Dear universe, Andrew and I are in Melbourne for OSDC from Tuesday December 5 to Sunday December 10 (in the morning, anyway). If any of you are in Melbourne that week and would like to meet us for breakfast/lunch/dinner/drinkies, get in touch.
linux.conf.au stuff
- Registration is open, starting from the low low price of $99 for students and proceeding to $300 for self-funded attendees and $690 for professional attendees
- the LinuxChix miniconference programme is available in draft form (waiting for some speakers to confirm that they can make it); and
- if you’d like partial reimbursement of registration costs, you can volunteer to help out.
Ubuntu code names
A relatively idle thought after doing Ubuntu support on LinuxChix lists for a while: are the code names really such a good idea? People have an enormous amount of trouble correctly identifying their Ubuntu version. I’ve seen the following problems:
- people not realising that the zeros are significant in the version number and asking for support with Ubuntu 6.1 (they probably mean 6.10/Edgy Eft) or 6.6 (they probably mean 6.06 LTS/Dapper Drake);
- at least half the time people quoting the Ubuntu version number and codename together quote a mismatched name and number (
Ubuntu Breezy 6.06
,Ubuntu Dapper 6.10
and that’s not even getting intoUbuntu Breezy 6.1
orUbontoo/Urbanto/Obonto Dragon
and so on), which means that you have no idea which version they actually mean; and - the code names are memorable, but seemingly not memorable enough, there’s a lot of people out there talking about the Edgy Elf, which sounds like a bad drug pusher.
Ubuntu is far from the only software using well publicised release code names. I remember the good old days pre-Windows 95 (the good old days are always more than a decade ago), when you couldn’t talk computers without talking about ‘Chicago’. Debian’s release code names are also very commonly used; potato, woody, sarge, how well I remember thee, and I have no idea what thy version numbers were. In fact, the problem might perhaps be that the release code names and the version numbers are essentially equally well known when it comes to Ubuntu, so people feel the need to state both and aren’t clear on the mapping between them.
I suspect also the regular releases are hard on people: people know that there’s lots of Ubuntus and they have to identify their one, but there’s changes often enough that casual onlookers and users are more confused by the release names than they are aided by them. The release numbers map to the release date (4.10 was released in October—month 10—of 2004, 5.04 in April 2005 and so on) but most people, I believe, treat version numbers as Marketing Magic the like of which mortals do not ken and question no further. The six month release cycle means that the current system always has several easily confused releases too (you can confuse either the first number, mixing up 5.04 with 5.10, say, or the second one, mixing up 5.10 with 6.10).
I don’t have any particular suggestion about an alternative, and suspect that the developer community is wedded to their names even if the users are a bit puzzled. I suppose simpler would be better: Ubuntu 1, Ubuntu 2… but then the numbers get high quickly.
Really final evaluation of edgy
Really final, because last time I hadn’t upgraded a server, and yesterday I did. It made me very sad indeed.
Original complaint | Bug number | Fixed? | Remaining sadness level |
apt crashes when upgrading courier-authlib | 64615 | No (there are a couple of potluck workarounds in the report) | High, because it took me about an hour and a half to hunt down the bug report and get apt and dpkg to dig themselves out of the mess they were in. |
Transparent proxying in Squid is broken | 68818 | No (there’s a fix and workaround in the upstream report) | High, because it took Andrew about an hour to hunt down the bug report and jigger with the upstream workaround. Yes I know transparent proxying is evil, and someday someone will figure out a clean way to autodistribute proxy settings whenever I connect my laptop to a new network, but until then I use it. |
Network Manager can’t always tell the difference between wired and wireless cards |
59981 | Yes | Moderate, fixing this one has just made the intermittant appearances of 40125 more obvious, but somehow I find 40125 less irritiating. |
Nevow is completely useless, won’t even import properly in Python | 61423 | No | Moderate. It turns out (and by it turns outI mean I figured out) you can install the Nevow 0.9 package from Debian unstable and it will work just great. But if Nevow isn’t supported even to the point of shipping an importable Python package, why is it still in Ubuntu’s main? This enhances my sadness level. |
If you type words into the address bar, the epiphany browser no longer treats them as search terms for Google, it instead treats them as a bad URL. |
56610 | No (patch is available) | Low, since I was able to build the fixed package as suggested in the report. |
When I attach my Canon IXUS 65 to my computer via USB, Import Photos reportsCould not claim the IO device. |
64146 | Yes, or at least they say so and it works for me, but people are still adding to the bug. | Low, and only because I keep getting the bug mail about it. |
X can’t always… work [actually, probably a bug in vbetool, causing rendering glitches on resume from suspend] |
60882 | Officially no, but I see it occur way less often now, maybe not at all since Edgy released. | Low, since I see it so seldom. It’s really annoying when it does pop up though. |
Aptitude… is now incredibly slow to resolve dependencies |
51893 | Yes | None |
GNOME reports that CPU scaling is not available on my machine |
Wasn’t one, I didn’t have powernowd installed | N/A | None |
Laptop presentation account
There are various ways speakers can embarrass themselves at conferences by projecting personal information or embarrassing stuff onto a screen in front of many people. Background images featuring non-professional levels of nudity are the most well-known problem, but others include accidentally popping up a personal chat session, interesting titles being shown in your browser history, the contents of your clipboard being more informative than you’d like, that kind of thing. You don’t only need to protect yourself against overly sexual material (well, unless you’re presenting to the BDSM community or something), there’s also password leakage, and just the vague embarrassment of showing professional peers a log of you and your husband discussing whether or not to have pork for dinner.
