Rebel Power Supply

So the Computer Science Forum. With a “Microsoft Evangelist.” It was …

…

respectable. Sam Stokes actually seemed like a way chill guy. At the beginning, he was pushing how Micro$oft is offering XNA Express “for free” (as he’s getting his laptop set up) so I decided to ask:

“Free as in Freedom?”

*he looks up*

“Now that’s a heavy question…”

“Well then … free as in beer.”

“Yeah, I like that a lot better”
So at least I could tell he knew what he was talking about. Later on, he said “When you guys go back home for the holidays, make sure you do whatever you can to make sure your families are safe on the internet. Hopefully your answer won’t be to have them install Linux.” Clearly just pandering to the open source devotee, but it worked.

He was also trying to get everyone excited about the Microsoft sponsored Imagine Cup, which may or may not be interesting. Yeah, um … thanks. But I think I’ll spend my time playing around with MOTU recipes and packaging. Overall, I thought he was pretty open minded and laid back.

I was speaking with the department head afterward, and they want to have speakers come down about once a month, and even asked if I knew anyone from the open source community that’d like to come speak. So yeah, looks like we’re finally starting to have some activity get started, which should lead to more school spirit/participation.

But if we could only have this much spunk, it’d be freaking amazing.

So the Ubuntu California LoCo Install Fest is no longer a catastrophe. It hasn’t been set in stone yet, but it looks like it’s going to be held at the Sun computer labs at Cal State Dominguez Hills thanks to Charles Wybles. I’m pretty stoked, because we’re going to have two guys on the team, Nathan Haines and Larry Cafiero, present topics on GPG Keys and Open Source Software. So pencil it in: November 3rd, Ubuntu California’s first event.

This is an excellent interview with Cindy Cohn from the EFF about their case against AT&T. The telecom companies really have a duty to their customers to protect their personal/private information. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve completely failed that. Summary: I’m so glad I donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I’d like to thank Alex Gao for hooking my PSP up hardcore. I’ve finally started messing with some sweet homebrew stuff on there, emulators and such. Next is playing with the PSP on Ubuntu.

Bad News (from the wiki) : I may have run into some trouble with setting up the room for this Saturday. Apparently there’s a capus-wide “Discover Chapman” event going on (which wasn’t on the calendar) and may conflict with our plans for a room. The president of our ACM chapter was helping me get the room, and he left me a message about it Friday night. I’m going to call the Calendaring Office to see what’s going on, but from what he told me, things aren’t looking good. Anyway, I’ll be at the meeting tonight to discuss where we should go from here, and as usual, ideas/suggestions are welcome.

Good News: Upgraded this server to Gutsy. Looks like everything’s working quite well

Shoot, the torrent finished downloading so fast. I’m going to be upgrading everything to Gutsy soon, so my first server upgrade should be interesting. Hopefully I don’t lose too much data ~_~ I’m pretty stoked for Toorcon, I’ll have some cool pictures/things to share when I get back. And yes, I am ridiculously excited for the Gibbon.

Well well, won’t this be exciting?

Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the Computer Science degree at Chapman University

The first event in the 2007 - 2008 Computer Science Forum series will be a presentation by

Mr. Sam Stokes

Microsoft Corporation

Sam Stokes has been working with embedded technology for 20 years, from GPS Navigational Data Unit, to a system that lands commercial aircraft automatically to being a Premier Consultant for Microsoft, as well being an adjunct Professor from time to time. Sam is currently a technology evangelist for Microsoft Corporation, with a focus on working with professors and students on how to use the Microsoft technology.

Please mark your calendar for this program.

Thursday, October 18 2007

The Charles and Nora Hester Faculty Senate Board Room

Argyros Forum 201

Refreshments and networking 5:15 PM

(Free to Chapman Students, Graduates, Faculty, High School Teachers and Students)

Program 5:30 PM

Clearly, this is going to be an interesting night. If anyone has any questions/ideas they want me to bring up, I’d love to hear them. Otherwise, I’ll be sure to let you know how things go.

Update: Just got another email from the department secretary (who made some bomb taco salad at the picnic, I might add), and the title of this entry is the actual title of his talk.

Just finished updating the Ubuntu California LoCo team wiki.  And by update, I mean create a page for next meeting’s agenda and fix some links. There’s got to be a way to automate all this. Anyways, I’m glad it’s finally done, but now I really need sleep.

Once midterms are over (two weeks!) I’m going to be able to do a lot more work on Bug Triaging for Ubuntu and QA testing for Mozilla. I think it’s an integral part of the Open Source community, and a way that a lot of people (even those without coding experience) can help contribute. I just found this How-To which raises some good points about writing good bug reports.

