Category: Uncategorized

Before I went to Thailand in November, I arranged to have our mail held (a saga by itself: in what way is three full business days from a Monday morning a Friday morning?) and intended to get a ‘no junk mail’ sign for our mail box (these work quite well at stopping non-addressed mail in Australia, although I think the code is voluntary). However I couldn’t find them in KMart and ran out of time for shopping around. Supposedly it’s hard to get them because everywhere that you’d think to buy them relies heavily on junk mail to advertise.

I looked around online when I got back but while one can find a lot of places talking about them, it’s hard to find someone who sells them.

Eventually though, I tracked down this: a free ‘No Advertising Material’ sticker from the Distribution Standards Board (Australia). Well, actually it costs $1 (two stamps) plus the unit price of two envelopes, because you send them a stamped, self-addressed envelope and they send back the sticker and a leaflet that tells you about the sticker. (The universal No Advertising Material (N.A.M.) sign is designed to replace the dozens of different and confusing signs now in use… etc etc. Apparently I still get free newspapers, political material and a few other things. And a hotline )

I’ve been in the habit of always having a big pack of envelopes at home and stamps in my wallet for several years now (I used to have to lodge a statement of my income once a fortnight in order to get my government student allowance). It’s surprising how useful it still is to do that. Well, not that useful. But somewhat useful.

I’ll be away for two weeks and not contactable. I’ll be back with a better tan at the end of the month.

There is a Best Australia or New Zealand Blog category in the 2007 Weblog Awards. Currently All Men Are Liars is coming second and Ask Sam third.

I call upon you to act to halt this tragedy. That is all.

Apparently there’s a man in my area assaulting women. The coverage comes with the usual advice:

investigators [believe] the offender or offenders [are] local, and warned women in the area not to go out on their own at night.

I’m one of those misbegotten women who doesn’t have a designated protector this week (my husband is overseas, I don’t know anyone else in the area, I don’t own a car and walk to and from the shops and public transport all the time) so for me this constitutes advice to be housebound between sunset and sunrise. Not terribly possible really, I already have plans for Saturday, Monday and Thursday nights and when I come home from them I’ll be bravely forging my way home from the train station alone. (After all, since there’s an attacker on the loose, it would seem unwise to ask for or accept an escort from a stranger!)

There’s been extensive commentary on the wrong-headed nature of this kind of advice before: many women are as much or more at risk from people who live in their house, some women are at risk from the kind gentleman who offers to accompany them on their dangerous walk home and some of us just plain have lives and can’t drop everything to hide ourselves from the local pervs and bastards. It’s like asking us to not only lock our doors, but set up force fields and install nuclear bunkers in order to protect ourselves from house theft. Probably better to suggest that if there’s a man near you in the wee hours wearing bikini underwear that you yell really loudly and hit him in the nose if possible.

Having said all this, I am wondering how good I’ll be at braving the mean streets this fortnight after reading that. I’ve had enough creep experiences on the late night trains already this year to make anyone want to get a car. (One guy was masturbating and trying to corner me, another was drunk and muttering fantasies about slitting the throats of all the passengers and raping all the women.) It’s not as though the risk of sexual intimidation and assault is so low as to be actually practicially zero.

Incidently, I’m really not looking for advice about this. I’m complaining about the woes of existence. I do know I’d probably feel happier if I took a self-defence course at some point, but suspect it would be false confidence: most non-trivial impacts will sublux my right shoulder, and at that point I believe a fight would be lost.

Jono Bacon mentions a Ubuntu roundtable about burnout and suggests that talking to someone about it is the correct next step.

Without intending this to be a particular commentary on the Ubuntu community (I haven’t been part of it since early 2005 other than as a user, I have no idea how effectively they respond to burnout among contributors) and while talking to someone is the first step, this does remind me of the occasional things about burnout which I do hear that don’t mention that you might need to reduce or change your duties. The common theme (and I’ve heard it particularly from volunteer organisations of all stripes) is along the lines of we’d really like you not to burn out — but please don’t let your burnout prevention or coping let you do anything as mean as quitting on us. Or alternatively something like other things in your life may stress you out and start to burn you out on us, but no one would burn out on us, we are the Kingdom of Love or what we are doing is so noble and good that it burns out only the weak and uncommitted.

Anyway, again without knowing whether Jono or the Ubuntu volunteer community make this mistake, the upshot is that even enjoyable and/or noble uses of your time can burn you out (arguably, noble uses of your time are actually especially prone to doing so) and sometimes the only cure is to have a long hiatus or to give up the pursuit entirely. A community truly resistant to burnout, funnily enough, needs to put prevention at such a high priority that the focus isn’t quitting is the worst thing you could do.

These aren’t overly exciting but I might as well get this down somewhere that at least some affected people will see it.

Stuff I need to do by Monday because someone else (who is paying me) wants me to:

• Substantially more work on my ALTA paper.
• Set up OJS.
• Organise and get the university to book flights and accommodation in Melbourne for ALTA (getting the university to do the booking is half the funbother, but policy says we have to or they won’t reimburse us for our flight).

