Randomness

User Experience Survey

2011-05-24T17:38:00.000-07:00

Note: this is not about the Advertising team survey, which has a very different focus but was inspirational.When your interaction with other Ubuntu users is entirely made up of developers talking about bugs they need to fix and users seeking support (IRC, forums, bug reports), your perspective changes. It's hard to get a good idea of the big picture. What portion of users are hitting problems

Why I'm not speaking

2011-05-20T06:49:00.000-07:00

I decided not to submit to the CFP for any LnuxFests this year. Bethlynn from Ohio LinuxFest was surprised to not see me on Southeast LinuxFest's speaker list and asked why. I told her I didn't submit anything to SELF and would not be submitting to OLF either. I'm not doing public speaking this year.On the one hand, I'm taking a break. Coming up with new topics that I feel comfortable with is

Blogging Against Disablism Day - ASL

2011-05-01T12:13:00.000-07:00

Penelope Stowe of the Ubuntu Accessibility Team told me about Blogging Against Disablism Day. Disablism and ableism have the same meaning and are more regional than anything else. They refer to the underlying assumptions about what "everyone" can do. I live not far from Gallaudet University, the only accredited liberal arts university for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, so I actually come across

Key transition

2011-04-27T20:39:00.000-07:00

I started a key transition around DebConf last year upgrading from my 1024-bit GPG key I've had about as long as I've had this blog. At the time, Debian's requirements for new maintainers was 2048 bits, so that's what I used. It's now 4096 bits. I learned this as I was preparing to send an email to newmaint asking to become a DM. So that's a bit of a waste. I have signatures on both the old

Future uploaders

2011-04-26T06:49:00.000-07:00

After seeing someone say on the Debian Women mailing list that she maintains 4 packages but isn't sure she's good enough for upload rights in Debian, I was had a thought again that I've had before but don't think I've ever said here. If you're a sponsor, and you think you're sponsee is ready, tell them!Rich Johnson once told me he was uploading through sponsors for years before his sponsors

Embarrassing Advertising

2011-04-07T18:08:00.000-07:00

Want to see a prime example of advertising that is in no way going to help the goal of getting members of the other half of the population interested in Ubuntu? It's right here!Thanks, OMGUbuntu!, for being an embarrassment. Oh, and responding to complaints about it with "Funny how companies can get away with using massive sex appeal in advertising but as soon as we try it, it's apparently 'not

Women in Open & Collaborative Software & Technology Survey

2011-03-28T22:35:00.000-07:00

The Ada Initiative is a new project working on the women in open source & open culture thing. It's been a number of years since FLOSSPOLS surveyed the Free Software community to see the status of women in the community at the time, so the Ada Initiative has a new survey up for men, women, and anyone in between to fill out giving their perspective on the status of women in their community,

"Sexy" software

2010-11-15T22:25:00.000-08:00

It has always rubbed me the wrong way when software is described as "sexy." There is something about the context that just seems off. Well, I just got around to reading a book I've been intending to read since 2006, "Female Chauvinist Pigs" by Ariel Levy. It's about how pop-culture & the media have managed to convince much of society that it is "empowering" for a woman to um…objectify herself

Please chip in

2010-10-29T14:02:00.000-07:00

Amber and Pete Graner house was struck by lightning while they were at UDS. Their kids and dog are fine, but their stuff is all burnt up. It'll be a while before insurance gets all worked out, and in the meantime, they need to be able to get things like clothes, shoes, etc. Rikki Kite setup a Chip In for the Graners for anyone who wants to give them a bit of money to get back on their feet.

Help Bryen out

2010-10-04T11:10:00.000-07:00

Bryen Yunashko of GNOME Accessibility had his equipment stolen. He's in Spain for the GNOME-A11y Hackfest, and on his way from Barcelona to Sevilla (where the hackfest is going on), his bags with his 17" laptop, Kindle, 1TB hard disk, and camera were stolen. He's visually impaired and deaf (so screen-readers are out), so those items were bought with that in mind. 17" so he can see the screen,

Introducing Gally

2010-10-04T10:55:00.000-07:00

For my senior design project in school, I decided to design and write a program for teaching sign languages on Linux. It was in a "working prototype" stage when I presented it in school in April. I had a few more things I wanted to get right before announcing it to the whole FOSS world, but I just got confirmation from Nigel Babu that the last known bug in RC3 is fixed, so it's time to release!

Algorithms, Reverse Engineering, and Crochet

2010-10-01T23:58:00.000-07:00

Sing along: One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just doesn't belong…Actually, not really. These things can all go together: algorithms, reverse engineering, and crochet. I've been crocheting since I was so young I don't remember not crocheting. My Mimi (what I call my grandmother) taught me. There exist crochet patterns you can buy on paper or find online, but she

Using ODBC with bind

2010-10-01T12:01:00.000-07:00

I ran into this last week, and the Google was failing me, so here's the reason why you sometimes get "Required token $zone$ not found." when debugging why bind won't start with ODBC. The answer is: because the DLZ documentation is slightly wrong. It delimits "zone" and "record" with % instead of $. That is, the directions show:{select zone from dns_records where zone = '%zone%'}But really, it

Horn Tootin': Isabell Long

2010-09-30T11:45:00.000-07:00

Isabell Long, one of the awesome people I know through Ubuntu Women, is currently being featured by the BBC for creating GovSpark, a site to aggregate energy usage statistics from different branches of the UK government and compare them. Way to go, Isabell!

