Category: Uncategorized

I’ve enjoyed reading the LWN.net ten-year timeline (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and perhaps more to come), enough that I wanted to do a short wrap-up of my own computer story. Apparently it’s going around, but I didn’t realise that when I started this.

Approx 1990 My great-uncle died and my great-aunt offered us his computer. I was extremely excited, and assured it was portable, very expensive and top-notch. This didn’t turn out to be exactly true: it had been very expensive and top-notch when he bought it. I didn’t work out when that was, but it was some time in the past. The machine ran MS DOS 2-ish, had no hard drive, and had 2 5.25″ drives. One floppy held the entire operating system.

It was portable in the sense that it was one of the all-in-one designs that Compaq stuck with for so long. It was about the same size as a medium-sized hard suitcase and had a handle so that it could be upended and hauled around.

I learned some variety of BASIC (BASICA, I think) and spent many hours typing out programs that greeted me by name and let me add numbers together. I used it for school assignments for about six months before I discovered that it booted with the Insert key toggled off, so if I made a mistake it was just like a typewriter: I had to re-type everything from the mistake onwards.

I soon ran into what turns out to been a semi-imaginary bugbear of at least the next ten years of my life: I had no ideas for what to program. I realised I could learn from the program that displayed a bee flying around and played ‘Flight of the Bumblebees’ but I couldn’t summon the energy to pick apart 2000! lines! of code!

1993–1998 My parents got a new computer at the end of 1993, another Compaq as it happened. 486, and I believe 4MB of RAM and a 100MB hard drive. This was rather underpowered for the time, I think, but not radically so. I became something of a power user of word processors and the like. My parents were convinced that I was on the verge of destroying their machine. The poverty of our flat file ‘database’ application bugged me no end. When I came across relational databases much later I knew exactly what they were for. Towards the end of high school (I jumped a couple of years in computing studies and took my final exams in Year 10, so I had some exposure to the wider computer culture, however distorted) I desperately wanted to learn C, but what I was going to do with it I didn’t know.

In 1996 I got a copy of Fractint, I have no idea where from. Most likely the World Wide Web, which I used for the first time that same year. (Someone in my computer class logged on for me, went to Yahoo, and typed in ‘girls’ and started surfing for porn. 1996 was a big year in parental outrage at our school.) I even signed up for a Hotmail account. Anyway, not only did I spend hours and hours choosing just the right colours for my fractals, Fractint was my first exposure to the idea of collective, free, software development and I liked it. I read an article about Linux around the same time and liked the sound of that too, but I fundamentally had no idea what it was on about.

In 1999 I started undergrad and was immediately delighted with UNIX, which I considered as super-powered MS-DOS with better doskey. That said, it was at least a year before I learned to drive tar from the man page, and I think at least two years before I learned that see also crontab(5) means typing the command man 5 crontab (now probably my most frequently used man page). I was unimpressed with the university’s webmail system for a long time (I don’t recall why, but undoubtedly it sucked) and read my mail by telnetting to port 110 on the relevant machine. Very recently, someone suggested to me that doing that is an urban myth equivalent to whistling 9600 baud. No, no it isn’t. But it sucks for attachments.

Andrew and I started going out in August of 1999 and soon after that he bought his own desktop and installed Debian on it. He was pleased with my taste when I chose the username ‘mary’. The relationship was young enough that I still deeply cared about his opinions on questions like what is a tasteful user name? (I still use ‘mary’, it’s short. And tasteful.) At the end of the year he moved out of college and an rm -rf accident on my part and reluctance to download a year’s worth of email on his part means that we no longer have copies of about a year’s worth of emails to each other.

I did learn C in 1999, although I somehow missed the square brackets dereferencing syntax for pointer arithmetic and was doing a lot of accessing arrays like this: *(p + 5).

