Diary for hypatia

Older diary entries for hypatia (starting at number 55):

13 Jan 2004 (updated 13 Jan 2004)  »

See also other l.c.a. blogs.

linux.conf.au Miniconfs Day 1 continued

I didn't go to any further talks in the afternoon of Day 1. spiv and I had lunch with horms, Silvia and ozone. Once the wired networking came up in the afternoon we headed down to check half a day's worth of accumulated mail, and then I caught up with some work via a convienient copy of StarOffice.

The Audio miniconf was meant to conclude with a jam session at a pub on the other side of Adelaide's CBD. Adelaide's CBD is nicely laid out in a grid, but it just isn't that simple: the east-west streets change names halfway along.

The jam was missing some cabling for a long time, and while we waited the kitchen stopped serving food because they'd had too many orders. jdub found that ordering every variety of Kettle Chips in the store wasn't a good substitute for the excellent porterhouse steak spiv had had, so spiv, jdub, James, mikal, gman, thom and at least one other person and I headed off for Chinese, taking in a nice tour of the resturants in the south of Adelaide's CBD on the way.

linux.conf.au Miniconfs Day 2

spiv only did the programme for his miniconf the other day, but nevertheless I was convinced it started at 10, he was convinced it started at 9:30 and it was actually scheduled to start at 9. We arrived late to find that malcolm had stepped in to give his talk an hour earlier than scheduled.

spiv's own talk began with us spending a solid fifteen minutes trying to get my Libretto laptop to talk to the projector. This was the beginning of lots of projector hassles -- every subsequent speaker, including Malcolm the second time around, had trouble with the projector. spiv ended up giving his Twisted talk on Erik's iMac, using MagicPoint tunneled over SSH from the Libretto.

Chris Foote gave a CherryPy talk, and we had a two hour lunch in the hope of intersecting with a Python/GNOME talk by jamesh over at the GNOME miniconf, but that didn't happen.

Numbers were lower after lunch (possibly because that was about the third change to the program) which was a shame because Malcolm gave a talk on the ancient art of Python judo -- that is, inspiring the audience to a bunch of guesses about which of a bunch of algorithmically equivalent methods of doing a particular list/dictionary constructions were fastest. It turns out, for example, that in Python 2.2, 

d = {}
for i in xrange(len(X)):
    d[X[i]] = Y[i]

is a faster way than: 

d = dict(zip(X, Y))

to turn two lists into a dictionary hashing the values of one list, X, to the values of the other, Y.

spiv had a faster solution than any of the given ones: 

d = {}
map(d.__setitem__, X, Y)

The miniconf concluded with lathiat's IPv6 talk, which was essentially an overview of the socket API with some discussion of the (small) changes needed to ensure basic IPv6 functionality.

In the evening, a bunch of people mysteriously vanished to the super secret speaker's dinner, so spiv, James, Erik, robertc. thom, jaq, myself and several others congregated in the beer garden of the pub spiv and I are staying in. This was fantastic, as when I got tired at 11, I just walked up a flight of stairs and went to bed.

linux.conf.au Tutorial Day

spiv and I made it to the welcome in plenty of time to find out about all sorts of things. Matt won the national Regional Delegate Prize, which turned out to be the TShirt Sun had bid a lot for at last year's conference dinner, with lots of kernel hacker signatures on it. The dunking of the speakers and assorted celebrities was heavily advertised -- the right to dunk Linus is going to auction.

I went to the first half of Keith Packard's cairo tutorial this morning. It was excellent -- Keith turned out to be an excellent speaker. I didn't resolve the resemblence to Paul Livingstone's "Flacco" character until morning tea -- I'm still not sure whether it goes deeper than a physical resemblence. spiv said not, but I thought there were some vocal mannerisms in common. That aside, the cairo introduction is the type of thing I came to l.c.a. to see: exciting introductions to stuff I know almost nothing about.

I didn't go to the second half of the tutorial, although the algorithmic pieces might have been interesting, electing to write this before the backlog of "things to write about" grew too long. Firebird nicely crashed halfway through, so I'm only going to continue this when I can save it to a text file and upload it at the end of the entry.