Help fund free culture

2010-09-14T15:42:00.000-07:00

Musopen is a group that's been trying to release classical music that's long been out of copyright back into the public domain. How did it leave the public domain? Each recording is considered a new work, so just because the copyright has expired on the sheet music doesn't help all us lovers of Free Culture. The recordings are still copyrighted themselves. They're using Kickstarter to get

Takoma Park Folk Festival

2010-09-13T07:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the DC LoCo Team was at Takoma Park Folk Festival yet again. This is the fifth year the team has been here. One man came over the table going "ok, that's a word from my part of the world. How are you using it?" Apparently he's from Zambia! He felt obliged to take an Ubuntu CD when we told him that it was started by a South African. We also had a visit from Mike Heney, who is running for

Ohio LinuxFest 2010

2010-09-11T17:39:00.000-07:00

I'm on my way home from Ohio LinuxFest. Why'd I leave so early? Partly because my carpool wanted to, and partly because the DC LoCo is going to be at Takoma Park Folk Festival tomorrow. I told everyone I'd post my slides here, so they'll be below.Both of the talks I gave were ones I've done before. At the UbuCon, I gave the Ubuntu Development Processes talk that I gave for a local LUG a few

Finding more women to speak at Ohio LinuxFest: success!

2010-09-02T19:05:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted on Geek Feminism. Co-authored by Moose J. Finklestein, OLF's 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

Sharing a shell and monitoring the other party

2010-09-01T22:42:00.000-07:00

Recently, I had a reason to allow someone else to use a shell on a machine for which I'm the admin, but I wanted a way to track what they're doing. You might think the history command is just fine for this, but it's possible to clear the history, and I wouldn't want that. Screen to the rescue!I ssh'd into the machine and created a new user for my visitor. Then I switched to that user. Once logged

ZaReason Terra HD

2010-08-27T23:32:00.000-07:00

Jono wrote about his new ZaReason Strata, and Rich wrote about his new ZaReason something-else, so I figured I'd let you all know about the ZaReason Terra HD I said I wanted to order, now that I've had it about a month.Typing has turned out not to be a problem. This makes sense, if you compare the size of the keyboard to the one on my other ZaReason laptop, a 13" they sold in 2008 under the

Is packaging new software hard?

2010-08-24T17:40:00.000-07:00

EDIT 1: Sorry Planet readers. I tried adding a "read more" thing to shorten it, but apparently that doesn't change the RSS feed, just the blog's front page. And yes, I will fix up the Ubuntu Wiki later.A common answer to my question about why people aren't packaging is that packaging is hard and the wiki is kind of lacking. Debhelper 7 and Source Version 3.0 (the new Debian packaging format)

What are the barriers to walking the MOTU/Developer path?

2010-08-24T09:42:00.000-07:00

I asked this on Ubuntu.StackExchange but only got 3 answers so far, so I wanted to put this a bit more publicly too. What keeps you from packaging, patching, etc? If you do those things, what keeps you from applying for upload rights?About 150 people are members of lp:~ubuntu-dev right now. There are also a handful of people who haven't yet become MOTU or joined another developer team but do

Kubuntu & Kubuntu Netbook 10.04.1 now available

2010-08-18T08:37:00.000-07:00

The first point-release for Kubuntu and Kubuntu Netbook 10.04 is now available. If you've been putting off installing because of the number of updates you'll have to download, the good news is all updates, bug fixes, and security patches that have been released for these two versions of Kubuntu have been rolled into the new 10.04.1 disc images, saving you from spending hours on updates. Yay!

The Next HOPE

2010-07-26T19:22:00.000-07:00

Last weekend was The Next HOPE (following from The Last HOPE) in New York City. HOPE stands for Hackers on Planet Earth and is a biennial conference put on by 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. The Wikileaks guy may or may not have shown up. Some online say he didn't. Someone else told me "oh yeah, he was sitting behind the Tesla stage drinking Club Mate all day Friday," so who knows. Apparently

Ubuntu Women t-shirt design + wallpaper

2010-07-09T22:22:00.000-07:00

Probably a year or so ago, I made this design and submitted it as a possible Ubuntu Women t-shirt:(download SVG source—you'll need the old Ubuntu Title font to render the SVG properly)Today I requested SVGs of the new logos popping up around the *buntusphere, and Martin Owens had them all so went and modified my design. I think it's beautiful!(download the SVG source —you'll need the new beta

OLF CFP extended!

2010-06-29T11:33:00.000-07:00

If you haven't submitted a proposal to Ohio LinuxFest yet, don't fret. The CFP has been extended to next Wednesday (7/7). Go to the CFP webpage to submit your proposal.

