely to be discontinued. They are seeking new contributors throughout the Accessibility project, including in testing and bug triage. I volunteered to help via Ubuntu Women and there was some brainstorming about how to get other people without disabilities can become attracted to contributing.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

- Etherpad Lite Summit integration -

In this session the proposal to use Etherpad Lite was put forward and there was a test instance running for us to to try. This new etherpad has built in chat, so it could potentially be what is projected by default in each room rather than a full screen IRC window, so you would be able to see chat in the etherpad and the etherpad too. Much of the session focused on logistics of replacement of the current Etherpad and access controls (log in to summit?). The demonstration showed that the mobile access was event quite usable on Android. We also had someone from IRC come on via Google hangout on the second screen in the room to show off what we could do since we’re not using a screen for IRC and a screen for the etherpad.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

Sessions wrapped up at 5PM and we all headed to the final wrap-up talks for the summit by the track leads. Then it was off to the “California Dreamin’ Beach Party” themed end party. In a change of pace, instead of having attendees handle entertainment they ended up bringing in an outside band to do it, The Spazmatics. It was a lot of fun, and MJ came out so I was able to introduce him to a bunch of people.

And with that, UDS was over for another 6 months! I had a really great time being a local, talked to lots of people I wouldn’t otherwise talk to. Thanks everyone!

I’ve uploaded my photos from the week here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157629702430040/

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

Phew, Thursday! I was moving a bit slower today due to not getting a whole lot of sleep last night, but it was quite the busy day for me.

– Community Roundtable -

We picked up discussion from the day before about announcements from Canonical, it was generally agreed that the community is less bothered by announcements which don’t impact them or require them to do a considerable amount of work, or makes work completed feel useless or ignored. It also seems like there may be missed opportunities to get the community involved in improvements. We then discussed the Unity Distilled list proposal, and compared it to the value that separating ubuntu-devel and ubuntu-devel-discuss has brought to the development community. With regard to UDS, I suggested that Canonical reach out to LoCo teams when planning so we can be more engaged. The session wrapped up by discussing UDS sponsorship and timing of announcements for venue and sponsorship, at this point timing-wise the contact for the next UDS hasn’t been signed. They’ll be working to open sponsorship earlier.

– IRC team meeting and IRCC review -

Generally good feedback about the status of the IRC Team and IRC Council. Quickly went through the process for operator recruitment, it has gone well and they’ve started syncing up calls for operators with the release cycle. They are seeking to clean up some of the access lists to better sync up with the launchpad lists, but won’t make changes where there aren’t problems. The IRCC only has 4 members, they’d like to fill their remaining seat so have added an agenda item to the next Community Council meeting and we’ll get that process started at that time. Reviewed no idling policy of -ops channel and agreed to explore some options moving forward. Wrapped up the session by discussing how IRC is used at UDS, newer versions of etherpad support a chat option which may improve interactions being noticed in the session, tomorrow there is a separate session about exploring this further in summit.ubuntu.com.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– Community Council – Code of Conduct Review -

The message of the Code of Conduct has changed with the merging of the Leadership Code of Conduct. The main reason we wanted to do this is that we’d rather not like to persist the separation between community members and “Leaders” since we want to encourage all of our community members to strive for and be empowered to take leadership positions as their roles grow. We also wanted to integrate a diversity statement, which is now in this 2.0 version. The session clarified some of the reason for the changes, including protecting leaders (and potential leaders) from non-constructive and sometimes abusive backlash from other contributors when they have to make a tough decision, instead encourages more healthy engagement. We also discussed that we may want to make it simpler to sign, rather than using a PGP key, but still make it some kind of process so it doesn’t become a “Terms and Conditions” type document that people just click through. We also had a lot of great participation in the room to point out some changes we’ll need to make before we send out a more final revision for review, so thanks to everyone who came out and spoke up during the session. My fellow Community Council member Charles Profitt wrote a blog post about the session here.

– Ubuntu Women UDS-Q Goals -

I started off this session by reviewing some of the work we’ve done in the past cycle and will continue to do like Career Days and Full Circle Magazine columns and we brainstormed some about how to keep these going and who we can contact to encourage to participate. An action item was taken to take some of our older Full Circle Magazine posts and start posting them on our blog (with “originally appeared in FCM Issue # in $year…” etc notes). There were also some ideas about how visible the project was on some of the more core Ubuntu resources and within about an hour of our session a note about the project was up on edubuntu.org (thanks Jonathan!). We’ll also be reaching out to projects like OpenHatch and other groups that do very targeted mentoring. Finally, we’ll be taking a look at our leadership structure and electing new leader(s) this cycle.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

I was sorry to miss the Edubuntu plans for 12.10 and Ubuntu LoCo Council Items for the Quantal cycle sessions due to conflicts, so I’ll have to catch up with notes and participants later.

The first plenary session after lunch was on QA and focused on a series of FAQ around Ubuntu Automated Test Harness (UATH) and then a demonstration. Calexeda presentation about some of the facts and challenges of massive scale datacenter deployments, including power, space and cluster management and then noted that hardware hasn’t kept up with the demands of software and data. On the Ubuntu side Calexeda began getting involved at UDS-L in Dallas in 2009 and then Linaro was founded in 2010 to accelerate ARM and Open Source work. In the 11.10 release Ubuntu shipped with ARM support, and in 2012 they are seeking to deliver a complete solution and they anticipate an aggressive adoption of ARM servers and the rate and pace of innovation. The next plenary was on the current state of OpenStack. I saw a talk of the same name at SCALE in January and it was great to see how different this one was post release of Ubuntu 12.04 which shipped with Essex and will have an option to update OpenStack throughout its supported life. A list of known deployments was also shared, which includes HP Cloud, NASA Nebula, Rackspace and private clouds at Sony and Disney. Also reviewed some specific states and goals of the separate pieces of OpenStack. Wrapped up with note that all major Linux distributions have signed up to be founding members of the OpenStack Foundation. The last plenary was about MAAS (Metal as a Service), where there was a quick review of the history of the project and then did a live demonstration.

- Leadership Summit -

Started off with a couple lightning talks by some of the community leaders. Charles Profitt spoke about Tuckman’s stages of group development. Jorge Castro talked about AskUbuntu governance and conflict handling, since it’s a StackExchange site they go by their “A Theory of Moderation” and they use the Questions and upvotes mechanisms for site policy and even electing new moderators.

