Whenever I try to be a stable blog writer (one post each month seems fine, huh? =)) I just FAIL. So I’ll write a summary of last few months, ..
A couple of days ago, I got the following e-mail from Google Diversity Team that was saying I am one of six award winners to attend linux.conf.au:
Thank you for your application to the Google-Linux.conf.au Diversity Delegates Programme. After careful review by a committee made up of Linux.conf.au organizers, Linux Chix, and representatives from Google - your application has been selected as one of the 6 award winners!
I had a list of talks in mind to attend @linux.conf.au. But unfortunately, it seems I can hardly get the visa on time (remember the MySQL case -and other side of the coin.. *click*)
Wonderful news.. but,.. well.. just news. =)
* It’s 19th of Jan. but I forgot to tell you Project 366 was succesfully finished! I started Project 366 just for want of trying, but lately it became a long-year album. I see how Photojojo was right. It’s an amazing way to document travels and accomplishments, relationships, .. and so on. Time moves surprisingly fast.
Since I successfully unlocked & signed into my Google account last week (it was only one step further: an edge or 3g connection! :)), I am happly using Android. It has nice features and geeky enough–except it rapidly drains battery (i turned brightness down to 0% as a workaround, but still sucks).
I am currently writing this entry via its browser. But I get bored.. Let’s be a bad girl ;P
Wha? What happened? Why my phone restarted? Aww, did it evaluate everything i write as a system command? I must kiddin’, huh?
But unfortunately, I’m not kiddin’… It is really the most bizarre flaw I’ve ever seen.. You can read more from here.
PS#1: Note that, only Android 1.0 TC5-RC29 or earlier are vulnerable and a patch has released already.
PS#2: Don’t even try to type “rm -rf /”
PS#3: Oh, and there’s that, too.
PS#4: Aomm, and there was that, too.
Finally, I returned to hometown after a painful roadmap (San Jose -> Denver -> Frankfurt -> Istanbul). But the only thing that makes those hours quickly spendable is the people I met –hopefully I can always find some interesting people to talk with This time, at my last transit flight (after 4 + 9 hours on air) I met with two men, it was really funny. In fact I just asked if they want a dark Twix or not, but one of them told me he’s just too tired to eat. So I wondered if they’re from CA, too.. Then we started to talk. After a while, I realized one of them was wearing a Microsoft t-shirt
- Uhmm.., you’re working for Microsoft?
+ Yes, we are.
- Oh, I’ve just attended to a summit in Google. Actually.. I am working for a Linux distribution.
Then we started to laugh.. and some kind of funny fan stuff. Then it went like that:
+ So what are you doing exactly?
- I am from the security team, I am tracking vulnerabilities and fixing them. And you?
(they started to laugh, and I was trying to figure out why :))
- Hey, what’s wrong?
+ We’re from Microsoft’s security team!
I think it was a really nice conjunction, think about that: you find somebody to talk -> you’re colleagues -> and you’re working in the same specific area + they are from a very different point of view.. So we talked about security, open source, Microsoft & Novell and so on. And Android! Damn, despite unlocking it successfuly, I still can’t sign in my Google account.. They were really nice people and shared their knowledge about unlocking phones So I realized I have some extra things to do rather than just network unlocking.
And at last.. the funniest part of our conversation:
+ So why are you working for open source anyway?
- For freedom!
I was at Google Mentor Summit this weekend. It was at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California. It was really amazing to meet with other FOSS developers.
It took 22 hours to arrive CA but hopefully I was strong enough to directy go to the welcome party.
First of all, I’d like to thank Chris DiBona, Leslie Hawthorn, Cat Allman, Ellen Ko and any other Googlers who participated to organize such a wonderful summit. I really had a great time.
During the summit, I attended several sessions including Android related ones (which made me to buy a TMobile G1 yesterday!) and Distro Leader’s summit that Donnie (from Gentoo) proposed (Karsten Wade from Fedora, Joe Brockmeier from OpenSuse, Steve McIntyre from Debian showed up) and we talked about how to get introduced more people with Linux. And of course, Sam’s Open Souce Game Development session was one of the greatest ones.
pic. from open source security session
I also led a session called Open Souce Security. It took much more time than I thought (90 minutes instead of 30′). A lot of participants from various level of security showed up– Google Network Security Team Leader, Eugene Teo from Redhat Security Team, developers from Tor project (you can remember Jacob Appelbaum from his Cold Boot Attack Research) and so on. At first minutes, I got really excited because there were a lot of security experts who have much more knowledge and experience than me. But the session went quite good and we mostly discussed about tracking vulnerabilities, disclosing security flaws, patches to OSS projects that possibly have security vulnerabilities and criterions of accepting them, and GSoC students’ secure coding.
I’d like to thank some of my friends that I met at the event -in order of appearance
* Eugene Teo from Redhat Kernel Security Team. I knew and respect him from OSS security society- it was really nice to meet and talk about security with him.
* Donnie Berkholz from Gentoo. He’s currently Gentoo council member and maintains X.org–which I think is a quite hard job
* Sam Lantinga, lead software engineer and leader of the group of gameplay programmers on World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertaintment. *cool* He’s also the creator of fabulous library, SDL. He became one of my closest friends during these two days. I’m really so lucky to meet with him.
* Nils Kneuper and Mark de Wever from Wesnoth. We used to know each other with Nils but I totaly forgot that he’ll attend to this event. But thanks God, we met at lunch by chance! Mark is also a cool guy from Wesnoth and *i think* he had a great time while watching me when I was drinking *natural* Green Tea (it was the worst thing i’ve ever drunk. ahh.).
* Austin Ziegler, from Ruby Central. He is a cool photographer and ruby person and I am looking forward to see his group girl photos.
* Selena Deckelmann, from PostgreSQL. I always glad to meet with other women in computing. I am looking forward to participate in a WiC project with her.
* Mike Melanson, Justin Ruggles, Reimar Döffinger from ffmpeg team. They were really funny people and we had a great time while Mike was talking about the times that Ismail’s complainings on Turkish support
* Alisson Yagi Costa, from Umit. We went to San Francisco and Santa Cruz with him and his words to describe me were quite remarkable :“you’re not normal, but you’re not strange”
Of course there are much more people to mention here. I’d like to see all of them in the next summit!
