A friend was trying to get some of her laptop's function keys working under Ubuntu, and that reminded me that I'd been meaning to do the same on my Vaio TX 650P.

My brightness keys worked automagically -- I suspected via the scripts in /etc/acpi -- and that was helpful in tracking down the rest of the information I needed. But it still took a bit of fiddling since (surprise!) how this stuff works isn't documented.

Here's the procedure I found.

First, use acpi_listen to find out what events are generated by the key you care about. Not all keys generate ACPI events. I haven't get figured out what controls this -- possibly the kernel. When you type the key, you're looking for something like this:

sony/hotkey SPIC 00000001 00000012

You may get separate events for key down and key up. It's your choice as to which one matters.

Once you know the code for your key, it's time to make it do something. Create a new file in /etc/acpi/events -- I called mine sony-lcd-btn. It doesn't matter what you call it -- acpid will read all of them. (Yes, that means every time you start up it's reading all those toshiba and asus files even if you have a Lenovo or Sony. Looks like a nice place to shave off a little boot time.)

The file is very simple and should look something like this:

# /etc/acpi/events/sony-lcd-btn

event=sony/hotkey SPIC 00000001 00000012
action=/etc/acpi/sonylcd.sh

Now create a script for the action you specified in the event file. I created a script /etc/acpi/sonylcd.sh that looks like this:

#! /bin/bash
# temporary, for testing:
echo "LCD button!" >/dev/console

Now restart acpid: service acpid restart if you're on karmic, or /etc/init.d/acpid restart on earlier releases. Press the button. If you're running from the console (or using a tool like xconsole), and you got all the codes right, you should be able to see the echo from your script.

Now you can do anything you want. For instance, when I press the LCD button I generally want to run this:

xrandr --output VGA --mode 1024x768

Or to make it toggle, I could write a slightly smarter script using xrandr --query to find out the current mode and behave accordingly. I'll probably do that at some point when I have a projector handy.

Whilst I was quite happily sleeping yesterday morning, the International Women’s Day competition winners were announced. The popular vote prize went to Elvira Martinez “tatica1″. The second prize went to Karen Y. Perez, and Jen Phillips got an honourable mention for her awesome analogy-style story.

You can read all the stories and see the record of votes on the Ubuntu Women wiki.

Thanks so much to everyone who entered and voted (and Jono for announcing). The competition was heaps of fun to organise and now we have lots of stories to show that we forge our own paths to Ubuntu just like the guys do!

At the recently concluded pycon2010 at Atlanta, there were some discussions about diversity, women etc... I suppose, much of my energy would have been saved if I had published this mail earlier or even blogged about some individual sexist behaviors. Nah, its not fear, rather I try to avoid talking about evil creepy stuff on my blog but during various discussions realised that many folks dont know what you experience on an individual level in the floss community, unless you talk about it. That is the first step.

Hi $PersonsName,

As i write this mail the words "Out the creeps publicly" uttered by a devel (who shall go nameless) comes to my mind and hence i'd prefer to not be anon and back my words under the pseudonym 'svaksha'. $PersonsName, do feel free to suitably trim my long train of thoughts and I wont be offended if it does'nt make it to your article as /self is too late in all probability -- my mental resources are wound up around a lexical parser atm.

Initially when i used to hear all the women speak about their experiences i took comfort in the fact that i am not alone in hoping for change. But i had not factored in the possibility that change is tougher when "clueless new idiots" follow in the steps of "sexist old timers". Over the years the attitudes towards diversity still remains sexist, especially within the Indian community where cronyism is normal.

My observations are largely India-centric salted with some experiences on international lists and sans a timeline ...

The usual personal mails asking for personal details under the guise of "i want to volunteer" or guised as a personal interview (since when did marital status become relevant to floss contribution?). Another peculiar one was a guy writing emails in different scripts despite my requests that i didnt understand them. It was when i requested a friend to translate them that i realised why -- personal questions in a non-english script meant fewer people would know he was asking personal questions.

