Finding more women to speak at Ohio LinuxFest: success!
Cross-posted on Geek Feminism. Co-authored by Moose J. Finklestein, OLF's speaker committee 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.
OpenArena – The OpenSource Quake III Arena
Guess where did I play Quake III Arena for the first time. Not place, I am talking about the platform/Operating System. Nope! its not windows, its Linux 
. Surprised, right? I was too when I found this brilliant opensource version of Quake III Arena aka OpenArena.
While looking for a good one man shooting game in the software center, I bumped into this one which says, "a fast-paced 3D first-person shooting game." I decided to give it a try. After downloading around 300 MB of the packages the game was finally installed and while runnning and shooting weird creatures(some almost nude lady warriors too 
) I couldn't believe that even such a game could be totally free.
I was indeed dazzled by the brilliance of this game but since I had never played Quake III Arena before, I never realized that it was almost exactly like it. One day co-author Chia saw me playing it and asked where the hell did I get Quake from? Thats when I came to know I had accidently found something really cool.
After gathering a little info about, I found out that it is actually Quake III Arena. Its built upon ioquake3, based on id tech3, the Quake3 game engine which was opensourced by the company, id software, in Aug 2005.
Thats when OpenArena project was established to built an opensource FPS game derieved from Quake III Arena. ioquake3 is a project aimed to improve the opensource engine further.
If you have been a Quake III Arena fan and miss it on Linux then you should give openarena a try. The one thing that sucks is its incompatibility with the propreitary game. I haven't tried coupling the original with openarena but I guess that won't work. However, its being cross-platorm removes most of the hurdles for network gaming. You can find the listing for online openarena servers here.
Install OpenArena
It is available in repos of almost all common distros. You can easily install it using the package manager. Otherwise, try running these commands.
[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install openarena #for Ubuntu or Debian based systems
[root]# yum install openarena #for Fedora or RedHat based systems
Kensington Pocket Battery for Smartphones Review
Smartphones are all the rage these days. Everyone uses them as more then just a plain old phone. We browse the web, stream media, play our music, check our e-mail, take pictures, check social networks and oh, yeah, use it as a phone. Battery technology in these phones have not really progressed to the point where you can make it the whole day. Especially if you are using it as something other then just a plain phone. If you are away from an outlet at anytime, well, you will likely run out of juice at any time unless you have something like Kensington’s Pocket Battery for Smartphones.
This battery is much smaller than my Droid 2. It fits nicely into a pocket in my jeans and hardly weighs anything. I don’t even feel it when it’s in one of my pockets on my cargo shorts.
On the back is a USB cable that you just flip put and plugin to a USB charger or a free USB port on any computer. Once it is charged, the light on the front turns green.
To charge your phone, you select one of the cables that are on either side of the battery depending on what kind of phone you have. It supports both Mini B USB and MicroUSB. Pull it away from the side of the battery, connect it to your phone and press the button. Your phone should go into charge mode and start charging.
Last night, in an experiment, I had the battery fully charged and y Droid 2 down to about 20 percent. I plugged it in while driving my family on some errands and even stopping for a bite to eat. Once the battery was drained, I looked at my phone and it was about 70 percent charged. While it was not a 100 percent charge, it is still extending the amount of time I can be away from a outlet. In extreme cases, this could help you make a phone call or two when your phone would normally go dead.
One reason this battery will not charge my phone up all the way because it only has a 1200 mAh capacity. The battery on my Droid 2 has a 1400 mAh battery. So even if you are completely flat, the best you can hope for is a 85 percent charge and you likely won’t get that to various losses that occur when charging. However, it’s still capable of giving your phone some extra life and that is something I appreciate!
The only issue I have had with this battery is I would occasionally plug it in and press the button and it would not charge. I would unplug it and replug it and hit the button again and it would start charging. Not exactly sure why this happened and when it did, I wiggled the cable a bit to see if it was a bad cable but the cable was fine. So I chalk this one up to a fluke.
The Kensington Pocket Battery for Smartphones is available for pre-order direct from Kensington for $39.99.
