Homage to Icarus

Getting on the ele­va­tor this morn­ing, it turned out I should have waited. Some woman was yelling at some­one on the ele­va­tor about how he should sup­port health-care, and some ran­dom­ness about the unnamed politi­cian who’s bumper sticker adorned his jacket was so ter­ri­ble and such.

She con­tin­ued to rant at him all the way up to my floor.

On the way out the ele­va­tor, I called back that scream­ing doesn’t solve any­thing, though after get­ting bet­ter caf­feinated, I wish I had told her to treat the man like a human being.

I went ahead and got the Adamo from Dell, so here’s my review of it, and what I did to set it up and get it work­ing the way I wanted.

Firstly, on the hard­ware: AC adapters is the weak point of this guy. For my old MacBook, I had three: one in my bag, one at home, one at the office. While it was a decent extra cost, it was one I under­took after I for­got my adapter a cou­ple times and had to go with­out for a while — some­thing that every­one with a lap­top deals with at some point.

This was par­tic­u­larly a pain since the one that Dell shipped with the lap­top died after the first charge — which meant another three days of being unable to use it after I received it. Not cool, Dell.

With the power sup­ply prob­lem fixed, I moved on to get­ting Linux on the thing. The thing ships with Windows 7, which I wanted to keep on there as an option, and there’s enough travel and sen­si­tive work stuff that I do on my lap­tops to jus­tify encrypt­ing the disk, which requires using the Ubuntu alter­na­tive installer. I also wanted to use LVM for my disks for when I start run­ning out of space and want to shrink the Windows partition.

The way to make this work is non-obvious, and it required two attempts to get going:

1. Resize the Windows par­ti­tion to some­thing less than the full disk. I chose to give it 100G, and allo­cate the rest for Linux. This works out of the box in the installer, which is nice.
2. Setup LVM on the remain­ing space next.
   • 200M for a /boot partition
   • 20G for swap (SSD disk means I assume that hit­ting swap is nowhere near as painful as it used to be)
   • The rest for a root partitiion.
3. Setup encrypted vol­umes on the LVM par­ti­tions you cre­ated for root and swap (not /boot). You want to encrypt your swap as well, because Linux isn’t going to zero-out your swap vol­ume when you shut­down, mak­ing it effec­tively an on-disk mem­ory dump of what­ever your appli­ca­tions were doing…

I tried set­ting up sin­gle root/swap par­ti­tions on top of a sin­gle large encrypted vol­ume, but Ubuntu aparently requires your /boot par­ti­tion be un-encrypted, so there wasn’t an obvi­ous way to boot it after doing so…

With that issue out of the way, the rest of the instal­la­tion went smoothly and things booted just fine. I’ll note that Windows 7 boots much faster than Ubuntu 9.10, but I’ve only actu­ally booted the thing from a POST onwards a few times in the last cou­ple weeks, so who cares? The time it takes to resume from sleep is much more impor­tant for a lap­top, honestly.

With every­thing installed, I used rsync to copy my doc­u­ments and such off my old lap­top. I had enough disk to rsync my music col­lec­tion off of my world book, so I went ahead and did that too, and I’ve writ­ten a sim­ple upstart con­fig that per­forms the rsync prop­erly when the net­work comes back:

#!/bin/bash
# Script to dispatch NetworkManager events
#
# Runs rsync when WiFi or ethernet is connected.

set -x

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
    echo "$0: called with no interface" 1>&2
    exit 1;
fi

# Fake ifupdown environment
export IFACE="$1"
export ACTION="$2"
export USERNAME="me"
export REMOTE_USERNAME="me"
export REMOTE_HOST="stuff.mine.nu"

case "$ACTION" in
    up)
	if [ "$IFACE" = "eth0" -o "$IFACE" = "wlan0" ]; then
		if [ -z "$(pidof rsync)" ]; then
			sudo -n -u $USERNAME rsync -a /home/$USERNAME/Music/* $REMOTE_USERNAME@$REMOTE_HOST:/shares/internal/MUSIC
		fi
	fi
	;;
esac

I used to try and just mount the drive via SSHfs/nautilus and play via Rhythmbox, but it would skip the first 30 sec­onds of the song, requir­ing man­ual inter­ven­tion every three minutes.

