Open Letter to KDE GSoC Students We Could Not Accept

Hello students,

I no longer have access to your proposal or emails, thus the open letter on my blog.

If you allowed commenting before the student proposal deadline, I along with other admins and mentors tried to help you improve your proposal. Some of you took the suggestions and sharpened your presentation, fleshed out your timeline and in general created a proposal you can be proud of.

If you did not allow commenting or only uploaded your proposal right before the deadline, you missed out on this mentoring opportunity, and for that I am sorry. That cut us off from a vital communication link with you.

This proposal process, along with fixing some bugs and creating some commits mean that you have real experience you can take with you into the future

. I hope you also learned how to use IRC/Matrix/Telegram channels to get information, and help others as well. Even if you do not continue your involvement with the KDE Community, we hope you will profit from these accomplishments, as we have.

We hope that your experiences with the KDE community up to now make you want to continue to work with us, and become part of the community. Many students whom we were not able to accept previously were successfully accepted later. Some of those students now are mentoring and/or part of the administration team, which is, in our eyes, the zenith of GSoC success.

Some of you we were unable to accept because we could not find suitable mentors. The GSoC team is asking us this year to have three mentors per student, because the world has become so uncertain in this pandemic time. So more developers who will mentor are a precious resource.

Almost every single proposal we got this year is work we want and need, or we wouldn't have published "Ideas" to trigger those proposals. If you are interested in doing this work and do not need the funding and deadlines that GSoC provides, we would welcome working with you outside of GSoC. In fact, each year we have Season of KDE which provides some mentoring, structure and timeline and no funding. This has been very successful for most mentees. And of course all are welcome to join our worldwide army of volunteers, who code, fix bugs, triage bug reports, write, analyze, plan, administer, create graphics, art, promo copy, events, videos, tutorials, documentation, translation, internationalization, and more! It is the KDE community who makes the software, keeps it up-to-date, plans and hosts events, and engages in events planned and hosted by others.

Please join the KDE-Community mail list and dig in! Hope to see you at KDE Akademy.

Oh hey, late update: I just learned today in #gsoc that I *do* have access to all the proposals -- and names and emails! So at the very least I will send a link to this open letter to all of our prospective students. Talk to you then. -v

Google Code-in in KDE

So far, so good! We're having quite a variety of students and I'm happy to see new ones still joining. And surprising to me, we're still getting beginner tasks being done, which keep us busy.

New this round were some tutorials written by Pranam Lashkari. I hope we can expand on this next year, because I think a lot of students who are willing to do these tutorials one by one are learning a lot. His thought is that they can be added to our documentation after the contest is over. I think we can re-use some stuff that we've already written, for next year. What do you think?

In addition, I'm seeing loads of work -- yes, small jobs, but keep in mind these kids are 13 to 18 years old* - for the teams who were willing to write up tasks and tutor. It is a lot of work so I really appreciate all those mentors who have stepped forward.

I'm very glad we are participating this year. It isn't as wild and crazy as it was in the beginning, because there are now lots more orgs involved, so the kids have lots of options. Happy that the kids we have are choosing us!

-----------------

* Rules state: "13 to 17 years old and enrolled in a pre-university educational program" before enrolling. https://developers.google.com/open-source/gci/faq

Akademy: closing time

Akademy is always a whirlwind which is my excuse for not blogging! Today we wrapped up the program which leaves us in a nearly-empty venue and a bit of time after lunch to catch up.

I did manage to gather photos together in Google Photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/qHPwehW8C1zPGuav7

Thanks again to the KDE e.V. for sponsoring my hostel and the Ubuntu Community Fund for part of my travel expenses. This allowed me to attend. Meeting Popey from the Ubuntu community and the Limux team was great, although we didn't do as much Kubuntu work as in past years. However, attending the Distro BoF was a great experience; very friendly and collaborative.

As always, the talks were interesting, the "hall track" fascinating, BoFs engaging. The high point for me personally was being given an Akademy Award on Sunday after a blessedly-short e.V. meeting. I almost fainted from surprise! It feels wonderful to be not just appreciated but honored for my work for the KDE community. 

Thank you again!

I will update here with a photo when I can.

Yesterday and today were taken up with trainings, which while exhausting are extremely valuable. Along with the documentation work ahead, I look forward to integrating both the Non-Violent Communication and Tech Documentation trainings into my work.

