Takoma Park Folk Festival

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 office in this area and apparently uses Gentoo (he says because the IT people where he currently works know how to use Red Hat and Ubuntu, and this keeps them from interfering). Donna Edwards, who represents Maryland in Congress came up too, and she asked what we were about. Kevin started talking about open source in government. She said she definitely thought that was a good idea and expressed an affinity for Free Culture! She also lamented a future of walled gardens. I asked her to go against Disney when they start lobbying for more copyright extensions in a few years (Mickey expires in 2023, and government moves slow, so they'll start soon), because the Public Domain needs to be protected. A teacher with a computer lab full of Edubuntu machines in need of administration and nobody to do so visited the booth. Turns out her lab is about a 10 minute walk from the restaurant where we meet up each Saturday. We said to email the mailing list, and one of us would arrange to come by and get things moving smoothly again.

Lots of existing Ubuntu users came up with questions, and thanks to the magic of 3G I was able to find answers to the harder questions. There were also lots of "oh I love Ubuntu!" "Did you know there was a local group?" "I had no idea." "Here's a list of a bunch of local Linux groups." We had lots of handouts "for students", "for educators", "for businesses", "for designers", "for publishers", etc. listing Free Software they could use, thanks to the Software Freedom Day folks. This was our 6-days-early celebration.

Someone forgot to bring the little thing you can hold in your hand and click for each visitor, so our count of visitors is based on us attempting to remember to tally on a piece of paper. Of course, the hardest time to remember to tally or to count is when lots of people show up! We ended up counting about 120 visitors to the booth. That's about 30 fewer than in previous years, but given the rain in the early part of the festival and the continuing threat of it from the cloudy skies, no too bad. Someone else (me) forgot to bring the stickers though, so I can't blame too much. I did have copies of Ubuntu User and Linux Pro for people to flip through.

I guess one of the organisers (possibly the one at the Information Booth who looked at my OLF shirt and said "oh, you must be with Ubuntu") knew that Free Software can be a bit of a religion for some, because we were put directly across from the Presbyterians', Quakers', and Jews' tables. There was a lot of back and forth between our table and the Quaker table, due to significant overlap between the local Quaker and Free Software communities. Annalee, the clerk of Takoma Park Friends Meeting, is working on learning Perl to contribute to Dreamwidth. Another fellow at their table, John, is someone I've seen around many LUG meetings and other events. And Arthur David Olson, who dutifully remained at their table the whole day, wrote the software that makes timezones work in UNIX and Linux: tzdata (aka the Olson Database). He also took this picture:

See the rest of the album.

Ohio LinuxFest 2010

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 months back with updated information. There are now 167 human members of ~ubuntu-dev, up from 147 when I gave the talk in May! Thanks goes to Alan Bell for his lplist.py that let me pull down the full list of members and automatically exclude teams and duplicates.

The talk I gave for the main OLF stuff was the security one from Southeast LinuxFest. It was slightly changed, but this time ran a lot shorter than last time. That's because I have neither the vocabulary nor the brainpower to go off on tangents while simcomming. Simcomm is short for "simultaneous communication." I gave the talk simultaneously in English and American Sign Language (ok, really, it was a bit of an ASL pidgin since I used English word-order—my grammar knowledge is little-to-none). I've never done that for a presentation before, just for conversations. While I did learn a bunch of new signs last week just for this (like "exploit", "vulnerability", "attack", "man in the middle attack", "internet", "infect", etc), I still needed to restrict my English vocabulary to things I could sign or for which I knew a sign that was a reasonable approximation. Because some words just plain don't have sign equivalents (at least not ones which my more-fluent-than-me friends know), I told those in the audience for which sign language is useful what signs I would be substituting, such as "horse" for "trojan" (get it?) and "fishing" for "phishing" (which really is the same concept anyway). By the way, "man in the middle attack" takes forever to sign. First assign a place in space for "you", then on the other side of your body assign a place in space for "computer" (as in the one you're trying to talk to), then sign "man" and motion that it exists somewhere in between those two places in space, then sign "attack."

Because I was signing yesterday with Mel Chua of Red Hat (who I think thanked me two or three times for actually *gasp* accommodating her—she's my friend, I promised I would simcomm if she attended a fest where I was speaking), a few people came up and started signing to me. There were a surprising number of people who at least knew the manual alphabet well enough to do that. One person told me today that seeing the two of us chatting in ASL yesterday had him thinking I was deaf (so I guess I wasn't resorting to fingerspelling too much). I met a woman named Carol who used to teach at Gallaudet University, the only liberal arts university in the US (or world?) that's specifically for deaf and hard of hearing students. She says I did a good job of simcomming, so yay! As you can imagine, using two languages at once is a bit of work. Because I left early, she agreed to interpret for the questions asked of a speaker later this afternoon who is deaf, for whom I was doing a bit of interpreting yesterday. I think he had booked an interpreter of his own who then didn't show up. Mel, Carol, and I tried to convince my dad to take an ASL class since he's getting to be that age (the pitch of my voice has been lost on him for years already). We also discussed the possibility of organising an accessibility/deaf-and-hard-of-hearing track next year.

Yes, my dad was there! He doesn't use Free Software at all, but I got him to sit down and play with my laptop at the KDE booth, and when I explained what Akregator is for and showed him Kontact and OpenOffice.org, he seemed to pick it up pretty easily. He even told a random person that they should give it a try! Yes, he's a salesman. He'll sell anything, even if he doesn't know how it works or exactly what it is :P He was at the party last night and so met a handful of Ubuntu and Fedora folks along with many of the people from the LUG in his city. He said he might take my brother over to a LUG meeting some time, and he got a "I ♥ LINUX" bumper sticker for my brother's car.

Anyway, here are the slides:

Ubuntu Developer Processes (OLF2010)

View more presentations from Mackenzie Morgan.

Linux Security Myth

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If you want to download them, you can either download from SlideShare (login required), or you can get them from the handy-dandy Presentations project on Launchpad, complete with LaTeX sources. Yes, I use LaTeX for slides. I ranted on here 2 years ago about how awful OpenOffice.org is for making slides and haven't gone back since.

Finding more women to speak at Ohio LinuxFest: success!

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 women to share their experience at OLF.

How'd we do? While last year only five of the speakers at Ohio LinuxFest were women, out of a total of 31, this year 14 of the 38 speakers are women. That's a third of the conference speaking slots! One of the two keynoters is a woman. There were 107 talk proposals for the 27 general speaking slots. Before anyone tries to suggest that we simply took them all, it should be noted that a full 48% of the proposals for talks categorised as not assuming high levels of prior knowledge (making them suitable for the most attendees) were from women.

We believe that much of this success is attributed to community outreach. This year, we contacted Ubuntu Women, Debian Women, LinuxChix, DevChix, and the FSF's Women's Caucus mailing list about the call for presentations, and did it have an effect!

Recognising the various concerns women speakers can face, we tried to specifically address potential issues in the email sent to women-focused mailing lists. Some of these known issues include lack of confidence in new speakers, not being clear what the intended audience is, or the "imposter syndrome," where someone doesn't recognize that they are qualified to speak on a topic. The woman to woman dialog made the difference.

We wanted to make sure people weren't refraining from submitting because they lack confidence in their technical abilities (an excuse we'd heard before), so we explained the attendees' demographics, hoping to get more proposals that would fill the gap we had for user-aimed talks. Ohio LinuxFest has everything from home desktop users who started using Ubuntu a week ago (or even that day!) to seasoned system administrators who love Slackware, Gentoo, or NetBSD. Nevertheless, beginner proposals have tended toward introduction to development topics, not leaving enough for people who want to be users, not developers. We also made sure to mention that it's a great crowd who is very welcoming of first-time speakers.

Women are involved with more than just speaking at the Ohio LinuxFest. Beth Lynn Eicher has been actively involved as a director for 6 years now, and the current staff, all volunteers, is about 35% female.

The Ohio LinuxFest takes pains to create a weekend conference friendly to all people, not just women. The diversity statement includes gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, and even operating system -- folks who don't use Linux are just as welcome as those who love it. There are regularly talks about or including BSDs, interoperability in heterogeneous environments, and cross platform free software.

Additionally, all speakers are instructed to keep the content of their presentations clean. The Ohio LinuxFest bills itself as a family friendly conference and aims to keep it that way. As an effort to make a positive effect with the community at large, the Ohio LinuxFest will host the second annual Diveristy in Open Source Workshop on September 12, 2010.

Looking at the growing trend of more female influence on the OhioLinuxFest we'd like to see it be the leader for more women to attend and become more involved with other free software interests.

For those interested in pretty graphs, I've been graphing women speaker proportions at various LinuxFests on the GeekFeminism Wiki.

The Next HOPE

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 his keynote timeslot resulted in everything being timeshifted by one hour though. The physical security folks said he ran long. Though maybe it was a substitute who did so? I don't know. Kaminsky had another of the keynote slots, talking about SQL injection and the difference between programmer ways of thinking ("I'll just concatenate these strings here…") and programming-language-developer thinking ("We'll parameterize these, so they don't break anything…"). He made the very good point that the reason programmers ignore that parameterization stuff is that it's a pain in the neck to have to jump all around as you try to read the code figuring out "ok now insert first parameter…back up to code…second parameter…wait which one's the seventh parameter?" and outlined some ideas he has to make syntax programmers won't hate that can still fix the problem. And yeah, let's face it. Trying to escape every bad character is total Whack-A-Mole.

A group of librarians were here talking about how to get FOSS into libraries. They had a very important tip: brush your teeth. If you show up looking like a caricature of a hacker, it's a bit hard for the librarians to take you seriously. So, look like you've bathed since last Tuesday and know what a toothbrush is. Yes, they mentioned Evergreen.

