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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
LinuxChix aggregator's InsaneJournal:
- RT @Taxidermied: Wearing sunglasses at night. You're either a blind guy or a douchebag. No exceptions. It is law. #
- Eating Sara Lee pumpkin pie… the only pie worth eating. Everything else is either too crusty, not pumpkiny enough, or a weird texture. #
- @zombieite What? No Nixon? Hunter S Thompson would be ashamed. in reply to zombieite #
- I miss the ladybug infestations of times past. I don't mind turning my head to see a ladybug has landed on my arm; but a stinkbug? Eww. #
- After successfully IDing http://is.gd/5NFrM a few months back, I've moved on to the more annoying pest of the moment: http://is.gd/5NFKV #
- I guess there are worse pests to have than bug-eating pests, but they keep flying around the kitchen and bouncing off people's heads. #
- "And now you’re looking at me triumphantly, like you’re some sort of sex god because you gave me a bruise." http://is.gd/5Pu60 #
| Friday, January 8th, 2010 | |
| 11:54 am | Kylie Willison: Today's Discoveries     Wow what a day! I've found two properties which used to be owned by members of my family. The first one was known as Willison Stud and was owned by my cousin Bruce Willison. Lot 50 Golden Grove Rd, Modbury Heights (Adelaide). This property is now owned by the Tea Tree Gully council and it's possible it will be demolished. The Tea Tree Gully Historical Society have written to the council asking that it be preserved as a community space. I'll be contacting the Historical Society on Monday to find out some more details.    The other property I found was Bruce's family home, I'm assuming where he grew up. It's called Drumminor and was built by Robert Milne. It was owned by Bruce's parents Andrew and Olva Willison from 1937 to 1962. It is situated on Jack High Lane off Golden Grove Rd (it's now Harrison's Funeral Chapel) I did my research at the Tea Tree Gully library. They are very helpful and have a great local and family history section and unlike some other libraries their resources are in the main part of the library for all to see and access. Some libraries you have to be supervised at all times which is a bit of a pain if there isn't a family history worker on duty that day.  |
| 9:20 pm | Akkana Peck: Python-GTK regression: How to catch mouse button release We just had the second earthquake in two days, and I was chatting with someone about past earthquakes and wanted to measure the distance to some local landmarks. So I fired up PyTopo as the easiest way to do that. Click on one point, click on a second point and it prints distance and bearing from the first point to the second. Except it didn't. In fact, clicks weren't working at all. And although I have hacked a bit on parts of pytopo (the most recent project was trying to get scaling working properly in tiles imported from OpenStreetMap), the click handling isn't something I've touched in quite a while. It turned out that there's a regression in PyGTK: mouse button release events now need you to set an event mask for button presses as well as button releases. You need both, for some reason. So you now need code that looks like this:
drawing_area.connect("button-release-event", button_event)
drawing_area.set_events(gtk.gdk.EXPOSURE_MASK |
# next line wasn't needed before:
gtk.gdk.BUTTON_PRESS_MASK |
gtk.gdk.BUTTON_RELEASE_MASK )
An easy fix ... once you find it. I filed bug 606453 to see whether the regression was intentional. I've checked in the fix to the PyTopo svn repository on Google Code. It's so nice having a public source code repository like that! I'm planning to move Pho to Google Code soon. |
| 8:07 pm | vid "svaksha": bengaluru lug meetup on jan09 Here is an update on the Bengaluru LUG meetup tomorrow: From,
http://groups.google.com/group/ilug-beng ILUG Bengaluru Meetup - Saturday 9th January 2010 |
| 5:22 pm | Marcia Barrett Nice: Monster Meme! stolen from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} thewronghands while I consider how best to summon a Raven...If I were a summonable monster, how would you summon me? (Include items to lure monster-me and method for said fell ritual.) Those of you on that other social networking site will have to see it twice. You are welcome, in fact, to suggest that one would summon Mimerki through a different method than the one used for MBN. |
| 11:54 am | Kylie Willison: Today's Discoveries Wow what a day! I've found two properties which used to be owned by members of my family. The first one was known as Willison Stud and was owned by my cousin Bruce Willison. Lot 50 Golden Grove Rd, Modbury Heights (Adelaide). This property is now owned by the Tea Tree Gully council and it's possible it will be demolished. The Tea Tree Gully Historical Society have written to the council asking that it be preserved as a community space. I'll be contacting the Historical Society on Monday to find out some more details. The other property I found was Bruce's family home, I'm assuming where he grew up. It's called Drumminor and was built by Robert Milne. It was owned by Bruce's parents Andrew and Olva Willison from 1937 to 1962. It is situated on Jack High Lane off Golden Grove Rd (it's now Harrison's Funeral Chapel) I did my research at the Tea Tree Gully library. They are very helpful and have a great local and family history section and unlike some other libraries their resources are in the main part of the library for all to see and access. Some libraries you have to be supervised at all times which is a bit of a pain if there isn't a family history worker on duty that day. |
| 8:02 am | Teri Solow: Atheist bingo!
Via apocalypsechic:
puttingthefunbackinfuneral…  Atheist bingo! Via apocalypsechic: |
| 4:33 am | Marcia Barrett Nice: Exciting Adventures Like lunch! thewronghands invited me to join herself, maramaye, and silenceleigh (who I must have seen around Norwescon because she's familiar without being known) for lunch at Celtic Bayou. (I had the blackened catfish. This surprises no one.) We stayed late as lunches go, and it was really good to see TWH & Maramaye outside the crazy of the lab NYE party. (It was lovely to see them at the party, but much less like catching up.) And SilenceLeigh is, as predicted, right cool and someone who fits neatly into the People I Should Know category.TWH refused to allow me to pay for my lunch, let alone hers, and scowled adorably when I tried to hand the money to Maramaye (who is more likely to have a chance to stealth a check at some point). I fail, but at least she couldn't keep the scowly face. On the way home, I stopped at the local bead shop and bought a new cord for my magatama. The old one has served well, and deserves its retirement. I asked Shinto-Sensei about replacing the cord, and he assured me it was fine to just replace the worn one. So now it had a shiny new black cord and does not look quite so worn. I got home to find my Frederick's order and some exercise bands I'd ordered w/ exciting Boeing Pride points waiting for me. Yay! Sinthrex is due home "late" and by that I mean "sometime after the 9 - 10pm he's been getting home." The house is chilly and I miss him. |
| 4:59 am | Teri Solow: Transmissions from 2010-01-07 No tags for this post. |
| Thursday, January 7th, 2010 | |
| 4:23 pm | Melissa Draper: On public discussion and safety As well as going through a leadership appointment process (despite the name, no, it is not an election), the Ubuntu Women Project is currently once again reviewing the IRC channel situation. This is of course not an easy topic to get to agreement on since The Ubuntu Women Project has several aspects, and not all the participants require or employ all aspects. The current discussion is centred around logging for things like the tracking of project and initiative discussions, etc. To understand how best the channel archiving is to implemented going forward, it requires evaluation of how the channel is used now. As I mentioned before, The Ubuntu Women project has several faces. It is a project, and hence it has initiatives. It also provides Mentoring. It is also a group who women can make contact with as a starting point. A place where they can get to know people like themselves (read: other linux geeky women) who are part of the community as a whole, who can inspire them through the process of stepping out in to areas like MOTU, or support channels, or their LoCo, and provide somewhere to fall back to if something happens. Instead of a 96:4 male:female gender skew, the proportions are much more balanced and hence more woman-friendly. The IRC channel (of between 60 and 70 people) for example, currently floats around 50:50. It is a place that has an incredibly higher chance of being sympathetic to problems that occur due to the 96:4 gender skew. A place that is less likely to attempt to silence discussion of the issues and hence give them more consideration than they would receive elsewhere and more likely to help the individual work through it. It is a place where people are less likely to turn a blind eye to people behaving badly towards women, both within and without. And that’s what makes it a ‘safe space‘. Being a safe space is not by any means a guarantee of airtight, cotton wool and bubble wrapped safety. It is a relative thing. Even men who are willing to respect the intentions and boundaries of the group are welcome to join, and always have been. The #ubuntu-women channel is available for anyone to join, and we don’t interrogate your intention or ask for proof of possession of ovaries. Questions are usually not asked unless behaviour raises them. As I mentioned before, the topic of archiving IRC activity is under discussion, and part of this involves understanding what a safe space is. I sent a mail to the list yesterday describing what I understand a safe space to be:
