I am thrilled to announce our sessions for this year’s Open Source Bridge conference. Thank you so much to everyone who submitted a proposal and gave us an awesome set of talks to choose from.
You can browse the full list of sessions on our site.
And don’t forget to register. You want to be there for this. Trust me.
Comments OffCategories: events · portland · technology
Tagged: conference, open source, osbridge
Thank you so much for all of the support these last few weeks. It’s been a rough time for the whole family. Teresa’s funeral was yesterday, but we still need to make burial arrangements for the cremains. I came down with a cold last week as well, which is just frustrating. Anyhow, this is just to say: I love you all, and I think it will be a little while still before it feels like life is back to normal, but we’re all muddling through as best as we can. Thanks for being here.
→ 2 CommentsCategories: life
Tagged: family, funeral
My aunt Teresa died early on Tuesday morning, from complications of ALS, just a month after her 47th birthday.
She started to have health problems about two years ago. It was slow to diagnose, but eventually her doctors determined that she had both fronto-temporal dementia (FTD) and ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease).
Two weeks ago, she developed aspiration pneumonia. With treatment, she improved enough to leave the ICU for her last few days, but her lung function was badly damaged. We made the difficult decision to not keep her on a respirator (Teresa was strongly against the tracheostomy it would have required). There were a lot of hard decisions involved in her care.
The last couple of days, I’ve been cataloging everything I know about her. She’s my mother’s only sister. Her favorite color was yellow. She loved to sing. When I was in grade school, she and Grandma Sandi used to make tapes, where they told stories and sang to us, and mail them off as audio letters. She liked board games and party games and scavenger hunts. She read trashy romance novels, and bought things because there were on sale and someone might like them (which meant an endless supply of cheap plastic toys when I was little. As an adult that switched to dishware).
She worked at Safeway in White Salmon, and was really proud when she saved up enough to buy her own little house near Mt. Adams. She liked flavored “specialty” coffees before there were espresso carts with flavored syrups available everywhere. She was a big fan of Columbia Valley wines, visiting many producers before any of them reached wider attention. She smoked for most of her life, and only stopped after she got sick. She was often anxious, and coped with it in various ways. The last several years that included an intense devotion to scriptural study.
She regretted that there were many things that would never happen in her life, that she ran out of time so soon.
I hate that we will never have another Easter egg hunt together, and that everything I found awkward in our relationship will just sit there, forever unresolved.
She deserved to have more time.
→ 4 CommentsCategories: life
Tagged: death, family, memory, teresa
In January, Suw Charman-Anderson challenged 1000 people to write about a female role model in technology on March 24 (today!), in honor of Lady Ada Lovelace, one of the first programmers. Over 1500 took the pledge, including myself.
In the past few years, I’ve met so many awesome women through various tech groups that I didn’t want to pick just one. So here’s five, all Portlanders, and why they rock:
I met Maria Webster through Code n Splode, a women-focused tech group in Portland. She runs a blog called .51, about women in technology. Maria is my hero because she acts like it’s Ada day every day. .51 regularly has links to interviews with women who work in technology and engineering, talking about what they do and why they love it.
I met Sarah Sharp through a PDX Geek Chix lunch. Sarah is my hero because she has awesome git skills. She’s a Linux kernel hacker working at Intel, on USB support. She’s also (along with Maria) involved with the Portland State Aerospace Society, an open source rocketry group.
I met Paige Saez two years ago through Dorkbot. She’s working on an MFA in interaction design. Paige is my hero because she asks great questions, about the intersection of technology and physical mundane life. At BarCamp Portland, not long after we’d met, I asked her to put a session on the board. She didn’t know what she wanted to talk about, so I asked, “What are you interested in? Just write that down and we’ll get people in a room and talk about it.” It turned out to be “Girls, Technology, and the Future”, and about a dozen people had a great discussion about our favorite books, and wanting Google to tell us which aisle the cereal is in at the store.
I met Gabrielle Roth through Portland Perl Mongers. She’s a network engineer, and co-author of the Bacon and Tech blog, where she writes about Perl, PostgreSQL, and running user groups. Gabrielle is my hero because she started Code n Splode after OSCON 2007, to provide a place for female developers to connect and work on their their presentation skills.
I also met Selena Deckelmann through Portland Perl Mongers. She’s a sysadmin, developer, Postgres contributor, and community organizer. Selena is my hero because she convinced me we needed to have a grassroots, all-volunteer open source conference in Portland. I can’t possibly imagine Open Source Bridge without her.
