Category: Uncategorized

For the record, I think Tony is a silly man. I LOVE Hudson Hawk, it is an awesome movie, particularly the song 😉

Last week I had the pleasure of being invited as a mentor to a program aimed at encouraging 14yr old girls to come into the wide world of ICT. I of course took the FOSS angle and showed them the awesome opportunities I’ve had available to me over the past few years. I actually felt very proud of our community, and how exciting it can be for newcomers 🙂 At any rate my time in Armidale went at thus:

• Wed Evening – arrive and give talk to about a dozen locals about the business benefits of FOSS. The crowd ranged from techs to business types, and even the most non-technical person in the room waled out saying “well I’m not sure about everything I’ve just heard, all I know is I should probably be switching to Linux”. A satisfying response 😉
• Thursday – Spent all day giving talks to the 40 girls, and then taking 10 of them for practical exercises in Linux and networking. I used Frozen Bubble and the GIMP for initial addiction, and then using Google as my constant to explain how the internet works. It kept them interested and asking great questions, so I’m pretty happy with how it went. I also talked them through what is actually in a computer. It was awesome! It was funny because each group had to give a presentation at the end of the day, and about 30 mins before it was the due the organiser wandered into our room asking how our presentation was going. We responded that we hadn’t started yet much to her stress, then proceeded to do the longest most entertaining presentation with 30 mins of work 🙂 Yay for all that training in last minute presentations! We were also lucky as we had this great drama student in my group who was selected by the group to be the speaker, then freaked out, then gave an awesome performance 🙂
• Friday – Spent some time with the IT team for the Catholic school in Armidale, who oversee about 1000 pcs in the area, giving them practical advice about FOSS applications and Linux. Then I went to the film school there, which rocks! I met an awesome Buddhist/Taoist guy, and some really creative students, who had been taping the entire event the day before, including an interview with me that they loved and wanted to continue 🙂 Incidently I’m thinking about taking FOSS to morning TV next! Anyway, I introduced them to Blender3d, which I didn’t know about before then but by the power of google found for them which they were excited about. Then I spent some time wandering in Armidale and trying to install Ubuntu on an old laptop with a broken cdrom, and no LAN. Unfortunately, time beat me and I didn’t succeed.

I gave away i386 and powerpc Ubuntu CDs, about 200 all up, and generally got quite a few people excited about FOSS as well as finding about 6 people interested in starting an Armidale LUG. Rock on Armidale! Many thanks to the wonderful people I stayed with, Zonta, Armidale TAFE, the Catholic school and of course the girls.

So I found a little tidbit about Sun chief executive Scott McNealy today, he apparently named his kids after cars, after all he is a car enthusiast. Maybe it’s me, but doesn’t that seem a little weird 🙂 With that logic, my kids would be called Wong Fehung, Jet Li, Fong Sai Yuk and all kinds of weird names. Two points for anyone who can pick the enthusiasm 😉

We’ve already had 5 states want to run something for Software Freedom Day. Melbourne, Darwin, Sydney, Perth and from QLD – Townsville, Brisbane and Bundaberg. Rock on! It’ll be a great chance to draw some really positive attention to FOSS in Australia, and hopefully grow the community in a quality fashion so jump on board!!! Some planning ideas have been posted on the forums site, but I’ll get a wiki up for it ASAP.

Also the e-girls thing I’m presenting at next week has a website up finally, so check it out. It’d be fun to replicate this effort around other schools in the country.

Thanks to Leon for this talk overview of my Code vs Culture talk. I will post my outline and slides tonight 🙂

The Open Source Forum on anti-circumvention was AWESOME. It didn’t draw the crowds we expected, however I put that down to most people not understanding why it is relevant to them. The DVD story is great to initially explain how it affects you as a user, but those of us who can say “bugger it, I’ll play my DVDs no matter what”, and don’t see that processes such as legitimate reverse-engineering for interoperability are being directly threatened. Anyway, I’ll have the talk slides up on the OSF webpage in a few days and you’ll see what I mean. Vendors have the opportunity to use unclear precedents to create artificial technology monopolies. Copyright owners (and not just the big bad movie companies 😉 are desperately trying to protect their works, and sometimes unwittingly creating situations where, for instance, only Windows users can access their works legitimately, which obviously means they then lose the rest of the market. There are ways we can work together to find a clear line between copyright holders and users/developers rights. While the line isn’t clear, copyright will continue to be used as a tool to restrict interoperability. Anyway, it concerns me greatly – check out the Lexmark and Blizzard cases to see how relevant they really are, and check out the slides when they’re up.