After that comes the cus­tom repos­i­to­ries I’m using to add a lit­tle snazz­i­ness and breakage:

ppa:ricotz/testing

Latest and great­est GNOME Shell

ppa:telepathy/ppa

Bleeding Edge Telepathy/Empathy (my at-work XMPP server man­ages to con­sis­tently crash Empathy)

ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa

Nightlies of Firefox 3.6

ppa:cmsj/lifesaver

Lifesaver screen­saver, search term “#fml”

ppa:chromium-daily/ppa

Chromium Web Browser nightly builds

It’s been said before, but a person’s first foray into free cul­ture of any type is often to scratch an itch. For me, my first Wikipedia edit was undo­ing van­dal­ism on the Hernando de Soto Polar page con­flat­ing him with the con­quis­ta­dor of the same name — replac­ing his actual birth date with 1500-something, etc.

It’s some­what dis­ap­point­ing that real Wikipedia van­dal­ism is as point­lessly child­ish as that…

Let me pref­ace this by stat­ing a few things: if you are going to tell me that girls are inher­ently bad at tech­nol­ogy, pro­gram­ming, or are get­ting their panties in a twist, please fuck the fuck off. I feel con­fi­dent in judg­ing you a waste of an oppor­tu­nity for a per­fectly good pair of ovary and sperm.

Secondly, I haven’t read a tran­script or seen a video, because the peo­ple rant­ing about this are seem­ingly unable to link to either, lest you judge it for yourself.

So all I have to go on is the quotes and snip­pets and attempts at con­text. It sounds like the obvi­ously poorly-delivered joke (I say so because it’s caus­ing a brou-ha-ha rather than a laugh) was meant to go some­thing like this:

1. Have you ever tried to explain your mud­dled think­ing to some­one else?
2. You know how it causes embar­rass­ment when the other per­son gives you that quiz­zled look, and you real­ize you’re an idiot?
3. As a multi-millionaire and astro­naut, I find myself embar­rassed try­ing to explain how my soft­ware works to mem­bers of the gen­der to which I’m attracted, even though my soft­ware is awesome.
4. If my soft­ware was easy to explain — thus sav­ing me the embar­rass­ment of mud­dled think­ing about design — it would also be easy for peo­ple to use.
5. Mush the last few steps together: if my soft­ware is easy to use, it’s easy to explain how it works, and I can sell it (and by exten­sion, myself) to mem­bers of the gen­der to which I’m attracted in social situations.

This is a log­i­cal pro­gres­sion, and an attempt to appeal to evo­lu­tion­ary processes in order to make a bunch of mis­fit worka­holics socially useful.

Unfortunately for him, Mark Shuttleworth is a well-socialized het­ero­sex­ual gen­tle­men from some­where other than the sub­ur­ban United States, so he’s attracted to women, and appar­ently isn’t aware that in the US, it’s not OK in polite com­pany to refer to some­one he’s inter­ested in chat­ting up at the bar a girl. It hon­estly sounds like he’s try­ing to be cute with it, but falling on his face because some peo­ple are offended when they hear about promi­nent fig­ures talk­ing about women as girls. Either that or one advan­tage of being a astro­naut is that your world is post-gendered.

Yes, I’m jeal­ous of the money and space travel. I’m also young and ambi­tious, so not too ter­ri­bly wor­ried about it.

Regardless, part of the reac­tion is defense against the asser­tion of priv­i­lege and con­trol: dudes don’t get mad when women talk about boys in those terms in our pres­ence because the matri­archy hasn’t existed for thou­sands of years and we don’t have to worry about it. The reac­tion we (boys) have is either blush­ing or strut­ting a bit, because we rec­og­nize it as a sign of selec­tion and an asser­tion of power.

