Author: Mary

Just a quick pointer to The Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers, Australia. Andrew’s father (a civil engineer) first pointed this out to him. It calls itself a non-profit organisation representing professional employees, but essentially it performs the functions that IT people most seem to want from a union:

• professional advice on employment contracts, including intellectual property agreements and restraint clauses; and
• subsequent advice in the event of disputes or confusion over said contracts.

You can also, apparently, get a whole bunch of research into stuff like average salaries in your field, broken down quite finely by level of responsibility. So called IT professionals fall under their umbrella. Membership is tax deductible.

I have no idea how much work they’ve done with Free Software related contract issues. My guess would be not much, but I haven’t actually asked.

And no, I’m not a member (although I’m considering becoming a post-graduate student member, but the considering will probably take a while). I just thought it would be a useful heads-up to the sundry people I hear occasionally wishing that there was some kind of union-esque service for hacking folk.

The various transactions and proceedings of The Royal Society are now online, dating back to Philosophical Transactions, starting in 1665. I should download some of Turing’s papers and have a look, but I can’t get past The Motion of the Late Comet Praedicted, An Account of a Very Odd Monstrous Calf and An Observation Imparted to the Noble Mr. Boyle, by Mr. David Thomas, Touching Some Particulars Further Considerable in the Monster Mentioned in the First Papers of These Philosophical Transactions in Volumes 1 and 2 of Philosophical Transactions.

Get them while they’re hot, access will stop being free in December. (I’m unclear about how that works with the older articles which shouldn’t be under copyright any more. Perhaps Project Gutenberg can, or even has, transcribed some of the articles. They don’t seem to index by journal name.)

Source:

• Kristen‘s entry.

The deadline for the written paper for OSDC was today. My talk is fairly fluffy—I just wanted another excuse to visit Melbourne and hopefully actually meet an entire crowd of Australian geeks that I know by name but haven’t met—but I dutifully wrote up the paper today, cribbing a section on the history of Planets from my old essay on the subject. Andrew read my paper this evening after I’d submitted it and carefully pointed out that my information about Advogato was out of date. Raph Levien is planning to take it down. (Note though that almost inevitably someone has offered to step up to the plate.)

I copied all of my old diary entries off Advogato to my tech log some time ago, but decided I should rescue one more piece of content, my essay on Questions your conference website should answer.

That essay came out of a giant discussion about trying to get members of LinuxChix to submit to linux.conf.au: probably I think for the 2003 conference in Perth (I drafted it in 2003 and published it a year later, which is about four years better than I’ve done with HOWTO pay for Free Software, which is still in draft form). It turned out that people were being put off by the jargon used in the call for papers, paper being the worst jargon of all. It’s an oddly good time to re-visit it, if only to re-format it for the move, because I’m in the middle of reviewing the crazy (good crazy) number of presentation and tutorial proposals for linux.conf.au 2007. I should have some comments on that process (in fact, I have made a giant mailing list post about the l.c.a. review process and its aims, strengths and weaknesses) after the decisions are made. And then, for a reason I don’t fully understand, I’ll also be reviewing for PyCon 2007. I get free admission for doing that, anyone want to fly me to Texas in February?

See also:

• Planet (former) advogato: aggregating the new blogs of former Advogato diary writers.

• Number of people who have advice for me about learning to snowboard: 0
• Number of people who have advice (mostly from personal experience) about washing electronics: 4.5 and counting (<!—->Pete<!—-> counts as at least 1.5 people for washing two pagers and seeing or being involved in a phone being dunked in tea.)

The phone itself seems OK, although there’s the possibility of further corrosion I guess. The battery is dead as a door nail, but I’ll be back on the air once I get a new battery.

This seems as good a way as any to let people know: I put my mobile phone through the washing machine yesterday. Andrew is optimistic about it drying out as good as new, I am pessimistic. Either way, I won’t be contactable at all on my mobile for the next few days.

Network Manager can’t always tell the difference between wired and wireless cards (bug 60162) and X can’t always… work (bug 60882).

I think I’m noting these more or less just to imprint on my mind not to upgrade before the beta release, next time. Especially not just because I can’t join an IRC channel, of all things.

I upgraded to Edgy on the weekend, mostly so that I could get a newer version of my IRC client. And actually, I was doing that because an IRC channel keyword I’d been given wasn’t working and I figured it must be my client. It turned out, in fact, that the keyword was bad somehow, so that was a wasted upgrade.