Then there was this instance of a jerk trying to crack into my server when he became aware of my gender.  I was happy with the anonymity --- Very very few folks (i trusted) knew my location and real name but that changed when I founded the Ubuntu-Women project, was termed a "militant feminist" (a pejorative term for Feminazi).  This pejorative was echoed in the Indichix (LC-India) mailing lists in 2008 to avoid answering the question of 'controlling a woman's group by proxy' - cronyism and elitism is gender-neutral The personal attacks descended into personal life queries (hint:: the coffee, splenda thread) by one Indian male who subscribed to grrls-only mailing list by pretending to be a woman. Gah, so much for the "cultural_Indian" !!

Other experiences include an smtp header spoof of my mail id to send a sex-related email ; an indian devel in his interview wanted to be stuck in a lift with me even while he admits to never having met me. Another was the death threats from "mikeeeeusa" on DW which went off-list ~~ IIRC around 5 women were the initial targets but Clytie (an AU contributor) had threats sent to her teenage daughter too.

http://eaves.ca/2009/07/06/structurelessness-feminism-and-open/ has a point I could relate to viz.elites and cronyism -- both of which are true as far as the local Indian floss community is concerned. I've heard past incidents of getting cronies to use social engineering (a bully's crony will pretend to be your friend and find out where you work, etc..) and use pressure tactics (complaining to your superiors/boss@work --the easiest way to bully an individual who fears losing his/her livelihood) to silence disagreeing voices -- This may probably not be sexist as it happened to an indian male (who shall remain anonymous) floss volunteer, but i'm writing this to highlight a deeper and more serious problem within the fragmented Indian floss community.

Pretending to support women racks up the positive Publicity Karma (hence commercially lucrative) while one can continue to be being elitist and deny decision making power via "cronyism" (the elites will use red herrings and out-shout the newbies who disagree under the cries of "show me the code") on the side. A very subtle game that is hard to decipher on a superficial level.

However, when subtle aggressiveness is reserved for the local community members only very few folks outside that circle are aware of it. This small subset of highly aggressive Indian men will never exhibit this negative attitude on the international project lists and irc channels where they do participate, because it will permanently damage their reputation which is never good for business or landing a job in future. Also, international lists/irc/etc... have lesser bystanders[0] taking care of SEP[1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem]

If readers are thinking its a malaise with the whole Indian community or a cultural baggage --its not. There is a lot of positive stuff happening thanks to many individuals who are polite and respectful and dont feel threatened by (wo)men. There are many men and women who continue their good work on an individual basis but unfortunately they are relegated to the  back-burner by pompous self-promoting jerks. I'm personally hoping to see a truly open community initiative like LCA or debconf (and others like it) happen in India.

Regarding including links and threads, i am undecided -- the marketing gimmick "bad publicity is still free publicity" is another reason why I prefer to avoid blogging too much about negative behavior as it can acquire a cult-like halo and an easy way to fame for other men or newbies, especially when they see peers getting away with it. While technical (like a ddos attack,...) misdemeanors are punished quickly i've not yet heard an a$$hat being ostracized or boycotted from the community and this despite there being discussion and more discussion and protests about the said negative behavior.

Besides, the online world is so small that there is the danger of forming a mental picture of an individual and getting over-familiar via blogs, twitter, irc, lists, etc... Its possible that judging folks during real life meetings based on these preconceived assumptions is another cause of social behaviour problems.

I dont have any magic answers and have always believed that community action is the best way to solve the problem. Yet, getting women to speak-up openly against the negative attitude is a lot harder, especially when they feel they will not get any support as the lone voice, statistically speaking.  Few folks will want to waste their time tackling a regular barrage of red-herrings and logical fallacies. Ex. using the term "we" is (sometimes purposefully) misunderstood as taking over control and using "I" is interpreted as "the problem is singular in nature" and _one_ person is statistically too small to figure in change -- hence the status quo remains. This tactic works very well in situations when no change is desired.

