by Mary
After a wee bit of confusion Valerie Valiant
Henson, kernel hacker, has inned herself and resumed her identity as a woman. Her male identity is still around for those who want to admire Dana Sibera‘s work with virtual beards.
Yes it was a joke. And this is tough to tell on blogs, but yes, I knew it was a joke. Pinkie swears!
Val(erie) Henson is a man.
For posterity, yep, joke. Val had a temporary manly homepage.
I was a bit despondent at the time of the Edgy beta release because it looked like all of my bugs were going to lie untouched until the end of time. But things have picked up.
Bugs I originally complained about:
As for the second lot of bugs:
One more major one for me springs to mind: bug 61423 against Nevow. If this one goes unfixed, as seems likely (essentially the fix is for someone to approve an exception to the upstream version freeze as per bug 57482), I won’t be able to use Edgy on my servers unless I want to install my own Nevow versions. I’ve gone through this before with Nevow—for either the Hoary or the Breezy release there was some problem with Nevow not matching the packaged version of Twisted—because it’s so little used, and I felt really bad hassling #ubuntu-motu daily about the UVF exception. I’ll probably go with my instincts and just not use Edgy on my servers, or at least not on the puzzling.org host. Given that though, I’m less concerned about using Edgy on my desktops for the next six months than I was on the day of the beta release.
Divester innocently points out Dive Google, a scuba diving search engine offering paid listings. But it’s not Google suddenly getting into scuba diving, it’s someone riffing badly on the trademark. Or as one of Divester’s commenters puts it:
another downside [to Dive Google]? It’s likely only hours away from being shut down by the Google team for trademark infringement.
The worst part is that they missed such an obvious name: Dive Goggle. D’uh. You could even work the paid listings thing into the metaphor by noting that goggles limit your field of vision.
Partially inspired by Larvatus Prodeo, a reminder that for residents of NSW and the ACT, tomorrow (Sept 30) is the last day to get your free packs of energy saving bulbs and a reduced water showerhead through the Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme. One place you can get them is from easybeinggreen, which has an online store and a bunch of stands.
As it happens though, Andrew and I have just had a reduced water showerhead put in by WaterFix this very morning. WaterFix comes around and replaces your tap washers with fancier flow regulating washers, reduces your toilet’s water consumption, and replaces your showerhead for $22 total. It’s not the same as the Greenhouse Gas scheme, it just happens to be going on at the same time. You need to have your water supplied by Sydney Water, which means its open to the Sydney metropolitan area. Unlike with the energy saver bulb packs from the Greenhouse scheme though, if you’re a tenant you need to check with your agent/landlord in order to have things in the house fixed up by WaterFix, because it’s the landlord who will get the $22 tacked onto their water bill. (In NSW, only metered water usage can be passed onto tenants, other water costs must be borne by the landlord.)
Just a quick pointer to The Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers, Australia. Andrew’s father (a civil engineer) first pointed this out to him. It calls itself a non-profit organisation representing professional employees
, but essentially it performs the functions that IT people most seem to want from a union:
You can also, apparently, get a whole bunch of research into stuff like average salaries in your field, broken down quite finely by level of responsibility. So called IT professionals
fall under their umbrella. Membership is tax deductible.
I have no idea how much work they’ve done with Free Software related contract issues. My guess would be not much, but I haven’t actually asked.
And no, I’m not a member (although I’m considering becoming a post-graduate student member, but the considering will probably take a while). I just thought it would be a useful heads-up to the sundry people I hear occasionally wishing that there was some kind of union-esque service for hacking folk.
The various transactions and proceedings of The Royal Society are now online, dating back to Philosophical Transactions, starting in 1665. I should download some of Turing’s papers and have a look, but I can’t get past The Motion of the Late Comet Praedicted
, An Account of a Very Odd Monstrous Calf
and An Observation Imparted to the Noble Mr. Boyle, by Mr. David Thomas, Touching Some Particulars Further Considerable in the Monster Mentioned in the First Papers of These Philosophical Transactions
in Volumes 1 and 2 of Philosophical Transactions.
Get them while they’re hot, access will stop being free in December. (I’m unclear about how that works with the older articles which shouldn’t be under copyright any more. Perhaps Project Gutenberg can, or even has, transcribed some of the articles. They don’t seem to index by journal name.)
Source:
The deadline for the written paper for OSDC was today. My talk is fairly fluffy—I just wanted another excuse to visit Melbourne and hopefully actually meet an entire crowd of Australian geeks that I know by name but haven’t met—but I dutifully wrote up the paper today, cribbing a section on the history of Planets from my old essay on the subject. Andrew read my paper this evening after I’d submitted it and carefully pointed out that my information about Advogato was out of date. Raph Levien is planning to take it down. (Note though that almost inevitably someone has offered to step up to the plate.)
I copied all of my old diary entries off Advogato to my tech log some time ago, but decided I should rescue one more piece of content, my essay on Questions your conference website should answer.
That essay came out of a giant discussion about trying to get members of LinuxChix to submit to linux.conf.au: probably I think for the 2003 conference in Perth (I drafted it in 2003 and published it a year later, which is about four years better than I’ve done with HOWTO pay for Free Software, which is still in draft form). It turned out that people were being put off by the jargon used in the call for papers, paper
being the worst jargon of all. It’s an oddly good time to re-visit it, if only to re-format it for the move, because I’m in the middle of reviewing the crazy (good crazy) number of presentation and tutorial proposals for linux.conf.au 2007. I should have some comments on that process (in fact, I have made a giant mailing list post about the l.c.a. review process and its aims, strengths and weaknesses) after the decisions are made. And then, for a reason I don’t fully understand, I’ll also be reviewing for PyCon 2007. I get free admission for doing that, anyone want to fly me to Texas in February?
See also:
The phone itself seems OK, although there’s the possibility of further corrosion I guess. The battery is dead as a door nail, but I’ll be back on the air once I get a new battery.
This seems as good a way as any to let people know: I put my mobile phone through the washing machine yesterday. Andrew is optimistic about it drying out as good as new, I am pessimistic. Either way, I won’t be contactable at all on my mobile for the next few days.