Then shifted into Q&A with the Canonical Community team. Led to a discussion about some of the collaborative meetings the team has, including regular one on ones, a public IRC meeting and some private casual meetings. Then moved into a discussion about the relationship between community and Canonical which led into a discussion about perceptions outside the project about the relationship. We then discussed some of the challenges as the LoCo communities grow and we expand beyond traditional contributors to companies and users with very different needs, motivations and interests. We also asked what other innovations could be made in the community moving forward.

After the break we picked up the Leadership Summit by discussing whether there are some core details that community members can focus upon. A proposal was made to get together some “more official” slide decks for some of the generic presentations (new features in $release, introduction to Ubuntu, introduction to getting involved). Leadership handbook was mentioned, the resources are available if someone wants to pick it up. We then continued the community lightning talks. Jono Bacon spoke about team planning and organization strategies. Then discussed some about getting through rough or lonely portions of projects, then on to the Learning team example – good to be clear about goals and expectations and being concise about making decisions.

- Drafting testcases for ubuntu flavors -

I ended up leaving the leadership summit to attend this session as the Xubuntu representative. We reviewed what the different flavors were already doing application QA-wise and discussed what the flavors teams need QA-wise. The Xubuntu team will be moving our Short and Long tests over to the QA wiki and there is a session Friday I’ll attend on Friday about expanding the isotracker’s test case capabilities.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

After all the sessions I sat down with Jose Antonio Rey to talk about the somewhat defunct Ubuntu Learning Materials and make plans to move forward so he can get some materials to a teacher of his who wants to teach about Ubuntu in his classroom.

I then met up with some folks from the Ubuntu Women Project to head over to my place in San Francisco for an Ubuntu Women Project dinner.

We had food!

And fired up a laptop with a Google+ Hangout so we could bring in some remote attendees as we sat around my livingroom and talked.

Ended up being a really fun night, 7 people came over, 3 participated remotely, and we wrapped up around 10:30. Thanks to everyone who came out! And for putting up with my over-friendly, chair-stealing cats :)

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

Day 3! The plenaries from Tuesday are up now, see here. The flavors talks start at about 30 minutes into it with Kubuntu, then my Xubuntu bit and on from there.

– Community Roundtable -

We talked some about Ubuntu Membership with regard to expectations, members not being siloed in their communities, and better documenting expectations for members as they cross into new communities within Ubuntu. There was also some discussion about some of the hardware (and other) reveals with Canonical partners that the community is not involved with, how to improve culture on both sides so that Canonical can protect relationships with clients and the community won’t be so troubled by Canonical not disclosing everything.

– Multi-Monitor Improvements -

Reviewed some of the improvements in multi-monitor support in precise, bug fixing (some of which are xorg and kernel fixes that all window managers benefit from, not just Unity), and features like the option of having launchers available on both screens. The Unity Multi-Monitor interactions toolkit is available here, including the Multiple Monitors UX Specification, Phase 1, which was used during the session. Went through sections on booting up, a proposed “presentation mode” where notify-osd does not activate (embarrassing or distracting notifications!) and power-saving isn’t enabled (display going blank during inactivity), laptop docking behavior, face lift of System Settings-Display Preferences, improvements to proper display focus, and more.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– Ubuntu Desktop in an Enterprise Setup -

Premise of the session: “We want to be able to use Ubuntu in an environment where it’s currently a small player and we believe a relatively small effort could grease the wheels significantly.” Currently there is not much Exchange calendaring support in Mozilla Lightning, there is some more in Evolution but it’s not all that reliable and doesn’t work in all instances (requires Exchange webmail option to be enabled). Simplifying authenticating against various types of LDAP-based implementations with different security profiles. Discussed management of keys for encrypted filesystems (so IT staff can hold encryption keys for systems they deploy so they can recover user systems in cases of password losses, diagnostics and such). Actual management of systems can be done with CFEngine or Puppet, but no great tools for machine inventory: packages installed, hardware details, users logged in (Landscape offers some of these, but it’s proprietary and Canonical-managed). Touched upon the issue of Windows or Mac-specific applications, but it’s not a problem that can easily be solved in the short term. Wrapped up by talking about Office formats integration, LibreOffice is fine for some users, but many are very closely tied to Microsoft Office specifically.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– Upstream App Developer Outreach -

The idea of this session is ways to more proactively reach out to application developers to get their applications into Ubuntu. One group is collecting a list of interesting applications and contacting the authors to see about getting them to package and submit it to Ubuntu. It was pointed out that personal contact is key for getting responses, automated emails or form mails don’t typically illicit replies. Also might want to go to gaming and programming conferences with fliers that have been proposed, which probably should point developers to developer.ubuntu.com/publish. The session wrapped up with brainstorming of suggestions of where else to look for potential applications.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

First up for the plenaries was Rich Hilleman from Electronic Arts. He opened by discussing how the gaming environment has changed over the past 5 years, focusing on being more mobile, social and free apps that people pay for “on the way out” rather than “on the way in.” They are platform agnostic by developing for various platforms and have been discussing with Canonical how to release on specific hardware configurations on Ubuntu. Noted that they have open sourced some of their older codebases like Sim City back in 2008 (released as Micropolis). Next up was Vin Sharma of the Open Source Technology Center at Intel. Intel contributes both code and money on upstream upstream projects. Sharma’s work is also focused on downstreams like Ubuntu. Discussed some of the interests and requirements of Cloud vendors and customers and are seeking to fulfill some of those resource implementations with OpenStack.

– Review of the ARB process using MyApps -

MyApps is the webapp the Application Review Board uses to track application submissions and this session is reviewing how that’s working and what improvements could be made. There was discussion about teams with review permissions and allowing flexibility of sources on the PPA upload user interface. Reviewed some existing bugs in the developer registration portal to assess priority.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– LoCo Portal Design Iteration -

We want to keep the concrete plans somewhat simple due to low number of developers for the portal this cycle. Discussed possible redirection of users using GeoIP, but there have been very mixed results in accuracy. Proposed creating a “planet like” feed of blog posts by LoCo members which can be managed by team admins. We quickly reviewed the front page and decided to put out a survey to LoCo teams to see what they may find useful. Wrapped up by finding a few more volunteers in the room who may be able to help with development.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– QA Team Organization -

There are a lot of QA teams (see here), so the discussion centered around how they could best collaborate, it was generally felt that administrators of the QA teams may find value in all project meetings a couple times a cycle, rather than seeking to create more teams or consolidate diverse teams. There was also the topic of giving feedback and recognizing contributions and avoiding burnout. There was an item to see about collecting data from trackers about who is doing what to give to team leads so they can handle recognition of their team members. The session wrapped up by talking about non-desktop testing, with focus on servers and hardware.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

That wrapped things up for the day, and it was on to the evening activities!