Y'all probably are aware of all this so i'll stop as i've got to leave now.

ciao,
-vid

As you've probably guessed, the above was my mail sent to an unarchived women's list. I'm also reproducing (with permission) an exchange with another floss contributors who wrote after he read the above e-mail:

Devel: And you cant have a community of human beings and donkeys right? That's why I refuse to believe most of the Indian FLOSS communities are communities at all. I dont care and I dont bother.

Me: That is the scary bit...everybody stops caring. When I stop caring its just downhill then. Somewhere we have to make an effort to build the community, sustain it and grow.

Devel: You have to make sure the community is worth it.

One should not expect women to say *Stop harassing/stalking*. Given the low female participation, women are an even smaller number in the existing scheme of things and the lack of space to speak up within projects is another crucial point that gets overlooked.  Instead of telling women how to adjust to sexist bullying, men within a project must learn to speak up if they wish to see change. Most times that action is taken against those who manage to offend those in power, else in floss communities sometimes one can get away with any negative behaviour with zero repercussions.

In my years within most Libre software projects, the common thread that surfaces is the expectation that "change is slow" because positive results with respect to reducing sexist behaviour takes time. I disagree.  Is it that women have to be offended with negative attitudes or sexism for action to be taken? Why cant a lone individual (irrespective of gender, nationality or any other criteria) say "stop being a jerk" and get tons of community support. If there is a lack of community support, its due to apathy and a lack of firmness and strong action with low tolerance to negative behaviour by every person involved in the floss community. 

This is not easy as easy as typing this blog entry was, since it needs impartial and strong leadership qualities.  We need an attitudinal change on an individual level if we dont want a gesellschaft instead of a community where people care for others. FLOSS Communities are still made up of individual people who use the same technology they create. Women (add foo-group of choice) should not be the diversity tokenism for spin doctors trying to prevent a PR disaster.

For those unfamiliar with the title of this blog post, let me introduce you to one of the most important tags in Launchpad: regression-potential.

What bugs tagged as regression-potential mean? Basically, they mean that a regression has been found in the development release of Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx, at the moment of writing).

Why are they so important? Because it means that a regression has been found but, good news, we still can do something about it.

These bugs are specially important in the kernel. Nobody likes to see hardware, working in previous versions of Ubuntu, failing once upgraded to the new one.
Jeremy Foshee, a QA member of the Kernel team, is trying to avoid as many regressions in the kernel as possible. As announced in several mailing lists, he is going to be organizing a weekly bug day of kernel bugs marked as regression-potential from today and until the release of Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). If you want to help avoiding regressions in Lucid, every Tuesday, you can check the Kernel Bug Day page, which includes a list of bugs that need some love. If you have doubts on how to help, please, join the kernel team on #ubuntu-kernel at freenode IRC, and feel free to ask any question.

The more people helping triaging regression-potential bugs, the fewer regression-release bugs Lucid will have.

Since Google Summer of Code is coming up again very soon Sven, Phil and I will be doing a short info session at the University of Karlsruhe on Thursday at 4pm in room HS -101 in building 50.34 (Infobau). We’ll be giving a short intro to GSoC and tell a bit about how GSoC works in KDE and Debian and of course answer lots of questions. If you’re planning to apply this year you should definitely show up Please drop me a short email if you want to attend at lydia at kde org.

If you’re not in Karlsruhe or anywhere near there are info sessions in other cities around the world listed in the GSoC calendar.

I never blog recipes. But while I was making rouladen today, I remembered when I first tried to make it, and discovered that the recipes on the web were all for something entirely different than the delicious rouladen my mom used to make. Mom got the recipe from a German babysitter named Betty who used to take care of me when I was little. It was fantastic and I haven't had anything else like it anywhere, so I asked Mom for the recipe, adapted it a little for my crockpot, and have been enjoying it ever since.

Apologies for the lack of precise quantities. This is how we do recipes in my family, and I'm not great at following precise instructions anyway, and in any case, the recipe originally came from Mom watching Betty make it once.

Crockpot Rouladen

Flank steak - lay it out flat.

Mustard - whatever kind you have lying around. Paint a thin layer onto steak. I personally hate mustard, but it doesn't taste like mustard in the final dish so it's okay.

