Category: Uncategorized

You have a unique opportunity to contribute to Wikitravel’s Dunedin article, and actually add some places to eat and drink. Barring Macca’s, I mean.

LiveJournal and planets

For some as yet not well explained reason, LiveJournal has changed their URLs so that each user has their own subdomain.

The upshot of this is that the Planet software has now moved some LJ users entire feed (last 15 or 20 entries) to the top of the planets they’re on. Sorry about that, LinuxChix Live and Planet Twisted. You can bump them off by writing more entries…

Actually, given that planet is kind of evil about redirects, it might be better to edit one’s planet config, so that all feed addresses that looked like http://www.livejournal.com/users/username/data/rss/ become http://username.livejournal.com/data/rss/ (or http://users.livejournal.com/username/data/rss/ if the username began with _ or -, or see the announcement for information about whatever the hell is going on with communities).

Planet todo

Speaking of the Planet software:

• It needs a complete go-over to convince it to dump as little as possible into RAM at various points. My two planets each take up to 40MB of RAM during generation. Potential problems include: feedparser does not stream; templating software does not stream. But even with those limitations, it shouldn’t be loading the complete cache of all entries from all blogs at once.
• Redirection code may need fixing.

I’ve been fussing about whether or not I want to use IRC for ages now. So I’ll put my dilemma out there into the void so that years later people can remind me how silly I was back in the day.

In this post ‘IRC’ means ‘hanging out on semi-technical IRC channels with people I barely know [in any sense of the word]’ and ‘hanging out on mostly-social IRC channels with people I do know.’ My feelings aren’t readily extensible to person-to-person IM, with which I’ve had so few obviously positive experiences that I seldom bother with it, and with IRC private messages, which I regard as essentially a more reliable way of getting Andrew to answer questions about his whereabouts and doings than email (he’ll answer about 50% of them rather than none).

Reasons why I keep using IRC

In order of decreasing importance:

1. There are several people I know slightly for whom I have some substantial degree of fangirlishness (in the nicest possible way, I love smart people), respect or general admiration who it is not practical to interact with in any other way: typically they live in other countries; and I’m not close enough to them to be comfortable taking up their time for a one-on-one conversation in any forum whatsoever. This leaves spending thousands of dollars flying to the conferences they attend or hanging out in their IRC channels as the sole means for me to bask in their company.
2. For several projects in which I’m interested, IRC is an important or essentially sole means of decision making.
3. For one social group I’m peripherally involved in, IRC is a fairly important medium for making social plans.
4. There are some coding activities that are easier to coordinate and some discussions it’s much faster to have on IRC than on a mailing list.

Reasons why I keep wanting to give it up

1. The vast majority of IRC conversations are dross. I’m not sure whether this is a function of the higher social bandwidth that comes from seeing people’s faces, but while I’ve had very good conversations with people on IRC, I seem to have them in person more often.
2. IRC is mildly addictive for me, and not in a nice way. The setup is much like the computer game model where there’s a certain amount of back-off in reward (to get from level 1 to level 2, you need to kill 3 rats, to get from level 29 to level 30 you need to kill 3 dragons and date two princes without either finding out about the other). On IRC, there’s always at any moment the possibility of fusion happening and a great (or important) conversation springing up from nowhere. Hence, just as I will tend to keep playing a computer game until the next reward state is reached, I’ll tend to stick around on IRC waiting for it to catch fire. Neither computer games nor IRC are terribly addictive for me, but both of them tend to have a net negative effect on my mood thanks to this usage pattern.
3. A small minority of the time, IRC conversations, typically political ones, absolutely infuriate me due to some conversation of the content being expressed and the manner of that expression. This probably isn’t noticed most of the times that it happens because I tend not to participate in them, but I absolutely loath having my blood pressure raised like that and each time it happens I’ll vanish for some days if not weeks.
4. Partly as a result of not valuing IRC very highly, I’m never in the inner circle of any channel I participate in. This means that every so often people will indulge themselves in a comforting social ritual that makes me feel like an alien anthropologist (various Twisted people like virtually squishing each other, some of the LinuxChix like to pretend to be cats…) and an unwelcome one at that. (Also, and I’m notoriously bad at explaining this and people keep misunderstanding me and thinking I’m claiming sexual harassment but here goes: this kind of thing would be extremely intimate behaviour coming from me and being in a place where people indulge in what I consider an extremely intimate behaviour and they consider to be a kind of mild social lubricant is just, well, weird.)