So, what of Edgy in general? Unfortunately for Ubuntu, the software as a whole tends to work well enough that I only notice broken things when I upgrade, so here’s the bad things I’ve noticed:

• When I log in, GNOME reports that CPU scaling is not available on my machine, so dagnabit, it’ll either run it at 1.6GHz constantly or just tell me it is, I haven’t worked out which. This is one of those things that has worked for me in every previous version of Ubuntu, so it’s annoying that it’s broken now. I believe this is bug 36014.

• 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. Now you need to type words in and then select Search the Web in the drop-down box. This is one of those niche desktop behaviours that a very small fraction of the users were doing but that I was so addicted to that it was central to my use of the application. It is going to take the best part of a month to retrain my URL usage. I’m heartily tired of the behaviour of the address bar in both Firefox and Epiphany changing (and differently changing) in every new Ubuntu release. That dialog is probably my single most used text input box. No bug, because in my experience changes in the behaviour of this kind of dialog are generally deliberate.

• Aptitude, which I use for package management, is now incredibly slow to resolve dependencies. As in, dependency problems that it previously worked out instantly now take a minute or so. It takes that long to begin every single system update. I’m pleased to see that this is bug 51893 and there should be a new package waiting that fixes most of it.

So far, Edgy seems unlikely to best Breezy (Ubuntu 5.10) in its place in my heart as most stable Ubuntu release to date (Dapper — Ubuntu 6.06 LTS — was less stable for me, Long Term Support be damned, although it’s solid enough on servers). I guess the name is a warning though. In news of things that aren’t broken suspend and hibernate don’t seem to have broken this time around, which is, I think, the first major development version I’ve upgraded to where I didn’t have to spend a lot of time convincing them to work again. And Unison still works for once: usually it whinges if you’re copying files to a machine with a different version of Unison, which is a problem if I don’t want to upgrade all of my servers to the development Ubuntu. (That’s Unison’s fault, not Ubuntu’s, of course. The protocol ought to be stable enough that the server and client can have different versions and still talk to each other).

I hope the intermittent problem with hibernating I had with Dapper are gone, but since they were intermittent I don’t know. Likewise, I hope bug 49221 has disappeared for me at least, but since it was intermittent I can’t be sure yet.

Andrew and I are going to the snow this week, and we’ll be un-broadbanded. Since I have some work I need to finish for a conference paper, and I know that the lodge has a fixed line, I thought I’d grab a temporary dialup account.

I would have thought that pre-paid dialup, which does exist, made sense. But either you have to pay a lot for a little (our friends at BigPond, as usual) or you have to go to a physical store and ask the blank-faced underpaid sales assistants to provide you with something that they sell very little of and therefore have never heard of (Primus, Chilli). And in any case I really don’t like the model where I look something up on a computer at home with a broadband connection and a perfectly good Visa card sitting right next to me, only to have a website tell me that I have to go to the shops to pick up a card, at which point I have to take the card back home, log onto a website using said pre-existing connection, and set up a new account. Since it involves a pre-existing connection anyway, why not just let me sign up online?

I do confess to having been stupid enough to try this retail outlet scheme this morning though. I was duly punished for that when Dick Smith told me that they don’t even sell the starter packs for pre-paid dialup, only the refills, for goodness sake.

Anyway, thanks to those picky folk at Whirlpool I found Beagle. Nice and simple. Beagle’s not pre-paid in the usual sense (that is, you have a fixed amount of access that expires at some point), they do actually sign you up for an ongoing dialup connection on a monthly billing cycle. But there’s no contract and cancellation is an easy, automatic and well-advertised website feature. $13 a month. Looking around a bit more I see that AstraTEL among others could do it a little cheaper, but with uglier web pages, so on the balance I’m still ahead.

And testing it out, I find that the support for my laptop’s onboard SmartLink modem has improved, I now only have to install sl-modem-daemon rather than needing to compile a kernel driver as well. Another win!

It’s Blog Day, or at least, it was, I was alerted to it late and timezones don’t help. Anyway, the idea is to recommend other people’s blogs. I’ve done this before for the Australian blog awards, so I’ll stick to new discoveries and people to whom I am not related:

The Amazing Adventures of Diet Girl

I know I have a number of readers who really don’t like reading about weight loss or dieting (mostly for political reasons or because it’s triggering), and so I’ll warn that if you don’t want to read about weight loss or dieting, you shouldn’t read Diet Girl. DG — she’s actually Shauna Marsh, the author of perennial Australian super-blog favourite What’s New Pussycat, but only outed herself as Diet Girl recently, due to having made the press — is not totally unaware of or unsympathetic to pro-fat or health at any size arguments… but she’s obviously personally rejected some of them.

That said, the reason I’m recommending it to untriggered folk is that, well, it’s Shauna Marsh and it’s the same mash of silly moments, minor neuroses and general fun.

Obsidian Wings

This is one of those cheating ones where I’m recommending something that’s a lot more popular than I am (2–3 orders of magnitude, I’d say, in the case of OW). But just in case it isn’t well known to Australian readers: if you’re interested in US domestic politics and international relations from what would count as the soft-left point-of-view as judged in the US you could do worse than following at least Hilzoy’s and Katherine’s posts.

Making Light

Again with the super-blogs, sorry. But I read Making Light for one of the minor sideshows: Jim Macdonald’s posts on first aid and emergency treatment. You can grab the lite emergency-only Making Light from my del.icio.us feed.

The Carnival of Feminists

Cheating again, but in a different way: this is a carnival of blogs, not a blog itself. Go to the sidebar for the action.

I’m surprised that the carnival thing hasn’t crossed over into Free Software blogging. In any case, the idea is that each week or fortnight or whatever, a chosen blogger hosts a ‘carnival’: a round-up of the best posts fitting under a certain umbrella. There seem to be a lot of them, but this is the one I read, because it touches on issues I’m perpetually interested in: posts on sexual harassment, women’s roles as homemakers and workers, sex, that kind of thing.

Divester

Divster is the best general purpose scuba diving blog I read, the others are mainly holiday fantasy blogs about diving in South-East Asia. Non-divers should at least check out their Flickr pool This is Why We Dive and also their competition to pick the real close encounters with sharks.

Andrew and I have one good set of speakers. Actually, they’re mine. I saved money for one and got the other with 21st birthday money. But this breaks a lot of the assumptions of household music sharing applications. It’s quite common to want to have a single place where all the music is stored and then siphon it off onto random players. It seems comparatively uncommon to want jukebox functionality: not uncommon enough that it’s never been done (oh boy has it been done), but one does rather seem to get stuck in the land of I had this party once and hacked up this software rather than something with the imprimatur our new desktop overlords.

Anyway, the Music Player Daemon is rather big in this world, and for a while I used its client gmpc because it seemed to be the best of the GTK-clients (and I just hate dependencies, don’t you know?). But it wasn’t actually good enough. To select a song to add to the playlist involved launching a new window, scrolling down a huge list of artists, clicking on the artist I wanted, clicking on the album the song is on (how should I know?) and then clicking the song.

Having used Rhythmbox I’m really quite stuck on a one window model where it’s possible to find a song in various ways without having MPD’s first artist then album then song hierarchy imposed on me. And today I found Pymp’d (I suspect it’s meant to be pronounced pimped, or possibly pimp-d), which is an MPD client in the style of Rhythmbox.

So far so good, with a few hassles:

• there’s something going on with the packaging that’s funky, because neither the Debian nor Ubuntu Edgy packages behave for me (Ubuntu not repackaging something against Python 2.4 always bodes ill);
• there’s something equally funky going on with the last tarball, it seems to think it’s been installed at the hard-coded path ‘PREFIX/share/bin’ (‘PREFIX’ as in the fixed string, not any kind of variable) so I installed the SVN version;
• adding my ‘All’ playlist, which is only 2700-ish songs (about 7.5 days worth of music) to the play queue causes the GUI rendering to freeze for a number of seconds, and 7.5 days is not that much music on the nerd scale; and
• I don’t like having to add that list to the play queue in any case, one of the nice things about Rhythmbox is that if there’s nothing in the play queue it doesn’t just stop dead, it just plays random music from your collection (or whatever bit of it your current search has picked out) until you add to the queue manually again. I realise that this would require some hacking around MPD’s model, because MPD itself is all about the fixed queue.

But it’s going to actually make my expensive speakers usable again, so thumbs up so far.