Heading out of winter and into Spring

This winter seemed long in many ways, and not just the weather. In life, progress continues during the winter, but it can be slow and hard to see.

Finally though, the snowdrops are up, dogwood tree buds are swelling, and progress is finally apparent in many areas of volunteer life - KDE, Kubuntu, and my genealogy society.

In KDE, Plasma 5.12 has been released, and it is great! It has been released in time to make it into Kubuntu Bionic, our next big release which will become an LTS. Plasma 5.12 is a great fit there, since it is also an LTS. After living through the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerability early-exposure, it feels great to finally be back on track. We have it available right now in Artful (17.10) as well: https://kubuntu.org/news/plasma-5-12-arrives-in-backport-ppa-for-kubuntu-17-10-artful-aardvark/. I'm using it now.

I'm also using the new KDE browser Falkon, which has not yet been released. I've written to the developers in hopes of a KDE release in time to make it into Bionic.

On the social front, it's great to look forward to Akademy in Vienna this August! I have hopes that many of our Kubuntu team will be able to attend, for the wonderful face-to-face meetings of Akademy. And this year, a special treat for me, since the great Boud and Irina have invited me to stay at their house for the week before Akademy and then make our way together from their home to Vienna by train. This will remove so much of the pain of travel!

Finally, my genealogy society has suffered greatly while Rootsweb was down. But our website is finally up again at https://skcgs.org and our Facebook presence is undergoing some long-needed maintainance as well. Finally, our Program committee has been doing fantastic work getting interesting speakers. It's fun to go to meetings, fun to do my work on the newsletter, and fun even to go to board meetings! You can't ask for better than that!

Even in my own genealogy research, Ancestry.com is making it easier than ever to find cousins, and more ancestors. Also looking forward to Google Summer of Code if KDE is accepted as an organization. It will be another very busy year!

Celebrate Ada Lovelace Day!

Who has helped you along the way? Women aren't generally encouraged to be geeks in our culture, but some of us are working to change that! I've met many heroes along the way, in Rootsweb, Linuxchix, KDE and Ubuntu Women, but today I'd like to mention someone of the encouraging friends I've met along the way, in honor of Ada Lovelace Day.

Joan and Pig were and are great friends from Rootsweb, which is a free genealogy project. They encouraged me to take the step of becoming a listowner, and then to administer the forums gatewayed to my lists. I still have those lists and boards, although they aren't too active these days. And Pig knew about Linuxchix, and guided me there when I was thinking about making the jump from Windows 2000 Pro to Linux. Both these women are not only tireless researchers, but also take the time to help others with both research methodology AND technical issues. Their patient, clear advice has guided me for a decade.

In Linuxchix, I met many heroes, but especially Akkana Peck and Carla Schroder. Both of these women rock! Carla has taught herself an amazing plethora of skills, which she's then turned around to teach others. You are my hero and example in that, Carla. Akkana is always willing to ask questions and find the answers, which is so rare in adults. She also then turns around and teaches others, whether it's astronomy, or how to use a plug computer.

Then there is Mackenzie Morgan, my youngest hero. I invited her to Linuxchix, and she in turn urged me to get involved in Ubuntu Women, where I've met so many wonderful people, and many heroes! I also met Linda Halligan on Linuxchix, and have been inspired by her hard work, skill, and enthusiasm in her life, as a mother, and in her work for Ubuntu, especially Ubuntu Washington, our LoCo. Maco has been an inspiration for many in her friendly geeky encouragement and increasing craft skills, along with her code contributions to Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu accessability.

Two more women who have inspired me in Ubuntu Women and in life, are Amber Graner and Lyz Krumbach. Both have faced significant personal obstacles in their personal and professional lives, yet remain calm, helpful, creative and dependable. Dependable is a compliment? Yes, of the highest order. Many people have great ideas, but few follow through. These women do, time and after time, and so are asked to take on more and more responsibilities. They shoulder so much, I'm not sure when they have time to LIVE! And yet they do. :-)

Finally, both in Ubuntu Women and in KDE, Lydia Pintscher and Myriam Schweingruber are my heroes. Both excellent geeky women, giving in so many technical and community-building ways to KDE and Ubuntu Women both. How do they find the time?

As usual, I didn't focus! But so many people have helped me along the way, picking out just one person is impossible. Even this list is much too small, and not detailed enough about the many accomplishments of this pantheon of geeky women. Many men have helped me along the way as well, but this blog is for Ada Lovelace Day!

Thank you all!

Are you a Listowner? Try listadmin CLI tool

I don't consider myself a very techie person, and generally chose the GUI tools over text-based commands in a console, with few exceptions. However, my life keeps getting busier, and spending time on mindless tasks like deleting list spam seems like a waste. Especially when there is a command-line interface (CLI) tool which promises both speed and control.

This will only be useful if you are a listowner, and your list is administered using Mailman, and you use Linux/Unix/BSD. But if this fits you, give it a try! In your package manager, select listadmin, or use apt-get install listadmin or the equivalent in your distribution. To start the application, in your console, type listadmin. If it's the first time you've run listadmin, you'll first see a series of questions which when answered will fill in the file $HOME/.listadmin.ini. I found it easier to edit this file by hand until I found the correct way to enter the password and listnames. You can edit this file in any text editor; I prefer Kate.

Here's my file, with some sample lists:

username valorie.zimmerman@gmail.com
password XxXxX
spamlevel 8

# If you uncomment the following you will only have to press Return
# to discard a message:
#
default discard

# Uncomment the following to get a terse transaction log:
#
# log "~/.listadmin.log"
volunteers@mailman.linuxchix.org


password XxXxXx
alsachat@lists9.rootsweb.ancestry.com

Username in this case is the email account you use in Mailman to administer the list; password is the password exactly as you type it - no extra spaces or symbols, and list address takes a bit more explanation. I successfully figured out the listname so it worked by using the Mailman administration weblink for the subdomain and domain part. For instance, my Linuxchix link is http://mailman.linuxchix.org/mailman/admindb/listname, which becomes listname@mailman.linuxchix.org. For Rootsweb lists, it's http://lists#.rootsweb.ancestry.com/mailman/admindb/listname, which becomes listname@lists#.rootsweb.ancestry.com, where # is the server number. The same procedure works for KDE lists: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/admindb/listname becomes listname@mail.kde.org.

The coolest thing is that if you set up your ini file as I did, you can do ALL your Mailman lists in one run, no matter how many servers the lists live on, and how many passwords you use. Be sure to use a blank line after the last list in a group, then create another group as shown above.

For more information, see the author's description: http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin and the Manual: http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/listadmin.txt