LinuxChix Los Angeles

The rover that could, and could, and could year after year is stuck in a sand trap since this past spring. On Monday NASA will attempt to extricate the Mars Rover Spirit. You can follow the progress via news reports on the Free Spirit page, or the Mars Rover’s facebook or Twitter feeds.

And while poking around on the Mars Rover pages I found the Women on the Mars Exploration Rover team photo. What an absolutely uber cool project in which to work. Go Team

The title is a quote by Cheris Kramarae which was subsequently quoted by Carla Schroder in her article “Sexism in FOSS” which appears in a Linux Today article. (Note: Carla is a managing editor of Linux Today and one of the current coordinators of LinuxChix.)

One of the comments to the article reads

Subject: An average male nerds take on this. “Hmmm…could it be that the low numbers of women in software in general is that most women, not persons, but women, happen to be not interested in this particular field?”

And I’m so freaking tired of “women aren’t in X profession because they are not interested,” horsesh*t. Eerily similar to this which “explains” why women didn’t need the vote.

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours. Grover Cleveland, 1905

Women ARE interested in open source development. Really. Women wouldn’t be so frustrated with, in its best light, the overall lack of gender diversity in the open source community if we weren’t interested in open source. Really. Women, and some men, continue to talk about the sexism that exists in FLOSS because sexism poses a barrier to participation by women in open source. Really.

Love this! Connecting to community through community. In the words of the Mozilla Foundation,

Mozilla Service Week is all about community – your community. We want you to find a way to use technology to make a difference in your neighborhood, your school, your library, your town, a fellow public benefit organization. We welcome any act of service, no matter how small.

How to participate? Visit the Mozilla Service week page for more information. Find a volunteer opportunity in your town, your city, your state, your country, or your world through the Idealist Mozilla partner listing of volunteer opportunities. You can search by location, field of interest, or desired skill set.

I’m off to see if someone needs a volunteer webmaster. I’ll let you know how it goes.

UPDATE 9/15: Issue is gone (I hope!). Everything I wrote about fsockopen, cURL, etc. forget it. It was a server firewall issue. The reason for the ad hoc creation of dynamic rules which intermittently blocked outbound http requests is still under investigation, but the installation of a firewall that had better integration with the backend web administration interface looks to have helped.
UPDATE 9/13: Issue is back. All outside connections, including rss feeds, are out. Damn.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Anita Borg Systers Pass-it-on Award applications for a financial stipend of $500-$1000 USD to women either in, or aspiring to be in, the field of computing. From the RFP page some possible uses for the stipend could include

• Small amount to help with studies, job transfers or other transitions in life.
• A broader project that benefits girls and women.
• Projects that seek to inspire more girls and women to go into the computing field.
• Assistance with educational fees and materials.
• Partial funding source for larger scholarship.
• Mentoring and other supportive groups for women in technology or computing.

Applications close November 4, 2009. More information and an application can be had here http://www.anitaborg.org/initiatives/systers/pass-it-on-grants-program

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages posted by James Iry is a wonderfully funny, and irreverent look at software development. My favorite?

1987 – Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall’s forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall’s monitor isn’t random but an example program in a programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. Perl is born.

Yup, that’s Perl.

Makes me think of my history (herstory?). The first computer I ever worked on was the Apple IIe that included the C/PM card for the full 80 column computer experience. Ah, the memories of WordStar and playing Pong on that Apple.

April summer day
Welcome gathering Philippes
Heidi gone too soon

I ‘fess. I’m a packrat. I save everything. And since I’m ‘fessing things, I admit to not having a good system, well, ANY system, to archive digital files.

When I either change or upgrade my hardware I’ve copied my old home directories and saved them in their entirety as a archive folder in my new fresh clean home directory, and then move individual files up to work on them as needed. The plan was always to go back and systematically organize and consolidate the contents. Which never happened.

The folly of my packrat ways was highlighted when I made a backup of the files on my penultimate computer to an external usb harddrive in preparation to wipe and install a home server. Well, 5 hours and 25 GBs later the archived home directories from my last five computers finished the transfer.

So my external drive now contains the nested archived home directories from:
-> hardy.laptop
—> gutsy.laptop
—–> dapper.desktop
——-> redhat73.desktop
———> windows98.desktop

So I’ve learned that I have to Organize, Consolidate, and Delete: a.k.a. OCD

Wandering out on the web in search of apache python information and found a sweet site with some quick tips for all things *nix from nixCraft. I found what I needed on configuring Apache2 with mod_python (and you’ll be hearing all about it at our April 19th meeting), plus so much more. If the sampling below doesn’t inspire you to add the nixCraft FAQ to your RSS reader of choice, me and my minions are coming to your house and taking all your penguins away.

• MySQL Reset Root Password
• Explain: php_self or $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] Usage
• FreeBSD: Upgrade PHP4 To PHP5
• Debian IPv6 Networking Configuration

What’s the connection? On behalf of Ada Lovelace Day LinuxChix Los Angeles is highlighting Terri Haber’s in-the-trenches-sysadmin presentation at linux.conf.au in Hobert, Tasmania. And Terri brought back a Tuz from linux.conf.au! And what’s a Tuz? In addition to being the mascot for linux.conf.au, Linus Torvald is replacing Tux with Tuz for the Linux kernel release 2.6.29 to highlight the plight of the endangered Tasmanian Devils whose population is plummeting in the wild due to a contagious facial tumor disease.

And yes, that is Terri watching Linus save shave the 27 year-old-beard of Bdale Garbee to benefit Save the Tasmanian Devil foundation. (Complete slide show of the shave.)

Now back to LinuxChix Los Angeles and our contribution to Ada Lovelace Day. Ada Lovelace Day is all about highlighting the contributions of women in technology. So why Terri? Because Terri did a most difficult thing, she contributed. Contributing is hard, being visible is hard, and Terri was visibly contributing when she shared what she knew at linux.conf.au. And in her contribution, Terri advanced women’s visibility in technology. So thanks Terri, thanks for visibly contributing.