• Watching @3liza make art live. So this is how it's done. Amazing! http://ustre.am/3PIM (Sketchbook Sweatshop live > http://ustre.am/3PIM) #
• Guess I'm not making it to the gallery openings tonight afterall. Doin' stuff! #
• @JhonenV: No, but you can make your twitter updates go to facebook so you can effectively ignore it while making it still look used. in reply to JhonenV #
• Gallery submission submitted. Now to hopefully find something fun to do with my Friday night! #
• @SkarrKrow: Sounds like a plan, whether I like it or not :) in reply to SkarrKrow #
• Yeah, #lofnotc! http://is.gd/1mQNx #
• Transformers two MAY be marginally better than shitting your pants, but I'm still not planning to go see it anytime soon. http://is.gd/1mRI2 #
• Heh, good point! RT @xinit0 @tekniklr Having seen it, I'd have to say, at least shitting your pants doesn't have to last 2.5 hours… #
• This is totally messing with my head. Maybe I need more caffeine? http://is.gd/1mTDq #
• @SkarrKrow: That breaks the premise and doesn't help the probability any. in reply to SkarrKrow #
• Just found out a website I designed for Rutgers in mid 2001 is still just as I left it. Now, bed! #

Digital NZ launched Make It Digital last week
http://makeit.digitalnz.org/

This includes a section where public propose and vote on collections they'd like to see make digital (and it seems implied they want it open as well)
http://makeit.digitalnz.org/voting

Top of the voting at the moment is:
Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives (AJHRS)
Electoral Rolls
School Journal
Lyttelton Times, 1851-1929
The Press (Christchurch, 1861- )
Stones Directories, 1884-1955
The New Zealand Herald, 1863-

I'd be nervous about today's electoral roll being online, but the electoral role from 50 years ago would be huge benefit to researchers without the same concerns.

Many of these are private publications, but outside the 50 year copyright monopoly.

Others, such as Journals of the House of Representatives are produced by our government - by people who work for us.
Government datasets are created using taxpayer money, they belong to us, hence I want easy access to them.

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I'm not embarrassed to have ideals, I am proud. Ideals elevate us above situational ethics. Ideals guide us into trying to be better people, and give us strong bases for making difficult decisions. (Such as No, little Bill, it is not OK to do anything in the name of making a buck.)

I've been busy, first with the workshop that kept me at the university 12hrs/day, and now with finishing the latest thesis proposal draft on a suddenly tighter deadline. (Turns out it is quite late, and while that won't be a problem, I've been told to finish ASAP.) Not to mention Canada Day and my visiting boyfriend who, sadly, has wound up largely ignored so I can write write write.

But apparently while I've been writing for a living, my blog has been surprisingly active. Or rather, this post complaining about Rachel from Cardholder Services has suddenly become abnormally popular and garnered a small collection of comments, months after it was written.

I am mystified and amused by this development. I guess my search rank went up somehow, and now that entry gets to be a place to vent about phone spam. I'm ok with that.

But the funny thing is that I haven't had one of these calls myself in months. Perhaps I just haven't been home enough, or maybe Canada's do not call list is more effective than the US one? Early on, there reports that the the list was being abused, but apparently the CRTC has investigated the claims, and says that it turns out to have been an urban myth. Others remain concerned about the potential for abuse even if there isn't yet evidence of same, particularly because few fines have actually been levied despite many complaints. But somehow, I haven't heard from Rachel from Cardholder Services or that irritating foghorn thing in a month now, so no complaints here!

Here’s a broad ranging list of interesting tidbits I’ve found recently.

• Heard of RDFa? A List Apart has a great introduction to it.
• Have a Mac? Have an iPhone? Want to use it as a remote? Learn how.
• Interesting strategy for wireframes: add color shading for emphasis. Example 1. Example 2.
• Top 10 Firefox 3.5 features from Lifehacker. I’m loving 3.5 so far.
• 10 Disruptive Technologies to have on the radar.
• A thoughtful, interesting example of where Drupal can work better over Wordpress.

The Westin partners with childcare centers.

• Celebrate 10 years of Moonfruit and win a MacBook Pro http://bit.ly/96bxC #moonfruit #
• When you live just to keep from dying, you wait for the end to start ♫ http://blip.fm/~99hei #
• Waiting… waiting… waiting… #
• Stronger. Faster. Better. I'm gonna go ahead and call that a success. Also, DONE. #
• Kawaii!!! http://is.gd/1lXIp #
• Taking a break from Arkham Horror to watch fireworks through the trees from my porch, coffee in hand. #
• @undeadlibra: Honestly, It was a bit slow for my liking. It might get better on subsequent plays. in reply to undeadlibra #

Its been some months since LCIN got a new home on Ketan's server and moved to a wiki at :

Well, Terri updated the official chapter page for India, so its high time Radha (i need your blog uri please !?) and Kadambari who completed the move and admin the server with Ram and Ketan helping them all along, got due credit. Thanks a ton folks - y'all r0ck

Lazy /me should have blogged about it earlier but i've been preoccupied with stuff. After wrestling with it for ages I finally started putting down my thoughts on all the linguistics stuff on a second blog earlier -- gee, i hardly have the patience to scribble on this blog and here i am creating another maintenance blackhole. *sigh* what was i thinking !!