Right now, the moderation of the IRC channel is sub-optimal as far as this is concerned. I have been, in the past, condemned for greeting a new participant who turned out to be looking for hawt ladeez and consequentially banned. I have been, in the past, condemned for directing to the rules a new participant whose behaviour in either PM or channel had been inappropriate, leading to their earning a ban for continuing the bad behaviour in the channel. In these (and other) cases I had blame for causing the behaviour of the individuals placed upon me because I dared to be proactive. This needs to change. Introduction of blanket logging of current #ubuntu-women discussion would put everything we say in this channel out in to the Public Domain (as this is what irclogs.ubuntu.com is licenced as). This includes women asking advice for dealing with online stalking, or inappropriate behaviour by people within the Ubuntu community. This would ruin the balance of public and privacy. You may be on the ubuntu-women mailing list and wondering why the discussion of this stuff is rare there. The mailing list is publicly archived. Both these things have happened on multiple occasions, and were discussed in #ubuntu-women. Without these discussions in #ubuntu-women the issues would not have seen resolve, and eventually would have driven the women away. The incidents included some actively participating women whose names are linked to their IRC nicknames on their wiki pages and elsewhere, and whose discussions would have, if logging had been in place, been locatable by a google search on something like ‘”her_nick” + “his_nick” site:irclogs.ubuntu.com/year/month/’. Right now this is not possible, so women who discuss incidents in #ubuntu-women are not currently doing so on the reflective side a 2-way mirror. If logging the social, mentoring and advice discussions occurs, they will be. The chances of someone guessing the domain of sekrit unauthorised logging is minimal. The chances of someone being told to look for logs in irclogs.ubuntu.com via say, a factoid in the Ubottu the official IRC bot, is rather high. If however we split the channel in to sections, then we can target the important discussions, pertinent to the project’s initiatives. Siphoning all project discussion to a publicly-logged project-specific channel would un-bury it from the social discussions that occur daily in the channel now. I honestly believe this is the best way to resolve the issue of archiving positive activity. The alternative that has been proposed is to split off a counselling-specific channel and leaving the regular socialising and project discussions all mixed up in the current channel and log that. I don’t think this would solve much. It would not give the project-specific discussion the focus it would greatly benefit from, and it certainly would not solve the “argh evil feminist Amazonian fem-bots are plotting our demise in sekrit discussions” attitude, since there would still be a private forum. And private discussions in PM which would need to be referenced in the channel. This privacy is needed for sensitive discussions that I mentioned above. There is no doubt that the discussion archiving needs work still. A policy that declares to a participant from the outset the circumstances (ie, need for higher intervention) under which personally held logs (of whichever area ends up being not-publicly-archived) will be exchanged with parties such as Freenode, the Community and IRC Councils, should be drafted. Here in Australia, private recordings of discussions are, AFAIK (and IANAL), able to be shared in spite of a privacy agreement if all stakeholders waive their right to privacy for the specific exchange. A written policy that permits the exchange of logs of presumed private discussions with respected parties under this sort of practice is probably worth investigating. On a personal level, the idea of logging the #ubuntu-women social banter is a real concern and worries me to no end. #ubuntu-offtopic is not logged, and is a social channel that caters to the 96% male/4% female audience. The prospect of logging a 50% female social channel because some people who haven’t bothered to really take the time to understand the Ubuntu Women Project think that maybe they might kinda one day be mentioned potentially negatively doesn’t sit well in comparison. Letting women socialise with a group half-comprised of women under the same circumstances as men are allowed to socialise with a group almost entirely comprised of men isn’t going to ruin the whole Ubuntu project. Seriously, it isn’t. Not even slightly. Really, it won’t. The meeting tomorro^WToday is set to decide on this, and the implementation of the result will be up to whoever is appointed Leader next week. Lucky them! And will no doubt involve sleepless nights like this one has been so far for me. I’m off for a nap. The meeting is in 4.5hrs. Bookmark to:
           |
| 6:56 am | Kylie Willison: 10 Minute Microwave Risotto - Tonight's Tea 10 Minute Microwave Risotto This is a delicious risotto style dish that is quick and easy to prepare. It's an easy dinner and very economical. Not for the risotto purists! Ingredients * 450g rice (long or short grain) * 200ml chicken stock * 50g sharp cheddar cheese, grated * 1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley Preparation method 1. Place the rice and chicken stock in a large bowl and microwave for long enough to make the rice cooked to your taste - about 5 minutes. 2. When cooked, mix in the cheese and parsley and serve piping hot. I've put some diced bacon with this but it can also be a vegetarian dish using vege stock instead of chicken. Tonight I'm having this risotto with a grilled steak and some salad!  |
| 7:50 am | |
| 7:53 am | Teri Solow: “Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.” — Nietzsche
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| 8:24 am | Brenda Wallace: something wonderful for your OLPC XO
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| 4:59 am | Teri Solow: Transmissions from 2010-01-06 No tags for this post. |
| 2:46 am | Carla Schroder (O'Reilly articles): I Just Want Something to Happen When I Click In the olden days of personal computing, we were on a continual hardware upgrade path seeking better performance. Now our low-end PCs would have been supercomputers ten years ago, and they're still bogging down. Is there no end in sight? |
| 3:52 am | Marcia Barrett Nice: One Spirit, Four Souls This is posted mostly for the others who picked up The New Big Book Of Shinto, since I had not seen these terms before and they were sort of tossed out like I should understand them. Ichirei shikon - "one spirit, four souls" The spirit is called naobi, and the four souls are the turbulent (aramitama), the tranquil (nigimitama), the propitious (sakimitama) and the wondrous, miraculous, or salubrious (kushimitama). |
| Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 | |
| 6:41 pm | CU-WISE blog: Keep up the good fight A fellow computer science student getting ready to write up his PhD dissertation wrote to me recently, asking for advice on using style files in LyX, since I had mentioned working on that in my blog. As part of his email, he wrote the below message, which he agreed to let me share here. I think you'll like it. On a more personal note, I really like your blog. I hope it encourages more women to enter the field. I was sent back to grad school by my manager at work, one of the most intelligent and accomplished women I know. My day job is as a scientist for the goverment. My manager has her Ph.D. and is now one of the government's leading experts in a field entirely separate from her dissertation. Despite her success, I've seen her face obstacles and prejudices that she just shouldn't have to. I have a bit of unique perspective on these things. In addition to my schooling in computer science, I have an arts degree and my wife is a professor in the Faculty of Arts at Ottawa U. I asked her how she would characterize the difference between her job and my manager's and her response, without even having to think about it, was that her gender was just not an issue in her job. It would have been 30 years ago, but not today. Wouldn't it be great if we could say that about our profession one day. I hope with people like my manager and you, it will take less than 30 years to get there. Keep up the good fight.  |
| 11:51 pm | |
| 9:00 pm | Magni Onsøien: Cold and power We're having a nice and cosy period of sub-zero temperatures now (and for once I am talking Fahrenheit). It's been like this for many days (and the forecast predicts it will remain like this for a while), just like I remember from the winters when I was a kid. Quite nice in a way, but when it dips below -16 - -17C (0 F) it gets a bit too cold for me (yes, I am glad I don't live in Røros, where the unofficial measurements from last night were -42C - now it's just -40.8C. Apparently no official measurements are available from the night, as the equipment froze...) The biggest problem so far is that the temperature in the cellar gets a bit too low on the "cellar cool" scale, it's just a few degrees above zero in some places now so I am a bit concerned about the water pipes. I guess we should mount a heater in an appropriate place and see if that helps. Tonight. It's also quite cold in the living room when we gets home. We don't see much use in heating it to the comfort zone when nobody are at home for 10 hours a day, so we've turned the heaters low during the day (they have a clock function) but it's an art to tune the thermostate so that it actually gets nice and warm. When it's -20C outside, having them on +20 doesn't yield +20 in the room - more like +12 or thereabout.... So fireplace is it when we get home, after a couple of hours it's nice and warm again :-) (It's just boooring to keep the heat going...) In addition it's the fun of power dips (no, we don't have a UPS). Tonight the current dipped to about 80 V in all the house, as well as in a few of the neighbouring houses. Nice. The cable TV PVR still worked (at least the lights were strong and clear), and my laptop power converter was (sufficiently) happy with this, but most other equipment either died or barely lit up. I called to report the error, and the guy at the power company first tried to explain me that they had disconnected customers with reduced tariff, which means they pay less for the electricity but can also be disconnected if the power company need their power. But I am not among them, so we agreed that an error in the next street could be the cause of this, and he promised to send someone to fix (and also to call me when it was fixed, which he hasn't so maybe it's not yet fixed?). 45 minutes later a car from the power company parked in the driveway of the neighbour. A good sign. After a while and some phone calls he drove in the opposite direction. Not so good. Two minutes later the power was disconnected completely - in most of the neighbourhood. Progress. A minute after that it came back again, and things seemed normal again. Good? Well, not quite. I am measuring between 181 and 185V in the outlets here and over at our neighbours', which is a little bit below the specification of 230V +/- 10% (i.e. 207 - 253V) even if my voltmeter might not be 100% correctly adjusted. We've had some trouble with a fluorescent tube in the bathroom, and also the one in the kitchen has been slow recently, and this could explain it. I am just not sure if this justifies calling the 24/7 number for the power company once more to report it tonight, or if I should do it during business hours. The advantage of doing it now is that they are aware of recent errors, and I will (probably) also get to talk to an electrician, while if I call tomorrow I will probably get to 1. line support. On the other hand they will bill me for it if the error turns out to be in the house, and that's cheaper tomorrow... but again, since the low voltage is in two houses, it's probably outside the walls somewhere. Considerations, considerations. (The neighbour was amazed that I had my own voltmetre. Is that weird?) |
| 6:41 pm | CU-WISE blog: Keep up the good fight A fellow computer science student getting ready to write up his PhD dissertation wrote to me recently, asking for advice on using style files in LyX, since I had mentioned working on that in my blog. As part of his email, he wrote the below message, which he agreed to let me share here. I think you'll like it. On a more personal note, I really like your blog. I hope it encourages more women to enter the field. I was sent back to grad school by my manager at work, one of the most intelligent and accomplished women I know. My day job is as a scientist for the goverment. My manager has her Ph.D. and is now one of the government's leading experts in a field entirely separate from her dissertation. Despite her success, I've seen her face obstacles and prejudices that she just shouldn't have to. I have a bit of unique perspective on these things. In addition to my schooling in computer science, I have an arts degree and my wife is a professor in the Faculty of Arts at Ottawa U. I asked her how she would characterize the difference between her job and my manager's and her response, without even having to think about it, was that her gender was just not an issue in her job. It was 30 years ago, but not today. Wouldn't it be great if we could say that about our profession one day. I hope with people like my manager and you, it will take less than 30 years to get there. Keep up the good fight. |