I had a job as a programmer in 2000. That didn’t work out so well, but I did get enough money for my first computer. Andrew downloaded SuSE for me because he wanted to see what it was like. Bad, that’s what, because it only had mutt 0.2 packages. I had to reinstall it and Windows several times each to get them on. (I was playing a lot of Baldur’s Gate at the time, I believe the Infinity engine still sucks under WINE in 2008.) I wrestled with Exim’s documentation for the best part of a day to get it to act as a smarthost, because ‘smarthost’ has nothing to do with the term ‘mail relay’. At the end of the year I registered puzzling.org. It was hosted on a FreeBSD box for a while, using qmail. (This is not why Andrew and I have a lot of user-suffix@puzzling.org addresses rather than user+suffix. That is because we were later hosted on Crossfire‘s machine for a while, and another user on that machine had used qmail style suffixes and asked for them to be set in Postfix. No one has ever let me finish telling this story until now.)

At the beginning of 2001 Andrew and I skipped the second half of a holiday at the beach for the first linux.conf.au. (Not counting CALU, which I don’t consider the ‘zeroth’ linux.conf.au because programmers count offsets from zero, but no one in their right mind counts objects from zero. Miss Manners would agree, I know.) This was an experience that in memory has not been surpassed in terms of pure mystical wonder. Especially Tridge’s hacking the TiVo talk. And Martin Pool’s rsync proxy thing. I think there is something irretrievably lost when you get better understanding of technology. No conference has been the same again. (And I don’t know that since taking up diving I’d be prepared to leave a beach holiday for any conference.) Soon afterwards, although unrelatedly, Andrew and I were living in a big sharehouse with Nicholas, Catie and Mark and Nicholas, I think, prodded me into installing Debian. And then was alarmed when the first apt-get command I ran was to install nmap. At the time, this was how I checked my machines for unnecessary services.

I tutored computer science from 2001–2003, and managed to always be a better programmer than my students. I suspect this was when I finally learned to program respectably. puzzling.org left Crossfire’s hosting after Andrew quit Weblink, was in shared hosting for a while at csoft and then went to various virtual machines and ended up at Linode. I managed to do all this without a complete meltdown a la the Exim smarthost thing. That was saved for trying to get pppoe working based on knowledge equivalent to an oily rag. Put the modem in bridge mode and all will be well.

This is making me feel as if everything I know about computers I had learned by 2003, and actually that’s largely true. I haven’t picked up a new programming language since then other than for specific projects (Perl in 2004, mainly). I switched to Ubuntu from Debian because Andrew was Canonical employee number 10 or 15 or so. I learned how DNS works around about the same time (from the point of view of configuring BIND, I can’t, say, parse the wire format). Things I’ve acquired since then belong to different stories: relationships, diving, travel, language, computational linguistics, experimental methodology, bits and pieces of statistics, some vastly improved life management skills around budgeting, a certain amount of peace that’s come from somewhere I don’t know. Writing. I’m still programming and doing hobbyist sysadmin, but success no longer comes with wow, I can really do this, finally, at last. I expect my stuff to work these days and I can even usually tell you how long it will take. (I remember Andrew claiming to have this skill as early as 1999.) New toolkits are no longer headline news, but if there was one thing I’d like to add to my store of skills it would be the arrogance of the gods that many programmers have as their birthright. Any problem a mere mortal can pose, they can solve. It sounds dreadful, but flip it over. See? It’s like flying.

I run several WordPress sites for other people (this isn’t one of them). A couple of them are private: no password for the site, can’t read the site. For years I’ve had an unwieldly situation in which the lockdown was implemented with HTTP Basic Auth configured in Apache, and the users separately log into the site in order to post.

I used HTTP Basic Auth for locking it down even after I discovered Authenticated WordPress (requires a login as a WordPress user before you can see anything) partly because it’s accessible to RSS readers. Many RSS readers (and assorted web fetching tools) can speak HTTP Basic Auth. Few can log themselves into WordPress, although I wouldn’t be surprised to find an exception or three. Eventually though different search terms led me to the HTTP Authentication plugin, and it turns out they play nicely together. If you install them both the site requires HTTP authentication in order to access any part of it, and any person who has successfully authenticated is logged into WordPress too.