11 Jan 2004 (updated 21 Jan 2004)  »

I'm going to write about the linux.conf.au conference here, mainly summarising talks. Next time, go yourselves!

linux.conf.au Miniconfs Day 1

I left Sydney with spiv at 7:00am this morning after having to throw out a pair of nail clippers and a pair of scissors I've been carrying around for at least a year (being one of those people who always has everything in their handbag finally came back to bite me). Was delivered in Adelaide at 8:30am local time, 9:00 Sydney time. I've only once been further away from home (New Zealand 1998), and feel very very strange because of course, there's absolutely no culture shock at all. Adelaide reminds me of Christchurch, but warmer and with Australian accents. Borders even sells the Sydney Morning Herald.

The conference proper starts on Wednesday, today was the first day of the miniconfs. I attended the first two talks in the Audio miniconf program.

Mark Greenaway repeated his SLUG talk on audio, which I missed the first time. Apparently the set of demos that didn't work this time didn't intersect at all with the set of demos that didn't work last time. He briefly showed off jack, ardour, sweep, hydrogen, qcontrol, freqtweak and alsamodularsynth. Mark is a good speaker -- I was his housemate for one and a half years and completely missed seeing him do any speaking in that time.

Peter Chubb talked about typesetting musical notation (and checking your typesetting via MIDI) using LilyPond, which I cannot convince myself to stop thinking of as "lilypad".

The immense level of organisation required for this conference only really hit me when I reached the registration desk . Every attendee has their name tag in a little plastic wallet hung from their neck with cords labelled "linux.conf.au 2004". The wallet contains a mini-progamme, a second nametag to go in the conference bag's name placeholder, tickets to the dinner for those who ordered them, and a voucher for icecreams. Several days of solid work probably went into that alone.

All has run smoothly so far except for the wired network for attendees (wireless was a-go-go) which didn't come up until this afternoon. But it was up in time for spiv to start on his Python miniconf talk.

spiv and I have elected to share a double room in a pub rather than stay in the college -- it's a nice room, but we're yet to see how noisy it will be.

30 Dec 2003  »

Life

After eighteen years in various schooling systems, 2004 will be the first year since I was 4 that I am not going to be a student.

I'm taking a job as a research assistant -- thus breaking from the tertiary education system not at all -- from mid-January until August. It will be my longest full-time work stint ever. Then I'll break it for a few months to go around the world, and then who knows?

Contributions

When I was learning BASIC (I was 8), I ran right into a wall when it came to thinking of stuff to program. I taught myself conditionals, loops and the basics of arrays out of a helpful little book that came with the computer, but when it came to making the leap into my own projects I was always stuck for ideas.

Obviously, not being 8 and also not being completely technically isolated has improved things somewhat, but there are still only two types of programming projects I really do: web projects and projects associated with a job or school project. Presumably the scale of the latter will only continue increasing, but I get the impression that I'm not likely to be a big contributor to Free Software in the "cool and exciting new stuff" category, at least, not in the immediate future.

In the last few weeks I've become the documentation editor for the Twisted project. So far this has meant very little, but apparently it means effectively that when it comes to documentation, it's my vision.

This is a little disconcerting, since I don't know the codebase outside the Twisted Web system at all, and I know only pieces of that. It is resulting in me producing documentation at the rate of about a paragraph every few hours, in which pace there needs to be a fair improvement before I will produce respectable amounts of documentation and of edited documentation. It is, however, a task (unlike software ideas and software design) where I have reasonable confidence that I can ascend the learning curve fairly quickly.

15 Nov 2003  »

Just passing by...

This year I:

This year I failed to:

Very poor form, three out of ten.

8 Jul 2003  »

Battle of the Pizzas, preliminary round

In the spirit of the original Free Your Pizza these are the toppings that did battle tonight:

Pizza #1, in the red corner: spanish onion, sweet potato, lamb, fetta cheese; and

Pizza #2, in the "everything goes" corner: salami, capsicum (red and green), bacon, Rogan Josh lamb, mango chutney.

The base was controlled: both pizzas had a base made of white flour, with basil and carraway seeds (spiv's sister has determined that this adds Latvian flavour). Both pizzas were topped with grated cheese and cooked in a pan brushed with olive oil.

Notes: carraway seeds and basil are both a bit strong for a pizza base. Use wholemeal flour next time. Also, I always put too little flour in dough.