And a pony

So really, the upshot is that somehow I wish I could have the positives of IRC (working with some smart people I know on some interesting things they work on; and/or shooting the breeze) without the negatives. One alternative would be to give up on IRC and seek those things elsewhere, but unfortunately that means accepting losing most or all contact with a number of people who I don’t want to lose contact with. So far I have no alternative plan.

1. I don’t actually dislike reading blogs and mailing lists, but I don’t miss them when they aren’t there. I’d say that this might lead up to minor purges, but last year’s purges were so ruthless that the only thing left to purge might be going online at all.
2. Actually, scratch that, I’m happier without IRC.
3. I do confess to worrying that some kind of awful tragedy in the lives of people I know that I ordinarily would have been informed of via the net. (I did hear about an arrest in Thailand, but if there’s anything more recent than that, um, I probably haven’t heard.)
4. Noone calls my mobile to see what I’m up to and where the hell I’ve got to.
5. I did get an SMS invite to an NYE party I couldn’t get to though, so that’s OK.

Apparently, text messages (SMSs) sent in Australia are stored by the telco for a few days and searches can be (and probably are being) carried out for messages containing certain content.

Nominations for the Australian blog awards are open. (The authority is self-appointed, but that’s OK. I set myself up as an authority on everything I can think of too.)

Best Australian tech blog. Last year I nominated Martin Pool, but it didn’t really get anywhere. (I think ‘popular tech blog’ usually corresponds to ‘person who blogs about Cascading Style Sheets a lot’ rather than ‘person who blogs about source control a lot’.) Martin hasn’t been writing very much this year and I don’t want to nominate him on past glories. I’d make an effort for the free software community, but none of the writers on Planet Linux Australia really stand out for me yet.

Best Australian Political Blog/Best Australian Collaborative Blog. This would be Larvatus Prodeo for me. I wish they had a less shrill set of commenters though. I keep hoping one day I’ll stumble on an Aussie Unfogged (one of the very very few blogs where more than 0.1% of the comment threads are worth reading), but it hasn’t happened yet. I keep meaning to commit to reading Andrew Bartlett regularly too, but I haven’t so I don’t know if he’s a contender.

Best Overseas Australian Blog. Surely I’m not the only person who loves Rachel Chalmers’ Yatima. Surely? Her whole family is my blog crush.

In categories they don’t have, here’s some others, from closer to home:

• Art blogging: Abstraktn
• Grog blogging/cranky blogging: Julia
• Bitchy teen blogging: Steph (get it while it’s hot, she’s turning 20 next year)

She’s a little bulky:

If I’d really appreciated this prior to purchase I might have spent a little bit more money on getting a real wrist computer, not a console computer in a wrist mount. But that’s OK, it can wait until I retire this one some years from now.

And yes, my wrists are quite slender. This wrist strap is actually a pain to get off when it’s that tight, fortunately I will normally be wearing it over my other baby:

The new one’s also a little crazy:

That’s saying that if I were to dive now (currently at sea level with no previous dives in the last couple of days) I could spend 5 minutes at 57 metres depth before it would insist noisily on my taking decompression stops during ascent. And it’s also assuming that I’m at least 70% completely crazy. I can’t say I have a great sense of my tolerance of nitrogen pressure, but I’m presuming that would be lala land: nearly 4 martinis by Martini’s law.

