Author: Mary

Twisted sprint

Andrew and I are flying to Hobart this evening for the inaugural Australian Twisted sprint. Sprinting will be competing with tourism a bit, but I’m looking forward to both, despite this being another weekend in which I am not sponging around on my beanbag.

Google spam, round 3

Seems Google’s business development people (or their cyborg stand ins — the mail has a reference number, so it’s possible it’s all handled by The Machine) were concerned I didn’t reply to their last mail. So, they sent a followup.

I sent the following in reply:

 On Wed, Mar 30, 2005, Google Crawl Coverage wrote: > Greetings, > > I just wanted to follow up with you to confirm that you had received my > previous email. If you are not the right person for this, perhaps you > could forward it to the appropriate person within your firm. > > Thanks. I look forward to hearing from you.  I received it. I've deliberately chosen to have a number of domains I run, including this, excluded from Google's index (and from many other robot crawls). It's not a site designed to be useful to casual viewers, and it isn't a commercial site so attracting extra visitors has no commercial advantage to me.  I'm concerned about this particular business development scheme of Google's -- what if every search engine sent me repeated queries about my robots.txt file? That would be very time consuming to deal with. I know the implications of its contents and deliberately chose them.  -Mary 

And hopefully that’s the first and last time I’ll reply to spam. Invoking the categorical imperative in that reply was silly anyway: much of the idea of a business plan is to do something that no one else is doing and hope that it doesn’t become a universal law.

Twisted 2.0

It was released. And that‘s exactly what I would have said about it too. So handy to have people to take care of these things.

More on conferences

The revival of the "why do you/don’t you go to tech conferences?" discussion on LinuxChix reminded me of my response last time: an article on making your conference website accessible to the conference-naïve (who aren’t necessarily undesirable speakers). If you’re interested in attracting proposals from any group that isn’t currently represented (be they women or QA people or whatever) your conference does need to make a special effort to aim its website and all other publicity at outsiders. Insiders just need the conference dates and the closing date for the Call For Papers. Outsiders need everything spelt out: what’s a ‘paper’ in this context? how long is a talk? what’s the selection process?

Since there’s nothing better than a topic which allows me to be both on-topic and narcissistic, I thought I’d explain my perspective on conferences in the light of the "women at tech conferences" weblog-thread:

• Liz Lawley: why sxsw?
• Shelley Powers: Number 9 Number 9 Number 9
• Kathy Sierra: My first ETech comments (via Dorothea Salo on misbehaving.net)
• (and, finally, a conference-I’d-actually-like-to-go-to post) Andrew Kuchling: Musings on gender balance

After all that lead up, I’m sorry to have to confess to say that my complete failure to attend a technical conference over the last year has nothing to do with their gender balance at all. The most I can contribute is to say that all other things being equal (which they never are), I’d probably have a better time at a conference approaching a 50-50 balance than I would at one approaching either extreme. As it is though, if I want mixed gender or female dominated spaces I know where to find ’em.

There’s two tech conferences I would have been tempted to attend this last year: linux.conf.au and PyCon. (linux.conf.au is, um, 3% female in attendance and around 5-10% in speakers I think. PyCon I don’t know about.)

The biggest single reason I’m not at these two conferences is holiday time. If I want to attend either of them, I need to take annual leave. Back in the days where I was unemployed and/or a student, a week at a conference did not automatically mean spending one week less by the sea that year: now it does. (My employer, like many, does not have its employees attend only peripherally relevant conferences on company time. Fair enough.)

This makes me a big cowardly custard in Free Software terms. (I know a bunch of people who would never consider having a holiday that didn’t involve a tech conference.) But there we have it. If I have to trade my beloved time-by-the-sea time off against a conference, it has to be a bloody good conference.

There are a few specific points that stop each conference qualifying as a ‘bloody good conference’. In PyCon’s case, it’s almost entirely the location. It’s an expensive trip from here: in addition to ‘spending’ holiday time on it, I need to spend thousands of dollars on the airfare. In linux.conf.au’s case it’s two things: I don’t drink heavily enough to find the after hours stuff all that appealing and I didn’t enjoy many of last year’s talks. (I don’t want to lean on that point heavily: I think it’s a sign of a mismatch between my interests and those of the program committee, rather than the committee’s choices being bad.)

What of women at conferences then? Well, some of the absent women are just stingy with their holiday time and their finances, just like, I presume, the absent men. There probably are some factors that specifically stop women attending and presenting, but I don’t think they’re anything compared to two things: women who are professional techies are less likely to have it as a hobby too (shades of my time-by-the-beach rationale here I admit); and there’s a huge starting gender imbalance in techies. I’m therefore not finding this particular issue very stirring.