Laptop (er, netbook) Love

2010-06-21T12:47:00.000-07:00

At Southeast LinuxFest, ZaReason (the company that made my laptop Betty two years ago) had a table.This is Courtney with a few of ZaReason's latest models. From left to right are the Strata 3660, Strata Pro 15, and the Terra HD.The Terra HD is the one I want to talk about today. Some of you might remember the Terra A20 netbook, which was very popular in "mocha" colour. Apparently one of the

"Is Linux Secure?" at Southeast LinuxFest

2010-06-12T13:19:00.000-07:00

I'm at Southeast LinuxFest right now, listening to Daniel Chen's Linux audio talk. A bit over an hour ago, I finished my presentation on the Linux security myth. It's meant to be accessible to normal users or to geeks needing to explain to normal users. I was asked afterward why I didn't talk about buffer overflows. That's easy: normal users can't do anything about them.Is Linux Secure?View

Where did my favourite package go?

2010-05-17T16:05:00.000-07:00

Did you upgrade to Lucid and find that some package you like is no longer available? There are a number of binary packages that were removed in Lucid as a cleanup of the archive, though for the most part the source packages are still in there. Most of these were removed because the source package was no longer buildable—meaning patches could not be applied to fix bugs since the patched source

Ubuntu Developer Processes presentation from CALUG

2010-05-13T19:20:00.000-07:00

Last night I did a presentation on Ubuntu Developer Processes for Columbia (MD) Area Linux User Group. You can find the slides on SlideShare.EDIT: Ohhh I can embed it! Neat!Ubuntu Development Processes

Please learn to follow directions

2010-05-01T02:22:00.000-07:00

This is the second time I've seen someone in #ubuntu do this.When you install sun-java6-jre, it will instruct you to go download something and drop it in /tmp and hit enter (something like that). For some reason I do not understand, some users just hit enter without downloading the file they were supposed to and putting it where they were supposed to. Of course, computers don't like it when

iPod Touch on Lucid

2010-04-23T14:08:00.000-07:00

Plenty of folks have reported so far that their iPod Touches work with Lucid. Well, my brother has one he got for Christmas, and he says it's not working for him. He came up with a (very plausible) hypothesis though. Maybe it has to be used with Windows or OSX once (as some sort of activation mechanism?) before it'll talk to a Linux machine.So, I'm asking: have any of you have an iPod Touch

Ada Lovelace Day 2010: Dianne Martin & Sue McKnight

2010-03-23T21:17:00.000-07:00

I'm going to write about two people today. I couldn't pick.Dianne MartinDianne Martin was one of my professors at The George Washington University. No, she's not teaching any of my classes this semester or going forward! I decided to write about her because she has done some pretty cool stuff.She taught the Team Project Development & Professional Ethics class I took two years ago. It was a

Favourite Ubuntu wallpapers?

2010-03-03T15:42:00.000-08:00

With all the talk of the new theme I was thinking I'd make a blog post of all the Ubuntu wallpapers over time, then as I was looking for them, I found a website doing just that (at least up to 8.10). I praised Hardy's wallpaper when it was first revealed (but erm, not the final version…). That was the last Ubuntu wallpaper I liked though (just as well I guess—I switched to Kubuntu for Jaunty

The "dist-upgrade" misnomer & confusion

2010-02-06T09:38:00.000-08:00

Yesterday in #ubuntu, someone asked, "I am still confused about this. Everything claims that dist-upgrade actually *upgrades* distributions...can someone please clear this up for me"So I told them: apt-get dist-upgrade differs from apt-get upgrade in that it will remove obsolete packages and add new dependencies, while apt-get upgrade will not. this is necessary when upgrading from one

Don't email me…

2010-01-15T15:20:00.000-08:00

…if this is the sort of email you're intending to send:Subject: I had no idea that hot girls liked linuxBody: Are there more of you? I mean how does that happen? How does a good lookingfemale put off their social life to the point where they can actually useubuntu without ripping their eyes out?Seriously, I don't want to hear it. Just think about it for one minute. What does appearance have

Links

2009-11-24T23:25:00.000-08:00

I just gave an impromptu lesson on symbolic links (symlinks) and hard links, complete with ASCII art, in #ubuntu-offtopic, and Topyli commented that simple explanations of this for beginners are hard to find, so here's a summary.The purpose of a link is to allow you to have two (or more) paths to access the same data without having the data exist on disk multiple times, thus giving convenience

Karmic FAQ

2009-10-29T13:08:00.000-07:00

(Planet people: sorry if this pops up >1 time...when I add another question, Blogger thinks it has to bump it up in the RSS feed)Following tradition, here's my Karmic FAQ: How should I download? Torrents, to keep the strain off the servers. There are IPv6 torrent files available as well, as a test so Canonical can see how many Ubuntu users are on IPv6 and thus how much

Care Bears

2009-10-21T16:20:00.000-07:00

Americans between ages 20 and 30 probably remember the Care Bears, a TV show where the Care Bears (which look like teddy bears), who are from Care-a-Lot fight off mean characters with the power of caring. Their attack is called the Care Bear Stare and their tummies have little icons that light up and shoot whatever their power is at the enemy. I'm not sure why, but one was Grumpy Bear. There

