Andrew and I have wedding photos and stories online now at wedding.puzzling.org.

Andrew and I have been using f-spot recently. It's imperfect in a bunch of ways: its UI isn't really designed for more than ten or fifteen tags, it's Gallery2-interface UI isn't designed for more than about fifteen albums, and it's not designed for two people to use it. (Like many applications these days, no two desktop users are ever assumed to want to share data between users, let alone machines, which is just too bad since we share the camera. Yes, I appreciate that this is a hard problem, but with shared music collections, photo collections and so on Andrew and I just keep hitting it.)

Anyway, Andrew found a bug in it based on one of Martin's pictures of our wedding, which relies on the EXIF data to tell it how much memory to allocate, even when the EXIF data suggests just over a gigabyte. I know that we've all been there at times, it's just a reminder to me (I don't do a lot of coding in languages where I need to allocate my own memory) that even non-malicious user data shouldn't be trusted.

linux.conf.au isn't just a Linux conference. It is a technical conference about Free Software, held annually in Australasia. We invite submissions on any Free Software related subject; from Linux and the BSDs to OpenOffice.org, from networking to audio-visual magic, from deep hacks to Creative Commons.

Important dates:

• Submissions open: Friday, June 1 2007
• Submission deadline: Friday, July 20, 2007
• Email notifications from review committee: early September
• Conference begins: Monday, January 28 2008

Read the full announcement, and don't forget to check Martin Pool's How to get a conference abstract accepted and my Getting a talk into linux.conf.au. I'm co-chairing the selection committee with Rusty Russell this year, so expect my points to still hold. This year we've added the option of a short video pitch for your talk, probably particularly useful for people who don't appear on the Free Software conference circuit a lot. Can you speak? Well, 30 seconds to a videocam will shed at least a little light.

There's also an email sized version of the CFP that you can mail around in excitement, although alas someone's removed my easy copy+paste into 72 character columns version. You could nab it from SLUG.

For the record I am no longer coordinator of LinuxChix. What am I going to do now? Well, probably not much for a while, but eventually I'll have a think about my goals related to women and Free Software, separately and together and figure out which of them are achievable and then how to achieve them.

I came across Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog a little while back, which discusses among other things:

• What is feminism?
• Why “feminism” and not just “humanism”? or “equalism”? Isn’t “feminism” exclusionary?
• What’s wrong with suggesting that women take precautions to prevent being raped?

I suggested a few more, although frankly some of these I see mainly used disingenuously (in particular I meant it as a compliment is often used to mean I knew that she or other women or their supporters would object to this, and I specifically said it to piss them off and hopefully win a fight with them, because in my ideal world anything positive I said to a woman would be lapped up with joy):

1. Why is calling women ’sexy’ problematic? (“We need more women in our gaming/coding/business circle, because they’re sexy!”)
2. Why can’t she just take my comments on her as a sexual being as they were meant, as a compliment?
3. Isn’t it a public/moral good to say whatever the hell I want and challenge the mainstream politically correct dogma?
4. Isn’t it better for sexual liberty if I make sexual possibilities explicit wherever possible?
5. Aren’t you just trying to cut down on all the fun bits of our circle and make us behave like stuffy business people?

The last one is frankly the most interesting to me in these discussions. Having friendly sex positive social circles is kind of fun (I said social, when getting work done, it's nice to have the option of not needing to so much as declare my hand on being sex positive or not) if they don't also require that women do all the legwork of embodying everyone's sexual needs and desires. I don't find that kind of balance online very often at all. If there's talk of sex at all in online geeky circles, there's going to be talk of how women are mysterious and ineffable and frustrating and essential and sexy and frigid and stupid and slutty by turns. (This is always odd to be part of as a known woman: one isn't accused to be one of the mysterious etc set, but one's expertise is downgraded. Women can never fully understand how sacred and contemptible other women are.)

Andrew and I seem to constitute a test of software design in almost everything we do, because we share so much stuff. Not just computers, which is already sort of an edge case for desktop Linux these days (or so I gather from how likely it is that the friendly 'Switch User' functionality will freeze most laptops; users must be assumed not to share them). We share data. Scads of it. Not just code. All kinds of data.

We share cameras to the point of not always being sure who took which photo. Does f-spot want us to maintain two separate databases, descriptions and tagsets over our 14GB collection of digital photos? Does it want us to each have a copy of the collection on our laptops? Yes it does! (We get around this with sshfs which has many downsides, but at least we can share data and won't lose everything the next time Andrew's laptop gets stolen at work.) We share music collections and one good set of speakers. MPD is actually designed for that use case and some day the clients for it will vaguely approximate sensible user interfaces per Rhythmbox and Quod Libet and whatever Apple application they're based on, instead of assuming that we'd like to browse the filesystem tree rather than, say, by artist or similar.

Today's unsharable piece of data is, alas, jMemorize flash card decks. We're both learning Spanish and would like to build a joint flash card deck. It took me a few weeks to give jMemorize a go at all because it was recommended to Andrew on the basis of having lots of cards ready for language learning and turned out to have lots of cards ready for learning Hebrew and New Testament Greek, so we have to do our own cards, contra the sales pitch. I was kind of cross about that.

Naturally though, we'd prefer to share the cards. I initially thought that, well, if the save format is text, I'd put it in version control and we'd both add to the deck. So I tried, and here are the options:

• Share the full XML jMemorize data files, which means that the number of times you've seen this card and number of times you got the answer right statistics would, instead of being modelled to each of us, be modelled on the sum of our performance (in fact this is the ideal case, in actual fact the presence of this data in the file looks like it would result in a stupendous number of conflicts). Entirely unhelpful, since we're learning exactly the same materials but can't be assumed to be equally bad at every question. (This is all important because jMemorize adapts how many times you see a card based on how many times you get it right.)
• Export to CSV. This basically doesn't work at all for a repeated add some more cards, import some cards Andrew designed, export my cards to him, around we go exercise, because it doesn't merge. If I export my cards to CSV, and then re-import them, they're assumed to be all new, so I get a duplicate of any card I happened to have in the deck already.

Andrew points out that I could hand roll some kind of more easily mergeable file format that doesn't include the user-specific how well am I, Mary, learning this fact? data, then have some kind of commit scripts that converts the XML to that format and commits that to the version control and then when I update, takes that format and stuffs it back into the XML (creating new cards only when it needs to). It's not even a hard problem, unless I'm missing something crucial, but it's, as usual, more time than I wanted to spend on this, given that I need to actually learn Spanish and I'm pretty much up to scratch on how that kind of hideous data munging is done.

Robert Collins, Peter Miller and Erik de Castro Lopo have put a page up linking to their linux.conf.au 2007 material on software testing: their do it our way paper, the video of the talk, and a mailing list that's forming to talk about testing (their way).