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Sharing a shell and monitoring the other party
Recently, I had a reason to allow someone else to use a shell on a machine for which I'm the admin, but I wanted a way to track what they're doing. You might think the history command is just fine for this, but it's possible to clear the history, and I wouldn't want that. Screen to the rescue!
I ssh'd into the machine and created a new user for my visitor. Then I switched to that user. Once logged in, I ran screen -L, which logs the shell (both input and output) to ~user/screelog.0). Then I called up the user, gave them the IP address, username, and password. They logged in, and I told them to run screen -ls to see a list of open screen sessions. The output looks like this:
There is a screen on: 2119.pts-0.marlyn (09/01/2010 06:32:03 PM) (Attached) 1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-maco.
The next step was for them to type screen -x 2119.pts-0.marlyn Once they did this, we could each see what the other saw in our SSH session, and it was all logged. Great! I could keep track of what they were doing as they were doing it and review the logs later for a double check.
It's not a VCS though. If you know what directory they'll be operating in, you might want to run bzr init ; bzr add ; bzr commit -m "starting point" first, so you can later run bzr diff | less to see what files changed and keep a record of what changed, since while it might all seem perfectly logical while it's happening, recalling the exact changes won't be easy. The point of watching can be to catch them in the act if they try to do something that violates your security policy or to be given a demonstration.
EDIT: After a question in comments about how you keep them from opening another non-screen'd connection, my friend Peter suggested adding screen -xR to the user's ~/.bash_profile, so it forcibly connects to the screen session. Thanks, Peter!
Codename of Frugalware 1.4 is Nexon
Finally, Vmiklos has published the codename and the roadmap of the next stable version of Frugalware Linux.
So, the codename of Frugalware 1.4 is Nexon and is planned to be released on 7/02/2011.
Nexon is a fictional planet in Isaac Asimov’s Robot Series. At 2 parsecs (6.5 lightyears), it formed with Solaria the closest pair of Spacer worlds.
0.A.D. now available on Frugalware
0.A.D is a real strategy game like Ages of Empire but opensource. This game is still in development but usable. I’ve tested it and I’ve found it very impressive. It’s so rare to see an opensource game with this quality.
I am pleased to announce that 0.A.D is now available on Frugalware current as nobuild package. To install it:
# repoman upd && repoman merge 0ad
Rock-It Turns any Flat Surface into a Speaker.
I am convinced that one of these days they are going to have a way to implant the music directly into our brains so that we have no wires to have to contend with. For now, the next best thing could be the Rock-It portable vibration speaker. It looks slightly like a speaker you might put under your pillow, except it has a pod that you stick on any flat surface. It could be a box, a window or the side of your file cabinet just so long as it’s flat and it will stick. Plug in your iPod, iPhone or anything that has a 3.5mm headphone jack and then that surface becomes your speaker. It is available now for only $29.99 direct from Pyramid Distribution.
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Get All Installed Packages on System in apt-get Format
Recently I needed to setup three almost identical web boxes. First of all I installed all three boxes with a base install of Ubuntu 10.04 server. I then installed all the required packages on one box and started looking for a way to replicate the installed packages on the other boxes.
I had a Google around and did not manage to find a way to do it so I decided to come up with a method by myself.
On the box where you have all your installed packages do
dpkg --list | grep "^ii" | cut -f3 -d ' ' | sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/ /g' > installedOnSystem01
if you check the outputted file it should look something like this
adduser apache2 apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils apache2.2-bin apache2.2-common apg apt apt-utils aptitude base-files base-passwd bash bash-completion ...
once you know the file is ok, copy it to your second system using your preferred method for example scp
scp installedOnSystem01 username@system02:
then on the second system run the apt-get command in simulation mode
sudo apt-get -s install `cat installedOnSystem01`
this should give you output like this
... 0 upgraded, 30 newly installed, 0 to remove and 6 not upgraded. ...
if this looks ok remove the `-s` and run the command again to install your packages.
That’s it job done, the systems should now have the same installed packages. If anyone has any questions or can offer a way to shorten the process please leave a comment.
