Category Archives: community

open source 2 Comments

open season interview with mark shuttleworth

Just listened to this interesting interview about Open Source project management, virtualization, Ubuntu. A couple quotes:

If you want your open source project to succeed…you absolutely have to have modularity.
–Matt Asay

He was talking about modularity that encourages developer participation – and they went on to talking about Open Office and the problems with their dev structure that drive developers away.

What i’m personally very interested in is how we collaborate efficiently… How do we improve the flow of collaboration? So that’s something we spend a lot of time working on within Ubuntu.
— Mark Shuttleworth

Lovin’ it.

Original Audio Source

conference, pdxpug, portland, postgres, postgresql, user groups

PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 – talk descriptions are up!

I just finished updating the Talks page for PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007. There are so many great folks giving talks — Neil Conway, Josh Berkus, Robert Treat, David Fetter and Robert Hodges are all flying in. It’ll be great to see Josh, Robert and David again! I’m excited to meet Neil and Robert, both of whom I’ve heard great things about.

PDXPUG will be represented by Mark Wong and David Wheeler. Mark will be talking about performance, building on a talk he gave last year to PDXPUG on performance and TPC benchmarks. This conference talk will be focused on practical tools one can use with PostgreSQL. David’s talk will be about his recent work with Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL. David was kind enough to give PDXPUG’s very first talk, about PL/PgSQL.

We also have Webb Sprague from Eugene, OR coming out to talk about PostGIS. We’re hoping to get him out for user group meetings some time. Eugene is about two hours away from Portland, so we occasionally have visitors (hi Andrew!) to PDXPUG and PerlMongers from there. And of course Joshua Drake will be there.

Another great thing about having this conference at PSU is that members of the database reading group folks will be sure to attend. And our favorite relational algebra teachers will certainly be there.

As of today, we’ve almost filled up our event space! So if you haven’t registered yet, register now.

gender, open source 2 Comments

participation in open source, any worse than the rest of the industry?

tech gender gap

One criticism I’ve heard about my article is that I should have addressed the computing industry as a whole, rather than targeting Open Source. That the problem of women participating is much more general.

I chose to write about Open Source because that’s my community. I installed Slackware in 1995 and learned about operating systems from a Linux command prompt, years before I took a class about it. When I worked at Intel, and there were a lot more women in my systems administration group (about 20%) than I saw on the Linux Kernel mailing list, the Cricket developers list or BugTraq. That’s part of where I formed my opinion.

Here’s a little graph showing the number of bachelor’s degrees granted in computer science. We’ve had a 15% drop in degrees granted since 1985. I wonder what we were doing right in the early ’80s.

There are other resources: FLOSSPOLS, salary studies that show gender breakdowns. I’ve also read figures on conference attendance and observed the difference in open source and system administration conferences. I do admit that I have not seen studies that directly compare open source participation to closed source participation.

How about you? Anyone out there have a study they can refer me to?

pdxpug, postgres, postgresql 3 Comments

relational algebra talk last night was awesome

Quickly: James Terwilliger and Rafael J. Fernández-Moctezuma gave a fantastic talk about relational algebra operators (there are 9, arguably 8). They started with the set theory origins, dropped Codd’s name a few times and captivated the room. There was also mention of proof by intimidation, brandishing of duct tape, fabulous drinks mixed by Gabrielle Roth, and twenty-one people in attendance.

Before the talk, we had an impromptu “What is HOT?” (HOT stands for Heap-ONLY Tuple) from Jeff Davis. More details on that later. I think we need more 15-minute, what-is-this-new-feature-and-why-is-it-awesome talks.

pdxpug, postgres, postgresql

PostgreSQL conference in Portland on October 20th

Joshua Drake, Josh Berkus and I are organizing PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 here in Portland, OR on October 20, 2007. We’ve got an incredible group of speakers lined up, and a great group of sponsors.

The conference is free to students, $60 for everyone else. We have a separate dinner everyone is welcome to for $10.

The whole thing is a bargain for a full day of highly-technical talks and the opportunity to meet contributors to the core of PostgreSQL, local Portland experts and a cadre of smarty pants database-lovers.

Plus, we’re raising money for PostgreSQL advocacy efforts with all money going to the non-profit organization Software in the Public Interest.

Today, we were working out the details for the schedule to add a talk from Neil Conway titled “Understanding Query Execution in PostgreSQL”, which will discuss the query planner and EXPLAIN. This will be great information for those of us who want to understand a bit more about query execution.

Speaker bios and talk abstracts should be up soon. This week, I’ll be working on getting some women-sized tshirts (woo!), A/V recording equipment and working on getting the word out at PSU that the event will be held there. I’d also like to drop some fliers off at Powells Technical, and maybe a few other user group events coming up. Let me know if you think I’ve missed a user group, or know of some other place I should drop fliers.

Plus, we’ve got our next PDXPUG meeting on Thursday, September 20th – Relational Algebra with a couple PSU PhD candidates. Rumor is that there will be mixed drinks.

codensplode, gender, user groups

a women-focused users group: the very, very beginning

I mentioned nearly a month ago that we were starting a group whose goal is to get more women involved in open source. We had our first group meeting this evening.

We decided on a “chaining” strategy for invitations – no broadcasts on mailing lists we aren’t subscribed to, and people should feel a bit responsible for the folks that they bring along. The accountability for group participation is one thing that I feel strongly about, and there was rough consensus, so looks like that will stand for now.

