Author: Mary

Apparently, text messages (SMSs) sent in Australia are stored by the telco for a few days and searches can be (and probably are being) carried out for messages containing certain content.

Nominations for the Australian blog awards are open. (The authority is self-appointed, but that’s OK. I set myself up as an authority on everything I can think of too.)

Best Australian tech blog. Last year I nominated Martin Pool, but it didn’t really get anywhere. (I think ‘popular tech blog’ usually corresponds to ‘person who blogs about Cascading Style Sheets a lot’ rather than ‘person who blogs about source control a lot’.) Martin hasn’t been writing very much this year and I don’t want to nominate him on past glories. I’d make an effort for the free software community, but none of the writers on Planet Linux Australia really stand out for me yet.

Best Australian Political Blog/Best Australian Collaborative Blog. This would be Larvatus Prodeo for me. I wish they had a less shrill set of commenters though. I keep hoping one day I’ll stumble on an Aussie Unfogged (one of the very very few blogs where more than 0.1% of the comment threads are worth reading), but it hasn’t happened yet. I keep meaning to commit to reading Andrew Bartlett regularly too, but I haven’t so I don’t know if he’s a contender.

Best Overseas Australian Blog. Surely I’m not the only person who loves Rachel Chalmers’ Yatima. Surely? Her whole family is my blog crush.

In categories they don’t have, here’s some others, from closer to home:

• Art blogging: Abstraktn
• Grog blogging/cranky blogging: Julia
• Bitchy teen blogging: Steph (get it while it’s hot, she’s turning 20 next year)

She’s a little bulky:

If I’d really appreciated this prior to purchase I might have spent a little bit more money on getting a real wrist computer, not a console computer in a wrist mount. But that’s OK, it can wait until I retire this one some years from now.

And yes, my wrists are quite slender. This wrist strap is actually a pain to get off when it’s that tight, fortunately I will normally be wearing it over my other baby:

The new one’s also a little crazy:

That’s saying that if I were to dive now (currently at sea level with no previous dives in the last couple of days) I could spend 5 minutes at 57 metres depth before it would insist noisily on my taking decompression stops during ascent. And it’s also assuming that I’m at least 70% completely crazy. I can’t say I have a great sense of my tolerance of nitrogen pressure, but I’m presuming that would be lala land: nearly 4 martinis by Martini’s law.

Things that suck

• Quickflix, because the last three DVDs they’ve sent us were faulty. (Actually, the two copies of Dr Strangelove might have been the same disk.) Double suck for the Fargo DVD being faulty in the last fifth.
• The thread starting here. Just looking at it in all its threadly glory will give you an idea.
• Stimulants. I can run on caffeine and pseudoephedrine when ill, but they both make me feel kind of hyper-well, so I drive myself into the wall and only find out when the effects wear off.
• Andrew’s machine’s BIOS which not only won’t work with USB keyboards (recall, he has no working PS/2 ports) but which also periodically fails to give him a usable mouse.
• Laptop prices in Australia. Let’s review one culprit, the IBM T series direct from Lenovo. In the US, it starts at $1 399. In Canada, it starts at $1 499 (US$1270 or so). In Australia, it’s $2 599 (US $1920 or so). Yeah. I can’t work this one out. I’m not exactly taking advantage of economies of scale when I point out that it would cost me about $100 to ship one from the US.
• Stores that don’t put the price on things above a certain price. I mean, if I have to ask, which I’m disinclined to because then I’ll get a sales pitch and I tend to do my consumer research before hitting a store, it’s not like the mere fact of having to ask will make me more likely to pay a huge amount for something. SCUBA stores are a bit weird about this. They’ll happily show off a new $3999 set as their top-end kit for the season or three (I’m talking rec diving here), but they’ll never ever put a price on a wrist computer, which tend to be about $500-$600 in Australia. (See above re laptops for the weird price differences from North America.) Camera stores are more consistent. C’mon, it’s not like I don’t know the current price range for low-end DSLRs, I just want to know if you’re selling at RRP or not.

Things that rock

• I just experienced my first ever hard-drive failure. Fortunately, not only was everything important to me backed up, I also found the sole remaining copy of my GPG secret key after hunting through several household computers.
• LeisurePro, who have just shipped me my new baby, despite being a bit dubious about a non-US card, and my initially giving them the wrong expiry date. First person to rip them off with an unjustified chargeback on a foreign card, you will feel the back of my hand.