I planned an evening of San Francisco Tourism and met about 30 people in the hotel lobby at 6:30PM and passed out handouts detailing the plans for the night. James Tatum was kind enough to offer help for the evening as another local and so together we managed to get tickets for everyone and on to BART and over to San Francisco.

The tour started at Ferry Building where we were able to walk around the pier and get photos of the Bay Bridge and check out the ferries.

From there it was on to a street car which we all managed to fit in and head up to Pier 39 where about half the group went their own way to explore and get dinner. We took the other half of the group down the pier to see Alcatraz Island, the very distant Golden Gate Bridge and the sea lions. We then walked up to Fisherman’s Wharf for dinner at Boudin. Our dinner ran a bit late so I skipped down to the Fisherman’s Wharf sign at 9:30 to tell those gathered there that we would be running a bit late and encouraged them to head up to Ghirardelli Square for some ice cream while we finished up.

We all managed to finally meet up at the cable car turnaround across the street from the Buena Vista Cafe for a ride to Powell station.

James ended up taking most of the group on one cable car as the 6 or so of us remaining caught the next one. We all met at Powell station and hopped on BART, I got off at Montgomery station while everyone else headed back to the hotel. In all, quite a fun evening, it was great to have so many people come out!

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

Day 2 of UDS! Mark’s keynote from yesterday is now up on youtube, you can view it here.

- Community Roundtable -

The session started off with some discussion around the use of Trello.com boards. Several teams have found them to be useful and we’ll likely continue use, we do want to be mindful that we’re not duplicating the work of other methods for work item tracking (ie blueprints). There was also some discussion about community documentation which was picked up in a session later in the day. Finally, Jono let us in on EA’s announcement that was supposed to be big news tomorrow but had already leaked to several sources: Electronic Arts now have two games in the Ubuntu Software Center: Command & Conquer Tiberium Alliances and Lord of Ultima (he blogs about it here). For now these are just links to web applications, but it is very cool that a company like EA is showing interest in Ubuntu as a gaming platform.

- Continuing Packaging Guide Improvements -

The two biggest take-aways from this session was that they need more user testing and there is a fair amount of work to be done to consolidate and complete packaging documentation. There are several open bugs (here), so there is some feedback coming in, but to continue testing and feedback there was a proposal for user testing at packaging jams. On the consolidation side, there is still an Ubuntu packaging guide on the Ubuntu wiki, so the one on the wiki will be merged into the formal one here. The formal packaging guide is written in Sphinx and they are looking for volunteers to help with the transition. It was also noted that there is a translation infrastructure is available, but there will need to be milestones for when we can do calls from translations, so they began developing some milestones.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

- Keybindings Health Check -

This session went through reviewing default keybindings in Unity and discussing what worked, what people where having trouble with and how changes can be made to alter how accessible it was. Representatives from the Accessibility team were available to chime in on changes. Throughout reviewed portions of the keyboard shortcut overly to see about whether additions/subtractions need to be made.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

- Transition help.ubuntu.com to SUMO -

In this session we did an analysis of SUMO to replace the help.ubuntu.com/community/ moin wiki. There are a lot of complaints about the current infrastructure, including that wikis are difficult to maintain and aren’t really built for the dynamic support documents that organizations like Mozilla have, plus there is no real support for translations. I did have some concerns about who can edit it, particularly surrounding whether moderator approval would be required for edits, unlike the wiki, and who would be responsible for handling the additional moderator burden that such an infrastructure may bring (the docs team is already spread pretty thin!). A test instance will be deployed so we can explore some of this.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

After lunch it was off to the plenaries! They started out with an Ubuntu at Google presentation with Thomas Bushnell, Tech Lead for Google’s Goobuntu team. He began by hinting at the size of their Ubuntu deployments at Google, saying “tens of thousands of employees” including graphic designers, managers, software engineers, systems engineers, translators and more. They push workstations to their limits, have very high costs for reboots and re-logins. Goobuntu is a light skin over standard Ubuntu in most cases, they don’t customize the UI, use centralized administration with Puppet and apt, LDAP-based user database and automated release testing. He went over some of the special demands based on security, including purging packages which may be dangerous and more secure network authentication, internal apt repository framework and very diverse developers they support. They use the Ubuntu LTS and make extensive use of multiple testing methods and automation.

Someone took notes from the plenary which I’ve uploaded here.

We then had the official flavors planery, where representatives from Kubuntu (David Wonderly), Xubuntu (me!), Lubuntu (Julien Lavergne), Studio (Scott Lavender) and Edubuntu (Jonathan Carter) gave quick updates on the status of their respective flavors.

Thanks to Benjamin Kerensa for taking a photo during my Xubuntu section!

The plenaries wrapped up with Jono Bacon discussing his journey creating the new Ubuntu Accomplishments system.

- Leadership Summit -

The rest of the afternoon was spent at the leadership summit. It was a small group and some of the topics we covered were nurturing leaders, handling conflict, best practices for leadership. The final hour ended up being quite a valuable time, with some of the core community contributors sharing personal stories about their rise into leadership within the project and some of the challenges they faced and lessons learned. I think one of the key take-aways is that some of our core struggles around recruiting and retaining great volunteers are very similar, and for every time we cast our net out for contributors there will be only a tiny percentage of that group who will be retained, whether due to changing interest, time constraints or other factors which prevent prolonged involvement.

I had some great “hallway discussions” before heading down to the Google-sponsored “Circus” themed party. All I want to say about the party itself right now is that it made me uncomfortable, I left pretty quickly. Instead I went with Michael Hall, Penelope Stowe, Alan Bell and Jamesha Fisher over to a sports bar down the street where we enjoyed beers and some sandwiches, which was quite enjoyable!

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

Being local to the Ubuntu Developer Summit this time I had the pleasure of meeting up with several friends prior to the summit. Enjoying dinner in Oakland on Saturday evening, picking up a first time UDS attendee at the airport Saturday night after BART stopped running. Then on Sunday a lovely brunch at EPIC Roadhouse with a couple of friends who were staying in San Francisco Sunday and then heading over with them to Oakland with their luggage.

Having a UDS that’s local to me is actually quite a surreal experience. The excitement of visiting a new place and all the travel that goes along with it has been part of the whole experience every time I’ve attended a UDS until now. This morning between walking to the station, waiting for the BART train and then walking to the hotel I spent less than 30 minutes getting there!

