Canllaith.org

I’m currently sitting at a pub in Wellington at the inaugural SHDH Aotearoa. which is inspired by SuperHappyDevHouse in the US. Essentially, it’s a hackathon bringing geeks together in the same place with a lot of free as in free-as-in-beer beer. The environment is buzzing and it’s great to have so many geeks together to bounce ideas around. It feels like aKademy, just with more Gnome.

It’s been organised by some extremely awesome people, among whom two I used to work with at my previous employer, Penny Leach and Brenda Wallace. I have ended up sitting next to a representative from Microsoft. This amuses me.

Today, I’ve decided that I’m going to do a bit of work on trying to come up with some improved content for KDE.org, to then go over with the Marketing & Promotional groups afterwards, as well as a little bit of sysadmin work (Dirk, I apologise in advance if I stuff anything up). If I end up running out of ideas before I’m finished here I’ll be ripping a lot of KDE3 content out of the FAQ and restructuring things a bit getting ready for KDE4 content.

Right now, hacking and a cool drink calls.

Although it’s advertising a dating site, I do find this little geek quiz kinda amusing =)

98% Geek

In other news, I would like my Dell M1330 I ordered to arrive Right Now.

I realised something cool today. My VAIO laptop currently has an uptime of over a week. Normally in the course of my job I don’t pay that much attention to uptime - it’s just the time between regular security patches. On my laptop it represents something a little different though.

It represents over a week of Linux power management working flawlessly. In that time, I’ve suspended and resumed my laptop a couple of dozen times - and every time, it’s come back, with everything working. It represents over a week of Linux applications doing everything I need, without resorting to booting into Windows to use a commercial program or read a proprietary file format.

In this week I’ve worked on some pretty diverse and important tasks. I completed my tax return - as a contractor this is a little more complicated for me than it is for regular employees. KSpread was more than capable of keeping track of my invoices and manipulating my data. I’m creating a presentation, but once again KOffice has me covered. I’ve also hacked on some code, done some sysadmin work, listened to music, watched videos, edited images, and spent way too much time on IRC. Physos, I blame _you_.

It’s not news to anyone that Linux is capable of doing all these things. Doing it for over a week without crashing, freezing, refusing to come back from suspend or otherwise displaying buggy power management?

Windows can’t do that on this machine.

Neither can OSX on the iBook I recently gave away to my mother.

Congratulations to the Kubuntu/Ubuntu teams for their latest release being the one that doesn’t just work as well as Windows - it works better. I’m doing a mke2fs -j /dev/sda1 to reclaim my Windows partition for storage space if I can go the rest of the month without needing to use it.

Now I just need to get the latest ion3 to compile on Kubuntu Feisty. Anyone got any ideas? =)

I am currently in the middle of a 12 day adventure in Perth, Western Australia. Apart from the weather being a bit changeable since it’s early in winter, it’s been pretty nice.

I had forgotten some of the more annoying things about Australia - absolutely nothing is open on Sunday and we had to spend about 2 hours driving around to find the one smegging supermarket that was open. It’s also damn near impossible here to buy a cell phone that isn’t locked to a network. In NZ there is only one GSM network, so no point in locking handsets. Here I had to ask at about 4 stores before I got a staff member who could tell me how to unlock a handset - and at one of the previous ones the woman who served me told me that there was a guy called Bill who lived down on the beach who’d unlock handsets on the cheap! Very professional.

Monday was shopping at Rockingham and then a coffee down on the waterfront looking over the ocean. Shopping here is fun, Australian women’s clothing and shoes tend to run to bigger sizes than those found in the stores I shop at in NZ making it a lot easier to find stuff that fits. Unfortunately still no easier to find stuff I actually like.

Tuesday we went to Freemantle, where we visited a car museum and a maritime museum - the latter offering a tour of a decommissioned Oberon class submarine. The submarine tour was excellent. The people who volunteer to be submariners must have nerves of steel - the idea of being under water in a big pipe under enormous pressure gives me chills.

Wednesday we just chilled down at the beach in the sun, and got attacked by a pair of ducks.

The weather has been a bit too cold since then for beach fun, so we’ve been doing more indoorsy things. Perth is kinda nice, but I’m really homesick for Wellington… and normal sized currency. Photos to follow.

