Author: Mary

My project for February is to read Bringing them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (free, online).

I wasn’t too engaged with Anthony Baxter’s keynote Two Snake Enter, One Snake Leave? on Python 3.0 (the first ever backwards incompatible release). Partly because it’s because I’ve been hearing about the thing for yonks and it generally turns into wailing and gnashing of teeth, hence my hindbrain goes into force override. Also, I was preparing my lightning talk slides. I kept working on them through Bringing kittens back to life – continuing story of open source graphics drivers, so I can’t say much about that either. (I hear that Seeking is hard: Ogg design internals over in another theatre was good.)

After kittens, it was time for law: Stop in the Name of Law, Kimberlee Weatherall’s wrap-up of the year in intellectual property. Some interesting conclusions from her talk:

• Weatherall says that you can tell her DRM is dead when digital movies and TV are DRM-free. Music has always had a more expensive DRM-free option: CDs. So the appearance of more DRM-free sales is not a revolution.
• The push to kill software patents entirely is dead. They’re worth an awful lot of money to an awful lot of people, and aside from that research keeps digging up what are effectively software patents even before they were meant to be around in the US and even in the EU, where they still aren’t. Draw a line, and software patents will spring up where the grass is greener.
• The big worrying new development we should watch for: the push to make ISPs responsible for copyright infringements. Particularly (watch out Australia) as riders on requirements to make them responsible for not letting kids see porn. THIS WILL PROTECT YOUR KIDS FROM PORN and also content owners from infringement BUT THINK OF THE PORN. (Dear, dear, dear readers: I am perfectly well aware that there are also legal, technical and ethical arguments against filtering porn too. Do not deluge me with them. Thank you.)
• If you’re worried about the worldwide IP situation and you’re scared and you’re one little person and you don’t know what to do, code. (Or create free content.) This content is becoming very useful to very many people, some of whom have a lot of money, and they are worrying about IP for you.

I wasn’t a great fan of Create your own Open Source Dance Mat, because the content was short for the slot and letting a few people dance didn’t really make up for the missing second half of the slot. Plus, the chaoticness of the dancing made several people in the audience decide that it would be a fine thing to have very loud conversations. I have no idea what they were about, as I have difficulty tuning in when a lot of conversations happen at once. But I suspect they weren’t on-topic.

The final talk we went to was Jeff and Pia’s The Australian Open Source Industry & Community Census 2007 where they presented some raw results of the community part of their census. They didn’t mention that they were working with psychometricians on it until nearly the end, so sent them an email with some semi-informed statistical rambling during the talk and spent about 48 hours worried that I’d been too snarky. But Jeff was enthusiastic in reply. Ah, performance anxiety.

There were lightning talks before the closing session. I compressed my Getting a talk into linux.conf.au post into a three minute lightning talk (Talks you should submit to linux.conf.au, PDF, 85KB) which was not unappreciated except when compared with Paul Fenwick’s 32 or 38 slides, which result in the MySpace for unsocial fascist bastards Greasemonkey script.

After close (summary: linux.conf.au 2009 will be in Hobart, best logo ever, march south next year) was the Google party. I quite liked the vibe. Last year was a bit more intense, going well into the evening with oppressive humidity and a fair bit more alcohol. This year was more like a barbecue in someone’s backyard. Someone’s really big backyard. (It probably helps that Melbourne sunset is about half an hour later than Sydney’s.) After the booze dried up (not that I was partaking but I could have done with another Coke) we headed to Polly’s, which is another very Melbourne find. (Fancy red armchairs and cocktails…)

I didn’t spend much time at Open Day. Unfortunately the venue was very uncomfortable: the floor was at the top of Union House and was unairconditioned. Our stand was also on the darker and hotter side. I womanned the LinuxChix stall with Akkana, Robyn and Kylie for about an hour. But I’d also printed the poster and had business cards done at my expense, so I feel I added in money what I couldn’t add in time.

The week is getting eaten up with trivial and non-trivial laptop tasks. (I’ll finish uploading the Chix slides later, rather than skip talks to do it. By the way, for people doing slides from Flickr photos, the best search to use is Advanced and tick all the Creative Commons boxes. Yes including the commercial use one, please. The conference and most of the miniconfs are asking for BY-SA. That means you can’t include NC — no commercial use — photos in your slides!)

Yesterday’s keynote was Stormy Peters on Would you do it again for free?, addressing whether or not Free Software programmers who have ever had a job developing it would continue doing so after they leave the job. Her conclusion is ‘yes’ for various reasons, but that they’d probably switch projects. The major howler was that she speculated without checking that Eazel employees are probably mostly still in Free Software (in actual fact, a whole team almost immediately disappeared into Apple-land, never to reemerge). It’s a shame she didn’t follow that up before throwing it as a passing commend into the talk: it would have been interesting information informing her conclusions. (For anyone interested in following up, she has some sources at her blog: Do external rewards kill intrinsic motivations? and Two new points on “Would you do it again for free?”)

There was a warning during the keynote not to go to Rusty Russell’s lguest tutorial without preparation, which I hadn’t done: there was a BOF session the day before that I heard about from Rusty after the fact. I wish I’d found his blog post in time to go, but I didn’t see it until after the tute.

lca has a long-standing problem with it being basically impossible to run any tutorials without starting from complete beginnings. Most of the audience will not have installed, studied or thought in advance, no matter how vigorously requested to do so. I’m beginning to wonder whether offering paid tutorials, as some other conferences do, would change the landscape a little.

I enjoyed Parrot: a VM for Dynamic Languages a lot. I believe Parrot has been around almost as long as Perl 6 has been talked about, or something like that, but fortunately I haven’t been on board for that ride, so I can enjoy the fun without thinking about the pain. I’m even tempted to look at the code.

I more or less worked through several other talks: By Sound and By Touch: Using Linux with Speech and Braille Output Interfaces, Application performance profiling with Xorg and Breaking the Silence: Making Applications Talk with Telepathy. Andrew tells me Clustered Samba – not just a hack any more was amazing, audacious, awesome. Perhaps aspirational. Some words like that. I’m sorry I missed it. Tridge’s talk last year was a step down, and silly me, I just assumed it was a predictor, not a total aberration.

As predicted, I didn’t ‘do’ the Professional Delegates Networking Session. I instead went out to dinner with Twisted and Twisted-ish folk: Jonathon, Stephen, Elspeth, Andrew and Tim. And it was quiet and not a performance and exactly what I needed. Especially since the Google party is tonight.

Wednesday began with the conference organisers assuming all 600 attendees would be at the keynote. It was very efficiently organised on this principle: get into the theatre, go down to the front most row with available seats, move all the way along to the side rather than sitting in the aisle and claiming most of that row for yourself. I was really impressed: it’s a common failing of meeting organisers of all types to counter people’s (or at least Australian’s) natural tendency to sit near the aisles and doors and try to leave as much space between themselves and other people as possible. When people arrive late, hilarity eventually ensues.

In the event, it turns out that about 500 of 600 people will show up for a keynote. Today (Thursday) it looks like about 400, at least by the start time.

The keynote was Reconceptualizing Security (video already available). Like most keynote-style speakers, Bruce Schneier doesn’t bring new insights and new work to every single talk. He overviewed the economic tradeoffs for and against security in general, and then the disparity between the way our amagdyla evaluates risk and the way risk works in modern technology and society in general. Bruce’s solution is that security providers need to provide the feeling of security to go with the reality, or otherwise consumers will behave as they always do in a lemons market: they’ll buy cheap, bad things over expensive, working things because price (and feeling) are the only market signals they get.

The questions afterwards all seemed reasonable, there wasn’t too much of we, the hyperintelligent trans-humans who have rid ourselves of our baser instincts, must, unfortunately, dig those poor unfortunates out of their hole vibe that can sometimes emerge from discussions of informing the market about unsexy but necessary features.