It has also meant that I’ve traded the exhaustion of travel for that of being a helpful local. This morning I quickly ran out of my 15 “I’m a local” pins I bought for Ubuntu California attendees and was giving out blank Clipper transit cards throughout the day (I still have some if you’re reading this and need one). There was also plenty of helping folks with maps and quick questions (“where is chinatown?” and the like). I really love the bay area and have enjoyed sharing that with my fellow UDS attendees.

The day kicked off with an introduction by Canonical’s Community Team lead Jono Bacon and a keynote by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. Quality and having a usable release throughout development were a major part of Mark’s keynote. As he mentions here the exciting part of the keynote was the unveiling of the first rack-ready 48-node 192-core ARM server from Calxeda. Some day I’ll get my sysadmin paws on such hardware!

From there, it was off to sessions.

- Community Roundtable -

We started off with introductions around the room and discussed some of our take-aways from Mark’s keynote. We also touched upon some documentation discussions that are scheduled or should happen during this UDS, including the proposed move to SUMO. Tomorrow we’ll be brainstorming a bit more for the Leadership Summit happening in the afternoon.

I’ve uploaded notes from the session here.

- OpenStack HA -

Having not kept completely up to date with OpenStack, but working with many of the technologies at work (HA clusters on Debian with pacemaker and corosync, drbd and application-level replication strategies), this was an interesting session for me. The discussion centered around what kinds of things should be handled by the OpenStack infrastructure and what should obviously be handled application-side, for several technologies in the stack, including MySQL, RabbitMQ, Nova, and with an eye out for what to do when Quantum comes out.

I’ve uploaded notes from the session here.

- LoCo Portal Content Review -

This session covered a lot of ground, but at the core it was a review of static text content itself on the LoCo Team Portal. Some action items were made for gathering photos for About Local Community (LoCo) Teams to make it more lively. I agreed to do some “wiki archaeological work” once a defined list of documents we want included directly on LTP is put together, as I’m quite sure all the text has been written at some point, it’s just hard to find on the wiki. There was also a fair amount of discussion about the severe lack of developers for the platform, which runs on Django, so a few folks will be reaching out to the community with some “getting involved” documents and blog posts to spark more interest – perhaps next UDS we can even add more features!

I’ve uploaded notes from the session here.

After lunch it was on to the plenaries.

First off was “How Ubuntu and Canonical work with OEMs” with Chris Kenyon. It was a very interesting talk that quickly dove into the adventure it’s been over the past 4 years to work with OEMs to learn the steps they need to take to get Ubuntu pre-installed at scale. A lot of the OEMs are exclusively geared toward Windows, so all their testing and automation is built around Windows. As a result, the Canonical OEM team has spent a considerable amount of time working with the professionals at the OEMs to develop these same tools to work on the rapid installation and testing required in this area.

The next talk was on “HP & Ubuntu” by Bdale Garbee. Garbee, always an excellent speaker, explained that HP is world’s largest IT company, and they have the opportunity to interact with hugely diverse market and get feedback. He discussed the Moonshot, Odyssey and Voyager programs and how they relate to Linux and Ubuntu. Then discussed Ubuntu on ProLiant story: 2006: support for Debian, 2009: broader support for “Community” distributions, 2012: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to be Certified and Supported. He also mentioned that they are doing a significant amount of work with OpenStack (not only technical content, but also hosting the build farm). The latest Ubuntu LTS is the core for HP Cloud offering, public beta begins May 10th.

The last plenary was about the juju Charm Store by community member Marco Ceppi. He quickly explained what juju is “apt-get for the cloud” and what Charms are (deployment scripts, or the “packages” in the “apt-get” analogy). Charms are submitted to the Charm Store, charms are reviewed for security, best practices and completeness. It’s a living archive, not frozen like you’d find with Ubuntu itself. And he gave demo of a juju deployment he just deployed a few minutes before the presentation. There is a charm browser at jujucharms.com

- Test Drive Different Tablet UIs – User Experiences -

I ended up in this testing room after some sessions got shuffled around, and I’m glad I did! There were several Exopcs on display running various operating systems and environments, including Gnome3, Windows 8 and Unity on 12.04. ZaReason also brought one of their soon-to-be-released Zatabs running Android. It was a popular room, but the traffic was flowing enough that it wasn’t too hard to get to see everything.

- QA community structuring and needs -

Aside from testing I did when I was maintaining packages in Debian, I’ve never actually done a whole lot of software testing until just this past release when I started to help test ISOs for the Xubuntu team. The session centered around analysis and proposals of changes which may need to be made to the QA community to raise effectiveness, recruit more volunteers (and not burn them out!) and in general leverage the resources they have to get the best results.

I’ve uploaded notes from the session here.

- App Developer Events -

Last session of the day! Ubuntu is seeking to get more developers to port (or simply write) applications to Ubuntu. I think the most interesting thing for me in this session was discussion related to some proposed “app contests” and how the discussion went from monetary and goods-based prizes to a more thorough analysis of what motivates people and is a compelling reward. It was generally agreed that something like recognition (ability to add to your resume “Winner of top app in Ubuntu for the month of July”) or prominent placement in the Software Center is going to be more valuable to a potential developer than a $100 gift certificate or goods (like a netbook) that may not be very useful to the developer who won it. There was also more general discussion about how we can better publicize app development for Ubuntu in general so potential app developers know it exists and have a clear path laid out to begin submitting apps.

I’ve uploaded notes from the session here.

After sessions I had several great hallway conversations before heading to the night’s meet and greet welcome event. I only stayed for about an hour, as I needed to head home to do some more preparation for the days ahead.

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

On April 28th we took Simcoe in for her quarterly checkup, the last one was on January 26th (I wrote about it here).

In general we felt she was responding well to the CRF treatment, activity level has been great and it seemed like she was even putting on weight.

Simcoe in the carrier before the vet visit

The physical exam went great. She indeed has put on a whole pound in the past 3 months, going from 7.1 to 8.1 lbs. This is up a significant amount from when she was just 6.06 lbs, but still a bit off her healthy weight of 9.1 lbs.

On Tuesday we got the blood work back:

BUN: 55 (normal range: 14-36)
CRE: 2.3 (normal range: .6-2.4)

So the BUN has increased a little (last time was 46) and CRE is down a little from 2.4. The vet suggested that we keep her on her treatment plan and check back again in 3 months.

She also again recommended that we start brushing her teeth regularly. We’ve since done it once… with marginal success. I’ll try again tonight. If anyone has some tips I’d be happy to hear them! We have been giving them treats that claim to help with dental health.

It’s also become increasingly difficult to give her pills, she is very sneaky. I’ll go through the whole pilling process, believe she’s swallowed it and then she’ll walk off and spit out the pill a minute later. On the recommendation of the petsitter we decided to try out Greenie’s Pill Pockets. It worked very well for the first few days, but now she’s trying to eat around the pills, the past two nights it took two tries.