The How-to isn’t for a specific project, so it’s pretty general, but I found it useful to help keep me on track. I know it sounds obvious, but a bug report is pretty much just the steps taken to produce a bug. I think that it can be easy (for me at least) to lose sight of the big picture when things like bug status levels come up on mailing list discussions or other “side tangents” develop.

Although the discussion involving the Launchpad Janitor was really interesting, and certainly gave me a lot of insight into the process behind creating a bug tracking system, I realize that there needs to be a good balance between creating the tools and actually doing something with them. I know that having the right tools for the job can make the whole process much easier, I just think that the end goal of Bug #1 needs to be kept in mind.

I’m in a bit of an similar spot, because even though I want to be contributing (The plan is to get to work on packaging and actual developing by Ubuntu 8.04), I still have so much to learn. I find myself sitting down after classes and saying “Cool, I can work on coding some stuff” and then realize that I’ve spent two hours fiddling with making Compiz work/catching up on newsfeeds. I mean, I’m still learning about X and plenty of interesting things, it’s just more from a user/admin perspective. I really need to make the mental transition to learning by doing and creating, as opposed to reading documentation and using.

So I think that what this means is that anyone that wants to get involved in Open Source really just needs to dive in and go for it. There was a presentation given by David Humphrey at Mozilla24 that was about joining the community. Excellent timing, for sure The main reason for me posting this is to make a public commitment, to really begin contributing. It will almost assuredly light a fire under me, since I think I’ve got a good grasp of how to proceed from here. I’d like to think that anyone else planning on getting involved will know that they’re not alone, and that the community is really helpful and friendly. Hopefully I’ll be able to make a chronicle of the different resources and wiki pages I read to gather up my information, so people interested in following a similar path will have a good base to build upon.

I saw Dave Matthews Band at the Irvine Amphitheater in Irvine last week, and it was the most phenomenal convert I’ve ever been to. Those guys really love what they do, you can just tell from how they smile and jam together. The venue was pretty large, it was a bit of a walk from the parking lot; but the acoustics were absolutely perfect. If you have a chance to see them, I say you HAVE to go. Freaking amazing.

If anyone has any experience running an installfest, I’d love to talk to you. I’m working on setting up an event to celebrate the release of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon at Chapman on Saturday, October 27th. If you’re in the area, please sign up at the Ubuntu California LoCo team wiki page.

China’s apparently started blocking RSS feeds, which does not bode well at all. I firmly believe that information needs to be freely available to all interested parties. I think that innovation breeds success and improvement, whereas ignorance leads to stagnation. Aside from Tor, there will hopefully be ways around this, such as when a Chinese clerk (totally ignorant of the Tiananmen Square Massacre) let a tribute slip through to be printed in a classified ads section.

Anyways, I better pay attention to Calculus/study for my Japanese exam in an hour. (Thank goodness for Kanatest!) And honestly, who isn’t excited for when Fake Steve Jobs comes down to LA? (October 23-25!)

Wow, I was so ridiculously tired (from Cross Country practice/classes), I just got up from a 6 hour nap. Which is actually alright, since I need the sleep… Now I just need to finish my Computer Systems exam. I’ve got a to-do list about 20 items long, so hopefully my GTD attitude will carry over to that too. After checking out my Google Reader feeds a bit, I wanted to comment on Brady Forrest’s post about Threadless and their new store in Chicago.

If you’re in the area, you have to check it out. The company has a really sweet community-based sales model: all of their designs are submitted by members of the community. Those that receive enough positive votes are actually printed into shirts, and put up for sale. People that take a picture of themselves wearing the shirt and upload it on the site can get discounts on future purchases. I think it’s an amazing way to harness the power of the market: if enough people like a shirt enough to vote for it, the odds are pretty high that they’re going to actually buy it.

Well, here’s my inaugural “Hello World” post. If I had known how ridiculously easy it is to set up WordPress, I would have done it a long time ago. The interface is intuitive and full-featured (without being bloated). It also seems like the plugin community is really active, and since I’m all for adding in extra functionality, I’m excited about finding some cool things to work with. But for now I think I should just hurry up and change the default theme…

In case you’re interested in setting up WordPress, check out the installation docs. They are clear and well written, and even go over setting up your database using MySQL. I’ve had a lot of trouble figuring out MySQL syntax and users/permissions, but I think I just need to sit down with a tutorial to figure everything out. Fortunately, most of the WordPress setup is simple, especially if you’re familiar with the command line. I’m really impressed with WordPress so far, it’s finally given me a platform where I can publish a blog that doesn’t feel like I’m restricted on what I can do with it. Now I just need to stop playing around with tweaks and my server, and start writing.