HowTo: Gather Full Mail Headers

2009-10-08T21:29:00.000-07:00

Say you want to find out where an email came from. Maybe it was threatening or phishing or spam. How do you gather evidence of what servers passed it to you to give to the authorities? You need the full headers. They contain all the routing information. Keep in mind, though, that it is possible the sender was making use of an open relay instead of their own mailserver.KMail: View -> Headers

Attention Folks

2009-10-05T23:26:00.000-07:00

TRIGGER WARNING: Victims of violence or sexual assault may want to stop reading.With all the discussion of sexism in FOSS this year, a certain individual calling himself MikeeUSA is back. I realize many people are not aware of this individual. He is notorious in certain circles for very good reasons. 2005 is the earliest record I know of him harassing women involved with Debian and LinuxChix.

I am a Technical Woman

2009-10-03T13:32:00.000-07:00

This video was released at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing on Thursday. It's very simple, made up of footage from last year's event. Also very cool. Have a look.Some day, I will get myself to Tuscon to attend this event.

OLF Follow-up

2009-10-01T10:30:00.000-07:00

Ohio LinuxFest was fun as usual. Others have already written about it on their blogs, so I'll save some of the repetition. Three of the guys from Southeast LinuxFest approached me about talking there next year. ZaReason had a table showing off their Terra A20 netbook and a couple machines that are not yet available for sale (yay! previews!). Earl asked me about an audio problem they were

Going to Ohio

2009-09-24T21:39:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned Ohio LinuxFest here before, but hey…it's almost time! I'm currently at the "checkpoint" on the trip to Columbus. By that I mean, a coworker and I are crashing at our bosses' house. We're leaving in about 4 hours.I'm working on my slides. My talk is called "Sysadmins' Rosetta Stone" and is about all those little things that trip you up when you switch from Debian or Ubuntu to

Takoma Park Folk Festival: Great Success!

2009-09-13T21:23:00.000-07:00

This is the 4th year the DC LoCo Team has had a table at the Takoma Park Folk Festival. In 2006, Kevin (the LoCo leader) says the table was well off the beaten path. Very few visitors. 2007 was my first year participating. That year we got a better spot, just around the corner from the lawn area where the main stage is. Anybody wanting to reach the main stage from that side of the building

The Root Password Rumour

2009-08-14T07:14:00.000-07:00

Every now and then, I see people make the following claim:Ubuntu has a root password; they just don't tell the user what it is.Rubbish. Some versions claim it is a randomly generated one. Rubbish. There is no root password, and this statement mustn't be confused with "the password is carriage return" (a usage RMS tried to popularize at MIT). Take a look at /etc/shadow, if you will (sudo less /etc

What Will We Use?

2009-07-21T19:02:00.000-07:00

I mentioned Bethlynn's bet that Bug 1 would be fixed by the end of June 2011 before. She was blogging over on her LiveJournal, but since a lot of comments seemed to go missing before even hitting her moderation queue, she now has a new blog to track bug 1, called What Will We Use? She has asked me to help her with the site, so I've got an article up there now, talking about the Hundred Papercuts

Male Feminists

2009-07-09T12:36:00.000-07:00

I notice in the comments on David Schlesinger's blog posts about RMS's "EMACS virgin" tangent at Guadec/Akademy a lot of folks telling him to stop being a "pseudo-feminist" or implying that he thinks women are defenseless and need a big strong man to protect us, or whatever.We don't need knights in shining armor, but we do need allies. For example, if someone has demonstrated that they are a

Bold Prediction: "Bug 1 will be closed in the next 24 months"

2009-07-07T09:00:00.000-07:00

At SELF, Bethlynn Eicher made a bold prediction: Bug 1: Microsoft has a majority market share will be closed in the next 24 months. The date she named on her blog is 30 June 2011. She keeps pointing out in her blog that we're at GhandiCon 3. "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."I'm listening to Season 1 Episode 20 of the Ubuntu UK Podcast, and they

Ohio Linuxfest Call for Presentations is Open

2009-07-02T18:36:00.000-07:00

Ohio Linuxfest is now in its 7th year, but that's nothing compared to the 40 years that UNIX has been around. The theme this year is the Past, Present, and Future of UNIX & Linux.Doug McIlroy will be keynoting. If you haven't heard of him yet, he was Kernighan, Thomson, & Richie's boss back at AT&T Bell Labs when they were creating UNIX and C. He's credited with creating the UNIX pipe ("|") as

Shedding some light on a recent trend

2009-06-25T19:05:00.000-07:00

I learned that apparently the recent cases of adult images in conference talks hasn't received as much attention as I thought it had. Given that I heard about Matt Aimonetti's CouchDB talk at the Golden Gate Ruby Con in April from an old coworker, Sarah Mei of DevChix, and hypa7ia on #ubuntu-women all in the span of one day, I was under the impression it was something anyone who reads blogs or

