Archive for July, 2010
Have I mentioned that I love my team?
Wednesday after work, we went out to the Santa Cruz boardwalk. I brought my guitar and strummed as we walked along, and then we found that if you brought a Pepsi product can (for recycling), you got unlimited rides for $10 (as opposed to $30 or so). Max found an empty Pepsi can in the street and persuaded the folks at the recycling booth to give all four of us $10 ride passes for the single can (for which I gaped at him and he turned and teased me and said “finally, I have won Mel’s respect!”) and we proceeded to go on the Dipper, a fantastic wooden rollercoaster, multiple times in a row. The first time was as the sun was setting, and at the top of the hill you could see the beach and the pier and the palm trees and the city and the sky with the dusk going down it; the second time was at night and the lights festooning the coaster had come on, so as you swooped over the clattering bunny hills it was a swirl of yellow strings that blurred past your head.
I went on the Fireball (as far as I could tell, the boardwalk’s wildest ride – it involves rapid spinning, swinging, and almost going upside down) with Karsten’s oldest daughter Malakai, then we met up with the remainder of the group (Ian had acquired a funnel cake) and ate at a falafel/burger joint, the only remaining place that was open at that hour.
Thursday: after work, we headed to Karsten’s place for another farm salon, which I spent mostly in the pedicab playing guitar (again), although I did finish Max’s plum pie after he ended his Magic: The Gathering game and decided he wasn’t hungry any more. Petted a chicken, admired Debbie’s seed catalog, stood in the fading sunlight talking about mail clients, general geekitude.
This morning: up before the sun, piled into Karsten’s rental van, whipped out my laptop and handed it to Ian so he could pay our electric bill… and then the roadtrip from Santa Cruz to Portland started, Karsten describing the economics of having solar panels on one’s house as we pulled onto the highway. Swung by Berkeley to pick up a Terra from Zareason for review, munching on strawberries in the meantime. Drove through a big valley full of trees with a river down below that’s a deep, deep blue, with sandy beaches on either side, and whitewater rushing through it. Halfway up the mountain perched on the edge was a house, and Max and I just looked at it and went (almost in unison) “look at that house!” (and generally expressed great envy to the owners for the view out all their windows). Actually, a number of such valleys. At high speed. In the sunshine. While listening to U2 (Ian) and Dave Matthews Band (Max) and oldies (Karsten).
California has everything – we saw snow-capped mountain peaks, rock formations that looked like a gothic cathedral carved out of brown stone, and pictures of Bryce Canyon in Utah (California has mobile broadband connectivity that you can use to get to Wikipedia). Karsten told me about the canyon when I was raving about the California scenery; apparently the early raytracing program (“bryce”) was named after the canyon because the creators wanted to be able to render something as gorgeous as Bryce Canyon. I’d heard of the software before, but not the place. Go figure. I also love the little trees that pop out from the side of the hills. It’s all bare dirt, bare dirt, bare dirt, and then – “HI! I’m a TREE!” – bare dirt, bare dirt, bare dirt… they’re just tiny cheerful tufts of things sticking themselves into nowhere at all.
We had dinner at Outback, which featured outrageously bad Australian accent imitations by Max and Karsten and a mad dash to the car by me to get my driver’s license (“bring the sangria, we swear to God she’s 24 and will be right back with ID”) and the fastest Bloomin’ Onion consumption I’ve ever witnessed. Then I closed my eyes most of the rest of the ride, and think I was even unconscious for a few moments at some point in there thanks to Karsten’s pillow. It is wonderful to have coworkers who are also friends, and this roadtrip was a great reminder of that.
CommArch shall ride again! But now we’re at the hotel in Portland and it’s nearly midnight – so I’m going to go out and walkabout a bit and get my “WHEE IT’S A NEW CITY!!!!” fix, then come back and (hopefully) pass out. I want to be up early tomorrow to (1) send Pat a sorely belated update and (2) plunge through email backlog once again (I’m winning! I’m winning!)
