Some thoughts on handling harassment and toxic behavior privately

I’ve seen some calls for people like @shanley to handle their complaints about abuse and harassment privately, or maybe “more privately” than they have. So, today I just mused aloud for a few minutes on Twitter the thoughts I have about private handling of public acts of cruelty, harassment and abuse. Here’s those tweets, slightly edited, in a blog form. This is meant as a discussion of why public responses to public harassment are not only justified, but helpful. I don’t believe that those who are harassed are obligated in any way to respond publicly to harassment.

Why is it important to “handle in private” the responses to public odious, toxic, anti-social and harassing behavior? How does that help?

I believe in proportionate response. However, when the interactions are online and there is no physical public space, just “public media”, there’s a serious problem with the idea that a private response, particularly from the harassed, works at all.

My experience has been that private responses to people who harass me don’t help. Harassment continues, the harasser does not change. The only thing that has ever “changed behavior” is directing a complaint through the public or someone with authority over the harasser. And, that only worked for me a small percentage of the time that I asked for help. Asking for help has also increased harassment.

I’m not sold on the idea of private responses to public acts shared on the internet as “effective for behavior change”.

There’s also a difference between individual behavior change (personal reform), and cultural change (what we find acceptable as a group). Not everyone is aboard the cultural change train. And, I see twitter in particular as performance art, not a conversation happening “inside” a community.

The more time I spend thinking about this, the more I realize I haven’t spent enough time defining what my community is. Because for a long time I bought into the idea that there was some kind of global FOSS community protecting me, caring for me, backing me up.

But what I believe now is that I have a few close friends, some who know each other, some who don’t — but not a coherent community. And the reason why I don’t think there’s coherency, is because they don’t respond the way that a community does when there’s danger.

There is real, lasting damage done to people I care about by harassers and abusers. Things I hear about afterward, things that make me ill to think about and repeat. Things I wish I could prevent. That we could all prevent. But the worst damage done, I think, happens when those who come forward aren’t believed.

I didn’t go into detail about this in the twitter thread, but I have found that many people, who I come in contact with through FOSS, who are abusive on social media and on public mailing lists, are also abusive and harassing in private. Assuming that the public behavior is the worst behavior that a harasser exhibits is not a safe or reasonable assumption.

So. Handling things in public when we’re dealing with public acts, cruelty, harassment: Yes, I think we should.

Personal email sabbatical, July 10 – October 15 2014

Starting July 10, 2014, I’m planning to take a personal email sabbatical.

I’m going to unsubscribe from all mailing lists and redirect all email to my personal email addresses (chesnok.com and gmail.com) to /dev/null.

I have a couple open source project addresses that will probably be redirected to people responsible for those areas during my sabbatical. The traffic on those addresses is so low, however, that this is likely not going to impact anyone significantly.

I will not be reachable via personal email until sometime around October 15, 2014.

Why I’m doing this:

I spend too much time responding to things that other people want me to do.

I have a full-time job where I do that already, and as a result, much of my personal time where I could be creative is spent in the service of others. I’m also about to have a baby! So, it seems like as good a time as any to make an explicit departure from the communication medium that’s been the focus of my life since about 1995.

I’m not sure that I will return to having a public email address outside of work.

I plan to continue blogging, although using a much simplified blogging platform that I’ve written (but haven’t deployed yet :D). I plan to continue to use Twitter, although I’ve separated public and private accounts. I do not plan to increase my use of other social media. I plan to continue to use IRC, although will likely take myself out of most project channels. I’ve removed Twitter from my phone, and plan to remove email from it in July.

I’m taking a cue from danah boyd, although not following her prescription for a lengthy advance notice to collaborators.

I spent the last six months substantially downsizing my volunteer commitments, spending more time on in-person events that are local. I am pretty sure most people won’t even notice my extended volunteer absence on the “greater internet”. I’ll trickle out some individual notices as needed, probably to anyone I’ve had more than three exchanges with in the last two or three years.