Bacon - maybe 5 pieces. Cook to not-quite-crisp, to get rid of some of the fat. I cut off some of the fat too, but I'm weird that way. Lay strips on top of mustard.

Bread crumbs - Sprinkle on top of bacon. A little or a lot, as you wish. Enough to leak out when it's rolled, as it thickens the sauce nicely.

Roll steak up and secure with skewers or string. Watch the grain and roll it so that when you slice it, you'll be slicing across the grain. This will seem weird and wrong and you'll want to roll it up the other way because this way you'll end up with a long skinny thing that doesn't fit in the pot. It'll taste just as good either way, but it'll be a lot easier to eat if you roll it up the right way.

Brown steak a bit in small amount of oil, any kind ... maybe use a little of the bacon grease.

Onions, sliced - I don't like onions, so I leave them out.

Tomato sauce - one regular-sized can. Pour over steak. Add a little water too, up to about 1/3 can, if you want more sauce.

Salt, pepper, spices as desired. I add a little cinnamon, to make it taste more like Grecian Chicken (another tomato-sauce recipe where googling gets entirely the wrong result, and if I ever find it I'll be sure to blog it) or like the chicken tikka masala at Bollywood Cafe (which has no resemblance to tikka masala anywhere else, but is wonderful). I usually toss in a couple of bay leaves too, and whatever else I feel like adding that day.

Cook in the crockpot maybe 6.5 hours on high, longer on low. Also works fine simmering in a pan on the stove -- check it about 2.5 hours but expect it to take 3 or so. It doesn't hurt to baste occasionally, or add water if it starts to look dry (in the crockpot that usually isn't needed).

In the last hour or two, toss in:

Raisins - maybe a double handful (a couple small boxes).

When it's done, it should be falling-apart tender.

Serving: Cut small rounds, ladle sauce over them, and serve with noodles or bread.

Enjoy!

Remember how I said that the voting for the International Women’s Day competition was open?

Well that statement only stays valid for about the next 16hrs or so.

There’s also a substantial number of people who’ve gone through, read all the stories and submitted their votes, but have not followed the instructions that were emailed to them. They really ought to do that. The token that is emailed out is how you validate your email address — votes are held in quarantine until this happens.

Obviously as I’m very new to being involved in the Ubuntu community, I didn’t go to Dallas for UDS Lucid Lynx earlier this month, however, I did decide to do as much remote participation as I could. I was quite surprised and pleased by how well remote participation was set up and how well it [...]

It’s been ages since I even really looked at this place, but it’s time for me to start over and get going with it again.   In the past 18 months or so I’ve graduated college, moved, started a job in publishing, somehow kept said job in publishing, and somewhere along the way really gotten lost from [...]

Guess who is looking for artists? - Ubuntu User Magazine!

I finally decided to bite the bullet and install Lucid Alpha 3 to my laptop last night, mainly due to the fact I couldn’t wait to experience the shininess of the new design and the “light” themes. It all went well and it booted, which was a significant improvement from Alpha 2, even if the screen resolution wasn’t correct. I noticed a bug then and reported it, however I didn’t do it properly which caused a bit of kerfuffle when I realised it was NVIDIA’s fault and had nothing to do with Ubuntu directly! I don’t know what happened to that one, I think it went down in the list. I have since found and reported more (bug numbers 521908 and 533201), so hopefully they will get fixed!

I do love Lucid, it’s lovely and shiny and the new “light” themes are lovely, especially the incredibly shiny white/silver coloured one with the Apple style icons. At first last night I hated the new position of the close/minimise/maximise buttons, but now I’ve got used to them and with the shininess I think they go quite well; they’re certainly better than they were in Karmic! I think I’ll install it to my desktop when beta 1 comes out.

That’s another point, some of the UK LoCo team are trying to complete the en_GB translations of Lucid for beta 1 and so I’ve been doing that as well, very entertaining!

