DoctorMo's Blog

I must write this response to the article by the FOSS developer “The Beez” over at his blog. He has taken it upon himself to attack feminism and has made such a lot of mistakes that I feel compelled as a strong supporter of fair social attitudes and cultural norms for women to correct these mis-memes.

Lets start off with ditching the feminism of the 1970s as it became more radical and inwardly looking. It’s not even the same kind of movement and to confuse feminism with what various FOSS women’s projects are trying to do is just disingenuous.

Secondly, brains change shape the more they are used. If boys are predisposed to mathematics (and I don’t think so) then girls should be given more help exercising and learning mathematics. Saying that women are no as good and thus not worth the effort, beggars our thinking of people’s worth. Women who are encouraged to engage in mathematics would have bigger IPL’s than average.

I’d also like to point out how ridiculous it is to think that programming is purely mathematical. Is it not. The majority of programming is logical, systematic and multi-threaded with a great dose of collaboration and writing ability. Things that women are “supposed” to be better at. Perhaps this is why young girls usually do better on maths and programming exams but are less confident of their abilities than young boys? It’s not until girls get older that they loose their advantage in programming and mathematics due to social stereotyping and the lack of encouragement and confidence building in these subjects.

To be picky, why is it that Beez wants us to believe that you can argue predispositions on averages and say that on average women are shorter, but then in the very next paragraph says men are “typically” more mathematical? Was averages not good enough for the second part? Perhaps because if something is typical, it is typed and deviation from this norm is ignorable. It gives it a much stronger definition of predisposition than a mere “average of possibility”.

Lets be honest here, it’s not about the code. I know Beez goes on and on about code being the ultimate valuable judgement, but I don’t buy it. I’ve worked with some talented programmers in my time, and some of them were impossible to be functionally productive with because of how little they regarded social interactions. Social collaboration is a major function of large software development, or at least successful projects.

Nowhere has there been an attempt to explain why some projects have no women and others have relativity larger numbers. Perhaps it’s because women like to program in projects that respect them? Perhaps what we should be doing is realising how much of our FOSS culture is depending on aggressive, self assertive, “on average” male cultural qualities and how very little of it is based upon real pragmatic views of code. It’s easy to ignore if everyone in your club is a fist pounding male gorilla.

I’ve seen the cultural and social effects that marginalise women and a lot of them can seem very subtle and almost innocuous. But that doesn’t mean these social factors should be tolerated and that as men we can excuse ourselves from watching our own behaviour and at least attempting to respect everyone. This includes respecting male peers and being able to function with them on a social level, this includes learning about behaviours that are detrimental to women’s participation and not encouraging them.

Finally I’d just like to say that I deplore men who attempt to preserve their precious all boys club in the FOSS community and I find it immature of them to disregard social aspects of being human when it comes to programming.

And yes there are differences between classifications of people on average, but there is normally a much greater difference between individuals in the same class than those averages between each class. I’m not saying that I think everyone needs to be equal, I’m saying people should be given the same opportunities and perhaps understanding differences can lead to better opportunities instead of denial.

Update: Because of the attacks in comments I’m getting from various boys, I’m closing comments until people can learn to be civil. I also deleted two comments, one by accident the other because I want to, now re-added.

The temperature wasn’t that high for today’s Software Freedom Day in China town, down town Boston; but at least the sun was out as I was making my way there by bike. When I got there at 10:30, the event seemed to be in full swing already with speakers about to talk.

Women in Free Software

There wasn’t much time given over to cover this subject in depth, but we did have a good talk about the big problems facing female developers in the Free Software communities. It was noted that it’s easier to be the second female, than the first and I asked weather or not online anonymity hurts the recognition that there are already some women involved in projects. there was also a very good idea about working at elementary school level to get girls interested in computers before they know they’re not supposed to find it interesting.

Some good ideas were collected, but I don’t think we had enough to to go through them all as well as I would have liked. I passed along the Ubuntu communities ideas of the Code of Conduct (helpful) and the Ubuntu Women’s project and so on.

Sugar Labs by Walter Bender

Walter once again was a marvellous and I really appreciated hearing the update on how sugar labs is going. fortunately you can read the presentation on Groklaw.

Antifeatures by Benjamin Mako Hill

This was a very interesting talk. Basically Mako laid out the concept of antifeatures as being extra work that technology companies do in order to restrict or diminish the functionality fo their products in the eyes of their customers. The conclusion was that antifeatures are the low hanging fruit of the Free Software community, as all we have to do is not implement these features (such as DRM or dongles) as we have be default created a better product.

Richard Stallman

The final part of the day was given over to Richard and we got to ask some interesting questions. These are just some of the things that I learned.

