Does anyone else ever get that feeling on December 26 that goes Christmas is as far away as it will ever get? Well, Christmas is getting closer, and so is Talk Like a Pirate Day. In fact, you have exactly as long to wait for Talk Like a Pirate Day as has past since the last one. To celebrate this equinox, today has been declared Pork Like a Tyrant Day.

Pass the word on, and have fun with all your porking tyranny.

I'm sure everyone is just dying to see me upgrade Ubuntu again after it went so well last time, so, as Ubuntu 7.04 (codename Feisty Fawn) went beta last night, I have upgraded my laptop.

Things that currently seem to work just fine that I tend to worry about on upgrades:

1. Ability to read photos from my camera over USB
2. Suspend to RAM
3. Network manager
4. Power management in general
5. gnome-session

Things I haven't tested:

1. Hiberate to disk
2. Network Manager's three million race conditions all meaning that it needs to be fully restarted after any resume

Bug fixes that I'm really hoping are genuine: 68818, 61423 and 49221.

Pipe dreams (stuff that I haven't even worked out how to think about doing):

1. Getting Network Manager to automatically choose a network appropriately even if, for example, I haven't logged in the 'mary' user, which has bitten me a few times trying to give people (houseguests) a user account on my laptop and be able to sleep while they check their email.

Andrew ran into two very annoying problems: he used the recommended upgrade tool (update-manager) rather than aptitude to do the update and:

1. Bug 73463: update-manager in its infinite wisdom decided that custom apt sources should be replaced with archive.ubuntu.com. In our case this meant that Andrew didn't download packages via our apt-proxy install which meant that when I went to download them this morning, I had to download them all again rather than getting any cached versions. (Attention US residents: bandwidth is still not infinitely fast nor priced at a flat rate everywhere yet). It also means that all of Andrew's non-main repository software (such as things in universe, the less well supported packages), got removed.
2. an Apache fast-cgi package upgrade failed, which managed in turn to crash update-manager, which then couldn't be restarted because update-manager relies on dbus, and dbus was in the process of being upgraded at the time of the crash. (He had to finish the upgrade with aptitude in the end.)

There's been a little confluence of events lately, resulting in yesterday (still time, if you're not at GMT+10!) becoming Stop Cyberbullying Day. There's been a lot of good discussion and I wanted to quote a bit of it rather than add much to it. If you're only going to read a bit of this though, just go straight on through to Dorothea Salo, who is quoted extensively below.

Two angles here: is a hostile environment harming the women participants and potential participants in geekland (and also other groups, Dorothea Salo does note homosexual people too, I just didn't quote that bit)? And then, how do you actually stop it, noting that being open about your goal of being friendly or welcoming to women is actually counterproductive?

Matthew Garrett, part 1:

The Ubuntu Code of Conduct is something that's designed to ensure two things. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, that discussions don't end up bogged down in personal abuse with no useful conclusions being drawn. Secondly, and perhaps more subtly, to ensure that potential contributors aren't put off by an atmosphere of perceived hostility.

...

A good rule of thumb is probably that if you think it would potentially result in a complaint to your boss if you did it in a moderately large company, then doing it on an Ubuntu mailing list is a bad plan.

Matthew Garrett, part 2:

We have basically three classes of people:

1. People who won't work on "fluffy" projects
2. People who won't work on "hostile" projects
3. People who will work on pretty much any project, independent of the atmosphere

So, think of it as an optimisation tactic - projects benefit from having skilled people working on them. Do you gain more skilled people from being "fluffy" or "hostile"?

I am not certain whether or not this is the limit of Garrett's opinion or just a practical summary in order to win the argument. In theory I'd go further: being inclusive within reasonable limits, good to newcomers, behaving in ways that will put people socialised to expect current widespread standards of professional behaviour at ease and not defending crass behaviour to women or anyone else as some kind of position of moral strength is actually morally better as well as probably more attractive to potential contributors. In practice I suppose if it takes the "but being better to people helps Linux!" argument that's what it takes, but it's not ideal. The idea is for the software and the associated communities to help people, and the other way around is just facilitating the end result.

But as we see below, the argument that we might be better people if we were gentle with each other, considered offending people generally a bad thing (sometimes necessary, seldom actually a good in and of itself) is well defended against.

