I need to pay more attention to DebSIG I think. How did I miss Conrad Parker on What can Free Software teach Free Media? This is what comes of being the only geek in Sydney who doesn’t like beer or pubs, I guess.
Thursday 25 August 2005
I’m really enjoying Bazaar 2.0 as compared to GNU Arch. There’s a lot of things I could say about Bazaar 2.0 as version control, but let’s leave it as ah, that’s why I originally liked the idea of distributed version control.
Now that that’s out of the way, I have something more pressing to communicate! Bazaar 1.0 has a commandline program baz, pronounced like the first syllable of bazaar
(I note in passing that until I saw that commandline, I thought that it was called ‘bizarre’ and am still disappointed). Bazaar 2.0 will have bzr. Now, people, you can’t seriously be expecting me to pronounce the latter as bazaar
can you? C’mon, … try saying it. bzr. bzr. BZR. It doesn’t quite have the Australian neutral vowel in it, but I’m determined and ready to fight for it to be pronounced buzzer
. You can have all kinds of really nerdy jokes about hitting the buzzer. Now get with the program.
The cut direct
Rusty Russell is not happy about John Quiggin’s embrace of Creative Commons’ Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.1 Australia License as a kind of a good default for allowing other people use of your creative work.
Russell slams Quiggin:
That Quiggin takes this path despite training as an ecomonist [sic, original author’s emphasis] demonstrates either a lack of deep thought on this issue, or that he uses economics to justify his leftist dogma, rather than to examine issues. (This paragraph was about as polite as I could make it).
I can’t say that I’m too much of a fan of the phrase “leftist dogma.” It’s about as meaningful to me as saying “fropbutz dogma” — ie I tend to prefer attacks on political positions on a particular issue rather than attacks on them because of other political positions that they’ve been known to be associated with. (What are the pragmatics of the word ‘leftist’? I read it as having exclusively hostile connotations, that is, that a position or group of positions is only described as ‘leftist’ — as opposed to ‘left’, ‘socialist’, ‘communist’ — by people who oppose it.) To be fair, this is what the rest of Russell’s piece does, I’m just having a go at the ‘leftist’ ending.
But that wasn’t what struck me enough to write an entry about it. I was struck more by the emphasised part: “despite training as an economist”. This strikes me as a cutting line indeed. Quiggin’s relationship to economics isn’t that he trained in it: it’s that he is an economist. Russell is implying that his economic positions would be foolish from someone with an undergraduate major. It would be like saying that Russell is a remarkably bad coder for someone who’s met a few kernel developers.
Broken windows
There’s been some fun and games in LinuxChix lately with a particularly violent sounding poster calling himself MikeeUSA posting variations on the phrase “Death to women’s rights” interspersed with some obscenity laden mails.
He’s been posting to Debian Women for a while longer and a bit more extensively. From what I gather from them and from Google his purported beef with women’s rights is that either:
- increasing rights for women reduces the pool of submissive women suitable to be his mate; or
- horrible controlling women not suitable to be his mate are invading every aspect of his life including his Free Software hobby and are actively attempting to steal all the credit for them, eg by claiming that women built Debian or something.
Some random places to look include the bug he filed against <!—->Daniel Stone<!—-> for being a “a woman disrespectful of men” (<!—->Daniel<!—-> claims to be neither a woman nor the Debian xorg maintainer, but has not yet to my knowledge stated in public that he respects men, so I consider this case open) and the by now rather well linked post to debian-women. With some small ingenuity with Google you can find him getting banned from games forums and Wikipedia for similar activities. It all gets a bit nastier later on with him posting fantasies about the violent deaths of the women reading, and harassing people’s teenage daughters off-list and stuff. Suffice to say that I disagree with his purported premises really quite a lot (if nothing else, he doesn’t strike me as being that attractive pre-feminism either: just because women earned less doesn’t mean that they didn’t know stark raving madness when they saw it) and with his methods so strongly that I can’t think of a good way to express it.
What I have been considering is the correct response to this.
Conventional wisdom about trolls says “don’t feed them.” Ignore them and deny them the precious coin of attention, and take especial care to avoid actually engaging with their arguments even as an antagonist. This has some merits, although it’s actually quite difficult to accomplish: the work of 499 people in ignoring the troll is more or less undone by the one person who responds. It’s pretty rare that I’ve seen all 500 people respond with silence.
The initial Debian Women post got a response that I (and Anarchogeek) considered quite bizarre: someone attempted to engage with whatever sanity lurks beneath the madness and honoured MikeeUSA’s need for recognition as a software developer. The only reasoning for this I’ve seen was in the Anarchogeek thread, in which commenter Jeevan argued that it was an appropriate decision because “Don’t you think the reason one person on the mailing list thanked him for the software is because it’s a Debian mailing list and not a human rights (or something equivalent) mailing list.” I appreciate that some members of the Debian community have different social norms to me, but I don’t quite understand how the mere mention of doing FOSS development entitles you to a free ride on such matters as making death threats against a group of Debian community members. However, Jeevan seems to think so, and therefore the option of “giving them the respect that they so manifestly deny you” is placed before me. Let’s move on from that one without further comment.
I may be missing a thread, but as the mails from this nut job continued I believe the next response from Debian Women was a month later, and here it is. It’s much closer to what I did on LinuxChix.
My decision on LinuxChix was to do the following: wherever this guy appeared, I would respond with a post directed at the list saying that this blatant violation of the “be polite, be helpful” list rules was being responded to by banning. After a few more episodes I posted a warning to people about avoiding direct interaction with him where possible. (Given the reported incident of harassing someone’s family together with the hysterically violent emails, I think it’s possible that he may pose a danger to people, if only by upsetting their family. I’m shocked not to have gotten a direct contact from him yet.)
My reasoning for doing so was as follows:
- it’s not acceptable behaviour on our lists, and we generally call people on considerably less outrageous nonsense than this;
- LinuxChix is a community which is always partly composed of people new to online forums and new to the related forms of bad behaviour; and
- some of these newcomers, in addition to possibly finding the nastiness frightening, would interpret silence as implying that that behaviour was either unremarkable or acceptable (as might readers of the archives).
Hence I wanted to show clearly that that behaviour was not acceptable.
I later thought of a further point, which is the Broken Windows theory.
In its standard formulation, this theory goes that minor signs of urban decay such as broken windows that are not quickly repaired lead very quickly to other decay and then to a failing of any kind of civic feeling.
My particular variant of this for this case is that by not clearly having someone with some notional authority about to state clearly that violent harassment is unacceptable has two negative consequences:
- it encourages a feeling that violent harassment may in fact be acceptable; and
- it encourages a feeling that whatever we might say is unacceptable doesn’t matter, because we’re not around to stomp on unacceptable crap when it happens.
In other words, nastiness that’s not publicly identified by someone with authority (in this case, I chose to use the authority conferred by my list admin status) who asserts community norms, is like a broken window in a community.
In many ways I imagine this matters more on LinuxChix, where blatant trolls are now rare, than on Debian Women which is still waging the odd flamefest with some Debian developers who have only slightly more moderate opinions than MikeeUSA’s, and which probably has a different position on trolls. (LinuxChix is not as ban happy as this post might imply, but people who the list admins consider purely disruptive will be booted: this happens once a year or so). I think following the standard prescription on trolls, while useful when individually targeted or when you realise that you’ve got into a discussion with one, is a potential broken windows disaster from a community’s point of view. The troll doesn’t care, but the rest of the community is likely to be pleased and reassured to see agreed standards fairly enforced.
Thursday 14 July 2005
Moments like this, it’s better to be Fred
PZ Myers highlights a letter to Nature that suggests that women scientists need to have about 2.5 times (250% if you like your numbers big and round) more impact as measured by number of publications and prestige of publication as male scientists to get evaluated as equally competant. (At least, in the middle of cohort, but it’s not so much better at the top: you’ll just outrank the bottom cohort of men.)
That number is amazing. And, well, frightening.
Planescape: Torment
I used to own this game, and now I want to finish it and I do not seem to own it any longer. C’mon, I recently gave away a film camera I’d kept unused for something close to ten years. How can this game have disappeared from my messy pile of game boxes?
Information overload
Just got back from 9 days of holiday with no ‘net access. No discernable withdrawal to report, although it’s possible I’ll now get Barrier Reef withdrawal in Sydney.
Given that I now have an enormous backlog of email and other info, if there was anything that required my attention I’d appreciate a special pointer. Otherwise I’ll skim.
Saturday 30 April 2005
Hackergotchi heads for LinuxChix Live
I’m planning to add the disembodied heads used by Planet GNOME and Planet Debian to LinuxChix Live.
They’re completely optional, but here are the specifications:
- the head image must be of your face;
- the head should be no larger than 80×80; and
- the head image should be GIMPed up as per this page (see also the other Planets).
If you need help with turning a photo into a floating head, contact me and I’ll pass your request along to the GIMP course, who I’m sure would have some fun with it.
Use of a hackergotchi head on LinuxChix Live will be entirely optional, but they can be fun and it makes it all seem a bit more personal to have more than names.
Email them to my contact address on the LinuxChix Live site itself.
Hackergotchi heads for Planet Twisted
Thanks to Chris, who started the trend, we’ve tended to use child heads for Planet Twisted. This is kind of a tough ask because most people have to hassle their mother for cute baby photos, but if you can supply me with the lil’ Twisted goo, I can add it.
Stuff that I could fix myself
Some thoughts on usability from experiences of the last few days include: yum vs apt; and Arch with more grabability.
I tried to use yum to upgrade from Fedora Core 1 to 3 rather than walk ten metres to ask our operations staff where the CDs were. This didn’t completely break my system as I was informed it would, although I did end up trying to upgrade packages in sets of 10. I gave up because I broke X so badly that starting it caused the machine to reboot. But at least it was booting in the first place, which is better luck than James had going from Fedora Core 2 to 3. (My story ends with the CD upgrade by the way, which went fine.)
So, why was I doing this? First I’m used to Debian-like systems which are more fussy about having good upgrade paths (to be fair, they don’t usually support skipping a release like I was trying to do). And second, I’m used to apt.
Two things that apt does that I wish yum did too:
- When asked to upgrade some enormous number of packages, and two of the upgrades are set to fail due to dependency issues, apt will install the enormous number of packages, minus the broken ones, thereby avoiding you having to manually construct a list of packages which don’t appear to be broken.
- apt does not re-index the repositories every time you invoke it, it needs a special command. Very useful when you need to walk it through several steps (and I have to say, I’ve never had to do as much of that as I have over the last day, but that’s partly because the office mirror of FC3 is incomplete) and don’t want to waste thirty seconds on each step waiting for it to rebuild its meta-data.
I’ve also been messing with Arch. Well, I branched Planet again and I’m going to put my old changes in by hand, I can’t face walking it though 60 revisions while it tries to merge my old old old changes in. While I was messing with doing this, I felt clicky urges. I’m not a hugely spatial user normally, but I had a sudden desire to have a big screen full of colourful blocks representing Arch branches, and I would merge code between them by grabbing branches with the mouse and dragging them to the right place. I don’t have a good system yet for maintaining a mental model of what branches come from and should be merged into what points in the parent branch.
Ubuntu 5.04; Smarter than your average stick
Ubuntu 5.04
Released today. I upgraded my servers this afternoon. (It’s a personal thing, I love watching aptitude run.)
I’ll be interested to see how long I resist the temptation of upgrading to the next development branch this time. (For Hoary, I waited until upstream version freeze I think.) For my uses, Hoary hasn’t seemed to be a significant improvement over six-month-old Warty, although I’m told under the hood that it’s much nicer. Perhaps on the next cycle I’ll wait until the actual release… unless suspend starts working, of course.
Smarter than your average stick
During the course of the Twisted Sprint, Mike made a very useful suggestion about our documentation: that it should begin by defining its target audience. I’m going to try and do this across the existing documents eventually. Failing to do this in the past have resulted in some spectacular misunderstandings of when you can use bits of Twisted (at least one person has appeared on IRC thinking that enterprise is usable without knowing how to write a SELECT statement).
Later on in the weekend I briefed Jonathan (read: ranted at him) about what we need to do about the Deferred documentation with regard to targeting it at users who have never encountered asynchrony before.
The original documentation seems to have been written revelation style: gather unto me my friends, and I will free you from the heavy chains we have all laboured under trying to manage our own callback sequences: I give you the Deferred. (Cue weary lifelong developers crying in relief.) The actual users of the documentation (at least, the ones who complain about the docs) seem to tend more towards the “callbacks? wtf?” audience than the “at last the scales have fallen from my eyes, lead me forth” audience.
The upshot of this is that we probably need extensive documentation on the fundamental concepts of asynchrony. So far so good.
And then, just this week, a post to Twisted Web threw me another curve ball (I don’t know what the equivalent term would be if I were making a cricket analogy, sorry Andrew): Twisted (or Twisted-ish things like Nevow at least) have people pottering around with them who don’t really know much about concurrency. Or, quite possibly, don’t know anything at all about it.
This can be reduced to a target audience problem eventually: at what point does the documentation take the smarter than this stick position?
This angst brought to you by one semester’s worth of memories from teaching second year concurrent programming and having people ask each other in the tenth week of the course, completely mystified, why their GUI was freezing. Do get in touch if you want to write a pre-pre-Deferred document (or was that post-post…?) that is willing to discuss threading in detail, since, yeah, people will have to know when to defer to thread at some point or other.
Twisted sprint
I, like a lot of people, don’t have the art of taking photos of people hacking and making them interesting to look at. But, hey, photos!
It’s been a good weekend so far. Chris, Andrew, Andy and Tim really have been working on a virtual firesystem abstraction, although without the April 1st insanity. Last I heard the aim was to have a demonstration server which allows (virtual!) files to be uploaded and viewed over SFTP and FTP and viewed through Twisted Web at the same time. Andrew has been buried in the guts of FTP: the man has a long burn out time but he’s back in the game. I asked him for some attention about two hours ago and I’m still in the queue.
I added a few tests to bugs yesterday in an attempt to learn some trial, and converted a few demonstration code bits to automated tests. Today I’ve been much more idle than everyone else, but I did make a start on a documentation writing style guide that could keep me busy for years if I make the ropes tight enough.