A couple of niggles:

1. (The HTTP Authentication plugin requires that you have two matching lists of user names (well, actually one can be a proper subset of the other if you like, but users who aren’t in both can’t authenticate): the WordPress DB needs to have a registered user, and the external authentication source needs to have an entry for the same user.) Actually, I tell a lie. There is an option to automatically create a WordPress account for a user who shows up as successfully authenticated with an unknown user name.
2. The HTTP Authentication documentation is slightly wrong: you don’t need the nickname to match the external user, you need the username to match the external user (which is the sensible way anyway).

I figure there has to be someone out there wondering what I did with my wireless A/V problems (namely, wireless A/V transmitters get interference from 802.11 wireless networks and are thus useless, especially in blocks of flats).

Well, first up for our purposes we decided to settle for wireless audio only. Neither of us have at all significant amounts of video sitting around on hard drives. We bought a Logitech Squeezebox. (The current Squeezebox is a re-badged Slim Devices Squeezebox version 3, Logitech aquired Slim Devices.) It connects to either wireless (WPA and WEP supported) or wired networks. It has several audio outputs, we’re just using analog RCA.

The Squeezebox needs to be fed music from a storage device. You can install SlimServer (soon to have a 7.0 release, at which time it will be known as SqueezeCenter) on a machine which has your music on it (Windows, Mac, Linux or anything else that can run Perl including lots of Network Attached Storage devices). You can sign up for SqueezeNetwork, which streams Internet Radio to it. We don’t use SqueezeNetwork: Australian broadband does not have the kind of download limits where it’s a good idea to stream your music over the ‘net all the time. Also it sounds like SqueezeNetwork, like pretty much every other Internet Radio service, has a lot of content which they have agreed not to distribute to non-US (or sometimes non-EU) users.

I considered one of these a year or so back but was put off by the Australian recommended retail of $500 (now $399.95 and in the US US$299). But on my most recent search Shopbot turned up a lot of excitingly named places — such as Don’t Pay Retail — that stock it for well under RRP. So I did the annoying dance of trying to find somewhere that didn’t charge exorbitant shipping (everywhere that has it seems to practice that annoying lock-in trick of only telling the customer the shipping cost after they’ve signed up and entered their name, email, phone, and full billing and shipping addresses) and we’ve had one since early December.

Reviews along the lines of this one are more or less correct about its strengths, in particular the menu design.

Some points not commonly discussed in the reviews:

• The menu design is really great. Actually this is mentioned in the reviews, but it’s great.
• SlimServer is GPL. Some of the skins for the web interfaces and some plugins might be an exception to that (there’s lots of IANAL discussion on the forums regarding people trying to avoid GPLing their plugins). There’s a Logitech EULA on the download page, that is almost but entirely unlike the GPL, as in, they’re both software licences, but this applies only to the firmware. I saw one of the developers somewhere saying that it’s practically impossible to close development too, since they use a lot of third party modules.
• It supports a lot of formats (Ogg Vorbis, various Windows stuff I know nothing about) in the server software. Music is sent over the network as either MP3 (if the original file was MP3) or FLAC (if the original file was anything else). Hence, you can only skip through either MP3 or FLAC files. Other files can only be played at normal speed without skipping, or be paused.
• The web interface to the server is ‘good enough’ (better than MPD clients I’ve used) but not amazing. In particular, it needs more AJAX for the current playlist. Drag-and-drop rearrangement of the playlist is much nicer than click move-song-one-position, load, click move-song-one-position, load, click move-song-one-position, load…
• The network protocol is documented (and presumably there’s a GPL implementation in Perl) but it’s a custom protocol, not something any other software than Slim Devices software speaks.
• The Jive architecture, with which your applications talk to the new Duet remotes, isn’t Free Software, although some of the stuff written for it is. I am entirely unclear on how core Jive will be to future Squeezeboxen. Fairly core.
• There is an active development and user community at their forums, most of which are mirrored to mailing lists.