In addition, I will be happy to see our documentation team re-group and gain strength over the next year as we work with the contractor on identifying pain points and fixing them.

I got lost yesterday, which one should always do in a strange city. Here is one of the beautiful windows I saw before finding the tram and a different way home:

Tomorrow we meet at 3:45 am to share an Uber to the airport and the beginning of the journey home. To KDE friends new and old: we'll meet next year at Akademy I hope, or at least in IRC.

Local friends and family, I'll see you soon!

Ade visits, and the weather changes so we can walk about Deventer

A lovely lunch and a shared afternoon and evening with Ade was a pleasant interlude in our time together here in beautiful Deventer. We changed tables a few times to avoid the sun! Last night we were wakened at around 2am with wind blowing rain into the open windows, which was quite exciting. Thunder roared in the south. It was still quite cool and breezy this morning so we ate inside.

After lunch, Boud proposed a walk around the town while the temperatures were moderate. We walked over much of the old town of Deventer, and spend some time in the Roman Catholic church, the old church on the "hill" with twin spires, the old Brush Shop, and back past the Weighing House and a lovely cast bronze map of Deventer.

Our favorite tree:

The Roman Catholic church whose steeple we see from the terrace:

On the wall of the Weighing House:

Our little corner of Deventer:

Tomorrow we travel by fast train to Vienna! I hope there is time to drink a cup of coffee. :-)

In my heart

Last night we were living outside as usual. It had cooled a bit and a stiff cool breeze began blowing, so we moved inside for the first time in a week. We had a wonderful discussion about the state of the world (worrying) and what we might do about it beyond working for freedom in our KDE work. I think I'm not alone in being concerned about visiting Austria since politics there turned "populist". Since I'm living in a country where the same is true at least on the Federal level, that might seem hypocritical. Perhaps it is, but I'm not the only one working to expand the scope of people we welcome, rather than the reverse. I believe the most fortunate--including me--should pay the highest taxes, to provide public goods to all: excellent schools, medical and social care, fine public transport, free libraries, and free software.

We can only do that last bit well with a healthy KDE community. This means uniting around our goals, contributing to the community along with the software; by creating good documentation, helping promote news, contributing timely information for release announcements, joining a working group or the e.V. itself and most important: living up to our Code of Conduct. Our Code of Conduct is one of the best and most positive in free software, and is a key reason I came to KDE and stayed to contribute. It is of little value, however, unless we occasionally re-read it and resolve to personally hold ourselves to a high standard of conduct, and in addition, daring to step up to help resolve situations where it requires courage to do so. This is an important bit:

If you witness others being attacked, think first about how you can offer them personal support. If you feel that the situation is beyond your ability to help individually, go privately to the victim and ask if some form of official intervention is needed. 

Similarly you should support anyone who appears to be in danger of burning out, either through work-related stress or personal problems.

It is sometimes very difficult and discouraging to confront distressing situations, when those whom you respect and even love deeply disappoint. However if we are to grow and thrive as a family, and we are a huge family, this must be done.

I've recently stolen from Boud and Irina's huge library In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth by J.P. Mallory. A bit old, but a lovely survey of Eurasia up to historical times. Just this morning with my breakfast I read:

In what did the Proto-Indo-Europeans believe, or, to use their own words, to what did they 'put in their hearts'? This archaic expression is still preserved in a roundabout way in English where the Latin verb credo 'I believe' has been borrowed to fashion our English creed. 

After our talk last night, this passage prompted me to write today.


More photos from Deventer:

Flower cheese!

Sage, parsley

Sunset

IPA even in Deventer!

Life in Deventer

Time passes. In Deventer, it is chimed by the church bells every hour, and during the day, a tiny concert every quarter-hour. To celebrate the Market, there was a concert of bells yesterday. The guest carillon-master was quite showy, with flourishes and trills! The church is in the next block, so we hear the bells very clearly. Behind the house a short distance is the Roman Catholic church, where yesterday we heard the joyous tolling of bells to celebrate a wedding.

After we visited the Market yesterday, Irina took me to the cheese shop. The phrase "cheese shop" doesn't cover how amazing this place is, even before one walks in and smells the symphony of cheese within:

After our trip to the Market, Irina as if by magick produced quail pies for lunch! The previous evening we had eaten at a *great* restaurant just around the corner from their house, and all had the quail. Our leftover halves were packed up and became pies!