Life

I call it "university".

I'm trying to divide my project into small enough bits that I can procrastinate and still be working on my project!

Code

Poked at Woven last night, and it looked like a cool and efficient way to pump content out cleanly in the minimum lines of code. Pity my host doesn't run Twisted Web (word up to the Northern Hemisphere: hosting at home is not economic in .au). So all I need to do is coerce it to write out static pages...

12 Jun 2003  »

Automating your advogato posts

... or "jdub has done it, so should you"...

hereticmessiah and others: use cmiller's advodiary script to help you automate advogato postings.

I don't have any content anywhere else to source advogato entries from (no .plan, no log, my other diary is somewhat baroque and quite non-advogato) or I would also jump on this bandwagon.

Life

Silently dropped off a bunch of mailing lists for the duration of Crunch Time I (the Coursework Descends). I can't even claim community involvement this month. I'm currently taking half an hour off between the two assignments that are due today.

31 May 2003  »

Finis

I graduated for the first time yesterday (B Science and B Arts). Graduation number two expected this time next year (B Science (Honours)). Honours thesis due Nov 11.

Energy

All my creative energies are being sucked into university work. In some ways it is good that academic work is requiring writing, editing and coding from me, but in other ways it is sad, since it leaves me drained.

Free Software

My involvement continues to be community based. Still on SLUG committee, still involved in LinuxChix, still running the (tiny) local Python Interest Group. My HOWTO Pay for Free Software is slowly improving and is near version 1.0.

I am so pleased that after years and years of waiting, my coding skills have reached the point where I feel confident reading and repairing other people's code. This bodes well for Free Software development in the future, but I'm trying to keep a lid on avenues of prostratination this year. I have constant struggles with procrastination, motivation and guilt which I am trying desperately to resolve, and alas, I've decided that stepping back from the keyboard after hours is likely to be part of the solution.

9 Feb 2003  »

Online stalking

(No, not really.)

tk: looks like you can find ESR at http://www.catb.org/~esr/ these days.

Coding

Spent today moving a set of CGI scripts to 'better' URLs (no GET queries). Yet another webby project. There are a couple of these projects I'm considering cleaning up for release, except that it would be more half-baked solutions in a saturated market.

Incidently, Cool URIs Don't Change is an extremely off-putting title. Cool Titles Don't Use the Word 'Cool'.

2 Jan 2003  »

I'm:

.... finished undergrad ...

but about to go back to university for honours. And I dreamt about failing first year history last night, and having to take a maths course over the summer to make up the credit.

... writing a HOWTO ...

on paying for your Free Software (I'm equating contributing with paying). It's not even properly proof read yet, let alone finished, or licenced...

... still around LinuxChix ...

although it mostly sails along. jennv has even been able to take a writing holiday.

... still around SLUG ...

my contributions of the past year were starting a Python Interest Group, and our hugely exciting (*excited*) new constitution, which was dragged into something like current practice. It's nearly as exciting as the insurance.

... scripting ...

It's all webby bloggy stuff, but isn't everyone doing webby bloggy stuff these days?

The more people code webby stuff, the more their private code library seems to approach middleware. But I'm reliably informed that existing middleware sucks. At least, once you've polled three random web developers, the union of the sets of sucking middleware encompasses all middleware, all software calling itself middleware, most databases, several scripting languages, object orientation in general, and probably a few endangered species.

At the moment, the favoured way to develop good middleware seems to be doing it all by yourself.

3 Aug 2002  »

Linux Workshop

SLUG figured that because installs are so easy these days, we should offer more, and had a fest with installs and talks on random Free Software things. All the same, we still struggled with people with dodgy hardware, old laptops, and Debian unstable CDs on which the base system was broken.

There are 150 more Linux users in Sydney tonight...

The next one is scheduled to be bigger and brighter. Codefest on the horizon too. Perhaps all the glsnake-ers will actually assemble in a single room at this time...

Party

There's a geek party in the longueroom which I'm sneaking away from for a bit. spiv, jdub, XFire, k and Liedra are assembled, among others. Whenever I organise a party, it seems to be rather random. The oddest set of people decide to come.

46 older entries...

[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects ]