OSSPACK

Thanks to the effort of the tireless Borja Sotomayor for the local ACM chpater as well as the good folks at Google in Chicago, we had a local kickoff meeting for this year's Google Summer of Code at Google's Chicago office. A few accepted GSoC students, mentors, and a few Google engineers gave short presentations to a bunch of ACM-affiliated students from U of C, Northwestern, DePaul, IIT, UIC, ... I gave my first ever 'lightning talk' --- on R and the GSoC --- and after chatting a bit more rushed home to catch the end of the amazing triple-overtime win of the Bulls over the Celtics. Go Bulls for the improbable game seven in Boston!

InternetNews: "There is money in the cloud. Just ask open source startup Eucalyptus which today announced it received $5.5 million in Series A round of venture financing."

I’ve been feeling good this year about the status of women in F/OSS. The percentages are still low (in spite of the Google bursary, the number of female attendees was abysmally low at the UKUUG spring conference) but there are a number of factors contributing to my optimism:

• Hey cool, female computer scientist Barbara Liskov was awarded the Turning Award for 2008! How inspiring!
• Ada Lovelace Day was an outstanding success. While I didn’t take part (was busy!), hundreds of other bloggers, men and women alike, did. Wow! I read some amazing posts and learned a lot that day.
• On a personal level, I much less frequently encounter people who are surprised to see a woman involved
• In a similar vein as the last, I encounter far less discrimination as I once did
• The number of women on the Ubuntu Women Mailing List and IRC channel continues to grow steadily, as do the number of women involved with Ubuntu in general
• Without trying, I’ve found myself working on F/OSS projects with women much more frequently

For the first time I am starting to feel accepted and not out of place within F/OSS communities.

Then the situation with “that Ruby presentation” came about and reminded me that while we’re on the right track, we’re not there yet. For those who aren’t aware of the situation, Audrey Eschright wrote a fantastic blog post about what happened and how she felt about it: Dear Fellow Rubyists. She articulated many of the feelings I’ve had over the years when it comes to scantily-clad women being used in presentations at conferences, of which I’ll only post a snipping of here:

Women are a tiny minority in the Ruby world, and we know it. Even before someone says, “hey, it’s cool to see women working with Ruby”. (These sorts of comments are often heard as “holy cow, there’s a chick in this room.” It’s not an issue of intent. It’s that we already felt like we have a blinking arrow over our heads.)

And since we’re a minority, and we often encounter awkward responses to that, we feel marginalized. We also tend to feel marginalized when we encounter sexualized images when we’re in a room full of men we don’t know very well. Even women who like porn can feel that way. It doesn’t have anything to do with whether we like sexual content, it’s whether we’re okay with seeing it in a professional context. Some women may be fine with this (especially if they know the presenter), some may find it tacky and awkward, and some may have the immediate urge to flee the room and be anywhere else right now.

I was also pleased with her follow-up which worked to address the situation: So now what? To me, this screams “We’re not helpless victims and we are not content to simply complain. We want to actively fix things.” Bravo! I’m not involved with Ruby (I’m not even a programmer, I’m a sysadmin!) so the blog entry storm addressing Ruby and the fallout within the community haven’t really interested me, but in the general Women In F/OSS arena there have been a few blog posts that have stood out these past few days:

• Selena Deckelmann’s What works? Getting more women involved in open source. and her follow-up success story: What’s changed? Portland as an example of increasing women’s participation. I can only hope that female participation in Philadelphia continues to grow similarly, I certainly work hard to implement these same techniques and encourage others around me to do the same.
• Hackety.org: A Selection Of Thoughts From Actual Women. It was excellent to read such a cross-section of thoughts from women on the situation. Predictably there were women who were all over the board with their thoughts (women are just people, after all, and we all have our opinions). The general consensus tended to be that most of us aren’t specifically offended by porn being included in a presentation at a professional conference, but that we didn’t feel it was appropriate in that setting and that it tends to make us uncomfortable.
• Catherine Devlin’s right to complaint. I think her first sentence sums of what was most striking to me about her post: “It’s not that the community needs to ensure offensive content never happens, or that the community needs to find a single standard of what is appropriate.” Absolutely. In any community there will be a few folks who are going to be out of line, but it’s the reaction within the community to poor behavior that is vital. It makes me hand out this link often: Dorothea Salo’s What Some Folks Can Do, If They Choose which explains how important it is when men within the community speak up when they see disrespectful behavior.

