Key transition

I'm migrating PGP keys from 0xF9FDD506 to 0x0C14A470. If you signed my old key, I would appreciate you signing my new key as well. Feel free to ping me with questions.

Accordingly, I've published a transition statement signed by both keys.

Teaching free/open source to high school students

A few weeks ago I taught a class on Open Source: Contributing to free culture (catalog entry) for Spark, a one-day program put on by the student-run MIT Educational Studies Program. I was fortunate to have two helpful co-teachers, Tyler Hallada and Jacob Hurwitz, who assisted with the lesson plan and the in class lecture.

We ended up teaching 3 sessions of the 1hr 50min class that Saturday, with about 10 students in each session.

I was pretty impressed by the quality of the students; a number of them had used GNU/Linux before, but even those who hadn't were able to gain something from the experience. The class was broken up into three segments:

1. Lecture on a brief history of open source and the free software movement
2. Small research project on an open source project
3. Lab where students could work through OpenHatch's training missions

The point was to mix up what could otherwise be a very boring lecture.

I think we might have missed the mark on the last bit, as I get the feeling that we didn't end up giving the students good actionables. While the quality of OpenHatch is high and the organization's campus outreach programs are amazing, skills practice only goes so far without clear direction to apply said skills. I'll be following up with the class participants to see how they're progressing on their own open source contributor journey, and will post updates if I have any.

While not an OpenHatch event, if this sort of thing interests you, OpenHatch runs a series of events like this one and has a mailing list for discussing planning and sharing best practices. Subscribe and say hi!

The presentation is enclosed below, and of course is licensed under CreativeCommons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. [PDF]

Where I've gone off to

For those of you back at my university, you may have noticed I'm not there this semester.

Google's 2012 FEP team

I spent this past summer at Google, Inc, developing internal tools for the AdSense team, specifically Google Programmable Ads. Being at Google was great; I loved my team and my intern cohort, the rest of the interns in the Freshman Engineering Practicum.

I'm not currently at Google; my internship ended at the beginning of August. Although it was a blast, all good things must come to an end.

I'm not at Mason, either. I was super excited to return to university, and was just about to buy my books and get ready to move in when I got an email from a former coworker at Ksplice, a startup Oracle acquired while I interned there last year. He was starting a new company which would focus on business communications. I'd be working with a bunch of my former coworkers, and based on what I had heard of the company's plans I was confident in their ability to make an awesome product.

Needless to say, when they decided to offer me a position working there full time, I jumped on it.

From an academic point of view, Mason didn't really have much of a mechanism to support this. Co-ops are uncommon there, and not really supported for more than one semester; a full year away had never been done, according to our career services. My department was fully supportive, however, so we managed to find a way to make it work. This involved filling out some oddly-named forms, such as Special Registration for Graduation Request, which the registrar asserted was the right form, trust us on this one.

Myself and Obey Arthur Liu
at a SIPB hackathon

But that's all neither here nor there. I'm now up in Cambridge, MA, working with awesome people (including but not limited to tabbott, wdaher, jesstess, and keegan), and exploring the city. I'm hanging out with MIT SIPB, helping with the maintenance of Sugar Labs' servers in E15 and spending more time working on various open source projects.

To my friends at Mason: I miss you all. I know regardless of how the next year+ turns out, it'll be one one hell of a ride.

Key transition

As Christian mentioned, the Debian Keyring Maintainers did a "promote" this weekend of the new keyring. I figure it's an opportune time to perform a public key transition, since this had the effect of replacing my key on the keyring.

For my new key, 0xF9FDD506, I decided to opt for a 4096-bit RSA, which is stronger than I should have to worry about for the foreseeable future. The key is much better connected than my previous one, 0x0AC70206. I also have a transition document, ripped almost word-for-word from Christian's.

If you signed my previous key, you should sign the new one unless you're feeling extra paranoid today.

Post-mortem on WMF Server Donation

Of the 12 servers sent to Sugar Labs, 6 arrived at the Arlington Career Center. Three of them stayed there, whereas I brought three home to attempt to salvage what I could from them. The three that arrived are described below.

wmf-01 "le premier"

2x Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 285 @ 2606.342 MHz
2x 250 GB HDDs, 2x slots empty
2 Gigabit Ethernet NICs

This machine worked swimmingly.

wmf-02 "something witty"

2x Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 265 @ 1800.000 MHz
2x 250 GB HDDs, 2x slots empty
2 Gigabit Ethernet NICs

This machine was incredibly noisy when turned on.

wmf-03 "lemon"

2x Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 265 @ 1800.000 MHz
2x 250 GB HDDs, 2x slots empty
2 Gigabit Ethernet NICs

This machine did not fully POST, and was incredibly noisy when turned on.

Between them, only one of them had working fans. The other two made ungodly noises. We managed to salvage enough fans from the machine that didn't post so that we now have two working machines cooling-wise.

We hope to install these machines at a Virginia co-lo center after we finish getting all the parts for Ivan Krstić's blackrock.

NB: This post has been sitting around in my drafts for a while, and I just got around to posting it now. We're still waiting on some last-minute parts before putting these servers into production.

If I had a dollar for every idea...

On suspendable computers retaining network services with conditional wakeup...

(11:28:29 AM) Luke Faraone: don't you hate it when you think of something cool, only to find that someone else already thought of it?
(11:28:47 AM) Peter Harkins: Depends. Sometimes I then think "Awesome, now I don't have to spend all that time building it."
(11:29:34 AM) Luke Faraone: I recently was thinking "it'd be cool to be able to have a smaller 'little computer' with a NIC, some RAM, and a low-powered CPU to maintain presence on IRC etc when my computer's sleeping." Then I saw http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/06/13/0641228/Microsofts-Sleep-Proxy-Lowers-PC-Energy-Use
(11:29:39 AM) Luke Faraone: ... and it's from MSFT.
(11:30:12 AM) Peter Harkins: cute
(11:30:25 AM) Peter Harkins: There are lots of tiny Linux pc's out there, though.
(11:30:45 AM) Peter Harkins: I've seen a couple the size of a power brick - you plug them in, add ethernet, done.
(11:31:14 AM) Luke Faraone: what'd be really cool is if one could author an API that would allow for desktop applications to request access to run services on the device, and have state magically transfer across them.
(11:31:40 AM) Peter Harkins: I've seen people talking about doing that - I wouldn't be surprised to see it commonly in 5y.
(11:31:49 AM) Peter Harkins: It's sort of the logical extension of GNU screen.
(11:32:10 AM) Luke Faraone: we have live migration of VMs in the enterprise market.
(11:32:34 AM) Luke Faraone: if the wall wart had hypervisor support, you could just operate each service in a sort of sandbox.

I know that in order to make it work in reality, we'd need support from app developers, but are there any technical reasons this won't work?