Southeast Linuxfest Post

2009-06-13T12:02:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting here with Amber Graner, Lyz Krumbach, Andrew from the Ubuntu Pennsylvania LoCo, Jimmy from the Florida LoCo, and a few others. We're in a BoF chatting about how LoCo Teams can reach out. I think Amber will be posting notes later.Amber led another BoF earlier today called "Why Not You?" about trying to get the folks we recruit involved. She was saying how for years people would talk

Jaunty FAQ

2009-04-23T08:29:00.000-07:00

In the tradition of the FAQs I did the last few releases...Where can I get the Jaunty torrent?Ubuntu Tutorials has compiled a list of all of them together.Why should I use a torrent?It takes a load off of the servers so you'll get your ISO fasterAnything Kubuntu users should know?If you upgrade or use the DVD, you'll get PulseAudio. Don't worry, just sudo aptitude purge pulseaudio if you don't

ext3 & 4 and data=guarded

2009-04-17T09:03:00.000-07:00

Valerie Aurora over at Red Hat has just posted on her blog about ext3 and ext4 and fsync() issues we've all heard so much about. As she says there, rename in ext4 now implies fsync() so that issue should calm down.However, 2.6.30 is defaulting to data=writeback, which means it only writes the metadata to the journal—not the actual data. This is how XFS, ReiserFS, and a few others work, and it's

Ada Lovelace Day Addition

2009-03-25T22:43:00.000-07:00

So on actual Ada Lovelace Day, I was a little :( at being the only person on Planet Ubuntu that blogged for it. Plenty on Planet Ubuntu Women, but Planet Ubuntu was empty. And none of the guys involved posted anything.But yay! They were just a little late. James Westby and Matt Zimmerman both joined in. Matt wrote about his mom, which I thought was pretty cool. And Miia Ranta joined in as

Ada Lovelace Day heroine: Valerie Aurora

2009-03-24T08:31:00.000-07:00

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, named for the world's first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace. It's interesting to me that while the first programmer was a woman, and all of the ENIAC programmers were women, there are so many more men than women in technology fields nowadays. Ada Lovelace Day is a day to highlight women who rock in the tech world. Since here in FOSS-land, the FLOSSPOLS survey

Ubuntu Developers Aren't Scary

2009-03-20T11:41:00.000-07:00

Seriously, they're not. At least, I don't think they are anymore. They used to scare the crap out of me.The first time I joined the #ubuntu-devel channel (slightly under a year ago) and said "hi, um, I have a patch. What do I do?" I was all scared. Jordan Mantha (LaserJock) popped up and offered to make it into a debdiff since I said I didn't know anything about packaging. The patch ended up

Pidgin in Jaunty

2009-03-20T09:41:00.000-07:00

This is just a quick update about how Pidgin interacts with the rest of the Jaunty desktop. Before we had the following problems:Pidgin icon sits in notification area when not notifyingPidgin status can be changed in both the FUSA and in the Pidgin iconRemoving icon gets rid of buddy list's hide-abilityThe first point extends into "if Pidgin and Evolution and Empathy and Xchat and ... are all

Please test Jaunty...soon

2009-03-03T08:46:00.000-08:00

Jaunty's release is less than two months away. Please grab a Jaunty alpha 5 or daily live cd and test! Go through the bugs you've filed and see if they still exist on the live cd. See if any new ones pop up. And do it ASAP.In every development cycle there's a huge influx of bugs in the last two weeks because a lot of people jump from stable to beta or RC, skipping alpha completely. Great,

Link to a shell escaping tutorial

2009-02-28T11:58:00.000-08:00

A nearby LUG member just posted to the LUG's mailing list an explanation of how bash expands variables containing special characters and how various utilities interpret them. Give it a read. How to handle newlines was something I never thought about.

Ubuntu audio blog

2009-02-25T19:03:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, Daniel Chen was an Ubuntu core developer and maintained the audio stack. He's no longer a core dev, but he's still doing a ton of work on audio. I can tell you first hand that practically every waking moment that he's not at the office, he's working on trying to make PulseAudio and ALSA work better in Ubuntu. Well, since he's not a core dev anymore and he never went through

Scanning multipage documents in XSane

2009-02-20T09:39:00.000-08:00

I have a flatbed scanner (part of my printer). I had no idea it was possible to scan a multipage document in Xsane. For a pull-through, sure, maybe, those can go through a stack of pages on their own. But a flatbed? Every time I've tried this before, I scanned individual pages, saved them as images, put them into an Open Office Writer document with one image per page, then saved that as a PDF

That Green Bar in Firefox

2009-02-19T20:56:00.000-08:00

I was just reading Dan Kaminsky's blog and saw something I found shocking. Let me quote it.Moxie’s putting his energy on the old positive feedback attacks — simply disabling the security, and seeing if anyone notices. And here he shows up with some pretty astonishing data: Nobody noticed. To be specific, absolutely 0% of users presented with missing encryption on important web sites, being

