Author: Mary

Rolling Stone magazine informs me that marketers of a brand of lipstick has appointed celebrity spokeswomen.

I am, quite frankly, mystified. Lipstick isn’t for talking in, it’s for pouting in. Talking is the the death of a really good lipline. Taking a sip of water at a press conference is the nail in the coffin.

The canvas for a good lipstick doesn’t move. You don’t do anything with lipstick. You either have a $60 kiss-me pout, or you don’t. And you don’t want to talk about your perfect pout under lights for an hour, because your pout will diffuse slowly across your face.

Actually, you don’t want to kiss with a perfect kiss-me pout either. Noone can appreciate your steady hand and even application when you’re smearing lipstick unevenly over someone else’s face.

You don’t touch, you don’t listen, you don’t converse. You are seen.

And besides, what is there to say about lipstick?

There’s an old question: "if you knew what was Right, would it be Right to force other people to do what was Right?"

The most obvious fudge is to say that part of knowing what was Right would be knowing the answer to that question. There are also several attacks on the premises, the most obvious of which is that "nothing is Right", at least in the sense that the question assumes. Perhaps what is Right for you is Wrong for others, or perhaps it doesn’t make sense to talk of Right and Good.

I tend to question ideals of tolerance, in which everyone has their own moral system, which is as equally and validly right for them as anyone else’s moral system. If nothing else, a good fraction of those moral systems are actually fairly intolerant. Is it possible to be tolerant, open, and accepting, of closed and intolerant ideas? Is it possible to be tolerant of someone else’s abhorrence for tolerance? Is it possible to tolerate people trampling on the tolerance of others?

I feel that in the act of exercising tolerance in these situations is often akin to asserting the superiority of tolerance, which leaves tolerant ethics in a bind in which they accept nothing quite so much as acceptance.

That said, the moral sky has not fallen in now that we are prepared to live with people who have different gods from us, or no god at all, or every god under the sun. The extent to which you can adhere to an absolute ethical system when surrounded by happy, content and ethical enough people who seem to hold fundamentally incompatible belief systems from each other is limited.

Even a humble absolutist who does not believe that they have a good personal connection to the ultimate truth at least asserts one truth: that there is an absolute morality out there somewhere. Relativists are doubly bound, as they must assert that everything is relative, except relativity, because it is absolutely true that there are no absolutes.

The natural answer in a pluralist society seems to be to not know. To be uncertain of whether or not there is absolute morality. The question then is how to be an idealist.

How can a person who has not decided whether being a better person is absolutely defined or purely subjective try to be a better person or to better anything? From where do ideals arise?

I have some faith in the interpersonal context. The question of things being better, or being a better person in a solipsist universe is meaningless. Hence ideals are not found by retreating into some system, either resolutely absolute, or completely relativist, that exists independently of interpersonal context. The only possible meaning that acts can have is with reference to something external. Reality kicks back, and the feeling of such kicking gives us better grounds for action than any internal decisions about morality.

Linux Workshop

SLUG figured that because installs are so easy these days, we should offer more, and had a fest with installs and talks on random Free Software things. All the same, we still struggled with people with dodgy hardware, old laptops, and Debian unstable CDs on which the base system was broken.

There are 150 more Linux users in Sydney tonight…

The next one is scheduled to be bigger and brighter. Codefest on the horizon too. Perhaps all the glsnake-ers will actually assemble in a single room at this time…

Party

There’s a geek party in the longueroom which I’m sneaking away from for a bit. spiv, jdub, XFire, k and Liedra are assembled, among others. Whenever I organise a party, it seems to be rather random. The oddest set of people decide to come.

Not a room to write in. I’d prefer to write on the grass, in the sun. With a big warm space to pace around in.

But…

A room to dance in. Because I like to pretend that I dance well, and that everyone is watching. But I don’t want anyone to see.

A room to cry in. Because I don’t want to explain to anyone. Because I want to listen to the same bad, angry music that made me happy when I was fifteen.

A room to read in. Because I shut everyone out when I read.

A room to sing in. Because I’m a terrible singer.

A room to talk to myself in. Because that’s how I make sense of the world.

I have the seeds of a historian within me. Thus far, they are contained within the mind of someone who would prefer that another person trawled through years of old newspaper ads to find out the cost of hats in 1972. One day, though, I’m sure a fully formed historian will wake in my body and I’ll spend the rest of my life surrounded by decaying newspapers.

I will possibly contribute the long account of my daily life I keep in my diary to posterity, or at least to posterity in the form of blinking historians, or at least an older version of myself. It’s something I’ve been conscious of ever since I began it. I like records. I like the idea of reality fading into dried ink as it whizzes by.

