Category: Uncategorized

Via slashdot.org (yes really, I still pull in the headlines, although the miracle of feed readers has allowed me to confirm that yes, Ars Technica is a better read), a site called Journal Space, which hosted weblogs, lost all their data. They only had a RAID setup as backup, that is, a system that mirrors content between two disks and is designed to protect against disk failure. If you’ve heard of RAID, you hopefully already know that it is not the same as a backup: if software error or an accident or a malicious act deletes data from one disk, the RAID setup faithfully mirrors it to the other disk. If not, imagine that you have two magical whiteboards. One is copied exactly to the other. If one magical whiteboard totally breaks down, excellent, you have a full copy of your meeting notes and doodles on the other. (Note for accuracy, not all RAID configurations produce a full mirror and sometimes the mirror is spread over more than one spare disk. But you get the idea.) However, if someone rubs something off the whiteboard, or falls over while holding a can of solvent and splashes it on the first whiteboard, everything on it is immediately deleted from the other.

Instead, for home machines you want, most likely, an incremental backup, that is, a separate disk/machine with several copies of your data going back in time. Your data as it was an hour ago. Your data as it was a day ago. Your data as it was a month ago. And so on. I have snapshots of my data for every three hours over the last two months. (Sensible backup programs will notice when data is the same across two or more time periods and only store it once, so your backup disk does not need to be so very much larger than your normal disk.)

For business systems you want both: the quick recovery from disk failure that mirroring systems such as RAID offer, and incremental backups. (I don’t maintain business grade systems, ask someone else for best practices if you need them. Internally consistent database backups are something you want to pay particular attention to.)

I note this because in November I gave a talk on home backups for Linux at SLUG and there is one other point of interest: do not trust third party providers to have good backups. It is getting increasingly common to have a lot of your most interesting data on someone else’s servers: your email on Google’s, your blog over at wordpress.com, contact details for all your friends on Facebook, and so on. But your provider can make both their own catastrophically bad decisions, like Journal Space, and have their creditors suddenly sell their hard disks off in a fire sale, as happened to Digital Railroad.

Which is a big problem, because a lot of third party providers do not provide an easy way to get your data (‘easy’ would be both a documented API accessible from common programming languages and an installable application), and lots don’t provide any way at all. (There’s also a whole batch of interesting issues to do with your comments or Wall postings or whatever: you don’t necessarily have the right to reproduce them and there would be privacy implications when allowing you to back them up and reproduce them on some other side. LiveJournal, for one, solves this problem by not allowing easy backups of comments left on your journal.)

If your email host, blog host, calendar host, documents host or social networking host failed or deleted your account, how would you fare?

From RavenBlack:

New Year’s Encouragements. Instead of making pressurey resolutions for yourself, make positive uplifting recommendations for other people. No negativity allowed, and try not to even imply something negative (eg. "eat better" implies you were eating poorly, but "make delicious home-cooked meals at least once a week" is pretty cleanly positive, and "make more delicious home-cooked meals because your cooking is great" is better still.)

Anyone with encouragements of this positive type may contact me via my preferred method or my LiveJournal, if you have access. (I am beginning, finally, to think about allowing comments on puzzling.org directly, but it’s not likely to happen very soon.)

You are hereby invited to do this in your own weblog.

One year I’d like to do the same project Skud is doing for 2009, that is: a resolution a week. But this year is a finishing year for me, not a starting year.

A quick wrap-up on 2008 resolutions:

• I dabbled in morning yoga, I am just not good at getting out of bed twenty minutes early for that reason, and Andrew is less good at it (and now has a fixed 9am work start time). I did some morning meditation practice when going through a very stressful period in April (after my DCS hospitalisation).
• Tidiness. We got slightly better, but that one was actually Andrew doing it for me. Which is nice and all, but I have no claim to glory here.
• Clothes shopping. Oh yes I did. The secret turns out, unfortunately, to be buying expensive clothes.
• Reading and watching movies. Not so much.

The first half of 2008 was pretty difficult for me. In retaliation, Andrew and I screamed around the south island of New Zealand in August. I do recommend its recuperative powers.

Major goals for 2009:

• Submit PhD thesis for examination.
• Do PADI’s Rescue Diver certification before my CPR qualification expires, that is, before March.