Update: Having wandered Portland at 1am now, I like it (then again, I pretty much like everything). Portland is warm (in July) and awake at night. However, its nocturnal population seems to mostly consist of young partygoers and the homeless, and the primary soundtrack of the city at this time of night is techno music that is still loud when you’re standing across the street. On the up side, it has a rather lovely river, and I found a tiny BBQ shack, a lot of food trucks open late, and Chinatown, which does indeed feature lugaw (rice porridge, most commonly known to American audiences as congee). And a park. With a fountain! It’s looking like a good week.
Saturday, July 17th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
The rest of CommArch arrived today; Karsten, his daughter Saskia, and I went to pick them up, then headed straight to In-’N-Out where we consumed too many fries, burgers, and milkshakes for our own good (my contribution: 2 animal burgers, 1 animal fries, 1 chocolate milkshake, 1 lemonade). On the way out of the burger joint, we turned around and looked over the shoulder of the building. The sunset had a gradient going from black at the top down to blue at the bottom, with purple and red, orange and yellow in between, and a thin sliver of moon hanging over it all.
It’s good to be with my team – no matter how well you work with people online, no matter how quickly and clearly you can make your jokes and pokes and back-and-forths travel over text, it’s really not the same as being there in person. You miss the overlapping conversations and the little tics of personality, facial expressions, random things they notice that you don’t (was it Max who first pointed out the moon, or Karsten? Maybe Karsten…) and just the sense of being there with people that’s so nice. Having them be there without needing to take the extra effort to type and make your presence known online.
At some point this week, I’m told, we’re going to the boardwalk and I’ll finally see the Santa Cruz beach, which I have somehow avoided seeing thus far (this may have something to do with being in the office past 4am). Karsten has another farm event (summer salon) on Thursday. Friday is our epic road trip to Portland. Sweeeeeet.
Good to be here.
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Are you or do you know a good Fedora contributor – an active, English-speaking member of any team, be it QA or Docs or Packaging – who’s interested in spending an all-expenses-paid week in Cape Town, South Africa getting university professors involved in the parts of Fedora they’re interested in?
Jan Wildeboer and I are teaching the first POSSE in EMEA from October 3-8, 2010 at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, hosted by Michael Adeyeye of the IT department. POSSE is a one-week workshop for professors, usually in software engineering, CS, or a related discipline (technical writing, etc) who want to get their students involved as contributors in open source communities. They spend their POSSE week diving into the community as contributors themselves to give them a better idea of how to scaffold their students through the same learning experience.
The workshop is taught by 2 instructors who go over community dynamics and basic tools/skills (wiki editing, IRC, version control, etc) as well as considerations particular to educators (semester schedules, grading, picking appropriate student projects, etc). As the tech guru, you’ll be leading us in deep-dives into the work you do every day in Fedora, giving us a living example of how an experienced contributor thinks, ask questions, and improvises through the ever-changing FOSS world by being “productively lost.”
The fine print:
- We’d like a local contributor, so we’ll pay for your round-trip airfare within Africa. If you’re from outside the continent and you can get yourself in, we’ll take you the rest of the way.
- Your hotel and living expenses (food, taxi, etc) will all be covered.
- That’s it. Short fine print.
If you’re interested or know someone who might be, reply here or email posse at teachingopensource dot org with a description of why you’d like to come and your activities within Fedora, and we’ll get back to you shortly. And if you’re interested in seeing a POSSE for your FOSS project or at a school near you (or perhaps your alma mater), consider organizing a POSSE of your own!
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 | fedora | 2 Comments »
I just got the news that one of my high school math coaches, Chuck Hamberg, passed away. He was retired by the time I got to IMSA, but still made an impression on my green 14-year-old self, co-coaching our little team of ‘shmen with great gusto alongside Dr. Condie. After several years of hungrily burning the midnight oil studying math (the kind they didn’t teach in school) by myself, hiding in the bathroom in the middle of the night to read books, these guys were the ones who first taught me how to do math, how to spin proofs and play with numbers and ideas in a way that’s never left me since.