Dorothea Salo:

I’m dubious that women can fix these windows on their own, in fact. It’d be nice, but geekland culture [earlier Salo notes "It’s not just the computer geeks, either, which is why I use the vague term geekland. Gaming of various sorts, comics, science-fiction fandom—same story"] has got a cozy little cycle going: demean women, then accuse them of overreacting (I’m being kind here; the accusations are generally much nastier than that) if they protest it, then demean the protesters, who are after all women, until they are driven off. Then demean women some more; who will be left to protest? And who will be left to protest should merely demeaning women escalate to threatening them? Threatening them sexually? Threatening their lives?

...

So here is what you do, if you’re a man wanting to help. You say, Um, was that supposed to be funny? Because, not laughing here. You say, Hey, could we not use that phrase? I don’t like it. You say to the main perpetrators, in IRC whispers or private email or whatever, Hey, would you mind toning down the jokes? That kind of talk really bothers me.

The key here is to express that the demeaning of women bothers you, you personally. Don’t appeal to nebulous higher causes; geekland scoffs at that stuff. Don’t even say the words sexist or sexism, much less feminism, and avoid woman and women whenever you can. If you say that kind of talk, trust me, they’ll know what you mean; whereas if you invoke the loaded words, they’ll shut down like a portcullis before an invading army.

And don’t say that you want the talk to stop because you want a comfortable environment for women, or even for a specific woman (your significant other, your sister, your daughter, your boss, your employee). Geekland doesn’t care. You can’t even say that you want more women to join the community. Some geeks will openly say Why? (Or, less openly, they will say that women aren’t there because they don’t want to be—without answering the question begged—or aren’t smart enough or good enough or tough enough to be. The last-mentioned, of course, is code for honorary guy.) The rest will simply assume that you want women for sex, because that’s all that women are for in geekland.

In fact, don’t get drawn into discussing why sexist talk irks you; doing so has probably been my major mistake. Geekland is very, very good at attacking feminist arguments, and dismissing and besieging the arguers. If they ask you why you’re bothered, just ask Shouldn’t I be? Doesn’t it bother you? Uh, isn’t it wrong? and like that—let them defend. (They will, don’t mistake me. But at least they have to.)

Beaming in from somewhere else on this not quite Stop Cyberbullying Day anymore day: Reasons to be polite and decent to other people in online fandom, noting that none of them have anything to do with niceness or censorship (or BNFs—Big Name Fans—but the influence they have on the discourse is a little particular to fandom communities).

Some reasons to be polite and decent to other people in online fandom, or in fact, many communities:

5) Among your audience there is probably at least one person whose good opinion you value, or who is in a position to do you either good or harm, who knows and likes the person you are about to be vile to.

8) [The person you are about to flame is] clearly considerably less intelligent than you are, and you have too much pride to shoot fish in a barrel.

9) [The person you are about to flame is] clearly considerably more intelligent than you are, and you have too much sense to invite a slapdown you'll still remember in painful detail when you are 90.

10) Appearances online can be deceiving. The fact of someone being very new to fandom, or just very young, or alternately much older and not terribly tech-aware, does not actually guarantee that they are not, for example, one of the world's leading authorities in the field you are discussing. This can lead to, once they have mastered the, for example, [LiveJournal posting] learning curve, and can express themselves clearly, a really really unpleasant burning sensation as your entire body turns flaming red with shame.

13) Something tragic or traumatic will probably happen to you one day, and that will be a bad time to discover that you've established a reputation as a person who doesn't deserve or appreciate sympathy, kindness or tact.

14) One of the many ways in which fandom is not like high school is that fandom is full of extremely smart people. We are not short of clever around here. The bar for "So smart you will automatically be loved and admired, even if you behave like a wild squirrel brought indoors" is set much, much higher than you think it is, and you are probably in no danger of concussing yourself on it.

16) If your motive for nastiness is that you are terribly, terribly annoyed by stupidity, you may want to keep in mind that intelligent and meaningful conversations rarely break out in the middle of vicious slapfights.

Unfortunately my main response to this is that it sounds like fandom in particular, or at least online fandoms that the author of that post is in, pays back your sins much more effectively than geekdom as a whole does.