Things I’ve learned from my personal trainer

I’ve been seeing a personal trainer for the last couple of years. I injured my back pretty seriously 5-6 years ago, and finally admitted that I had a “real problem” that required doctor and other professional intervention. After x-rays and a couple months more of denial, I started an exercise program focused on weight training.

Previously, my main (and sometimes only) exercise had been running. The back problem I have caused my doctor to recommend that I never run again. At first this was an easy thing to do because running was incredibly painful. Later, I realized that running was not only a fitness thing for me, but also an important part of my mental health. I really needed another way to get in a lot of exercise.

I go to the gym 3 times a week, and I try to walk about 5 miles a day at least 3 additional days a week. Playing Ingress, and bird watching tend to make this pretty easy.

I’m now 7-months pregnant, and I still do both things. I typically don’t get any 10k days in like I did before I was pregnant, but apart from some grueling travel I did in April, I’ve been able to keep it up the entire time.

I’ve threatened to give a talk about this, but rather than wait to assemble all of this until then, I thought it would be nice to just write it down in the event it helps someone else!

My physical activity background:

I did first ballet, then karate and judo as a child. I never played any ball or team sports, and did not learn to swim other than barely keep myself afloat until I was an adult. In high school, I ran cross country for three seasons. Mostly I played the violin, at least 2 hours a day sometimes up to 5 hours a day, which is a physically tiring activity, but not aerobic (usually). I also hiked and backpacked with my family. I was able to run a 7-7:30 minute mile until a couple years after I graduated from college. In general, I thought of myself as a pretty fit person, and ran slower because no coach was yelling at me and no competitors were chasing me as I got older. The last time I seriously “trained” was for a marathon I ended up not running in about 2005. I got myself up to 18 miles and then just cycled about 8 miles a day to and from work for many years.

So, by the time I decided to get a trainer I was not in very good shape.

Here’s the stuff that I learned right away:

  • I did not know how to lift things. “Lift with your legs” is what people say. I did not know what this really meant, and was doing some strange combination of using my quads and my lower back to lift heavy things. That’s pretty much exactly what you should not do.
  • My shoulders were incredibly weak. Part of that was from typing all day for my work and being tense. Another part was just lack of use.
  • My lack of grip strength was causing me a lot pain in my hands and forearms. I’d overuse my wrists and hands every day, and then go back and do it again. I didn’t quite have carpal tunnel, but it was probably coming pretty soon.
  • I was very embarrassed by my lack of basic knowledge in the gym. I’m pretty good with jargon, but holy shit, gym language was complicated. And didn’t map to anything I already knew. The names of the exercises were not helpful to me, and I found myself drawing lots of stick figure pictures to try to remember how to do things properly. I didn’t know the names of equipment, I couldn’t remember the difference between a barbell and a dumbbell, I could not for the life of me recall an exercise if I took more than about a week-long break from it.
  • Strengthening my back causes a lot of soreness that can easily be confused with bad pain. I was terrified at first that I was going to reinjure myself and was extremely cautious about any kind of back “pain” I experienced. Over time I figured out the difference between muscle soreness and real, “don’t do that” kind of pain. But it took me nearly a year to feel confident that I can (mostly) tell the difference.
  • I will never be able to perform a new exercise perfectly the first time. And I really need to be ok with that. As a person who regularly masters new technical skills with little or no help from colleagues or friends, it’s regularly an embarrassing and humbling experience to go to the gym.
  • “Testing out” injuries to joints doesn’t help anything. I am able to hyperextend most of my joints, including my wrists. I’d injured my wrists and had to do pushups and things like that from my fists for many months. When I first discovered I was injured, I kept “testing” which likely was just reinjuring myself over and over. It took probably 8 weeks the first time, and maybe 4 weeks the second time to recover from wrist injuries enough that I could do open-handed pushups. Learning to avoid the avoidable reinjuries was extremely helpful.

So what are the kinds of facts that I wish I would have known earlier in my life?

