puzzling.org

Simon Rumble writes:

I quite enjoy the various Planets I read because I get to read more about people. I read about their cats, their struggles with the landlord, their healthy problems, all kinds of stuff.

[…]

Of course, the shadowy cabal who run Planet Linux Australia clearly don’t agree with this thinking, [as demonstrated] by silently dropping all of my blog except the geek category.

[I believe the cabal in question is still entirely comprised of LA’s very own shadowy underworld evil genius, Michael Davies, for what it’s worth.]

I generally concur with Rumble’s sentiments within certain limits that I won’t go into here extensively, save to note that there’s different genres of blogging and actually, not all of them do work on a Planet. There’s a certain level of formality, a certain level of curiosity and a certain level of detail that makes for a geek’s blog — even when they write about cats or landlords — and I do notice when there’s a syndicated blog that is substantially out of genre and it does bug me. (Even when the blog in question is a good example of its own genre.)

This is part of the reason that I generally choose to have my short, whiny, chatty, half-geeky thoughts section syndicated, and never my diary section. It is out of genre, mostly because individual entries are far too long for Planets (the most frequent comment I receive on it these days is well, it’s good writing and all, but I don’t read twenty paragraph stuff online), but for another reason also, which is that I don’t really want it publicly criticised. It’s not a dialogue. I’m happy to take email input on what wireless audio device to buy, but I don’t really want or expect anything other than very neutral commentary on what I put in the diary section, not much more than sounds like you had fun or similar.

In particular, geek blogs are very commonly assumed to be in a genre where unless quite strongly specified otherwise, the poster is assumed to be asking for advice or a critical take, much like a posts to a user mailing list for a software project. There are reasons I’ve written about my day-to-day life online for over seven years, yes, and I am aware that by doing so I at any time could suddenly receive one hundred thousand emails and discover a thousand blog posts containing nothing but kindly advice concerning and stinging criticism of my every sentence. And what’s more, I’d probably deal with it fine. Well, relatively! But it’s not the genre I intend, and so I don’t feel comfortable having it syndicated on a Planet any more than I would, say, fiction or poetry I wrote, even though in practice I’m sure none of those things would horribly jar Planet readers.

I did a fair bit of web research before buying and returning a 2.4GHz A/V sender yesterday but it turns out I didn’t use the right search terms: including the frequency in the search is revealing. Basically, 2.4 GHz is the frequency used by 802.11b and 802.11g, and also by many cordless phones. Interference is pretty much inevitable unless you have the luxury of not having any close neighbours who have wireless networks and then, if you’re lucky, you can set your wireless network to one end of the spectrum and the A/V system to the other and most A/V systems will be happy (some of them use pretty much the entire spectrum, so not then).

Various solutions and proto-solutions:

Use the 5.8GHz spectrum? No. Firstly, people are already starting to get cordless phones in this spectrum in order to avoid interference on those so it’s just deferring the problem until there’s just as much noise in 5.8GHz. Secondly, all A/V systems I’ve found are analogue (FM) modulation and analogue use of the 5.8GHz spectrum is illegal in Australia. (Such systems are sold nonetheless, usually with the disclaimer that unless you’re buying them exclusively for use in the US and other countries, you don’t want them, nudge nudge, wink wink.)

Use digital modulation in either 2.4GHz or 5.8GHz (which is legal)? Well, this ought to be possible. A lot of cordless phones do exactly that and advertise it heavily. However, this just doesn’t seem to be an option with A/V systems: they all use analogue, pretty much. The one possible exception is the AVLabs AVMagic system, which is alleged to use 802.11g. But that’s only stated in a few reviews of the product (using identical wording), not on AVLab’s homepage and not on places where the system is actually sold, which makes buying it a bit of a risk.

Buy one of the many products by the consumer router companies (Netgear, D-Link…) which claim to be wireless media players or digital entertainers or similar? Well, possibly. However, most of these require software to be installed on my (Windows or sometimes Mac, ie no) PC which streams signal to it. Or often it streams just straight out files, which means that in future it may well not be able to read my new-fangled format of the twenty second century media files. In fact, most of them don’t support Ogg Vorbis. Plus they’re pretty DRM-happy. I don’t know anything about DRM from a technical point of view, but I know what I don’t like.

Use a second computer sitting near my speakers in various ways (make it my media centre, stream some audio to it)? Again, possibly, but I do rather like having only one 24/7 computer in my house (noise, power, impending heat death of the universe). If I could get a wee fanless PC in Australia with enough grunt to decode a stream and run a sound card for the kind of prices I see at cappuccinopc.com, then probably. For more than about $400 at the absolute most, not so much.