It occurs to me that with a bit of discipline about files, the easiest way to avoid this on laptops where you can set up a second login is to do just that: have a second account which has suitably bland background, in which you only access presentation related websites, in which you don’t IM and so on. Set the password to something totally unrelated to your usual passwords, and change it immediately after each presentation, just in case the worst happens and you type it in such a way that it appears on the screen.
And then do all presentations logged in as your special cleaned up for the general public laptop user. If you don’t even want cross-presentation pollination you could re-create the account for each presentation or have a script that does so for you, just to be sure that there’s no browser history and such.
Final evaluation of edgy
Original complaint | Bug number | Fixed? | Remaining sadness level |
If you type words into the address bar, the epiphany browser no longer treats them as search terms for Google, it instead treats them as a bad URL. |
56610 | No | Moderate, although I only realised that this was a bug, rather than the spinning wheel of dubiously user friendly UI changes, yesterday. |
Aptitude… is now incredibly slow to resolve dependencies |
51893 | Yes | None |
GNOME reports that CPU scaling is not available on my machine |
Wasn’t one, I didn’t have powernowd installed | N/A | None |
Network Manager can’t always tell the difference between wired and wireless cards |
59981 | Yes | Moderate, fixing this one has just made the intermittant appearances of 40125 more obvious, but somehow I find 40125 less irritiating. |
X can’t always… work [actually, probably a bug in vbetool, causing rendering glitches on resume from suspend] |
60882 | Officially no, but I see it occur way less often now, maybe not at all since Edgy released. | Low, since I see it so seldom. It’s really annoying when it does pop up though. |
Nevow is completely useless, won’t even import properly in Python | 61423 | No | Moderate. It turns out (and by it turns outI mean I figured out) you can install the Nevow 0.9 package from Debian unstable and it will work just great. But if Nevow isn’t supported even to the point of shipping an importable Python package, why is it still in Ubuntu’s main? This enhances my sadness level. |
When I attach my Canon IXUS 65 to my computer via USB, Import Photos reportsCould not claim the IO device. |
64146 | Yes, or at least they say so and it works for me, but people are still adding to the bug. | Low, and only because I keep getting the bug mail about it. |
Anyway, on the balance it worked out that Edgy is reasonably stable. Still no Breezy, but as stable as Dapper on my desktop. And I am asking for trouble playing with Network Manager. How I wish to smite things when stuff that used to work just fine stops for a while though. And I’m not using it on my servers: one of them is currently running a four month experiment and I don’t want to reboot it (the experiment is interruptable, but it takes about a day to recover from interruptions); and the other one runs a couple of Nevow sites and I’d prefer to use a supported package. Or at least supported.
Huh (a big deal)
Back in 2004 I finally noticed a really common construction that so far seems confined to American English: it’s not that big of a deal
and similar (How big of a perv is Foley?, How big of a problem with security?, How large of a volcanic eruption would it take to cover the entire world with volcanic material?) In Commonwealth, or at least Australian, English this would be it’s not that big a deal
(likewise how big a perv is Foley?
, How big a problem with security?
, How large a volcanic eruption would it take to cover the entire world with volcanic material?
, although I suspect the last one would often be rephrased).
I asked about it at the time (and of course one never blogs alone) and completely failed to notice that the answer came from on high, that is, that Mark Liberman from the Language Log bothered to answer. Wow.
When taboos become taboo
Again, on the theme of Paul Graham’s article about things you can’t say, I have an odd one: there are a lot of environments where it’s becoming indefensible to admit that anything offends you. I’m reminded of this most powerfully by the various and sundry arguments about Ubuntu showing a bit of skin.
