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I’m going to write about the linux.conf.au conference here, mainly summarising talks. Next time, go yourselves!

linux.conf.au Miniconfs Day 1

I left Sydney with spiv at 7:00am this morning after having to throw out a pair of nail clippers and a pair of scissors I’ve been carrying around for at least a year (being one of those people who always has everything in their handbag finally came back to bite me). Was delivered in Adelaide at 8:30am local time, 9:00 Sydney time. I’ve only once been further away from home (New Zealand 1998), and feel very very strange because of course, there’s absolutely no culture shock at all. Adelaide reminds me of Christchurch, but warmer and with Australian accents. Borders even sells the Sydney Morning Herald.

The conference proper starts on Wednesday, today was the first day of the miniconfs. I attended the first two talks in the Audio miniconf program.

Mark Greenaway repeated his SLUG talk on audio, which I missed the first time. Apparently the set of demos that didn’t work this time didn’t intersect at all with the set of demos that didn’t work last time. He briefly showed off jack, ardour, sweep, hydrogen, qcontrol, freqtweak and alsamodularsynth. Mark is a good speaker — I was his housemate for one and a half years and completely missed seeing him do any speaking in that time.

Peter Chubb talked about typesetting musical notation (and checking your typesetting via MIDI) using LilyPond, which I cannot convince myself to stop thinking of as “lilypad”.

The immense level of organisation required for this conference only really hit me when I reached the registration desk . Every attendee has their name tag in a little plastic wallet hung from their neck with cords labelled “linux.conf.au 2004”. The wallet contains a mini-progamme, a second nametag to go in the conference bag’s name placeholder, tickets to the dinner for those who ordered them, and a voucher for icecreams. Several days of solid work probably went into that alone.

All has run smoothly so far except for the wired network for attendees (wireless was a-go-go) which didn’t come up until this afternoon. But it was up in time for spiv to start on his Python miniconf talk.

spiv and I have elected to share a double room in a pub rather than stay in the college — it’s a nice room, but we’re yet to see how noisy it will be.

Life

After eighteen years in various schooling systems, 2004 will be the first year since I was 4 that I am not going to be a student.

I’m taking a job as a research assistant — thus breaking from the tertiary education system not at all — from mid-January until August. It will be my longest full-time work stint ever. Then I’ll break it for a few months to go around the world, and then who knows?

Contributions

When I was learning BASIC (I was 8), I ran right into a wall when it came to thinking of stuff to program. I taught myself conditionals, loops and the basics of arrays out of a helpful little book that came with the computer, but when it came to making the leap into my own projects I was always stuck for ideas.

Obviously, not being 8 and also not being completely technically isolated has improved things somewhat, but there are still only two types of programming projects I really do: web projects and projects associated with a job or school project. Presumably the scale of the latter will only continue increasing, but I get the impression that I’m not likely to be a big contributor to Free Software in the “cool and exciting new stuff” category, at least, not in the immediate future.

In the last few weeks I’ve become the documentation editor for the Twisted project. So far this has meant very little, but apparently it means effectively that when it comes to documentation, it’s my vision.

This is a little disconcerting, since I don’t know the codebase outside the Twisted Web system at all, and I know only pieces of that. It is resulting in me producing documentation at the rate of about a paragraph every few hours, in which pace there needs to be a fair improvement before I will produce respectable amounts of documentation and of edited documentation. It is, however, a task (unlike software ideas and software design) where I have reasonable confidence that I can ascend the learning curve fairly quickly.

[cross-posted from a mailing list, with some editing]

Having finished honours, I’m reflecting again on the extent to which I did or did not waste the last five years of my life.

I spent those five years doing a B Science (Hons) and B Arts. Here’s what I got out of it: a maths major; a comp sci major; a philosophy major; a linguistics major; a semiotics major; 1 year of chemistry; 1 year of modern history and computing (not “computer science” because I switched universities) honours.

The semiotics major was a complete farce, it’s a so called “cross-listed major”, and I had to take one English subject and three linguistics subjects to get it. I did it purely so I could graduate with five majors.

My subject choices were OK considering what I knew about my interests when I left high school. I knew that I was a relatively talented maths student, a good essay writer, and that most courses were relatively interesting and easy to do well in. The first and last pieces of knowledge took a beating at university, but I’m still a good writer, at least compared to computing students in general.

However, with the benefit of hindsight, there’s a bunch of (completely incompatible) changes to my program I wish I’d considered.