<spiv> Ok, another upgrade, this time for universe. This should be the last net connection-choking thing I do today.
<spiv> Uh, weird. It self-aborted mid-download.
* spiv lets aptitude just do whatever.
<spiv> Ah, fuck.
<hypatia> ???
<hypatia> *suspense*
<hypatia> ???
<spiv> dpkg segfaulted, and now the machine has hung.
<spiv> *sigh*
* spiv sysrq reboots.
<hypatia> Ew, suck
<hypatia> Maybe you should have done the whole thing at once??
<spiv> Possibly, but I wouldn't think so. Anyway, I'm fscking to make sure it's not like the weird error I saw on trogdor.
<spiv> Anyway, file this one away for next time you feel like computers only hate you 🙂
<spiv> They hate everyone 🙂

Consider it noted.

Later:

<spiv> Ah, kernel BUG during fsck.
<spiv> I'll try without the proprietary NVidia module, then I'll try vanilla 686.

Just for reference, he’s trying to upgrade an underclocked (long story) Athelon machine with a August 2004-ish snapshot of Debian sid to Ubuntu Hoary (as of today). Um, don’t try this at home… ?

Is this really Google spamming me because LinuxChix Live‘s robots.txt file is a universal block?

This line at least does seem to imply that it came from their netblock (the public google.com IP addresses also begin with 216.239):

 Received: from 216-239-45-4.google.com (216-239-45-4.google.com [216.239.45.4]) by fuchsia.puzzling.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4D2DF1016C for <additions@live.linuxchix.org>; Tue,  1 Mar 2005 05:58:08 +1100 (EST) 

That’s kind of … uncool. One might almost say… unsolicited commercial email.

I did get something like this once before and forwarded it to abuse@google.com, only to get an instantaneous automated reply telling me that any spam I was reporting could not possibly have come from them.

Perhaps it didn’t and it’s a rather more competent header forgery than most spam. The forensics will be interesting in that case.

I bring you this list of things I do to stay sane on the internet more in the spirit of catharsis than anything else. In saying it, it no longer binds my heart. I am free! And so on.

By no means is this intending to be convincing: you do not have to choose your reading material like I do. By all means read things that piss you off. Even more important, read things that piss me off. Someone has to do it. I choose… you.

That said, I bring you Mary’s rules for staying sane on the Internet:

1. re-read Charles’ Rules of Argument monthly;
2. do not syndicate an RSS feed if anything in it ever causes me to stand up and pace around having an imaginary argument with the author;
3. do not syndicate an RSS feed if more than one-twentieth of the posts are commentary about weblogging as a fabulous community building tool (and that number is only one-twentieth so that Crooked Timber and Easily Distracted slip under the radar), making exceptions only for people in their first months of weblogging;
4. unsubscribe from an RSS feed when I read less than half the content;
5. permanently unsubscribe from all mailing lists on which I read less than half the content;
6. temporarily unsubscribe from mailing lists when at least two posts in any one thread cause me to pace around the room having an argument with either their author or everyone who’s contributed to the thread;
7. permanently unsubscribe from a mailing list the third time the previous condition is met (I make exceptions for the LinuxChix lists because they’re the only very active and vibrant social lists I’m on); and
8. delete unsent about one third of all emails I compose to mailing lists.

Geek etiquette

<!—->Kirrily Robert<!—-> has a new <!—->Geek Etiquette<!—-> blog addressing questions like:

What about the etiquette of software forks, or how to address a room full of OSCON attendees?

Admittedly I’ll be following it for the same reasons she says that she reads old etiquette books (fascination with rule based systems, or in her case “useless trivia”) rather than out of a desire to apply new etiquette in my personal life. But we’ll see how that goes. I’m trying to think of some “Dear Skud” questions to ask.

Twisted Sprint

After a couple of weeks back and forth with the Twisted collective in Tasmania, we’ve announced a date for the Twisted sprint in Hobart: 1–3 April 2005.

Andrew and I are kind of divided about going to Hobart and then spending three days indoors programming before coming right back home, so it might be that we are disciplined morning sprinters, disappearing in the afternoons to see the sights.

Geek conferences

Over on linux-aus, Jeff Waugh is suggesting that linux.conf.au’s date be fixed firmly in January, which raised some issues about what is the best time to lure internationals to the conference (probably the Southern summer because it’s cold over there in Elsewhere) versus which is the best time to lure locals to the conference (sort of up in the air: some people find it very easy to take leave in January, but other people have to fight the entire office for the precious January summer leave).

I feel a bit bad about putting my oar in actually because with four weeks of annual leave available to me and having suddenly acquired a whole bunch of holiday sports I find my annual leave is starting to be spoken for by snowboarding and diving (plus my family’s annual beach holiday) before the geek conferences get a look-in. I’m wondering whether this is going to be generally symptomatic of losing interest in geek communities after working a programming job all day. It’s too soon to know when the job is still tiring me out.

Ubuntu’s Hoary Hedgehog release

I upgraded from the stable Ubuntu to the development version (due to be released in April as, I believe, 5.04) on the weekend. So far I haven’t actually noticed very many dramatic changes. Booting is marginally faster. There are now suspend scripts that don’t work (well, for me, there’s positive feedback about them in general). The default fonts look different. Otherwise everything seems pretty much the same.