There is dismay at the increasingly hard to access media on which we dry our ink. What will be the Rosetta Stone that teaches our descendents to read data in Microsoft Word format off a CD-ROM? How we will unearth the early digital pictures of a young photographer from a dusty flash card in an attic in a century’s time?

On the other hand, I’m a little obsessed with preservation. I want to print my diary to paper. I want to send my sisters copies of theirs. I want to scan every photo I take – even the ones of nameless people at parties that didn’t have the floods of light that my poor cheap camera prefers.

I hoard my mail. If anyone is interested in seeing what mail I received in one hundred and fifty years time, mailing list mail will outnumber my personal mail by about fifty times. For each insight into the life of a young stay-at-home twenty-something, they will uncover the inner workings of about fifteen different technical and other groups. They might also assume I read it all.

Sometimes I think creativity is helped more by destruction. The Brontes left an immense amount of juvenilia, but there are those who argue that their obsessive writing tied them to a child’s imaginary world, and a child’s writing, that they broke away from much too late. Would it have been better to throw it all in the fire, go on a long holiday, and start again on a cleaner page?

Should I be obsessed with keeping everything I write, every picture I take, and with archiving the mundane, or with reworking it, purging it, burning it, and creating from the ashes?

Does history want our lives or our greatest works?

Community

At the moment I’ve heavily involved in three user groups meeting monthly, Sydney LinuxChix, SLUG and the SLUG Python Interest Group. I’m doing a fair bit of LinuxChix stuff too: maintaining a few webpages, running a few mailing lists, running a C course. I’ve honestly started to feel a bit burned out being solely responsible for two of those user groups.

Advertising

At OLS, apparently the people at the LinuxChix BOF were surprised that LinuxChix had been publicised so little. Sometimes we worry about it being publicised too much, but:

*drumroll*

LinuxChix, a community aimed at women Linux users. See our technical, political and social mailing lists. Friendly men are welcome. If you know a woman Linux user who would like to be part of a women’s Linux community, please point her at LinuxChix.

Coding

I joined the Mailman developers list because I was rather enthused by their TODO list. Shame so much cool stuff is already in 2.1beta, really 🙂

Next stop is ‘cvs co’ I guess.

I’m much more enthused about coding now that I’m six months out of a comp sci degree.

Every so often I’ve heard people say that convicting you of a crime should allow the state to do whatever it wants with you. I’ve heard suggestion of experimentation, and that criminals should lose all liberal democratic rights (freedom of speech for example).

Now here’s a thought: immorality and illegality are not the same thing. There are things that are illegal that are not immoral, and things that are immoral that are not illegal. I don’t claim to have insight into the divine writ of morality, but I can’t see any good arguments that claim that driving at 200km/hr is necessarily immoral. There are all kinds of conditions that might make it so – driving at 200km/hr through a children’s playground whilst wearing a blindfold might be a good one. Even driving at 200km/hr when road conditions are poor or you aren’t a good driver seems relatively immoral. It might, on the other hand, be a moral act if you were an excellent driver attempting to deliver someone to hospital, or completely amoral if you were driving across an endless deserted plain. But it’s almost always illegal.

As the holder of a NSW driver’s licence with good eyesight, no physical impairments, I can drive a car down the Pacific Highway at 70km/hr in peak hour if I want to. But it might not be moral to do so, if for example, I was extremely angry or upset, or otherwise not terrible reactive and alert (leave out drunkenness, as that would make it illegal).

The point of a good legal system is meant to be that the illegal is generally immoral. If there is a law against something that isn’t fairly obviously immoral, then it should be carefully considered. Perhaps, for example, you might justify such a law by saying that, although any individual doing the act in question might not be acting immorally, a crowd or society of individuals all doing that act might harm many people, and the state has a moral responsibility to innocent bystanders, and even the participants, to protect them from the consequences of such an event occurring.

The philosophies justifying law are a bit of a patchwork. A belief that wrong-doers deserve to be punished is a large part of it. In a society of moral agents all possessing a working and appropriately just yet cruel conscience, perhaps law would be a non-issue. But people seem to want the law to deliver from the outside what the conscience fails to deliver from the inside.

And so we have law, and all too often people conflate it with morality, whether that be assuming that all criminals are pathologically immoral, or that any legal action is morally sound. And in so doing they feel that a badge reading "criminal" means "not human".

But people need to be more suspicious of trusting the state with their moral decisions. Perhaps today we can look at our laws and say "well, they clearly only outlaw acts that are completely inhuman, and therefore we should strip convicted criminals of their freedom of speech." And then tomorrow, our paternal state, whom we trust like children with our moral instruction, defines "saying bad things about the state" as being illegal. And so then people who say bad things about the state have no more freedom of speech. And everyone else sleeps safer at night knowing that the state can be completely entrusted with their moral decisions.