Atm, in all probability it will remain a private space for me to distill my thoughts from the pen and paper khichidi which was turning me scatter-brained each time i ask someone for their opinions and thoughts.  Last week, MM and me were out and over-enthusiastic 'me' spent all my cash on some books (not that there are many great publications by Indian authors, but...duh !!), instead of that dress i wanted.

I was planning to attend the fosscomm meet in delhi, mainly as an excuse to meet Hassath, an LC'er with whom i've only corresponded online in the last 5 years. Maybe on Sunday, which gives me a day to extract my money's worth from the dead-tree versions before the trip.

The Melbourne LinuxChix will meet up before the monthly Linux Users of Victoria (LUV) meeting. Feel free to forward this message to any women you think might be interested in coming.

Date: Tuesday 7th July 2009

Time: 6.00-7.45pm

Location: Thresherman's Bakehouse, 221 Faraday St, Carlton.

Directions: Take any tram up Swanston St to the Melbourne Uni super-stop. Faraday St is directly east, and Threshermans is on the south side before Lygon St.

RSVP: rsvp.melbourne@au.linuxchix.org

Can men come? Men may come as the guest of a woman attendee.

If you RSVP, we can send you a mobile number to call if you can't find us.

Afterwards we will go to the LUV meeting together. (Although you could just go home... but where's the fun in that?!)

Rust Dyeing Fabric - Hobby Farms

Shared via AddThis

I'm trying out this rust dyeing because I'd heard about it at college. We've just finished a whole dyeing unit and now we're doing printing and stamping!!! Lots of fun!!!

Ohio Linuxfest is now in its 7th year, but that's nothing compared to the 40 years that UNIX has been around. The theme this year is the Past, Present, and Future of UNIX & Linux.

Doug McIlroy will be keynoting. If you haven't heard of him yet, he was Kernighan, Thomson, & Richie's boss back at AT&T Bell Labs when they were creating UNIX and C. He's credited with creating the UNIX pipe ("|") as well. Peter Salus, known for his books "A Quarter Century of UNIX" and "The Daemon, the Gnu and the Penguin" will be keynoting as well. And finally, Shawn Powers of Linux Journal fame will be giving a keynote on "Fixing the Economy with Linux."

As with last year, Bdale and his daughter Elizabeth Garbee are expected to speak. Jono has also agreed to speak.

But these six people can't be it. If you've got something to say, why not submit a proposal? The call for presentations is only open a few more days—it closes on the 8th. Get your proposal in!

If you're not that interested in speaking in front of a large crowd, registration is open too. There's free admission, or for $65 you can support the fest, get a T-shirt, and have lunch. There's also a professional package that includes a day of training in addition to what's in the supporter package. That one is $350. There's more to that, but the details aren't fixed yet, so I won't post them yet. There are going to be BoFs and parties of course. LPI certification level 1 testing is expected to be available again as well.

And as I've mentioned before, there is going to be a Diversity in Open Source workshop day. Proposals are being accepted for that as well. Details on the linked page.

Finally, Ohio Linuxfest is now on Identi.ca and has a group there as well. This is in addition to the Twitter account that already existed.

Actually, it doesn't, as things back home have been sunny and beautiful and things here are grey and foggy.

Also, for anyone who noticed how I said that if you need me I'll have my cell phone? Envision that your urgent messages are going to my car. Now, my car is pretty spiff, but unlikely to care about your urgent message. (They may also be going to my living room, where the cat might theoretically care but only if your urgent message involves breaking into my house to feed her tuna fish.)

We've talked a bit about unfortunate incidents of inappropriate behaviour at conferences. But today, I want to point out a tech conference that's trying to help! The Linux Symposium, recognizing that there have been fewer registrations from women in recent years, is offering discounts to female attendees.

I'm reposting my post to the linuxchix announcement list below, in case any of you are interested in coming out. The student registration fees aren't too onerous, but if you ask nicely you might be able to get an additional discount as a WISE member too.

The Linux Symposium would like to offer special deals members of Linuxchix and UbuntuWomen, particularly because many female attendees have lost funding in recent years.