Doing normal level subjects rather than advanced level for third year maths. I wasn’t prepared to work hard enough to do well in the advanced subjects (and even if I did work hard I may not have had the ability — those courses are really there to groom the honours candidates). I probably would have both done better in the normal level subjects and enjoyed them more. That one I should have realised after second year.

Exchange the philosophy major for a history major. This one requires hindsight, because I didn’t really get into history until fourth year when I took two semesters of history. But with the benefit of hindsight, I would have really really loved doing three years of history, whereas I ended up being a bit blah about philosophy. History is more concrete and also more human.

Fortunately, history is something that is fairly easy to continue learning about without academia’s help (I preferred academia only because USyd‘s modern European history people were so passionate and informed about their research — if you have a chance take their courses).

Dropping the Science degree (possibly exchanging it for Liberal Studies which is the 4 year version of BSc/BA). This one requires hindsight. From what I knew about myself after high school, I was a science kiddie. As it turns out, my interest in science is mainly a layperson’s interest, with the exception of computing.

I’d have to drop the maths major to do this, but that would be OK. I didn’t get much out of university maths (in fact, I feel rather fraudulent about getting the major). I’d probably also drop the semiotics major, but that would be OK it would mean that I’d never have had to take courses in systemic functional grammar (here’s a tip: don’t go there).

Completely change specialities and become a historian. This would have meant doing a BLibStud or BA with a history major.

Even in hindsight this isn’t such a great idea: I would either have to give it up after the BA or after a PhD — there’s very very few jobs for historians. It might still be worth it even given that, but I don’t think I’m going to find out.

To do this, I should have done a European language too.

Completely change specialities and become a human biologist/psychologist (probably a neuropsychologist). This one I actually did consider after first year, very very briefly. The thought of needing to redo first year put me off it. I wish I’d thought about it a bit harder.

When I consider all this, it means that the only subjects I’m totally happy about choosing are computing and linguistics (sucked at chemistry and maths, semiotics was a wank, philosophy was a bit dull, got into history too late). That’s not to say I’m really happy about the computing either, I found almost all the subjects either hard work or dull, and all basically passionless. The reason I’m still glad I did it is that it let me do the honours year I’ve just finished. That honours year was also hard work and at times dull, but I think it’s the best decision I’ve made during my entire degree.

Just passing by…

This year I:

• am the secretary of SLUG;
• finally did play a bit with Twisted Web;
• let my honours thesis consume me;
• resurrected buglinks.org although I’m not actually sure what to do with it; and
• established a LinuxChix aggregator in the spirit of planet gnome;

This year I failed to:

• contribute either code or documentation to any Free Software project;
• finish my HOWTO; or
• hold regular meetings for either of the user groups I notionally run.

Very poor form, three out of ten.

The comforting "noone will ever bother writing Linux viruses" folklore is still floating around the net, but judging from how much viruses have annoyed me in the last couple of months, one of the premises is now false.

There are two reasons explaining why Linux will never have a major virus problem usually given. The first is the heterogeneity of Linux programs, meaning that its hard to write a virus that Linux users can catch, the second the inability of an unprivileged user to successfully execute commands that do serious damage to their hardware or operating system, meaning that once caught, the virus can’t do anything serious anyway.

The former may hold in a grand World Domination scenario, although I suspect the demands of corporate user support would force a convergence on several, or perhaps one, standard corporate Linux desktop. At present however, it’s certainly the case that Linux run a wide variety of the most common applications exploited by virus writers — mail readers, browsers, office applications, and the result is that there aren’t many widely catchable Linux viruses around. It may also be the case that these systems trust user input less than the current MS Windows equivalents, but time may tell otherwise.

The latter, however, seems to be completely irrelevant in the modern virus-ridden world. As far as I can tell, at the moment most successful viruses do not carry particularly harmful payloads, or, if they do, the effect of the payload is incidental to the havoc that the virus creates. The real problem the viruses cause are overloading common resources (mail servers, usually) to the point where they become more or less useless. And since at present, the standard privileges of a Linux user account normally allows it to send and receive data over the Internet, if there was a widely catchable virus for Linux, normal users would have more than enough privileges to propagate the virus, and bring down mail servers and hubs without the virus needing to go near the root account.