Why do we insist on treating criminals in a humane fashion? Why do many people insist that the current humane fashion is inhumane? Because, one day, if our consciences compel us to break the law, then, even those of us who agree with the need for a legal system and the need for criminals of conscience to be punished with other criminals, that we would not lose our humanity in our moral fervour.

Or perhaps we dread the fallibility of the legal system, and fear stripping an innocent person of their humanity. Or perhaps we believe that even nasty nasty people with no conscience don’t automatically deserve endless pain. Perhaps we distrust the state, and want to allow finer grained moral decisions that aren’t always the whims of law. Perhaps we believe that it is better to treat others not as they would treat us, but as it is right to treat them.

I’m heavily involved in LinuxChix, an online group targeted at women users of Linux. The whole point of LinuxChix, originally, was that there are a lot of online Linux groups that have a… quite high standard of entry.

Or more to the point, they prefer the entry standard to be too high rather than too low. If there’s a choice between encouraging someone who doesn’t even know the words to ask the question with, and roasting them alive (eating their liver with some fuava beans and a nice Chianti, if that’s to your tastes), roasting them alive is healthier, because it preserves the technical, or possibly, inflammatory, standards of the group.

So LinuxChix is expressly anti all of the usual straight out derogatory stuff. Certainly, it’s not the place to turn up and say, "maaaan, I wish there were more chix using Linux, cos I could use more cute butts in my lab." It’s also not the best place to tell someone to come back once they’re out of diapers, and certainly not the place to try and fool someone into deleting the contents of their hard drive.

But, on the other hand, this means it is almost unfailingly nice. It means that on the (quite rare) occasions when someone gives the wrong answer, they give it at such long and reasonable and informative length, and they’re so nice about it, that they sound right. And then you need to double their word length, and apologise heaps, when pointing out that they’re wrong.

It’s actually quite a female way of interacting, at least, according to your average analysis of female ways of interacting. It places a lot of emphasis on ‘positive face’ (in the socio-linguist’s terminology) – that is, doing as much as you can to make other people feel good and maintain their status in the community. Most Linux groups are very much about ‘negative face’ – maintaining status by destroying others image in the community.

And it’s not something I’m entirely comfortable with all the time. I don’t always favour making people feel better about themselves over teaching them the right way to do things, if there is one. I’ve gotten past the ‘oh my god, there are indeed other women who use computers’ experience I see on LinuxChix everyday – although the fact that we do hear that a lot is an excellent reason for its continued existence.

One of the things I do not like about ‘positive face’ stuff is needing to apologise for correcting people. This isn’t an unambiguous position, as there have been times when I’ve been very embarrassed and upset to be told that I’m wrong, or that I’m not doing things the best way. But I feel, sometimes, especially in all-female groups, like correcting people is a socially unacceptable thing to do. I also don’t mind if the correction becomes a mutual correction, and you get a better answer than either individual answer.

I learn in a very collaborative way. I like to be in a group tossing ideas around, throwing things into the mix and seeing what happens. I don’t mind being the least experienced person in the group.

I dislike learning by continual correction right up until the point where I reach perfection – "wrong, wrong, still wrong, um, still wrong, wrong, ok, now you’re done". But I also dislike learning by continual affirmation – "good try, good try, oh you’re working so hard, everyone finds this hard, you’re making a good try, oh don’t worry, you’re doing fine, ok, now you’re done".

So in that sense, the prevailing atmosphere on LinuxChix sometimes irks me. I crave polite technical discussion. Sometimes I don’t want to have to end the whole discussion when the inevitable new subscriber turns up and says "wow, you’re all so smart, guess I’m really dumb hey?" and the inevitable old subscriber (sometimes me, when I’m in a better mood) says "no, no, you’re the reason why we’re here, don’t worry about it".

But, at the same time, a woman who works for a large software company told a story today about how their software went through usability testing with five users, and the programmers were shown the videotapes. The users were given tasks to do, and the programmers watched the tapes of them doing it and spent lots of time thumping their heads against the wall and saying "oh god, I had no idea someone would think to click there", which is the point of usability testing.

But, the one woman in the five users ended up in tears, and was recorded crying and saying "tell them I’m sorry I suck". And I’ve been there, not as a guinea pig in a usability study, but many times when I’ve tried to learn some computing skill or other. And, purely anecdotally, it seems to be the primary reason that high achieving women in my university’s computer science course walk away from computers forever after three years and high marks – they’re sick of the endless frustration and damage to their self-esteem.

So LinuxChix is doing something really good, I just wish it didn’t have to start afresh every single day. I guess that’s the goal.

Here’s a couple of bad ideas.

Bad idea 1: Have friendly, perky charity collecters at a railway station having a massive appeal for a good cause. Have them tell people that to donate, they have to hand over bank account details (and a name and address). Have them refuse all one off donations. Definitely don’t accept any cash.