There was some talk about maintaining at least 50% women in the group. Ultimately, I don’t think a percentage will matter if we have a strong group identity. But it got me thinking – what are the elements of this group that will keep me interested and will continue to draw women in? And then, what can I do to help maintain the group’s identity and goals?

One idea I had was the socratic seminar. Another was a goal of 100% participation in every meeting. During today’s meeting, three of us mentioned that we’d gone to a series of user group meetings without ever saying a word. What I like about the 100% participation goal is that combined with a socratic seminar, it would be radically different from other user group meetings I’ve been to.

For structure, I thought we could have our show-and-tell, followed by an hour or so of group work, and then a post-group-work sharing. I think that the sharing piece is key. And if we keep ’em short – and timed – I think it could be a very interesting.

We’ll see how things go. I offered to talk next month about the temporal database stuff I’ve been working on with Jeff. I asked for five minutes and thought it would be a nice jumping-off point for a smaller group to run off and work on database stuff for an hour. We’ll see if I can make a 5-minute presentation that is useful about temporal data.

sysadmin

non-profits and systems administration

Wouldn’t it be great if the non-profit world could embrace free software? In my head, I’ve seen a giant Venn diagram labeled “VALUES” with Open Source/Free Software overlapping significantly with the of non-profits. Here’s a small one:

nonprofit open source venn diagram
I think that non-profits are certainly not ignorant of open source. In Oregon, our legislators tried to pass a bill that required F/OSS alternatives to commercial software to be considered for every software purchase. Then, the story goes, the guys from Redmond came down and talked them out of it. NOSI has been around for a few years, and I come across forums or blogs like techsoup daily.

The problem is implementation and systems support. Administration is where the car goes off the rails for non-profits. Qualified open source admins are not necessarily available to non-profits – I’m not sure exactly why, but I’d bet cost is a big reason.

Non-profits often receive equipment and software donations from the community, with little technical experience to maintain them. Most of the donations are commercial software with expensive licenses. There are a few tech support groups popping up that cater to non-profits (lower prices, focus on maintaining – not upgrading).

We have FreeGeek here in Portland. But there are still many non-profits who don’t or can’t use their services. I wish that there was a “server-in-a-box” setup that office managers would feel comfortable maintaining. Filesharing is so ubiquitous and necessary, it is unreasonable to expect that every office that needs filesharing will have a “qualified” systems administrator to maintain the server.

I guess my question is – is there a set of software apps that could be given to small- to mid- size non-profits as a replacement for commercial/non-free software?

Off the top of my head, I would want:

* Ubuntu Linux for client/server
* Firefox for a web browser
* Zimbra or Chandler/Cosmo for email and calendaring
* WebDav and SMB filesharing
* Subversion auto-versioning support on sharepoints
* Something like once:radix for a Filemaker-like database interface
* Accounting software?
That would all be pretty tough for a non-profit to maintain. I wonder about packaging those things together. Would it be worth it?

And then, once it was put together, how do we create a system where non-profits either have access to qualified sysadmins or can administrate everything themselves?

I’ve done a little research into non-profit/tech forums and organizations, but not nearly enough to know everything about what’s already out there. I’m very interested in pursuing this idea, maybe just for the sake of the few non-profits I work with.

oscon 3 Comments

oscon: day 2

The opening talk about Processing was really cool. On Sunday, I’d talked with Schwern and Tom Limoncelli about women’s participation in computer science. Schwern mentioned some neat visual programming environments. I think that Processing seemed like something in that direction. I want to play with it!

The overcoming bias talk was pretty boring. The idea was good, but Robert Hanson didn’t really have the crowd with him. He said one thing that stuck out in my notes: “Private advantage but at a social cost”. It was nice that he spoke before the Microsoft guy.

So microsoft is launching an opensource portal/marketing site. Nat’s questions about where microsoft was going with it’s litigation really put him on the spot, and the guy didn’t give a real answer.

The Pirat Partiet guy was awesome! Rick Falkvinge started the Pirate party in sweden to encourage copyright reform. They’re going for 4% of voters in 2009 (i think!). Campaign contributions are unregulated in Sweden, so you can donate here.

Steve Yegge spoke last about branding. Then the keynote sessions were done!
I saw Amy Hoy’s When Interface Design Attacks talk. A great distillation of a lot of UX material. I learned a new word: satisfice. It’s what a user does when they can’t do what they really want to do – use the next best thing or give up.

After that, I went to the Mahara presentation by Penny Leach. Penny is the maintainer of the postgresql port of Moodle. The idea behind Mahara to maintain ePortfolios throughout a student’s education career. For example, there’s hooks for creating a CV and creating/sending cover letters to employers. I like the idea of tracking that type of thing automatically. I learned that my husband’s high school the high school my husband teaches at uses Moodle later. Ton of functionality, seems like a great product. The talk wasn’t well attended – I wonder if fewer university/education folks came to OSCON this year. Penny mentioned mochikit as a good javascript library.

oscon

oscon: day 1 (continued)

I also saw Larry Wall’s Perl 6 talk – i need to look up implicit list comprehension and DFA/NFA regex syntax. Lots of neat stuff, I wish Perl 6 were coming sooner.

Luke Kanies also gave a talk about Puppet. I thought it was great, but heard some negative stuff about it from someone else. I’m going to give it a try, but cfengine is my fallback plan.