I hear about software rotting a lot, but not a lot about hardware rot. But rot it does. No sooner had Andrew and I got back to Australia about this time last year (354 days ago, actually) and slowly but surely coaxed our desktops back to life over the course of a week or so of patiently reseating cables and whacking them hard on the side, it seemed, did we moved house (five and a half months ago) and somehow destroy them again.

Being laptop enabled, I didn’t find this out until I wanted a Windows machine to do my tax return. Booting my old faithful produced nothing more than a loud and upsetting pop. My intimidating hardware acumen lead me inevitably to diagnose some kind of bang in the motherboard thingie. Or actually, probably in the power supply, because it smelled weirder. (On a tangent, I still count the day that I showed my father how to plug the CD-ROM back into the motherboard and the adventure went to his head and he ended up taking the case’s power supply apart and carefully vacuuming it as one of the odder experiences in my life. Thanks for the memories Dad.)

So then I tried Andrew’s slightly less faithful desktop only to find that it booted into a completely broken Windows 98 install by default and couldn’t be fixed because it didn’t work with PS/2 keyboards anymore, so the BIOS is uneditable.

So I did my tax return on paper and resigned myself to using up perfectly good airspace in our house by filling it with completely useless computers (I’ve never worked out how to dispose of computer bits). And that was all fine and good until Andrew’s laptop was stolen and we were down a computer, a key element of our lifestyle. Surely between two broken desktops we could put together one working machine? Unfortunately, neither has such an accessible setup anymore: my BIOS is kaput, his is not editable. But we eventually did it by shoving the hard drive in another machine.

Incidentally, a big boo-hiss to Ubuntu for requiring a key-press to boot their live CD (apparently, Andrew was the one who waited for it, but not me). Andrew’s BIOS doesn’t like USB keyboards, so he needed an operating system that could be booted with no key-presses.

As most of the relevant community already knows, there’s a O’Reilly Twisted book out. You can also buy it from an Amazon associate to help defray the twistedmatrix.com hosting costs.

An important question is being discussed as I write: what should the book’s code name be? If Programming Perl is the Camel book it is argued, this should also be coded on its cover. So far, the orgy book seems simplest, with the snake orgy book as a backup if O’Reilly gets a bit wilder with their covers.

I’ve had several discussions recently with people interested in the why-so-few-women-FOSS-developers problem (pimp: it’s a problem talked about a lot now, got links for the bibliography I maintain?) specifically as it relates to LinuxChix. The general starting position is this: where is LinuxChix in the creation of Free Software? Well, while individual members are here and there, that tends not to have much to do with their participation in LinuxChix. LinuxChix is a user and social community, and further, it doesn’t seem to ‘graduate’ a lot of people into the big bad world of FOSS development. (Note that some chapters, particularly LinuxChix Brazil, operate pretty differently.)

This has come up in a few places online. I don’t know if Fernanda Weiden was thinking about LinuxChix when she wrote this, but it’s a good match for some of the more negative opinions:

That’s the role of the women’s groups, to offer a friendly interface for women to get their feet wet and then join the community. The problem is when these groups don’t have a clear target, in the end they turn in Barbie worlds that don’t exist in reality. Instead of integrating the women into the community, they serve as ghettos, re-creating existing groups in the community with the only objective being more friendly for women.

Máirín Duffy writes:

LinuxChix gets a lot of mention in the essay is referred to as being an open source development community, but I feel quite strongly that it is not. Some of the motivation behind my pushing for GNOME Women was borne out of frustration with LinuxChix. LinuxChix is really more of a Linux User’s Group (LUG) than an actual development community.

I raised this on a LinuxChix list today and got an interesting response from Carla Schroder. To paraphrase greatly, the upshot was that Carla draws a distinction between not being an open source development community, which pretty much everyone agrees that LinuxChix is not, and not being an activist community.

LinuxChix is pretty broad brush, but some of the things it is active in are: providing a forum for answering technical questions from women and providing skills education to women. And that’s only the more formal stuff. Behind the scenes, there’s a long tradition of discussing technical careers and related things (interviews, salaries) and working on giving women recognition for their technical accomplishments (within the community, mostly). Carla also pointed out that while there aren’t masses of FOSS developers emerging from the community there are quite a lot of women technical writers and a huge number of women sysadmins who’ve derived a substantial chunk of their career launch from LinuxChix help. It’s not a ‘ghetto’ in that sense.

LinuxChix is not active politically, and it’s not a development community. (It helps coders, but it doesn’t have a coherent project.) It does suffer from being seen as the one-stop-shop for women-in-FOSS when it’s actually not doing some things that women would like to do and it’s particularly not doing work to produce women FOSS developers. But that doesn’t mean it should be mistaken for a sheltered workshop, it just means there’s a difference between reality and publicity that could use some work on one direction or the other.