  • “Lift with your legs” basically means “lift by squeezing your glutes.” These are usually the largest muscles in your body, and basically they are your butt muscles. As my glutes have gotten stronger, my back pain has entirely gone away. In the last two years, I have had two incidents requiring more than a couple hours worth of recovery time. Previous to weight lifting, I’d needed sometimes 5 days to be able to stand up properly from a couch. While injured, I’d had to roll myself down to the floor and slowly push my entire body up, barely able to stand. Of course, this is specific to the injury I have. However, a lot of people sit in terrible chairs, hunched over computers all day and they could really benefit from learning how to strengthen their glutes.
  • Increasing glute strength through barbell lifting from a standing position (squats, deadlifts mostly) improved my posture dramatically. I now get people saying things in passing like “you have great posture”, something that I NEVER heard for the first 35 or so years of my life.
  • I need a lot of protein first thing in the morning to feel well through out the day. I eat two eggs every morning, usually also some yogurt and fruit. Cereal does not cut it. Oatmeal can sometimes be ok if combined with a bunch of other things.
  • Pain does not necessarily mean you are injured. You might just need to stretch something out.
  • Lifting weights when you feel like crap often will make you feel much much better.
  • It doesn’t take very long to get really strong. Within three months, I had dramatic improvements in basic stuff like being able to lift boxes of heavy stuff.
  • Grip strength improves amazingly as you increase the weight of barbell and dumbell lifts. I rarely feel pain in my hands and forearms anymore, and I have a pretty crushing grip.
  • I work best with minimal verbal cues, a lot of physical queues (poking muscles, mostly) and being able to see someone try to do something before I try it. As an obsessive reader, it never occurred to me that in the physical world, I would mostly require this kind of instruction. The bigger realization was probably that demonstration was extremely effective for me, more effective than: telling me to do something, being observed doing it, and getting feedback. Part of that is my a lack of gym vocabulary, but I also really need to see each exercise before I am able to mimic proper form (and ask a ton of questions).
  • Foam rollers are amazing. I foam roll a bunch of things before I work out and sometimes at home. Currently I’m focused on my IT-bands and quads, and sometimes I roll out parts of my arms. My elbows started pinging when I started increasing the weights I used for curls. After I was able to do curls with something like a 55-lb barbell, the tightness and pain went away.

Anyway, so that’s the stuff that I know now. I have said to myself that I wished I would have gotten into weight lifting earlier in life. But, to be honest, I don’t know that I would have been that into it without an enthusiastic teacher and a group of people encouraging me to do it. Now, I feel pretty good about independent physical activity, and I can afford to pay someone to help me stay on track.

I’m also extremely fortunate to be able to continue to lift while I’m quite pregnant. I’ve dramatically reduced the weight I lift for squats and deadlifts, after my doctor freaked out and told me I really shouldn’t be lifting so much.

If I ever get pregnant again, I might try to do some research and figure out what my real limits should be on this. Some current wisdom on this says that you should only do lifts that work your abdominals and lower body at about 60% of your max while pregnant. I have no idea where that comes from, and sincerely wish there was more than just hearsay and fear related to lifting while pregnant. There’s of course a lot of documentation of how bad injuries to a woman’s pelvic floor can be while pregnant, so there’s real science backing up the urge for caution. But if you’re otherwise very strong, I’m not sure that the freakouts about specific weight are warranted (if you’re healthy and not trying to achieve personal bests :D) any more than freaking out about women running until they give birth is called for.

I’ve been also thinking about the ways in which gym discipline has affected how I think about teaching and programming, but that’s a topic for another post!

Printing flashcards on 3×5 index cards

I’m making a few sets of these for a meetup tomorrow night:

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In the past, I’d printed out text from a spreadsheet tool and then used a lot of tape and scissors to make the magic happen.

I wanted to step up my game a little and print things directly onto index cards. Printing is a little tricky on most printers because you won’t be able to print double-sided unless you have a very fancy printer. I have a Cannon MG6220 (mostly for printing photos).

