So it occurs to me that it's been a long time since I wrote about how much I love New Zealand music, and this seems rather neglectful. This is somewhat precipitated by the fact that I saw The Black Seeds play in Winterthur on Saturday night, but also because I was talking about New Zealand accents last week, which led me to recall that even my amazing boyfriend with his excellent grasp of English, had trouble watching Goodbye Pork Pie without English subtitles because the accent was so thick, and that led me to Rhombus because of their Clav Dub video, and anyway I still spend an inordinate amount of time listening to Fur Patrol, Fat Freddies Drop and of course The Phoenix Foundation, not to mention all the others as evidenced by my last.fm profile. So I thought a blog post about how awesome New Zealand music is must be long overdue.

Here are some of the videos on youtube that I've found that make me go, "arrrrggggh!! New Zealand!! Homesickness!"

The Phoenix Foundation / Bright Grey:


The Phoenix Foundation / 40 Years:


Fat Freddy's Drop / Wandering Eye:


Fat Freddy's Drop / Roady:


Rhombus / Clav Dub:


Salmonella Dub / The Love Of It:


The Black Seeds / Slingshot:


Hollie Smith / Philosophy:


The Woolshed Sessions / Stringing Me Along:


Bic Runga / Sway:


And of course, Fly My Pretties / Fly My Pretties:

I've been a proudly self-identifying feminist for a long time. I took Women's Studies and Feminist Philosophy at University, I wrote articles about Women in Open Source, together with Brenda and Joh I helped start the New Zealand Linuxchix chapter, and I believed strongly in furthering the cause.

I still want more women involved in Open Source, and I want to help the movement that encourages that. But the current climate makes it something I just don't want to be a part of.

I can't take it anymore. The second to last straw was seeing the Geek Feminism Wiki suggest that the Google/O'Reilly Open Source Awards that myself, Angela Byron and Pamela Jones won were examples of Tokenism, meaning that we didn't actually deserve them. The last straw is seeing that people are switching away from Ubuntu, calling for boycotts and talking all over the internet, about a stupid comment that Mark Shuttleworth made during a conference keynote talk about not being able to explain what he does to girls.

Yes, that comment was exclusive, and I myself get pissed off when people use male specific language (I just on Friday corrected a document written by someone that used the gender specific "he" all through it), and I grind my teeth when people make comments that suggest all geeks are men. I even think that Kirrily was well within her rights writing a letter suggesting he apologise (although I agree with Allison Randal that it should have been done privately first), and I think he should apologise too.

But oh my god, the size of the reaction, and the sensationalism of it, absolutely blows me away. Days later, it's still all over twitter, people are still arguing about it, talking about switching to different distributions, gleefully jumping on the "sexism!!" bandwagon, and I'm left thinking that "feminism" is no longer a word I am proud to be associated with.

This Wednesday and Thursday I'm going to be at the Swiss Open Expo, "manning" the Mahara stand. Liip are always in heavy presence at the Open Expo, but this time will be the first time we have a Mahara stand, so it's pretty exciting!

If you're in or around Winterthur and interested in Open Source e-portfolios, come and say hi!

Sunday was the first day in a long time where I only had 600 things to do, instead of 1000, so instead of doing them in the morning, I stayed in bed and migrated my homedirectory from one giant monolithic repository of .dotfiles into multiple repositories. Here's how & why.

I've tracked the config files in my homedirectory for a long time in git. Previously I just had one git repository with everything in it, from my .vimrc and .muttrc, through to the contents of ~/bin and ~/texmf. This was annoying for a number of reasons, mostly that it included private stuff with passwords in it (like my .irssi/config and .offlineimaprc), and so, when I often wanted to share snippets with people, I couldn't just point them at my git repository. I also found that I wasn't very good about committing changes atomically, since I never really made the context switch between editing my .muttrc and someting else, and then I would find a week went by and I had 20 changes that should really have been committed separately, but I was too lazy to do so.

So about 6 months ago, I signed up to the vcs-home mailing list, and lurked. Finally, on Sunday morning, I once again was experiencing massive packet loss to NZ (it's often above 70%) and, since I run irc in screen on a machine in NZ, irc was a real pain. That was the last straw, and since I have a virtual server here that I've been meaning to migrate to for a long time, I finally decided to do it.

In typical yak shaving way, this meant I first had to set up backups on the machine, which involved editing config files in vim. But of course my vimrc wasn't on the machine. And I didn't want to checkout my entire monolithic repository, so I decided it was time to first split up the homedirectory.

I talked to my amazing boyfriend, and he suggested a combination of git with "fake bare" repositories (bare in that they're initialised with --bare, so that the repository doesn't contain files, but "fake bare" because core.bare is set to false, and core.worktree is set to ../../), vcsh, and mr. Let's look at each of those in detail.

Fake git repositories

First, I have a .fgits directory in my ~, in which to store all the git repositories. fgits because that's what Martin used and I was copying some of his config, even though he can't remember what the f stands for.