One thing I was reminded of, particularly when upgrading my workstation which has such a slow disk that the UML server that runs puzzling.org can install packages faster, is that desktop Ubuntu systems have all the Python development libraries installed. It’s nice that they’re all supported, but I’ve developed using Python as a primary language for four years or so and I’ve still used only five of those libraries (more once Twisted splits into packages…). I’d be happy to install them as needed, just like I would gcc.

Mutual obligation

Alignments of the stars this week have me going to a meeting at SLUG on Friday to try and organise a community program that tries to get local volunteers together to work on Free Software. Why add this layer between local volunteers and Free Software, given that most projects have open development communities?

Well, there are a couple of reasons. The first is that to receive unemployment benefits in Australia you need to fulfil a ‘mutual obligation’ requirement in which you seek work, train or give back to the community. Setting up a local community group/non-profit will allow people on the Newstart allowance to work on Free Software (and docs and bug triage and mailing lists and…) as part of their mutual obligation. The second is that there is a group of somewhat nebulous size who would ‘love to help out’ but aren’t for whatever reason suited to jumping into new communities and offering their work up. Having a group set up to specifically push them into projects may help here: it will be interesting to see.

This is something that’s been in the background of my thoughts for years now: working with people who aren’t used to the standard model where you just start doing stuff; or the other standard model where you hang out on IRC for a few months until people know you’re not an idiot, and then you start doing stuff. This third group is the set who ‘need an invitation’, if you like.

I haven’t seen this mentioned in many places at all, perhaps everyone follows the Google blog?

Google has added an unofficial rel attribute value to the a tag that their indexer will know how to understand: rel="nofollow". Using this tag as part of a link will say to Google "I am linking to this page, but that does not mean that I think its rank in your search engine should be increased."

Why are they doing this? Well, if you haven’t heard about comment spam this might not make sense to you, but many popular weblogs and wikis are continually hit with people leaving comments like "get your discount viagra here" with a link. They sometimes get hit so much their bandwidth limit is reached or their server crashes under the load.

People occasionally ask "Does this really work? Sure it appears on the page, but it seems even less effective than email spam. People from my rightist libertarian feminist discussion board have Viagra suppliers already! They will ignore these dumb comments you leave." And that’s all very well, until one day you get hit with 15000 spam comments in a single day and have to turn comments off.

The answer to "does it work?" is suspected to be: it works, but not like you think. While they probably would think it’s a bonus if your weblog readers clicked, you know who they really want to ‘click’? Google. Why? Because Google counts the number of links to a website as a measure of how ‘good’ that website is as a search result. If they can add their link to enough pages (including yours, through your comment form), then zooooom up the search results they go.

Anyway, this tag is Google’s attempt at an answer. By marking URLs provided by commenters as no-follow, you can say "Dear Google, I don’t trust this link, so neither should you. For popularity purposes, this link never happened, OK?" Ideally, it will remove the spammer’s motivation for posting on weblogs. (The problem of wikis is much harder, since all the content is user created, it’s not really possible to mark out bits of it as ‘Google good’ and ‘Google bad’.)

Some questions imply that I wasn’t terribly clear about this, so now I will be clear: Ubuntu has supported binary gcc and g++ packages. You can install them via apt-get/aptitude/synaptic. (By the way, on Debian systems I use aptitude now because it especially marks "packages that were only installed because I installed another package that depends on it" and automatically removes them when nothing depends on them any more. Even better than deborphan.) It’s probably easier to grab the build-essential package though, which drags in those and make and a few other things as dependencies.

The ‘problem’ with the compiler is not that it is not packaged and supported, it’s just that if you whack a CD in your machine, choose the default install, and then log into your brand new Ubuntu machine, you will find that the compiler is not yet installed.

This is not something I personally consider a problem, possibly because I’m a Debian user and also because while I have tried the RPM distros I came to them rather late anyway (RH8) when apt-get like tools (yum, apt for rpm) were not far away. I’m very used to the idea that software that’s not installed yet is just sitting in an archive or on the CD somewhere for me waiting for me to use a nifty tool to download and install the package. (As for satisfying dependencies of packages, my automatic reaction on any distro whatsoever now is "what’s the apt-get equivalent on this one?" It pretty much always has an answer now too.)

It appears though that some people don’t think this way. They think "either it’s on the computer at the end of the install or it’s a major disaster involving downloading the packages myself and resolving the dependencies by hand or it’s a super-major disaster involving downloading the gcc source and trying to bootstrap a gcc compile." They don’t imagine this fourth option where it’s not on the computer yet, but hey, it’s just there on the CD waiting for me to type "aptitude install gcc". (Actually, there are people who do realise this and just hate the idea, but the entry wasn’t about them.)

And these users are not a good fit for this particular design decision of Ubuntu’s. Which is a pity actually, because I thought it was rather a good one myself.