hypatia dot ca

I just rebooted my work desktop into Karmic Koala, the new release of Ubuntu, my preferred distribution of GNU/Linux.  I don’t have much substantive to say, but the qualitative experience has so far been pretty amazing.

Not only did I get to work all day while the upgrade was downloading, only having to reboot at the very end, but everything worked as I expected when I rebooted – which is to say that the only thing which didn’t work was VMWare, which I expected to not work as with every kernel upgrade.  I might even take this as an opportunity to give Virtualbox a proper try (it was less than amazing last time I did).

Let me make that really clear – I only had about twenty minutes of downtime for the entire upgrade, and it would have been less if the installer had left upgrading Firefox until the end, as that was the only thing which broke (and even then, only partly – no new urls, but clicking through links was fine) while the upgrade was going on.  Try that with Windows :)

Things feel just a little snappier, just a little shinier.  I’m really impressed so far.  The new theme and icon set is lovely.

If you’ve been putting off trying out Ubuntu or Linux in general, now’s a great time to start!

My Mum is English by ancestry, and has for a number of years been making one of her family’s traditional recipes to go with Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. I think it’s really yummy, so I asked her if I could share it.  Here it is, mostly verbatim – I just separated out a list of ingredients for easier shopping.

English Bread Sauce

Ingredients

• 10-15 cloves
• 1 medium onion
• 3 cups milk
• 1 tsp salt
• 1-2 cups bread crumbs (the ones you can get pre-made at the grocery store work, but bakery ones are better :) )
• butter

Directions

• Stick the cloves in the onion.
• Add onion to milk in a saucepan.
• Simmer for about one hour on low heat, so that milk is infused with the onion-clove flavour. Do not boil.
• Remove onion and discard.
• Add salt and about 1 cup bread crumbs, and simmer over low heat.  Again, do not  boil.
• The crumbs will swell up, and the sauce should have a thick consistency. If it is too runny after simmering for a few minutes, add some more bread crumbs.

Serve with turkey, ideally with more bread crumbs, these ones fried in butter.  About a half cup should be enough – use whatever you have left.

No-context-needed IRC log time!

-!- zfe [n=Gianluca@88.252.29.47] has joined #ubuntu-women
<zfe> is this the kitchen?
<zfe> who would make me a sammich?
<redacted> zfe: No this is not the kitchen
<zfe> aren’t you women?
<redacted> zfe: you are welcome to go into your own kitchen and make yourself a sandwich.
<redacted> zfe: please read the channel guidelines in the topic
-!- mode/#ubuntu-women [+o hypa7ia] by ChanServ
<zfe> ok i will while you make me a sammich
-!- mode/#ubuntu-women [+b *!*=Gianluca@88.252.29.*] by hypa7ia
-!- zfe was kicked from #ubuntu-women by hypa7ia [http://xkcd.com/322]

Nicknames redacted to protect the innocent.

On September 1st, I sent an email to the HackLab discussion list asking for folks to commit. Less than 24 hours later, members and non-members alike stepped up and pledged $700 in addition to my initial commitment of $200. Our MakerBot Batch 7 CupCake CNC will ship in early October, hopefully in time for MiniSoOnCon!

3D printing is so amazing. This is the MITS Altair of a DIY revolution whose shape I’m not at all certain of. I couldn’t be more exited to see what the hacklabbers make and how we improve the machine, too.

In alphabetical order, the donors were:

3ric Johanson
Alex Leitch
Byron Sonne
Chad Mounteny
Cheryl Mok
Chris Pilkington
Dale Babiy
Dan Kaminsky
Eric from NYC Resistor
Kate Raynes-Goldie
Sergio Martns
Seth Hardy

Welcome to the future, folks.

-Leigh

One of the early results from the dialog the Python community is having about diversity issues is a new blog – Python Open Mike.  The idea is that there are folks out there who have something to say that’s relevant to the Python community, but who don’t necessarily keep a blog themselves.  Open Mike is a venue for their posts.    It’s moderated, but easy to post to via email, and syndicated on Planet Python.  Though it came out of the diversity mailing list, it’s not intended to be restricted to diversity issues.  So if you have something to say about Python and are disinclined for whatever reason to set up your own, feel free to step up to the Mike!

-Leigh