I’m a bit worried by the recent appearance of the Squeezebox Duet, which is much more in the Sonos multi-room mold. I like my little box and its monochrome display. However, apparently the Squeezebox v3 remains in production, as does its very expensive brother the Transporter, and if the v3 is any indication, the Duet will be a great piece of work for people who want something more like the Sonos system. (People who live in a bigger place than us.) Further, the Duet remotes can control Squeezeboxen and Transporters, not just Duet Receivers.

Another device work looking at if you’re in the market for a device to which you can stream music you have sitting on your hard drive — yeah I’ve heard of sound cards, but I only have one good set of speakers and they live over near the TV, not near the computer — is the Roku Soundbridge. It speaks DAAP and UPnP, which makes it much more generic in terms of the software that can communicate with it. Ross Burton reviews it favourably. Since it’s hard to pick between them from reviews, we decided to buy the cheaper one, which in Australia in December seemed to be the Squeezebox.

My project for February is to read Bringing them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (free, online).

I wasn’t too engaged with Anthony Baxter’s keynote Two Snake Enter, One Snake Leave? on Python 3.0 (the first ever backwards incompatible release). Partly because it’s because I’ve been hearing about the thing for yonks and it generally turns into wailing and gnashing of teeth, hence my hindbrain goes into force override. Also, I was preparing my lightning talk slides. I kept working on them through Bringing kittens back to life – continuing story of open source graphics drivers, so I can’t say much about that either. (I hear that Seeking is hard: Ogg design internals over in another theatre was good.)

After kittens, it was time for law: Stop in the Name of Law, Kimberlee Weatherall’s wrap-up of the year in intellectual property. Some interesting conclusions from her talk:

• Weatherall says that you can tell her DRM is dead when digital movies and TV are DRM-free. Music has always had a more expensive DRM-free option: CDs. So the appearance of more DRM-free sales is not a revolution.
• The push to kill software patents entirely is dead. They’re worth an awful lot of money to an awful lot of people, and aside from that research keeps digging up what are effectively software patents even before they were meant to be around in the US and even in the EU, where they still aren’t. Draw a line, and software patents will spring up where the grass is greener.
• The big worrying new development we should watch for: the push to make ISPs responsible for copyright infringements. Particularly (watch out Australia) as riders on requirements to make them responsible for not letting kids see porn. THIS WILL PROTECT YOUR KIDS FROM PORN and also content owners from infringement BUT THINK OF THE PORN. (Dear, dear, dear readers: I am perfectly well aware that there are also legal, technical and ethical arguments against filtering porn too. Do not deluge me with them. Thank you.)
• If you’re worried about the worldwide IP situation and you’re scared and you’re one little person and you don’t know what to do, code. (Or create free content.) This content is becoming very useful to very many people, some of whom have a lot of money, and they are worrying about IP for you.

I wasn’t a great fan of Create your own Open Source Dance Mat, because the content was short for the slot and letting a few people dance didn’t really make up for the missing second half of the slot. Plus, the chaoticness of the dancing made several people in the audience decide that it would be a fine thing to have very loud conversations. I have no idea what they were about, as I have difficulty tuning in when a lot of conversations happen at once. But I suspect they weren’t on-topic.

The final talk we went to was Jeff and Pia’s The Australian Open Source Industry & Community Census 2007 where they presented some raw results of the community part of their census. They didn’t mention that they were working with psychometricians on it until nearly the end, so sent them an email with some semi-informed statistical rambling during the talk and spent about 48 hours worried that I’d been too snarky. But Jeff was enthusiastic in reply. Ah, performance anxiety.

There were lightning talks before the closing session. I compressed my Getting a talk into linux.conf.au post into a three minute lightning talk (Talks you should submit to linux.conf.au, PDF, 85KB) which was not unappreciated except when compared with Paul Fenwick’s 32 or 38 slides, which result in the MySpace for unsocial fascist bastards Greasemonkey script.