Buy a mini-ITX board and little case and build it yourself, lazy bones. This is me we’re talking about. I was once warned away from sewing machines due to my lack of patience and short temper. I’ve never built a computer either, and you want me to start with an eeny one? (I did once change a CPU. It went OK. Except then I had to get someone help me underclock it, and it made me the least cool 22 year old on the planet.)

Get your man to do it. He’d probably eventually try, maybe if I had a gun or something, but just as I worry that during the process of building it, I’d go crazy and throw the motherboard across the room with a ninja scream, he worries about his hand tremor. The hand tremor that gets worse when he worries. And besides, c’mon. Why can’t we substitute money for time? Paying for fiddly things to already be done is awesome.

Reconfigure the house network so that everything lives near the speakers? Kind of a pain because the aerial connection and the telephone jack (ADSL) are separated by about ten metres, which includes doorways and cupboards and stuff. We like using the computer itself as the router for a bunch of reasons. In fact Andrew really likes it and strongly discouraged me from playing around with it. (He probably remembers the first time I set up PPP over ethernet, which took two hours of yelling. On my birthday. This comic is the story of our relationship, except that every so often we switch roles.)

Buy another set of speakers? Given how much the current set cost, the ‘buy another computer’ solution is better.

So what are you going to do? Not sure. Maybe a Squeezebox. (Open source server, uncompressed streams.) But man. C’mon wireless revolution, get with the program.

I feel crappy being sad about the news that Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer’s mainly because of the books… but then, I mainly know the books. Pratchett outside the books I mainly know from his Usenet posts, which I’m sufficiently interested in to go and do that search about once a year.

Anyway, it’s sad. For him, and for the books. Good luck, Terry.

I’ve been in the market for wireless audio-visual transmission equipment for about a month, since my good speakers are now living next to the TV so we can listen to Wii, DVD and TV sound through them. The computer with music on it is tied to another part of the house by the modem location and I’m well over the era of running cables all over my house.

For the benefit of people thinking of suggesting a product, what I’m looking for is not anything that requires software to run on the computer itself. Instead, I’m looking for something that takes the soundcard output — ie probably just RCA plugs — transmits it over radio and which has a receiver that I can sit near the speakers which will feed out sound via RCA. That way I have fairly good future-proofness: the wireless sound is entirely independent of the operating system I’m running and the origin of the sound it’s transmitting, it just transmits to the speakers anything I can feed to my soundcard.

However, we found such a thing today, and I must say: DO NOT BUY the Cocoon Wireless AV systems being widely sold in Dick Smith Electronics. The diagram on the back may well have a brick wall between sender and receiver, but we managed to get significant interference just by putting me between the sender and receiver. In addition, 802.11 wireless networks interfere quite strongly, to the point where Andrew started sending pings over the network and could hear the related interference. (They’re listed as interfering in the troubleshooting guide too, without a solution, just a mention that you might want to consider turning your network off to eliminate possible interference.)

Unfortunately, well, in a way, Dick Smith was very ready to do a full refund of something I’d only owned for an hour, because I was all ready to tell them this story, but they cut me off when the hand gestures started, and wrote down ‘DOES NOT WORK AS ADVERTISED’.

Before I went to Thailand in November, I arranged to have our mail held (a saga by itself: in what way is three full business days from a Monday morning a Friday morning?) and intended to get a ‘no junk mail’ sign for our mail box (these work quite well at stopping non-addressed mail in Australia, although I think the code is voluntary). However I couldn’t find them in KMart and ran out of time for shopping around. Supposedly it’s hard to get them because everywhere that you’d think to buy them relies heavily on junk mail to advertise.

I looked around online when I got back but while one can find a lot of places talking about them, it’s hard to find someone who sells them.

Eventually though, I tracked down this: a free ‘No Advertising Material’ sticker from the Distribution Standards Board (Australia). Well, actually it costs $1 (two stamps) plus the unit price of two envelopes, because you send them a stamped, self-addressed envelope and they send back the sticker and a leaflet that tells you about the sticker. (The universal No Advertising Material (N.A.M.) sign is designed to replace the dozens of different and confusing signs now in use… etc etc. Apparently I still get free newspapers, political material and a few other things. And a hotline )

I’ve been in the habit of always having a big pack of envelopes at home and stamps in my wallet for several years now (I used to have to lodge a statement of my income once a fortnight in order to get my government student allowance). It’s surprising how useful it still is to do that. Well, not that useful. But somewhat useful.

I’ll be away for two weeks and not contactable. I’ll be back with a better tan at the end of the month.

There is a Best Australia or New Zealand Blog category in the 2007 Weblog Awards. Currently All Men Are Liars is coming second and Ask Sam third.