Other plans in 2009:

• A short holiday in January in Tasmania.
• With any luck, an international conference or two, and depending on my PhD timeline, a holiday around one of these.
• A major party to celebrate my PhD submission.
• Something meaningful in August to mark the 10th anniversary of my relationship with Andrew.
• Stretching and strength work. If I can’t get it together to do a full yoga routine, I do want at least to be working on contributing skills daily.
• The odd SCUBA dive here and there.

Also, given the PhD submission thing, I will probably be looking for a job towards the end of 2009. I do not know yet if I am going to apply for postdoctoral positions, this will probably depend on achieving a couple of major conference acceptances in 2009. And on deciding whether I want to live in the northern hemisphere. Even if I am I may be looking for programming or similar work in the short-term to wait out my examination process. So, keep in touch, if you want to offer me work, or come to my submission party. Or both.

Something that’s been on my mind recently, of which I was reminded by Joshua Gans linking to a study about problems with high birth weight babies: did you know medical care is somewhat compromised by being extremely tall? How so, you might ask? Well aside from the fact that Jo(an) Public’s sense of what a good weight is is seldom corrected for height, especially for women, actual doctors with actual charts have no idea what a healthy measurement is for me in terms of blood tests or, in some cases, actual organ size. I have over the last couple of years had several tests where the radiologists and/or pathologists were unable to give a firm reading because they do not have enough data for women at my height (or weight in fact). They can extrapolate, but appear unwilling to, it’s different from having an actual sample. I guess I shouldn’t really be surprised, I’ve been reading for years about how correct diagnoses are harder to obtain the further you get from the profile of people who participate in clinical trials. It’s even justifiable in my case: it’s not as though there’s an overlooked population of very tall women out there to be studied. But it’s still extremely irritating to be told that ‘this result would be worrying in most women… for you, we simply don’t know!’

Anyway, I’m never able to read the stuff about heavy babies (I was, I believe, a bit this side of 4.5kg, but not by much) without wondering if someone is correcting for parental/neonatal height in these measures. Are all babies really supposed to be the same size regardless of, to take a hypothetical case, having a mother sitting on the fifth standard deviation above the height average?

Judging from the xkcd forums I am probably the only person alive who has read today’s xkcd Friends comic in a particular way, so I thought I’d fill it out.

Firstly, you have the Nice Guy position. The Nice Guy position (it’s by far most expounded by men interested in women, but I have heard it other ways), goes something like this: women say they want nice men who look after them. (How women say this varies, some Nice Guys say they hear it direct from their female friends, others say that they got the memo direct from feminism itself. This bit has always seemed a bit weird to me. I can’t recall ever saying or ever hearing other women saying that they had persistent problems finding men who aren’t mean to them.) But they don’t behave like this: take me, a Nice Guy, for example. I am so nice to women, I hold them when they cry, I listen to them when guys cheat on them, I pick them up from parties drunk at 4am and put them to bed. And they all say you’d be such a great boyfriend and then they go off and date other guys. (Or, in many forms of this argument: they go off and date my polar opposite, Jerks who are mean, abusive cheaters.) Nice Guys finish last.

And most people reading the comic seem to be reading it as essentially damn straight, this happens to me all the time, I am the totally bald stick figure guy (TBSF Guy), you nailed my life down dude, just, man, I wish women were as honest about their innate preference for Jerks as dark-haired stick figure girl (DHSF Girl) is and would stop lying.

I see the comic as a bit more subtle than this. See, there’s also a long running criticism of Nice Guys (as opposed to men who are nice), and it goes something like this: no one owes you sex or a relationship. You offered what looked like intense loving platonic friendship to your romantic interests and she took it for intense loving platonic friendship. (Or in the occasional case, she is not a nice person, she realised you would do anything for her and played you for a sucker, it happens too.) If you want sex or a relationship, ask for it and risk rejection, don’t try and buy it from someone and especially don’t be angry about how you did your bit by being a friend, where’s the sex?

I won’t go into this in great detail here, it’s done the rounds several times — check out Alas A Blog: Defenestrated On “Nice Guys” and Shakesville: Explainer: What is a “Nice Guy®?” for longer versions of this and ensuing all-in comments threads where Nice Guys and their critics go head to head — but I see the comic as essentially making this critique too. TBSF Guy is the "friend with detriments.". The last panel is how TBSF Guy sees the situation (it is not literally quoting DHSF Girl), but is actually irony. It’s TBSF Guy who never respected DHSF Girl. The couple of panels before that say this pretty plainly to me, although to a lot of readers they seem to boil down to no relationship is as great as you think, women should settle or alternatively this is, was and ever shall be the male experience of women, life sucks and then you die. My reading is this experience of women is contingent on you bringing this baggage with you.