Personal stuff I need to do before Wednesday morning (because Andrew leaves the country for a month on Wednesday and he’s in on half of it):

• Book accommodation in Phuket.
• Book accommodation in Ko Lanta.
• Check booking for SCUBA liveaboard since they haven’t mailed us about it.
• Finish one last (revision) unit of Spanish and do the compulsory speaking exercises for assessment.
• Register for linux.conf.au, find and book accommodation in Melbourne (actually here recommendations would be vaguely appreciated: we’d like to stay in budget accommodation, near the University of Melbourne, and we’d like to stay together).

Stuff that requires me to leave the house between now and Wednesday morning:

• Dinner type thing tonight.
• Baby shower type thing tomorrow afternoon.
• Diving type thing Sunday morning.
• Yoga on Monday. (Or possibly not.)
• Swimming. I keep promising myself I won’t stop swimming when I have a time crunch, but I do. The important thing is to start again though.

Stuff I’ve actually finished this week:

• Compiled the latest issue of the journal I work for.
• Finished the second last compulsory Spanish assignment.

It’s rather headline news when I release software.

So far this seems reasonably similar to 7.04/Feisty except with a few extra bugs. Mind you, compviz-by-default never actually happened on my desktop, so I seem to have missed one of the two key features (the other one being improved X config, which I simply haven’t had a chance to try).

Overall, I found Feisty less buggy than I’ve found Gutsy. Gutsy is not quite as bad as Edgy, but for me it’s been the second most problematic Ubuntu release.

Another problem with comparing is that both my machines broke for non-Ubuntu related reasons and have been completely replaced (bar two hard drives) since then. So with some of these things it’s hard to directly compare, particularly on my laptop, which I almost immediately started testing Gutsy on. Maybe everything would have been just as bad under Feisty, if I’d been using it on these machines.

Reported bugs:

• 151146: my home server (which is just a new desktop) won’t boot into gutsy’s kernel.
• 151786: the server’s networking broke on upgrade because a particular upgrade script entered the network interfaces into the relevant file twice: once in lowercase and once in uppercase. This one took a while to track down too. find -type f /etc | xargs grep eth0 returns a lot of results on a system that was originally some variant of Debian (maybe sarge while sarge was still in testing?) then Ubuntu 4.10 and upgraded from there. Network and driver management has moved files a bunch of times since then.
• 153119: microphone recordings sound like they were produced underwater while locked in a lead box.

Fixed bugs:

• 131133: Sound didn’t work on a bunch of new laptops with Intel chipsets for quite a while. It still doesn’t for some people, check the wiki for various workarounds, backports and bug reporting help.

I haven’t reported several bugs, mostly because I’ve lacked the energy and time to come up with a good description of the symptoms and possible triggers (for these kinds of bugs it can take as long as an hour, and then there’s rebooting your machine every time the developer has a new theory):

• NetworkManager is incredibly unstable, much worse than Feisty (although recall that it was Feisty on different hardware). When I come back from suspend, it has about a 50% chance of locking up so hard that I have to send it SIGKILL and restart it. This has sometimes, I think, occurred without suspending when I’ve switched networks, but it’s hard to tell because I have suspend-on-lid-close turned on, so I end up suspending it in order to change seats sometimes.
• Suspend on lid close doesn’t always work.
• The installer (Feisty’s) gave me so little swap (about 700MB against 2GB of RAM) that quite often hibernate refuses to work because it doesn’t have enough free swap.
• gnome-typing-monitor doesn’t count time suspended or hibernated as time not spent typing (it seems to freeze its timers entirely). So I can start my laptop back up and be asked to do a break within a few minutes, even if I had it off for hours and have just started typing again. This may not be new in gutsy, but I sure have noticed it much more recently.

I’m not in the USA, but since this project hasn’t reached its goals yet I figured I might reach some people who are.

Kirrily Robert is currently staying in Vanuatu. Her friend who lives there is heavily involved in local IT and community iniatives.

Vanuatu is short on books and specifically short on technical books. They have terrible internet connections and many people do not have a computer at home, let alone a net connection for it (see Kirrily’s blog post about Vanuatu home life). So geeking out the old way at TLDP or whatever isn’t an option. It’s also a pain in the neck to ship anything there, as it’s expensive and takes forever (sounds like the shipments wait in Brisbane until the winds are right, the stars are aligned and the containers are overflowing).

So. Kirrily will be picking up technical books for Vanuatu in San Francisco in about a week’s time (all shipments must arrive there by the 30th) and flying back to Vanuatu with them. You can send your good condition second hand books or drop them off there if you happen to be in the area. They’re after books on a bunch of programming languages, web technologies, networking and Free Software. At the moment they seem short on anything in that list that isn’t Perl or Python and are particularly short on HTML and Javascript. If you don’t have books or can’t get them to San Francisco there’s an option to buy them from Amazon if they have a shortfall.

Find out more at Books for Vanuatu and sign up at the tracking page.

Please check with Kirrily before re-posting this somewhere with a huge number of eager readers: she wants a box or two of books, not a shipping container of them.

If you haven’t heard that the LinuxChix miniconf will be held at linux.conf.au again in January 2008, well, now you have. It will feature presentations by women both on their work in Free Software and women in Free Software in general.

If you’re interested in presenting, our Call For Presentations closes today.