GIT_DIR=~/.fgits/zsh.git git init --bare && cd .fgits/zsh.git && git config core.bare false && git config core.worktree ../../


This creates a new "fake bare" repsotitory for me to commit my zsh related config into. Setting core.worktree means that it actually uses my homedirectory for the worktree, which means that it actually uses the .zshrc file in my homedirectory. This means that I can have multiple .fgits repositories, all pointing to ~/ for their worktree, and commit selective files from ~/ into each of them.

vcsh

However, it seems that I can't actually use it until I use vcsh. vcsh is a little script that changes into the "context" of one of the fgits repositories, in a new shell, with some extra GIT_ variables set.

It looks like this:

hermia:~% vcsh zsh
hermia:[git/master-]:{vcsh:zsh}~%


And inside there, I can git add, commit & push everything I need, and then exit the sub shell.

mr

mr is a tool used to manage multiple repositories. With it, I configure a list of repositories to be checked out/ updated, and it manages them all for me. I simply made a new .fgits/mr.git and committed ~/.mrconfig to it

Now mr knows about "git fake bare", so in the checkout command, I tell it git_fake_bare_checkout, and give it the path to the worktree. Running mr update in my homedirectory now updates all of the repositories in .fgits and that means that the actual files in my homedirectory are updated.

zsh prompt

Finally, I had to do some magic to get both the vcs_info stuff I already used, and the vcsh information into my zsh prompt. Here's the relevant zsh snippet. Notice $PSEXTRA in there, I slightly modified Martin's vcsh script to set PSEXTRA instead of writing to PS1.

Then, back to the virtual server I was setting up here. I scp'd my .mrconfig to ~/ there, and then installed git and mr, and just ran "mr checkout" and had all of the files in my homedirectory perfectly set up.

So far there are no shortcomings, other than the obvious fact that I copied Martin's vcsh script from his func directory in his zsh git repository , put it in my ~/bin directory and modified it, without being able to track his changes. But other than that, I now have "all" my dotfiles in seperate repositories and it's working perfectly. "All" is in quotes, because while I've done 8 or so, I still have a lot to do.

Finally, .gitignore doesn't work with this setup at all. I couldn't even make status.showUntrackedFiles work. Here's a discussion about this. For now I'm reasonably happy just doing git status -uno to get around it.

After some feedback on irc from Nigel, I must explain why this helps me commit properly. First, it's a bit of a context switch, like, "oh, I have to edit my zsh config, I better switch to that context by issuing vcsh zsh", and then I have a prompt to remind me. Secondly, if I forget, I actually have to commit separately because everything is in different repos, where previously the urge to do git commit -a -m "last few weeks config changes" was almost overwhelming.

Finally, I am very happy to annouce that I will soon be working on adding LEAP2A support to the Moodle Portfolio API that will be in Moodle 2.0.

There's already a rough specification for this work, and it's been on my TODO list for a very long time.

LEAP2A is a very simple and open atom-based e-portfolio standard, to promote interoperability between e-portfolio systems. Interoperability is very important in an e-portfolio system, because it is vital to be able to transport portfolio data around with you, as you move between educational providers, into higher education, and on to professional development. Imagine having in one portfolio system, your entire portfolio of work, starting from your first day at primary school, right up to your continued professional development. Of course, one would use many different portfolio systems over that time, so some sort of open standard to transport data around is imperative.

I was involved with the LEAP standard group last year when I was living in London, adding LEAP2A support to Mahara. I attended the LEAP meetings in the UK, and worked on the export side of the project. Nigel took over when I left Catalyst and continued, adding the import side (which is of course, much harder).

But wait, you ask. Isn't Moodle a learning management system, not an e-portfolio? Why do we care about interoperability with an e-portfolio standard? The answer is of course, that while you're working, you are entering data into Moodle, and at the end of the course, the natural thing to want to do is to export some of that data into your portfolio. At the moment, we have the Portfolio API in Moodle for that, which I worked on for last year for 3 months, during my time at Moodle HQ. However, at the time I wrote it, it wasn't at all clear what portfolio standard we should support, so content is transferred in "raster" format (rendered to HTML or a file like a pdf). Since then though, LEAP has emerged as a clear front runner, and now that Mahara 1.2 (almost released!) fully supports importing and exporting LEAP2A, the time is right for us to take the plunge and add LEAP2A support to Moodle's Portfolio API. This improves the integration between Moodle and Mahara, as well as opening the door for Moodle to integrate better with other e-portfolio systems that implement the LEAP2A standard.

I am therefore very grateful to the State of New Hampshire for providing the funding to Liip for me to do this work. This comes from a grant from the New Hampshire Department of Education, and a collaborate group made up of the following school districts:

• Exeter Region Cooperative
• Windham
• Oyster River
• Farmington
• Newmarket
• Timberlane

Special thanks also to Matt Oquist who has been tirelessly helping me find funding for this work!