The issue isn’t of intense personal interest to me: I haven’t been single since I was eighteen and don’t regularly require my friends of either gender to help me through romantic crises. I know that for some people this experience of relationships continues but my experience was it tailed off sharply after about twenty two for many people, because the men involved realise that there isn’t only one perfect woman in the world for them and that therefore they can expend their emotional energy in more than one place, and the women involved realise that there isn’t only one perfect male friend in the world for them and don’t accept devoted attention from male friends anymore. (Possibly the only less heard contribution I have to this discussion is that women have trouble saying no to a lot of things: friendship is one of them. I suspect some of the you’d make someone a great boyfriend stuff is a insufficiently strong attempt to say essentially I don’t want this friendship to be as strong, please go and find someone else to spend emotional energy on. Please.)

I proceeded to have an interesting conversation with Donna and others on IRC about the point-of-view: essentially, it’s male point-of-view. While the comic is criticising a man it’s still not about how DHSF Girl thinks, but about TBSF Guy thinks about her (and, if I’m reading it correctly, how he should instead think about her). xkcd is often like this, which is fine, but does anyone have a pick for similarly themed comics, without ongoing storylines (just because I cannot for the life of me get into comics that require me to read regularly) by women? It would be fun to read them too.

Last night at SLUG I attended my second technical talk featuring projected slides of scantily clad women (the first was at the Open Source Developers’ Conference in 2006, see the presenter’s account of it and also my jam). I wrote something quite long about this tonight and have thought better of publishing, at least at the moment.

However, in brief, a couple of things for event organisers. First, it is apparently necessary for Free Software events who don’t wish to have sexualised material shown at the conference (and neither OSDC or SLUG do, as far as I know: neither the sponsors of OSDC nor the hosts of SLUG were impressed with what happened at their respective events) to warn their speakers of this. Here’s something you could adapt:

[Event name] is an all-ages event, attended by people of different cultural backgrounds and sensitivities. Please make sure your talk and slides are not likely to offend or upset people unnecessarily: particularly we require that no sexual material and nothing targeting people on the basis of age, religion, race, gender, sexuality or ability appears in your talk or slides.

Second, it would be good for chairs to be aware of how to react: being unable to seize the moment is common in anything to do with inappropriate behaviour, because of lack of experience. Something like the following would work from the chair:

• Stand up and move towards the speaker. If their slides are inappropriate right then, block the projection, disconnect their laptop from the projector or turn the projector off. Otherwise ask them to halt the presentation at the current point.
• Tell the speaker quietly that the material is inappropriate and that they may not continue the presentation.
• Address the audience and apologise for inappropriate content and let them know the talk is ending. If the speaker seems genuinely contrite allowing them a brief apology would work.
• Let the event organisers know what happened, if they aren’t in the room. They may wish to do something more or be prepared for questions about what happened.

The reason you need to end the presentation is that otherwise the audience is stuck in the very uncomfortable position of needing to continue responding to a talk after seeing both out-of-line material and seeing an intervention about it. The speaker is also likely to be embarrassed and off-put.

Note that the audience should not be expected to demonstrate openly that they feel uncomfortable before you intervene: they have far less power than the chair or conference organisers do. Don’t ask them for their opinion of the material that you’ve already decided is inappropriate (and don’t let the speaker ask them either). It’s pretty uncomfortable to be asked to identify yourself as someone who was just offended, it’s seen as a weakness. Also, don’t assume that children or women or homosexual people etc were necessarily the only ones who were upset: for example some heterosexual men find hetero-male oriented sexual material distasteful when used in technical talks too. Just apologise to the audience as a whole.

In the course of writing my talk for SLUG tonight, the following idea occurred to me.

Scenario: I am a desktop/laptop user without cron/commandline fu (caution to people picking this entry up without knowing me: I am not actually a desktop/laptop user without cron/commandline foo: I am fully fu-ed up and just pretending). I want to backup my stuff. I don’t want pain. So, I buy a big external hard drive. I plug it in. Up pops a helper/notification/whatever saying “would you like to use this drive as a backup drive?” I select ‘Yes’, do as little configuration as I can humanly get away with, and it is now my backup drive. Every time I plug it in in future, a (non-system destroyingly intensive) backup begins. I do not have to even contemplate anything named ‘udev’ or any commandline tool whose name begins with ‘r’.