We’re still working to handle different food for each cat. Caligula’s food sometimes makes her sick and we suspect Caligula has put on a little weight by sneaking her food. She’s also very picky about her soft food and I’ve had to sneak in the prescription food with the low-phosphorous over the counter food that she likes. On the bright side she hasn’t lost her appetite! She just walks around and meows when I don’t give her the food she wants.

I’m very happy that she’s responding so well to treatment, quite a change from the devastation we felt when she was diagnosed in December when we learned it was incurable and thought her prognosis was on the order of just a few months. From day to day she acts like normal pre-illness Simcoe!

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

I have been to four Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS), and at all of them I found the advice of local Ubuntu contributors to be very valuable to my visit, the shining example of which was the culmination of being downtown in a city and having the support of the Hungarian LoCo team while we were in Budapest.

This UDS it’s my turn to be a local, and it’s once again being held downtown in a city!

From May 7-11th UDS will be held in Oakland, which is across the bay from me here in San Francisco. With the cities being so close I make frequent trips to Oakland for baseball games, to fly out of the Oakland airport, to visit their museums and zoo or to see shows. In the “Bay Area” of which Oakland is part of, there are many similarities in transit and other key things that make most anyone within the area a useful local at an event in Oakland.

The Ubuntu California team has been pretty excited about this, and we’ve been brainstorming some things to do on our wiki:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CaliforniaTeam/Projects/UDS-Q

And we have been moving confirmed evening events to the UDS wiki:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDS-Q/OtherEvents

We’ve also put together a public transit page for UDS attendees:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDS-Q/PublicTransit

Huge thanks to Eric P. Scott and Chris Peeples who have offered invaluable suggestions for this transit page, it was much smaller when I began!

We’ve also gone ahead and created “I’m a local” buttons which friendly members of the Ubuntu California team will be wearing throughout the week of UDS to help out with public transit directions, finding places to eat and more.

We welcome any UDS attendees to join us in our channel #ubuntu-us-ca on freenode or the ubuntu-us-ca mailing list with any questions about the area as you make your preparations to visit.

Several of us on the team have also cleared our schedules on the weekends surrounding UDS to spend time with visitors and are happy to help with details on bay cruises, museums and other “tourist stuff” which may be of interest in the area. On the Sunday before UDS I’ll be in downtown San Francisco (where I live) and would be happy to spend time with folks looking to do some shopping around Union Square. The Saturday following UDS I am thinking about taking interested folks over to the San Francisco Zoo and to see the Pacific ocean (too cold to swim, but it is pretty!), both accessible via light rail public transit. For both of these things people are welcome to drop suitcases and other items at my home downtown if it makes the logistics easier. If you’re interested, please drop me an email at lyz@ubuntu.com or grab me (pleia2) on IRC or track me down at UDS :)

Hope to see you there!

Disclaimer: I don’t work for Canonical and the work of the Ubuntu California team is not in any way a sponsored or included as part of the Ubuntu Developer Summit itself. If you have more general questions about UDS, your sponsorship or travel arrangements please follow-up with the contact at Canonical you’ve been working with.

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

On Thursday night I hosted the typical Ubuntu California release party at Thirsty Bear Brewing Company in downtown San Francisco.

We had…

A thirsty pangolin!

A hungry penguin!

A guy in a Fedora shirt (hi Jeff!)!

And lots of people having fun!

All told we probably had 20 people who came and went throughout the night. As is tradition, we stayed until past closing and there were plenty of friendly “I haven’t seen you in a while!” to go around. It was really great to see so many amazing people together for this event, thanks again to everyone who made it out!

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

This morning I dropped MJ off at the airport. To cheer myself up and enjoy the beautiful weather I decided to take a detour on my way home to visit the San Francisco Zoo.

If you read my blog you know that as a member I visit frequently. Took lots of pictures (set here) and was generally enjoying the visit. Slash the cassowary was out! One of the polar bears was posing for pictures! The grizzly bears were running around in anticipation for their breakfast!

Then I got to Orkney’s pool.

Orkney’s pool was empty. All his signs were gone. A zoo staff member was nearby so I quickly asked her about it and she conveyed the bad news, Orkney had passed away the previous month. There were some tears and she admitted that she had cried too when she learned.

From the San
 Francisco
 Zoo
 Mourns
 the
 Death
 of
 “Orkney” the 
Beloved
 Grey 
Seal press release on March 2nd:

SAN
 FRANCISCO 
– 
Today, 
San 
Francisco 
Zoo 
is 
sad 
to 
announce 
the 
loss 
of 
Orkney, 
an
 Atlantic
 grey 
seal 
that 
arrived 
at 
the 
Zoo 
in
 1970.
 He
 was 
42
 years
 old 
and 
considered
 the 
oldest 
grey
 seal 
living
 in 
any 
North 
American 
Association 
of 
Zoos 
and 
Aquariums’
 (AZA) 
captive
 populations. 
He
 was
 born
 in
 the
 wild
 at 
Prince
 Edward
 Island
 in 
Eastern
 Canada
 and
 was 
a
 favorite
 among
 staff
 and 
visitors. He
 shared 
his 
exhibit 
with other
 grey
 seals 
over the
 years
 and
 sired
 multiple 
offspring
 between
 1979
 and 
1983.




For
 the
 past 
several 
months,
 Orkney
 had 
been
 undergoing 
medical 
treatments
 as 
well 
as
 regular
 training
 sessions
 that 
allowed 
staff 
to 
monitor 
his 
weight 
and 
conduct 
visual
 exams. 
Yesterday, 
his 
keepers 
noticed
 that 
he 
was 
extremely 
lethargic 
and 
weak. 
They
 kept 
a 
close 
eye 
on 
him 
in 
hopes 
his condition 
would
 improve. 
On Friday
 morning,
 his
 breathing
 was 
deep
 and 
labored,
 and 
he 
showed 
no 
signs 
of 
engagement 
or 
interaction.
 After 
careful 
consultation 
with 
the 
Zoo’s 
Animal 
Care 
staff 
and 
the 
Chief 
of 
Veterinary
 Services, 
the 
decision 
to 
euthanize 
him 
was 
made.




“Unfortunately, 
we 
had 
to 
make 
the 
decision 
to 
say 
goodbye 
to 
Orkney,” 
Tanya 
M.
 Peterson, 
San 
Francisco
 Zoological
 Society
 Executive 
Director 
and 
President 
said. “He
 had
 been 
our 
own 
Lance
 Armstrong
 by 
beating
 the 
odds 
for 
so 
long. 
He’ll 
be 
greatly
 missed
 by 
staff 
and 
visitors 
alike.”