Software as a Service was heavily condemned as limiting and removing people’s freedoms. Having your data and processing on another machine is worrying and not good for Free Software or control over your own computing. He makes a big distinction between online services used for communicating (i.e. email) and those used for replacing desktop apps (Google Anything).

Mono framework is not so much of a problem, but C# shouldn’t be used in core apps as legal problems would be hard to work around. Recommends uninstalling any apps using C#.

Proprietary Javascript will be a problem for Free Software in the future and tools are already in development to allow users to deny non-free javascript from executing. For not he advises to use no-script plugins.

Control has replaced Free Speech in Stallman’s the rhetoric. This is one of the most noticeable things I took away from today, that there has been a cultural shift from the way proponents of Free Software talk and communicate about the ideas and rationalities of Free Software principles. Although I’ve been picking up on the same advantages to using control language instead of freedom of speech in my own advocacy.

Miguel de Icaza “is basically a traitor to the Free Software community” This was in response to my question about Richard’s thoughts on the new Microsoft “Open Source” CodePlex lab. He went on to say that Miguel’s involvement in the project doesn’t give much confidence as he is a Microsoft apologist. The project looks to be concerned with permitting “Open Source” programs to work on the Windows platform and thus divert valuable developer time away from free platforms such as Gnu/Linux. He also went into an interesting story about Miguel and the FSF, although this had nothing to do with Mono (unlike some people have reported).

Some people asked for the story that was told, I’ve tried to recover it from memory, but it’s bes to ask Richard as there isn’t a good transcript of the day:

Back in the day when Miguel and Nat Friedman were creating Helix and don’t forget Miguel was a board member at the FSF. We had talked to them about releasing only Free Software. Friedman or Miguel, I forget which, I think it was Friedman with Miguel CCed, told me that they had no plans to release proprietary software. Later I found out that Helix has shipped proprietary software and when asked, Miguel responded that it has always been the plan to do so.

Conclusions

It was a very good day, although I would have liked to have seen more Ubuntu LoCo people there. We were fed well with breakfast, pizza and then cookies later on in the day as well as having a free software version live cd running on a bank of machines, should someone need to look something up.

I thought the talks were interesting and the social atmosphere good, I got to talk to people as the FSF that usually ignore the local community in favour of working on top down grand schemes, so hopefully I can convince some of them to give some time up to helping Boston/MA move forwards with Free Software.

For next year if your able, do come.

Hey Ubuntu Land, some of you guys who are not developers but would still like to be able to edit various none coding parts of projects might be interested in this.

I’m developing it for the Ubuntu Learning project, since we’re going to need normal folks to be able to get involved, and the best way to do that is to increase the usability of the tools we use. My main focus here is not on replicating the functionality of bzr or launchpad at any fundamental level, it’s about producing functionality which follows a prescribed workflow. those who need a different workflow will obviously use the command line tools, but for all other people, this kind of integration will be used (hell it was even useful to me).

So watch the video and tell me what you think.

[blip.tv ?posts_id=2638378&dest=-1]

Code can be found on launchpad here.

This is the second commission I got done while at Pi-Con, I haven’t inked/vectorised it yet, but you can see how wonderful this piece is.

Don’t forget that it’s talk like a pirate day saturday!

Professor Mike Hulme at the University of East Anglia wrote a very interesting opinion piece in New Scientist last month. It was all about climate change and how fighting climate change isn’t just about the practical, natural phenomenon, but also about the social narrative phenomenon.

He says:

…the idea of climate change carries quite different meanings and seems to imply different courses of action. The IPCC has constructed a powerful scientific consensus about the physical transformation of the world’s climate. This is a reality that I believe in. But there is no comparable consensus about what the idea of climate change actually means. If we are to use the idea constructively, we first need new ways of looking at the phenomenon and making sense of it.

One way I do this is to rethink our discourses about climate change in terms of four enduring myths. I use “myths” not to imply falsehoods but in the anthropological sense – stories we tell that embody deeper assumptions about the world around us.

He then goes into explaining four classical myths and different ways we convince ourselves to dot he right thing. These stories are familiar to me, and not just to climate change. These are the kind of stories we use in social settings to convince ourselves of all kinds of things, from not murdering your neighbour, to using Free Software.

Thoughts?

I just did an odd thing with my bug report. lp:#429926, I attached a video which attempts to explain the problem.

I didn’t do this at first, at first I just described the bug as I have in the past. But JazzyNico’s not reproducible response got me thinking of how I could show this bug as being reproducible. So using gtk-recordMyDesktop and my handy usb headset I made a video recording on my desktop while I showed the problem and how to reproduce it.

