Author: Mary

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My talk at OSDC: the Planet Feed Reader

I gave a thirty minute presentation at the Open Source Developers’ Conference yesterday about the Planet software and the associated communities and conventions, focusing more on the latter since one of my reviewers suggested that the social aspects are more interesting than the code. My slides [PDF format, 2.1MB] are now available for the amusement of the wider public.

Much of the discussion of history was a recap of my Planet Free Software essay and the discussion of Planet conventions was a loose recap of accumulated wisdom, including:

  1. using bloggers’ real names, or at least the ones which they attach to email (usually real names) in addition to common IRC/IM handles is useful for putting faces to blog entries to contributions;
  2. once the convention of using real faces and real names is established, people get upset when the conventions are broken (quoth Luis Villa: I’m not sure who/what this ubuntu-demon is, but ‘random animated head without a name meandering about doing a lot of engineering work to fix a problem that should not exist’ was not what I was looking for when I was looking for information on planet ubuntu); and
  3. life blogging is of interest to an extent, many developers would actually like to feel that they’re friends with each other, but the John Fleck case on Planet GNOME shows that there are limits.

Much of the rest was due to Luis Villa’s essay on blogging in the corporate open source context, but as I wasn’t allowed to set assigned reading to the audience I was able to pad out by half an hour by including that content.

Mostly it was a fun experiment in doing slides in a format other than six bullet points per slide, six slides per section, six sections per talk format; incorporating badly rescaled images in various places; and using Beamer so I was surprised to end up hosting a Planet BoF (Birds of a Feather) session, discussing it from the point of view of someone running a Planet (the editor). Some of the topics that came up were:

  • trying to start communities via Planet sites, rather than enhancing them, by, say, starting a environmental politics Planet;
  • the possibility of introducing some of the newer blog ideas to the Free Software world (like carnivals);
  • allowing a community to edit a Planet, and editorial policies in general;
  • potential problems with aggregating libellous or illegal content (another reason some editors apparently insist on real names);
  • alternative aggregators;
  • banning RSS in favour of Atom;
  • whether it is possible or wise to filter people’s feeds without their consent;
  • moving to the Venus branch of Planet; and
  • making Venus trunk.

I may propose a blogging BoF at linux.conf.au and, if I do so, I’ll even plan some discussion points, which will make it less random.

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Logging into the OSDC wireless network

I have a wireless login script for attendees of OSDC who use Ubuntu, Debian, or anything else that can run scripts on connecting to a network and has essentially the same iwconfig output:

 eth1      IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:"Monash-Conference-Net" Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: 00:13:7F:9D:36:C0

To save some tiny amount of time when connecting to the wireless, stick my osdc-login script in your /etc/network/if-up.d directory or equivalent and give it similar permissions to what’s already in there. You can get the latest version of the script at https://gitlab.com/puzzlement/osdc-2006-monash-wireless-login/raw/master/osdc-login, or through Bazaar git, with the repository at https://gitlab.com/puzzlement/osdc-2006-monash-wireless-login/tree/master. It’s very small, but feel free to send me improvements (although if using Bazaar git, please don’t check in a version containing the real username and password).

You need to replace INSERTCONFERENCELOGINHERE with the appropriate username and INSERTCONFERENCEPWHERE with the password. By running the script you will be agreeing to Monash’s terms of service, which are here.

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linux.conf.au payments (attention earlybirds)

Just spreading the word, since neither Andrew nor I received an email invoice for our registration: credit card payments for linux.conf.au are now being accepted. (We did get the announcement, but previous conference experience—ACL, HCSNet—this year has unfortunately taught me that registration information is not sent out using titles like Countdown to linux.conf.au 2007: 48 DAYS TO GO, those kind of titles now indicate to me we’ve updated the website! and now we have a directory of attendees!, ie, not action items. So, I didn’t actually read it. Oops.)

People who got the earlybird price (which closed Nov 15) must pay by December 8. You can also still register now and get the regular price, although as the announcement (also) pointed out, if you want to stay on campus in the pre-arranged accommodation, or you want to go to the dinner, register soon. (It’s unpredictable how full they really are, until they start re-opening spots that people haven’t paid for. But 450 attendees who haven’t put down money yet is still a goodly number when I believe the aim is 800.)

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In Melbourne Dec 5–10

Dear universe, Andrew and I are in Melbourne for OSDC from Tuesday December 5 to Sunday December 10 (in the morning, anyway). If any of you are in Melbourne that week and would like to meet us for breakfast/lunch/dinner/drinkies, get in touch.

