puzzling.org

Just spreading the word, since neither Andrew nor I received an email invoice for our registration: credit card payments for linux.conf.au are now being accepted. (We did get the announcement, but previous conference experience—ACL, HCSNet—this year has unfortunately taught me that registration information is not sent out using titles like Countdown to linux.conf.au 2007: 48 DAYS TO GO, those kind of titles now indicate to me we’ve updated the website! and now we have a directory of attendees!, ie, not action items. So, I didn’t actually read it. Oops.)

People who got the earlybird price (which closed Nov 15) must pay by December 8. You can also still register now and get the regular price, although as the announcement (also) pointed out, if you want to stay on campus in the pre-arranged accommodation, or you want to go to the dinner, register soon. (It’s unpredictable how full they really are, until they start re-opening spots that people haven’t paid for. But 450 attendees who haven’t put down money yet is still a goodly number when I believe the aim is 800.)

Dear universe, Andrew and I are in Melbourne for OSDC from Tuesday December 5 to Sunday December 10 (in the morning, anyway). If any of you are in Melbourne that week and would like to meet us for breakfast/lunch/dinner/drinkies, get in touch.

1. Registration is open, starting from the low low price of $99 for students and proceeding to $300 for self-funded attendees and $690 for professional attendees
2. the LinuxChix miniconference programme is available in draft form (waiting for some speakers to confirm that they can make it); and
3. if you’d like partial reimbursement of registration costs, you can volunteer to help out.

A relatively idle thought after doing Ubuntu support on LinuxChix lists for a while: are the code names really such a good idea? People have an enormous amount of trouble correctly identifying their Ubuntu version. I’ve seen the following problems:

1. people not realising that the zeros are significant in the version number and asking for support with Ubuntu 6.1 (they probably mean 6.10/Edgy Eft) or 6.6 (they probably mean 6.06 LTS/Dapper Drake);
2. at least half the time people quoting the Ubuntu version number and codename together quote a mismatched name and number (Ubuntu Breezy 6.06, Ubuntu Dapper 6.10 and that’s not even getting into Ubuntu Breezy 6.1 or Ubontoo/Urbanto/Obonto Dragon and so on), which means that you have no idea which version they actually mean; and
3. the code names are memorable, but seemingly not memorable enough, there’s a lot of people out there talking about the Edgy Elf, which sounds like a bad drug pusher.

Ubuntu is far from the only software using well publicised release code names. I remember the good old days pre-Windows 95 (the good old days are always more than a decade ago), when you couldn’t talk computers without talking about ‘Chicago’. Debian’s release code names are also very commonly used; potato, woody, sarge, how well I remember thee, and I have no idea what thy version numbers were. In fact, the problem might perhaps be that the release code names and the version numbers are essentially equally well known when it comes to Ubuntu, so people feel the need to state both and aren’t clear on the mapping between them.

I suspect also the regular releases are hard on people: people know that there’s lots of Ubuntus and they have to identify their one, but there’s changes often enough that casual onlookers and users are more confused by the release names than they are aided by them. The release numbers map to the release date (4.10 was released in October—month 10—of 2004, 5.04 in April 2005 and so on) but most people, I believe, treat version numbers as Marketing Magic the like of which mortals do not ken and question no further. The six month release cycle means that the current system always has several easily confused releases too (you can confuse either the first number, mixing up 5.04 with 5.10, say, or the second one, mixing up 5.10 with 6.10).

I don’t have any particular suggestion about an alternative, and suspect that the developer community is wedded to their names even if the users are a bit puzzled. I suppose simpler would be better: Ubuntu 1, Ubuntu 2… but then the numbers get high quickly.

Really final, because last time I hadn’t upgraded a server, and yesterday I did. It made me very sad indeed.

There are various ways speakers can embarrass themselves at conferences by projecting personal information or embarrassing stuff onto a screen in front of many people. Background images featuring non-professional levels of nudity are the most well-known problem, but others include accidentally popping up a personal chat session, interesting titles being shown in your browser history, the contents of your clipboard being more informative than you’d like, that kind of thing. You don’t only need to protect yourself against overly sexual material (well, unless you’re presenting to the BDSM community or something), there’s also password leakage, and just the vague embarrassment of showing professional peers a log of you and your husband discussing whether or not to have pork for dinner.