Guess what was on my mind on Wednesday evening as I was finishing up preparations for my Ubuntu Open Week presentation on Ubuntu Women? I was so nervous! The last time we had an Ubuntu Women presentation for UOW was back when Gutsy was released and we had to moderate the channel. While there were some good questions, the whole session was very stressful. The next time I was approached to do an UOW session on the project I declined.

So 23:00 UTC rolls around last night and I start my presentation in #ubuntu-classroom. There are lots of people in #ubuntu-classroom-chat piping up with discussion. The session went amazingly well. There were fantastic questions, there were no issues that even made us consider moderating the channel, people were engaging and overwhelmingly excellent. A full log of the session is up now: MeetingLogs/openweekJaunty/UbuntuWomen (it’s a shame -chat wasn’t logged, because the discussion there was great).

Following the session we moved the conversation over to #ubuntu-women and continued going over key project points in a discussion where there were dissenting views and opinions but everyone remained polite and open-minded. At the end of the evening I believe disagreements remained, but everyone chose to respect each other and our different opinions and part as friends.

So…

Thank you to the members of the Ubuntu Women project who came by to be supportive and help me answer questions.

Thank you to the members of the US Pennsylvania LoCo team I’m part of for coming and lending their support.

Thank you to everyone who attended the session and asked such engaging questions.

Thank you to those who couldn’t attend but offered words of support.

Thank you to those who had differing views but chose to express them in helpful, polite and constructive ways.

Thank you to the Ubuntu community for making the Ubuntu project a place I can be genuinely proud of being a part of.

You all rock!

For those who haven't heard, Dreamwidth is a new journal hosting site using the LiveJournal code base (with improvements) but a different business model and general attitude towards their community. They're trying to be much more transparent and open about everything they're doing, they're trying to run the business so that it's focused on building a community than making a profit, and they're trying to do much better at being an active open source project than LiveJournal has managed. They also run all of their servers on Ubuntu, so they feel like part of the broader Debian community.

I haven't had a lot of time to help, but I think their ideals look great and I really would like to see them succeed.

Dreamwidth just launched open beta, which means you can purchase a paid account but they're using an invite code model for free accounts. Since they just launched, I have invite codes.

I think one of the things that will make Dreamwidth successful is to have a broad-based community, and I'd also like to see Debian and Ubuntu folks involved in their community, in a position to help with improvements to infrastructure packages they use, and help with the open source development of the underlying code base. I've therefore got a few invite codes reserved for Debian and Ubuntu folks on basically a first-come, first-served basis. If you're active in Debian or Ubuntu, want to try Dreamwidth, and think there's a chance you'd actively use it, send me e-mail and I'll send you an invite.

For more information about Dreamwidth, see their wiki.

So I got the Windows 7 RC and played around with it. The install process was nice and easy. The background image is kinda nice. The window border is ugly though. After installation the nightmare started.
A click on the combobox-like shutdown thing in the start menu shut down the (virtual) computer without asking. Okay, I was looking for trouble.
The start button is still one of the most tasteless artifacts created by man, the hover effect is an attack on my eyes. Garish T0 TEH MAXX!!!.
The general color scheme resembles toothpaste packaging. Or maybe the inspiration was the image on this page.
Windows Media Player uses not a single standard widget. The full-screen button is an ugly green sphere somewhere left in the main window, for no particular reason. Best thing: In fullscreen mode sort-of-standard translucent window border buttons appear in the expected place.
The "Games, Computer" group on the right side of the start menu also deserves a honorable mention for absence of logic.
The look of Internet Explorer 8 made me nauseous, and I'm really not exaggerating. I felt violated.
I deleted the virtual machine and the ISO image. If I had a DVD I'd have fried it in the microwave.

I just wanted to point out that our beloved Foxkeh is featured¹ on apple.com! He can be found on the Twitter business profile page in the first photo in the gallery:

Related Posts

1. Foxkeh demos Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation
2. Updating your zenphoto theme for zenphoto 1.1

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

As you can see at the XO1.5 bring-up page, I've been invited to helping the various OLPC, Quanta and VIA folks with the bring-up of the XO1.5 board from OLPC.