There’s still time if you’d like to chime in with your own role-models. Just tag the post with “adalovelaceday09″ and “ALD09post” so other people can find it.
→ 1 CommentCategories: technology
Tagged: AdaLovelaceDay09, ALD09post, role-models, technology, women
I’m in the middle of a 2-part trip right now. I’ve been in Denver since Sunday to attend the Pragmatic Studios Advanced Ruby workshop. After filling my brain with continuations, object models, and metaprogramming for three days, I have an open (well, work from hotel and coffeeshop) day here, then tomorrow I fly to Austin for SXSWi.
Yesterday was a good ego day. Dawn Foster did an interview with me about community event organizing for Web Worker Daily. Lizzy Caston gave a shout-out to my food cart map on her Portland Food Cart blog. And I think I actually understand how to use continuations.
It was a good day for Open Source Bridge, too. Slowly we’re getting the word out about what we’re doing. If you want to be part of the conference, don’t wait. Especially since we’re a first-time conference, we need your registration/sponsorship/proposal/volunteer support now so we can plan appropriately for June.
The other fabulous news yesterday is that the Portland City Council approved the MLS soccer plan. As a Timbers fan, I’m thrilled. I think moving up to the MLS level will be great for Portland in many ways (bringing attention, tourism, and income). I am crossing my fingers that all the details pan out.
Another bit of serendipity yesterday was finding out that Ignite Denver was happening, just a few blocks from my hotel. I got to meet a bunch of friendly Denverites, and talk to Chris Messina (who was there to speak about activity streams) and Luke Sontag (also visiting from Portland) about open web projects.
So, busy week. It’s only going to get busier. But I am excited to be attending SXSW this year. It should be a great time.
→ 1 CommentCategories: technology · travel
Tagged: denver, prag studios, ruby, sxswi, travel
Last night, Reid launched an update of the Open Source Bridge site, now with links to attendee information like registration and booking a hotel room in our block. Conference passes are $175 if you register now, and $250 after March 31.
We’re also still accepting proposals. Current submissions include putting the cloud in the clouds, how and when to fork a project to do your own thing, and RubySpec (filed under hacks!). We’re interested in a wide range of topics, including advanced material, as long as it’s open source.
Comments OffCategories: events · portland · technology
Tagged: conference, open source, osbridge, portland
When we started working on Open Source Bridge, Selena and I came up with the term “open source citizenship” to describe what we hoped to explore. We’re planning a conference that will connect developers across projects, across languages, across backgrounds to learn from each other. We want people to experience something beyond “how to use tool X” or “why databases keel over when you do Y” (even though those topics are important, making up our tools and trade, and will be a central part of the conference content). We’d like to share what open source means to us, what it offers, where we struggle, and why we do this day in and day out, even when we’re not paid for it.
In order to do that, it seemed important to bridge the kinds of roles we have in open source, user/contributor/owner/institution, getting down to something more fundamental. What else are people who interact in this multi-directional way? Perhaps we’re citizens. Not residents—we do more than live here. We are, like citizens of a country, engaged in the practice of an interlocking set of rights and responsibilities.
Citizenship isn’t a concept I’ve thought about much since grade school, so I might only be scratching the surface of what it implies, but here’s a few thoughts.
There are rules for gaining citizenship. You have to be born in a place, or have parents who are citizens, or be sponsored, or apply and jump through hoops and make sense of bureaucracy. There’s no requirement you and the government like each other, but you must agree the follow the laws you and it are bound by.
Citizens are constrained, but they also have rights. They are protected from outside entities. They may be called to act in service, to contribute to the country’s well-being and defense.
Citizenship can be revoked, or renounced, if the person commits treason, or is found serving an opposing side.
—–
I’ve been working with Ruby and Rails for almost exactly three years now. I have yet to submit a patch to either project, but I help with pdx.rb events and share what I know with other developers. I also promote Ruby, Rails, and related projects by telling people what I like about the tools I use. In return, I expect the projects to not do anything stupid that would prevent me from writing software (especially since it’s how I earn a living) and continue to make useful improvements, asking for feedback as they go. Their continued stable existence protects me from having to work with something less useful or appealing. Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst transition, but I like it here.
Last year I started Calagator, an open source calendar aggregator, with a group of local tech enthusiasts. Our citizenry is broader than that of a programming language, encompassing all types of technology users and creators, as well as the whole Portland metro area (and perhaps beyond). We try to provide a useful calendar service, and ask the users to help us by providing and updating event data, letting us know what is or isn’t working, and assist us in developing new features that meet their needs.