I went to the Writing really rad GTK and GNOME applications … in C, Python, or Java! tutorial in the first session. This was at exactly the right level for me: I know Python and C (and Java more or less, but I haven’t used it since 1.4) but nothing about GTK. lca tutorials are hard: very few people do any preparatory work and there will always be a substantial amount of the audience who wants the tutorial to start by helping them install the development tools. (There goes a two hour tutorial.)

I also enjoyed Tux’s Angels: Incident Response Unravelled, except that it was kind of unfortunate that the chair dwelt on the young, conventionally attractive women! but! awesome! hahaha take that world! aspect. I don’t know how the Angels themselves feel about this (possibly differently, given that they refer to their team as Tux’s Angels), but, as a woman who doesn’t actually get a lot of wow, woman… kick-butt woman! fanboys (this has never happened to me, in fact), I compare this to comments about my height. (Uh, aside for people who’ve never met me: I am 193cm, more or less 6′ 4″, tall.) Sympathy jokes (haha I bet people ask you about basketball all the time) are better than straight jokes about it, but it’s better just to leave it alone entirely, unless you’re asking me to find you someone in a crowd. Likewise, comments about being a woman in tech: unless we were specifically talking about it, better to leave it alone and just let people in tech do their thing.

Anyway, the Angels walked us through an incident response mockup using Free Software tools. It was a very well-prepared talk, with videos of all the demos, and rehearsed handovers between speakers, something I rarely see at these conferences and something worth cultivating.

There was also a weird announcement from the chair about not distributing our own media of the talk. I really wish I knew what that was about: it was unclear whether they meant our own videos or also any photos. If they mean photos, that’s a pretty major departure for lca. (In Australia, the subjects of photography do not have a right to privacy, they only have the right to control the use of their image when promoting a product. However, the owners or hirers of the venue — ie the conference organisers — have the right to demand photography ends, if they like. See NSW Photographer’s Rights for a long discussion.) However it was just one, confusing, announcement during a single talk: I honestly have no idea what it was really about.

I also saw AbiCollab – Rich Text Collaborative Editting — I wish it had had more demos — and I wanted to see Peace, Love and Rockets but there was a fire alarm and the start of the talks was delayed and I decided, given my energy levels of the previous night, to just chill.

The conference dinner was in a sheltered area of the Melbourne night markets: very different from the formal dinners of other conferences. I think the major disadvantage of this was for people who don’t know anyone at the conference: with everyone able to eat from the stalls really quickly and move around a lot, people who didn’t know anyone weren’t able to chat to people through the mere force of having to sit through three courses with them. Andrew said he saw a few people sitting entirely alone. I probably would have enjoyed a (short) speech or welcome too. For my purposes, of course, it was excellent to have control over when I ate; that is, as soon as I turned up, and when I left (not that early, in the end, but not controlled by when dessert finished either).

I was locked up most of the day with this, which went well. Check out the slides and videos as they go up. Specifically, everyone was well-prepared, timely (although I was doing the timing so that’s something of a matter of course) and interesting.

One thing I learned from each talk:

• that I’m a visionary (Pia);
• to reset passwords that John the Ripper can crack inside 10 seconds (Joh);
• that I can’t analyse the speed of Perl functions while fiddling around with my camera (Jacinta);
• what Memcached is (and in fact I really might use it soon) (Brenda);
• what Wikipedia means by bureaucrats and wheel wars; (Brianna)
• the concept of polychronic cultures. (Adaora);
• that husbands and children throw women off the computer… until she has to do her computer class homework (Robyn and Kylie); and
• that some community managers get their jobs by convincing the company to create the position (Stormy).

The gender balance of attendees was very different from last year. My guesstimate is about 60%-40% female-male, but last year was more 80%-20%. This has good and bad points I guess: a higher proportion of men (who make up the vast bulk of attendees overall) means exposing our speakers (yeah, haha, go away) to a wider audience, which is good; but it means less of the community feel of last year.