Deb "freedeb" Nicholson from the Free Software Foundation spoke about why diversity is important to the growth of Free Software (hint: more diversity = more people!) and how to get there. In a similar vein, Nikki Neulist had a talk called "Hey, Don't Call That Guy A Noob: Toward a More Welcoming Hacker Community." She was talking about how new people provide new perspectives and if you're willing to just be helpful early on, they can end up really useful later. I think this is something we've tried to exemplify in the Ubuntu world, though I do still occasionally see some unwelcoming behaviour on IRC. Unfortunately, during her talk's Q&A, some guy thought it made sense to say tough cookies, this is our hacker culture and if your skin's not thick enough, you don't belong here. C4BL3FL4M3 and I started yelling at him from opposite sides of the room. How on Earth could "if you don't like our bad attitude, GTFO" fit in in a conversation about being welcoming? Why did he even attend if that's his attitude? Troll!

The Vintage Computing talk ended in me dragging a 14 year old I was showing around to the Borders across the street to buy her a copy of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution to give her more context about things like the Altair and the PDP-11.

There were talks on "Color, Light, and Perception" and "Cooking for Geeks." In the former, I learned that magenta does not exist as part of the white light spectrum. You will not find it with a prism. It's not a single wavelength of light but rather a trick in our brains when red and blue wavelengths overlap. I also learned about additive colours, which is what the RGB colour model we use for defining colours on a computer screen is based on. The reason I see white captions on a black background as red/blue-split (like when you look at 3D stuff without the glasses) when seeing it at an angle out of my glasses was also explained. Neat! The latter was about food science, a basic introduction to it, and a reference to there being more in the speaker's new book of the same title. Apparently the temperatures we're taught in food safety courses assume you're not hitting the coldest part of the meat, that your thermometer's wrong, and a bit more, so they're overestimated by a good 15°. Not that I eat meat or am interested in testing that. Time at temperature was brought up as well—the fact that reaching a temperature doesn't matter as much as maintaining that temperature for a decent amount of time. Various enzymes take various times to break down into something tasty. I think he said brussels sprouts were in the category of things that need to spend a good amount of time at high temperature to taste good. Someone should tell my mum this. Hers are too bitter.

I missed much of the "Simpson's Did It" talk, but I caught Mouse's segment where she talked about Mozart. Apparently "Miserere" by Gregorio Allegri was well-loved by the pope of his time. So well-loved, that he had analogue DRM on it! That is, no copies of the sheet music could be made without the pope's permission, period. Only two copies ever were, and they were for princes who had to promptly return them as soon as they finished. Additionally, the song could only be played during Easter week. What did Mozart do, knowing he couldn't get sheet music? Showed up, listened, memorised, and transcribed from memory. DRM broken! Thanks, Mozart!

If you want to write online about controversial topics and you find that your free speech is being harmed by those who do not want you to be heard sending false DMCA notices, you should know about Project DoD, a web host who is willing to send a counter-notice in response (apparently unlike most others). You still have the mandatory 10-day offline period while the counter-notice goes through, but at least it's not a permanent offline period. They're willing to fight for their clients. Lawyer Tiffany Rad (who was my carpool for the trip) and Chris Mooney were talking about this project of theirs.

I mentioned earlier taking a 14 year old around. She's a smart kid named Johannah, so I was introducing her to the other LinuxChix and other assorted cool people. I explained public key cryptography (the practical, not the mathematical theory) to her and showed her how to generate a GPG key. She's an Ubuntu user, so I got her uncle to pick up a copy of How Linux Works for her. It looks like an excellent book for her skill level. It starts out with basic command line stuff and goes on all the way through explaining bootloaders and system internals. Cool!

We attended a LinuxChix Lunch on Saturday, where the women who'd been there in 2002 for H2K2 were expressing surprise at how many women were present, saying LinuxChix would soon be obsolete. They said H2K2 had somewhere between 10 and 30 women total. Improvement was obvious. And by the way, yes, the hacking community does seem to have more women than the Free Software community. There was definitely a higher percentage of women here than even at SELF, which I've already said has more than I remember seeing at any other Linux event (uh, outside of LinuxChix events, obviously). Funny enough, when we got back, I ended up talking to some woman I'd never met who saw my panoramas on my screen and wanted to know how I took them. I told her about Hugin and Free Software and Ubuntu. Anyway, the "funny" bit is that one of the first things she said when asked how she liked the con (she'd never been to a hacker thing before, but her son was a speaker, so she showed up) was (paraphrased) "this is all very interesting, but I notice it's mostly male, and mostly Caucasian." Yeah…still got a ways to go.

I had a duty while I was there too. I was handing out postcards for Ohio LinuxFest to everyone I saw with a Tux, GNU, or distro logo on their shirt, laptop, or tattoo. There were a lot of Ubuntu users. At one point I thought I saw an Ubuntu laptop in front of me, but it was actually OSX.

"Is Linux Secure?" at Southeast LinuxFest

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 more presentations from Mackenzie Morgan.

Slide 31 shows what happens when a .desktop is not executable and is in a home directory. Notably, that Fedora and openSUSE make it easy to run anyway, while Ubuntu policy says those buttons aren't OK (thanks James Tatum for the link pointer). I can understand that reasoning, but I don't expect normal people to know how to mark it as trusted or geeks to know that that's a euphemism for "set the executable bit."

Ubuntu Developer Processes presentation from CALUG

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