After close (summary: linux.conf.au 2009 will be in Hobart, best logo ever, march south next year) was the Google party. I quite liked the vibe. Last year was a bit more intense, going well into the evening with oppressive humidity and a fair bit more alcohol. This year was more like a barbecue in someone’s backyard. Someone’s really big backyard. (It probably helps that Melbourne sunset is about half an hour later than Sydney’s.) After the booze dried up (not that I was partaking but I could have done with another Coke) we headed to Polly’s, which is another very Melbourne find. (Fancy red armchairs and cocktails…)

I didn’t spend much time at Open Day. Unfortunately the venue was very uncomfortable: the floor was at the top of Union House and was unairconditioned. Our stand was also on the darker and hotter side. I womanned the LinuxChix stall with Akkana, Robyn and Kylie for about an hour. But I’d also printed the poster and had business cards done at my expense, so I feel I added in money what I couldn’t add in time.

The week is getting eaten up with trivial and non-trivial laptop tasks. (I’ll finish uploading the Chix slides later, rather than skip talks to do it. By the way, for people doing slides from Flickr photos, the best search to use is Advanced and tick all the Creative Commons boxes. Yes including the commercial use one, please. The conference and most of the miniconfs are asking for BY-SA. That means you can’t include NC — no commercial use — photos in your slides!)

Yesterday’s keynote was Stormy Peters on Would you do it again for free?, addressing whether or not Free Software programmers who have ever had a job developing it would continue doing so after they leave the job. Her conclusion is ‘yes’ for various reasons, but that they’d probably switch projects. The major howler was that she speculated without checking that Eazel employees are probably mostly still in Free Software (in actual fact, a whole team almost immediately disappeared into Apple-land, never to reemerge). It’s a shame she didn’t follow that up before throwing it as a passing commend into the talk: it would have been interesting information informing her conclusions. (For anyone interested in following up, she has some sources at her blog: Do external rewards kill intrinsic motivations? and Two new points on “Would you do it again for free?”)

There was a warning during the keynote not to go to Rusty Russell’s lguest tutorial without preparation, which I hadn’t done: there was a BOF session the day before that I heard about from Rusty after the fact. I wish I’d found his blog post in time to go, but I didn’t see it until after the tute.

lca has a long-standing problem with it being basically impossible to run any tutorials without starting from complete beginnings. Most of the audience will not have installed, studied or thought in advance, no matter how vigorously requested to do so. I’m beginning to wonder whether offering paid tutorials, as some other conferences do, would change the landscape a little.

I enjoyed Parrot: a VM for Dynamic Languages a lot. I believe Parrot has been around almost as long as Perl 6 has been talked about, or something like that, but fortunately I haven’t been on board for that ride, so I can enjoy the fun without thinking about the pain. I’m even tempted to look at the code.

I more or less worked through several other talks: By Sound and By Touch: Using Linux with Speech and Braille Output Interfaces, Application performance profiling with Xorg and Breaking the Silence: Making Applications Talk with Telepathy. Andrew tells me Clustered Samba – not just a hack any more was amazing, audacious, awesome. Perhaps aspirational. Some words like that. I’m sorry I missed it. Tridge’s talk last year was a step down, and silly me, I just assumed it was a predictor, not a total aberration.

As predicted, I didn’t ‘do’ the Professional Delegates Networking Session. I instead went out to dinner with Twisted and Twisted-ish folk: Jonathon, Stephen, Elspeth, Andrew and Tim. And it was quiet and not a performance and exactly what I needed. Especially since the Google party is tonight.

Wednesday began with the conference organisers assuming all 600 attendees would be at the keynote. It was very efficiently organised on this principle: get into the theatre, go down to the front most row with available seats, move all the way along to the side rather than sitting in the aisle and claiming most of that row for yourself. I was really impressed: it’s a common failing of meeting organisers of all types to counter people’s (or at least Australian’s) natural tendency to sit near the aisles and doors and try to leave as much space between themselves and other people as possible. When people arrive late, hilarity eventually ensues.