Here’s how to set up a word processing app to print out cards (I used Pages):

  1. Configure the page layout to be 3″ x 5″. Here’s the Page Setup dialog box for Pages: Screenshot 2014-02-18 17.18.04
  2. Add your flashcards to the document! Add the cards with the front and back of each flashcard as single, adjacent pages. A sample PDF of what this looks like is here.
  3. To make the printing work, I set up 2 printing presets – one called ‘front flashcards’ and the other called ‘back flashcards’. The ‘front’ is set up to print odd pages only, and ‘back’ is set up to print even pages only and in reverse order.
  4. Print the front side of the cards using your ‘front flashcards’ preset.
  5. Flip the stack of cards over, face down, and put them back into the paper feeder (YMMV with this in the event that your printer is set up differently than mine).
  6. Print the other side of the flashcards using your ‘back flashcards’ preset.

That’s it!

My nerd story: it ran in the family, but wasn’t inevitable

This is about how I came to identify as a hacker. It was inspired by Crystal Beasley’s post. This is unfortunately also related to recent sexist comments from a Silicon Valley VC about the lack of women hackers. I won’t bother to hate-link, as others have covered his statements fully elsewhere.

I’ve written and talked about my path into the tech industry before, and my thoughts about how to get more women involved. But I didn’t really ever start the story where it probably should have been started: in my grandfather’s back yard.

grandpa-our wedding

I spent the first few years of my life in Libby, MT. Home of the Libby Dam, an asbestos mine and loggers. My grandfather, Bob, was a TV repairman in this very remote part of Montana. He was also a bit of a packrat.

I can still picture the backyard in my mind — a warren of pathways through busted up TVs, circuit boards, radios, transistors, metal scrap, wood and hundreds of discarded appliances that Grandpa would find broken and eventually would fix.

His garage was similarly cramped — filled with baby jars, coffee cans and bizarre containers of electronic stuff, carefully sorted. Grandpa was a Ham, so was my uncle and Grandma. I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but at some point my uncle taught me Morse code. I can remember writing notes full of dots and dashes and being incredibly excited to learn a code and to have the ability to write secret messages.

I remember soldering irons and magnifying lens attachments to glasses. We had welding equipment and so many tools. And tons of repaired gadgets, rescued from people who thought they were dead for good.

Later, we had a 286 and then a 386 in the house. KayPro, I think, was the model. I’d take off the case and peer at the dust bunnies and giant motherboard of that computer. I had no idea what the parts were back then, but it looked interesting, a lot like the TV boards I’d seen in piles when I was little.

I never really experimented with software or hardware and computers as a kid. I was an avid user of software. Which, is something of a prelude to my first 10 years of my professional life as a sysadmin. I’m a programmer now, but troubleshooting and dissecting other people’s software problems still feels the most natural.

Every floppy disk we had was explored. I played Dig Dug and Mad Libs on an Apple IIe like a champ. I mastered PrintShop and 8-in-1, the Office-equivalent suite we had at the time. And if something went wrong with our daisy wheel printer, I was on it – troubleshooting paper jams, ribbon outages and stuck keys.

My stepdad was a welder, and he tried to get me interested in mechanical things (learning how to change the oil in my car was a point of argument in our family). But, to be honest, I really wasn’t that into it beyond fixing paper jams so that I could get a huge banner printed out.

I was good at pretty much all subjects in school apart from spelling and gym class. I LOVED to read — spending all my spare time at the local library for many years, and then consuming books (sometimes two a day) in high school. My focus was: get excellent grades, get a scholarship, get out of Montana.

And there were obstacles. We moved around pretty often, and my new schools didn’t always believe that I’d taken certain classes, or that grades I’d gotten were legit. I had school counselors tell me that I shouldn’t take math unless I planned “to become a mathematician.” I was required to double up on math classes to “make up” algebra and pre-algebra I’d taken one and two years earlier. I gave and got a lot of shit from older kids in classes because I was immature and a smartass. I got beat up on buses, again because I was a smartass and had a limited sense of self-preservation.