Obviously there needs to be a nice easy way to do partial restores too in the event that I accidentally delete my desktop. In the event of media failure, I should be able to pop in a new internal hard drive, boot from a LiveCD and be invited to plug in my backup drive if I have one, and the system is then restored to the new hard drive… and already know about the backup disk for ongoing backups!

Random things that would be nice:

• integration with my ‘Trash’: things that are on the backup drive don’t need to remain in the local Trash, and perhaps I should be able to see backed up stuff in my Trash folder when the drive is plugged in… and have the option to restore more than the most recent version!
• sane command-line interfaces to all this, so the fu-ed up can join the fun
• network backup as well/instead of local drive backup

Time Machine for MacOS (which I was only aware of by name before just now, when I wrote most of this entry and then went and looked at it) seems to be more or less the equivalent of this, and has some other desirable features:

• doing backups as long as the drive stays plugged in
• automatically cleaning up old increments
• skipping caches (oh ~/.thumbnails, how giant you are)

I don’t care so much about the visualisation of my system as it changes over time, but what the hell, it sounds cool anyway.

I am giving a talk for women in a while (the venue has not yet been announced) entitled Starting Your Free Software Adventure. This is the current abstract:

Free Software development opportunities range from code and documentation through to community management. There are a huge number and variety of projects to get involved in and even more waiting to be started. But finding a place to begin can be difficult.

This talk will show where the entry to Free Software contributions lie from all kinds of directions: coding, bug triaging, documentation, packaging and more, using women already involved to illustrate pathways to involvement.

If you are a woman involved in Free Software or Free Culture volunteering or paid work, I’d like to invite you to be used as an example in this talk. There are two main things I want to know:

1. what are you doing now?
2. what were your first few steps into Free Software/Culture?

I will want to use either your name or a usual handle in the presentation, and a (CC BY-SA or compatible) photo if possible, but neither is absolutely essential.

I’d prefer to talk to women who have made the results of their work public at some stage (ie you’re active in a freely joinable community with web archives, or your code goes in a Free project, etc). That is not essential though. Please identify the country or countries you would say you come from — I am hoping to have a good mix of Australian and international women, for an Australian audience.

Feel free to send a link to this to other places before November 28 2008. Please do not forward after that. I would like expressions of interest by December 5 2008 to mary@puzzling.org and we will take it from there in email.

I have that thing all PhD students hate and fear to speak of, that is, a submission goal. I aim to submit my thesis no later than October 2009.

This means that until then I’m doing the same thing I did in my honours year in 2003: cutting back on random accumulated cruft in my life. That includes but is not limited to volunteering for committees, talks and organising events. It will definitely mean less time shooting the breeze on IRC or IM: I intend to try and be on them only when I have something to accomplish. I’ll cut blog subscriptions and twitter/identi.ca subscriptions back shortly too. I’d cut mailing lists, but my mailing list subscriptions never actually made it back from 2003/2004.

I’ll probably also be trying to cut down on social and semi-social commitments: as I’ve said elsewhere the number of them this year has been staggering. (You’re lovely people, all of you.) And exhausting: I can’t keep getting home after midnight three or four nights a week. I don’t intend to crawl into a hole, far from it, but I need to rediscover the joys of introversion, and not having my evening scheduled military style. So if you see me saying no to your things, that’s what’s going on.

If I’ve already volunteered for something with a firm scope, I am still doing it unless you hear otherwise. If it doesn’t have a firm scope, I’ll be in touch to firm it up. If I haven’t volunteered, I’m not hugely likely to. Not this year.

Incidentally, I’m not sharing this for accountability’s sake. If I need someone to sit on me and make me finish my PhD, I already have a mother. And you can be sure that she’ll be sufficiently displeased on your behalf if she does have to do that: she never spent much time making me do my homework before.

Apparently the linux.conf.au domain is dead and might be for a little while. Steve Walsh writes:

Subject: Re: [Linux-aus] linux.conf.au dead?

> whois linux.conf.au
> No Data Found

The admin team noticed this about 11am this morning and notified the
registrar of the domain, who appears to have expired the domain out of
their system. We're working on getting it back into the system ASAP.

Meanwhile, http://marchsouth.org and https://conf.linux.org.au are still
up and serving conf-y goodness.