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Ubuntu code names

A relatively idle thought after doing Ubuntu support on LinuxChix lists for a while: are the code names really such a good idea? People have an enormous amount of trouble correctly identifying their Ubuntu version. I’ve seen the following problems:

  1. people not realising that the zeros are significant in the version number and asking for support with Ubuntu 6.1 (they probably mean 6.10/Edgy Eft) or 6.6 (they probably mean 6.06 LTS/Dapper Drake);
  2. at least half the time people quoting the Ubuntu version number and codename together quote a mismatched name and number (Ubuntu Breezy 6.06, Ubuntu Dapper 6.10 and that’s not even getting into Ubuntu Breezy 6.1 or Ubontoo/Urbanto/Obonto Dragon and so on), which means that you have no idea which version they actually mean; and
  3. the code names are memorable, but seemingly not memorable enough, there’s a lot of people out there talking about the Edgy Elf, which sounds like a bad drug pusher.

Ubuntu is far from the only software using well publicised release code names. I remember the good old days pre-Windows 95 (the good old days are always more than a decade ago), when you couldn’t talk computers without talking about ‘Chicago’. Debian’s release code names are also very commonly used; potato, woody, sarge, how well I remember thee, and I have no idea what thy version numbers were. In fact, the problem might perhaps be that the release code names and the version numbers are essentially equally well known when it comes to Ubuntu, so people feel the need to state both and aren’t clear on the mapping between them.

I suspect also the regular releases are hard on people: people know that there’s lots of Ubuntus and they have to identify their one, but there’s changes often enough that casual onlookers and users are more confused by the release names than they are aided by them. The release numbers map to the release date (4.10 was released in October—month 10—of 2004, 5.04 in April 2005 and so on) but most people, I believe, treat version numbers as Marketing Magic the like of which mortals do not ken and question no further. The six month release cycle means that the current system always has several easily confused releases too (you can confuse either the first number, mixing up 5.04 with 5.10, say, or the second one, mixing up 5.10 with 6.10).

I don’t have any particular suggestion about an alternative, and suspect that the developer community is wedded to their names even if the users are a bit puzzled. I suppose simpler would be better: Ubuntu 1, Ubuntu 2… but then the numbers get high quickly.

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Really final evaluation of edgy

Really final, because last time I hadn’t upgraded a server, and yesterday I did. It made me very sad indeed.

Original complaint Bug number Fixed? Remaining sadness level
apt crashes when upgrading courier-authlib 64615 No (there are a couple of potluck workarounds in the report) High, because it took me about an hour and a half to hunt down the bug report and get apt and dpkg to dig themselves out of the mess they were in.
Transparent proxying in Squid is broken 68818 No (there’s a fix and workaround in the upstream report) High, because it took Andrew about an hour to hunt down the bug report and jigger with the upstream workaround. Yes I know transparent proxying is evil, and someday someone will figure out a clean way to autodistribute proxy settings whenever I connect my laptop to a new network, but until then I use it.
Network Manager can’t always tell the difference between wired and wireless cards 59981 Yes Moderate, fixing this one has just made the intermittant appearances of 40125 more obvious, but somehow I find 40125 less irritiating.
Nevow is completely useless, won’t even import properly in Python 61423

No Moderate. It turns out (and by it turns out I mean I figured out) you can install the Nevow 0.9 package from Debian unstable and it will work just great. But if Nevow isn’t supported even to the point of shipping an importable Python package, why is it still in Ubuntu’s main? This enhances my sadness level.
If you type words into the address bar, the epiphany browser no longer treats them as search terms for Google, it instead treats them as a bad URL. 56610 No (patch is available) Low, since I was able to build the fixed package as suggested in the report.
When I attach my Canon IXUS 65 to my computer via USB, Import Photos reports Could not claim the IO device. 64146 Yes, or at least they say so and it works for me, but people are still adding to the bug. Low, and only because I keep getting the bug mail about it.
X can’t always… work [actually, probably a bug in vbetool, causing rendering glitches on resume from suspend] 60882 Officially no, but I see it occur way less often now, maybe not at all since Edgy released. Low, since I see it so seldom. It’s really annoying when it does pop up though.
Aptitude… is now incredibly slow to resolve dependencies 51893 Yes None
GNOME reports that CPU scaling is not available on my machine Wasn’t one, I didn’t have powernowd installed N/A None
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The linux.conf.au review process

I’ve written already about the type of proposal that is likely to be accepted to linux.conf.au, this is a discussion of how the process worked.

Our process aims to find a good set of talks. Past conferences have asked for written papers too, but we do not believe they are widely read and some authors have simply not sent them in, which is possibly unfair to people who believed the given requirements and wrote their paper. This year we didn’t ask. By not asking for papers, conferences like linux.conf.au are missing one opportunity to actually check that our speakers have had more than a paragraph worth of thoughts concerning their talk. Hence the emphasis on known good technical quality and known speaking ability in the criteria.