I double checked with some launchpad people to make sure I wasn’t uploading anything too big or crazy. They seem happy with it so long as it’s not too big. And recordMyDesktop saves as ogg vorbis/theora videos, so artefacts are kept low. I could have uploaded to blip.tv or some other video site, but I think they would have converted to mpeg, further degrading the video.

Have other people done this?

Sometimes the problem with communicating important ideas just lack some identifying element. So when we say “such and such thing costs 4 billion dollars” all we really see is a number and we’re at a loss to put it into any sort of a scale or terms.

Some people have tried to compare large costs with consumer grade products such as Big Macs or Ford Cars. But that really isn’t that useful since it’s not honest, how many of us really understand what a product is worth or what it took to make.

So my rationale is that you have to consider that money is not actually real, but is simply a reflection of people’s work. If you have to spend billions of dollars on something, then at least spare a thought for all the people who will have to slave away in order to make that money make any sort of sense economically.

I will instead specify costs in terms of number of person income years¹ Which I will describe as the mean income of each householder over the age of 14 in a given country. I do this because if someone is not working in an economic sense, it’s likely that they are working in the shadow none monetary social services economy that serves those who do work. Treat the following as back of the envelope, playful and not serious or in depth, but just my way of experimenting with an idea, so forgive me if it’s totally illogical.

I will list out a few large, costly human endeavours using this to see if it helps my own understanding of what it cost our economy to achieve them and so this is in US median annual incomes per household persons in 2007 ($26,036):

• Red Hat Revenue – $111.1 million – 4.3 thousand people.
• NASA – $17.6 billion – 676 thousand people.
• Microsoft Revenue – $51.12 billion – 2 million people.
• USA Defence budge – $515.4 billion – 19.8 million people.
• USA Annual Increase in debt – $1035.1 billion – 39.8 million people.
• USA Health spending – $2.2 trillion – 84.5 million people.
• USA Gross Debt – $8.9 trillion – 344 million people.
• USA Total GDP – 14.2 trillion – 547.9 million people.¹

¹ Does this mean that 240 million people outside of the USA are working for the people who live in the USA? More likely this either points out massive debt or that my maths is bogus. I’ll go with the later, because I’m not an economist.

This is just a quick blog post to exacerbate what a pain in the neck it is to try and print barcodes that will actually work. The problem is that the printing framework (cups and gnome printing) consistently expects US Letter sizes, consistently resizes images, consistently produces odd results printing svg or pdfs generated from svgs and even pngs with transparency produce black field backgrounds.

I’m disappointed that I haven’t managed to get any of the 5 different image viewers or edits to print correctly yet, and don’t really have any good ideas of all the different problems. I can’t really file a bug report as there are too many different bugs that I can’t quite nail down precise singular issues. Although orientation and sizes are difficult problems I know, so perhaps we just need some guys to spend some paper-cut time on it.

Update: I managed to get gimp to do the job by changing the orentation of the paper that is defined in the custom sizes. So as well as 5×3, I also have 3×5. I now have a clue as to what the problem may be so I can help report it.

If ever you’ve thought about baking your own bread, do. It’s so much better than what you can possibly buy, even from those fancy stores:

Fresh Bread baked for Soup

Today I was trying to solve an unsupported device problem, I’ve been asked to get a small library terminal type computer up and running using a barcode scanner…

There are two kinds of barcode readers, those that fake keyboard interfaces (keyboard wedges and keyboard usb hids) and those that communicate over the serial bus. The keyboard variety work perfectly with Linux and thus Ubuntu, but the serial readers are a backside pain unless you want to write your own tools which can’t interface effectively with anything that already exists (i.e. Firefox).

But I didn’t get a choice in what barcode reader I was to work with, instead I was given a SerialIO LaserChamp, which comes with a USB to serial interface as well as a memory bank to store more than one barcode. The real solution here would be to digg into the Linux Kernel project and develop a serial keyboard interface driver, much like the 4 already available.

The problem? When I looked at doing just that the code for those devices is not commented at all. The code just expects the programmer to instinctively know what’s going on, and well it’s not too complex a feature to take in scancodes and output key events, but seriously at least explain API use. Since I’m not a C programmer and the Kernel programmers are as helpful as nepalm, I ditched that idea and decided to hack it instead.

Instead I created a small python program which will sit and listen to the serial port and take in the barcodes, then it will output them using xdotool causing the barcode to be typed as if it were a keyboard. Once it was up and running I marveled at how badly I had to hack this up in order to get it working. I’ll have to run the python program as a daemon type service, but meh, it’s not like I’m going to distribute it.

Thanks to Romain Aviolat (xens) for phonixing some code to make this work, you can find code for serial barcode scanners here: On GitHub