(and how to convert MPEG video to animated GIF)

I gave an Ignite talk this week at Ignite Silicon Valley. It was a great event! Lots of entertaining talks about all sorts of topics.

I'd always wanted to do an Ignite speech. I always suspected the kicker would be format: O'Reilly's guidelines specified PowerPoint format.

Of course, as a Linux user, my only option for creating PowerPoint slides is OpenOffice. Historically, OpenOffice and I haven't gotten along very well, and this slide show was no exception. Happily, Ignite needs only 20 slides ... how hard can that be, right? Most of my slides were very simple (a few words, or one picture), with one exception: I had one simulation I wanted to show as a video. (When I give this presentation on my own machine, I run the simulation live, but that's not an option on someone else's machine.

Impress woes

First I wrestled with Open Office to create the non-animated slides. It was harder than I'd expected. I just loved having to go back and un-capitalize words that OO kept helpfully re-capitalizing for me. And the way it wouldn't let me change text format on any word that triggered the spellchecker, because it needed to show me the spellcheck context menu instead. And the guessing game clicking around trying to find a place where OO would let me drag to move the text to somewhere where it was approximately centered.

And when I finally thought I had everything, I saved as .ppt, re-loaded and discovered that it had lost all my formatting, so instead of yellow 96 point centered text I had white 14-point left-aligned, and I had to go in and select the text on each slide and change three or four properties on each one.

And I couldn't use it for an actual presentation. In slideshow mode, it only showed the first slide about one time out of six. The other times, it showed a blank slide for the first 15 seconds before auto-advancing to the second one. The auto-advance timing was off anyway (see below). Fortunately, I didn't need use OpenOffice for this presentation; I only needed it to create the PPT file. I ended up making a separate version of the slides in HTML to practice with.

Inserting a movie

But I did eventually have all my static slides ready. It was time to insert my movie, which I had converted to MPEG1 on the theory that it works everywhere. With the mpeg added, I saved one copy to OpenOffice's native format of .odp, plus the .ppt copy I would need for the actual presentation.

Then I quit and opened the .ppt -- and the video slide was blank. A bit of searching revealed that this was a long-known issue, bug 90272, but there seems to be no interest in fixing it. So I was out of luck if I wanted to attach an MPEG, unless I could find someone with a real copy of PowerPoint.

Plan B: Animated GIF

Next idea: convert my 15-second video to an animated GIF. But how to do that? Google found me quite a few web pages that claimed to give the recipe, but they all led to the same error message: ERROR: gif only handles the rgb24 pixel format. Use -pix_fmt rgb24.

So what? Just add -pix_fmt rgb24 to the commandline, right? But the trick turns out to be where to add it, since ffmpeg turns out to be highly picky about its argument order. Here's the working formula to convert a movie to animated GIF:

$ ffmpeg -i foo.mpeg -pix_fmt rgb24 foo.gif

This produced a huge file, though, and it didn't really need to be 1024x768, so I scaled it down with ImageMagick:

convert -depth 8 -scale 800x600 flock-mpeg.gif flock-mpeg-800.gif

which brought the file size from 278M down to a much more reasonable 1.9M.

Happily, OpenOffice does seem to be able to import and save animated GIFs, even to .ppt format. It has trouble displaying them -- that's bug 90272 -- so you wouldn't want to use this format for a presentation you were actually going to give in OpenOffice. But as I mentioned, OpenOffice was already out for that.

If you do this, make sure all your static slides are finished first. Once I loaded the animated GIF, OpenOffice slowed to a crawl and it was hard to do anything at all. Moving text on a slide turned into an ordeal of "hover the mouse where you think a move cursor might show up, and wait 45 seconds ... cursor change? No? Okay, move a few pixels and wait again." Nothing happened in real time. A single mouse click wouldn't register for 30 seconds or more. And this was on my fast dual-core desktop with 4G RAM; I don't even want to think what it would be like on my laptop. I don't know if OOo is running the animations continuously, or what -- but be sure you have everything else finished before you load any animations.