I was going to go to the speakers’ dinner last night. In fact, I did make it to the cocktails. But this week I’m stressed, tired and my appetite is suppressed. (This section comes with a ‘I do not require advice about my health’ warning, by the way. If you want to use it as a jumping off point about your own experiences, that’s another thing but my health is well under control.) I’d just spent a day doing timing and cat herding for an event. At the best of times I find environments where there’s a lot of conversations, dense crowds of people and a lot of standing up tiring. Last night I was really starting to get on edge and fled when it was announced that we’re only letting you in because of the rain, no food for another hour! I left at eight and I believe they were indeed finally served about nine.

This is something of an lca problem for me. Surprise! is a big part of the conference social philosophy. I’m able-bodied and largely healthy, and even I really find this stressful because I remain healthy (and in a good mood) largely by being reasonably vigilant about how the timing of my eating and sleeping affects me and planning in advance. Since I’m not entirely well this week, I find it especially hard that the evenings are all arranged on the principle of turn up, and half the fun is going to be finding out if we’ll give you food!

I anticipate tonight (Wednesday, conference dinner) with curiosity.

• The network isn’t working yet. Well, by the time you read this I guess it is. Right now not so much. I hear 500 people have already asked about it. Looks like DHCP isn’t working, because my zeroconf interface has come up.
• Occupational hazard of holding the conference at a university: there’s a moderately well-rendered erect penis drawn on this desk.
• I remain torn on the question of 14″ versus tiny laptops. Advantages of former: arguably easier to type. Advantages of latter: could have brought my 400D as well, but cripes, that would have been weighty.

• If only laptops were more in the camera price range: I could have a big one and a small one. Actually, thinking about it the 400D is not much cheaper than a normal entry level laptop, and the IXUS 65 at the time of release cost about as much as an ASUS Eee. But somehow owning two cameras seems less bread and circuses than owning two laptops. Maybe it’s the recycling aspect.
• Breaking news from the security miniconf: Michael Davies wants us to use Zign even though his slides are in Comic Sans or something that looks suspiciously like it.

[Thieves] are targeting Sydney cars fitted with global positioning systems (GPS) which cost up to $1300… Superintendent Plotecki suggested drivers stick to an old-fashioned street directory.

Thieves zero in on easy money from GPS units

I suppose back when iPods and mobiles were the big thing in theft (as per the same article) Superintendent Plotecki would have kindly recommended that people stick to old-fashioned CD players at home and dial telephones. And when women are getting attacked after dark he’d suggest they stick to good old-fashioned chaperone policies provided by the man of the house… naturally there is one, this being old-fashioned land.

In other words, that’s just silly. Avoiding being a victim of crime is difficult and in some cases rather life-limiting. (See also: single women, never leave your houses after sunset.) This is one for the manufacturers of GPS devices: decide how to make theft less rewarding, if only by making small devices people can take out of the car with them.

First in a hopefully occasional series of brief reviews of things I read or watch.

Sex Slaves is one of those English language books that it’s surprisingly easy to get hold of in Thailand, like memoirs of minor drug traffickers who’ve spent time in Thai prisons. You find them next to Lonely Planet. I actually bought it in 2004 and read it then, and was reminded of it by seeing it in Bangkok airport, so I’ve returned for another reading.

Brown’s book is a discussion of the different types of people involved in sex work, mainly sexual slavery or debt bondage work, in Asia: the prostitutes, the clients, the traffickers, the criminals, the lawmakers and the police. It’s mostly focused on what she believes is the major market for paid sex in Asia: Asian men (both residents of the country and sex tourists from rich Asian countries). She’s interviewed those who she can: largely the workers and to some extent the brothel keepers.

It’s something of a shock to the system for anyone who is used to reading careful anthropological standing-back-from trying-to-read atrocities (I read a lot of Inga Clendinnen). Brown is more immediately angry. Angry at the clients who largely don’t care whether the girl on the bed is allowed to say no to them, or whether she’ll see any of her earnings this decade. Angry at talk about ‘family values’ in countries where 70% or more of men visit prostitutes and where their family is not in an economic position to enforce make any objections. Angry at ads suggesting that men might want to protect themselves from the dirty dirty prostitutes, rather than protecting the women from their diseases. Angry at clients who do so by demanding virgins for unprotected sex.

