Category: Uncategorized

… you would give him a redesign of his site.

Moments like this, it’s better to be Fred

PZ Myers highlights a letter to Nature that suggests that women scientists need to have about 2.5 times (250% if you like your numbers big and round) more impact as measured by number of publications and prestige of publication as male scientists to get evaluated as equally competant. (At least, in the middle of cohort, but it’s not so much better at the top: you’ll just outrank the bottom cohort of men.)

That number is amazing. And, well, frightening.

Planescape: Torment

I used to own this game, and now I want to finish it and I do not seem to own it any longer. C’mon, I recently gave away a film camera I’d kept unused for something close to ten years. How can this game have disappeared from my messy pile of game boxes?

Just got back from 9 days of holiday with no ‘net access. No discernable withdrawal to report, although it’s possible I’ll now get Barrier Reef withdrawal in Sydney.

Given that I now have an enormous backlog of email and other info, if there was anything that required my attention I’d appreciate a special pointer. Otherwise I’ll skim.

After a successful Twisted sprint in Tasmania in April, we’ve decided to do a followup. There are all kinds of bad sequel jokes people are making about this one. Twist Harder?

Details: it will be another sprint on the Twisted codebase, docs and/or closely related things. It will be another Friday—Sunday deal. It will be somewhere in Sydney. We will be working on documentation, and most likely on further tidying of the VFS layer from the last sprint and perhaps some porting or merging (I don’t know where that was up to).

The date is still preliminary so now is the time to give me feedback on it. (The constraints are: August, and don’t clash with OSCON 2005.) But the date is currently down as 19th–21st August 2005. The date should be confirmed very soon.

I’m going to apply for a Linux Australia grant for it in a week or so when we firm details up a bit, so transport (domestic airfares) and accommodation sponsorship may be possible. Watch this space.

Every time I move house my mother has some empatic instructions to do with getting rid of ‘stuff’. ‘Stuff’ is associated with a certain amount of horror. It’s only by the thinnest of threads that she avoids coming here in the middle of the night and binning things at random.

I have found on many moves that the effort of sorting through ‘stuff’, identifying the source of the horror and disposing of it thoughtfully exceeds that of just carrying it to the new place. So I’ve tended to do that.

But I had more lead time on this move so I did what I could. Here’s a quick review of methods of getting rid of stuff:

Bins

Positives: simple, effective. Negatives: I’m bad at bins. I look at all the stuff that’s still useful or working, or which at least could be useful or working, or which, at a pinch could leak heavy metals into the soil and deform my great-grandchildren, and it doesn’t get thrown out.

eBay

Positives: people actually give you money for stuff. In the whole two eBay transactions I’ve made, it’s been more money than I’ve expected by three times or so. Negatives: you have to photograph the stuff, describe its condition accurately, communicate with your buyer, arrange payment and shipping or pick-up. Good for the odd thing that actually appears worth something.

Freecycle

Positives: people come and take your stuff away! And thank you for it! And bring you big lemons! Negatives: it’s still time consuming, although you don’t have to feel like you’re in a fight with the Trade Practices Act. And you don’t get any money. And they suck at nominating a time. (“Any time! When are you home?” “There’s someone there nearly all the time! Now pick one!”) Good for the bulk of my junk: too valuable for the bin, sale price not worth the effort.

Book Crossing

Sort of a nice idea, pretty worthless for giving away books. It’s not set up to facilitate that; they get much more excited when you just leave them on a park bench than they do when you re-home them. So their entire system is devoted to tracking the park benches you left books on, rather than on facilitating finding loving homes for bad Rob Grant novels.

LinuxChix Live redesign

I redesigned the LinuxChix Live site using some of the ideas from Seth Nickell’s Planet GNOME design (see his rationale). I’ve used bits and pieces of the main site’s colours with help from the colour scheme generator, although I think I should have used the colour mixer instead. I quite like the design, but it’s a bit ambitious for a colour-impaired person like me.

Priorites

I’m rearranging my commitments to Open Source (etc etc) projects a bit, so that I don’t burn out before I actually do anything.

It works out like this:

• Ubuntu Documentation Team: I’m completely dropping out of this. I found myself not only skimming the mailing list, but actually failing to read it, and that’s always a bad sign. This means effectively dropping my remaining involvement in the Ubuntu community and giving up all chance of ever appearing on Planet Ubuntu, but having a planeting motivate me is a bad idea.
• Twisted: Still intend to work on its documentation in the usual fits and spurts. Would like to coordinate a reviewing effort, but I don’t see that taking off very speedily.