It was the first time I’d heard good mathematicians talk to each other about math and do math, joyously, in front of a group of awestruck and excited kids. This sounds simple, but… when your prior exposure to math classes has largely been full of rote stuff, watching adults having fun with it is absolutely spellbinding – and heartening, if you’ve grown up wondering whether any other real (i.e. not in books and/or dead) people also actually like this stuff. And to watch adults having the kind of dialogue I wanted to grow up to speak – but had never heard before and therefore couldn’t even picture – that was awesome.
Mr. Hamberg also gave me a valuable lesson in teaching. The summer I turned 16, I taught math camp for the first time. As one of the most experienced students in the group (I was a rising senior, so I wasn’t that experienced), I was in charge of the Number Theory team. We’d worked hard on our curriculum all school year, and the first day went well – we taught 3 classes, identical curricula, 1 before lunch and 2 after. And then we pulled out the curriculum for the second day… and failed. The kids (our students were just a few years younger than I was) blanked out, weren’t engaged, weren’t excited… and we had lunchtime to figure out how to turn this around before sections 2 and 3 hit. My team was looking to me for guidance; I was the leader, I was supposed to know what to do. I had no clue.
Shamefaced, I slunk over to Mr. Hamberg’s lunch table, sat down beside him, and apologized for being a failure. He and Dr. Condie asked why, and I explained the situation and that we didn’t know what to do, wavering between resigned dejection and mild panic the entire time. “Well, what were you trying to teach them?” Something about Pascal’s triangle, I replied. Anything, really. “Lunch is ending. Come watch us and then tell us afterwards what it is you saw us do.”
They proceeded to pull off this spectacular class on Pascal’s triangle, Fibonacci numbers, the Sierpinski triangle, and all these lovely little things tied into that sort of stuff – the kids were practically leaping out of their seats, shouting questions… and then during the break between sections, they walked up to us and said “okay, now you teach the next section.”
“But… but…” I sputtered, “I don’t know what to say! I… didn’t prepare that curricula!”
“Neither did we.” They backtracked and explained how teaching wasn’t a script – how you knew the material, and then roamed around it with your students, helping them dive into interesting things, roving on the fly. “All the stuff we just covered,” Mr. Hamberg pointed out, “you played with during your first year on math team. You know this stuff.” And then they left, and the students poured in, and my team looked at me expectantly.
And I proceeded to lead my crew through team-teaching one of the best math classes I have ever taught in my entire life to date.
8 years later, I’m still proud of it. We were sailing by the seat of our pants, but I really did know the material, and it was exhilarating improvising it and knowing it was okay to do that, that you could make it up, that you weren’t doing it COMPLETELY WRONG!!! if you didn’t follow a script, and that… kids get really excited about math if you do that. Wow. Excited students, learning stuff… I was on a teaching high.
I went up to them afterwards all excited with this revelation – probably babbling something like oh my gosh you make it up and it works you totally make it up and it works and it’s okay and they were so excited and and and PASCAL’S TRIANGLE!!! and the ideas lead so many places and you just go! and Mr. Hamberg smiled and told me that I was a teacher.
And so I am.
Thanks, Chuck. We’ll miss you.
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 | teaching open source | No Comments »
Took the bus + train out to Palo Alto on Sunday to watch the World Cup finals with my brother Jason. He’s a rising senior at Stanford and has a few buddies working at IDEO this summer, so that’s where we watched the game from. It’s a gorgeous design studio, full of fun toys and materials and bikes hanging from the ceiling (we got a full tour, including the treadle pump by the bamboo garden outside). I like both kinds of design spaces – shiny well-branded ones like IDEO and Continuum, and disheveled anything-goes hack-houses like Asylum and pika. For different reasons. I think I need both – a rough-and-tumble test area, and a nice display, and (most importantly, imo) a way to switch back and forth between them.