Things that suck

• Quickflix, because the last three DVDs they’ve sent us were faulty. (Actually, the two copies of Dr Strangelove might have been the same disk.) Double suck for the Fargo DVD being faulty in the last fifth.
• The thread starting here. Just looking at it in all its threadly glory will give you an idea.
• Stimulants. I can run on caffeine and pseudoephedrine when ill, but they both make me feel kind of hyper-well, so I drive myself into the wall and only find out when the effects wear off.
• Andrew’s machine’s BIOS which not only won’t work with USB keyboards (recall, he has no working PS/2 ports) but which also periodically fails to give him a usable mouse.
• Laptop prices in Australia. Let’s review one culprit, the IBM T series direct from Lenovo. In the US, it starts at $1 399. In Canada, it starts at $1 499 (US$1270 or so). In Australia, it’s $2 599 (US $1920 or so). Yeah. I can’t work this one out. I’m not exactly taking advantage of economies of scale when I point out that it would cost me about $100 to ship one from the US.
• Stores that don’t put the price on things above a certain price. I mean, if I have to ask, which I’m disinclined to because then I’ll get a sales pitch and I tend to do my consumer research before hitting a store, it’s not like the mere fact of having to ask will make me more likely to pay a huge amount for something. SCUBA stores are a bit weird about this. They’ll happily show off a new $3999 set as their top-end kit for the season or three (I’m talking rec diving here), but they’ll never ever put a price on a wrist computer, which tend to be about $500-$600 in Australia. (See above re laptops for the weird price differences from North America.) Camera stores are more consistent. C’mon, it’s not like I don’t know the current price range for low-end DSLRs, I just want to know if you’re selling at RRP or not.

Things that rock

• I just experienced my first ever hard-drive failure. Fortunately, not only was everything important to me backed up, I also found the sole remaining copy of my GPG secret key after hunting through several household computers.
• LeisurePro, who have just shipped me my new baby, despite being a bit dubious about a non-US card, and my initially giving them the wrong expiry date. First person to rip them off with an unjustified chargeback on a foreign card, you will feel the back of my hand.

I hear about software rotting a lot, but not a lot about hardware rot. But rot it does. No sooner had Andrew and I got back to Australia about this time last year (354 days ago, actually) and slowly but surely coaxed our desktops back to life over the course of a week or so of patiently reseating cables and whacking them hard on the side, it seemed, did we moved house (five and a half months ago) and somehow destroy them again.

Being laptop enabled, I didn’t find this out until I wanted a Windows machine to do my tax return. Booting my old faithful produced nothing more than a loud and upsetting pop. My intimidating hardware acumen lead me inevitably to diagnose some kind of bang in the motherboard thingie. Or actually, probably in the power supply, because it smelled weirder. (On a tangent, I still count the day that I showed my father how to plug the CD-ROM back into the motherboard and the adventure went to his head and he ended up taking the case’s power supply apart and carefully vacuuming it as one of the odder experiences in my life. Thanks for the memories Dad.)

So then I tried Andrew’s slightly less faithful desktop only to find that it booted into a completely broken Windows 98 install by default and couldn’t be fixed because it didn’t work with PS/2 keyboards anymore, so the BIOS is uneditable.

So I did my tax return on paper and resigned myself to using up perfectly good airspace in our house by filling it with completely useless computers (I’ve never worked out how to dispose of computer bits). And that was all fine and good until Andrew’s laptop was stolen and we were down a computer, a key element of our lifestyle. Surely between two broken desktops we could put together one working machine? Unfortunately, neither has such an accessible setup anymore: my BIOS is kaput, his is not editable. But we eventually did it by shoving the hard drive in another machine.

Incidentally, a big boo-hiss to Ubuntu for requiring a key-press to boot their live CD (apparently, Andrew was the one who waited for it, but not me). Andrew’s BIOS doesn’t like USB keyboards, so he needed an operating system that could be booted with no key-presses.

As most of the relevant community already knows, there’s a O’Reilly Twisted book out. You can also buy it from an Amazon associate to help defray the twistedmatrix.com hosting costs.

An important question is being discussed as I write: what should the book’s code name be? If Programming Perl is the Camel book it is argued, this should also be coded on its cover. So far, the orgy book seems simplest, with the snake orgy book as a backup if O’Reilly gets a bit wilder with their covers.