Monthly Archives: October 2009

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twittering on 2009-10-29

twitter

twittering on 2009-10-28

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twittering on 2009-10-27

community, portland , , ,

Server Sky presentation, with Personal Telco folks, tomorrow in PDX at 6:30pm

The following email just dropped into my inbox, and I had to share. Keith is a fixture in the Portland tech community – running Linux clinics (scroll down the page for info), volunteering at FreeGeek, attending user group meetings and occasionally presenting.

He’s got this crazy idea – provide computing services from orbit. It involves ultralight discs of silicon, solar sails and launching “stuff” into orbit from a really long rail line.. and, well, some other completely awesome ideas. Keith set up a wiki, and there are great volunteer opportunities sprinkled throughout it, like “Study and simulate the trajectory and recovery of a tumbling server-sat in detail.” Seriously.

If you’ve got some time tomorrow, you should go check it out, have a beer at Roots and mingle with the Personal Telco folks, who are amazing for creating a completely free, volunteer-driven wireless network throughout Portland.

Tomorrow’s meeting at Roots Organic Brewing will feature a talk by
Keith Lofstrom about ServerSky.

See you then!

Chris Chen

—– Added by keithl ———————————————–

Roots Organic Brewing: 1520 SE 7th 503-235-7668
http://www.personaltelco.net/RootsBrewing

For Pluggers that don’t know, The Personal Telco Project is a brave
band of wireless warriors, unwiring Portland one free hotspot at a
time. A great way to give back to the community, learn about wifi
and Linux and neat gizmos like the ALIX SBC, and hang out with the
Cool Kids. The monthly meeting is a great chance to “network” 🙂
http://personaltelco.net

Server Sky is a proposal for array computing and internet service
from orbit. We are building a team of technically savvy dreamers,
then will recruit local manufacturers (Solar World, Intel, Triquint,
etc.) to build it. If you can do radios, math, physics, coding, or
even drawing or gardening or salt-water coral aquariums (!) we can
use your help. http://server-sky.com

Someday, we will feed the PTP ground mesh from the multivendor
orbiting mesh, and no longer depend on ground monopoly backhaul.

I’ve given versions of this presentation before. This is somewhat
improved, and I will be presenting it next week at the A.I. Meetup
in the Bay area, Lawrence Berkeley Labs, the Hackers Conference,
and a few other venues.