Weekly Rewind #66
Howdy folks. Apologies for missing an article last week. It was a very busy weekend and I just didn’t get the time, I’ll tell you about that in a minute. I was surprised to learn this week that some friends of mine actually read this blog. It’s odd because although I write this stuff and publish it, I never really expect anyone will bother to read it. It’s nice to find out they do. I’ve got almost 2 weeks worth of stuff to catch up on, so let’s get into it.
I’ll begin on Wednesday 18th of August. The day was mostly taken up with Drupal hacking and various bit’s of CSS. Whisper it quietly, but I finally feel like I’m starting to make some sense of CSS. I’m far from a master but I’m getting somewhere at last. I received a last minute call to appear as a co-host on FLOSS Weekly again just the night before. One of the hosts dropped out and Randal asked if I could fill in. Of course I was happy to. We interviewed Stephen Hemminger about Vyatta, a Linux-based network gateway. My first appearance on FLOSS a couple of months back went ok but was dogged by technical problems. I’m glad to say the delay was sorted this time and the HD camera sent to me by Fab was a big improvement. I used my studio kit and the audio sounded a lot clearer. People seemed to enjoy the show and it was released as a podcast a couple of days later.
Cain's Brewery Tour - Part 1
I’ll skip forward a little bit to the weekend. On Saturday it was my cousin Anthony’s stag do in Liverpool. He’s getting married next month and we all went on a tour of the Cain’s Brewery in town. Cue the jokes about arranging a piss up in a brewery. The tour was very interesting and I really enjoyed it. We ended up in the Brewery Tap pub at then end, sampling the wares with our beer vouchers. This was pretty early Saturday afternoon and I’m not a big drinker so it was an early start for me. Despite that I kept up alright and we staying in the pub a few hours before heading to a restaurant in the Albert Dock. We then wandered back into town and hit a couple of places like the Slaughterhouse, before my uncle insisted on taking us all to The Cavern. He knows the manager and was desperate to show we could get in free with his connections. It was very nice of him and we did indeed all get in for free. They had a band on called The Cave Dwellers in the main bar. I’ve not heard of them before but they seemed fairly good and apparently they always invite members of the audience up to sing and play with them. I was asked many times if I would be getting up and my uncle put my name down, I asked if they could do Jumping Jack Flash, they couldn’t. What sort of pub band doesn’t know that song. A quick look through their catalogue showed they didn’t know many songs I know. I settled on Ziggy Stardust and didn’t think much more of it. Suddenly the MC called out my name and I was shuffled onto the stage in front of a fairly big crowd. This is all after about 12 hours drinking. I borrowed a guitar (managing not to break any strings) and struck up the opening riff. The song went well, though I’m not sure if I was singing in tune because you couldn’t hear a thing on stage. People clapped and congratulated me afterwards so they must have thought it was alright. After that we had to move quickly to catch our last train back home. I stumbled in sometime after midnight and watched TV for a while before bed.
The following morning I was supposed to be helping with the How Why DIY event in Liverpool. I was pretty late after my long Saturday. I loaded up the car with gear for the Rathole Radio live show and then drove over to town. Finding parking was a bit of a nightmare but I managed eventually. As I walked through the door with all my stuff I was informed I was running a session on streaming video, not a subject I’m really an expert on, and it started “10 minutes ago”. Nevertheless Andy Goodwin and I formed a great double act with no plan or rehearsal. The people attending the workshop certainly seemed to enjoy it and that’s the main thing. The rest of the day was spent helping out in various ways and moving my car around before I got parking fines. I also went up to Kimo’s a couple of times for food. It’s a really great Mediterranean place nearby. The event was all taking place in the old Rapid Paint shop on Renshaw Street, right in the heart of Liverpool. It’s quite an iconic DIY shop which recently moved to a new location, that’s why we wanted it for How Why DIY.
Cain's Brewery Tour - Part 2, inside
In the evening I set up in the shop and did a live Rathole Radio show in front of about 15 people. A small but appreciative audience. I took my electric guitar and played a few live songs for everyone but managed to break 2 strings in as many songs and that put paid to it really. I’ll have to sort out a heavier gauge of string or look at my playing action I think. It can’t be right that I break so many strings all the time. I became used to playing an acoustic guitar for years and I was able to bash out rhythms on it quite heavily. You can’t get away with that on an electric guitar, this is something I’ll have to work on. I think I’m single handedly adding points to Ernie Ball‘s share price at the moment, hehe. The show was great fun and people seemed to like being there to see it live. Hopefully it’s something I can do more of in the future.