The moment of truth

I never found out whether my presentation worked in real Microsoft Powerpoint. As it turned out, at the real event, the display machine was a Mac running Keynote. Keynote was able to import the .ppt from OpenOffice, and to display the animation. Whew!

One curiosity about the display: the 15 seconds per slide auto-advance failed on the animated slide. The slide showed for 30 seconds rather than 15. I had written this off as another OpenOffice bug, so I wasn't prepared when Keynote did the same thing in the live presentation, and I had to extemporize for 15 seconds.

My theory, thinking about it afterward, is that the presentation programs don't start the counter until the animation has finished playing. So for an Ignite presentation, you might need to set the animation to play for exactly 15 seconds, then set that slide to advance after 0 seconds. If that's even possible.

Or just use HTML. The great irony of this whole story is that some of the other presenters used their own laptops, so I probably could have used my HTML version (which had none of these problems) had I asked. I will definitely remember that for the next Ignite! Meanwhile, I suppose it's good for me to try OO Impress every few years and remind myself why I avoid it the rest of the time.

Note to my readers: Its been some weeks since I blogged and had started this entry on 2010-02-19 21:43 (roughly two weeks) ago and I am less inclined to modify the older writing so its "as is" thought bits about my first pycon experience!! Thanks to Broadcomm bcm43x drivers which made me jump hoops and downgrade the kernel version, I was having wifi issues and could not blog or tweet much during pycon. Broadcomm, please be less evil.

I reached Atlanta after 4pm on thursday afternoon and Sylvia and me went straight to the Chicago room to volunteer for bag-stuffing and there I was rushing a guy ahead in line, little realising that it was CarlT who recognized me but I was so fixated on the task at hand that I didnt notice whom i was talking to. Yikes, assigning nicks to faces is not my strength!

Next, it was onto the swag T-Shirts and since Greg had just 2 PP templates we had only two teams taking a go at it. Sylvia, me and Wei (and later various volunteers) had a simple humanized-robo process to maximize folded shirts output per minute. This drew tons of pycon gawkers and many onlookers wanted to pitch in and have a go at folding t-shirts. Greg's wife and daughter came to watch too. Our efforts were rewarded with yummy pizzas (yeah they had vegan pizza too) and drinks. It was a lot of fun for my first day and its really heart-warming to see icons who should be UP there, stand and work with you. The simplicity and lack of pride is endearing.

Friday, (the first day of) the conference, was kicked off by Van Lindberg and Steve Holden introducing the PSF and its objectives and stressing on the PSF's focus on diversity. This was echoed by GvR who started off his keynote for Pycon2010 wearing a t-shirt that had the python logo and "python is for girls", sent to him at Google by an anonymous person. Hmm...I am curious to know who is the $AnonPerson@Google !!

GvR is one speaker that I enjoyed listening to, for the casual twitter-feed keynote and yet informative speaking style sans slides. And no, GvR didnt wax eloquent on the "state of CPython" although that was what was listed on the guide. For someone of his stature, the lack of vanity in his community interactions is endearing and if you are not already a part of this space, you'd be inspired to want to chip in and do something. Another noteworthy aspect, the organizers make no bones about pycon being a commercial event. Unlike "some" private and commercial Indian events, there is no BS about claiming to be a "floss" event with shady financial(s) that are not privy to the community that makes the event, and neither is there a cabal that controls and pulls strings from behind the scenes.  Their honest and transparent process is admirable, akin to other community conferences.

A round of snacks later it was over to many luminary speakers from the Python community and the first talk I attended was "The Mighty Dictionary" by Brandon Craig Rhodes and then I attended, Managing the world's oldest Django project by James Bennett who explained why it was such a bad idea to have different branches for each of your clients which will lead to an unwieldy and incompatible codebase over a period of time. Deployment headaches with each server-client network running its own software instance. Their solution was "hosted service". He spoke about unit testing, its importance and how they used spidering tools to test sites for all hosted apps. Saying "No" to customizations and instead creating re-usable customized apps from some requests. IIRC, his parting shot was "FLOSS, Internal code becomes external dependency. Floss jettisons legacy code."

