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Open Source Web Design Redux

A couple of years ago, I was sitting in a dingy but servicable apartment in Prague whinging about the Open Source Web Design site. Since I went back there the other day and used one of their designs to make a site I run look passable, I thought it was only fair to point out that the quality of designs there have improved a lot, and many seem to be quite good at being reasonable implementations of current standards-compliant lightweight web design in the blog mode. It’s still a little sketchy on the idea of licences or conditions of re-use though.

This sounds like faint praise mostly because it is. I’m a little bit wary of the thin centre column, still life image at the top, smaller navigation bar at the side etc etc trend mostly because I feel like I’ve been slapped around with it a lot. I suppose there’s a part of me that looks forward to the day that web design becomes more like typesetting in terms of its intrusiveness. However, that said, they really are quite reasonable designs, no longer in any way a shock to the system. I’ll probably use a couple of them to re-style puzzling.org and andrew.puzzling.org.

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Getting a talk into linux.conf.au

We had a programming committee meeting for linux.conf.au 2007 on Saturday. Decisions were made. They may be revised based on budget. But the general consensus was that it’s the papers that linux.conf.au rejects that makes linux.conf.au the best. And here’s the more cuddly than Rusty guide to being among the best.

First a note. We had in the order of 250 proposals for 60 talk slots. (The ratio is a bit better for tutorials, about 2 proposals for every slot available.) We reject most of what we get, and we reject a fair number of things we suspect or know would be perfectly fine talks. It’s a competitive conference.

  1. Software talked about or that is core to your talk must be available under an Open Source licence. This is not negotiable, with a tiny bit of wiggle room for people who are waiting for their employer to sign off on an Open Source release. Only a little wiggle room, mind you.
  2. It is getting towards being a requirement that you are a core member of a project, or of the part of it you’re talking about. You need to have written a fair chunk of the code, initiated the documentation project, done the benchmarks, whatever. Sweated the sweat. Tutorials are a little different: for a tutorial, evidence of ability to convey enough knowledge well is generally important, and depending on your intended audience might trump not being a major developer of the tool in question.
  3. Project maturity is not essential, but is desirable. If it hasn’t been merged yet, or you are the only user, it will have to be great to be accepted.
  4. Enormous maturity can be a disadvantage, or at least it is if it leads to the the style of proposal that goes here’s the update on my LCA 2005 talk about [some project]. It’s easier to get accepted if you submit a talk focusing on a particular new feature or development.
  5. Being known as a good enough speaker is a big advantage. Standards here are high, but I feel not crazy. You can be accepted without being an amazing speaker. It is, however, essential to convince the review committee somehow that you have had and can convey 45 minutes worth of thoughts about your subject and that people will want to hear it. Being known as a good speaker from other conferences or events is excellent, and a high quality abstract can be convincing in some cases too.
  6. Insane coolness is another huge advantage. In particular, people who’ve built things they can hold in their hands, put their arms around or have a sword fight with, tend to get their papers accepted. Most proposals do not fall into this category, those that do have a high acceptance rate.
  7. Not submitting a kernel talk helps your chances of acceptance. This one is interesting. The problem is that we get a huge number of very good kernel proposals. linux.conf.au accepts a fair number of kernel talks, but is not a kernel conference and doesn’t intend to become one. So to get a proposal accepted into this stream, you must not only be good, but be very very good.
  8. Not submitting a general commentary on your experiences in the Open Source world also helps your chances of acceptance. Again, we accept some of these, but almost everyone has opinions on how to run an Open Source project, and they submit a variety of them. We need some special reason to believe you have something to say that the audience can’t easily think up for themselves or read about.
  9. Having some relevance to a primarily Australian audience is useful. This is really only meaningful for the above mentioned commentaries, for things like kernels it doesn’t matter, and if it’s hella cool, it also doesn’t matter.

For comprehensive information about submission statistics and a list of all the program committee’s blog entries, see John Ferlito’s entry.

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Getting a talk into linux.conf.au by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Another pre-Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) update

I was a bit despondent at the time of the Edgy beta release because it looked like all of my bugs were going to lie untouched until the end of time. But things have picked up.

Bugs I originally complained about:

Inability to scale CPU frequency.
This wasn’t bug 36014, bug 36014 was about the CPU being stuck at the lowest available speed, whereas mine was stuck at the highest available speed. It was actually not a bug at all: it was caused by my not having powernowd installed. (It’s only a suggested package for gnome-applets, it isn’t a proper dependency. Likewise, it’s only recommended by ubuntu-desktop, and I stopped installing all recommended packages because the recommendations for some packages are… comprehensive.)
Aptitude being slow to resolve dependencies
This was bug 51893, which never had a problem getting anyone’s attention. It’s been fixed for a while.

As for the second lot of bugs:

Network Manager not being able to identify wireless cards
This is actually a problem with hal, bug 59981 (my originally filed 60162 was a duplicate, and it’s attracting duplicates like nobody’s business because everyone looks for it against NM, not against hal). It’s not fixed, but there is a patch floating around and being tested.
X having dramatic glitches after suspend.
Evidently the neglected child of the family, bug 60882. Someone has confirmed it and moved it to a new package, but there’s been no sign of anyone wanting to look into it.

One more major one for me springs to mind: bug 61423 against Nevow. If this one goes unfixed, as seems likely (essentially the fix is for someone to approve an exception to the upstream version freeze as per bug 57482), I won’t be able to use Edgy on my servers unless I want to install my own Nevow versions. I’ve gone through this before with Nevow—for either the Hoary or the Breezy release there was some problem with Nevow not matching the packaged version of Twisted—because it’s so little used, and I felt really bad hassling -motu daily about the UVF exception. I’ll probably go with my instincts and just not use Edgy on my servers, or at least not on the puzzling.org host. Given that though, I’m less concerned about using Edgy on my desktops for the next six months than I was on the day of the beta release.

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Dive Google

Divester innocently points out Dive Google, a scuba diving search engine offering paid listings. But it’s not Google suddenly getting into scuba diving, it’s someone riffing badly on the trademark. Or as one of Divester’s commenters puts it:

another downside [to Dive Google]? It’s likely only hours away from being shut down by the Google team for trademark infringement.

The worst part is that they missed such an obvious name: Dive Goggle. D’uh. You could even work the paid listings thing into the metaphor by noting that goggles limit your field of vision.

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Energy and water saving

Partially inspired by Larvatus Prodeo, a reminder that for residents of NSW and the ACT, tomorrow (Sept 30) is the last day to get your free packs of energy saving bulbs and a reduced water showerhead through the Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme. One place you can get them is from easybeinggreen, which has an online store and a bunch of stands.

As it happens though, Andrew and I have just had a reduced water showerhead put in by WaterFix this very morning. WaterFix comes around and replaces your tap washers with fancier flow regulating washers, reduces your toilet’s water consumption, and replaces your showerhead for $22 total. It’s not the same as the Greenhouse Gas scheme, it just happens to be going on at the same time. You need to have your water supplied by Sydney Water, which means its open to the Sydney metropolitan area. Unlike with the energy saver bulb packs from the Greenhouse scheme though, if you’re a tenant you need to check with your agent/landlord in order to have things in the house fixed up by WaterFix, because it’s the landlord who will get the $22 tacked onto their water bill. (In NSW, only metered water usage can be passed onto tenants, other water costs must be borne by the landlord.)

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APESMA

Just a quick pointer to The Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers, Australia. Andrew’s father (a civil engineer) first pointed this out to him. It calls itself a non-profit organisation representing professional employees, but essentially it performs the functions that IT people most seem to want from a union:

  • professional advice on employment contracts, including intellectual property agreements and restraint clauses; and
  • subsequent advice in the event of disputes or confusion over said contracts.

You can also, apparently, get a whole bunch of research into stuff like average salaries in your field, broken down quite finely by level of responsibility. So called IT professionals fall under their umbrella. Membership is tax deductible.

I have no idea how much work they’ve done with Free Software related contract issues. My guess would be not much, but I haven’t actually asked.

And no, I’m not a member (although I’m considering becoming a post-graduate student member, but the considering will probably take a while). I just thought it would be a useful heads-up to the sundry people I hear occasionally wishing that there was some kind of union-esque service for hacking folk.

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Transactions of the Royal Society

The various transactions and proceedings of The Royal Society are now online, dating back to Philosophical Transactions, starting in 1665. I should download some of Turing’s papers and have a look, but I can’t get past The Motion of the Late Comet Praedicted, An Account of a Very Odd Monstrous Calf and An Observation Imparted to the Noble Mr. Boyle, by Mr. David Thomas, Touching Some Particulars Further Considerable in the Monster Mentioned in the First Papers of These Philosophical Transactions in Volumes 1 and 2 of Philosophical Transactions.

Get them while they’re hot, access will stop being free in December. (I’m unclear about how that works with the older articles which shouldn’t be under copyright any more. Perhaps Project Gutenberg can, or even has, transcribed some of the articles. They don’t seem to index by journal name.)

Source:

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Closure of advogato.org

The deadline for the written paper for OSDC was today. My talk is fairly fluffy—I just wanted another excuse to visit Melbourne and hopefully actually meet an entire crowd of Australian geeks that I know by name but haven’t met—but I dutifully wrote up the paper today, cribbing a section on the history of Planets from my old essay on the subject. Andrew read my paper this evening after I’d submitted it and carefully pointed out that my information about Advogato was out of date. Raph Levien is planning to take it down. (Note though that almost inevitably someone has offered to step up to the plate.)

I copied all of my old diary entries off Advogato to my tech log some time ago, but decided I should rescue one more piece of content, my essay on Questions your conference website should answer.

That essay came out of a giant discussion about trying to get members of LinuxChix to submit to linux.conf.au: probably I think for the 2003 conference in Perth (I drafted it in 2003 and published it a year later, which is about four years better than I’ve done with HOWTO pay for Free Software, which is still in draft form). It turned out that people were being put off by the jargon used in the call for papers, paper being the worst jargon of all. It’s an oddly good time to re-visit it, if only to re-format it for the move, because I’m in the middle of reviewing the crazy (good crazy) number of presentation and tutorial proposals for linux.conf.au 2007. I should have some comments on that process (in fact, I have made a giant mailing list post about the l.c.a. review process and its aims, strengths and weaknesses) after the decisions are made. And then, for a reason I don’t fully understand, I’ll also be reviewing for PyCon 2007. I get free admission for doing that, anyone want to fly me to Texas in February?

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