Of course, this tiptoeing around offence isn’t everywhere, far from it. Witness the weekly media circus in Australia where someone says something that isn’t in line with a secular liberal viewpoint. Relevant interest groups immediately issue press releases demanding a full apology. If the Prime Minister and his advisers think that the silent conservatives would agree with the stated viewpoint, they tough it out, but if it was too far out of line (as a rough guide, implying to the press that homosexuals are paedophiles is on the wrong side of that line) the unfortunate speaker gets fed to the media wolves to deliver a scripted ‘apology’.
I’m on-board the liberal secular peace train with a first class ticket and I still find the regular demands for, and occasionally delivery of, these stupid meaningless apologies unbelievably teeth-grindingly infuriating, because you don’t get a liberal secular world by making everyone pretend that you already have one.
However, when liberal secular sorts argue amongst themselves about morality, it’s often possible to get a real rhetorical advantage just by refusing to be offended. By anything. You want the age of consent lowered to 18 months. You want people to have sex with strangers in boring queues. You want to be able to urinate artistically on trains. OK, perhaps I’m exaggerating. Maybe you just don’t have a nudity taboo, or you’re OK with people getting a little bit horny in your workplace. Fine. But how is it that that means that you represent the vanguard of the human race?
Whoever is offended in these arguments, especially if they’re offended by anything that can be potentially tied to the full and free expression of human creativity or sexuality, is standing on very slippery ground. If you’re offended, you’ve delivered the following advantages to your opponent: you’re a conservative; you’re repressed; and you’re holding humanity back. You can see some particularly prime examples in the Ubuntu debate, because challenging conventional notions of how you develop popular software can sometimes get people a little high on the “we’re changing humanity one user at a time, as if by magic” pipe.
Offence is a part of the weaponry of the social conservatives. It’s also part of the weaponry of real progressives, except they invert it and are offended by conservatism or reminders that it exists (in its pathological form you get the apology packhounds with their ready made outraged press releases).
And I think it’s time that the voice of offence got a little ground back in some other arguments too, because calls to be freer and less repressed are all too often just a rhetorical weapon used to make people feel like they’re not toeing the humanist party line. In other words, they’re a way of shutting you up by making you feel bad about yourself and inferior to the super beings around you who have cast off their taboos. Sound very liberated? Sound like you’re all part of the one great push to make the world a better place? Thought not. So have a bit more respect for other people’s funny little lines they don’t like to cross.
Comments
I love this paragraph:
“I’m on-board the liberal secular peace train with a first class ticket and I still find the regular demands for, and occasionally delivery of, these stupid meaningless apologies unbelievably teeth-grindingly infuriating, because you don’t get a liberal secular world by making everyone pretend that you already have one.”
I’m on board that same train, but it had never occurred to me that I didn’t have to be on the side of those calling for an immediate, public, inevitably insincere apology. Thank you for writing this.
Posted by katie on October 14, 2004 11:49 PM
Big deals
2006 update: Mark Liberman addresses the source of the [adjective] of a [noun]
construction in the Language Log.
Is “big of a deal” as in “it’s not that big of a deal” a US usage, or am I just missing out on a trend?
I say “it’s not that big a deal”, “I don’t want to make that big a deal”, but not “it’s not that big of a deal” or “I don’t want to make that big of a deal”, but it seems like some of my correspondents do.
And does anyone else have those moments where you’ve been looking at words too long and they don’t look right any more? For a second, I thought “big” and “deal” weren’t even words…
On the shame of liking high school
It’s not actually true that I liked high school, I’m just wearing a mask. If I was going to recap high school in a paragraph, I would say that it was intellectually and socially frustrating. Interestingly the social frustration of a gifted student, which teachers worry endlessly about, proved to be relatively transient. Most people grow up, grow out and become adults. There is a limited correlation with high school social success. My own intellectual frustration was much nastier, because the ease with which I slid through high school caused several minor crashes at university, some of which I may never recover from.
Actually, I loathed high school. My reaction to leaving was very uncomplicated: I was thrilled to get out. And I still am thrilled to be out. Every time I meet a “you know, it’s true what they say, you don’t believe it at the time, but it really is the best time of your life” person I feel like the conversation’s over. I was miserable most of the time.
I haven’t tried to systematically understand why I had so much trouble with high school, but that’s been OK up until now because Paul Graham has been doing it for me. Except now, he’s getting it wrong.
So here’s a secret: I hated high school, but I loved English class.