The vegan lunch was fabulous but more about the post-lunch sessions. They were, Python 3: The Next Generation by Mr. Wesley j. chun ; Maximize your program's laziness by Dr. David Q Mertz ; The Ring of Python - Holger Krekel. The latter was a talk I simply loved so go and watch the videos which are online and linked via the pycon website. This is another aspect of pycon that I love --Sharing videos with those that could not attend pycon. They dont assume the worst about people, as in, people will not attend the event if talks are made available online (and hence the organizers wont make money when attendance drops), not including other arrogant (if not) silly excuses that I have heard from certain Indian events.

In 2010, attendance topped previous pycon's. It was announced that this year diversity was at its peak with 113.3 women attendees.  No, I am not sure how 0.3% women attended pycon :). Danny blogged and Guido tweeted, and wrote to the list endorsing his support and thoughts on "diversity, people representing other countries and minority groups". I did make it a point to thank him and all the PSF member/organizers that I could remember for the PSF sponsorship, enabling me to attend. GloriaW deserves a special mention and a BIG thankyou for handling hyatt reservations for a bunch of women who were room sharing.

I also met Noufal and Satya (who was our room-share partner), who were also sponsored by the PSF this year. Satya was telling us about her horrid experience with the legendary US B1-visa process in India and the running around she had to endure. Hmmm, why am i not surprised at the horrid experience she had?! It was incredibly funny to hear that the officer asked her to speak in python....doh!! My immigration officer was a hulk at 6'4" and the only intimidating question he asked me was "So, is python like C language?" and before I could speak he cuts in with "Never mind, I'd never understand what you'd say. You are good to go."

LOL, more later.

The future is looking bright for Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx, beaming with a brilliant new look and polished performance.

Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx will be bringing more than faster boot times and open drivers to users this spring, it will radiate "Light" throughout the community with a face lift for the future.

As for me - I like the new "light" theme not only for the new look of the Ubuntu Brand, with polished new features, lightning fast boot times, and ease in use, but also what it means for the Ubuntu Community. If Light as mentioned in the wiki is -- Visually, light is beautiful, light is ethereal, light brings clarity and comfort -- and from 2004 to 2010 Ubuntu has been "Linux for human Beings" -- I would now ask has the time come where we can say - "Ubuntu - Linux Illuminated" one user at a time.

More>>>

I’ve just gotten around to reading my email.

There’s a faux journalist in my inbox wanting comment about my relationship with Ubuntu of late. He’s been told to publish no such thing. Forecast is for a high chance of misquotes and misappropriations.

You have been warned.

With all the talk of the new theme I was thinking I'd make a blog post of all the Ubuntu wallpapers over time, then as I was looking for them, I found a website doing just that (at least up to 8.10). I praised Hardy's wallpaper when it was first revealed (but erm, not the final version…). That was the last Ubuntu wallpaper I liked though (just as well I guess—I switched to Kubuntu for Jaunty without bothering with Intrepid).

Leading up to that, Gutsy had a lovely wallpaper that looked to me like chocolate-coloured silk draped gracefully across the screen. One of my cousins said it looked to her like delicious chocolate mousse (and asked for a spoon) when I replaced her Mac's wallpaper with it.

And before that, Feisty and Edgy…well, I didn't like their default wallpapers, but they had the same alternate wallpaper which I'd forgotten about until now, and which I really liked at the time (and still do).

This one looks like melted dark chocolate to me. Anyone got a strawberry? Hmm, maybe it's good that the new wallpaper looks like a bruise. I wouldn't be wanting to eat my desktop…

Which release had your favourite wallpaper?

Now I have calmed down considerably since the whirlwind of last night, I will now attempt to write this blog post (some of which I drafted last night) coherently.

As some of you may know, but the majority of you probably do not as this blog has hopefully now being fed into the official Planet Ubuntu, last night I went for my Ubuntu Membership and succeeded! I have never been so nervous about anything in my life before, and I can tell you I don’t want to get that way ever again, I feel I was incredibly silly getting so worked up about something so small and insignificant to anyone outside Ubuntu and its community! Thank you to everyone who left me a testimonial on my wiki page.