Orkney swimming in his pool, September 29, 2010

I love animals and it would be impossible for me to say what is my favorite, or even what general type is my favorite, but I do adore pinnipeds. I go up to Pier 39 to visit the sea lions regularly, I was delighted by the seal-covered beaches in Monterey and I’m a member of the Marine Mammal Center and have said “if I ever give up this open source stuff, I’ll go volunteer there.” When I joined the zoo in 2010 Orkney was the only pinniped (they now also have two sea lions, the blind rescues Silent Knight and Henry) and so I made a point to visit him every time to say hello. On my birthday I joked that I went to see him “to see someone older than me.”

The last time I saw Orkney was when I was last at the zoo on February 4th, soaking up the sun near his pool.

Orkney resting by his pool, February 4, 2012

I am glad he was able to live such a long life with the care he had, but I will miss him.

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

Back in August I wrote a post “News is hard, but we’re making it easier” regarding improvements to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter.

At the time I defined some todo list items, which I now have updates on:

• UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter wiki
  • Make sure workflow is properly documented DONE
  • Confirm team contact information has been updated DONE
  • Review instructions for how to get involved DONE
  • General clean-up for clarity DONE
• Train additional releasers INPROGRESS
• Redefine team structure and leadership DONE

I think one of the most exciting things about this reorganization is the formal decentralization of a single editor in chief running the whole thing. Unfortunately this is largely in name only, as there are still only 2 people who can complete the full publishing routine and if I’m unavailable I need to plan accordingly to make sure we have volunteers available to coordinate the preparation. I’d really like to move past this because it’s not sustainable.

We need more volunteers doing summary writing and editing so we can complete the newsletter in a timely manner each week (and can actually complete it to our highest standards, last week we had to forgo summaries on two full sections of the newsletter because we didn’t have enough people to write them). We also wish to have a wider pool to draw from when it comes to experienced folks to train on the release process as most of our volunteers have very limited time to contribute.

See this page for details of each and how you can help out: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Join

Email me at lyz@ubuntu.com if you have any questions, comments, suggestions or anything. Feel free to drop by #ubuntu-news on chat.freenode.net if you want to get a feel for the team or ask other questions (as always with IRC, please be patient when waiting for replies, we’re a small team and not always around to reply!).

Finally, huge thanks to everyone who is currently involved with the team and recently joined. We recently had Matt Rudge join us as a wonderfully thorough editor, Charles Profitt stepped up while I was traveling to collect links and has been working on summaries, Amber Graner is reliably available for releasing when I’m not, Chris Druif has been maintaining our Ubuntu Flavors meetings section, Jose Antonio Rey recently started maintaining a Spanish translation and Benjamin Kerensa (who also works on Dev news) has stepped up to be trained on releasing. And of course our hard-working summary writers (and sometimes editors!) Nathan Dyer, Neil Oosthuizen, Emma Marshall, Unit193 and others who don’t explicitly put their name in the credits.

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

Last night, as announced here and mentioned here, Grant Bowman and I did a presentation for the Bay Area Linux Users Group (BALUG) on Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin).

When I arrived a gentleman I’d been corresponding with over email had his netbook set up for me to look at. He couldn’t remember his password and I had a USB stick with Ubuntu ISOs on it, so resetting the password just took a few minutes. We then headed into the dining room for the typical BALUG family-style Chinese offering.

The presentation followed dinner and was very casual, meeting in the bar area of the restaurant rather than the upstairs room (there was another event going on). Michael Paoli graciously printed out handouts that I put together in lieu of projector+slides. People asked questions throughout and we had very engaging discussions about virtualization technologies on Ubuntu these days (KVM, Xen, VirtualBox), kernel changes (PAE, the 64-bit as default discussion), OpenStack and more. The improvements in Unity to keyboard navigation where a huge hit, as was the new shortcuts menu you get by holding down the Super key, there were a few people who mentioned they would “give Unity another shot in 12.04″ after the demonstrations.

We wrapped up the evening by answering a few final questions and passing around our identical Lenovo G575 systems running 12.04 so people could play with Unity and gnome-panel versions.

Much of the content from the handouts came from the Alpha and Beta release announcements. The handouts themselves are available, licensed CC BY-SA, so you’re welcome to borrow for your own presentations:

• PDF: http://people.ubuntu.com/~lyz/handouts/12.04BALUGHandout.pdf
• ODT Source: http://people.ubuntu.com/~lyz/handouts/12.04BALUGHandout.odt

In other 12.04 news, next week the Ubuntu California team will be hosting a release party in San Francisco!

Date: Thu, 26 April 2012
Time: 7:00 – 9:30PM PDT
Where: Thirsty Bear Brewing Company, 661 Howard Street, San Francisco, 94105 (Map)
RSVP: http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/ubuntu-california/1615/detail/

This will be a pretty informal get-together where we enjoy tapas, optional craft brews and chat about Ubuntu. This is a restaurant so all ages are welcome and there are non-alcoholic beverage offerings. On and off-street parking is available and the venue is just a couple blocks from the Montgomery BART and MUNI station.

We’re going to try and meet around the high tables opposite the bar, but in case we’re not there just look for the people with the Ubuntu shirts. Please note that this is not a sponsored event, so it’s pay-for-what you eat/drink and we’ll be closing the tab throughout the evening so we don’t end up with a big bill at the end.

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

MJ and I travel a frequently, last year was my biggest travel year ever for me with nearly 50k miles of airline travel. For long trips last year we have a couple of friends who were happy to drop in to feed and water them every few days. Then, when Simcoe was diagnosed with CRF in December we learned she’d now need special food, special attention to her behavior, daily medication and subcutaneous fluid injections every other day. How could we travel now that we had a sick kitty to care for?

It quickly became clear that we had three options:

1. Stop travelling
2. Board Simcoe at the vet while traveling
3. Hire a petsitter to come in daily while traveling

While I have learned that many folks with CRF cats selection option 1, it wasn’t practical for us. I don’t anticipate as much travel this year as last, but travel is an important part of our lives from work to family. The second option is not optimal given how stressed out Simcoe gets at the vet, to leave her at a place that makes her so upset for a whole week without Caligula? So sad! We were apprehensive about the third option because it required giving keys to our home to a stranger and trusting them with the security of our home and lives of our cats. We spent several weeks going over our options.