It occurs to me that with a bit of discipline about files, the easiest way to avoid this on laptops where you can set up a second login is to do just that: have a second account which has suitably bland background, in which you only access presentation related websites, in which you don’t IM and so on. Set the password to something totally unrelated to your usual passwords, and change it immediately after each presentation, just in case the worst happens and you type it in such a way that it appears on the screen.

And then do all presentations logged in as your special cleaned up for the general public laptop user. If you don’t even want cross-presentation pollination you could re-create the account for each presentation or have a script that does so for you, just to be sure that there’s no browser history and such.

Anyway, on the balance it worked out that Edgy is reasonably stable. Still no Breezy, but as stable as Dapper on my desktop. And I am asking for trouble playing with Network Manager. How I wish to smite things when stuff that used to work just fine stops for a while though. And I’m not using it on my servers: one of them is currently running a four month experiment and I don’t want to reboot it (the experiment is interruptable, but it takes about a day to recover from interruptions); and the other one runs a couple of Nevow sites and I’d prefer to use a supported package. Or at least supported.

Back in 2004 I finally noticed a really common construction that so far seems confined to American English: it’s not that big of a deal and similar (How big of a perv is Foley?, How big of a problem with security?, How large of a volcanic eruption would it take to cover the entire world with volcanic material?) In Commonwealth, or at least Australian, English this would be it’s not that big a deal (likewise how big a perv is Foley?, How big a problem with security?, How large a volcanic eruption would it take to cover the entire world with volcanic material?, although I suspect the last one would often be rephrased).

I asked about it at the time (and of course one never blogs alone) and completely failed to notice that the answer came from on high, that is, that Mark Liberman from the Language Log bothered to answer. Wow.

Again, on the theme of Paul Graham’s article about things you can’t say, I have an odd one: there are a lot of environments where it’s becoming indefensible to admit that anything offends you. I’m reminded of this most powerfully by the various and sundry arguments about Ubuntu showing a bit of skin.

Of course, this tiptoeing around offence isn’t everywhere, far from it. Witness the weekly media circus in Australia where someone says something that isn’t in line with a secular liberal viewpoint. Relevant interest groups immediately issue press releases demanding a full apology. If the Prime Minister and his advisers think that the silent conservatives would agree with the stated viewpoint, they tough it out, but if it was too far out of line (as a rough guide, implying to the press that homosexuals are paedophiles is on the wrong side of that line) the unfortunate speaker gets fed to the media wolves to deliver a scripted ‘apology’.

I’m on-board the liberal secular peace train with a first class ticket and I still find the regular demands for, and occasionally delivery of, these stupid meaningless apologies unbelievably teeth-grindingly infuriating, because you don’t get a liberal secular world by making everyone pretend that you already have one.

However, when liberal secular sorts argue amongst themselves about morality, it’s often possible to get a real rhetorical advantage just by refusing to be offended. By anything. You want the age of consent lowered to 18 months. You want people to have sex with strangers in boring queues. You want to be able to urinate artistically on trains. OK, perhaps I’m exaggerating. Maybe you just don’t have a nudity taboo, or you’re OK with people getting a little bit horny in your workplace. Fine. But how is it that that means that you represent the vanguard of the human race?

Whoever is offended in these arguments, especially if they’re offended by anything that can be potentially tied to the full and free expression of human creativity or sexuality, is standing on very slippery ground. If you’re offended, you’ve delivered the following advantages to your opponent: you’re a conservative; you’re repressed; and you’re holding humanity back. You can see some particularly prime examples in the Ubuntu debate, because challenging conventional notions of how you develop popular software can sometimes get people a little high on the “we’re changing humanity one user at a time, as if by magic” pipe.

Offence is a part of the weaponry of the social conservatives. It’s also part of the weaponry of real progressives, except they invert it and are offended by conservatism or reminders that it exists (in its pathological form you get the apology packhounds with their ready made outraged press releases).

And I think it’s time that the voice of offence got a little ground back in some other arguments too, because calls to be freer and less repressed are all too often just a rhetorical weapon used to make people feel like they’re not toeing the humanist party line. In other words, they’re a way of shutting you up by making you feel bad about yourself and inferior to the super beings around you who have cast off their taboos. Sound very liberated? Sound like you’re all part of the one great push to make the world a better place? Thought not. So have a bit more respect for other people’s funny little lines they don’t like to cross.

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