The two kids I knew who were into computers in high school were really, really nerdy. I was awkward, in Orchestra, and didn’t wear the kind of cool girl clothes you need to make it socially. I wasn’t exactly at the bottom of the social heap, but I was pretty close for most of high school. And avoiding those kids who hung out after school in the computer lab was something I knew to do to save myself social torture.

Every time I hear people say that all we need to do is offer computer science classes to get more girls coding, I remember myself at that age, and exactly what I knew would happen to me socially if I openly showed an interest in computers.

I lucked out my first year in college. I met a guy in my dorm who introduced me to HTML and the web in 1994. He spent hours telling me story after story about kids hacking hotel software and stealing long distance. He introduced me to Phrack and 2600. He and his friends helped me build my first computer. I remember friends saying stuff to me like, “You really did that?” at the time. Putting things together seemed perfectly natural and fun, given my childhood spent around family doing exactly the same thing.

It took two more years before I decided that I wanted to learn how to program, and that I maybe wanted to get a job doing computer-related work after college. What I do now has everything to do with those first few months in 1994 when I just couldn’t tear myself away from the early web, or the friends I made who all did the same thing.

Jen posted an awesome chart of her nerd story. I made one sorta like it, but couldn’t manage to make it as terse.

Whether it was to try and pursue a music performance career after my violin teacher encouraged me, starting out as a chemistry major after a favorite science teacher in high school told me I should, or moving into computer science after several years of loving, mischievous fun with a little band of hackers; what made the difference in each of these major life decisions was mentorship and guidance from people I cared about.

Maybe that’s a no-brainer to people reading this. I say it because sometimes people think that we come to our decisions about what we do with our lives in a vacuum. That destiny or natural affinity are mostly at work. I’m one anecdata point against destiny being at work, and I have heard lots of stories like mine. Especially from new PyLadies.

Not everyone is like me, but I think plenty of people are. And those people who are like me — who could have picked one of many careers, who like computers but weren’t in love or obsessed with them at a young age — could really use role models, fun projects and social environments that are low-risk in middle school, high school and college. And as adults.

Making that happen isn’t easy, but it’s worth sharing our enthusiasm and creating spaces safe for all kinds of people to explore geeky stuff.

Thanks to an early childhood enjoyment of electronics and the thoughtfulness of a few young men in 1994, I became the open source hacker I am today.

Why PyLadies?

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Hey Hacker News! If you’re coming here for the first time, you may also be interested in What I mean when I say I would like more women in the software industry

PyLadies is a group of women working on welcoming, encouraging and directly inviting women to join the Python community and to learn from each other.

I started a PyLadies chapter in Portland, OR last September (2012). We started out with weekly meetings to do homework from a Coursera class to make games with Python. That turned into weekly meetings — plus homework meetups on Saturdays at a local coffee shop, and IRC hangout time to test homework. And that turned into me giving mini-lessons at each Coursera meetup about the material from the class.

People seemed really excited.

Stats - PyLadies PDX (Portland, OR) - Meetup

Before we knew it, it was December, we had over 60 women subscribed to the Meetup, 30 of which had attended a meeting. Today, we’ve got 96 subscribers, 50 people have attended a meeting, and more have signed up to attend events in the future than ever before. And, it’s done by women. Using open source. Teaching classes. Learning developer tools. And writing software.

Since September, I’ve met even more women involved in running PyLadies chapters across the country. Much like the way the PostgreSQL community is organized, we’ve got a loosely connected group of people working independently. We offer support to each other, but don’t have hard and fast rules about what each chapter does. We encourage teaching and workshops, but don’t require them. We share our resources and are quick to put git repos out there of our materials. We send lots of pull requests. And we’re constantly looking for ways for women to get more involved in open source and Python.