Paul Graham’s social essays tend to start from a simplified premise which you can pick up easily from his The Age of Essays article: he’s writing for people like himself. He hated English class and likes writing essays. He wants to explain to you why you hated English class and why you’d like writing essays. He doesn’t make many concessions to readers who are different from him (and he probably sees this as a virtue). If you were a clever bored iconoclast busting to get out into the world and do some stuff, then Graham’s talking to you. If you liked pulling Dickens to pieces, then you were part of the problem that held Graham’s audience back all these years.
I suppose we cogs in the aging machinery can console ourselves safe in the knowledge that for once literature nerds are part of the big boring mainstream holding the world back, rather than a little shallow sidestream holding the mainstream back.
I feel the need to respond to Graham though, precisely because I agree with so much of his article, and yet don’t fit inside it. The essay art form is only tied to the study of literature by academic accident, although probably not exactly of the sort he describes. (There seems to be an unexplained gulf between his uncritical dismissal of the study of modern literature and his uncritical acceptance of the core place history has as part of the ideal intellectual toolkit.) The essay is a useful tool outside that realm. And the essay in particular, and writing in general, is a good way to draw interesting conclusions from a solid set of premises.
And now that I’ve had this explained to me, I’m meant to understand why I didn’t like English class. Except that I did. Oh, the cognitive dissonance.
The answer lies in Graham’s essay too, oddly. It’s possible to build an interesting ediface out of a lot of things, he points out. The art of the essay is in some sense that of being able to sketch the structure, and also that of shining a torch from an unexpected angle while doing so. Well, you can do this with programming techniques, or ice cream sales, or you can do it with literature.
And the connection between literature and composition is not merely that they both have to do with writing, and composition teachers might as well write about literature since the mathematicians have already cornered geometry, it is that literature too is a complex enough structure that we can build it up in our minds into something solid enough to have an inside.
I liked English class because I liked taking novels apart and putting them back together. I like essay writing more generally because I like taking other things apart and putting them back together. I like doing this to some things more than others, so I can even understand why some potential essay writers don’t like English class. But I don’t think Graham understands why they might like it.
Moving in geek circles has been an interesting experience for me in this respect. In person my friends’ view of school varies widely: some liked it; some hated it; some would have hated it except for their friends, their teachers, or their drama club. But the party line says that we ought to have hated it, and not only hated it, but found it beneath us. (OK, that’s unfair, the slashdot line is indiscriminate: everything is beneath us.)
I care about this mainly because I’m tired of feeling defensive about my intellectual hoover: I find a lot of stuff interesting. I even found stuff in the high school curriculum interesting. It made me happy. So why am I part of the problem?
It’s a shame Graham’s essay pushes the line that “everything is potentially interesting, except for the stuff that the system teaches you, that stuff is crap.” I think everything’s potentially interesting. I’d love to persuade more people of that, but convincing them that the entire world except for themselves is trying to kill interest off is not exactly the right way to make the point.
Comments
From my US vantage point, “big of a deal” is very common.
And I too have those moments of looking at a word for a while and it not looking like a word anymore. I know what you mean.
Posted by katie on February 25, 2004 01:17 PM
I just came across “How large of a litter does a rat have at one time?” in the TREC QA 2003 questions too.
I can’t do that with “of”.
Posted by Mary on February 25, 2004 03:51 PM
From a Norwegian: is this supposed to be the same as “it’s not a big deal”, or is THAT just some Norwenglish and gramatically incorrect phrase?
Posted by Magni on February 25, 2004 09:06 PM
Magni:
“It’s not a big deal” is perfectly fine, and you wouldn’t blink hearing it in Australia. The “that” simply lets you add emphasis, it’s always said “it’s not /that/ big a deal”. Having it there at all is a little colloquial.
Posted by Mary on February 26, 2004 02:24 PM
I hate the word “of” in a lot of contexts that seem to be loved by Americans.
“Get off of my lawn”.
It just grates me, I know not why.
In fact, I hate most Americanisms: “one hundred two dollars”, “write me”, “most all”… Hmmm, there’s one more, but I can’t remember it for now.
Posted by TimC on March 4, 2004 10:03 PM
Katie: In the photo of tornado kitty, simon and you napping, is Simon sucking his leg and sewing? Because that’s exactly the thing that one of our ginger kitties, imaginitively called “Ginger” did when happy. Always sucked his left rear leg. It would be really cool if there was another identical ginger kitty (they look exactly the same) was just as stupid as our one
Posted by TimC on March 4, 2004 10:11 PM
One I love though, is “Way!” in response to “No way!”
In fact, I tend to like most back-formations.
Posted by Mary on March 10, 2004 11:33 AM