If you're interested in attending but cost has been a factor, please contact info(at)linuxsymposium.org before registering to get the discount.

http://www.linuxsymposium.org/

The Linux Symposium (formerly the Ottawa Linux Symposium, but being held in Montreal this year) is a conference that I often find interesting and useful in surprising ways. For me, the real benefit has been in meeting other linux folk in person, so even if the technical talks seem to be outside of your interests or over your head, it may still be worth coming to meet the people!

I'm going to be doing a very linuxchix-inspired BOF about attracting women to open source, and we usually try to do a linuxchix dessert night too. I'd love to see more women out! And please don't feel shy about saying hi or joining me and whoever I'm with for lunch/dinner/whatever if you come and would like some people to hang out with!

Dr. Steve Brule Rules!

For your health!

Via VideoSift

Any consulting shop that does significant amounts of implementation and development (as we do) needs a project management and ticketing tool. Basecamp seems to be a standard that many people have reached for. We were using Intervals for a while, which is really a fabulous tool if you do a lot of hourly consulting. We also have been using Google spreadsheets for some elements of project management.

All tools have their strengths and weaknesses. And, in addition, the best tool does nothing without good human project management skills using it. As a shop that practices Agile development (we use an adaptation of scrum methodology that seems to work for a shop that does multiple projects with small teams,) finding a good tool that facilitates instead of hobbles Agile was critical for us.

We found, and have chosen to use Redmine for our project management/ticketing system. You can think of it as a multi-project version of Trac, which is a fabulous ticketing/wiki system that we were initially going to go with. Redmine has the elements of Trac that we liked, with the added ability to track multiple projects. Like Basecamp, Redmine has document storage and messaging systems. It doesn’t have milestones per se, but it does allow you to see tasks in calendar and Gantt views, which is very helpful. Unlike Basecamp, you can add custom fields to tickets, users and other features. Having spent many hours in Basecamp, I actually like Redmine much better. It does even do time tracking, which we won’t use, but is nice to know is there. And the wiki is nice. Basecamp’s Writeboards seem so much more like an add on than integrated.

It’s a Ruby on Rails application, and that was actually kind of fun to finally get to install and play with RoR a tiny bit. And it’s great that it’s free and open source. Although that wasn’t an absolute requirement for us, it is most definitely a plus, given so much of our work is implementing open source web tools. And it’s nice to save a few bucks per month.

Suspend (sleep) works very well on the dual-Atom desktop. The only problem with it is that the mouse or keyboard wake it up. I don't mind the keyboard, but the mouse is quite sensitive, so a breeze through the window or a big truck driving by on the street can jiggle the mouse and wake the machine when I'm away.

I've been through all the BIOS screens looking for a setting to flip, but there's nothing there. Some web searching told me that under Windows, there's a setting you can change that will affect this, but I couldn't find anything similar for Linux, until finally drc clued me in to /proc/acpi/wakeup.

cat /proc/acpi/wakeup will tell you all the events that can cause your machine to wake up from various sleep states.

Unfortunately, they're also obscurely coded. Here are mine: Device S-state Status Sysfs node SLPB S4 *enabled P32 S4 disabled pci:0000:00:1e.0 UAR1 S4 enabled pnp:00:0a PEX0 S4 disabled pci:0000:00:1c.0 PEX1 S4 disabled PEX2 S4 disabled pci:0000:00:1c.2 PEX3 S4 disabled pci:0000:00:1c.3 PEX4 S4 disabled PEX5 S4 disabled UHC1 S3 disabled pci:0000:00:1d.0 UHC2 S3 disabled pci:0000:00:1d.1 UHC3 S3 disabled pci:0000:00:1d.2 UHC4 S3 disabled pci:0000:00:1d.3 EHCI S3 disabled pci:0000:00:1d.7 AC9M S4 disabled AZAL S4 disabled pci:0000:00:1b.0

What do all those symbols mean? I have no clue. Apparently the codes come from the BIOS's DSDT code, and since it varies from board to board, nobody has published tables of likely translations.

The only two wakeups that were enabled for me were SLPB and UAR1. SLPB apparently stands for SLeeP Button, and Rik suggested UAR probably stood for Universal Asynchronous Receiver (the more familiar term UART both receives and Transmits.) Some of the other devices in the list can possibly be identified by comparing their pci: codes against lspci, but not those two.

Time for some experimentation. You can toggle any of these by writing to the wakeup device: echo UAR1 >/proc/acpi/wakeup

It turned out that to disable mouse and keyboard wakeup, I had to disable both SLPB and UAR1. With both disabled, the machine wakes up when I press the power button. (What the SLeeP Button is, if it's not the power button, I don't know.)