This is being typed and put together out on the terrace, shared with the birds of the nieghborhood, the sun, and an enormous tree in a neighboring square.

In short, life is good! My thanks to the KDE e.V. for supporting the KDE community and Akademy, and sponsoring my accomodation while there. My thanks to the Ubuntu community fund for sponsoring my travel here and back home again. My profound and deep thanks to Boud and Irina Rempt for their generosity, thoughtfulness, hospitality, peaceful house and delicious food, and most of all, for asking me to come and live with them in Deventer this week. This is city living at its finest.

Going to Akademy!

Here in beautiful Deventer, in the Netherlands, with Boud and Irina Rempt, the first leg of the journey to Akademy is done. The plane ride as always was dreadful, however the train from Amsterdam through the countryside was nearly silent, fast, and beautiful. I'm recovering from jetlag, eating great salads, wonderful cheese, drinking good beer, and most important, chatting up Irina and Boud, and watching the birds play on the nieghboring roofs. The church in the next block rings the hours, and during the day, some small tunes at the quarter-hour. We walk to the grocery and out to a local restaurant yesterday:

Thank you to the Ubuntu Community for funding my travel here and home!

Coding and Gardening

Warning: metaphors ahead! May be inappropriate or stretched.

Reading through student proposals for Google Summer of Code yesterday, I took a break from sitting in front of a keyboard to get some gardening done. We've had a few windstorms since I last raked, and with spring beginning, a few weeds have been popping up as well.

One of the issues I've been reminding almost every student about is unit testing. The other is documentation. These are practices which are seen as not fun, not creative.

Raking isn't seen as fun or creative either! Nor is hunting and digging the wily dandelion. But I rake away the dead branches and fir cones, and snag those dandelions because later in the season, my healthy vegetables and beautiful flowers not only flourish without weeds, but look better without litter around them. In addition, we chop up the branches and cones, and use that as mulch, which saves water and keeps down weeds. The dandelions go into the compost pile and rot into richer soil to help transplants be healthy. In other words, the work I do now pays off in the future.

The same is true of writing unit tests, commenting your code, and keeping good notes for user documentation as well! These are habits to build, not onerous tasks to be put off for tomorrow. Your unit tests will serve you well as long as your code runs anywhere. The same is true of your commented code. And finally if you code is user-facing, user documentation is what lets people use it!

So students, please remember to put those necessary bits into your proposal. This along with good communication with your mentor and the entire team are absolutely crucial for a successful project, so bake these into your plans.

More zsync magic for LTS updates

I wrote before about how to update superceeded ISOs using zsync, and it's time to do that again, now that 16.04 LTS has the latest point release, to .4.

So the new command needed, after cd /path/to/iso is

cp kubuntu-16.04{.3,.4}-desktop-i386.iso && zsync http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/16.04.4/release/kubuntu-16.04.4-desktop-i386.iso.zsync

The magic I didn't fully understand was the {.3,.4} part. Now I get that it is saying copy the files ending in .3 and replace them with files ending in .4.

I wanted also to point out that zsync is also invaluable for testing, because Ubuntu spins daily ISOs. For instance, on the qatracker such as the most recent for testing the above point releases, http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/milestones/386/builds there are a number of small CD icons. When you click on one, you are led to a small page with for instance, the following links to get xenial-desktop-amd64.iso:

HTTP http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/xenial/daily-live/20180228/xenial-desktop-amd64.iso 

RSYNC rsync -tzhhP rsync://cdimage.ubuntu.com/cdimage/kubuntu/xenial/daily-live/20180228/xenial-desktop-amd64.iso 

ZSYNC zsync http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/xenial/daily-live/20180228/xenial-desktop-amd64.iso.zsync 

GPG signature http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/xenial/daily-live/20180228/MD5SUMS.gpg 

MD5 checksum http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/xenial/daily-live/20180228/MD5SUMS

The http link will download via your browser to your ~/.Downloads folder unless you have set that otherwise. Fine if you want your testing ISO to be there. If instead you do zsync by

cd ~/Downloads && zsync http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/xenial/daily-live/20180228/xenial-desktop-amd64.iso.zsync

in the commandline, you will see a remarkable difference in how long it takes to download the second and subsequent times. Rsync does roughly the same thing. For these you do not need the "copy" cp step.

Get familiar with zysnc and use it more. It will save you time and make you more productive.