Things I already knew: Microsoft _really_ suck.

I decided while off work sick and a bit bored that I’d take a look at a demo of Microsoft Office 2007. I’d heard lots of things about it, and figured it would be interesting to see if there were any revolutionary new ideas in it.

I had already mentioned I was sick, and therefore not thinking clearly, right?

The Microsoft website provided me with a time limited demo of Office ‘Home and Student’ (I only really wanted to poke at Word and Excel). Apparently these demonstration versions of office are ‘fully functional’ but are time limited to 60 days. That seemed pretty reasonable to me - even the cheapest copy of Office is about $500 NZD, I can imagine people wanting to give it a good long test before investing in it.

After taking 20 minutes to download, Office took about half an hour to install on my Vaio laptop. The Core Solo chip is designed for long battery life and not power, but that still seemed excessive to me. Of course, the Vaio was being tormented with Vista at the time so it wasn’t running at it’s best. That’s another blog post in itself.

Finally, it was installed. I opened up Word with some anticipation but was immediately struck with how slow and cumbersome it felt. Unfortunately, I can’t really report on any of it’s actual features as Microsoft’s idea of a ‘fully functional trial’ is to grey out the ‘new’ and ’save’ options in the file menu. Yup, they’d disabled the ability to create or save documents. At all.

I figured after going to all that effort to download and install Office, I might as well have a bit of a play in the blank document pane that’s presented when you first open Word. Except it seems that was functionality denied a demonstration version as well - the program informed me that I could not make any edits as the selection was locked.

Time to download: 20 minutes
Time to install: 30 minutes
Time used: 2 minutes
Time waiting for the uninstaller to finish: 20 minutes

I’ve really wanted to start getting into looking at KDE4 and finding places I can be of use, but I didn’t want to be running a broken development environment on my laptop. So, I started looking around for a desktop machine that would have good compile times, and not take up too much space.

Creative Commons licensed imaged used from tachikoma’s photostream

applepenguin is a base model Mac Mini. He’s a Core Duo 1300 1.66Ghz with 512MB of memory and a 60GB disk. It’s running Debian testing, and is currently busily compiling KDE. Qt only took 13 minutes, so I figure this is going to be so much less painful than on my tiny laptop. It’s so small that it fits inside the monitor stand of my desktop computer and makes very little noise. I’m extremely pleased with it, even though it took a little longer than I expected to get Debian onto it. The process went something like this:

• Install updates from Apple onto the preloaded OSX, since this included a mac mini firmware update that was required to get this working.
• Delete half the crap that’s on a stock OSX install. Who needs 2GB of printer drivers?
• Use Apple’s beta bootcamp tool to resize the OSX partition - leaving a little under 30GB for OSX, and 30GB for Debian.
• Install http://refit.sourceforge.net/, which provides an extremely attractive looking bootloader for EFI based machines including the intel mac mini
• Select the rEFIt Partition Tool option from the newly installed bootloader for it to do some MBR magic
• Boot from Debian CD
• Install Debian. Ignore wailing about bootloader. Also ignore wailing about lack of swap partition, since there was no way I was going to allow Debian to touch the partition table to create one
• Install and configure Lilo, using the instructions at http://bin-false.org/?p=17
• Reboot, and be astonished that it actually works
• Realise you somehow ended up with Debian Sid, and have all kinds of shenanigans trying to revert to Lenny.

I don’t really know what I’ll use the OSX it came with for, unless perhaps to play with Qt4 KDE on mac and to troubleshoot any hardware problems I might have since understandably the Apple retailers I bought it from would not be thrilled with supporting issues that came up while it was running Linux. Now I just need to figure out why kdebase is complaining that I don’t have libkio when it’s Right. There.

It’s also going to be handy to use for article writing and things that require me to mangle, break, and otherwise do unpleasant things to my system. Huzzah!

Today there was a very regrettable incident on the #kde IRC channel. Not many people were around and the channel moved on, oblivious to what went on before.

Those of us who did notice, ensured the issue was dealt with - but it still left a nasty taste in our mouths.