I call upon you to act to halt this tragedy. That is all.

Apparently there’s a man in my area assaulting women. The coverage comes with the usual advice:

investigators [believe] the offender or offenders [are] local, and warned women in the area not to go out on their own at night.

I’m one of those misbegotten women who doesn’t have a designated protector this week (my husband is overseas, I don’t know anyone else in the area, I don’t own a car and walk to and from the shops and public transport all the time) so for me this constitutes advice to be housebound between sunset and sunrise. Not terribly possible really, I already have plans for Saturday, Monday and Thursday nights and when I come home from them I’ll be bravely forging my way home from the train station alone. (After all, since there’s an attacker on the loose, it would seem unwise to ask for or accept an escort from a stranger!)

There’s been extensive commentary on the wrong-headed nature of this kind of advice before: many women are as much or more at risk from people who live in their house, some women are at risk from the kind gentleman who offers to accompany them on their dangerous walk home and some of us just plain have lives and can’t drop everything to hide ourselves from the local pervs and bastards. It’s like asking us to not only lock our doors, but set up force fields and install nuclear bunkers in order to protect ourselves from house theft. Probably better to suggest that if there’s a man near you in the wee hours wearing bikini underwear that you yell really loudly and hit him in the nose if possible.

Having said all this, I am wondering how good I’ll be at braving the mean streets this fortnight after reading that. I’ve had enough creep experiences on the late night trains already this year to make anyone want to get a car. (One guy was masturbating and trying to corner me, another was drunk and muttering fantasies about slitting the throats of all the passengers and raping all the women.) It’s not as though the risk of sexual intimidation and assault is so low as to be actually practicially zero.

Incidently, I’m really not looking for advice about this. I’m complaining about the woes of existence. I do know I’d probably feel happier if I took a self-defence course at some point, but suspect it would be false confidence: most non-trivial impacts will sublux my right shoulder, and at that point I believe a fight would be lost.

Jono Bacon mentions a Ubuntu roundtable about burnout and suggests that talking to someone about it is the correct next step.

Without intending this to be a particular commentary on the Ubuntu community (I haven’t been part of it since early 2005 other than as a user, I have no idea how effectively they respond to burnout among contributors) and while talking to someone is the first step, this does remind me of the occasional things about burnout which I do hear that don’t mention that you might need to reduce or change your duties. The common theme (and I’ve heard it particularly from volunteer organisations of all stripes) is along the lines of we’d really like you not to burn out — but please don’t let your burnout prevention or coping let you do anything as mean as quitting on us. Or alternatively something like other things in your life may stress you out and start to burn you out on us, but no one would burn out on us, we are the Kingdom of Love or what we are doing is so noble and good that it burns out only the weak and uncommitted.

Anyway, again without knowing whether Jono or the Ubuntu volunteer community make this mistake, the upshot is that even enjoyable and/or noble uses of your time can burn you out (arguably, noble uses of your time are actually especially prone to doing so) and sometimes the only cure is to have a long hiatus or to give up the pursuit entirely. A community truly resistant to burnout, funnily enough, needs to put prevention at such a high priority that the focus isn’t quitting is the worst thing you could do.

These aren’t overly exciting but I might as well get this down somewhere that at least some affected people will see it.

Stuff I need to do by Monday because someone else (who is paying me) wants me to:

• Substantially more work on my ALTA paper.
• Set up OJS.
• Organise and get the university to book flights and accommodation in Melbourne for ALTA (getting the university to do the booking is half the funbother, but policy says we have to or they won’t reimburse us for our flight).

Personal stuff I need to do before Wednesday morning (because Andrew leaves the country for a month on Wednesday and he’s in on half of it):

• Book accommodation in Phuket.
• Book accommodation in Ko Lanta.
• Check booking for SCUBA liveaboard since they haven’t mailed us about it.
• Finish one last (revision) unit of Spanish and do the compulsory speaking exercises for assessment.
• Register for linux.conf.au, find and book accommodation in Melbourne (actually here recommendations would be vaguely appreciated: we’d like to stay in budget accommodation, near the University of Melbourne, and we’d like to stay together).

Stuff that requires me to leave the house between now and Wednesday morning:

• Dinner type thing tonight.
• Baby shower type thing tomorrow afternoon.
• Diving type thing Sunday morning.
• Yoga on Monday. (Or possibly not.)
• Swimming. I keep promising myself I won’t stop swimming when I have a time crunch, but I do. The important thing is to start again though.

Stuff I’ve actually finished this week:

• Compiled the latest issue of the journal I work for.
• Finished the second last compulsory Spanish assignment.