(originally posted a couple of weeks ago, but to my genealogy blog by mistake)

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!

Seeding new ISOs the easy zsync way

Kubuntu recently had to pull our 17.10 ISOs because of the so-called lenovo bug. Now that this bug is fixed, the ISOs have been respun, and so now it's time to begin to reseed the torrents.

To speed up the process, I wanted to zsync to the original ISOs before getting the new torrent files. Simon kindly told me the easy way to do this - cd to the directory where the ISOs live, which in my case is 

cd /media/valorie/Data/ISOs/

Next: 

cp kubuntu-17.10{,.1}-desktop-amd64.iso && zsync http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/17.10.1/release/kubuntu-17.10.1-desktop-amd64.iso.zsync

Where did I get the link to zsync? At http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/17.10.1/release/. All ISOs are found at cdimage, just as all torrents are found at http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/.

The final step is to download those torrent files (pro-tip: use control F) and tell Ktorrent to seed them all! I seed all the supported Ubuntu releases. The more people do this, the faster torrents are for everyone. If you have the bandwidth, go for it!

PS: you don't have to copy all the cdimage URLs. Just up-arrow and then back-arrow through your previous command once the sync has finished, edit it, hit return and you are back in business.

Beginning 2018

2017 began with the once-in-a-lifetime trip to India to speak at KDE.Conf.in. That was amazing enough, but the trip to a local village, and visiting the Kaziranga National Park were too amazing for words.

Literal highlight of last year were the eclipse and trip to see it with my son Thomas, and Christian and Hailey's wedding, and the trip to participate with my daughter Anne, while also spending some time with son Paul, his wife Tara and my grandson Oscar. This summer I was able to spend a few days in Brooklyn with Colin and Rory as well on my way to Akademy. So 2017 was definitely worth living through!

This is reality, and we can only see it during a total eclipse

2018 began wonderfully at the cabin. I'm looking forward to 2018 for a lot of reasons.

First, I'm so happy that soon Kubuntu will again be distributing 17.10 images next week. Right now we're in testing in preparation for that; pop into IRC if you'd like to help with the testing (#kubuntu-devel). https://kubuntu.org/getkubuntu/ next week!

Lubuntu has a nice write-up of the issues and testing procedures: http://lubuntu.me/lubuntu-17-04-eol-and-lubuntu-17-10-respins/

The other serious problems with meltdown and spectre are being handled by the Ubuntu kernel team and those updates will be rolled out as soon as testing is complete. Scary times when dealing with such a fundamental flaw in the design of our computers!

Second, in KDE we're beginning to ramp up for Google Summer of Code. Mentors are preparing the ideas page on the wiki, and Bhushan has started the organization application process. If you want to mentor or help us administer the program this year, now is the time to get in gear!

At Renton PFLAG we had our first support meeting of the year, and it was small but awesome! Our little group has had some tough times in the past, but I see us growing and thriving in this next year.

Finally, my local genealogy society is doing some great things, and I'm so happy to be involved and helping out again. My own searching is going well too. As I find more supporting evidence to the lives of my ancestors and their families, I feel my own place in the cosmos more deeply and my connection to history more strongly. I wish I could link to our website, but Rootsweb is down and until we get our new website up......

Finally, today I saw a news article about a school in India far outside the traditional education model. Called the Tamarind Tree School, it uses an open education model to offer collaborative, innovative learning solutions to rural students. They use free and open source software, and even hardware so that people can build their own devices. Read more about this: https://opensource.com/article/18/1/tamarind-tree-school-india.

The power we have as bystanders

Bystander.

It seems such a passive word for a passive role.

Let's consider how it is instead a position of power.

First, as a bystander, I can observe what is happening which nobody else sees, because nobody else is standing exactly where I am. Nobody else has my mix of genes and history and all of what makes me who I am and so I see uniquely.

As bystanders each of us has power we often do not grasp. It is of the moment. We can plan, and prepare so that we are ready to act, intervene if necessary; build up potential energy. While remaining polite, I can step in to help, intervene, participate, engage. I can ACT.

Pro-tip: run this program (courtesy of the Linuxchix:

1. be polite
2. be helpful
3. iterate

Boom! You have a team.

Supporting free software is one of the things I do. Right now is a great time to help support KDE.