Moreover, Linux user accounts also have all the privileges they need to contribute to the problem by generating secondary traffic via mail bounces whether they caught the virus in question or not. In fact, most virus bounces are generated by slightly out of data server software that is not yet aware that any up-to-the-minute virus forges its origin, but as a general principle, you no longer need to be infected to be part of the problem, you just need to trust mail headers a little too much.

So the old adages no longer apply so well. The Linux desktop remains relatively free of catchable viruses, but Linux systems are as vulnerable as any other to the immense abuse of common resources and standard protocols by modern virus writers. In other words, if I receive 500 viruses in a day, it’s not the threat of being infected that’s particularly annoying, it’s the receipt of the damn viruses.

Assuming that you have good reasons for keeping an online diary, there are a few things you can do to improve your chances of making your diary readable. I’ll begin by stating the general principles, and then by reviewing a few breakable rules of thumb that, in my experience, are good indicators of an interesting diary.

The general principle of good writing is to determine your audience, and write for them. An online diarist will normally encounter some tension here — the diarists are often writing partly for themselves or their future selves, and the desire to record events that were important to them may conflict with the desire to record events in an interesting way. You will need to decide to what extent you are intending to resolve this tension in the audience’s favour.

It is the case, if I am part of your audience, that your choice of material is generally meaningless to me, and the use to which you put your material is everything, which is why most of these tips tend towards the stylistic.

Tell a story

Of the beginning, middle and end structure, online diarists struggle most with the ending, often because they don’t know it yet. The most successful stories are often trivial anecdotes. However, there may be an ongoing story that you don’t want to record only in hindsight. In this case, you will want to return to it periodically.

It is very very hard to make a story out of emotions you are still experiencing, unless you’re a brutally honest and particularly insightful person, so if you want to write a powerful emotional entry, you may be better off writing an entry that looks back a year or more.

Write long entries

A long diary entry gives you the chance to tell a story, rather than writing an instant message to your readership, and most good online diaries contain at least the odd long entry scattered in their archives.

Very few online diarists seem to be poets, and so generally very few short entries will not become the highlights of your diary.

Drama is the biggest online diary cliche

If your entry is an allusion to misery that only your three best friends in the world can comprehend, your entry will be boring. The high points of an online diary are very seldom the most dramatic entries, save in the case of diaries that resemble an emotional car crash. For the rest, you will need to hone your ability to make the prosaic interesting, because it is actually much easier to do that than to make secretive drama interesting.

Make your entries complete within themselves

Again, if your entry is full of allusions to events you cannot describe in full, and people you cannot say anything about, and feelings that you are unwilling to share, your entry will be boring. If you need to censor something that is crucial to understanding a story, you may as well censor the entire story. In other cases, tell the story in such a way that it is a complete anecdote, even if it is not totally uncensored. If your reader can tell that you’ve left part of the story out, your entry is not as good as it could be.

A subtle style will serve you well

A diary with a unique voice is often an interesting read. One of the easiest ways to achieve this is to let your spoken style influence your written style. It should be relatively sparing, but a touch of spoken mannerisms in a diary makes it more readable.

I think there are several bad reasons to keep an online diary, including using it as a poor substitute for a paper diary, using it to experiment with hyperlinking writing, or using it as a forum for your opinions. Each of these needs is better served by alternative forms. On the other hand, online diaries are maligned as being necessarily uninteresting due to their trivial nature. Trivial and uninteresting do not always go hand in hand, as diarists and letter writers have appreciated for hundreds of years.

The online diary is a format held in peculiar contempt, for several reasons. Most of those reasons are due to the usual meaning of ‘diary’ — that is, a more-or-less secret record of one’s life, written, presumably, for your satisfaction alone, and deriving much of its power from the fact that it has no readers, freeing the author both from the stylistic constraints of writing for an audience, and from the judgements of that audience.

The online diary format naturally loses much of that power. The disadvantages of the online diary format compared to the paper diary format include less honesty (or less sweeping honesty anyway), and much less privacy. It also leaves the author wide open to charges of narcissism, since they are writing about themself for an audience of other people.

So, let’s free the online diary from those constraints. You do not keep an online diary for the same reasons you keep a paper diary. The disadvantages include a lack of complete honesty and privacy. If you want to write with complete honesty and privacy you should keep a paper diary or correspond in private with trusted friends who will destroy your missives rather than hand them to anyone else.

I also suggest that you do not keep an online diary in order to experiment with stylised writing, because you’re likely to attract the wrong audience. Audiences seeking experimental writing styles don’t expect to find it in online diaries, and audiences reading online diaries don’t expect highly stylised writing, or content that deviates radically from the normally online diary content (that is, a person’s record of their life).

