Author: Mary

Russell Coker interpreted my post about how laptops are expensive in Australia as a lazy-web request for instructions on how to buy a laptop from the US, and posted accordingly. His blog is down, so I thought I’d clear it up here: I know how to buy a laptop from another country.

It can even be much easier than he suggests: some US sellers will happily post or courier a laptop to me directly, without the need for me to find a friend about to visit Australia. And I can also get someone in the US to take the delivery and re-post it, if I need to. In any event, it comes to Australia, it gets held by Customs, I pay import duties, and it still ends up being much cheaper than buying it from an Australian importer (import duties will be 10% of the purchase price, give or take, but Australian markup for pre-imported laptops over US sale price is closer to 100%).

So why a post at all then? It wasn’t a lazy-web request, it was just a complaint. There’s a cheap method of buying a laptop, in which I shop on US websites after finding one that will take a non-US billing address, bother my friends, spend a lot of time researching the minutiae of warranties (I’m at a loss, for example, for how I check Russell’s claim that ThinkPads have international warranties unless I already own one), spend a bunch more time on Customs paperwork with which I’m utterly unfamiliar and then receive it. There’s an easy method of buying a laptop, in which I walk into an Australian store, give them money and receive a laptop. One takes many hours of my time, one involves twice as much money. And thus a whiny blog post was born.

A lot of the time when I hear about new social software I wrinkle my nose. Take this post hoping that people will take up Dopplr, which is apparently a site where you enter your travel details and it tells you if you’re going to be in the vicinity of friends while travelling. Why did I wrinkle my nose? Because the beneficiaries of this kind of site are people who travel a hell of a lot. The rest of us are just being harangued into entered our very occasional trips in order to provide the pool of people that our well-travelled friends might or might not hang out with. The chances of me personally finding someone to hang out with when travelling are much higher if I just post an itinerary to my blog and hope someone sends me an email saying huh, I’ll be in town that weekend!. (Speaking of which, anyone I know going to be in Iaşi, Romania, between July 22 and August 6? Thought not. Let me know if you want a postcard though.)

Be that as it may, here’s a social software idea that sounds useful: Crowdvine + Pathable, a combo which FOO Camp people used to hook up people with similar interests. Conferences should indeed do more of this stuff: you and him, you guys need to talk! There are meet ups and BOFs and such things of course, but it does sound like it’s possible to develop the matching a lot if you can persuade people that it’s worth their while to do up a decent profile.

Kirrily Robert discusses The Tyranny of Distance: Why it sucks to be an Australian geek, prominently featuring the price of bandwidth, the price of books and the price of electronics.

This bears highlighting, because I need a new laptop fairly urgently. The Lenovo T60, when purchased in the United States, costs AUD 1300 or a bit less at the current exchange rate. When purchased in Australia, it costs about AUD 2500, that is, around about double the US cost. (Memo to USians whose major exposure to the Australian dollar was a few years ago: it buys USD 0.80, roughly, not USD 0.50 as you may have become accustomed to assuming, which means that doubling the US cost to get a price in AUD is no longer just a function of the exchange rate.)

A few other models at current actual sale prices on the official websites (not RRP, which the US models are typically discounted from):

• Dell XPS M1210: 1050 AUD in the US, 1400 AUD in Australia, about a third more expensive
• Dell Latitude D630: 990 AUD in the US, 1900 AUD in Australia, a bit less than double
• HP Compaq nc2400: AUD 1800 in the US, AUD 3000 in Australia, a bit less than double

It’s not clear to me what one does from here. I bought my recently deceased Fujitsu Lifebook S6120 in the US, but I never had to exercise the warranty, so I don’t know whether or not I could have had it serviced in Australia. I don’t know if there are any manufacturers who will honour warranties locally on self-imported laptops. And of course, I have to put it through Customs myself.

• Mario Strikers Charged, because it sounds hugely crazy. And it’s online multiplayer. And it’s actually been released. Wow!
• My Sims, because it looks like the absolute purest crack.
• Guitar Hero III, even though Harmonix won’t be doing the development because, hell, we’ve been waiting a long time. A looooong time.

Also, for those of you who have Jedi mind powers, a push for Wii versions of Rock Band (Harmonix made encouraging sounds) and Spore (hell, it’s going to be on the DS!) wouldn’t go astray.

I’ve pointed this out to enough people recently that I might as well make a blanket recommendation: if you are about to be or are a relatively new owner of a Canon SLR, digital or film, specifically an EOS (that’s Canon’s SLR series since 1987 right up to the new models), you’re interested enough to do a fair bit of reading beyond the manual and you don’t already know a lot about the technical details of photography, have a look at the Canon EOS Beginners’ FAQ by NK Guy.

Photography is a complex field, and it can be difficult getting started. There’s a lot of material out there aimed at beginners, but much of it is quite general and doesn’t get into a lot of the specifics of a given camera maker’s product lineup… There’s more specific material to be had, but a lot of it is quite advanced in nature. For example, Bob Atkins has an excellent Canon FAQ available, but it has little beginner material and has not been recently updated.

So that’s the purpose of this document. It’s information on Canon EOS SLR cameras and related products, aimed at the beginner and packed with a lot of typical questions that beginners actually ask.

Introduction to the Canon EOS Beginners’ FAQ by NK Guy.

Note that even if you already have a firmish notion of what aperture settings, shutter speed etc can do for you there’s still good material in this article on specific lenses and such that you probably don’t know unless you’re a Canon hound. It’s also written for a technically minded audience: I didn’t feel talked down to. It did start me wanting the Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro though (or perhaps the Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro with the Canon mount), so it has downsides.

As of, I think, yesterday, John Howard can go to the Governor General and call an Australian Federal election at any time, although he has until January sometime and is unlikely to do so right away with the polls against him.

As Australians may or may not know, the laws have changed since the last Federal election, and the rolls will close pretty much as soon as the election is called (rather than just before the election itself). So, if you’re a bored Australian citizen today, it’s a good day to check that you’re enrolled to vote, rather than being locked out when the election is called (especially what with voting being compulsory for most adult resident citizens).

Things to check:

• Are you enrolled at your current permanent address? (You can check online.) If not, best to update it, as the Electoral Commission does check (usually when someone new moves into a place) and removes people who don’t seem to be living where they’re enrolled.
• Might you turn 18 before election day? If you’re 17 you can enrol now just in case you happen to be 18 on the day.
• Are you an Australian citizen living overseas? If so, you can (optionally) enrol to vote in some circumstances.

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).

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.

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.)

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.