KDE Powers You - You Can Power KDE, Too! 

https://www.kde.org/fundraisers/yearend2017/

Kubuntu Artful beta 1 milestone released today

I'm happy to announce that Kubuntu Artful beta 1 milestone released today, having passed all the mandatory testing, thanks to lots of testers! Thanks so much to each of you.

If possible, we'll also be participating in Beta 2 with the next round of KDE bug-fix releases for the last testing milestone before release of Kubuntu 17.10 on 19 October 2017.

Release notes: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArtfulAardvark/Beta1/Kubuntu

If you would like to help us seed the torrents, go to http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/. To quickly find all the betas: control f and type beta.

Join us in freenode IRC: #kubuntu-devel with praise, help, or bug reports.

Why YOU care about accessibility, and can help!

Accessibility (a11y for short) seems like a niche area of concern for many people. I was thinking about this recently on a hot morning in Spain, walking to the bus station with my wheeled luggage. The sidewalks are thoughtfully cut out for wheelchairs -- and those with luggage! and the kids riding skateboards, and...... the rest of us.

When websites and program output can be parsed by a screen-reader, it is great for blind folks. It is also great for the busy person working and listening, and even for the reader who doesn't have to ignore popup menus and other distractions. In other words, all of us.

There are many more examples, but my point is -- a11y helps everyone. So please - everyone - help KDE focus on accessible software at Randa! Fundraiser is ongoing! Don't pass it by because you think this is niche. Accessible software is better for all.

Stop by https://www.kde.org/fundraisers/randameetings2017/ and give generously, or read more about it first: Randa Meetings 2017: It's All About Accessibility.

Repugnant

I grew up in a right-wing, Republican family. As I grew to adulthood and read about the proud history of the Republican party, beginning with Lincoln, I embraced that party, even as racism began to be embraced as a political strategy during Nixon's campaign for president. I overlooked that part, because I didn't want to see it. Besides, the Democrats were the party of racists.

However, as I heard about the crimes that President Nixon seemed to be excusing, and that people around me also seemed to excuse, I began to think long and hard about party versus principle. Within a few years, I left that party, especially as I saw the Democrats, so long the party steeped in racism, begin to attempt to repair that damage done to the country. It took me many years to admit that I had changed parties, because my beliefs have not changed that much. I just see things more clearly now, after reading a lot more history.

Today I've seen a Republican president embrace racism, support of the Confederacy, and support racists, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and the Ku Klux Klan party -- a party his father supported in Queens, New York. Fred Trump was arrested for marching publicly in full regalia, masked, hooded and robed. I've seen no report that he was convicted, although there are pictures of the march and the arrest report in the local newspaper.

Make no mistake about it; today's statement was deliberate. Trump's entry into the political fray was as a leader of the so-called birthers, questioning Barack Obama's citizenship. His announcement of candidacy was a full-throated anti-immigrant stance, which he never moderated and has not changed.

Yes, previous American presidents have been racist, some of them proudly so. But since the Civil War we have not seen -- until today -- a president of the United States throw his political lot in with white nationalists and neo-Nazis. Good people voted for this man, hoping that he would shake things up in Washington. Good people cannot stand by statements such as Trump made today.

It is time for the Congress to censure this President. The statements made today are morally bankrupt, and are intolerable. Good people do not march with neo-Nazis, and good people cannot let statements such as those made today, stand.

Akademy; at 20, KDE reaches out

Some of the talks, initiatives, conversations, and workshops that inspired me at Akademy. Thanks so much for the e.V. for sponsoring me.

A. Wikidata  - We have some work to do to get our data automatically uploaded into Wikidata. However, doing so will help us keep our Wikipedia pages up-to-date.

B. Looking for Love, Paul Brown's talk and workshop about Increasing your audience's appreciation for your project. Many of the top Google results for our pages don't address what people are looking for:

1. What can your project do for me? 
2. What does your application or library do?

Paul highlighted one good example: https://krita.org/. That crucial information is above the fold, with no scrolling. Attractive, and exactly the approach we should be taking in all our public-facing pages.

My offer to all projects: I will help with the text on any of your pages. This is a serious offer! Just ask in IRC or send an email to valorie at kde dot org for editing.

C. The Enterprise list for people with large KDE deployments, an under-used resource for those supporting our users in huge numbers, in schools, governments and companies. If you know of anyone doing this job who is not on the list, hand along the link to them.

D. Goalposts for KDE - I was not at this "Luminaries" Kabal Proposals BoF, but I read the notes. I'll be happy to see this idea develop on the Community list.

