puzzling.org

SLUG

Just as my formal involvement in SLUG is about to end (a new committee is being elected Friday night, and I’m not standing), I find that I’m putting a lot of time and thought into it again. But… I’m still not standing. I figure that being able to choose my level of involvement will stop me periodically burning out and getting resentful.

Also, I can then focus on helping get hacksig off the ground. I’ve gotten just about everything I need from SLUG in terms of using Linux. I’m not personally interested in advocacy, except possibly in the legal arena. Clearly, a programming group is the next step.

Linux

I’m well past where I ever expected to get with Linux: I’m a competent single machine or home network, small-size, non-critical sysadmin. Finding that out was nearly as big a surprise as finding out that I was confident programming.

But I don’t want to go any further with it. I try not to make decisions like this: I am generally uncomfortable with saying I want no more knowledge. But honestly, I know what I want to know. Need only, not desire, will push me further.

Twisted

Twisted is a whole other kettle of fish. I find that I need to find a four or five hour solid block of time to get writing done, and I only have that time on weekends. But weekends also have the unfortunate side-effect of containing family birthdays, moving days and house cleaning.

To be fair, I’ve spent the last few weeks working (finally! finally!) on the re-write of my website that has been on the drawing board for well over two years. It is somewhere between three and six hours from deployment. During that time, I’ve spent zero hours writing documentation.

I feel silly in many ways putting so much effort into a website. It’s certainly not something that people seem to admire. I’m putting a negative spin on everyone’s reactions there though. Most people I know are programmers, and a large number of them simply don’t like writing, or don’t like it enough to want to build a house for their writing. I do like it, and building a CMS is a natural consequence. Or so I will maintain from here on in.

Aside from this, while my wrist pain has improved with a better arrangement at work, I do need to be careful about typing when I’m not being paid for it. I need some HTML macros for my editor (stat) because the < and > signs seem to bring on weakness and discomfort quickly.

Travel plans

I’m planning to zip around the world, or parts thereof, starting in September or so. I’d better hurry up, I’m not even at the budgeting stage.

Life plans

It is suddenly horribly clear that I need to decide whether to do a PhD and where to do this hypothetical degree in a hurry. I need to have a supervisor and some kind of topic before I leave Australia in September if I’m to do it here, and I need to think about funding, GREs, applications, interviews, visas and spiv if I want to do it in the UK or US. (If I do it in the US, I also need to think bout all that time.) And if I don’t do it, I should think about what the hell else to do. I envy spiv his attachment to programming as a vocation, I myself am simply part of the indecisive masses.

It’s been at least a couple of years since I really settled into programming. I can take code and change it without understanding the whole thing. I can guess at the function of libraries, or read their source to find what I need. I write some amount of code that ‘just works’.

But it still surprises me, every time.

Today the first pain of RSS-as-anything-at-all bit me, with someone on Planet Twisted embedding very wide text in <pre> tags, causing (for most viewers, not for me) the main column to expand to the right to accomodate the rogue <pre>.

I got a nice mail suggesting that the cross browser fix for this is to convert:

 <pre> blah  blahblah blah</pre> 

to:

 <div style="font-family:monospace;"> blah&nbsp;&nbsp;blahblah<br> blah</div> 

(There’s not meant to be a line-wrap in that second example, but I’m being kind to the Planet Twisted readers &mdash oh, rendering HTML in HTML is hard!)

But let’s face it, fixing other people’s HTML for them is nightmarish. Start with <pre> tags, end up with… well, writing a complete HTML parser/sanitiser for Planet. So I’m being a wimp and not doing it. I hope.

Life

Relatively severe wrist/shoulder pain had to bite eventually &mdash I should have expected it now that I’m working in an environment I don’t control. Yes, my immediate supervisor is sympathetic, yes, my employer has Occupational Health and Safety people, yes they’ll probably take action, however the downside of working for an organisation large enough to have organised OHS is that the request needs to travel up three levels and down again.

In the meantime, I need to keep typing because that’s my job.

FOSS things

Even the mildest bug blackmail is driving me insane at the moment: all bug reporters should visualise a wild-eyed harpie with stiff fingers when entering “please document now, you are destroying my life [note: author’s completely exaggerated paraphrase]” bugs.

One afternoon fixing Twisted documentation bugs (status: 1.5 bugs fixed) and already I feel like writing my own bug reporting guidelines.

Highlights include: one bug, one report, and use a verb phrase in the title (“document furbucator” or “fix furbucator” rather than simply “furbucator”).

I’ve been playing with Planet (one day our galactic masters will populate that page and take advantage of the links they receive), which meant learning a bit of arch to create my own working copy which I can check revisions into. (I believe this is called a branch if I understand arch’s nesting correctly: archives contain categories which contain branches which contain versions which contain revisions. Revisions correspond to individual checkins, archives to a CVS repository and categories, roughly, to a project.)

So now my Planet variant pings the weblog update sites if the data has changed &mdash although I think the way it detects changes is against the spirit of the feed parser. Doing this has proved an excuse to spend an hour or so coming to grips with arch finally, which I wasn’t motivated to do for its own sake.

I think arch would be a great tool for people like myself who want to get people to double-check changes before checking them into the project’s main branch, and for people like spiv, who has thrown away a lot of changes to Twisted because he’d made a lot of distinct changes in his tree and was a bit anxious about trying to merge them with recent changes in the main tree before isolating each change and checking it in. Distributed repositories are an excellent solution to this: you can check changes into your own repository without effecting the “main” one, and then pick them out, merge and commit to the main one.

See also my l.c.a. photos, other l.c.a. photos and other l.c.a. blogs.

This is the belated final l.c.a. entry. I wrote it several days back and since I no longer have my own computer, it took several days to resize, reorient and caption all the photos.

linux.conf.au Presentation Day 2 continued

After lunch I went to jdub‘s GNOME strategy talk, which was good. I would have liked to have seen more screenshots, but that’s just a personal thing — I want to see more of what I can expect from GNOME 2.x — but he actually wasn’t given a screenshot style talk. It wasn’t a talk about “things in the GNOME desktop”, it was a talk about upcoming release strategy.

I skipped Andrew Tridgell‘s junkcode talk in favour of behoffski’s grep talk. The grep talk was really badly attended, and we could hear faint joy from tridge’s talk next door. It also lacked oodles of finite state machines, which was a shame.

linux.conf.au Conference Dinner

I didn’t really anticipate the speed with which tables would be taken, I also didn’t feel any need to figure out in advance who I’d be sharing a table with. This was a mistake. For the record: tables were taken swiftly. spiv and I were lucky to grab a table with Bradley, later to be joined by James, thom, Gus, Stewart and Drew. We were right up the front, close enough to see Rusty’s flame show (featuring the “so have you ever kissed a girl?” reply to davem, which doesn’t seem to be archived anywere on the web. [Edit: That was before Rusty uploaded the text of the flames]).

The staff seemed to me to be on anti-madness patrol, keeping our water glasses filled up all the time, and not leaving bottles on tables. Most people found the dinner really un-crazy, but I’m assured that somewhere up the back there were a few people who had to be carried out.

Rusty conducted a couple of auctions: first the l.c.a. signed T-Shirt. Bidders were goaded by several tables throwing in extra money if the bidding reached a certain amount. Several project incentives were offered too: Linus offered an Australian animal for the next kernel release, jdub offered (I think) a choice of name for the GNOME 2.6 desktop release. The Debian project is yet to release, so last year’s purchaser still has that one.

The second auction was for the opportunity to sink Linus. The ozlabs guys put together $1500, but the community started assembling notes, and made it to $2700. This made things a bit difficult: Rusty described it as “some kind of raffle.” mrd was chosen to sink Linus by popular acclaimation.

jdub assembled a group of people to go and grab gelato. It was quite nice gelato, and the walk gave me a chance to meet mbp, which was excellent (although he thinks we’ve met before).

I was back in my room around 1 — it was pretty cold out there, and I wasn’t really interested in making the trek to north Adelaide that night.

linux.conf.au Presentation Day 3

spiv and I were up in time to check out and to make it to hp‘s keynote. I really liked this keynote, I thought it was one of the best talks of the conference. hp ran through the reasons to aim for a Linux desktop, challenges to the Linux desktop and strength’s of the Linux desktop. In his view, Open Source is the single strongest unchallengable, unduplicatable advantage.

I went to Janis Johnson’s regressions talk before lunch, which I quite liked, although I think again it would have been better if it had pushed through the introductory stuff faster, and had some case studies. This was, to me, the biggest disappointment in most of the talks I attended: perhaps I’m idealising tridge’s 2001 “hacking the TiVo” keynote in 2001.

The dunking followed at lunch. It was fun for a while — most people ended up having to run up and push the button to dunk their target: mrd must have been lucky (or a good shot) to sink Linus on his first ball, which was good considering that with an extra donation that shot was costing over $5000. thom got the opportunity to sink rasmus and I think managed to do it without pressing the target with a hand. The most amusing effort was that of tridge and jallison, who struggled to sit on the dunking seat together, tridge nearly slipping in a number of times. A few non-speakers were offered up for their sins: gman and daniels. After a while, the dunking got less exciting unless you had a debt of honour involving the person on the seat, and people drifted away. There were meant to be water pistol fights as well, but it was a cold day and I don’t think it seemed appealing.

After lunch, tridge’s talk was repeated in the best of series. It was indeed a good talk, but the audience was pretty flat compared to the last one. thom kept nodding off. The talk seems to be partly evangelical (keep your junk code, put it on the web) but would have worked just as well without an actual message. tridge’s talks are generally “look! look! hacking is fun!” talks anyway. See them if you feel a bit jaded and need a good kick.

The energy was definitely leeching away after the dunking, and everyone was very sleepy by the time of mrd’s conference close and the handover to the Canberra team.

Most people stuck around until Sunday I think, but spiv and I went off to gelato with keithp and people he’d managed to drag along for icecream before we headed to the airport. The plane to Sydney was a bit of a SLUG-express but I was getting far too sleepy to talk to anyone by then.

Assuming that you have good reasons for keeping an online diary, there are a few things you can do to improve your chances of making your diary readable. I’ll begin by stating the general principles, and then by reviewing a few breakable rules of thumb that, in my experience, are good indicators of an interesting diary.

The general principle of good writing is to determine your audience, and write for them. An online diarist will normally encounter some tension here — the diarists are often writing partly for themselves or their future selves, and the desire to record events that were important to them may conflict with the desire to record events in an interesting way. You will need to decide to what extent you are intending to resolve this tension in the audience’s favour.

It is the case, if I am part of your audience, that your choice of material is generally meaningless to me, and the use to which you put your material is everything, which is why most of these tips tend towards the stylistic.

Tell a story

Of the beginning, middle and end structure, online diarists struggle most with the ending, often because they don’t know it yet. The most successful stories are often trivial anecdotes. However, there may be an ongoing story that you don’t want to record only in hindsight. In this case, you will want to return to it periodically.

It is very very hard to make a story out of emotions you are still experiencing, unless you’re a brutally honest and particularly insightful person, so if you want to write a powerful emotional entry, you may be better off writing an entry that looks back a year or more.

Write long entries

A long diary entry gives you the chance to tell a story, rather than writing an instant message to your readership, and most good online diaries contain at least the odd long entry scattered in their archives.

Very few online diarists seem to be poets, and so generally very few short entries will not become the highlights of your diary.

Drama is the biggest online diary cliche

If your entry is an allusion to misery that only your three best friends in the world can comprehend, your entry will be boring. The high points of an online diary are very seldom the most dramatic entries, save in the case of diaries that resemble an emotional car crash. For the rest, you will need to hone your ability to make the prosaic interesting, because it is actually much easier to do that than to make secretive drama interesting.

Make your entries complete within themselves

Again, if your entry is full of allusions to events you cannot describe in full, and people you cannot say anything about, and feelings that you are unwilling to share, your entry will be boring. If you need to censor something that is crucial to understanding a story, you may as well censor the entire story. In other cases, tell the story in such a way that it is a complete anecdote, even if it is not totally uncensored. If your reader can tell that you’ve left part of the story out, your entry is not as good as it could be.

A subtle style will serve you well

A diary with a unique voice is often an interesting read. One of the easiest ways to achieve this is to let your spoken style influence your written style. It should be relatively sparing, but a touch of spoken mannerisms in a diary makes it more readable.

I think there are several bad reasons to keep an online diary, including using it as a poor substitute for a paper diary, using it to experiment with hyperlinking writing, or using it as a forum for your opinions. Each of these needs is better served by alternative forms. On the other hand, online diaries are maligned as being necessarily uninteresting due to their trivial nature. Trivial and uninteresting do not always go hand in hand, as diarists and letter writers have appreciated for hundreds of years.

The online diary is a format held in peculiar contempt, for several reasons. Most of those reasons are due to the usual meaning of ‘diary’ — that is, a more-or-less secret record of one’s life, written, presumably, for your satisfaction alone, and deriving much of its power from the fact that it has no readers, freeing the author both from the stylistic constraints of writing for an audience, and from the judgements of that audience.

The online diary format naturally loses much of that power. The disadvantages of the online diary format compared to the paper diary format include less honesty (or less sweeping honesty anyway), and much less privacy. It also leaves the author wide open to charges of narcissism, since they are writing about themself for an audience of other people.

So, let’s free the online diary from those constraints. You do not keep an online diary for the same reasons you keep a paper diary. The disadvantages include a lack of complete honesty and privacy. If you want to write with complete honesty and privacy you should keep a paper diary or correspond in private with trusted friends who will destroy your missives rather than hand them to anyone else.

I also suggest that you do not keep an online diary in order to experiment with stylised writing, because you’re likely to attract the wrong audience. Audiences seeking experimental writing styles don’t expect to find it in online diaries, and audiences reading online diaries don’t expect highly stylised writing, or content that deviates radically from the normally online diary content (that is, a person’s record of their life).

Most of the good stylised writing I’ve seen on the Web has been noticably free from the constraints of chronology. Online diaries are tied to a date based format, and people who are interested in telling stories or linking ideas together would be better off with a more integrated site, all of which is an ongoing work. I consider gruntle, raze, and the Jargon File to be excellent examples of the power that loosely organised, heavily hyperlinked sites offer to writers interested in experimenting with style and content that doesn’t fit in a chronological format. If you want to tell stories, I highly recommend this form over the online diary format.

If you’re interested in writing opinion pieces, rather than snippets of your daily life, I suggest you consider blogging, rather than keeping an online diary. Blogging and online diaries are both presently primarily chronological formats, and there is a gray area between them, since people use the same tools for both. The primary distinction between the stereotypical blog and the stereotypical online diary is the amount of linking in the former. Blogs link to websites, link to each other, comment on each other, discuss each other, discuss links, and discuss ideas. If you’re interested in taking part in intellectual crossfire, the blogging tools and communities will be much more satisfying than the online diary format.

Where experimental sites link internally, and blogs link externally, online diaries are largely hyperlink-free. The form requires authors to relate chosen aspects of their life on a loosely chronological basis. They attract readers who like to follow simple story lines, who like to feel involved in the lives of others. As often as not, the readership is made up of people who know the author and people who would like to.

So, what are good reasons to keep an online diary? If you need pre-digital examples of online diary-like writing, consider letter writing one hundred years or more ago. Letters of this time were often gossipy, personal, entertaining, bitchy and informative. In retrospect, some of the writing in informal letters is not only historically interesting, but very very good. So, if you think that one hundred years ago you would have liked to sit in your drawing room and write to your sister in the next town about your housekeeping, giving interest to the mundanities of your life, then online diary writing is probably a format you would enjoy.