In the event, it turns out that about 500 of 600 people will show up for a keynote. Today (Thursday) it looks like about 400, at least by the start time.

The keynote was Reconceptualizing Security (video already available). Like most keynote-style speakers, Bruce Schneier doesn’t bring new insights and new work to every single talk. He overviewed the economic tradeoffs for and against security in general, and then the disparity between the way our amagdyla evaluates risk and the way risk works in modern technology and society in general. Bruce’s solution is that security providers need to provide the feeling of security to go with the reality, or otherwise consumers will behave as they always do in a lemons market: they’ll buy cheap, bad things over expensive, working things because price (and feeling) are the only market signals they get.

The questions afterwards all seemed reasonable, there wasn’t too much of we, the hyperintelligent trans-humans who have rid ourselves of our baser instincts, must, unfortunately, dig those poor unfortunates out of their hole vibe that can sometimes emerge from discussions of informing the market about unsexy but necessary features.

I went to the Writing really rad GTK and GNOME applications … in C, Python, or Java! tutorial in the first session. This was at exactly the right level for me: I know Python and C (and Java more or less, but I haven’t used it since 1.4) but nothing about GTK. lca tutorials are hard: very few people do any preparatory work and there will always be a substantial amount of the audience who wants the tutorial to start by helping them install the development tools. (There goes a two hour tutorial.)

I also enjoyed Tux’s Angels: Incident Response Unravelled, except that it was kind of unfortunate that the chair dwelt on the young, conventionally attractive women! but! awesome! hahaha take that world! aspect. I don’t know how the Angels themselves feel about this (possibly differently, given that they refer to their team as Tux’s Angels), but, as a woman who doesn’t actually get a lot of wow, woman… kick-butt woman! fanboys (this has never happened to me, in fact), I compare this to comments about my height. (Uh, aside for people who’ve never met me: I am 193cm, more or less 6′ 4″, tall.) Sympathy jokes (haha I bet people ask you about basketball all the time) are better than straight jokes about it, but it’s better just to leave it alone entirely, unless you’re asking me to find you someone in a crowd. Likewise, comments about being a woman in tech: unless we were specifically talking about it, better to leave it alone and just let people in tech do their thing.

Anyway, the Angels walked us through an incident response mockup using Free Software tools. It was a very well-prepared talk, with videos of all the demos, and rehearsed handovers between speakers, something I rarely see at these conferences and something worth cultivating.

There was also a weird announcement from the chair about not distributing our own media of the talk. I really wish I knew what that was about: it was unclear whether they meant our own videos or also any photos. If they mean photos, that’s a pretty major departure for lca. (In Australia, the subjects of photography do not have a right to privacy, they only have the right to control the use of their image when promoting a product. However, the owners or hirers of the venue — ie the conference organisers — have the right to demand photography ends, if they like. See NSW Photographer’s Rights for a long discussion.) However it was just one, confusing, announcement during a single talk: I honestly have no idea what it was really about.

I also saw AbiCollab – Rich Text Collaborative Editting — I wish it had had more demos — and I wanted to see Peace, Love and Rockets but there was a fire alarm and the start of the talks was delayed and I decided, given my energy levels of the previous night, to just chill.

The conference dinner was in a sheltered area of the Melbourne night markets: very different from the formal dinners of other conferences. I think the major disadvantage of this was for people who don’t know anyone at the conference: with everyone able to eat from the stalls really quickly and move around a lot, people who didn’t know anyone weren’t able to chat to people through the mere force of having to sit through three courses with them. Andrew said he saw a few people sitting entirely alone. I probably would have enjoyed a (short) speech or welcome too. For my purposes, of course, it was excellent to have control over when I ate; that is, as soon as I turned up, and when I left (not that early, in the end, but not controlled by when dessert finished either).