E. UserBase revival -- This effort is timely! and brings the list of things I'm excited about full circle. For many teams, UserBase pages are their website. We need to clean up and polish UserBase! Join us in #kde-wiki in IRC or the Telegram channel and https://userbase.kde.org/Wiki_Team_Page where we'll actually be tracking and doing the work. I'm so thankful that Claus is taking the leadership on this.

If you are a project leader and want help buffing your UserBase pages, we can help!


In addition to all of the above ideas, there is still another idea floating around that needs more development. Each of our application sites, at least, should have a quality metric box, listing things like code testing, translation/internationalization percentage, number of contributors, and maybe more. These should be picked up automatically, not generated by hand. No other major projects seem to have this, so we should lead. When people are looking for what applications they want to run on their computers, they should choose by more than color or other incidentals. We work so much on quality -- we should lead with it. There were many informal discussions about this but no concrete proposals yet.

Keysigning!

There are a couple of reasons to create a network of trust, using gpg keys. If you are a software developer and want to sign your commits, and on a larger stage, sign software releases, you need a key pair. On a distribution level, ISOs are signed as well. In Ubuntu, a GPG key is required to sign the Code of Conduct.

On a personal level, emails and other communications and files can be signed and/or encrypted. In this era of wide-spread spoofed emails and more and more efforts to snoop into our every move, gpg is a tool we can use to prove our identity and be able to rely on gpg-signed emails.

I attended a keysigning at Akademy, which involved a few steps. First, generating a key pair. This is amazingly easy: gpg --gen-key . Various options are discussed here, among other places: http://www.cryptnet.net/fdp/crypto/keysigning_party/en/keysigning_party.html#keypair_generation. This site and many others describes how to immediately create a revocation certificate, just in case. This is not difficult either. Finally, send your key pair to a keyserver, and your fingerprint to the person running the keysigning event, or print out the fingerprint yourself.

At the keysigning, you will check to see that your own fingerprint is correct as provided by the host, and that each person at the event has valid identification proving they are who they say they are.

The final step to creating your web of trust is signing those keys. Some people have an additional step before signing and uploading; that of sending an encrypted email to each person to establish that both keys work. Since I created my key pair using my gmail address, I was having some difficulty with decrypting some of those emails using "mailvelope", a gmail addon. Bhushan Shah told me that I can download the raw encrypted email and then decrypt that file by gpg --decrypt filename.txt . Excellent!

gpg --encrypt filename.txt recipientkeyID works as well.

Now I've found and am trying out GooPG which is interesting, and seems to work. Nothing seems to be able to read the email I got from Launchpad to verify my uploaded key, however. :(  The actual code block throws a CRC error.

To sum up: be a geek, do some key signing, and sign your emails! And when needed, encrypt them.

PS: Martin Bednar asked where to find the Google extension. None of my browsers let me answer comments (or even make comments) directly, so here is the link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/goopg/ifpoaednafmgolabhpjmbimllaoidelg

SeaGL's Call for Presentations open through August 6th

SeaGL is a grassroots technical conference, in Seattle, dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge about the GNU/Linux community and free/libre/open-source software/hardware. We welcome speakers of all backgrounds and levels of experience – even if you’ve never spoken at a technical conference.

http://seagl.org/news/2017/06/19/CFP-open.html

This year's conference is on Oct 6 & 7 and will take place at Seattle Central College.

Artful Alpha 2 release candidate is ready for testing!

Test if you can, on real hardware if possible, in virtual machines if not.

Kubuntu Desktop amd64 testcases in Artful Daily:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/milestones/379/builds/153034/testcases

The label "Daily" will change once the Alpha 2 has been milestoned. Remember to report bugs and link them on the qa site. The easy way to file bugs is in the commandline: ubuntu-bug packagename. Ask us in IRC (#kubuntu-devel) if you need a package name.

Kubuntu Desktop i386 testcases in Artful Daily:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/milestones/379/builds/153035/testcases

It is so important to get this preliminary testing done if we want a 32-bit Alpha 2 ISO! We could not do an alpha 1 of Artful for this reason.

Thank you folks. That alpha 2 ISO will be spun on the 27th -- IF we have all tests done. If not.......

Valorie

PS: sorry for the late notice; I'm currently in Spain at KDE Akademy. You can subscribe to get the testing notices directly: http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/subscription