• Community Code: This is looking like a huge effort to turn it into something with real mentoring, rather than another version of Sourceforge’s help wanted board. It’s the reason why I gave up on the Ubuntu doc team now rather than soon.

I’m beginning to suspect it’s time to rearrange my contributions so that they include code. But not right now.

I went back to the Ubuntu Down Under conference yesterday and had quite a nice day. The specification writing was winding down, and therefore it was possible to communally laptop. Sitting around with a bunch of people all using laptops is more communal than it sounds, especially in a sunny room with comfy couches and beanbags.

This also meant that Andrew and I got a visit from an ACPI fairy in its human incarnation Matthew Garrett to make our laptop suspension and hibernation work in Ubuntu.

In order to save Canonical the expense of a personal visit from the the angry (not-)DPL to every Ubuntu user in the world, here are some notes, some of which I knew about:

Enabling sleep and hibernate

The file /etc/default/acpi-support needs to contain some lines that look like these two:

Setting up hibernate to resume from your swap partition

People who installed Ubuntu in some early-ish phase of its lifecycle need to edit their /etc/mkinitrd/mkinitrd.conf file. Down the bottom there will be a commented-out line like this:

Uncomment this and point it at your swap parition (replacing /dev/hda3 with your own swap partition):

Then run the following set of commands as root (replacing /dev/hda3 with your own swap partition, and 2.6.10-5-686 with your kernel version as necessary):

Re-fairying acpid

If you tested out ACPI support earlier in Matthew Garrett’s Hoary testing cycle, you may have installed acpid from his laptop apt repository. Unfortunately, that version is numbered 1.0.4-1ubuntu1+mjg59-1 and the version that shipped with Hoary, 1.0.4-1ubuntu4, while more featureful, looks like a downgrade to apt and associated tools. You should install the Hoary version of the package by whatever means you have available. This made suspend to RAM work for me.

Believing in fairies

I think someone who is a better artist than I am should do a fairy picture based on this one to promote more ACPI love for everyone.

Hackergotchi heads for LinuxChix Live

I’m planning to add the disembodied heads used by Planet GNOME and Planet Debian to LinuxChix Live.

They’re completely optional, but here are the specifications:

• the head image must be of your face;
• the head should be no larger than 80×80; and
• the head image should be GIMPed up as per this page (see also the other Planets).

If you need help with turning a photo into a floating head, contact me and I’ll pass your request along to the GIMP course, who I’m sure would have some fun with it.

Use of a hackergotchi head on LinuxChix Live will be entirely optional, but they can be fun and it makes it all seem a bit more personal to have more than names.

Email them to my contact address on the LinuxChix Live site itself.

Hackergotchi heads for Planet Twisted

Thanks to Chris, who started the trend, we’ve tended to use child heads for Planet Twisted. This is kind of a tough ask because most people have to hassle their mother for cute baby photos, but if you can supply me with the lil’ Twisted goo, I can add it.

I went to Ubuntu Down Under more to experience these mysterious events that Andrew flies off to every four months more than anything else. I wasn’t entirely sure what I expected from the day, but I wouldn’t recommend them to people who do not have a pretty developed interest in Ubuntu or something else Canonical is working on.

Yesterday, the ANZAC public holiday in Australia, was conceived as “Ubuntu Down Under Love Day” originally. I’m not quite sure whether I picked up the wrong message or whether I picked up the right message and the concept didn’t work out. The message I got was that it was going to be the most outsider-friendly day, and a chance to reach out to Sydney Linux users and Free Software developers.

What this amounted to, aside from SLUG’s small installfest, was that the Monday (like every other day of the conference) is open to drop-ins. It didn’t mean though that there were many sessions that had much need or interest for people not already, at the very least, following the Ubuntu development mailing lists. This conference is one week long, apparently because the two week conferences were burning people out too much to work during the second week, but the way that’s been achieved is to roughly double the output expected from the single week. The schedule, which is now sufficiently complicated that making it must be approaching the complexity level of the high school timetabling problem, was completely changed the night before the conference, leaving me with a pretty unfamiliar set of sessions I could attend.

And at a really basic level, the mindset just wasn’t about “let’s take outsiders and draw them in.” Very few BoFs started with an overview of what the session was set to accomplish and most were limited to conversations between two or three people while others listened in. All of them have a very formal aim, which is an edited write up including a set of goals for implementation.

I sat in on a couple of Launchpad sessions as a kind of observer with a professional interest in software engineering techniques, but it was pretty opaque to people not following development (the code is in-house and completely proprietary, so that essentially means Canonical employees).

Carlos was interested in talking to me as a representative of the documentation people, but unfortunately I don’t know the translation work-flow at all.

The Membership and Maintainership BoF Mako ran was the most interesting I went to, partly because the topic is community participation, which is easy to understand, and partly because the goal is moderately interesting. The idea is to separate the two things that Debian combines in the New Maintainer process: that is, power to help make decisions (by voting, usually), and the power to upload software into the distribution. In the Ubuntu community, the idea is that people shouldn’t have to jump through all the ‘can we trust your software skills?’ hoops if their contributions are, for example, helping out on the mailing list. However, they should be able to vote. Hence, the Member/Maintainer distinction.

I would have had a better day if a few more documentation team members had been there I think. At the moment I’m trying to do some facilitation for them (facilitation is relatively newly discovered talent of mine, and since I prefer editing technical documentation to writing it, I think it’s the main thing I’m going to offer those docs) and there are going to be some very pressing issues shortly surrounding two things: communication with the development team; and whether contributions should be tightened up and funnelled through the doc team (which would mean, among other things, bringing the wiki under tighter control). These could have used some nutting out with the developers in person.

As it was, I didn’t get a lot out of it for the most part. It’s not a marvellous ‘networking’ (read: meeting cool people) event, because the Canonical people are working 14–20 hour days, and the meals are in-house and expensive (breakfast and lunch were each $22 buffets, I don’t know how much dinner was). I doubt I would have met anyone much if it wasn’t for knowing several of the Canonical employees already. (It would be possible to, but you’d have to be a bit more outgoing than me, and also confident of making a good impression on very busy people.) I’m not familiar enough with distribution development to help write specifications for that; ditto Launchpad (and I gather they don’t want outside help anyway); and I’m way behind the eight-ball on distributed version control.

Assuming that the conference pattern follows this one, I wouldn’t recommend people without a really pressing need to get involved or existing involvement go along to these things in future. Assuming that this is a problem (it need not be, not all conferences are suitable for casual observers) I think the solution would have been to really pull SLUG into it and push a lot of the reach-out work onto SLUG. I would have enjoyed, say, a codefest with some token Canonical participation or some ‘donated’ talks from them, more than I enjoyed their development conference.

Some thoughts on usability from experiences of the last few days include: yum vs apt; and Arch with more grabability.

I tried to use yum to upgrade from Fedora Core 1 to 3 rather than walk ten metres to ask our operations staff where the CDs were. This didn’t completely break my system as I was informed it would, although I did end up trying to upgrade packages in sets of 10. I gave up because I broke X so badly that starting it caused the machine to reboot. But at least it was booting in the first place, which is better luck than James had going from Fedora Core 2 to 3. (My story ends with the CD upgrade by the way, which went fine.)

So, why was I doing this? First I’m used to Debian-like systems which are more fussy about having good upgrade paths (to be fair, they don’t usually support skipping a release like I was trying to do). And second, I’m used to apt.

Two things that apt does that I wish yum did too:

1. When asked to upgrade some enormous number of packages, and two of the upgrades are set to fail due to dependency issues, apt will install the enormous number of packages, minus the broken ones, thereby avoiding you having to manually construct a list of packages which don’t appear to be broken.
2. apt does not re-index the repositories every time you invoke it, it needs a special command. Very useful when you need to walk it through several steps (and I have to say, I’ve never had to do as much of that as I have over the last day, but that’s partly because the office mirror of FC3 is incomplete) and don’t want to waste thirty seconds on each step waiting for it to rebuild its meta-data.

I’ve also been messing with Arch. Well, I branched Planet again and I’m going to put my old changes in by hand, I can’t face walking it though 60 revisions while it tries to merge my old old old changes in. While I was messing with doing this, I felt clicky urges. I’m not a hugely spatial user normally, but I had a sudden desire to have a big screen full of colourful blocks representing Arch branches, and I would merge code between them by grabbing branches with the mouse and dragging them to the right place. I don’t have a good system yet for maintaining a mental model of what branches come from and should be merged into what points in the parent branch.