Well, I’m now an Ubuntu Member, waheey! That’s brilliant, I think. I certainly wasn’t expecting the questions they asked, and when you think it was my first or second real interview (even though it was over IRC and not face to face – when I get to the job stage it’ll be more daunting going and sitting face to face with potential employers) and considering some of the not very forgiving questions I was asked which were mainly related to my time management as I’m involved in lots of projects, I think I did reasonably well! I did well enough to impress the EMEA Regional Membership team so I must have done something right. I did try to prepare, but as I think it always is the questions you prepare for aren’t the questions you get asked!

I don’t know even why I was so nervous, as I said above for something so small and insignificant to the “outside” world it was silly, but I was. I’d been working myself up for days since I put my name down on the list, improving my wiki page, getting hints and tips about how to improve this and that and gathering extremely positive testimonials (thank you to everyone who gave me one) and in the end I was just so nervous I was surprised I could type, if I’m honest. I should have calmed down and been a bit more professional and controlled my nerves, as reading back through the logs I can see now that it was quite apparent just how nervous I was by the way I was phrasing my answers.

Now though, I have lots of things to take into consideration, lots of time management comments to think about and I need to make a list of exactly what I do (yes, I know there’s one on my wiki but I mean a handwritten list, they’re always better) and what I absolutely love (probably the translations) and what I’m not so keen on and what I want to learn and decide what to drop and what to carry on with – as one of the membership board said to me last night, Ubuntu wants full fat issyl0 [that's my IRC nick] and not just semi-skimmed. Now I’ve started to make these lists, I realise how much I’m attached to everything I do and how I do try to do everything to the best of my ability (certain parts get the “15% reduced fat Isabell”, but I wouldn’t say I’m “semi-skimmed” really in anything I do) and how it is going to be hard to give up some of the things, even the things/projects I’m less active in, but I do need to do it for the sake of my own sanity – as Amber Graner said to me a few nights ago, I don’t want to get Ubuntu hangovers or have my parents saying to me “Ubuntu stole our daughter”. My hunger to learn does not help this though, at all, I learn by getting involved in things that I have a passion for! That again is a thought to ponder, and it is also important to note here that my parents fully support me in everything I do online and I am grateful for that, and here I feel it is appropriate also to mention that I do put time and effort into school and my studies as well, for without good exam results I’m not practically going to get anywhere in life, even with the amount of experience I could (and without a doubt will) gain over the next few years.

Many thanks to the audience at my PyCon cmd/cmd2 talk for your interest and enthusiasm! It was my first full-scale PyCon presentation and I absolutely loved it.

I need to follow up on three things I claimed in my talk:

1. "My presentation is already online at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/cmd2". FALSE (at the time I said it, and for several days afterward). I actually had posted the docs and edited the PyPI page to point to them, but forgot to update url in setup.py, so it overwrote the link when I registered cmd2's 0.6.0 release.

It's fixed now, though. The cmd2 PyPI page has a link to the cmd2 documentation, which in turn links to my talk slides. You can also watch the talk thanks to the fantastic PyCon video crew!

2. "A more stable version will be out within a couple weeks of PyCon." TRUE. 0.6.1 is not exactly stable stable, but I think I've smoothed out bugs that snuck in while I was pushing to release 0.6.0 for PyCon.

3. "sqlpython will be more presentable in a couple weeks, too." TRUE. The new sqlpython 1.7.1 brings the postgreSQL functionality (thanks Andy!) to pretty near 100% (except for the can't-see-other's-schemas problem, which should be fixed for 1.7.2.) I believe that MySQL should be fully functional, too, but that's very lightly tested because I barely use MySQL and don't know much about how to test it.

The International Women’’s Day Competition was launched in January. Entries closed last week and we have a whopping 15 stories to vote on. Some are funny, some are poetic, but they’re all great examples of women discovering Ubuntu.

Voting has opened, and anyone can vote, so go on.