Inspiring stories from Texas Linux Fest

At the Texas Linux Fest I was particularly intrigued by Amber Graner, who went from a complete Linux newbie, to becoming a Ubuntu User Magazine contributor in one year. She spread a message that everyone, no matter how non-technical they are, can become proficient in Ubuntu. As they progress, they can participate in user forums, educating less advanced users. If I'm not mistaken, she said she recently accepted a position as Ubuntu User Magazine editor, though I haven't been able to find a confirmation of that on the net. Whatever her position is, the magazine is now her day job.

My old acquaintance Janet S., who I first met at the Atheist Community of Austin, was at the Texas Linux Fest too. She is now involved in writing FLOSS manuals -- technical documentation for open source software. And what do you know -- a couple of weeks since TXLF she started a job doing developer documentation for Mozilla.

Amber Graner gives a presentation "A Year NTEU* (pronounced In-to) Ubuntu and the Open Source Community". More pictures from Texas Linux Fest are in my photo gallery.

Those stories are inspiring. While I am not by all means closed off to a possibility of writing proprietary software (if you are a prospective employer Googling me, please be assured of that :-)), I've been thinking there are serious advantages to working in open source. It opens prospects in self-marketing you won't get in closed-source. Quite simply, if you're writing proprietary software, it's very hard to prove to prospective employers that you've done worthwhile, creative things. They have only your word to take for it. And even if you were permitted to show pieces of your code to outsiders (extremely unlikely), they still won't understand the context your applications worked in, the needs they addressed, or technical challenges they conquered.

But if you are writing open source software, depending on how widely used it is, chances are that someone on your prospective employer's team may be familiar with it. Also, its open nature allows you to blog about your work, and answer questions about it in user forums, building your online visibility and reputation.

At the nonprofit I'm currently working for we use Drupal and the LAMP stack -- Linux, PHP, MySQL and Apache -- to build our web application. At the very least this will give me opportunity to openly blog about the problems we are facing, and the ways we are solving them. I'm too busy actually building the application to blog about it yet, especially we as we are trying several approaches and it's not clear which of them will "stick". But I'll have to start blogging about it soon. Drupal is open-sourced, with a huge community seeking answers to their own problems -- thus, lots of social capital to be gained. I'm hoping it may become useful for me one day if, as I suspect, this nonprofit does not secure funding, and I'll have to continue to search for jobs.

Pictures from Texas Linux Fest are in my photo gallery.

What I got out of Texas Linux Fest

This is a bit of old news, but My "official" writeup of Texas Linux Fest was posted on GeekAustin.org, an Austin website that chronicles tech-related events in Austin, and puts geeks in touch with networking and learning resources.

Elze's wrap of Texas Linux Fest

I won't repost it in my blog, since it concerns people and topics that are of little to no interest to whoever might be reading my blog.

Going to events like that isn't exactly educational for me -- presentations are not my learning style. When I want to find out about a new technology, product, methodology, or trend in software development (like agile programming), I google it, and jump around from page to page, fishing out relevant bits of information from each one. Presentations are sequential in their nature, which has the unfortunate effect of causing me to tune out sooner or later. In any presentation there will come a moment when I won't see how a particular tangent the speaker went off is relevant to the topic; sometimes I will need to chew over a new piece of knowledge before I can build on it; yet the presentation does not stop, does not let me mull over what was said, or jump back to connect a new bit of knowledge to a previous one. So sooner or later I get off track. (Presentations where I don't lose the thread of thought are even more of a waste of time, because they mean I know the subject -- at least at the level of complexity the speaker is presenting it at -- so well that I'm not learning anything new.)

The reason I go to conferences like this, then, is to find out about people's career paths in areas that interest me (I'm not just speaking about open source here, but also about science fiction and writing). Even if they don't have paid jobs in my area of interest, I still want to hear how they incorporated their passion for the subject into their working life. Even better if they integrated it into their day job, or carved a space for it apart from their day job.

There were some people like that at the Austin Linux Fest -- more about them in my next post.

SXSW: prelude

I can finally summon some energy and time to blog, not just tweet, about South by Southwest. First of all, I didn't even go to SXSW, only to public events. That alone was enough to keep me very busy.