Malware Terminology: Trojans, Worms, & Viruses

2009-02-11T23:33:00.000-08:00

Some guy wrote How To Write a Linux Virus in 5 Easy Steps, but he's wrong. What he describes is not a virus; it is a trojan. And he calls himself a geek!Let me start by saying that "malware" and "badware" are two commonly used umbrella terms for these types of software.It is a trojan because it relies entirely upon social engineering to install and run. Remember the Trojan Horse? The Greeks

I'm a traitor

2009-02-04T00:36:00.000-08:00

I've been cheating on my desktop environment.If you follow Planet Ubuntu, you saw Celeste's post about the KDE 4.2 release party. And yes, I'm in the photos. Scott Kitterman's trying to show me how to set what kind of window switcher I want when I hit Alt+Tab in KDE in one of the photos.Yeah, I'm a traitor. As of last Friday, about 4 hours before the release party, I'm a KDE user. Scott

Jaunty: No sound outputs?

2009-01-30T14:11:00.000-08:00

If you're running Jaunty, and since 28 Jan when you right-click the GNOME Volume Mixer applet and click Open Volume Control you see no sound outputs listed, it's a known bug believed to be a race condition with PulseAudio. It's being worked on, but in the meantime, you can restart PulseAudio using pulseaudio -k ; start-pulseaudio-x11

Since we ALL know X is nowhere near stable...

2009-01-29T10:37:00.000-08:00

BackstorySome X developers decided that it's too easy to accidentally press 3 keys that are spread far apart on the keyboard and require 2 hands to press simultaneously (???), so they got rid of disabled by default Ctrl+Alt+Backspace (also known as "zapping").Some people within Ubuntu realized that this makes no sense since X really likes to lockup. At UDS, they decided to keep zapping available

Washington, DC Events/News

2009-01-29T10:23:00.000-08:00

We've got two events coming up in the Washington, DC area. Anyone's invited.KDE 4.2 Release PartyWhere: Piratz Tavern, Georgia Ave, Silver Spring, MDWhen: Jan 30 (tomorrow), 7pmContact (RSVP): Celeste Lyn PaulLinuxChix MeetupOK, this one's for ubuntu-women. Shmoocon's coming up again, so once again DC LinuxChix and other LinuxChix that happen to be in town will be meeting up. More info later

Holiday Hacking

2008-12-30T23:38:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted in about 2 weeks, so I figure I ought to give a quick update on what's going on. I'm with the family for the holidays, and there's no wireless at my mom's house, and things are nuts what with the whole extended family visiting. Oh, and my mother has not complained at all about Hardy (upgraded her computer from Gutsy in August), so yay. I mentioned before that I wanted to teach

Adobe Flash: Avoiding Checksum Errors

2008-12-18T17:21:00.000-08:00

The way flashplugin-nonfree works right now is that it's a fairly empty package that downloads Adobe's Flash installation tarball, untars it, and copies the .so to the necessary directory. There's one more step in the middle though. It does a checksum on the tarball after it downloads and a checksum on the .so. These checksums are to make sure you're getting the right file, as opposed to some

Dear Phisher...

2008-12-12T23:20:00.000-08:00

Dear Phisher:Thank you for contacting me today with your offer to reactivate my email account that I did not know I had. There are just a few problems I see with the request you made regarding reactivating my email address. You see, the link you gave for me to download software to reactivate the account is a Windows executable. First, I'm not quite sure why I need any software other than a web

Jaunty users: Can you test these?

2008-12-02T16:45:00.000-08:00

I've got two patches that I need to have tested on Jaunty. One has a deb. One is just in a branch.As a new user, test Pidgin from my PPA. For a new user, it should default to only showing the icon in the notification area for new messages. Check in Tools->Preferences. The reason is to keep it from duplicating the icon that's in the Fast User Switch Applet, as noted in Bug 273220. In that

Compiz? Emerald? Metacity? What's the Difference?

2008-12-01T20:36:00.000-08:00

Not for the first time, I found myself the other night explaining on IRC how the window manager and window decorator parts fit together. There seems to be a misconception that Compiz requires Emerald. That is far from true. There also seems to be confusion regarding what different kinds of themes do. So let's start at the basics.The three most common window managers in the Ubuntu world are

New Licensing on the Blog

2008-11-29T23:13:00.000-08:00

A while back, I found that someone was copying all of my posts to their own ad-laden site with no linkbacks. I put up some license terms at the time saying quoting and translating with linkbacks were fine, and aggregators are fine, but copying the whole thing without a linkback isn't cool. Well, I'm in the middle of writing a paper for school including a large chunk on licensing, and as I was

Tis Better to Dup Than to Convolute

2008-11-19T16:37:00.000-08:00

Let's talk about bug reporting.There's something which occurs very often in bug reports by people who mean well. They find a bug, and to avoid making extra work for triagers, they check for a duplicate first. While that's very thoughtful of them, it often ends up getting in the way. So, let's talk about when you should file a duplicate, and when you should not. This is mostly in regard to

