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I am!

God. November was my last post? It's been a while.

Life has been crazy busy. I just got back from SCALE, where I worked the FreeBSD booth. On Saturday night, I participated as a contestant in "The Weakest Geek", a play off "The Weakest Link". I got second place, but there's no shame in losing to a old bearded unix dude. It was a fun weekend, and I met a lot of great people. Everyone was very nice which I found very surprising, being as how I was a BSD person at a Linux convention. It was the first SCALE I've gone to, but I'll definitely be going again in the years to come.

I submitted a paper for BSDCan, and I'm still waiting to hear back to see if I'll be presenting. If you thought I was freaking out in my last post about MCing a conference, just imagine how much I'll be freaking out about standing in front of people lecturing them. Oh, boy. Time to get that Valium bottle refilled. I do not do well in these situations, but it's time I learned.

I just solved a problem at work that I've been beating my head against the wall about for the past month or so. I slept 14 hours last night. I think if I sleep another 60 hours, I might just be caught up.

So there's this neato Canadian dude I talk to online almost every day, Colin Percival. He is insanely smart and I am so totally not, but he keeps talking to me anyways, so I'm kinda OK with this. You may have heard his name before, as he's the Security Officer for FreeBSD (sends out those cute little security announcement emails), and he wrote portsnap, bsdiff, and freebsd-update. If you run FreeBSD and you haven't heard of these tools, you really need to get with the times. I've been playing around with one of his new programs called tarsnap. Don't let the webpage fool you, it's an extremely useful tool. (Seriously, Colin, hire someone to design a webpage for you. This isn't 1990.) Tarsnap is an encrypted and inexpensive online backup service that's designed for the paranoid. Most of us probably aren't paranoid enough about our data, I know that I'm not. I keep ssh private keys on usb drive keyfobs. I know this is retarded, but I can't help myself. Despite this personal failing, I can feel a little better knowing that I've got my other important stuff backed up by tarsnap. Check out tarsnap's webpage to learn more, or join #tarsnap on EFNet and bug cperciva yourself.

It's late, and by all accounts, I should be asleep right now. Tomorrow is a big day. It's the first day of meetBSD, the conference that I've been working to help put together for the past year. The evening will end with the 15 year FreeBSD anniversary party.

A few days ago, I asked Matt if I could be the person to kick off the conference. You know, the usual little speech the conference organizers give before bringing on the first speaker. I am kicking myself right now for requesting this. The first thing you should know is that I am not a public speaker. My only memory of speaking in front of a crowd is 5th grade social studies. We had to speak in front of the class for a full 5 minutes, and if we couldn't remember our speech, we had to stand there and repeat the bits we could remember until our time was over. I think this may have traumatized me for life.

I have never in my life been on this side of the microphone at a conference. It's not necessarily that Idislike people. I actually like people - at least, these people. It's that I am terrified of people - especially these people!

Five years ago, I took a trip to California for the first time so that I could attend the 10 year FreeBSD Anniversary party. At that point, I wasn't into OS advocacy. I'd run FreeBSD a little bit at home, and I was starting to like it quite a bit, but I wasn't excited about it. I met this crazy guy on Friendster (Alfred Perlstein), and he told me about the party. I'd never been to California before and I was in great need of a vacation, so I figured, why not?

I had never met such an awesome group of people. As much as I love to sit on my pedestal and pimp the technical advantages of FreeBSD, I still believe the heart of any OS is it's community, and I fell in love with the FreeBSD community that night. I spoke with so many incredibly smart people, and I'm still friends with them to this day. Some of these people have become like family to me.

I met Matt for the first time that night, and it's just a complete mindfuck for me that 5 years later, I'm helping him run the 15 year anniversary party. I'm just some silly girl, and I'm going to be speaking in front of 250 people at meetBSD, many of which I met at the 10 year anniversary party. So many of these people continue to be my role models. A few of them I'm still scared to talk to because I look up to them that much, and I'm going to have to speak in front of them.

This is so much more than just another conference to me. This is culmination of the five best years of my life. I don't know what I'm going to say tomorrow morning. I'm just hoping I don't get too sappy, talk too fast, or make a complete fool of myself.

Since I live just a few minutes from SJC, I'm going to be available to shuttle people back and forth between SJC and the hotel recommended by MeetBSD on the Friday before the conference for a limited number of people. If you are arriving at SJC on Friday (or Thurs night), email me at randi [at] freebsd [dot] org to arrange for pickup, and I'll let you know if I can do so. First come, first serve. SFO arrivals, you're out of luck.

I am tired, and people want me to blog about these things. Ugh, people.

I may have mentioned before that I'm working on a website for blog.freebsd.org. I've got some ideas for what to put on it, but as most of my readers are FreeBSD users, I'd like to know what would y'all like to see? Some ideas I've had so far are:

• Ongoing projects such as drivers that you normally have to dig down in Google to find some perforce repo with a status page that may or may not be up to date.
• Security advisories.
• New releases and details of all the changes being made - something a bit more in depth than the CHANGES file.
  

Have any other ideas? Comment and let me know!

I'm going to be moving the site over to a new server soon. Plans are being made for blog.freebsd.org, as well. More about that (and the company that's going to be hosting me and blog.freebsd.org) in a bit. It's pager week for me at IronPort, so I'm tired and busy.

Holy crap. I keep meaning to update, but then I get distracted by any one of the million things happening in my life right now.