Keith

twitter

twittering on 2009-10-26

twitter

Weekly tweet digest for 2009-10-25

  • @turoczy happy birthday 🙂 #
  • until this morning, i actually did not know what 'natch' meant. thanks urban dictionary! #
  • @snaga hah! Thanks! 🙂 it's definitely fun working with colleagues living in Philly, Louisiana, Utah and NYC every day. in reply to snaga #
  • @petdance heh. #8 got me. in reply to petdance #
  • @caseorganic consider flying to a border town and driving over. in reply to caseorganic #
  • sad i won't be in town! RT @lawduck: Veganocracy rules this week for #pdxbreakfast – Tin Shed, Thursday, 8:30 am: http://tr.im/CjWY #
  • @snaga will I see you at the PostgreSQL Conference in Tokyo next month? I can share what I've learned working w/ very distributed team. in reply to snaga #
  • @darkixion no, was for a long time, but now i'm vegetarianish. #
  • RT @lhawthorn: report from the #NCWIT on Women in IT. DATA. If you think there's no problem, you might be surprised. http://bit.ly/1Y7SQt #
  • from http://bit.ly/1Y7SQt : Nearly half of women say mentoring would help retain technical employees #
  • from http://bit.ly/1Y7SQt: "women & men say they would hire ppl w/résumés w/male names rather than female even tho identical" #
  • from http://bit.ly/1Y7SQt: men report finding more informal prof.dev. opportunities than women (82% vs 62%) formalize to help fix. #
  • @stewartsmith study was US-specific, so hard to say. anecdotally – i hear similar things from UK/AU; less so India/Phillipines/EU #
  • re: hack girls – yahoo! developer network has been incredibly supportive of diversity initiatives. good people, doing good things. #
  • heh. RT @stewartsmith: wants to magically be transported to Portland for @OpenSQLCamp #
  • trying to avoid tech event collisions is hard work. #
  • @leandrod huh. i found the salary info to be interesting – nearly equal at high levels, but big disparity at entry points, mid-level. in reply to leandrod #
  • i <3 http://packages.endpoint.com #
  • @turoczy 2? #
  • RT @gchaix: PDX food cards gone horribly horribly wrong: http://twurl.nl/gfwo0h #
  • headed to PDX -> SJC #
  • reviewing backup routines, waiting for replication sets to finish syncing. free wireless @PDX rocks. #
  • RT @neil_conway: O'Reilly Radar article on our recent MapReduce Online work: http://tr.im/CtlE #
  • uneventful travel, followed by good conversation. now time to call it a day. #
  • headed off to second meeting of the day. hoping for bacon. (kicking off the mentoring book sprint!) #
  • getting a tour of flossmanuals.net from Adam Hyde #gsoc #
  • waiting for @dukeleto to share his git repo for our notes. #gsoc #
  • looking forward to the next iteration of flossmanuals: booki! #gsoc #
  • So, what do you think are the features of FLOSS culture that distinguish it from other cultures? (i'm writing a book chapter!) #
  • @edaypdx yeah, like those keywords – transparency, directness, peer review in reply to edaypdx #
  • @edavis10 yes — although not sure i agree with 'everyone as equals'.. i typically see hierarchy, although not always explicit in reply to edavis10 #
  • so full of indian food. #
  • OH: Typewriter manufacturers all over the world are going to gang up on me now! #
  • @robertmhaas LOL! in reply to robertmhaas #
  • @dlangille yes, indeed! in reply to dlangille #
  • .@skud also see @gorthx & my's 'running a successful user group' talk from OSCON 2008 – http://tr.im/CADC #
  • what we're working on: http://tr.im/CB0A, my contribution so far: http://tr.im/CB0z #gsoc #
  • OH: "It's like drinking a salad!" #
  • @thesethings no, bloody marys. in reply to thesethings #
  • discussing barriers to student participation, and setting expectations for success #gsoc #docsprint #
  • whew, done for now. more editing after dinner! #gsoc #
  • @samv are you coming for the mentor summit? #
  • @dukeleto HEY! What am I? Chopped liver? in reply to dukeleto #
  • protip: circular references – always good for trolling! #
  • doing our last pass at reviewing and updating before we send the book to the presses #gsoc #flossmanuals #
  • still editing… #gsoc #flossmanuals #
  • RT @dukeleto: We need #parrot and #postgres hackers to join us in hacking on PL/Parrot http://bit.ly/2C04TY , #plparrot on freenode #
  • The #GSoC mentors manual looks awesome. Thanks so much @lhawthorn and Adam Hyde @flossmanuals for facilitating #
  • OH: I'm getting a git tramp stamp. advanced-#gsoc #
  • @silentlennie i don't use it regularly, but word on the street is that runtime is faster. in reply to silentlennie #
  • @samv LOL! will do. will also send owner of that comment to you. in reply to samv #
  • at the googleplex for #gsoc mentor summit #
  • "there is nothing as productive" as open source code @cdibona #gsoc #
  • #gsoc mentor manual available at: http://icanhaz.com/gsocbook #
  • session on advanced trolling explicitly called out in introductions #gsoc #mentorsummit #
  • Pick people over projects #mentorsummit #gsoc #
  • Structures are a way to 'set a clock' for participants. And encourage communication. #mentorsummit #gsoc #
  • Just had most awesome session on non text documentation. Can't wait to see notes #gsoc #mentorsummit #
  • Epic advanced trolling session today. Now @ SJC, heading back to PDX soon. #gsoc #mentorsummit #
twitter

twittering on 2009-10-24

community, conference, postgres, postgresql , , ,

GSoC Mentor Summit and the new mentor’s manual

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I’ve been in San Jose since Wednesday, working on a book and preparing for today’s Google Summer of Code Mentor’s Summit. We’re here at Google’s campus, setting up the schedule and meeting new and old friends.

A group of us – me, Jen, Alex, Bart, Jonathan, Leslie and Olly – worked with Adam Hyde from Flossmanuals.net to create a new GSoC mentoring guide. We “book sprinted”, writing the entire manual in two days. Leslie was nice enough to produce printed copies for attendees, and the whole thing is available online at: http://en.flossmanuals.net/GSoCMentoringGuide. Flossmanuals.net is pretty cool — you can create epub books, PDFs and beautiful looking printed books quite easily.

I was happy to reference the patch review process from PostgreSQL in the ‘upstream integration‘ chapter.

We’d love comments, feedback and contributions to the manual!