geeks hanging out

This morning in my email there was missive from Betsy Aoki – Founder of the Seattle LinuxChix chapter. Sounds like a great contest!

I figured I’d reach out to the Seattle Linuxchix group because I’ve designed a contest for Live Search that is platform-agnostic, and might be fun for folks you know who are students, coders out of work, or just want to win $10,000 and have their Web application highlighted at the Gnomedex conference this August in Seattle.

The goal of the contest is to build the best Web app that helps other people cope with the economy, or helps them protect the environment. (Hence the “Will code for Green” name of the contest). Check out he blog post that explains it.

The technical requirements are that they use the Live Search API (which if you think about it, essentially returns the whole internet/video/images/phone book data, etc to play with) and it’s a Web app. That means, it can be a Web mashup customized for the iphone that helps them find jobs in their area. It can be Linux/Apache/ Perl serving Web site that helps people locate organic farmer’s markets.

I know it’s unusual that Microsoft be broadminded about such things but, in an API contest, we can be. And I’d love to see what your comunity could cook up. I would be stoked seeing this contest be won by both Microsoft and non-Microsoft tech community members.

If any of you is heading to Linuxfest Northwest, please join me for breakfast!

Ada Lovelace Day is the brainchild of Suw Charman-Anderson

… an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless.

Augustina and I have each blogged of our own favorites in women in technology. (I posted about Evi Nemeth and Augustina about not finding rolemodels and the discouragement of women.)   If you want to see more of the articles written globally today, please check out this mashup of posts but, even if you’re not interested in this particular internet phenomenon, please learn more about Ada and women in computing.

As Suw calls out we are responsible for identifying and proslytizing about our heros so others can be inspired too.

Recent research by psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones. That’s a relatively simple problem to begin to address. If women need female role models, let’s come together to highlight the women in technology that we look up to. Let’s create new role models and make sure that whenever the question “Who are the leading women in tech?” is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues.

Suw’s leadership clearly makes her an inspiring woman in technology as well.

I just configured Eclipse to use Adobe’s Flex plug-in on Linux and thought I’d share my instructions. I made the mistake of installing Eclipse via apt and then upgrading to the latest version from Eclipse.org which pretty much failed miserably. I finally got it working by removing everything and just installing off of Eclipse.org directly. So anyways, here it is…

today, we got the seattlelinuxchix.org domain moved!

that gave me an excuse to update the blog and remind people to put this on their calendars — 5/12 6pm!

but, if you’re looking to do something next weekend, Robin is hosting a Seattle Drupal User’s group Bar camp –

We are having a BarCamp style, one-day event on February 21st.

Learn about it!

Plus we have a monthly meeting (3rd Thursday of each month):

or if you would like to see what’s happening with the group in
general:  http://groups.drupal.org/seattle

Drupal isn’t Linux but it is GPL’d and the community has a strong *nix
background.  Plus folks are enthusiastic and nice!

I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to stop by Cafe Vita last night for our first meetup.It was great to meet you all face to face and see what everyone was up to!

We spent a lot of time swapping web sites and sharing info on different things we were currently playing with and working on.

Marie shared Tux, a game that mimics Super Mario Bros. Sarah shared her experiences at a recent Seattle Startup weekend. Robin talked about their Drupal users group and mentioned they are setting a date for a mini-conference in April. Augustina (me) showed off Compiz desktop effects on my eeePC. Kevin and Marie were working to share an internet connection between their computers because Marie’s doesn’t have a wireless card.

Finally Sarah convinced Robin to finally get a Twitter account, so we all spent time installing different Twitter clients and trying them out. Robin finally decided on Twitux as her Tweet client of choice. I was able to get Digsby installed via WINE but it had some UI issues that made it annoying. If anyone wants to try installing Digsby let me know and I’ll post instructions.

It was awesome meeting everyone! Looking forward to our next meetup in May!

Great meeting last night!

Meryll wrote a quick recap

Next meetings are

5/12 6pm
8/11 6pm
11/10 6pm

The space at CaffeVita was quite inviting, and lively.

Join us in May, we’ll just gab and geek!

Augustina and I will be there with penguins!

Seattle Linux Chix first meeting
(in recent years)

February 10, 2009

Caffe Vita
1005 East Pike Street, Seattle, Washington 98122
6-8pm on the upper floor.

we’ll be the geeks with laptops and a penguin