Since I couldn’t hear the actual audio commentary (and thus had a very faint idea of what was going on), I popped on IRC and watched the match remotely in #oercommons with Greg and Sebastian, with Ryan and Ian joining us later (we had to yell at Ian for imitating a vuvuzela once in a while). I mean, I know it’s a chatroom, but… I couldn’t really participate in the in-person location I was at, and it’s not like this was less fun – it’s how I can hang out with my friends when all 5 of us are in different places. And we were cursing about yellow cards and offsides and cheering and arguing about teams and groaning about would someone please make a goal already??!!? and I think I was the only one rooting for Spain in there (Spain won) so I think it was a relatively accurate futbol watching experience, really. (And I learned quite a bit about soccer as we swapped links o’ background information back and forth. Whee, Wikipedia!)
Spent the rest of the day with my brother, pretty much. He took me to a BBQ with a bunch of his (design major) friends, wherein we played kickball, during which I acquitted myself rather well – I still have my grasp of baseball strategy, and I can sprint faster than most design students… just not for extended periods of time. Showed me his projects, which included a swinging lamp with magnetic reed switches that made this crazy tactile light display, and a rain chamber, and a door-knocker that looked like a fist. I fixed the javascript on his webpage (and just pointed him towards P2PU school of webcraft, since he’s trying to figure out this “make a website” thing). He exhorted me to take care of myself more (I’m really bad at that) and I exhorted him to let himself want something and work towards it (as opposed to drifting along doing okay stuff and waiting for someone else to make him do things he wants to do). And then I got on the train and went back to Santa Cruz (and almost missed getting off the bus at the end of the line – I had fallen asleep for a moment and only jerked back awake when everyone else had left the bus… but only a minute or so after they had, so I did get off the bus in time).
Today: Jeff pointed me towards the AI touchbook, and I drooled. Apparently Chris’s team needs to rewrite how root filesystems are created this fall. The livecd-creator needs to use a new storage architecture to solve the same sort of overlay issues SoaS is having, and the tool should be generalized for MIPS and ARM and x86 embedded at the same time. He asked if I wanted to ride along, and I yelped a happy yes – I need to see if I can actually do this without killing myself, though… I’m wary of putting too many things on my plate.
It’s black magic to me, to go “aha, it is a beagleboard, and Fedora does not run on it yet” – and then a miracle occurs – “…and now we do!” I know it can happen, but I don’t know how it happens. And I’ve longed to work on (and learn about) hardware again since… I gave it up for software after graduation, really. I never did get good at it – I got to the point where I was starting to be really fascinated and could sort of understand conversations about it – but I still feel like I’ve not started learning. And I think that this is what I’d like my technical depth to be, since I do have to study engineering as part of my grad studies and need to pick a focus for that. So I ought to learn.
I’ll check it out at Jeff’s OSCON session next week and keep listening in to see what helping with it (in my copious amounts of free time, heh) and if I like it – and can afford it (time and money-wise) – I’ll consider getting a beagleboard-xm and setting aside time for it as if it were a class this term… or maybe even find an NCSU class I can use it as a project for, and actually get credit for it. Trying to start shifting my brain back towards a school calendar, as I’m trying to learn how to get the two worlds (academia and FOSS) to coexist within my head, at least. That’s the first place it’s got to go… after that, I can start helping other people do the same. More.
I’m poking the Etherpad FAD to a public mailing list, and then I promised Max I’d do another round of expense reports tonight, and I swear to god I want to get to (RH) inbox zero tonight, and… then I’ll stop. I think. I hoped to work on the TOS Textbook with Karsten and ask him about a meeting I’ve got in the morning, but by this point he’s probably sleeping and not making it to the office, so… oh well. Tomorrow is another day!
Being with Karsten in Santa Cruz is great – weather is wonderful, city is pretty awesome, but… really, the thing I like about this is that I get to see how he’s actually made this place his home, and what a home and a life like this is like. He knows the weather and the seasons and the way plants work here, the history and governance and the people of the city, has friends here who he’s known since they were little kids, runs a weekly urban farm salon with his family. Roots, a sense of place… and yet he’s also so kickass at what it is we do (our CommArch work), and I learn things from him all the time.