Most of the good stylised writing I’ve seen on the Web has been noticably free from the constraints of chronology. Online diaries are tied to a date based format, and people who are interested in telling stories or linking ideas together would be better off with a more integrated site, all of which is an ongoing work. I consider gruntle, raze, and the Jargon File to be excellent examples of the power that loosely organised, heavily hyperlinked sites offer to writers interested in experimenting with style and content that doesn’t fit in a chronological format. If you want to tell stories, I highly recommend this form over the online diary format.

If you’re interested in writing opinion pieces, rather than snippets of your daily life, I suggest you consider blogging, rather than keeping an online diary. Blogging and online diaries are both presently primarily chronological formats, and there is a gray area between them, since people use the same tools for both. The primary distinction between the stereotypical blog and the stereotypical online diary is the amount of linking in the former. Blogs link to websites, link to each other, comment on each other, discuss each other, discuss links, and discuss ideas. If you’re interested in taking part in intellectual crossfire, the blogging tools and communities will be much more satisfying than the online diary format.

Where experimental sites link internally, and blogs link externally, online diaries are largely hyperlink-free. The form requires authors to relate chosen aspects of their life on a loosely chronological basis. They attract readers who like to follow simple story lines, who like to feel involved in the lives of others. As often as not, the readership is made up of people who know the author and people who would like to.

So, what are good reasons to keep an online diary? If you need pre-digital examples of online diary-like writing, consider letter writing one hundred years or more ago. Letters of this time were often gossipy, personal, entertaining, bitchy and informative. In retrospect, some of the writing in informal letters is not only historically interesting, but very very good. So, if you think that one hundred years ago you would have liked to sit in your drawing room and write to your sister in the next town about your housekeeping, giving interest to the mundanities of your life, then online diary writing is probably a format you would enjoy.

Battle of the Pizzas, preliminary round

In the spirit of the original Free Your Pizza these are the toppings that did battle tonight:

Pizza #1, in the red corner: spanish onion, sweet potato, lamb, fetta cheese; and

Pizza #2, in the “everything goes” corner: salami, capsicum (red and green), bacon, Rogan Josh lamb, mango chutney.

The base was controlled: both pizzas had a base made of white flour, with basil and carraway seeds (spiv‘s sister has determined that this adds Latvian flavour). Both pizzas were topped with grated cheese and cooked in a pan brushed with olive oil.

Notes: carraway seeds and basil are both a bit strong for a pizza base. Use wholemeal flour next time. Also, I always put too little flour in dough.

Life

I call it “university”.

I’m trying to divide my project into small enough bits that I can procrastinate and still be working on my project!

Code

Poked at Woven last night, and it looked like a cool and efficient way to pump content out cleanly in the minimum lines of code. Pity my host doesn’t run Twisted Web (word up to the Northern Hemisphere: hosting at home is not economic in .au). So all I need to do is coerce it to write out static pages…

Automating your advogato posts

… or “jdub has done it, so should you”…

hereticmessiah and others: use cmiller‘s advodiary script to help you automate advogato postings.

I don’t have any content anywhere else to source advogato entries from (no .plan, no log, my other diary is somewhat baroque and quite non-advogato) or I would also jump on this bandwagon.

Life

Silently dropped off a bunch of mailing lists for the duration of Crunch Time I (the Coursework Descends). I can’t even claim community involvement this month. I’m currently taking half an hour off between the two assignments that are due today.

Finis

I graduated for the first time yesterday (B Science and B Arts). Graduation number two expected this time next year (B Science (Honours)). Honours thesis due Nov 11.

Energy

All my creative energies are being sucked into university work. In some ways it is good that academic work is requiring writing, editing and coding from me, but in other ways it is sad, since it leaves me drained.

Free Software

My involvement continues to be community based. Still on SLUG committee, still involved in LinuxChix, still running the (tiny) local Python Interest Group. My HOWTO Pay for Free Software is slowly improving and is near version 1.0.

I am so pleased that after years and years of waiting, my coding skills have reached the point where I feel confident reading and repairing other people’s code. This bodes well for Free Software development in the future, but I’m trying to keep a lid on avenues of prostratination this year. I have constant struggles with procrastination, motivation and guilt which I am trying desperately to resolve, and alas, I’ve decided that stepping back from the keyboard after hours is likely to be part of the solution.