The topic of traveling came up on one of the cat care lists I’ve joined since learning of Simcoe’s diagnosis and someone recommended searching for a sitter on the National Association of Professional Pet Sitters (NAPPS). It was there where I found The Petsitters here in San Francisco. We met with the owner, Elaine, and her assistant who would be accompanying her on visits and could take over in the event of an emergency. We spent almost an hour answering questions about the cats and going through details of their care, everything from their favorite toys and treats to the specifics of Simcoe’s particular care routine. They have considerable experience with administrating the subcutaneous fluids, giving pills to pets and caring for sick animals in general. At the end of our meeting I was satisfied with the interaction and felt comfortable going on our trip.

Our trip to Philadelphia last month was the first trial of this petsitting experiment. “No news is good news” is their policy, but took an opportunity to call once during our trip just to check in to confirm all was well – and it was! I was able to keep my worrying to a minimum.

When we returned home the cats where happy and healthy and Elaine had left a detailed note talking about their care while we were gone. In all, an excellent experience that we will repeat the next time we go out of town for more than a couple days!

While on the topic of Simcoe, she’s been continuing to respond well to treatment, largely acting like her old self again and even putting on a little weight (which is unusual for CRF cats). We’ll be taking her in for blood work soon to make sure her levels are all still looking good and to adjust care as needed.

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

About a decade ago I wrote an article My Spiritual Path To Atheism, I last updated it in 2004. The too long; didn’t read version: I was put off by hypocrisy, bigotry and cruelty of the Christian church I attended as a teenager, dabbled in other religions and followed history back to learn why certain religious things exist and eventually came down with the conclusion that in my world view there was no place for God.

Now, I don’t actually have a problem with religion in general. I haven’t found a connection with it in my own life but I respect much of what it provides for others and understand that a lot of people have deep cultural ties that include religion. I am deeply offended by religion being used to justify pain being inflicted upon others, but I find that a fair amount of that is painful interpretations by people who are just looking for a justification for the cruel behavior they were going to engage in regardless.

Upon reflection, some of this is deeply cultural for me, or lack there of. While looking for “the truth” on the question of religion I checked in with my relatives and ancestors. My immediate family has dedicated secular humanists, Catholics, and Christian Protestants of all kinds. Going back a several generations they were some kind of Christian like much of Europe, go back further and my ancestors were all kinds of pagan, go back further… where do I stop? And even if I were to stop, does sheer passage of time mean something is truer than another? If so, why would my ancestors have given it up for a new belief system? Clearly this isn’t the way.

Speaking from a strictly cultural sense I have a grandfather who deeply identifies with his Irish heritage and my other grandfather went as far as working with others to publish a newsletter celebrating German heritage. I spent time going down these paths too, but as as a 3rd generation American-born child in a family that has embraced the culture here and after doing some traveling in Europe, I have learned that in truth I am deeply American.

So here I am, an American atheist. I actually have come to identify with Secular Humanism because I feel that I’m more defined by my compassion for others than the fact that my world view does not include any god(s). My moral code is quite simply “don’t hurt others” and I do a workaholic level of volunteer work now that I’m in a position in my life where I can. When looking at all this, the fact that I don’t believe in god(s) seems incidental.

Now, my fiance is Jewish, wishes to get married by a Rabbi and to raise any children we may have in the Jewish tradition.

I’ve taken a lot of time to think about how we could handle this. I’ve come to the conclusion that when it comes to values and culture, I care about American culture, helping others and advancing the freedom of information and learning. This doesn’t conflict with Judaism (indeed, it’s compatible with most religion), so as long as I’m free to express my feelings about these things in our life and to our children I’m happy to be part of a household which observes and respects Judaism as well.

This week we joined a synagogue together that recognizes and respects non-Jewish partners like myself who aren’t currently interested in conversion. I was relieved to learn that the synagogue also offers classes and tips for parents who are not the same religion because it’s so common here in California. My intellectual curiosity about Judaism abounds, and I’ll start attending Judaism classes hosted by the synagogue this fall so I can learn more about the culture and religion. I also put together a little page tracking the tools I’m using to help me learn about Torah here.

This past Saturday I attended my first Seder.

Looking forward to a whole year, and more, of firsts!

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

Happy Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) Beta 2 everyone!

I’ve been an Xfce user since 2004, this post from last year documents my UI adventures. It’s been my Desktop Environment of choice for my whole professional career as a systems administrator and I’m very set in my ways configuration-wise at work. These days I help out with the Xubuntu team on marketing, website, release notes and testing. I really love Xfce and I’ll continue to use it and contribute to Xubuntu (we had our beta2 today too, and formal release of our new branding!).

That said, I wanted to take some time to give a respectful nod to Unity.

I recently tried Ubuntu 11.10 with Unity on a new laptop. I have to admit that I found it a bit cumbersome (point: I also called Gnome2 cumbersome). There were little things about it that felt unfinished, like gaps where just using keyboard navigation didn’t quite cut it. I also quickly realized that pretty much all of my favorite tips Jorge Castro showed off in his The Power User’s Guide to Unity talk at Ubucon at the Southern California Linux Expo back in January where specific to the newer version of Unity in 12.04. I grabbed the daily build on March 13th and loaded it up alongside my Xubuntu 11.10 and 12.04 daily installs.

Unity in Ubuntu 12.04 is really quite impressive.

As a long-time fan of minimalist desktops I like it when the UI stays out of my way. I am a total sucker for keybindings, I use keybindings for everything. The new Unity has patched up the gaps in support for keyboard navigation to make the whole experience very smooth. Holding down the Super key (usually has a Windows logo on it) will pop up a cheat sheet for keybindings that I immediately fell in love with. The “display all windows” option (shift alt up arrow) for seeing all open windows on a screen is super useful when you have multiple windows of the same type open doing different things, like terminals. After sitting on my couch with my laptop for an hour I was quite comfortable with the new interface and had started working on some project stuff.

In all, Unity in 12.04 is significantly more polished than previous versions and I think finally presents a solid implementation of the vision that the designers had for it. Bravo! If anyone was put off by Unity in the past I highly recommend giving it another shot with this new release.

On Tuesday, April 17th, Grant Bowman and I will be doing a presentation on 12.04 at the Bay Area Linux Users Group (BALUG) where I’ll be showing off some of the nifty tricks I’ve learned.

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

Our trip to Philadelphia went by far too quickly. We had 6 wedding venue visits scheduled, ended up with 8 by the time we had finished collecting and reviewing recommendations from friends and family. I am really happy with what we ended up seeing, and upon browsing through a local weddings magazine we were given at one of the venues (they were featured) I couldn’t really find any we were missing out on. I’ll probably share the list of contenders once here after we make our decision, but I’m happy to share it privately until then, just drop me an email.