Max and Ian fly in tomorrow, and our team will all be together tomorrow night (and until after the weekend). We plan on celebrating this with a lot of burgers and a roadtrip up to Portland, where Karsten and I are speaking at OSCON. Actually, I’m… giving two talks at OSCON, running a BoF (birds of a feather) and helping with another, and probably talking with an industry analyst during that time, in addition to a couple more appointments during the 5-day conference (at which I am a first-time attendee). Er. I gotta make sure not to kill myself while I’m there, because right after OSCON I stop by my parents’ house and then fly to Boston to pack my car and drive to Raleigh less than 12 hours after my plane lands in Boston so that I can fly to China the morning after I arrive in Raleigh (assuming I drive nonstop)…
…yeah, I’m taking vacation in August.
And I am so loving this. I’m not complaining at all. I’ve waited for years and years to be able to go all-out, full-steam-ahead, and it’s just… wonderful to be able to do it, and oh my gosh I can work hard and nothing is in the way of that. AWESOME.
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
I found this mailing list conversation snippet to be very insightful, and wanted to share it.
Scott: “Open to critique” isn’t quite the same as “responsive to critique”. From an outside perspective, it seems that frequently SugarLabs is just not listening to people who offer contrary opinions. This is better than flaming them, but maybe not as good as it could be. For an end-of-year report, I’d like to see instances enumerated where SugarLabs actually internalized some outside critique and responded in a positive way — some concrete change made to the UI, or Sugar, or to process. That would be more convincing that simply stating, “we are now open to critique”.
Bernie: We’re definitely intimidating to non-technical people. At least, this is what I sensed at the Realness Summit. OLE also seems to be doing a better job at connecting with educators. I’m not completely sure what corrective actions should be. We might need to do some work on the wiki, maybe add web forums, which non-geeks tend to prefer…
Scott: I suspect that the answer to this problem does not involve installing additional software.
Later in the day, Jeff and I were having this conversation on #teachingopensource.
Jeff: Is IRC really a barrier to entry? maybe I have simply been using it too long, but it seems immediately recognizable to me. I think one barrier might be the attitudes that crop up. Even with emoticons, sometimes it’s hard to discern intent. Hard enough in email, but sometimes devastating in real time.
Mel: Actually, yes. I had a really, really hard time figuring out IRC. First, figuring out that it existed and I had to use it. Then how to get it, how to set the software up. Then what the heck networks and channels and whatnot were – and why channels? my IM paradigm was “you have a buddy list and you ping people individually.” So “chatrooms are the default!” wasn’t hard to understand once I realized it, but it took a while to realize because I wasn’t looking for it.
And then “oh man, who are all these people? I am nervous about pinging them, will they yell at me?” And then all the /commands I had to remember. It was so bewildering and terrifying and new and it was being used as a way to present new information to me at the same time, sort of like… taking your first calculus class in… Mandarin, if you’ve also just started studying Mandarin as a foreign language. You can’t concentrate much on the calculus because you’re going “zomg it’s in CHINESE.”
It’s hard to remember how hard things can be, especially when you’re surrounded by a community of people who are the ones who self-selected and made it past that hardness. By definition, if you’ve gotten into FOSS, the current participation mechanisms worked for you… so why fix them?
Because we want others to join us.
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 | fedora, olin, olpc, sugar, teaching open source | 9 Comments »
As promised, I kicked our SLOBs agenda items forward for another week. Turns out you can do a lot without needing to vote. :) Our meetbot does some truly awful meeting minutes formatting, but here’s the summary:
What else do people consider the most pressing topics to the future of SL? How are we doing? Are we reaching our goals? (What are they?) These should be the agenda items we discuss.
Sunday, July 11th, 2010 | soas | No Comments »
Tiny vent time right now.
- I can’t hear.
- This includes phone calls. I mostly have a phone so I can send and receive text messages[0].
- My voicemail message says, explicitly, I can’t hear, do not leave me voicemail, it will not, not, NOT get listened to because I CAN’T HEAR.