That brings us up to this week, which started with more Drupal hacking as always. That continued as the week went on so I won’t bore you with all that again. We were scheduled to do Linux Outlaws as usual on Monday night but it was aborted at the last minute, Fab managed to douse his laptop in coffee. It seems even a Thinkpad can’t take that kind of abuse. The free time did allow me to watch the Liverpool V Man City game instead, but I wish I hadn’t. We were hammered by City and it didn’t look good. The show was recorded on Tuesday and released yesterday as episode 165 “Hairy Fridays”. It’ll be the last show for a couple of weeks as Fab is off to Italy on holiday. We’ll be back very soon but in the meantime please don’t panic, everything is fine 
Me at How Why DIY, not sure what the Fez is about.
On Wednesday night there was more podcast action as I again joined Randal to co-host FLOSS Weekly. This time we were talking to Dan Scott about Evergreen library systems. I was still a little nervous with the large audience on FLOSS but I feel as though I’m finding my feet now. I’m never quite sure if it’s ok to cut in with a joke as I would on Linux Outlaws. The recording went well and hopefully it’ll continue to be a semi-regular gig. I’m enjoying it a lot and the exposure doesn’t do me any harm. The rest of the week was fairly quiet apart from the aforementioned Drupal stuff. We had a band practice on Thursday night and I was pleased to get back into the swing of things. We’ve finally decided on a name, get ready for it….
Twenty Pound Sounds. It’s a bit odd I know but it was the one we could all agreed on, and I think after messing around for a couple of months it’ll do us good to finally have a name. I’m thinking it should be pounds as in weight rather than currency. In keeping with my addiction to domain names I’ve registered 2 for the band already: 20pound.net and 20lb.net, unfortunately twentypound.net is taken. There’s not a lot to see there yet but we’ll have a proper site soon. I want to do it with Drupal and make something we can all contribute to, somewhere people can join up and get involved as well. We need a decent logo/design and I’m thinking the name should be written 20lb Sounds, if anyone has ideas on that let me know. I might have an acoustic gig for us in town soon and we certainly need to book more gigs. I think that’s how you really get good. Practising is great and it definitely helps, but regular gigs are how you really learn to play together. I saw Noddy Holder talking about this recently on a documentary, he said “once you’ve played in pubs on a Saturday night with people right in your face looking for a fight, how can any gig phase you after that? Stadiums or whatever”. He makes a good point, not that I think we’ll playing stadiums any time soon. The weekend has been spent doing various little things I can’t remember right now but I plan to chill out and enjoy a break today and tomorrow. It’s a public holiday here in England tomorrow, woo hoo!
Upcoming:
There’ll be a break from Linux Outlaws for a couple of weeks as I said, so don’t turn up on Monday night expecting to see a show. I don’t have any more bookings for FLOSS Weekly yet but hopefully more will come. It’s Liverpool LUG on Wednesday night and I’m keen to get down there after missing the last one. I missed Chester LUG last week so apologies to everyone for that. At the weekend there is talk of another live Rathole Radio from the old Rapid shop, I’m yet to confirm it though. I hope we’ll be able to do an unplugged gig with the band as part of that. I’ll let you all know as soon as I find out for sure. No doubt other exciting things will crop up, so I’ll tell you about those next time. Till then, take care everyone.
Dan
Atlanta Linux Fest 2010 Cancelled
"Folks, it is with great disappointment that I need to announce ALF 2010 has been cancelled. Josh, Nick, Amber, David, and myself all have too many distractions in our lives these days to be able to focus on the planning and fund raising necessary to bring ALF 2010 around. SELF (http://www.southeastlinuxfest.org) is certainly a worthy gig to consider as an alternative."
Unfortunately, I did not get the opportunity to attend SELF this year and was very much looking forward to ALF next month. Last year's event was a great time. So if you were wondering what was going on as far as ALF was concerned, there you have it.