All Group Reviews - PyLadies PDX (Portland, OR) - Meetup

I’m completely energized by the positive feedback we’ve gotten for every meeting. More recently, I’ve heard from people that they feel confident and sure of their knowledge because they’ve spent time in our meetups talking and learning from other women.

My goal is to make every get together like that – by having great lessons, a shared understanding of coaching and peer-based education and presentations from our members. Building these groups takes time, and I’m impatient to get to the part where I feel like every interaction with the group is rewarding for every member.

And I can’t do it alone. We’ve got four meetup organizers (although one is about to relocate to the Bay Area!). I work closely with Flora Worley, a kickass developer who chose programming as a career path after working on a PhD, on topic details and planning for the meetings. I’m so looking forward to meeting in person with the many members of the PyLadies community at PyCon next month.

WebTools workweek, start of a symbols database, Kasturba Ghandi

I came across a comment from Sumana saying that she’d like to hear more about the day-to-day life of our fellow FLOSS women. So here’s a run-down of my past week:

Mozilla WebTools team workweek

Mozilla teams hold work weeks from time to time – to get the team together, to experiment with new ideas and in our case, to meet up with a couple other teams (Marketplace and AMO, plus a couple extra folks we work a lot online with, but don’t see very often). I did my normal nerd-out things like making a spreadsheet of all the names and silly intro comments people made on the first day, and I setup and deployed backup scripts to a new 5TB backup server that’s just for crash-stats.mozilla.com’s PostgreSQL database.

There were a few projects on the table to deep-dive into: support for JSON datatypes, creating a symbols database-backed system to replace our filesystem-based one, and work a bit on replacing the SQL-file migration system in Socorro with a SQLAlchemy one.

Symbols database and Range Types

I ended up focusing on the symbols database because Ted, one of our breakpad experts, was around and very generously walked me through what we needed. I have a rough schema in place, and a plan for setting up a few systems to house what will likely be a 1TB database.

In working on this, I spent some time learning more about how to apply range types. The queries for finding symbols are mostly “show me the functions that contain the memory address I have”. Functions all have start addresses and a size, so running “contains” queries makes a lot of sense. In my initial tests, queries using the range types were about 60% faster than queries using plain integer types.

When we’ve got a larger data set to work with imported, I will post some detailed numbers about the in-database comparisons, as well as any performance improvements we’ll get from querying a database instead of loading the plain-text symbols files

Getting JSON files to describe builds and releases

A small project I’ve been working on is getting JSON files produced to describe our builds. Before I go on — please know that this is pretty obscure. The people who are concerned about this information are mostly people who identify crashes and track down which releases are affected by particular bugs. What we keep are things like what platform (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows), what day a release occurred on, whether the release was a beta or not and a few other things.

The way that we got this information in the past was by deriving it from filenames and directory names in our release FTP server. The code to pull this information out is kind of a pain, and if anyone changes a directory name (for a good reason, or on accident..), this code breaks.

It would be much better if we had a way of getting this information in a standardized format. I recently talked to B2G about putting this information into a JSON file (they already were publishing release information via the manifest directory on our FTP server in XML, so it wasn’t too big of a leap). I thought it would be nice to spread this practice to our other software releases.

As luck would have it, a person familiar for Firefox builds is in Mountain View and was giving Ted a ride to the airport! So, just as they were about to leave, we chatted about the problem, created a bug and now I’m going to get build and release information from a JSON file. 🙂

It’s a tiny change, and hopefully won’t take very long to make, but is going to make getting this information much more pleasant and reliable.

Reading about Kasturba Gandhi

I decided to read a real paper book on my flights last week, and picked up a copy of “The Forgotten Woman”, a biography of Kasturba Gandhi, wife of Mahatma Gandhi. Arun Gandhi visited the University of Oregon in the 90s, and my husband had picked up a signed copy.