And, of course, bad-assed women are very attrac­tive to guys my age — so many video games, so lit­tle time… Our great-great-grandsons, how­ever, will curse us for our blind­ness.

Conversely, ladies may bris­tle when men talk about the girls, because it’s a term of endear­ment that is inex­orably tied back to when all women, in all cir­cum­stances, were con­sid­ered girls. There’s an extremely ugly legacy lurk­ing close enough to the col­lec­tive mem­o­ries of both women and men when it comes to a man assert­ing power and show­ing signs of selection.

That’s, I think, why Mark’s com­ments are com­pared to RMS’s. Even though — at least in my third-hand decon­struc­tion — they are log­i­cally to get the audi­ence to do the right thing because of a woman’s dom­i­nance in selec­tion sit­u­a­tions, the lan­guage he is using is loaded enough to tell a dif­fer­ent narrative.

Collective mem­o­ries!? Narrative!? Holy pre­ten­tious fuck. Fuck this, who’s play­ing at the club tonight? Yeesh!

Update: Thanks to Mackenzie for post­ing the link to the video and slides.

As noted by nukeedit, the release com­ment (in the first few min­utes), has a con­nec­tion to orgasm, but it was not gen­der spe­cific, and had no con­nec­tion to hook­ers at all. Now, I’ve read Emma Goldman, and claim to under­stand it, but iter­at­ing that pre­cise chain of logic to any­thing related to sex ends up with your pro­scrip­tions effec­tively indis­tin­guish­able from moral tra­di­tion­al­ists, and results mat­ter more than inten­tions. To put it another way: dark­mat­ter may be a tool, but sex is not the enemy.

On the “girls” com­ment… (at 36:00, slide starts at 35:00) ugh. He ends up elud­ing to the fact that he’s refer­ring to “girls” as “peo­ple who don’t care about free soft­ware.” In con­text, the com­ment is actu­ally worse than it is with­out con­text. Logically, there really isn’t a way to sal­vage his com­ments as some­how dif­fer­ent from the “teach it to your grandma”, even though I don’t think that was actu­ally what he was try­ing for.

Results do mat­ter more than inten­tions. To me, as a native-born white male engi­neer in the US, the results are this: an oth­er­wise engag­ing talk on how to make FOSS not suck, which gives voice to my own thoughts from years ago about UX and code — par­tic­u­larly the inti­mate rela­tion­ship between the APIs you’re writ­ing and the UIs that can rest atop them — is com­pletely for­got­ten, and the only thing peo­ple are talk­ing about is what a com­plete cobag Mark was for jok­ing about girls.

I’m set­ting up an iso­lated net­work for peo­ple to test inter­nal appli­ca­tions on, since the devel­op­ers all have Sun work­sta­tions with a dual-port Gigabit NIC on the moth­er­board, and we’ve got a bunch of older net­work equip­ment that we haven’t got­ten around to eBay­ing yet. What I’m doing is link­ing the sec­ond NICs together with some vir­tual machines and the older net­work equip­ment to cre­ate a sep­a­rate devel­op­ment network.

The devel­op­ment net­work is a full Layer-3 net­work run­ning an IGP between mul­ti­ple nodes with attached client boxes. This allows me to play around with a decent lab net­work, and pro­vides devel­op­ers with a way to dis­cover that Linux sets the TTL of mul­ti­cast pack­ets to “1” well before they are called to explain why their appli­ca­tion didn’t work even after loads of test­ing, spend 8 hours play­ing head-desk, and finally start ques­tion­ing me about fire­walls on our inter­nal net­work, forc­ing me to claw it out of them that they are dri­ving mul­ti­cast with­out a license and explain how to use tcpdump.

Not that I’ve had to do that a dozen times now, or any­thing…
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