Washington, DC - Intrepid Installfest - TONIGHT

2008-11-14T11:01:00.000-08:00

As usual, we're having an installfest for th new Ubuntu release. Also as usual, it's being hosted by GW ACM with many of the helpers coming from the DC Ubuntu LoCo Team.What: Installfest for Ubuntu 8.10Why: In case you need/want helpWho: Anybody interested in trying LinuxWhere: George Washington University (Foggy Bottom metro)CS Dept Conference RoomPhillips Hall, 7th Floor22 & H NWWhen: 6pm,

Help Avoid Regressions

2008-11-04T10:27:00.000-08:00

If you saw Planet Ubuntu today, you saw Jonathan Ernst's post about feature regressions. I was discussing this with Jordan Mantha last week. I think too much time is lost during sync, and with nobody being willing to test until beta or RC by which point it's too late to fix much. He seemed to agree. I think a year-long release cycle would be nice, but he says Ubuntu's testers are a major

Go Vote!

2008-11-04T10:20:00.000-08:00

This is a little friendly reminder to go exercise your right to vote. Remember: it's your civic duty.Oh, and Californians, please vote NO on Proposition 8. Proposition 8 would legalize discrimination against quite a lot of people. You may think you don't know anyone that's gay, lesbian, or bisexual, but are you really sure? For all you know, a vote for Prop 8 could be a vote to legalize

Intrepid Update FAQ

2008-10-29T20:53:00.000-07:00

Last time, I did a FAQ for Hardy upgrades. I may not be running Intrepid on hardware, but I've been reading a lot of bugs and have an Intrepid VM. So, here are some of the things you might need to know.When will it be released?While it is 30 Oct in at least one timezoneHow should I download it?Torrents! They take the load off of Canonical's serversHow can I upgrade?First, make sure you have

Happy Tux-o-ween!

2008-10-27T20:26:00.000-07:00

My friend Nick (AKA Spec) made himself a Linux pumpkin this Halloween, and he asked me to post the pictures here so you all could see it. It's cute!Looking at the next one, you'll see that it's not actually carved all the way through. He just made it really thin so it glows nicely instead of having one bright point of light.

Why do people hate Ubuntu's fonts?

2008-10-22T11:05:00.000-07:00

I always see people complaining about Ubuntu's fonts and font-rendering. I don't get it. Could someone please tell me exactly what is wrong?Ubuntu has some pre-set font settings: Monochrome, Best Shapes, Best Contrast, and Subpixel Smoothing. These are equivalent to certain settings found when the Details button is clicked. They are as follows:Monochrome → No smoothing, Full hintingBest

A Couple of Links

2008-10-17T22:56:00.000-07:00

I was just reading through ZaReason's news page, and I saw a link to Linux is Making Me Fat and Lazy by Carla Shroder, a woman I know from LinuxChix. I found it rather amusing. The other thing I saw that stood out was What Dell Can Learn From ZaReason. I think the writer makes a good point, because having to wait months after a release to get the newest Ubuntu from Dell is rather annoying.

Don't Get Cracked on Hostile WiFi

2008-10-11T17:03:00.000-07:00

That was the title of my talk today at Ohio Linux Fest. I told everybody I'd put my slides up here, so:PDF versionODP versionI think there should also be a video appearing on the OLF website some time soon. I'm sorry, I know I was speaking a bit fast. I pretty much always talk fast.

I am not impressed with OpenOffice Impress

2008-10-09T17:51:00.000-07:00

OpenOffice.org Impress makes LaTeX + Beamer look user-friendly. Now that I've gone through turning my OLF slides from boring black-on-white to prettier, I realize how much of a usability nightmare Impress is.First I tried making a background image in Inkscape. Inkscape's nice, because it has a bunch of preset color palettes. I decided to use Tango colors. So I made a background image 1024x768

Firefox 3 Hug Day Tomorrow!

2008-10-08T12:04:00.000-07:00

Firefox has a fair number of bugs, but before they can be fixed, they need to be triaged. How about going through the New bugs and confirming the ones you can reproduce? And for the confirmed ones, check that it's still reproducible. In both cases, add any necessary information you can. For the New bugs, ask for necessary information too.The Mozilla Team has a Triagers' Handbook with all the

Intellectual Property & Some Politics

2008-10-02T00:07:00.000-07:00

Update: A reader named Jude just sent me an email showing that apparently the House passed PRO-IP by roll-call vote two days after the Senate unanimously passed it. About that transparency thing…yes they're public records, but what about telling everyone what's going on beforehand?In my Information Policy class today, the topic was Intellectual Property with two lawyers, one of which is from the

5-A-Day on Ubuntu UK

2008-09-25T21:59:00.000-07:00

The most recent episode of the Ubuntu UK Podcast has a segment on 5-A-Day beginning about halfway through. I'd like to highlight this part of the conversation:Dave: "If 5-A-Day is manageable, why have in the last 7 days there been only 35 people who've actually submitted bugs to the 5-A-Day project?"Alan: "How'd you measure that?"Dave: "Ah, Daniel Holbach's 5-A-Day stat page."Alan: "Well, I

Swfdec 0.8: Open Source Flash

2008-09-24T18:22:00.000-07:00

Raise your hand if you've had issues with Flash on Linux. Er, let's try this again. Raise your hand if you haven't had issues with Flash on Linux. That's a bit easier to count, now isn't it?Supposedly Flash is much much hairier if you use 64bit Linux, because Adobe only releases 32bit plugins. I decided that instead of dealing with nspluginwrapper and then needing libflashsupport to work

Try out the Intrepid themes in Hardy

2008-09-23T10:58:00.000-07:00

I just realized that a lot of you out there probably don't know about this. We've all heard about the planned visual refresh for Intrepid. Well, if you want to try out some of the themes that have been created, you can install them in Hardy and stay up to date with their improvements using kwwii's PPA. Just add these lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kwwii/ubuntu

To upgrade or not to upgrade?