There are many other open source products I use, but those are the ones I feel most closely aligned with. Even with casual or temporary affiliations, there’s a minimum contract: it will do what I need, or I won’t stay. Long-term residency may have stronger demands (and more benefits: now I know how it works and how to alter things).
As I said before, this is just a starting point, but I’d like to explore further what rights and responsibilities open source citizenship brings. Especially for developers, we’re not just users, but a kind of co-producer, and that relationship is often assumed and left undocumented unless we’re in charge of a project or join the government core team. I’d like to draw it out, see what the implied contract looks like, and talk about how well it’s upheld on all sides.
If you have ideas on that, or anything else open source, our call for proposals is open now through March 31. We want to hear what’s interesting and important to you.
→ 4 CommentsCategories: life · technology
Tagged: citizens, citizenship, open source, responsibilities, rights
I finally finished the Sputnik vs. Roomba video I started last year when we got our robotic vacuum. Sputnik doesn’t try to attack it quite as ferociously now, but he will chase it around if he’s bored. I did the clips from the Roomba POV by taping the camera to the top of it. I think there’s a potential to make some funny monster movies this way: cover the top of the Roomba with a costume of some sort, tape the camera on, and set it loose in a city of cardboard skyscrapers. Cats and giant people feet optional.
I also made another mobile magazine to follow the Dinosaur one. This time it’s a short story about cats. There’s a mobile pdf and a printable-foldable copy like before.
Comments OffCategories: projects
Tagged: cats, funny, magazine, mobile, roomba, video
I had a series of thoughts that started like this:
Last week, impatient for the new Kindle release, I looked up eBook readers for the iPhone, and found Stanza. I then spent large pieces of my weekend reading the Rifters books (I’m now on the second half of Behemoth), which are available through the Feedbooks catalog under a Creative Commons license.
For a couple days I’ve been thinking about what I like about reading on the iPhone. Part of it is that I can hold the phone at a comfortable angle no matter how I’m sitting or standing, which is something books have over laptops. Stanza also makes it easy to adjust the font and colors to something your eyes find friendly. Plus it’s very portable, letting me read a couple pages here and there in between other things.
Today I started wondering whether anyone is making magazines targeted at mobile devices or ebook readers. It’s not as accessible a format as paper, but one copy costs the same as a thousand, which seems like it should appeal to someone given the current print media meltdown. So I made an iPhone-scale pdf to try it out. It’s sort of Zoobooks crossed with the video @reidab and I are making for Open Source Bridge’s IP5 sponsorship.
I’ve also been reading notes from PaperCamp. That’s why the document is 8 pages long. I think it would be neat to print and fold these like the single-page bookfolding trick used by PocketMod and leave them in random places, the paper artifact linking back to the digital with the QR code on the last page.
Now to figure out what the next one should be about.
Update: There’s now a printable version available. Fold according to the directions here.
→ 1 CommentCategories: crafts · projects · technology
Tagged: books, experimentation, iphone, magazines, mobile, paper, print
The service went down on Jan. 30th, losing all user data. I had been saving bookmarks there since May 2007, and kept only partial backups locally. Their latest update:
So far, my efforts to recover Ma.gnolia’s data store have been unsuccessful. While I’m continuing to work at it, both from the data store and other sources on the web, I don’t want to raise expectations about our prospects. While certainly unanticipated, I do take responsibility and apologize for this widespread loss of data.
I am angry. I am not particularly comforted by their apology. I think web services have a responsibility to look after their customers’ data, and I’m very disappointed that a 3-year-old service did not plan better.
But really, all I can do about this is recover what I can from other online caches, and move to another service (while keeping my personal backups more current). So here’s one way to recover bookmarks using Firefox plugins:
Get this Google cache Greasemonkey script. Also install the Operator plugin. Then query Google for your bookmarks page using a string like “cache:ma.gnolia.com/people/spinnerin/bookmarks” (replace spinnerin with your own user name).
The Operator plugin will detect the bookmark microformat on the page, and extract a list of bookmarks that you can import to another service (click the bookmarks menu to select them). The Greasemonkey script adds yellow “cache” links that will let you browse through the cached versions of each page. Browse/select/export until done, you hit the end of Google’s cache, or decide you no longer care.
This whole process should be scriptable, too. I may give that a shot later.
→ 7 CommentsCategories: technology
Tagged: bookmarks, data, fail, magnolia, recovery