I will admit to one venue though because it was an attraction and I took a bunch of pictures: Morris Arboretum hosts weddings. It’s an amazing place and would make for an absolutely stunning outdoor wedding, if it didn’t rain. We were able to walk around the arboretum until closing to get a feel for it and I took several photos (including some of alternate wedding sites), I’ve uploaded several here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157629331826836/

We’ll probably pass on it due to a variety of factors (not the least of which is depending upon no rain on a day in April in Philadelphia is not a great thing). We have narrowed it down to, at most, 4 venue options. We’re now going to work with the potential officiant to figure out about dates and then work from there to decide on our final venue. I’m excited, nervous, and had my first wedding-related nightmare a few nights ago – about rights to our wedding photos. I’m exceptionally laid-back about all of this planning, but if there is one thing I’d go bridezilla about it would be photos. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that we’ll be paying out of our nose to get full resolution digital copies and a non-commercial license that grants us the ability to print AND put the photos online ourselves. I wouldn’t be at all happy with just prints or with some digital photos on a website owned by the photographer that I can’t store securely myself.

This trip has uncovered dozens of other things we need to decide. The wedding is still over a year off but the venue selection is a major dependency and once we make that decision we’ll be able to move forward with many of the other decisions. We’re also dealing with not only planning remotely, but a wedding party that’s scattered all over the country. We’ll most likely be skipping the bridal shower entirely and be doing destination bachelor(|ette) parties (Hello Las Vegas!). Thankfully my maid of honor, Danita, has offered to help in any way she can with wedding planning stuff.

We were also able to catch up with some of our friends and MJ’s family while we were in town, but not nearly as many people as I always want to. I got to enjoy some of my favorite foods (Cheesesteaks! Soft pretzels! Rita’s! Dunkin’ Donuts! Hoagies!), this time I didn’t overdo it too much and I made it to the hotel gym twice. We’re planning on coming back at least twice before the wedding to take care of some things, do the catering tasting, get our marriage license…

We also went to the Giant Mysterious Dinosaurs exhibit at The Franklin Institute</a>. I was excited when this exhibit came out but feared I wouldn’t get to see it. It happened to be the perfect thing to do to keep us awake after the redeye that put us in Philadelphia early Wednesday morning. I had a couple cups of coffee at a diner following the flight and being entertained by dinosaurs (Mamenchisaurus!) was enough to keep us awake until we were able to drive up and check in to our hotel in the afternoon.

It was a good trip. I will say, I adore San Francisco, but I am always sorry to go home after a visit to Philly. Next to Maine, the Philadelphia region is where I’ve spent the most years of my life and it’s where I finally found a great deal of strength and independence. Upon reflection, there were no doubts, and barely any discussion, when we decided that we’d go there for our wedding.

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.

I couldn’t read until I was 8 years old.

Over the years, the number of people I admitted that to has been very low and it wasn’t until recently that I realized I was hiding it because it was an intense such a source of shame.

My decision to start talking about it came in October when I listened to an podcast of Radio Times where Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Schultz talked about his own struggle with dyslexia (mp3 available for download on this page). I was on a plane when I listened to it and remember it very vividly, it made me cry. It’s taken me this long to actually write about it in public.

See, I didn’t really believe I was dyslexic. Both my parents were dyslexic, I was diagnosed when I was in 1st grade, but I convinced myself that I had been misdiagnosed. In spite of my slow start, I didn’t really fit the typical symptoms of random-dyslexia-website-I-found-in-2003 (which, in spite of seeming dubious now, I was happy to accept, who wants to admit to having a reading disorder?). By 8th grade I shocked myself (and my parents!) by scoring in the 97% percentile on reading comprehension in the state of Maine and receiving an award. Today I love books, enjoy reading and have a successful career where being able to quickly read, absorb and apply information is critical. This doesn’t sound like someone who is dyslexic to me! By accepting the diagnosis I thought I was doing a disservice to people who struggle in their adult life with the disorder. I wrote off all my problems to some nebulous “late bloomer” excuse and never talked about it again.

Listening to the interview with Schultz made me realize I was wrong. Here was Pulitzer Prize-winning poet talking about his struggle with dyslexia. While his symptoms didn’t strictly match mine, it made me realize that there was much more to dyslexia than a few generic symptoms I once found on a website. I bought his book, My Dyslexia.

I began to understand that successful dyslexics don’t necessarily “overcome” the disorder, but instead develop ways to cope. Some obviously cope by selecting career paths which require limited reading skills, but some (particularly fortunate ones like me who were diagnosed early and benefited from early Special Education) learned or were taught tricks which allowed us to function on par with our peers, and even excel. Looking back to my childhood, it was my dyslexic father who inspired my love of books, he was a journalism major and spent the most successful years of his career as a writer at an insurance company. I have the fiction book he began writing in my office. I didn’t actually need to look any further than dyslexics in my own family to find the success and coping mechanisms I found in the interview with Schultz!

Back to my own academic career, I realized that in my eagerness to dismiss dyslexia I did myself a great disservice. I now understand that many of the struggles I had in high school were due to my dyslexia, and not because I was particularly lacking in intelligence. I could pull general academic success if I was given more time for tests (which my teachers were often able to grant, but my SATs were a disaster) and with a significant amount of studying time via repetition through mixed media (if all reading, I would read multiple views of the same thing), creation and copying of detailed notes and studying alone. This is all still true for me today.

Self-confidence wise there is this meme in US geek culture about public high school being “boring” or “too easy” or otherwise a waste of time. It’s a painful one for me because that was never my experience, I found my, admittedly very highly rated, public high school to be very challenging and I had to study a lot to do well. I even enjoyed many of my classes and took additional history electives when I was a senior rather than taking free periods. I’ll sometimes say that life circumstances and money are the reason I didn’t go to college, which is all true, but people overcome those every day. The actual reason I didn’t go to college boils down to sheer terror of having to struggle through classes like I did in high school and the vast amounts of time I’d need to put in to do well.

I’ve since read dozens of stories similar to those of Schultz, my father and myself. It’s opened a whole world for me that I didn’t bother to explore previously. I’ve grown infinitely more interested in the research into alternative learning styles so kids like me wouldn’t necessarily have to learn coping mechanisms to keep up with the other kids, instead instruction could be altered to cater to a broader range of learning style — and ones that make sense for our information age world.

Most importantly for me, I want be more open about it, stop being ashamed of it and want to gain back the self-confidence I’ve lost along the way because of it.

Originally published at pleia2's blog. You can comment here or there.