My SXSW experience started out with Austin Tech Happy Hour on Thursday. One of the startups featured at ATHH was Other Inbox. (I didn't find out what the other 2 were -- either there weren't any, or they were well hidden.) A woman at the Other Inbox table approached me with a pitch: "Do you need a cure for email overload?" I decided to play a devil's advocate for a while. I said I didn't really have email overload. That's not quite true -- I would feel very overloaded if I had to read the posts from all the email lists I am on, but I didn't go into detail. She replied that I am a lucky person. I said it's not a matter of luck: the only real cure for email overload is real-life management, not email management. In my opinion, the email you get is merely a reflection of responsibilities you take on. Don't take too many responsibilities, commit to only what you can accomplish, say "no" more often, unsubscribe from mailing lists that don't add much value to your life, and you won't be overwhelmed with email

I asked how can Other Inbox technology do all that to a person. They admitted it can't, but it can recognize which emails in your inbox come from real people versus mailing lists and such. Hmm. I was quite surprised one needs an application to do that -- I never had trouble telling real people's messages from mailing list messages. But you never know what kind of interesting difficulties some folks might have! :-)

I still think that no matter how you organize your inbox, if you have an average of x emails to read every day, it will take you the same amount of time. That's not to say that certain approaches to email don't help. Some people read it all first thing in the morning, others last thing at night, and so on -- to avoid being constantly interrupted by new emails. That's all good. But ultimately I think a cure for email overload is simply not to get too much of it.

Then I inadvertently crashed Austin Interactive Marketing Association meetup. I was told about it by one guy from Austin Linux Group, who said it was a "welcome out-of-towners to SXSW" happy hour. AIMA people at the registration desk have not heard of such a thing, though sure enough they took me for an out-of-towner. With my accent it was almost guaranteed. :-) (They asked me if I was from Sweden.) Anyway, I met with two people from Austin Linux Group, and we chatted for a bit. In their experience, Linux user groups are dying, at least in Austin. Or if not dying, they are going virtual. Some of them, including ALG, have strong email lists, but they don't feel much need to meet in person. Some people think it's a matter of there being so much good info about Linux on the internet, you can google anything, so you don't have to meet in person to ask for advice or help with hands-on installations, etc. But that's not what these two ALG people thought. The high likelihood that a typical newbie will run into serious problems with WiFi and thus lose interest in Linux, is one reason that Linux desktop is not gaining popularity. But there's also a more interesting reason. For many young people Linux is not in the running if they're considering an alternative to Windows. And not because they are Mac afficionados. A smartphone is a more likely competitor. Many people these days no longer want to carry around laptops when a smartphone is enough for their daily computing tasks. Thus, a phone becomes their primary computer.

Pictures from this Austin Tech Happy Hour and other SXSW events can be found in my photo gallery.

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Companies that don't Get It

While visiting his mom in New Jersey with Erika, Steve bought a Kodak disposable camera to take pictures of the child gallivanting about New Jersey beaches and such. Back in Austin he got the film developed at HEB and pictures put on a CD. I stuck the CD in my computer to get the pictures off. That's all I wanted: to get the pictures off the CD and onto my hard drive. It may come as a shock to Kodak that I did NOT want to sign up for Kodak's online photo gallery, and that I was perfectly capable of viewing and copying pictures using the good ole Windows Explorer -- I did NOT special software for that! Most emphatically, though, I did not want to install the said software.

Yet that's what I was forced to do if I wanted to see the pictures. Clicking on the CD gave me only one option, to install Kodak Easy Share software. It took half an hour to install. As is typical of Windows programs, the installation required to reboot the computer. All so that I could take a peek at 20-odd pictures. Because you know, as an average user, I'm so dumb that if you give me a CD with a folder of pictures in it, I won't know what to do with it. ;-) No, Kodak had to waste half an hour of my time installing software that lets me do nothing I can't already do by double-clicking or drag-and-dropping folders and files! Never mind that my hard drive is creaking at the seams with all the software I have on it, including several image manipulation programs. And wouldn't you know, Easy Share installed itself in the system tray, slowing down my already slow computer even more.