Now for something a little different, Jeff and I are taking a whole TWO days off everything work related to take a brief rest. Honeymoon late July, and then we’ll be sweet. It has been an amazing but tiring and stressful few months.

So on thursday we are running another Open Source Forum and the topic is anti-circumvention. The discussion will no doubt also cover Fair Use (and the lack thereof in Australia) and it will be recorded. I’m looking forward to this one heaps, it’ll hopefully highlight some of the in my opinion biggest issues we face, that are also the least known about. It’ll be recorded and posted on the OSF webpage after the event.

Jeff is in Germany for GUADEC (which I really want to go to one year), and the house smells lovely ;P

I had a long interview that resulted in a few lines in a fairly well written piece by ZDNet. Unfortunately the piece didn’t really address trying to look at younger people, and the opportunities available to them, which ultimately defines the opportunities available to adults. Offering a woman all the opportunity in the world in IT isn’t going to help if she’s been brought up to think IT is utterly uninteresting, and a boys job. I believe that trying to look at getting equal opportunities and more equal expectations is the key.

I don’t believe the problem is the opportunities facing women so much as the opportunities facing girls. I was lucky enough to be the daughter of a computer technician/programmer, and growing up in a town where basically no one was using computers, so there wasn’t any negative expectations or environmental glass ceilings on me until I actually entered the ICT industry.

I’m going to be talking to a school in Armidale in a new scheme called Digi-Girls (see page 6 of http://www.women.nsw.gov.au/PDF/Archived/ap02-04edu_train.pdf) where I’ll be presenting to school age girls about the awesome world of computers (and Open Source) and the opportunities available to them. Through Open Source I have had the opportunities to travel the world, meet many people, and expand my job and life studies dramatically, and I’m hoping to bring the same opportunities to them. I believe this is where the future lies. I don’t believe achieving equal numbers in ICT for the sake of it is useful or relevant, but ensuring that equal opportunities are presented to children ensures that individuals are able to clearly chose their own future, without having their options restricted artificially. I also believe that Open Source offers an equal playing ground, which may (hopeflly) influence other areas such as politics, the corporate and scientific worlds, where in many countries and certainly in Australia women are also expected to not participate. Being expected to not participate in an area is actually worse than being actively told not to participate, because people often rally against opposition, but usually accept the status quo without noticing.

This month is crazy, I’ve got so many events I’m involved in or organising. Check out the list below for things that might be of interest to you 🙂 in chronological order

• Whoever participated in the Education letter you rock! We’ve already made a bit of a dent in the issue. Yay!
• 17th May – Talk at Meadownbank TAFE about Linux and FOSS and why it is good for the education system from both an infrastructure, and learning aspect.
• 24th-26th May – Cebit – OSV have a booth there (rock on guys!) and I’m helping out as a Volante person.
• 25th May – Evening talk at UTS by Sebastian Rahtz from the UK. Should rock! Awesome job by SLUG to get a venue and urn organised on such short notice. Thanks! 🙂
• 26th May – Volante Open Source Seminars – Please note this is a work thing, but still pretty exciting 🙂 I’m pretty proud to be working for an Aussie owned solutions provider doing Open Source 🙂
• 27th May – SLUG of course!
• 2nd June – Open Source Forum – Anti-circumvention. This forum looks to be very interesting, with speakers from both sides of the fence. Information to be emailed out soon, but some initial info is up and speakers nearly confirmed. The last two forums have been graet. Every two months seems reasonable timing to keep them going 🙂
• 16th June – Digi-girls presentation to Armidale School – This event I’m really looking forward to, introduce young women to the world of FOSS 🙂 If someone had done that for me, I’d be miles ahead of where I am now 🙂 I’m looking forward to helping bring that opportunity to new blood.

Random – Presenting to Meadowbank TAFE sometime, presenting to SCLUG and I’m probably forgetting something 😉 Also OpenEducation has been initiated. This will effectively be a sub-committee of Linux Australia, targeting education of and on FOSS. Please contact me if you are interseted in helping out on this.

In response to Mikals question about my lovely orange overalls at the Edexpo, we were thinking about putting “Free the Penguin” on the back, but that was a little controversial, so we stuck with them being attention grabbers. Not that Jeff and I need any props to achieve that aim 😉 At one point I was wandering around with a penguin stuck on my shoulder (arrr!) which made one women on her mobile nearly fall over laughing 🙂