I’m having a hard time summing up the book. There were a number of things that surprised me. I hadn’t realized that illiteracy for women was so prevalent at the turn of the 20th century in India. I also wasn’t aware of the focus Mahatma Gandhi had on women’s role in political transformation, or how much he had attributed the origin of Satyagraha to Kasturba. Also, this biography attributed Gandhi’s vow of celibacy to Kasturba’s near death after the birth of her fifth child. Kasturba also led an important self-reliance movement, urging women in India to learn to spin and weave their own cloth, rather than buying foreign goods. She also led an effort to teach hygiene to Indigo farming families.

I had a look at the wikipedia page for her, which had no citations and not very well written. I’ve started some work on it, but need to think a bit more about how it should be structured.

Current status: little victories

I’ve got a lot going on right now.

Nothing feels momentous about any particular thing. I’m trying a lot of new ideas and work, struggling, failing and trying again. The transition from the last couple of years of insane travel and starting a business to development work and staying closer to home has been a very good one.

Work

For those that have asked about my work status recently:

Mozilla is great. You can see a lot of the work I do in the Socorro commit feed. Or, in my bug feed. I hang out in #breakpad, #db and a few other channels on irc.mozilla.org. And I’m going to give a talk about Postgres and Backups on February 6th, based on the research I’ve been doing into open source solutions for binary backups.

It’s wonderful to be working in public. I love how much time I have to write software and think about database architecture. I’ve been digging out of a backlog of application and DBA-related work and just coming up to speed on Socorro for a couple months, and that’s starting to pay off.

It’s also wonderful to have coworkers, working on the same things. Most of my work life has been solitary, both in physical proximity and the work itself. Now, all my code is reviewed and I work closely with developers and engineers, daily, on everything.

PyLadies

I’ve been organizing PyLadies meetups with Flora Worley and a few others. We now have more than 60 people who have joined the Meetup, and over 20 women show up to every workshop and hackathon. It feels quite unreal to have 20 women I didn’t know a month ago showing up, forking repos and sending me commits every day. I ask newcomers to send me a commit that links them to our github landing page.

Travel/Speaking in 2013

I’m giving a talk at Portland State University on Feb 1. I’ll be in Mountain View Feb 4-8.

I’m confirmed to be speaking at PyCon March 16 about K-12 teachers and what we in the open source community can do to help them.

I’ll be speaking at a conference in Taiwan in April, and another in the US in May.

Recent talks

My most recent talk was a plenary session at LISA 2012, a USENIX conference in San Diego. It was about the false dichotomy of Education vs Training, and what we can do to improve education of sysadmins. Specifically, I gave shout outs to opsschool.org!

And…

So many other little things are going on. I restarted my sourdough and I’m reorganizing my house, one room at a time. We’re remodeling bits of the basement. We replaced a terrible light fixture in the house, and got an ESPN subscription with cable (which I love and hate at the same time). I’m reading and re-reading some lovely science fiction, at a pace of about 2 books a week. I’m walking more, catching up with family and planning things all the way into 2014.

I’m saying “no” a lot recently to doing more things, volunteering for conferences, and travel. Which, is hard.

Of all the stuff I’m working on right now, PyLadies is the hardest and the most rewarding. So, I’m making space in my life for that, for the little bits of teaching I get to do, and for connecting more women with each other and the open source communities that I love.

A mostly working Lenovo x230 running Ubuntu and Gnome3: Two weeks later

I’ve been planning to switch to a Linux laptop for a while, either for work or as my own laptop aged out. So, joining Mozilla was the perfect opportunity to switch over. And, I’m happy to report that I’m fully converted, enduring a few bugs that need some help, and seriously considering Gentoo to handle all the weird driver issues I’ve got.

Overall, I’m liking the new setup. It’s easier to install all the developer stuff I need like new versions of Python or PostgreSQL. Having real package management instead of adhoc messy MESS of installers is an incredible relief.

I’m using Firefox for my primary browser instead of Chrome, which has made me realize how broken lots of websites I look at regularly are for most people. Also, I am exploring more plugins as a result.