What I found the most presumptuous is that it also asked me to create an account for its online photo sharing site. Why did it assume I don't already use photo-sharing sites of my own choice, such as Flickr? This attitude is so patronizing. And the software did not really give me an option to NOT create an account. The most you can get away with is "Remind me later".

So I gritted my teeth, went through the install, copied the pictures onto my hard drive, and uninstalled the damn thing. Only then I realized I could have bypassed this by booting my computer into Linux, sticking the CD in, and getting the pictures off. Since the Easy Share program wouldn't run on Linux, it would not launch itself when I click on the CD, so I may be able to see directly into the image directory hidden somewhere in the Easy Share directory structure. So I did that, just for the heck of it. And of course, Linux was able to see the picture directory on the CD right away. Should have thought of it earlier. I'm glad to know -- attention, flame bait! -- that Linux is useful for something. :-) Kodak -- less so. I'll try to remember not to buy Kodak disposable cameras again. (Because I'm pretty sure it wasn't HEB's idea to stick the Easy Share software on the CD: it must be part of an agreement it has with Kodak about developing pictures from their disposable cameras.)

For a moment I thought, maybe it was just me.

(See the header of the pre-previous post.)

I got a new laptop at work, which, to borrow a phrase from certain digerati, I'll call Teh Shiny. :-) It has both Windows and Linux on it. Our SA at work installed Debian on it. That's the only distribution he supports. For a short while I was truly impressed with how well and painlessly it worked. It only took Steve about 2 hours to get the wireless connection working, as opposed to days and days he spent on my other Linux laptops (with very little result). And the wireless connection was stable from then on, instead of flickering on and off. That was encouraging. The laptop also recognized USB devices and did not crash when a USB device was plugged in. When I plugged in my camera, it came up automatically. More than that, when I tried to play an .AVI movie file, it played! In my previous attempts to play movie files on SUSE 9.1, the player immediately crashed, or in the best case, played the sound without the video. This was a quantum leap above my previous experiences with Linux.

I was happy, except for one little detail. There was no sound. The movie was silent. The sound icon on the desktop was set to the minimum, and when I tried to push it towards the maximum, it would bounce right back. So I asked the SA at work if he could do anything about the sound. He thought it shouldn't be hard. Well, after spending a day working on my lappy, he told me that with all the customizations he made the laptop has diverged quite a bit from standard Debian, and he would like to install Ubuntu on it instead. (No word as to whether he got the sound to work, but if I had to guess, the answer is no -- otherwise why would he want to install a different operating system on it? :-))

So now I'm thinking, as an answer to the question raised in the pre-previous post, maybe it's Not Just Me. :-)

Maybe it's just me, or maybe Linux is really not ready for the desktop

In preparation to moving to the new house, I decided it's time to pack. But not the physical stuff. First I was going to clean up the Augean stables of my data. In a gesture the futility (or just ill-timedness) of which is becoming more apparent day by day, I am trying to consolidate my data scattered around numerous partitions of numerous laptops. Some laptops I've used over the last, say, 4 years, had both Windows and Linux partitions. So right now I'm dealing with a total of 5 partitions. Many of them have the same identically named folders. Some files in those folders have the same names, but different sizes and dates. Other files are identical. Yet other files exist only on some laptops and not on others. All this bedlam has resulted from the fact that for many years I haven't thought of a good way to synchronize files between different computers. I still don't have a foolproof way to accomplish this, but at least I have thought of something that should work well enough. Or so I thought until yesterday.

Why it's not an easy problem for me, and how Linux makes it harder

It complicates matters that at some times in my life I've used Linux for daily computing needs, such as when I worked with Gimp for long periods of time. At those times I also stored other elements of the daily computing narrative -- mail, pictures, interesting articles saved from the net, on the Linux partition of the machine I was working on. Then, as I was getting more and more frustrated with Linux (see, for example, this entry), I would switch back to Windows, but I would not always copy the files over to the Windows partition of the machine. Or I would copy some files but not others. (And not just because I was lazy: Linux did not cooperate well on this task. Imagine this: you copy a directory from one location to another, and then find out that not all files in the directory got copied. About 1/4 of the files didn't make it over. Why? What's so special about the ones that were left behind? You pore over their names -- too long? Contain symbols that could be by some stretch of imagination interpreted as scpecial characters? No, nothing like that. Their dates, their extensions? Any pattern at all? Nope. SUSE had randomly decided to not copy some files when copying a directory. I first noticed this bug in SUSE 8.<something> , and later when I upgraded to 9.1, it still had it. This meant I could not copy all my directories from a Windows partition to a Linux partition in one operation. I had to descend down each directory tree, and select individual files and copy them that way! What tedium, what a stupid waste of time. No wonder I wasn't very diligent about maintaining my files synchronized.)

