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Wed, 07 Jan 2015

Engaging Developers with Content -- talk notes by Asheesh

How to think about marketing, when marketing to developers

Video link:

Interesting phrases:

Types of content:

Interesting things they found:

Interesting questions:

Things I need to revisit:

More content ideas:

Questions for me:

What to measure, early on:

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Quick thoughts about Jade's Meteor community talk

URL:

Very interesting phrases:

Very interesting concepts:

Remaining questions for Jade:

Questions/thoughts it brings up for me:

Other remarks:


Overall remarks:

It's not every day I watch a talk from someone who works in my space who has an idea that makes me rethink a lot of what I've done.

Welcome to Sandstorm.

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Sat, 19 Oct 2013

Meaning

I've noticed that there are some tasks that seem important, and for which I am happy to invest sporadic effort, but that don't seem to repeatedly attract my attention. The obvious one here is my nice external disk array for doing backups.

By contrast, I've been energized this morning to work on OpenHatch and the Open Source Comes to Campus program. Right now I'm a volunteer with OpenHatch, not a paid staffer.

It feels much more interesting to work on OpenHatch things while Shauna is running an event in NYC (and where I can see on IRC and by email the activity going on there) than it seems interesting to fix my personal storage array. I suspect this relates to my sense of personal meaning being intertwined with feeling like I'm part of some activity that other people are part of, synchronously.

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Mon, 30 Sep 2013

Linux 3.8 (or newer) on Ubuntu Precise (12.04)

At this time, the latest Linux kernel that has been specially prepared for use with Ubuntu 12.04 is based on Linux 3.8. The rest of this answer is about how to get Linux 3.8 within Ubuntu 12.04.

(Before I get into that, first an aside: you've linked to the "mainline kernel" PPA, a collection of Linux kernel packages that have not been specially tested and prepared by the Ubuntu kernel team. You can read more about mainline kernels here. The mainline kernels are not suggested for installation, except if you are doing tests or you experience a major problem that it can be resolved with a specific mainline kernel.)

The recommended way to get the latest kernel on Ubuntu 12.04 is to stay within Ubuntu 12.04, rather than enabling separate package archives like the PPA you linked to. The latest Ubuntu 12.04 provides special package names to install the more up-to-date packages.

To install them, open a terminal (CTRL+ALT+T) and issue the following commands.

sudo apt-get install linux-image-generic-lts-raring
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic-lts-raring

When the installation completes, you can reboot your system to boot from 3.8 kernel. (The above commands won't uninstall anything (unless your APT is somehow misconfigured), and definitely won't auto-reboot, so you can run the commands and then do the reboot at some later time.)

The bootloader that Ubuntu uses (Grub) lists the newer kernel first, so it will boot from 3.8 automatically (except if you have installed a newer than 3.8) (and except if you know you've customized Grub somehow).

A note about why 3.8: Because of the Long Term Support status of Ubuntu 12.04, many different kernels will be backported (aka specially prepared) from newer versions of Ubuntu. (Additionally, a backported graphics stack (X and related packages) is available.) The 12.04.3 version (that has been released on 22 August 2013) contains the latest kernel and graphics (X) packages from Ubuntu 13.04 (raring). Ubuntu raring has 3.8, so therefore the "backported" version of Linux from raring to precise is also 3.8.

A note about the best way to get an even fresher version, like 3.11: Wait for Ubuntu Saucy (13.10) to come out, and then wait (not very long) for the Ubuntu Long Term Support process to backport that to Precise (12.04). Per the release schedule, Saucy should be out on October 17. Then you will be able to install linux-image-generic-lts-saucy!

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Mon, 29 Apr 2013

How I just imported my signed keys

First I set up GPG Agent. To do that I followed the Gentoo documentation, with particular attention paid to section 4 and configuration files.

Within ~/Maildir/cur/ I just ran:

for thing in `grep -l -i 'Subject: .*signed'`           
do              
gpg --decrypt < $thing | gpg --import
done

As it happens, I synchronized all my email using Dovecot dsync, so I could do this on my laptop.

Then I just ran:

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --send-keys 37E1C17570096AD1
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --send-keys EC4B033C70096AD1

to upload those to the keyservers.

Now I can delete all those three month old caff emails. Sorry everyone.

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Mon, 13 Aug 2012

From Zephyr


   geofft / supost.q / geofft  19:56  (Wobbuffet!)
       "the cuttest girls on campus"
   geofft / supost.q / christy  20:13  (Christy Swartz)
       The cute ones are always the deadliest.
-> geofft / supost.q / ageng  20:19  (Homomorphosis: when a caterpillar turns into another caterpillar.)
       a cut above the rest.

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Fri, 03 Aug 2012

Anonymous should submit patches

About a day ago, there was a problem with the Wikimedia Foundation websites.

Leslie Carr provided this explanation:

[22:26:13] <LeslieCarr> in reality, looks like a bad squid config was pushed, then when it was rolled back, the site came back up

Apparently, the BBC asked why the sites were down.

George Herbert suggests:

They probably wanted to make sure it was accidental and not some denial of service attack (i.e., newsworthy). Were say Anonymous to jump on us for some unforseeable reason, it would be newsworthy, and I am sure the newsies would come running to everyone ever publicly identified as knowing anything about ops at the site...

Conclusion: Anonymous should start submitting (broken) patches to the Wikimedia operations team, in the hopes one of them lands and causes the site to go down, so it can get more press.

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Mon, 30 Jul 2012

AisleRiot

I only just figured out that AisleRiot is supposed to be a pronounceable pun.

...in addition, I wrote AisleRiot (pronounced I'll Riot), the GNOME solitaire program.

The source of that quote has a plausible Last-Modified header of Mon, 28 Aug 2000 04:07:12 GMT.


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Sat, 07 Apr 2012

Advocacy-free

advocacy-free My writing used to be heavily philosophical, with lots of advocacy and questioning. I still consider the why of things much more meaningful than the how, but it's time to focus on the how rather than the why. I'm making this little writing place a "no trolling zone." I will try to avoid preaching, and the obvious corollary is that I will also avoid worrying about whether people agree or disagree. Instead, I will try to simply share little pieces of code as it comes to me. There is no advocacy on here. I frequent a few scuba diving forums. One annoying part of scuba culture is that it can be very polarizing. A bunch of people over here say there is only One True Way to dive, right down to using the exact same equipment as each other. Another bunch of people over there disregard the conventional wisdom and choose to dive solo, attracting criticism from young and old. The forums discovered a long time ago that running flame wars simply drove members away, so they have instituted "no trolling" zones within their boards, places where people can discuss the how of solo diving, or sidemounting, or DIR, without getting into a battle of whether such a thing is a good idea or not.

-- Reg Braithwaite.

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Thu, 11 Aug 2011

Apple and product names

...in the comparison with apple is that apple has never had a product called “apple”.

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