Month: March 2009

Happy Ada Lovelace Day – Silvia Pfeiffer

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, and below is my blog about a female geek I admire! Get writing your Ada Lovelace Day blog post, sign the pledge and add a link to your role model blog post to the Geek Feminism wikia page! This would be a great assignment for teachers to take to their schools to get students knowing about famous and accomplished women in technology 🙂

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Silvia Pfeiffer

I chose to do my Ada Lovelace blogpost on Dr Silvia Pfeiffer. Silvia has been a friend for many years, and she continues to be a technical, professional, academic and personal inspiration. She also let’s me stay over when I’m visiting Sydney and helps maintain my addiction to excellent takeaway Indian food, so this is my way of both showcasing Silvia as a fantastic ICT role model for women and girls, but also as a thank you for being such a role model for me 🙂

Silvia has a broad swathe of skills and accomplishments. She is a software developer, project manager, AV guru, Open Source project lead for Annodex, Open Media advocate, co-founder and CEO of an up and coming Australian video metrics company called Vquence and much more. She used to work for the CSIRO as a researcher and software developer, and has forged a fascinating career around video and online media, putting her on the cutting edge of technology and emerging markets.

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Silvia has also put substantial time into voluntary community community projects, including as a member of the Sydney Linux User Group committee, on the Pearcey Awards board, the head of AV for linux.conf.au 2007 (which was the best video/audio coverage linux.conf.au has ever seen), a constant participant in various open media and open standards events and committees, a participant in online accessibility work, the coordinator and founder of the Foundations of Open Media Software workshops, co-founder of OLPC Friends, and a volunteer for various Open Source events including Software Freedom Day, SLUG events, OLPC Friends events and more.

Some of the things that really amaze me about Silvia include her constant optimism, professionalism, business smarts and how she manages to balance all this while simultaneously being a fantastic mother, who for many years did this as a single parent.

Her wonderful son is learning programming – just like Mum – so who could ask for a better role model on Ada Lovelace Day 🙂

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If you want more information about Silvia, check out her brief biography, her blog, and the many articles she’s written.

Ubuntu training for educators

On the weekend I ran a short training session for teachers about Ubuntu. It was a lot of fun, and surprisingly most of the teachers had never played with Ubuntu before. Usually at these kinds of events, the people who turn up to the Linux/Ubuntu session are the hard core converted, so that was lovely!

We spoke about a lot of stuff, but unfortunately, even though I mentioned the need to be online, the people running the day hadn’t put two and two together (booting from a livecd and asking to be online) and they didn’t know their proxy details to get online, so the session was slightly less interactive than I would have liked. I wanted to have the online Ubuntu repository available so we could install and play with ome specific applications. Anyway, below are some useful links for the people who attended, and for anyone else interested.

The meaning of “Ubuntu”:

Ubuntu is an African word meaning ‘Humanity to others’, or ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.

Information about Ubuntu:

Information about Open Source generally:

Make sure you join the edulists open source mailing list to connect with other teachers using and talking about Open Source in education. Join the list and introduce yourself 🙂

Have fun everyone! If you have additional links that would be helpful, please add them to the comments.

Iceland software resellers being screwed by disappearing clients and licensing contracts

I just read this really interesting blog post about what is happening in Iceland. I won’t go into detail as those interested should simply read it. Please note, it has some crude language and imagary. Basically the companies that are falling over due to the financial crisis have multi-year contracts for software licensing, and the software resellers are being held responsible for the outstanding yearly fees of customers that don’t exist anymore. Really nasty stuff.

I am generally against Microsoft bashing, because I find it both contrary to our message of software freedom, and that it turns off newcomers. Basically I believe we have so many positive and inspiring messages that we don’t need to use “because it’s better than M$, lolz” as a rationale for free and open source software (FOSS). However, stories like this are clear cut examples of how companies such as Microsoft can play pretty nasty when it comes to the bottom line. For another example of Microsoft playing dirty, if you haven’t already heard about the TomTom fiasco, here is a wrapup by Glyn Moody about why he thinks Microsoft are targetting embedded Linux companies.

It is very frustrating because ultimately in a free market, you wouldn’t have these spiderwebs of glass cutting down the competition, you would have the best products and services being able to shine. I think the great think about FOSS is that in spite of all this idiocy (and in many cases because of it), the general population is turning to FOSS and to openness.

What are you doing for International Women’s Day?

International Women’s Day is coming up on the 8th March. Considering I’m in a new town and all, I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing, but I was recently told about a women’s lunch get together in Sydney happening on the 6th that sounds fun.

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Our plan is simple: bring your own lunch and join us to support International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA) charity and network with likeminded people. Entry is free, gold coin asked to help cover room rental costs and donations to IWDA will be collected separately.

Sounds like fun 🙂 And I know a lot of really awesome geek women will be there like Kate Carruthers and Spiderlily Redgold. Should be fun!

There is also an Aussiechix Python gaming hackfest on March 14th which should be awesome! And a FITT IWD Lunch event which is $120 a head unless you are a FITT member, which is $90 a head. Add events in your community to the comments below.

Even if you aren’t going to any event for IWD, take a moment to think about all the women in your life, their challenges and achievements, and about how you are helping contribute to a world where negative gender discrimination is eliminated. Of course, IWD is also a great opportunity to think about any negative discrimination, and how we can equal the playing field for everybody 🙂

And don’t forget about Ada Lovelace Day, March 24th! Blog about an awesome geek woman you know!