Category: Uncategorized

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jdub: “haw haw” is so passe. It is now “haw haw… um.” The inspiration is clear.

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barryp: I have a theory about Python uptake that runs something like this: five or so years ago, your average larval phase pizza-guzzling university computing student was a big Perl user and Perl advocate. Now, a lot of those students are Python users and advocates. Which is not to say that a lot of them don’t know Perl too, but Perl is moving away from being the scripting language of choice of your Geek of Tomorrow. Still, this might just be my university.

Part of the problem [with teaching groupwork] is the difficulty recruiting good tutors. The other part is that noone is as committed to their studies as they are to their job (people will allow themselves to fail much more often than they will allow themselves to get fired), so even though people are meant to work in a group, one or two group members end up being responsible for much of it. Result: groupwork is the most despised part of CS courses especially by the good people, who ended up doing much of the work.

Keysigning

jaq‘s keysigning party was all well and good, except that his own key fingerprint got mangled in transition to his Palm somehow and his own key cannot be part of key-lovin’

The horror

25 certifications. 24 (including mine) at Apprentice, 1 at Journeyer. Certification: Journeyer. That’s mainly what is disturbing me about my new fake-cert.

I wonder what malcolm thinks is the cause of the difference in opinion about my contributions to free software.

I wonder also what he heard while I was working in February. I wasn’t working on free software, I was just using it, after all.

Exceedingly scary…

I should have the option of not being able to be certified higher than I’ve certified myself (which I did when I found my new imposter-cert). I realise then some ultra-modest hackers might end up being certified very low… but how many are there…

Um. Know lots of Python. Must do some problem-hunting in Mailman – suspect it is a GID problem but a re-configure didn’t help. Improved error logging might be good.

Got some tutoring work at uni too. I will aid the young coders on their journey…

Moving house to a five-geek household. Will have cable.

Doing [a certain] kind of work removes my ability to speak properly. Seriously. I attempt to speak through the hyper- attention fog and all the words come out wrong, and the sentences unformed.

There was a whole lot of references to beer in the linux.conf.au survival guide. So it concluded last night with a pub crawl.

I met more people, mainly from Perth, including mtearle, who realised at some point that I was “the strange person who knows Adrian [k]…” It turned out he’d seen my webpage and …

If Advogato let you calculate degrees of separation there wouldn’t be enough to make it interesting.

Thanks schoen. I’ve read a little bit about hexaflexagons in James Gleick’s Genius, a biography of Richard Feynman.

Unfortunately, they sound something I’d give to someone I like.

Yay – what fun. The lecture material has been interesting, I met a few people. I met jdub and I recognised him. Thank goodness for that 🙂

I think I might join SLUG now.