Brown is, I think, more or less totally opposed to sex work in most conditions and certainly in Asian domestic ones: she thinks it is more or less always chosen only due to severe economic pressure or coercion. The money’s not bad, for the three or four years a lucky prostitute in Asia might be able to work safely after she gets out of debt bondage and before she’s too old for the clients and either dies of AIDS, has to prostitute a daughter or starts selling unprotected sex in order to compete for work. (It’s unclear what she thinks of prostitution in societies where a sex worker isn’t then an irredeemably fallen woman, I think she thinks the numbers of such women are too small and takes up too much space: women who can refuse clients are, to her, the lucky few.)

On this re-read, one of the more interesting points for me was her description of the women’s own perception of their human rights: essentially they (correctly) believe they don’t have any. This is particularly vivid in the case of debt bondage, in which the prostitutes must work either unpaid or on very low pay for around about five years (conveniently, their highest earning period and for some the only period where they are not visibly ill with AIDS-related sicknesses) because they must re-pay the brothel owner for the full cost of their purchase from the trafficker plus any money the brothel owner has spent on them. The debt seems to be usually real (as in, each sex act does pay off some part of it) but is openly manipulated with interest rates as high as 100% and when the debt is nearly done with the girl can be re-sold into a new debt bondage or a convenient raid from the police can be arranged, with the bribe or bail price being added to the debt. Brown says their reaction is never along the lines of I cannot be bought and sold, especially without my consent, this is invalid but rather they accept the notion and see repaying the debt, on whatever unfair and coercive terms, as an important matter of honour.

I recommend this, even if you don’t agree with her position on prostitution in all circumstances, although if you don’t she’ll repeatedly hit you with it. It’s possible to do more than quibble with the methodology, but it always will be: how does one do comprehensive longitudinal studies of a despised slave class being illegally held and usually doing illegal work? One can’t. It is, though, one of those books that left me a bit depressed about the possibility of change from activism; probably because Brown is. She thinks the sex industry is more than capable of changing in ways to beat any legal, international or NGO opposition either to it, or to its abuses of human rights.

Seth Schoen asks why some children are totally horrified to realise that meat comes from animals, and others aren’t and links to a story of a toddler who learns that she eats living things when she chooses a live fish to killed and cooked.

The idea of this being a revelation to people is a puzzle to me: it’s rather like death. Just as I have no memories of a big revelation to me that humans get older and older and eventually die, I don’t recall the meat revelation. I don’t remember not knowing that chicken was dead chicken, that beef was dead cow and so on. It’s worth noting here that I don’t actually fall into the crazy damn city slickers, only see their milk in cartons and their meat on plastic trays, probably think it grows that way! category. Does such a thing really exist? Anyway, I grew up with the animal trade in the house. My father has been a stock agent (an agent who buys and sells livestock for farmers) my whole life and for several years now he’s raising steers as beef cattle. (Something I didn’t know though: beef cattle are killed quite young.)

I do remember that I’m eating an animal! was a common major plot point in children’s books I used to read, but always because it turned out that the meal on the table was not just any old chicken, but specifically the child protagonist’s pet chicken, or similar. Admittedly in The Robber Bride this does lead one child to become a vegetarian (although she turns out to have a rather unusual take on killing animals, namely that some people are the strong killing types and she just isn’t) but The Robber Bride is an adult book. When this is a plot point in children’s books — older ones where people were more likely to actually have a farm animal that the children thought of as a pet — the children almost always refuse the meal but don’t consider becoming vegetarian. (The horror of the children was so universal and generally well rendered that I suspect that most of the authors were drawing on an actual childhood experience of being told they were eating a pet halfway through a meal. After several episodes in different books it got annoying: why were adults so consistently cruel?) These days in Australia one doesn’t usually get as close as eating one’s own animals; the closest I’ve come is the occasional gifts of a butchered carcass my father has been given (professionally butchered, not home butchered).