2008-09-22T14:10:00.000-07:00

I'm content with Hardy. It "Just Works." Someone convince me to try Intrepid!Here's the situation. Every release, I've had a real incentive to upgrade in the form of better hardware support.Dapper->Edgy: Xorg got AIGLX built-in. I could use Beryl. SD reader module included.Edgy->Feisty: SD reader module loaded on boot.Feisty->Gutsy: xserver-xorg-video-intel means no more 915resolutionGutsy-

Today: Ubuntu Testing Day

2008-09-22T10:59:00.000-07:00

Today is Ubuntu Testing Day. The goal is to test out the new Intrepid Ibex alpha 6 ISO. Just pick one (or more):ISO testing instructionsFeature testingHardware testingJoin #ubuntu-testing on irc.freenode.net if you need any help. And don't forget to file any bugs you find!

Advice Requested: Teaching Python to an 8-year-old child

2008-09-13T21:19:00.000-07:00

I want to teach my little 8-year-old cousin Python. Her dad says she's only just getting used to Windows. I'm giving her an old laptop running Edubuntu to practice on (so her environment is similar to mine), and I'll be teaching her through email correspondence since I go to school away from home. I figure Edubuntu will be good for two reasons. First, she'll have education games. Second, her

Its name is... (Planet Ubuntu meme)

2008-09-11T20:30:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned it before, but hey I'll follow along with the current Planet meme (it has jumped from Planet Debian to Planet Ubuntu), which is to give the naming scheme of your computers. So, my naming scheme, like his, is for female names. Specifically, my computers are female computer scientists. I have:Ada, after Lady Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, commonly referred to as Ada

Reminder: Sept 11 == Hug Day!

2008-09-09T16:56:00.000-07:00

Brian Murray sent out the next Hug Day announcement today. The target this time is confirmed bugs that aren't assigned to a package. The list of 50 bugs being attacked is on the wiki. Even if you've never triaged before, don't worry, the wiki includes instructions for what to do for the Hug Day. Oh, and don't forget the part where you get a hug for every bug you work on! Get together with

Trendnet: "We support Linux...not really"

2008-09-07T22:17:00.000-07:00

Even when the box claims Linux compatibility, beware.Seriously, they need to be more specific. When it says Linux is supported, they mean strictly that the hardware supports Linux. The software to configure the hardware does not. Tech support does not. And the hardware defaults to a static IP address that very likely is not accessible with your default route…even though it supports DHCP.My

Ubiquity?

2008-09-04T22:27:00.000-07:00

Am I the only one that hears people talking about Mozilla's Ubiquity and thinks of Ubuntu's Ubiquity? Poll on the right.

Stephen Fry says "Happy Birthday" to GNU

2008-09-02T09:09:00.000-07:00

Check it out! Actor and writer Stephen Fry is explaining Free Software and GNU/Linux. He makes a nice little analogy in there too. I find it rather interesting the method they use to show the video. It's an open source Java applet that asks where to put temporary internet files (defaults to /tmp so you can just OK it) and then plays a video in I-don't-know-what format, but it works quite well

Who's using Gwibber?

2008-09-02T08:22:00.000-07:00

I know a bunch of Ubuntu folks switched to Identi.ca, what with it being like an open-source Twitter. And a bunch of us are using Gwibber to send and receive updates. There's talk going on of some micro-blogging (with Identi.ca/Laconica's tags, that is) for Ubuntu and possibly UDS and such. But right now I'm wondering who's using Gwibber? I know I am. Jorge Castro is. Myrtti is. Who else?If

Microsoft, Enough With the Obvious Patents!

2008-08-31T23:32:00.000-07:00

A bit over a year ago, I blogged about Microsoft patenting sudo. They're at it again. Guess what they patented this time. According to ZDNet, Microsoft patented the Page Up and Page Down keys. Yeah, no kidding. I really like how they linked to a keyboard from 1981 where you can see the aforementioned keys on the numpad.

Keep One Application Together

2008-08-27T20:19:00.000-07:00

One feature of VirtueDesktops that I really liked on OS X was being able to constrain an application to a specific workspace. It turns out Compiz has been able to do this for, well, since Beryl and Compiz became Compiz Fusion. For organization, I like to keep my Pidgin windows all in one place. I'm likely to miss them if they popup behind my Firefox, after all. Usually this means I notice