My favorite feature in the Gnome window manager (and lots of window managers support this) is the ability to automatically snap windows to 1/2 or full size with the ‘window’ and arrow keys. It saves an incredible amount of time vs using a mouse to resize.

Unfortunately, I lost the epic rundown of all the problems I encountered on installation, as I encountered them. I can sum up with: the experience of desktop linux has significantly degraded in the seven or so years since I last tried to have a linux laptop as my primary workstation. Talking with friends about this has caused several to remark that Apple got it right with tightly controlling vendors and having full control over the hardware used with it’s operating system. Without a real commitment from a vendor toward supporting drivers, the situation seems unlikely to improve. I think the strongest hope for this is ZaReason, but they weren’t an option for my corporate laptop.

Here’s a few tidbits that might be helpful to a future x230 owner, wanting to run Ubuntu:

I’m running 12.04, Precise Pangolin.

Installed from an Ubuntu netinstall image created with: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/.

Here are a bunch of ppas I used, from my /etc/apt/sources.d directory:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/andreas-diesner/lightdm-fix-temporary/ubuntu precise main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/andreas-diesner/lightdm-fix-temporary/ubuntu precise main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/andreas-diesner/lightdm-fix-temporary/ubuntu precise main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/andreas-diesner/lightdm-fix-temporary/ubuntu precise main
deb http://linux.dropbox.com/ubuntu precise main
deb http://linux.dropbox.com/ubuntu precise main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fkrull/deadsnakes/ubuntu precise main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/fkrull/deadsnakes/ubuntu precise main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fkrull/deadsnakes/ubuntu precise main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/fkrull/deadsnakes/ubuntu precise main
### THIS FILE IS AUTOMATICALLY CONFIGURED ###
# You may comment out this entry, but any other modifications may be lost.
deb http://dl.google.com/linux/musicmanager/deb/ stable main
### THIS FILE IS AUTOMATICALLY CONFIGURED ###
# You may comment out this entry, but any other modifications may be lost.
deb http://dl.google.com/linux/musicmanager/deb/ stable main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/hannes-janetzek/enlightenment-svn/ubuntu precise main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/hannes-janetzek/enlightenment-svn/ubuntu precise main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/hannes-janetzek/enlightenment-svn/ubuntu precise main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/hannes-janetzek/enlightenment-svn/ubuntu precise main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/pitti/postgresql/ubuntu precise main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/pitti/postgresql/ubuntu precise main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/pitti/postgresql/ubuntu precise main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/pitti/postgresql/ubuntu precise main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/upubuntu-com/chat/ubuntu precise main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/upubuntu-com/chat/ubuntu precise main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/upubuntu-com/chat/ubuntu precise main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/upubuntu-com/chat/ubuntu precise main

There’s a painful lightdm problem fixed by a package the first source in the above list.

I also compiled a new kernel for myself to try to fix a bad video flickering problem I’m having with my external monitor. Jury’s out on that – the flickering hasn’t entirely gone away, and it doesn’t happen to my coworker who’s got a x220 and is running Gentoo, but a different kernel.

Also, my video camera doesn’t work, and I actually need it. Skype seems to work ok for voice, but not video. Vidyo, however, doesn’t work at all.

Wish list for the future:

  • Camera working
  • A Skitch replacement
  • Vidyo working
  • A package for my .bash_profile, .ssh and .gpg directories that I can install in any new system
  • A better driver for the touchpad that doesn’t let my mouse jump around while I’m typing (Yes, I have already enabled the feature, and it doesn’t work so great. Friends suggested it might be a hardware limitation.)
  • Change configuration to have the mouse behave like the latest OS X (reverse scrolling)

Here’s a few other sites that helped me out:

And, I don’t recommend trying out Enlightenment as your only window manager on your first try. You’ll need something else anyway to get your wireless configured, and if you do something stupid like trying to install ‘econnman’ and you blindly say ‘yes’ to uninstalling some packages you don’t know anything about, you’ll end up accidentally removing your wireless devices. So, start with Gnome, read up and switch to E later.