My mouse and keyboard are PS/2. For a USB mouse and keyboard, look for something like USB0, UHC0, USB1.

The UAR1 setting is remembered even across boots: there's no need to do anything to make sure the setting is remembered. But the SLPB setting resets every time I boot. So I edited /etc/rc.local and added this line: echo SLPB >/proc/acpi/wakeup

So I didn’t actually get to vote in the Triple J top 100 of all time. I feel really stupid to have missed it! I was just asked (live on radio) whether I had voted and I stupidly said yes intending to get straight off the phone and onto the voting, but it was closed! So below are my top 10 songs of all time, some for technical reasons, all for emotional. Thought it might be of interest to some

Meme time!

In no particular order:

• Gorecki – Lamb. Our wedding  song About finding that person that just completes you, that complements and helps you want to be a better person. A beautiful song and a beautiful voice.
• Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana. Changed everything, and yet so simple. Influenced a generation.
• Shame – Stabbing Westward. My favourite angsty teenage song. Once went to a Live (the band) concert just to see Stabbing Westward play support, and then left The man has an incredible voice.
• H – Tool. I love a lot of the older Tool music, this particular one reminds me of  a close friend who died very young in very unfortunate circumstances.
• We’re in this together – Nine Inch Nails. I love pretty much every NIN song, but this one really talks to me about regardless of everything going on, none of us are truly alone.
• Fade to Black – Metallica. One of their best songs, and one that influenced me to learn guitar in the first place.
• Burn – The Cure. an amazing (and dark) song from The Crow soundtrack. One of their best in my opinion. Admittedly takes me back to school
• Cornflake Girl – Tori Amos. Beautiful, powerful and disturbing. Worth looking into the deeper meaning.
• Classical Gas – Mason Williams. An incredible guitar piece that puts me in an almost meditative state when I play it. Technically challenging but also a joy to play and listen to.
• Pathetique – Beethoven. Such an exquisite piano piece, and when played well covers about the entire scope of human emotion. Fun to play too, but I’ve yet to master it

There are so many more songs I love, and I’m sure given more time I’d rejig this another dozen times. So I’ll leave it there Apart from one last honorary mention:

• Space Cadet – Kyuss. Couldn’t leave this off. This 3 person rock band had such a big sound, such a complex and incredible mix. Great fun to play on the bass. Demon Cleaner also very worth listening to.

• Going straight to the server farm this morning means no coffee. This seems like a combination ripe for disaster. #
• Restoring server from backups, finally, after installing to the point where the backup program worked. Next, figure out firmware upgrades! #
• Wondering if it's safe to leave this alone for a while. I've already said "yes to all" for 2 types of conflict- how many more can there be? #
• Truly, I need a job that involves more blinkenlights. I like the server farm. #
• RT @malki @chaodmalma DRAW YOURSELF RIGHT NOW AND POST IT!!!!!!!! http://is.gd/1kVVd #
• I've been here way too long. Hopefully at this point I can finish most of this from home with SSH. If not there's always tomorrow, I guess. #
• I suspect some of these idiots are hipsters that do this shit to be "ironic", or as asshole improv theatre http://is.gd/1l1bi Via @SkarrKrow #

Does the idea of "advocacy" make you nervous? It does sound a bit scary, doesn't it, like those annoying door-to-door religious people. But it's not that way. If you're interested in helping people learn to speak Linux, here are a few easy, non-scary tips.

Following my Saturday trip up to NYC, I spent Sunday with Stephen down at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. We spent all their open hours there, from 1-5PM, and what a great little museum! I never even knew it was there!

Sadly after charging my camera after my NYC trip, I completely forgot the battery in the charger when I went down to Philly, I spent the entire museum visit with just the camera on my g1. I’m not the biggest fan of using cellphone for cameras, but the g1 didn’t do so bad! I actually shrunk all the full-size photos in this entry a bit.

Skeleton in Ancient Egyptian exhibit

An ancient Greek on a laptop ;D

Necklace from the Painted Metaphors Exhibit

At 5 we were shooed out of the museum and drove over to the new Chipotle in University City for dinner. Earlier in the day I had twittered about being downtown and my friend DarKrow dropped me a tweet to meet up, so he joined us for dinner. After dinner he introduced us to the best gelato I’ve ever had at a chain called Capogiro Gelato. I ended up with a cone of their Tiramisu and Chocolate Banana. Following that I headed home.

This weekend I’m heading out to San Francisco for a long weekend visit with MJ. I’m flying out Thursday evening and taking a redeye home Sunday night/Monday morning. Plans? Sushi! 4th of July celebrations! Snuggles! Samurai (…in a museum)! OK, maybe won’t get to everything, but it should be a fun weekend :)