I was fortunate enough to have seen her talk before she vanished from the radar scope, and have referred to her blog entries later in my life for inspiration. I’ve never been a gamer and not really a coder either, but her input to my thinking about user experience, marketing and blogosphere has been profound.

There are a few names I’d like to mention in addition to Kathy; many of the women of Ubuntu Women and the Finnish IRC collective of female geeks, who have been empowering and supportive in my daily quest to keep my sanity as one of the Invisible Pink Unicorns of the Internet, women who use/do Linux (and even might get paid for it!). I’d like to thank, in no special order, Mackenzie Morgan, Emma Jane Hogbin, Melissa Draper, Elizabeth Krumbach, Jonna Pesonen and Johanna Toikkanen. Some of the names you might or might not know, some probably are not that active in the development scene of Linux and Ubuntu but are “only end-users”, but all of them deserve a thank you from me. Thank you for being you.

I’ve had my relapses. I’ve installed AlbumArt from sources, and I use statically compiled Skype. I even installed Amarok once, long long time ago, though used it only for an hour and uninstalled. I try very hard to keep my computers Qt free zone. But one app always slithers its way to my computers no matter what. I was introduced to the application by a Summercode Finland project in 2006, but the love doesn’t go away.

Scribus is a desktop publishing application, a tool for professional page layout creation on Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops. My fiddling with it has been limited to making badges for different conferences and making flyers for promoting a website here and there, but I love it to the extent I install it even when I don’t really want to install anything done with Qt.

I love Scribus a bit like an auntie loves her nieces and nephews, in a distant, non-intrusive way. I know one of the developers as heritage from summer of 2006, and I’ve once in a while given feature suggestions. I just today checked how one of my ideas from spring is doing and apparently it’s been already put in the svn… which… has the version 1.3.5… which is… only… about a year late from publishing?!

After discussing the matter with Riku (a.k.a. Tsoots @ freenode), he told me that apparently all the current developers are quite busy these days. Everyone is happily employed, life treats them good. Although this is nice, it’s a bit sad that the developement and bug crushing has stalled at a point when there’s only 8% of the future release roadmap issues to be solved!

So… If you feel a little tinge on your halo, feel that you could contribute in squashing these blocker bugs or help in any way, poke Tsoots in freenode or toss him an email to riku at scribus.info. He really wouldn’t mind. Rilly rilly.

What tickles me in the svn version is that little birdies tell me the new version would be more easily made to look like native GTK app! ;-)

Hilarious!


{"No other window.",
"You cannot escape from window %d!"},

{"Detach aborted.",
"The blast of disintegration whizzes by you!"},

{"First mark set - Column %d Line %d",
"You drop a magic marker - Column %d Line %d"},

{"New screen...",
"Be careful! New screen tonight."},

{"Creating logfile \"%s\".",
"You start writing on your scroll of logging named \"%s\"."},

{"getpwuid() can't identify your account!",
"An alarm sounds through the dungeon...\nThe Keystone Kops are after you!"},

{"There are screens on:",
"Your inventory:"},

note: enabling/disabling by typing ctrl-a nethack on/off in your screen session.

/me resists the urge to install nethack-gnome…
(Thank you, Renter!)

As I’m a fairly mobile person (and in this case mobility can mean anything from shifting from using desktop computer to laptop computer to using only mobile phone and/or my Nokia 770), I’ve not been happy with having multiple instances of the same reader (or even worse, multiple different readers) running on several different platforms. On Sunday, I became very frustrated because of this, and although I love RSSowl to pieces, I’ve moved to the simplest and the most accessible feed reader, Google Reader.

This solution is not the best possible still, as I’ve grown accustomed to have libnotify or an equivalent alerting me with a bubble about new, unread entries. One solution to this is to publish all my feeds and use YET ANOTHER RSS READER, such as… “Yet Another RSS Reader”, also known as yarssr… *sigh* which can almost do what I wantalso sucks and can’t do a thing I want it to do except make a pretty icon on the systray…

So. Is there any solution of my problem? I want to – at minimum – get a nice little bubble informing me that I’ve got unread feed items. Or, if not, would someone be willing to mentor me to create such an application (preferably cross-desktop, to be usable in all Ubuntu derivatives) with Python?

*sigh*
/me picks up her copy of “Learning Python” by Mark Lutz and starts on page 1…

I also showed my sister some fineries of using Facebook, like how to navigate (“ooh I didn’t know you can return to that start page by clicking the logo!”) and to change status and add a profile picture. She wanted to add “those cool buttons you’ve got” and the way she is accepting every damned app her friends invite her to, she’s going to have lots of them soon. I’ve removed lots of my own apps recently and have also started to block out the most obnoxious ones. The ones that are left are those I’ve deemed atleast semi-usable…

One of those I’ve got left is MyType – an application to show your Myers-Briggs type indicator. Plenty of people think this is great big brouhaha, but for some odd reason I think MBTI can truthfully give a quick view to a persons personality. A quick survey among few my closest friends in FLOSS field has revealed a surprising fact – though my own personality type, INFJ is supposedly rarest among the general population – it seems that plenty of my friends are actually INFJ personalities, people with Introverted, Intuition-based, Feeling and Judging personality.

And why not:

“INFJs tend to be devoted to what they believe in and seek work where their needs, values, and ideals can be deeply engaged. They move on the wave of their inspirations and are determined to see that their values are worked out in their lives. They will work toward their goals individually and, when needed, will put together a team of other highly dedicated people like themselves.”
Sandra Krebs Hirsch and Jean Kummerow

I’m not a big fan of pulling great assumptions based on such a tests, no matter how scientific they might seem, but I remember doing this test about 10 years ago in school as some professional considered it a valid tool for assessing what kind of future careers might fit our personality. I’ve done the test several times since and the results never change, and I actually think INFJ reflects my personality quite well. In the light of that I think I’ve picked the perfect career and the perfect intrests; this might be the reason I’m so strongly devoted to FLOS solutions.

Go ahead, test yourself.

Hi, I’m Miia Ranta, one of the recent additions to Ubuntu members but also to Planet Ubuntu. I’ve been using Ubuntu since February 2005, Linux few times before that. I can be spotted at some of Ubuntu related channels in freenode as Myrtti. I’m Finnish geekette, living in Tampere, Finland together with two guinea pigs.

It’s quite surreal to be making my first ever entry to Planet Ubuntu. I wrote about Ubuntu and the spirit of it on my blog oh, so many years ago (was it 2005?). Then, I was still studying in Tampere, doing office cleaning every evening after school, coding my own flat-file based blogging system with PHP, and fiddling with this new thing called Ubuntu. I had used Ubuntu for about 8 months by then. Using Linux and open source fit my mentality and my view on life in general. Since then I was employed by COSS, the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions, to help them with Linux and Open source in their own infrastructure, to overview the Finnish Summercode. I’ve met wonderful people, learnt new things, gotten new responsibilities and now working from home for a FLOSS company called Nomovok. Now I get paid for doing what I loved few years ago, but has the basics changed?

No.

Also sprach Myrtti 2005-11-15:
Q:So how does this compute to you being a person promoting open and free source where ever possible?
A:Because I feel that when I help somebody, I get something eventually in return. Because I feel that there is very few types of information that need to be private and classified. Because I think information is the key to every problem. Because I think that *we together* are stronger than *we individually*. Because I think that you don’t have a right to complain about something that sucks unless you’re ready to do something about it. Because I think that if something is wrong and the effort of trying to improve it isn’t uncomprehencively huge, you should. Because I think it’s a sin if you know something and someone would use the information, and you don’t tell it to anyone.

Because I think I love you.