Last weekend was The Next HOPE (following from The Last HOPE) in New York City. HOPE stands for Hackers on Planet Earth and is a biennial conference put on by 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. The Wikileaks guy may or may not have shown up. Some online say he didn't. Someone else told me "oh yeah, he was sitting behind the Tesla stage drinking Club Mate all day Friday," so who knows. Apparently his keynote timeslot resulted in everything being timeshifted by one hour though. The physical security folks said he ran long. Though maybe it was a substitute who did so? I don't know. Kaminsky had another of the keynote slots, talking about SQL injection and the difference between programmer ways of thinking ("I'll just concatenate these strings here…") and programming-language-developer thinking ("We'll parameterize these, so they don't break anything…"). He made the very good point that the reason programmers ignore that parameterization stuff is that it's a pain in the neck to have to jump all around as you try to read the code figuring out "ok now insert first parameter…back up to code…second parameter…wait which one's the seventh parameter?" and outlined some ideas he has to make syntax programmers won't hate that can still fix the problem. And yeah, let's face it. Trying to escape every bad character is total Whack-A-Mole.

A group of librarians were here talking about how to get FOSS into libraries. They had a very important tip: brush your teeth. If you show up looking like a caricature of a hacker, it's a bit hard for the librarians to take you seriously. So, look like you've bathed since last Tuesday and know what a toothbrush is. Yes, they mentioned Evergreen.

Deb "freedeb" Nicholson from the Free Software Foundation spoke about why diversity is important to the growth of Free Software (hint: more diversity = more people!) and how to get there. In a similar vein, Nikki Neulist had a talk called "Hey, Don't Call That Guy A Noob: Toward a More Welcoming Hacker Community." She was talking about how new people provide new perspectives and if you're willing to just be helpful early on, they can end up really useful later. I think this is something we've tried to exemplify in the Ubuntu world, though I do still occasionally see some unwelcoming behaviour on IRC. Unfortunately, during her talk's Q&A, some guy thought it made sense to say tough cookies, this is our hacker culture and if your skin's not thick enough, you don't belong here. C4BL3FL4M3 and I started yelling at him from opposite sides of the room. How on Earth could "if you don't like our bad attitude, GTFO" fit in in a conversation about being welcoming? Why did he even attend if that's his attitude? Troll!

The Vintage Computing talk ended in me dragging a 14 year old I was showing around to the Borders across the street to buy her a copy of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution to give her more context about things like the Altair and the PDP-11.

There were talks on "Color, Light, and Perception" and "Cooking for Geeks." In the former, I learned that magenta does not exist as part of the white light spectrum. You will not find it with a prism. It's not a single wavelength of light but rather a trick in our brains when red and blue wavelengths overlap. I also learned about additive colours, which is what the RGB colour model we use for defining colours on a computer screen is based on. The reason I see white captions on a black background as red/blue-split (like when you look at 3D stuff without the glasses) when seeing it at an angle out of my glasses was also explained. Neat! The latter was about food science, a basic introduction to it, and a reference to there being more in the speaker's new book of the same title. Apparently the temperatures we're taught in food safety courses assume you're not hitting the coldest part of the meat, that your thermometer's wrong, and a bit more, so they're overestimated by a good 15°. Not that I eat meat or am interested in testing that. Time at temperature was brought up as well—the fact that reaching a temperature doesn't matter as much as maintaining that temperature for a decent amount of time. Various enzymes take various times to break down into something tasty. I think he said brussels sprouts were in the category of things that need to spend a good amount of time at high temperature to taste good. Someone should tell my mum this. Hers are too bitter.

I missed much of the "Simpson's Did It" talk, but I caught Mouse's segment where she talked about Mozart. Apparently "Miserere" by Gregorio Allegri was well-loved by the pope of his time. So well-loved, that he had analogue DRM on it! That is, no copies of the sheet music could be made without the pope's permission, period. Only two copies ever were, and they were for princes who had to promptly return them as soon as they finished. Additionally, the song could only be played during Easter week. What did Mozart do, knowing he couldn't get sheet music? Showed up, listened, memorised, and transcribed from memory. DRM broken! Thanks, Mozart!

If you want to write online about controversial topics and you find that your free speech is being harmed by those who do not want you to be heard sending false DMCA notices, you should know about Project DoD, a web host who is willing to send a counter-notice in response (apparently unlike most others). You still have the mandatory 10-day offline period while the counter-notice goes through, but at least it's not a permanent offline period. They're willing to fight for their clients. Lawyer Tiffany Rad (who was my carpool for the trip) and Chris Mooney were talking about this project of theirs.

I mentioned earlier taking a 14 year old around. She's a smart kid named Johannah, so I was introducing her to the other LinuxChix and other assorted cool people. I explained public key cryptography (the practical, not the mathematical theory) to her and showed her how to generate a GPG key. She's an Ubuntu user, so I got her uncle to pick up a copy of How Linux Works for her. It looks like an excellent book for her skill level. It starts out with basic command line stuff and goes on all the way through explaining bootloaders and system internals. Cool!

We attended a LinuxChix Lunch on Saturday, where the women who'd been there in 2002 for H2K2 were expressing surprise at how many women were present, saying LinuxChix would soon be obsolete. They said H2K2 had somewhere between 10 and 30 women total. Improvement was obvious. And by the way, yes, the hacking community does seem to have more women than the Free Software community. There was definitely a higher percentage of women here than even at SELF, which I've already said has more than I remember seeing at any other Linux event (uh, outside of LinuxChix events, obviously). Funny enough, when we got back, I ended up talking to some woman I'd never met who saw my panoramas on my screen and wanted to know how I took them. I told her about Hugin and Free Software and Ubuntu. Anyway, the "funny" bit is that one of the first things she said when asked how she liked the con (she'd never been to a hacker thing before, but her son was a speaker, so she showed up) was (paraphrased) "this is all very interesting, but I notice it's mostly male, and mostly Caucasian." Yeah…still got a ways to go.

I had a duty while I was there too. I was handing out postcards for Ohio LinuxFest to everyone I saw with a Tux, GNU, or distro logo on their shirt, laptop, or tattoo. There were a lot of Ubuntu users. At one point I thought I saw an Ubuntu laptop in front of me, but it was actually OSX.

From http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is Issue #202 for the week July 11th - July 17th and is available here.

In this issue we cover:

• Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase calls all artists to contribute to next version of Ubuntu
• Operation Cleansweep: We Need You!
• Ubuntu Accessibility Team Personas Survey
• ISO testers for the Hall of Fame
• Ubuntu User Days Wrap-Up
• Ubuntu Stats
• Rocking The LoCo Council
• Ubuntu: a computer operating system built around community
• Ubuntu Chicago Bike Tour
• The Early-Summer LoCo BBQ at hutchnate’s house was a tasty success!
• Ubuntu Honduras LoCo Team Wakes up
• Launchpad News
• Launchpad EPIC 2010 photo
• Showing first/last 40 comments in Launchpad
• Three tips for faster launchpadlib api clients
• Ahmed Kamal Joins the Horsemen
• Reviewers Team and Operation Cleansweep
• Ubuntu Manual Project core philosophy
• Man Your Browser
• Android SDK on Ubuntu
• KDE SC 4.5 RC 2 Packages Available
• KOffice 2.2.1 is out
• Updating the Ubuntu Packaging Guide
• Building a Ubuntu website on Stackexchange
• In The Press
• In The Blogosphere
• Mozilla Ramps Up Vulnerability Reward Program
• Firefox joins Microsoft in uncool kids class - Chrome hangs out, looks good
• Linux to eclipse Microsoft’s ‘all-in’ tablet enthusiasm
• TurnKey Appliance Development Contest: An Open Source Summer Bonanza!
• The GIMP 2.6.10 Ubuntu Karmic And Lucid PPA
• Google App Inventor: Make Your Own Android Apps
• Spotify music streaming service comes to Linux
• The End of Shot of JAQ
• Introducing HTML5: a book review
• Keeping things simple: the Linux kernel
• sudo apt-get install sl is Fun!
• Featured Podcasts
• Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
• Upcoming Meetings & Events
• Updates and Security
• and much much more!

This issue of The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

• Amber Graner
• Liraz Siri
• J Scott Gwin
• Penelope Stowe
• Nigel Babu
• Mike Holstein
• Daniel Calab
• And many others

If you have a story idea for the Weekly Newsletter, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

Except where otherwise noted, content in this issue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License BY SA Creative Commons License

Article contributed by Amber Graner

In the latest LoCo Team interview in this US Teams Interview Series - LoCos, Leaders, and Lessons Learned, Amber Graner talks to Martin Owens of the Ubuntu Massachusetts LoCo Team. Martin talks about the tools the team uses, events they attend as well as help with, and what advice the Massachusetts LoCo Team would give to other teams and community members and much much more!

US-Teams: Could you tell us a little about you and what your role in the LoCo Team is?

Martin Owens: My current role in the Massachusetts Local team is as a leader and official contact to the world wide community, I provide each member with assurances and self-authority in cases where members are too shy to take the initiative and I also supply the local team with news and interesting updates that may effect us.

US: When was the Ubuntu Massachusetts LoCo team started? How long after it was started did it take to get approved?