#kde is one of the community faces of KDE. It should be an inclusive and welcoming place where people can be assured of a safe environment. Hate speech and other offensive behaviour will not be tolerated, and not only will it get you ejected from the channel but reported to freenode staff.

Please help us make #kde the warm community it should be by ensuring your behaviour is appropriate for the environment.

She’s Such a Geek really jumped out at me with its bright yellow cover. I remembered having read about it on boingboing, and on the linuxchix mailing list. I bought it and started reading it over hot chocolate on my lunch break. It’s a collection of essays written by women in science and technology, essentially about their geekiness and what it’s like to be that geek and be a woman. They’re in turn bold, strong, honest, familiar, inspiring, and at times bitter. It isn’t easy being a woman geek and I found myself empathising often.

I can recommend She’s Such a Geek to any one who either wants to better understand some of the difficulties woman geeks encounter, or those who, like me, understand only too well already. This isn’t an earth shattering book - it isn’t going to radically change how you feel about women in science and technology, or being a woman in science and technology. It is a celebration and an affirmation. We’re here, it says, and we understand - we’re like you, and we don’t feel we should have to apologise for it either.

After being a little disappointed with Kubuntu Edgy, I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to Feisty on my VAIO. I have been very impressed with some of the changes evident so far.

At the moment Feisty is using the Polyester theme by default and it looks great. Very glossy and shiny without being too heavy. Knetworkmanager has been updated and now has the option to configure static addresses as well as being a little more reliable. Nice work!

The main reason I was less than thrilled with Edgy was that both suspend-to-ram and hibernate were broken for me. Not so good. Both seem to be ok in Feisty though. Occasionally my wireless card doesn’t want to come back from suspend-to-ram, but that is a marked improvement over kernel panics. Kubuntu’s Guidance power management tool also has some great improvements - It is now capable of setting the cpufreq policy on plug/unplug events, and setting actions for other events. For example, you are now able to set the machine to suspend when you close the lid.

It wasn’t all roses though - the Ubuntu installer was a nightmare. I most certainly did not want it to touch my Windows partition, yet the only options it gave me was to resize my Windows partition, delete it and use the entire disk, or manual partitioning. I had an unused 30GB vfat partition I wanted to delete and then use that space for Feisty. I usually partition manually, but this has to be the worst tool I have ever seen for that process. It forced me to specify partition sizes in bytes, told me perfectly valid sizes were invalid and crashed quite a lot. Finally I chose to partition first with fdisk and then run the installer, and I managed to get there with a minimum of pain. This was an Ubuntu rather than Kubuntu CD though, I hope the Kubuntu installer is a little friendlier.

All up, I am pretty impressed with Feisty. Looks as though it is going to be an extremely polished release.

I am currently writing this post on an interesting new gadget. I got rather sick of always carrying at least three gadgets around (phone, ipaq, mp3 player) and replaced them with a PDA phone instead. It is the i-mate jasjam, affectionately nicknamed jamjar. It is my new best friend. It is just as functional as each of the other devices were separately, and the qwerty keyboard makes it pretty usable for jabber and irc on the move. Indeed, also for typing out long blog posts. It is Windows Mobile, which is probably the only thing to dislike about it, but I am reconciled to it’s operating system every time I leave the house with only my wallet, keys, and my jamjar.

In other much less exciting news, I managed to sprain my back on Friday night. Not all that much fun. Lots of drugs are rendering it bearable, but I recommend that people look after their backs. They suck heaps when they’re unhappy.

Last night I had a really great time attending the first NZ Linux Chix get together. A group of women I used to work with have started our very own Chix chapter (http://linuxchix.org.nz). We met at Butler’s chocolate cafe, who are across the road from my office and have the most amazing chocolates. We then migrated to my favourite cafe, Mojo Invincible, to terrorise the staff and plan our first steps. So far we have a mailing list, planet, a team of very cool chix, interesting plans and for some of us, hangovers. It’s amusing to see people you used to work with so drunk they cannot actually talk coherently. Or at least, one person who I bet is not feeling all that great today.

Looks like we’re going to meet every month for coffee and chocolates and things, and the first event we’re planning is an installfest. Sounds like it’s going to be great, and I’m really pleased and surprised to see how many women are getting involved. It looks to be the start of a really nurturing community.