Andrew and I have been talking about what makes a good technical community Planet. Here are some thoughts about what the best planets have, keeping in mind that it is probably not possible to achieve this by any other means than luck:

Critical mass

This seems to be somewhere around about the twenty or thirty writers mark, just in order to achieve content that changes regularly. This seems to be the major failing of Planet Twisted. You might get regular content from as few as three or four people, but it will get same-y.

Community leaders

It’s most interesting to see actual decision making discussion happening through entries themselves, but after the fact analysis is nearly as good. But you won’t see any of this if you don’t have key decision makers or at least opinion makers blogging about decisions and direction. I see this as one of the big advantages Planet Debian and Planet GNOME have over Planet Ubuntu. My primary interest here is for interesting reading, but this has a bonus side-effect of greater community transparency: a lot more relative outsiders scan Planets now than scan development mailing lists.

Expert writers

It’s useful to have a significant set of regular writers who write in some area of their personal expertise, be it user interface design, translation, programming or cat herding. This decreases the sense that you’re reading uninformed and predictable reactions to technical decisions and increases the chance that you’ll learn something new by reading.

It adds a bit of spice to have some of these writing about project irrelevant expertise (climate change, workout programs, photography techniques) because it increases the “smart people who I’d love to go to dinner with” vibe. It can be overdone though: while it’s likely that your writers are the best there is to offer on technical subject X, it’s less likely that they make as universally interesting reading on their other interests, because it’s less likely that they’re the people worth listening to and it’s less likely that their interests overlap with those of the readers. Sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don’t.

‘Journal’ blogs are hard to pull off on masse: it’s both a tempting format and a difficult one to make work for readers who have no prior interest in the writer’s personal life (ie, everyone who isn’t friends or family). These blogs are much like outside interest ones: considerable payoff in community spirit if they work, risking uninteresting reading in many cases.

A Planet community

The best Planets are full of people who actually read the Planet and let it inspire their entries. I also find that planets from a focused technical community have an advantage over planets from a user or random community because they’re more likely to make for coherent reading with common threads.

Inter-entry conversations

Once you have a Planet community, the best Planets start having extended inter-blog discussions during which you can see opinions being formed, revised and finalised. This is the Planet zenith.

So-called memes (standardised entries based on quiz results or a common entry template, which tend to be quick and fun to write and therefore highly contagious), as in all other blogs, generally are the most common and most boring kind of inter-entry conversation. There’s not a lot to gain as a reader from knowing that someone is more like Bilbo than they are like Sauron or which countries they’ve visited unless this is used as a platform to make some kind of debatable point (almost every opinion that’s actually interesting is debatable) or to tell a story, and people do this too seldom.

I need to pay more attention to DebSIG I think. How did I miss Conrad Parker on What can Free Software teach Free Media? This is what comes of being the only geek in Sydney who doesn’t like beer or pubs, I guess.

del.icio.us is rather old hat really, but I wanted to copy my comments here from dria’s blog about why I like it.

For those who haven’t heard of it, del.icio.us is a bookmarks site. Once you create an account, you can add a little pop-up button to your browser toolbar, and when you see a site you want to store for later reference, or recommend to someone else, you click on it, it loads up a simple page for you to enter descriptions and tags, and then its stored. You can get to it from anywhere.

It also has a so-called social software component in that it shows you who else has bookmarked that URL thus potentially introducing you to new people who have the same taste in links as you do. See for example [people linking to me]. (Why md5 for the URL hash, I wonder?)

Here’s what I like about it:

• a fairly flat site for bookmark storage where things are tagged rather than buried in folders. I can find my bookmarks more easily on del.icio.us than I can in a web browser’s bookmarks menu;
• bookmarks accessible via my del.icio.us user page from any web browser (the Hotmail advantage); and
• the handy provision of the ‘remember this’ bookmarklet so that I can click “pop up post to del.icio.us” in my taskbar at any time and post a link to the page I’m looking at for later reference.

I’m actually more or less neutral about the social aspect of it. Links tend to divide into three categories: links chosen by several hundred users; links chosen by a few users and links chosen by me. There doesn’t seem to be a query engine that allows anything more sophisticated than who else linked to this one thing? I can see myself asking who links to things I’ve tagged politics? or who links to some of my less popular choices? as ways to find bearers of fresh links, but the fact that we have one chosen link in common is uninteresting to me.

Related links:

• de.lirio.us, like del.icio.us but Free (via Beth Skwarecki); and
• CiteULike, like del.icio.us but for academic citations (via Liam Hogan).