ROSE Blog Interviews: Juliet Kemp, author and admin extraordinaire

Oct 28, 2009 GMT

In this interview, we hear from Juliet Kemp, sys admin extraordinaire and a frequent contributor to Linux Magazine/Linux Pro Magazine. Her articles in our issues include:Serving up ASP.NET from Apache with Mod_Mono Linux Software on Mac OSXGet Started with strace and Debug FasterTechniques for Extending Your Website with CSS Tuning in with Hobbit, Nagios, and monit Remote Access Security with Single-Packet Port Knocking Manipulating Your Machines with Puppet Q: Who are you? A: I'm Juliet Kemp; I'm a sysadmin and freelance writer on Linux. I've been using FOSS for getting on for a decade now, and working as a sysadmin for nearly as long. I recently wrote a book of Linux systems...

Most Influential People in Open Source (and women, too!)

Oct 27, 2009 GMT

MindTouch released a list of Most Influential People in Open Source, and despite rereading the list several times, I'm not seeing any women on it. More than 50 votes from "industry insiders" determined who would make this list of influential people (specifically, men). I'm not sure who the insiders are – were you one of them? If not, who would you name as some of the Most Influential People in Open Source? And would any of the people who make it on your list be women-type-people? (According to the MindTouch rules, you can't pick someone in your own company!)

ROSE Blog Interviews: Red Hat's Mel Chua

Oct 26, 2009 GMT

Mel Chua made her event-speaking debut at last weekend's Ontario [Gnu] Linux Fest. Congratulations, Mel! In this interview, Mel explains how she got sucked in to open source and how she gets to Be Excited for a living leading the Fedora Marketing team.Q: Who are you? A: My name is Mel Chua; I go by mchua online. I'm a hacker – started with hardware, then moved to software, then communities. When I was studying (electrical) engineering, I saw the way that folks in open source communities learned how to Make Things and went "... wait, why don't we teach it this way in school?" So I took a gap year after college to volunteer on...

2010: The Year of WIOS at Events!

Oct 26, 2009 GMT

I spent this past weekend at Ontario [Gnu] Linux Fest, which was my first trip to this event. Ontario [Gnu] Linux Fest also marked my fourth time speaking at an event this year. As you might know, earlier this year I spoke at SCALE 2009 for the first time, and in each of my talks I share my experience with the hope that other women will be inspired to speak at events, too. Most of the events I attended this year would have been great events for first-time attendees or speakers. Now I have a vision for 2010: Let's make a concentrated effort to increase participation by women at events. How can we do this? Here are some ideas to get us started: Take a friend/colleague to her first...

ROSE Blog Interviews: Noirin Shirley, Vice President of the Apache Software Foundation

Oct 20, 2009 GMT

ApacheCon 2009, held November 2-6 in Oakland, California, will also be a celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Apache Software Foundation. In this interview, Noirin Shirley, VP of the ASF, discusses her work as a technical writer at Google and the upcoming ApacheCon event.Q: Who are you? A: I'm Noirin Shirley. I work as a Technical Writer in Google's Zurich office, where I get to spend 20 percent of my time working on Open Source projects. And when I go home, I put on my feather cap and turn into the Vice President of the Apache Software Foundation, responsible for conferences and events. Although you'd never know it to look at my desk, I'm a born organiser, and whether it's words on...

ROSE Blog Interviews: Cheryl McKinnon, CMO of Nuxeo

Oct 19, 2009 GMT

Cheryl McKinnon will be one of the speakers at this week's Ontario Linux Fest. In this interview, Cheryl talks about her new role at the rapidly growing open source ECM company Nuxeo.Q: Who are you?A: My name is Cheryl McKinnon. I've spent most of my career in the technology space known as ECM – Enterprise Content Management. It's a pretty broad category that includes software to help companies with their electronic content: document and records management, archiving, workflow, and collaboration. I became interested in this area while a grad student in History – started thinking about some of the preservation and archive risks we will face in the future as the world of work goes...

Color of the Comments

Oct 14, 2009 GMT

As soon as I arrived for the monthly Tweetup last night, I received a DM via Twitter that alerted me to a couple of new beyond-offensive comments left on a recent blog post. You're welcome to read that blog post, but I've turned off the comments for now. Originally I decided not to mention who left the majority of the offensive comments – the same few nasty comments, over and over again the past few days – because he seems to get some perverse pleasure out of getting attention for being a/an [imagine your favorite way to describe this person here]. Instead, I just deleted his comments, over and over and over again. Before I left the Tweetup last night, I stopped to chat with a couple...