I attended the 2008 FreeBSD Developers Summit along with BSDCan in Ottawa, Canada. BSDCan is like Christmas for me. I love going, and I look forward to it all year. I get to see a lot of friends that I normally don't get to hang out with, and I miss them a lot. There was some awkwardness, however. A few years ago, I made a rule for myself that I would never, ever date someone affiliated with FreeBSD. It sounds like a good idea in theory, but I knew it would end badly if ever put into practice. Last year, I broke that rule. It was just a fling: nothing serious. He was at Dev Summit and BSDCan though, and it was tense trying to avoid him. Maybe I didn't end the relationship in the best way, but there's not much I can do about it now. I related this story to Leslie, adding my signature phrase "There is no sex at the BSDCan." She then busted out an awesome modified rendition of Chris Rock's "No Sex in the Champagne Room".

I met up with Leslie at BSDCan, which was a huge relief. When I stood up at Dev Summit and looked around the room, there was one other female, Diane Bruce. BSDCan itself usually isn't much better. You don't know the meaning of the term sausagefest until you've been to a BSD convention. When I showed up at BSDCan's opening ceremony, I saw Leslie sitting in the middle of the room. Yay! Another female. She introduced me to her friend, Emma. Very cool chick. We three girls hung out together most of the conference. As much as I love talking about FreeBSD with random people, I'm just a lot more comfortable hanging around girls, especially these girls. No one will ever refer to them as "such-and-such's girlfriend". As a female in tech, I've got to say that's one of the worst things I could be referred to as. Hello? I am not an accessory.

Now, on to the big announcements. I've officially joined the FreeBSD Marketing team. Yep, that's right. I'm now randi at freebsd dot org. Most of my friends know how much I've wanted to find my place in the project. It's been very important to me for a long time. I was so happy that I escaped back to my hotel room to jump up and down and squeal like a girl. Thank god no one saw that. I doubt that anyone else has quite reacted to joining the project like I did.

I've got a few projects in the works right now. Soon, I'll be setting up blog.freebsd.org. Sure, we've got release notes and such, but wouldn't it be great if we had a blog where we could pimp our accomplishments? Talk about what we're currently working on, projects recently completed. ZFS got like a one line mention in the release notes. That's a bunch of crap. How are people supposed to know about it? I know that not everyone bothers reading release notes. I'm even willing to admit that sometimes I don't bother reading the whole thing, either. I guess that's going to have to change, now.

I'm also helping plan MeetBSD California, where we will be celebrating FreeBSD's 15 year anniversary. Setting up a conference is challenging, especially on a tight budget. Know any companies that might be interested in helping sponsor us? Want to get on the mailing list for conference info? Drop me a line at the new email address.

Igor's moving out next weekend, so I'm busy packing all of his crap. I'm trying to prepare for living on my own, something that I haven't done in a very long time. I bought a pink toolset from Amazon, and I think I'm going to get a cat. Isn't that what single girls do? I also bought a PS3 last night. I'm not sure if I'm impressed by it or not. The game selection is a bit lacking. I picked up Heavenly Sword (chick with a sword, how can you go wrong there?), Uncharted, and Guitar Hero III. Any recommendations?

I was interviewed by Geek Entertainment TV at Linux World - you can check it out here. I'm on about 1/3 of the way through.

I was completely frozen up and nervous the entire time. Matt/Denise put me in front of the camera, and 5 seconds later it was on - despite my protests. You can tell how nervous I am (and how much of a ditz I am). Regardless, it was kind of amusing. She totally played with my tail. :P

It's been quite a while since I wrote a post about getting flash working under firefox in FreeBSD. It's gotten fairly popular, but I've also gotten a lot of emails and comments telling me that it was out of date. I hadn't set up flash on my computer at home yet, so I just went through the steps and revised them a little.

linuxpluginwrapper will prompt you with a config menu for multimedia/linux-realplayer and print/acroread7 support. I suggest not enabling acroread - as of mid 2006, linuxpluginwrapper was having some issues with unresolved symbols. It appears this is still the case.

# cd /usr/ports/www/linuxpluginwrapper
# make install clean

If you try to compile linuxpluginwrapper with acroread support, you'll get something like this when you try to use it later:

LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/ENU/Browser/intellinux/nppdf.so [/usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/ENU/Browser/ intellinux/nppdf.so: Undefined symbol "__ctype_b_loc"]

rltd has to be patched if we want any chance of getting flash7 to work properly.

# cd /usr/src
# fetch -o - http://people.freebsd.org/~nork/rtld_dlsym_hack.diff | patch
# cd libexec/rtld-elf
# make clean && make && make install

Install www/linux-flashplayer7. Do not use flashplugin-mozilla.

# cd /usr/ports/www/linux-flashplayer7
# make install clean

Although linuxpluginwrapper does supply an example libmap.conf, it's old. I mean, just look at the version number. 2005? I'm going to assume that you actually bother to run somewhat updated software, so here's a libmap.conf that will work with the prefix change for X.Org when we bumped major versions.

# My sample /etc/libmap.conf
# Flash 7 with Mozilla/Firefox
[/usr/local/lib/npapi/linux-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so]
libpthread.so.0 libpthread.so.2
libdl.so.2 pluginwrapper/flash7.so
libz.so.1 libz.so.3
libm.so.6 libm.so.4
libc.so.6 pluginwrapper/flash7.so
# Helix RealPlayer
[/usr/local/lib/linux-mozilla/plugins/nphelix.so]
libstdc++.so.5 libstdc++.so.5
libc.so.6 pluginwrapper/realplayer.so
libm.so.6 libm.so.4
libgcc_s.so.1 pluginwrapper/realplayer.so


We're almost done. Create a symlink for the flash player.

# ln -s /usr/local/lib/npapi/linux-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so /usr/local/lib/browser_linux_plugins/

Run firefox and go to about:plugins to verify plugin installation. It should look something like this. If you see it listed, you can test to see if it's working by coming to freebsdgirl.com and seeing if my meebo app loads.

I've heard rumors of proper flash 9 support soon, so keep your fingers crossed.