I'm looking forward to doing some more x86 work. It is a welcome change after my predominantly ARM based work during the last years (Openmoko, OpenPCD, OpenBeacon, OpenEZX, gnufiish, ...).

Watch Kirsty tells Oprah why/how she managed to gain so much weight.

© buzzpatrol.com - visit the celebrity gossip blog for more great content.

The official Ubuntu images for EC2 do not allow ssh directly to the root account, but instead provide access through a normal “ubuntu” user account. This practice fits the standard Ubuntu security model available in other environments and, admittedly, can take a bit of getting used to if you are not familiar with it.

This document describes how to work inside this environment using the “ubuntu” user and the sudo utility to execute commands as the root user when necessary.

SSH

First, to connect to an instance of an official Ubuntu image for EC2, you need to ssh to it as “ubuntu” instead of as “root”. For example:

ssh -i KEYPAIR.pem ubuntu@HOSTNAME

Note that existing EC2 documentation and tools like the EC2 Console and Elasticfox assume that all EC2 instances accept connections to root, so you’ll have to remember this change.

If you accidentally ssh to root on one of the official Ubuntu images, a short message will be output reminding you to use “ubuntu” instead.

SUDO

When logged in under the “ubuntu” user, you can run commands as root using the sudo command. For example:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y

Note that sudo clears the environment variables before running the command. If you need to have them set, then use the sudo -E option.

SUDO PASSWORD

The official Ubuntu images for EC2 are configured so that no password is required for sudo from the “ubuntu” user. Yes, this sacrifices a bit of security from standard Ubuntu operation, but any published hardcoded password would be more insecure, and randomly assigned passwords quickly become unmanageable when running many instances, in addition to preventing some types of remote automation described below.

Note that this policy does not allow logging in to the “ubuntu” user without a password. The password is disabled for login and not required for sudo. Login is done through the usual EC2 ssh keypair management as described above.

If you wish to increase security in this area, set the ubuntu user password and adjust the /etc/sudoers file.

sudo passwd ubuntu
sudo perl -pi -e 's/^(ubuntu.*)NOPASSWD:(.*)/$1$2/' /etc/sudoers

Make sure you set the password successfully first and remember it. If you change the sudoers file first, you will be stuck with no root access on that instance.

ROOT SHELL

If you want to switch to a root shell once you are logged in to the “ubuntu” user, simply use the command:

sudo -i

This is generally not recommended as it loses the enhanced logging of commands used as root and you risk accidentally entering commands when you did not intend to use root.

SSH SUDO

To automate a remote command as root from an external system, connect to “ubuntu” and use sudo:

ssh -i KEYPAIR.pem ubuntu@HOSTNAME 'sudo apt-get install -y apache2'

RSYNC

Now for the trickiest one. Sometimes you want to rsync files from an external system to the EC2 instance and you want the receiving end to be run as root so that it can set file ownerships and permissions correctly.

rsync -Paz --rsh "ssh -i KEYPAIR.pem" --rsync-path "sudo rsync" \ LOCALFILES ubuntu@HOSTNAME:REMOTEDIR/

The --rsh option specifies how to connect to the EC2 instance using the correct keypair. The command in the --rsync-path option makes sure rsync is running as root on the receiving end.

The -Paz options are just some of my favorites. They aren’t a key part of this rsync approach.

In order for this method to work, the “ubuntu” user must be able to sudo without a password (which is the default on the official Ubuntu images as described above).

ROOT SSH

Finally, if you wish to circumvent the Ubuntu security standard and revert to the old practice of allowing ssh and rsync as root, this command will open it up for a new instance of the official Ubuntu images:

ssh -i KEYPAIR.pem ubuntu@HOSTNAME \ 'sudo cp /home/ubuntu/.ssh/authorized_keys /root/.ssh/'

This is not recommended, but it may be a way to get existing EC2 automation code to continue working until you can upgrade to the sudo practices described above.

SEE ALSO

For more information on recommended sudo practices in Ubuntu, please refer to:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo

Comments? Questions?

[Updated 2009-04-30: Simplified rsync instructions.]