Then after a couple of years I acquired a new laptop, which again was partitioned into Windows and Linux, I copied over some files from the old laptop to the new, but not others, and the story repeated itself. Add to this a fact that I keep some of my personal data on my work laptop (yes, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, but is there anyone who doesn't do that? :-) and it's easy to see how I got myself into an unbearable mess.

Finally I decided to bite the bullet and sort out this mess once and for all. I set out to review the data scattered over several laptops, determine the "definite" version of each file that may exist across several laptops with different date-time stamps, and to put all those files on a gigantic external hard drive. I may try to sell my old and slow laptop, if I can find a buyer, or just give away, keeping only the newest laptop (not so new anymore either). The external hard drive plugs into a USB port and therefore can be easily ported from a machine to a machine, hereby relieving me of a need to keep files synchronized between machines. So the files would live in just one place (with appropriate backups to other external hard drives, perhaps).

I thought it was a good solution, until Linux threw a proverbial wrench into it.

So I held my nose and got on with the job. First, I copied the data from the old laptop's Windows partition over to its Linux partition (can't do it the other way around: Windows does not see the Linux partition, nor do I remember my Windows password I stopped using 2 years ago. :-)) I sorted out file dates, times and sizes, and was able to satisfactorily determine the "definite" version of each file that was in doubt. So far, so good. Tedious, but... not so much more than scrubbing the bathroom. Given the choice between physical cleaning and data cleaning, I'm not sure which one I would choose.

Then I plugged in the USB hard drive into my old laptop, and was elated to see that Linux (SUSE 9.1, to be exact) recognized it and was able to read the data on it! This was more than I typically expect from Linux! So I proceeded to copy the files to the hard drive. Which was a slow process, because the hard drive, having been used before with my new laptop, already contained different versions of some of the files I was copying! So I hunkered down to sort out the "definite" versions of each file in doubt. I did not spend more than 15 minutes on this before my old laptop froze. The mouse stopped moving, the keyboard stopped reacting to keystrokes. My laptop went completely catatonic, and there was nothing left for me to do than to push the power button to shut it down.

I have experienced these out-of-the-blue laptop freezes before with Linux, and I always suspected that they were somehow caused by my unstable wireless connection at home. (Which is another tale of woe unto itself, mentioned in the post I linked to above.) My wireless signal flickers in an out of existence several times an hour, sometimes several times a minute. I was wondering if perhaps SUSE gets into a bad state trying to pick up the wireless connection. But this time I did not have the wireless card plugged in. This time I was using an ethernet cable, since I've given up on having wireless access on Linux long ago. So, just in case, I unplugged the ethernet cable and rebooted. Again, the laptop froze after just some 10 minutes. It barely made it through boot up!

Then I started to wonder if it was the USB hard drive, after all, that was causing this problem. I unplugged it, rebooted the lappy, and voila -- it's been stable for days. So it must be the USB driver, or something, that causes it to freeze. Wow. For all the highly praised Linux stability, for all the talk of how it puts Windows instability to shame, I must say USB devices never caused any of my Windows boxes to crash. Of course, my version of SUSE is 2-3 years old, and there may be better USB drivers for it now; (but then, a little voice whispers to me that Windows XP is 5 years old, and I never had to download new drivers for it!) Of course, a person who truly enjoys fixing such things would probably hunt down a better USB driver for Linux, but I'm not one of those people. I don't have days and weeks to spend on this. I just want to Get Things Done.

I almost long for the days when I used to complain that Linux can't see devices I plug in. It seems that things are worse when it can actually see them! :-)

And now I have a nice stable lappy, but I can't back up my files. :-) Well, I actually have a way -- I zipped up my files and ftp'd them over to my website. From there I'll copy them onto an external hard drive. How silly.