Bad idea 2: Have a computer ring people up, and play them a message telling them a telemarketer will be with them shortly.

OK, so I bet the reason for 1 is that it makes more money for the charity. If you let someone drop $2 in the box, then they feel all good about themselves and won’t give again for a year.

In fact, since I’m someone who has two charities taking money from their account at the middle of each month, and if I could be bothered I’d stop both of them, I’m sure it makes them money. But it is very very annoying, and since I now have two leeches, there’s no way I’m signing up for anything else. Maybe I’d drop a gold coin or a bill in a bucket for Appeal of the Month, but I’m not handing over bank account details.

It seems like a bad move to me. Maybe if you were the first charity on the block to do direct debit, it was working. Now all the other charities are poisoning the minds of the populace too. Lose-lose.

2 just seems really really really dumb. I can’t see how it works.

But friends in telemarketing have told me though that people will do anything rather than say "sorry, not interested." They’ll say they’re busy, or to call back later or they’ll fake illness or anything else. (Hint: this is a bad idea. Telemarketers will have to call back if you say something that makes it sound like you’d be open to a second call. Neither they nor you want to waste time on the phone if you aren’t buying or taking their survey or whatever. Do everyone a favour and tell them no, and not to call again.)

I guess there are people out there who are too polite to hang up on machines.

The idea of Free Software is writing software, and allowing other people to modify it at will. The reality of Free Software, for me to date, has been that I can use a large amount of software for gratis. I have been a user, not an author.

By default, copyrighted works have all rights reserved. If I put a piece of software up on my webpage with no specific mention of allowing you to do anything with it, you can only do ‘fair use’ type stuff. You could satire it, you could review it, and you could quote from portions in the course of your research. You couldn’t go and make a bigger and better piece of software based upon my code (you could base it upon my ideas if I hadn’t patented them, but not my code). Just as if I put a novel up on my webpage, you couldn’t write a novel with the same characters in the same fictional universe, nor could you write a sequel, or take my novel, make it a better novel, and publish it, even under joint names.

Anyway, the point of Free Software is giving people a licence to make derivative works based on your code (a better novel, if you will). You can do this to varying degrees. You can tell everyone that they can do what the hell they want with it. You can tell them they can do what the hell they want with it as long as your name is still part of any copyright notices.

A relatively common way of doing things is to use the GNU General Public Licence, which doesn’t really let people do what the hell they want with your code. They can make derivative works, but they must make the source code of their derivative work available if they distribute it, and it too must be GPLed, meaning that people can then make derivative works of their code, and

This doesn’t mean they have to distribute it gratis, just that they must then distribute the source code to anyone who has the product (and the source code must be distributed at cost, not for profit), and because the source code is GPLed, anyone who has it can make derivative works and distribute them, with the modified source.

It’s not really a winning proposition if your business model involves making software and relying on the fact that people can’t make better software from your software. You use the GPL if you want to make sure your work, and improvements on your work, remain Free. If you want to make the lives of programmers everywhere easier without forcing them to distribute modifications, you don’t use the GPL. Your decision.

Which is all well and good, until you suddenly realise that you might be making a derivative work of an existing GPLed piece of code (which means that your product, if you distribute it, must also be GPLed), rather than an original work, as you had intended. As I am considering doing with this weblog.

I rather like the idea of people being able to do what they want with their own intellectual property, produced for some value of time and/or money. If they want to sell it for oodles of money and not allow derivative works, and they can get someone to buy it, so be it. If they want to hand it out on street corners, well that’s generous, well done. The GPL is somewhere in between, and well, if you put the work in to make an original piece of software, and a condition of using it is that derivative works have certain restrictions, well, it was your work.

Now wanting to contribute a few hundred lines of blogging software to the world is not exactly the most serious of contributions. And I was considering using a piece of software in it that is in fact, GPLed, which would mean that this software is a derivative work.

However, I kind of sputtered. I’ve been thinking of it as an original work, you see, and therefore entirely my property to be distributed under such terms as I choose. It seems odd to hook it up to something else, and have it suddenly lose its status as my own work. I’m more accustomed to the idea of the GPL applying when you make little improvements to something big, rather than when you take two rather different pieces of software and link them together at a few points. It feels rather like writing a novel that makes a passing reference to Frodo Baggins and having your novel’s copyright suddenly owned by the Tolkien Estate. The analogy is not fair, but I’m illustrating reactions rather than ethical decisions.

So, at this point, I’m deciding whether or not to re-implement the wheel a little bit for the sake of having an original work, or to eat of the fruits of the GPL. It’s been luxurious being a user of Free Software, since it is generally distributed for rather small sums of money, I wonder if I’ve been fed too well?