- When I give people my phone number (when I must), I always write something to the effect of “I can’t hear, please SMS or email.”
- PEOPLE STILL LEAVE VOICEMAIL.[1][2]
[0] There are exceptions. When people I know very well – folks who I’ve talked with often and long enough to be used to their voice and word choice patterns – call and talk with me on a subject I know (and which thus has predictable conversations paths), I can make it through a call. It’s still hard. Generally speaking, the cognitive load needed for me to process audio-only data is sufficient to make my reasoning sub-par when I can’t lipread (or in other words, if you want me to be able to think and comment intelligently on what you’re saying, find a way to let me read your lips). Drive out to meet me. Turn around to face me. Grab a webcam. Go to text chat. Something. Anything. Seriously.
[1] And expect me to call them back and speak with their customer service representatives. I need to find a relay service I’m happy with because AT&T over AIM has not been able to help me make my calls the last 5 or so times I’ve tried. Not sure what’s up with that.
[2] Imagine needing to ask a friend to listen to – and relay – every voicemail message you ever get. Think about how inconvenient, potentially embarrassing, and – honestly – downright disempowering – that would feel. I realize I have a lot of privilege, I realize this is a minor thing compared to what many other people have to go through, but… after a decade (I’ve had a phone for 10 years now) it’s starting to get to me a little.
I’ve vented about this before, but still don’t have a good solution. Any ideas?
Sunday, July 11th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 9 Comments »
I’ve always wondered what birds sounded like. This is one of the things I’ve played with in my head because I don’t actually know (I can hear owls with my hearing aids on, and sometimes, when it’s very, very quiet, I can hear snatches of extremely low notes by… some birds, I don’t know what kind).
Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.
Saturday, July 10th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 2 Comments »
California is awesome. I’m in Santa Cruz working with Karsten at his place, taking occasional breaks to cook and hang out at the farm. They had a salon last night, so work ceased for a while as Karsten taught me about cooking, and then I drank tea, ate pie (with plums his daughter and I got from the tree in the backyard), got a little bottle of fromage blanc and some kraut from one of the mini-farmers-market women. That’ll be for snacking on when I watch the World Cup with my brother on Sunday. I may or may not join them to wander around San Fransisco’s Chinatown on Saturday depending on timing, whether I rent a car, and so forth. I dunno… rental cars are expensive, and it’s not like I don’t have things to do here. Or perhaps a bus. I’ll have to check my transit options.
There was a basket of biscuits out front, and I got them when they were just out of the oven and hot, so you butter them and the butter immediately melts. Then I went on the swing (which is really a blanket tied to the rafters of the porch next door with rope on both ends, so like a small hammock) and swung while munching on the biscuit, so the hot melted butter was dripping all over my hand. Potato curry with blue, red, pink, orange… all sorts of multicolored potatoes from Karsten’s garden, and then I sat on the hay bales outside by the fire pit and played guitar.
Later that night Karsten and I sat up and I braindumped on education stuff. There’s so much of it wrapped up in my brain, so much context I’ve been immersed in over the past month (really, the past 4 months) that it feels good to just get it out to someone, into a form that’s understandable in a shorter format (i.e. “does not take 4 months to realize all this”). Still working on it. Today it’s his turn, and I get braindumps on TOSW and the TOS Textbook. We’re trying to push what we know as publicly as possible, so notes from both braindumps should go out… well, tonight, I hope.
I hadn’t realized how much I’ve learned about education (and how much I am utterly unable to express it – Karsten is helping me work on that) in the past few months, just like I didn’t realize how much I’d learned about working in open source communities until I went back to my Olin friends and started explaining and teaching it. I love teaching; it makes you realize what you understand. I need to learn how to be in both cultures fluently, and also to be able
to step back and explain my fluency in each one to the other. Mmm, metacognition.
Today: figure out my Chinese visa, and SLOBs at some point. More edu braindumping with Karsten, and my poor, poor inbox, plus a business plan to Matt Ritter.
Friday, July 9th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »