Older blog entries for Liedra (starting at number 23)

squrl:
I don't think that these women are doing such a thing *just* because women are underrepresented on the Internet, I think they are just letting interested women know that the stories aren't necessarily true, that you *can* be a female geek.

They're giving women a support network for when things do go wrong, when they are discriminated against or whatever. Even really really geeky geek females have probably been discriminated against or somewhat abused at least once in their lives by other (usually male) geeks. I'd classify myself as mostly a geek under your qualifications (I do have another life outside sitting at my computer, but I do the latter *quite* a lot), and I certainly have - several times. I don't think you can call it (LinuxChix in particular, of which I am not actually a member) a sisterhood as such, the LinuxChix welcome men to their meetings and on their mailing lists, so if my understanding of American culture's "sororities" is correct, this is somewhat different.
And you *are* being elitist if you say "90% of the engineers I've met are idiots" - and frankly, it's not very productive to be so openly judgemental about people, especially people you may be working with.

In Australian culture there is an idea that you should give people a go, whether or not you immediately think they're stupid - you may be pleasantly surprised. If a woman, or man, or anyone, thinks they have the mindset, give them a chance at that - if they fail, then they'll work it out and do something else. I think the most important thing is encouragement and education, and these groups provide it for women who may not be able to get it elsewhere for fear of ridicule or otherwise - and some just might end up finding that they really are good at coding or sysadminning or whatever, you never know.

Yay! After months of procrastination, I've finally finished my promised article on Linux DVD players, which is currently featured on the front page of freshmeat.net (URL updated as it moved off the front page :-). Hopefully I can get my act together and write more if this one goes down well :-)

OS X

Have been trying to get pygame + PyDDR to work under Mac OS X 10.2 with little success - the little dock icon opens, and then closes in a spectacular lack of fireworks or crash messages or anything really at all.
Hmm. Shall wait for a little more stability and/or ease of use in that arena I think :-)

10.2 seems to be a lot faster, and the initial crash-on-wake problems have been fixed up by the security update of early this week of all things... strange but true. And all the apps look more finished and nicer, except that Mail.app has somewhat broken the ability for me to see folders on my IMAP server that have mail fed to them by procmail on the server... anyway, suffice to say that I'm now using Entourage with its somewhat superior handling of subscribed folders. The only problem with most GUI clients is their inability to handle proper threading - if anyone has a suggestion of a good threading OS X GUI client I'm all ears!


Life

Have been feeling better this week than I have in the last three years. Huzzah for new routines and "prevention rather than cure" techniques. Getting a second (or in my case, third) doctor's opinion can be very useful. Other life is also good, with Uni group project working out very well so far (but it's been back to Java programming for me), fun parties, and generally all round good company. Yay :-)

pjf:

Giant Burrowing Cockroaches, although not as useful as chickens, are at least not as destructive as bunnies.

Unfortunately, my male, Siegfried, died last night due to what we think was dehydration caused by the excessively dry weather we've been having and the fact that he had a crack in his exoskeleton. Although I misted them with water frequently, the low humidity might have been enough to tip the scales, so to speak. Oh well, RIP, Siegfried. I'll have to go and find Brunhilde a friend so that she doesn't get lonely :~(

daniels:
Talk about pot calling kettle black! You FUD projects and people yourself, which does not lend you any credibility when whinging about hypothetical FUD spread about yourself.
Did you approach ElectricElf and ask him to clarify the situation? Did you even think that it was possible for whoever it was that blurted around second-hand information to be wrong, or out to cause trouble?
If you want people to respect you and take up your offers of help with projects, juvenile behaviour such as this is not going to win you hearts.

mwh: Well, from the documentation that came with the tibook (I had to hunt that one down :-), it says "If your battery runs low while you are working, you can put your PowerBook to sleep and replace the battery with a charged one. The internal backup battery provides enough power to maintain the contents of RAM for one minute while you change the battery."
So there you go ;-)

(Hi, rest of advogato! I've started fostering some open source OS X apps on freshmeat.net for people interested. So far there's Fire.app, and hopefully more to come.)

mwh, dobey: my tiBook gives me approximately three minutes (the documentation disagrees with itself as to whether it's one or three minutes, but I know it's more than one from experience!) to get my act together and find the power supply.

And fink is, indeed, cool.

Okay, this is sweet. I'm sitting in bed typing up this Advogato entry on my brand new titanium PowerBook G4 (800MHz/512M RAM). *drool*

OS X is so sweet. I have had a lot of people ask me if I am going to put linux on it, but no. No way. Mmm, nice OS X.

Okay, I'll get over it soon... nope.

Mmm.

freshmeat

Finally, the big project I was working through has been launched. With only 25% of the themes processed (lousy Window Maker having 2.6k themes) themes.freshmeat.net is finally up and open to the public. There are still hours of processing to go, so it'll be a looong haul, but it'll be worth it in the end. Thanks to scoop, Ray, Chris, and Jeff, and everyone else who helped out on the conversion :-)

amars: Join the "saving up for a G4 Powerbook" Club! You know you want to :-) *sighs as she looks at her bank balance*

In other, slightly weird news, I came home today with two Giant Burrowing Cockroaches. Australian natives, these guys are flightless and as big as your index finger. If your index finger is as long as mine :-) They're perfectly clean and non-disease-carrying and overall really cool pets. I have some initial photos up here and am currently finishing a short piece on looking after cockroaches in general.
No, they're not ew! I promise!