I was locked up most of the day with this, which went well. Check out the slides and videos as they go up. Specifically, everyone was well-prepared, timely (although I was doing the timing so that’s something of a matter of course) and interesting.

One thing I learned from each talk:

• that I’m a visionary (Pia);
• to reset passwords that John the Ripper can crack inside 10 seconds (Joh);
• that I can’t analyse the speed of Perl functions while fiddling around with my camera (Jacinta);
• what Memcached is (and in fact I really might use it soon) (Brenda);
• what Wikipedia means by bureaucrats and wheel wars; (Brianna)
• the concept of polychronic cultures. (Adaora);
• that husbands and children throw women off the computer… until she has to do her computer class homework (Robyn and Kylie); and
• that some community managers get their jobs by convincing the company to create the position (Stormy).

The gender balance of attendees was very different from last year. My guesstimate is about 60%-40% female-male, but last year was more 80%-20%. This has good and bad points I guess: a higher proportion of men (who make up the vast bulk of attendees overall) means exposing our speakers (yeah, haha, go away) to a wider audience, which is good; but it means less of the community feel of last year.

I was going to go to the speakers’ dinner last night. In fact, I did make it to the cocktails. But this week I’m stressed, tired and my appetite is suppressed. (This section comes with a ‘I do not require advice about my health’ warning, by the way. If you want to use it as a jumping off point about your own experiences, that’s another thing but my health is well under control.) I’d just spent a day doing timing and cat herding for an event. At the best of times I find environments where there’s a lot of conversations, dense crowds of people and a lot of standing up tiring. Last night I was really starting to get on edge and fled when it was announced that we’re only letting you in because of the rain, no food for another hour! I left at eight and I believe they were indeed finally served about nine.

This is something of an lca problem for me. Surprise! is a big part of the conference social philosophy. I’m able-bodied and largely healthy, and even I really find this stressful because I remain healthy (and in a good mood) largely by being reasonably vigilant about how the timing of my eating and sleeping affects me and planning in advance. Since I’m not entirely well this week, I find it especially hard that the evenings are all arranged on the principle of turn up, and half the fun is going to be finding out if we’ll give you food!

I anticipate tonight (Wednesday, conference dinner) with curiosity.

• The network isn’t working yet. Well, by the time you read this I guess it is. Right now not so much. I hear 500 people have already asked about it. Looks like DHCP isn’t working, because my zeroconf interface has come up.
• Occupational hazard of holding the conference at a university: there’s a moderately well-rendered erect penis drawn on this desk.
• I remain torn on the question of 14″ versus tiny laptops. Advantages of former: arguably easier to type. Advantages of latter: could have brought my 400D as well, but cripes, that would have been weighty.

• If only laptops were more in the camera price range: I could have a big one and a small one. Actually, thinking about it the 400D is not much cheaper than a normal entry level laptop, and the IXUS 65 at the time of release cost about as much as an ASUS Eee. But somehow owning two cameras seems less bread and circuses than owning two laptops. Maybe it’s the recycling aspect.
• Breaking news from the security miniconf: Michael Davies wants us to use Zign even though his slides are in Comic Sans or something that looks suspiciously like it.

[Thieves] are targeting Sydney cars fitted with global positioning systems (GPS) which cost up to $1300… Superintendent Plotecki suggested drivers stick to an old-fashioned street directory.

Thieves zero in on easy money from GPS units

I suppose back when iPods and mobiles were the big thing in theft (as per the same article) Superintendent Plotecki would have kindly recommended that people stick to old-fashioned CD players at home and dial telephones. And when women are getting attacked after dark he’d suggest they stick to good old-fashioned chaperone policies provided by the man of the house… naturally there is one, this being old-fashioned land.

In other words, that’s just silly. Avoiding being a victim of crime is difficult and in some cases rather life-limiting. (See also: single women, never leave your houses after sunset.) This is one for the manufacturers of GPS devices: decide how to make theft less rewarding, if only by making small devices people can take out of the car with them.