MO: It was started way back in 2007 when a group of us went out for pizza, since then it’s become much more formalised now that there is some direction and definition about what a local community group is supposed to do. Once you’ve found your feet and got some events organised it’s possible to get approved, we got approved way back when you had to go to the council directly. It was easier to set up events since Ship-it would still give people small amounts of CDs to get started back then.

US: What tools do you use for your team? Mailing Lists, Forums, IRC, websites, Micro-blogging sites etc.

MO: At the moment our primary communication is IRC for transient discussion and mailing lists for announcements and more permanent discussions, we do announce on website, broadcast accounts and forums but we tend not to use them for more than that.

US: On the road to LoCo approval what were some of the challenges the team faced and how did the team overcome them?

MO: The team has had not unexpected criticism from the geek community here in Massachusetts about the singular focus on one distribution, from the FSF (based in Boston) and the very old and well established LUGs and university groups who don’t want to look like they favor one commercial product.

This has made event organizing challenging since we have to attract people who are outside of universities in a university town and try and spark interest in advocacy in unusual places.

US: What are the biggest challenges your team faces now and what strategies does the team use to over come them?

MO: Apathy is the biggest problem with any team I think, keeping things energetic over a long time without having any full time members to keep on top of the little administrative burdens which make everything less fun. That’s why things like loco.ubuntu.com are needed, to take away the burdens and help us make making events awesome and enjoyable.

US: What types of activities does the LoCo Team participate in? Are there any events the LoCo team sponsors?

MO: We used to have training sessions every Tuesday for two years and sometimes special sessions on Wednesdays for advanced classes but the community center moved we were teaching at moved to Apple iMacs and now those have stopped. We also run events at Sci-Fi or similar events, booths at these events can pull in people who are slightly non geeky and introduce new people and add a layer of authenticity which is missing from something not on a shelf in a shop.

US: What are some of the projects your LoCo team has worked on? What are some of the upcoming projects the Ubuntu community can expect to see from the LoCo team throughout the next cycle?

MO: After the success of Anime Boston we’ve got another similar event at Pi-Con5, it’s a mid state event which should attract people from a wide area who can’t normally get into Boston proper. There is also Ubuntu Hours happening and some random community work sparking off which plans are not yet confirmed for.

US: What are some of the ways in which the LoCo actively recruits new members? What resources have you created or do you use (ie posters, fliers, business cards, banners etc).

MO: Traditionally we’ve tried to keep our advertising to Ubuntu it’s self, the thinking was that attracting new Ubuntu members would grow the pool of interested people who would come and help out inside the group for advocacy. Now I think it’s time to reassess that thinking and perhaps have adverts for the group it’s self in places such as universities.

US: What do you think is the best aspect of being part of a LoCo team is?

MO: Getting support from people who you know.

US: What has been the most rewarding and exciting moment for the LoCo Team to date and why?

MO: Probably setting up a community lab with ubuntu, including servers then training people how to use the PXE boot to install ubuntu on many new machines to go out into the community.

US: What suggestions would you offer for newly formed LoCo teams or those teams working toward approval right now?

MO: Make sure you do social events, get a home base organized even if it’s a coffee shop somewhere and make sure there is an official contact, and don’t worry about stepping on peoples toes at the start, too many times people are too cautious with their organisation plans.

US: What tips, tricks, tools, references etc would you suggest for the leadership of a LoCo team?

MO: Use all the resources available to make great posters and flyers, http://openclipart.org/ http://spreadubuntu.neomenlo.org/ or http://ubuntu-artists.deviantart.com anything that you can legally derive wonderfully looking designs and work them into local targets.

US: When you think of the Ubuntu Community and the spirit of Ubuntu how does the LoCo embody and share that spirit?

MO: We embrace the code of conduct and look to make sure there isn’t any mean spirits, everyone should be free to enjoy Ubuntu and it’s community.

US: Is there anything else about the LoCo team, or suggestions for being an effective and successful LoCo team you would like to share that you haven’t already?

MO: Make sure that you set everything up and listen to advice from other leaders, they’ve usually got great ideas in what kind of events to set up.

[Discuss this interview with the Massachusetts Team on the Forum]

Originally posted by Elizabeth Krumbach here on Fri Jul 9 2010 19:59

Recently I was invited to go on the Oracle TechCast video show to talk about community within the context of MySQL.

I was joined by Luke Kowalski, Oracle VP in the Corporate Architecture Group, and we discussed a range of topics. The primary message I took to the show was that (a) we should not pre-judge Oracle yet for their stewardship of the MySQL based on the fear of what could happen, but I also made it clear to Luke that (b) Oracle needs to make a firm commitment to acting within the culture and ethos of Open Source to have an effective, fulfilling relationship with the MySQL community.

You can see the full interview below:

Can’t see the video? Check it out here!