I’d like to make a quick comparison here with academic computing conferences. Firstly to clear up a common misconception about academic conferences: people don’t just read their papers out loud; or at least not in computing. I’m told they do in philosophy. It’s meant to be an engaging narrative about a problem and its solution, much like a technical conference talk. (Both types of conferences have speakers that fail at this.) The selection is very different though: for an academic conference you submit an abstract or a full academic paper, usually in the 8–15 pages range, and selection is usually based entirely on the quality of the research as demonstrated in the paper, rather than on your history as an engaging or hugely popular public speaker. And the papers are actually important, in computing they will contain (or ideally contain) enough details to allow people to replicate the research (in traditional experimental science, that stuff goes in journals, in computing journals tend to contain only very serious and really stellar work). People wanting to do serious critiques of the work or to extend it will refer extensively to the paper; the paper matters in the way that code does in Free Software. Reviewers will study the paper in detail: ten conference papers would be a very very high reviewing load for a single conference.

This year all program committee members were asked to review all proposals. We voted on them, literally, on a scale of 1–5, which I personally interpreted as please no through to I will die if we reject this, although other reviewers may have calibrated differently. We did not provide feedback that was intended for the authors. We did not, therefore, do what would be called peer review, which is about extensive constructive criticism of the work suggesting ways to improve it, even if it is being rejected. That’s expensive for reviewers and would require drawing reviewers from a broader range of backgrounds: the kind of expertise required to say this talk is not terribly exciting is not the same as the expertise required to write a letter to the author suggesting technical improvements to their work. I called the linux.conf.au process Am I hack or not? initially, although since our acceptance rate is about 25% this turned out to be unfair to people who were rejected. Many were actually hack.

That acceptance rate does have certain effects when it comes to our criteria. We are not able to take many chances on people without a track record. We do not have the reviewing manpower to make any useful suggestions to people about their work or their talk proposal, although this would be possible with some other processes we could have used. The abstracts length for this conference makes proper peer review impossible (we could offer suggestions about making a better abstract, but not about doing better work as such even if we had the manpower). We can aim to possibly only select good or excellent talks.

I’ll be interested to compare the PyCon process, particularly since they’re pattern nuts and have found a series of patterns around which you can organise your committee meetings. I have to say an occupation hazard of doing these things is that you really want to go to the conference afterwards. I’d kill to go to PyCon now, if it wasn’t that that wouldn’t help me get a ticket to Texas one bit.

In other news, the linux.conf.au programme is available. Here’s talks I’m particularly looking forward to:

  • The Kernel Report (Jonathan Corbet)
  • Fixing suspend for fun and profit (Matthew Garrett)
  • Digital Preservation – The National Archives of Australia, Open Standards and Open Source (Michael Carden) [although unfortunately this is up against Val Henson, who I’d also like to see]
  • The OzDMCA: what it means for FOSS (Kimberlee Weatherall)
  • Tutorial:GIMP Uncovered: Understanding Images and Image Editing (Akkana Peck) [I’ll have to catch either Kimberlee Weatherall or Akkana Peck on video though, another clash]
  • Starting an Open Source business (Paul Fenwick)
  • How to Herd Cats and Influence People (Jono Bacon)
  • Concurrency and Erlang (André Pang)
  • Making Sausage: How the OLPC Machine Was Designed (Jim Gettys)

Andrew has already put his hand up for the cricket match and he doesn’t even have permission to take the leave yet.

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The linux.conf.au review process by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Laptop presentation account

There are various ways speakers can embarrass themselves at conferences by projecting personal information or embarrassing stuff onto a screen in front of many people. Background images featuring non-professional levels of nudity are the most well-known problem, but others include accidentally popping up a personal chat session, interesting titles being shown in your browser history, the contents of your clipboard being more informative than you’d like, that kind of thing. You don’t only need to protect yourself against overly sexual material (well, unless you’re presenting to the BDSM community or something), there’s also password leakage, and just the vague embarrassment of showing professional peers a log of you and your husband discussing whether or not to have pork for dinner.

It occurs to me that with a bit of discipline about files, the easiest way to avoid this on laptops where you can set up a second login is to do just that: have a second account which has suitably bland background, in which you only access presentation related websites, in which you don’t IM and so on. Set the password to something totally unrelated to your usual passwords, and change it immediately after each presentation, just in case the worst happens and you type it in such a way that it appears on the screen.

And then do all presentations logged in as your special cleaned up for the general public laptop user. If you don’t even want cross-presentation pollination you could re-create the account for each presentation or have a script that does so for you, just to be sure that there’s no browser history and such.