After months of planning, my cat finally arrived in Switzerland on Friday, after a long journey from New Zealand. Thinking back to February, when I was desperately looking for apartments, one of my criteria was that my cat would be happy in whatever apartment I found. I was primarily looking for a ground-floor apartment, with a good outside area for her, and that I would be able to put in a cat door. She is 11 years old, and has been an inside-outside cat her whole life, with cat doors since she was about 4, so there was no way I was going to have an apartment where she couldn't go outside, or where she would be limited to a balcony, or where I would have to open doors for her.

Unfortunately, ground-floor apartments are pretty rare. The girlfriend of my boyfriend's flatmate told me that it's pretty common in Switzerland, for people to have cat ladders (katzentreppe (cat stairs) for this reason. Typically, I turned to the internet for this, and found the most amazing website. My absolute favourite is this incredible one, which just blows me away.

At any rate, yesterday my amazing boyfriend built me a cat ladder, with a little help from the neighbour's children. It took a little bit of coercion before the cat would go down the steps, but finally she did, after another neighbour came along and bribed her with chocolate, and I managed to get photos of the first descent:









Awesome.

I just read this post on the use of the word "Offense" (and derivatives), and how it is unhelpful when describing interactions between people that result in one or more of the participants feeling "offended".

I won't reiterate the post here, because it's very well written and clear and anyone interested can just go read it there. However, what really fascinates me is the comments that followed.

I generally agree with everything in the article, but while I was reading it, I was thinking that there is still a responsibility on the behalf of the person feeling the reaction, and I thought this was somewhat missing in the post. So I read throught the comments, and I came across one that made me think, "yes! exactly what I felt was missing too". I'm quoting a bit here:

People do need to do a better job of taking responsibility for their actions, this is absolutely true. However, people need to take responsibility for their reactions as well.

[ snip ]

As long as you accept things as being done to you, you will remain the victim, this is true of everyone, male or female. When you cannot separate someone’s action from your reaction, you are enslaved. When you can make that separation, when you can process the situation and then act instead of simply reacting, you become powerful.

I remember recently that I wrote about sexism at the Best of Swiss Web awards. One of the comments was about the minority frame of mind. Quoting again:

In my experience, whenever a minority group feels they are being discriminated against, they tend to adopt the victim frame of mind, and interpret people's actions through that frame of mind.

I think this is a very important point when it comes to dealing with undesirable sexist behaviour. That is not to say that accepting it is easy, it's definitely not. It takes real, tangible effort, to, when in the heat of the moment (the moment in this case, being confronted with behaviour that causes an uncomfortable reaction), to stop and evaluate not only the behaviour, but also the reason you are feeling the reaction, and how you can react in a way that isn't going to exacerbate the problem.

Yes, of course, we as women in open source should not be lumped with having to do this. But the reality is, as others have pointed out, that there are good, and bad, ways of trying to create change. Blindly reacting is the status quo, it's the innate response. Taking the time to cool off, take a few deep breaths, and react to the situation in a positive, change-forming way, that is power.

I don't want to be a victim. I have been in situations that made me see red and react blindly and been unable to stop myself. I have also been in situations where after the fact I realised that my reaction was actually caused by baggage on my behalf, and that the offense I felt was due to that, rather than actually anything that was the fault of the offender. I increasingly try to be in situations where I cool off before I react, and own my reaction. This doesn't mean I do, all of the time, but this is what I aim for.

Back to the post that caused me to write this blog post. So I agreed with one of the comments. I continued reading, thinking there would be interesting follow-on discussion from that. I guess I shouldn't have been, but I was surprised, to see that this person (I didn't assume gender but the following comments made me believe it was from a guy) was completely flamed. Why? He wasn't rude or patronising. People flamed him, and he came back and tried patiently to explain himself again. As far as I can tell, he wasn't blaming the victim (he was accused of this), he was merely saying that in an interaction between two (or more) people where offense is created, it's something that both of them must deal with. Blaming the victim would have been to say, "HTFU and stop overreacting" and I didn't get that from his post at all. So why is this idea (that I support) that owning our reactions is so terrible?

Today I had to use a Windows laptop, for whatever reason. I haven't used Windows for .. oh, about 8 years, and the last half hour or so has completely justified my hatred of it.

I had to connect to the wireless network at the office. The first problem was that wireless was turned off, I had to first switch it on using some hardware switch, which seemed reasonable. Windows then helpfully told me that wireless was on, but I had to enable it by hitting FN-F5. No idea why it couldn't just do that for me, but that was a mild annoyance compared to what was to come.

The next annoyance was that I could see about 20 wireless networks, but I couldn't resize the tiny window listing them so I had to scroll through all of them to find the one I want.

I put a USB drive in my nice Debian laptop and pasted the wireless key into a text file on it, and took it over to the Windows laptop. Windows let me paste the key into the connection dialog for the network I wanted, but refused to connect, and gave me a very helpful error message like, "I couldn't connect", and offered that I might get some more information in the event log. Hoping it would be something like syslog, I opened it up, but it merely said, "Connection may not have been successful" (emphasis mine)

Hrmmm, I thought. Perhaps there was a space or other whitespace character on the start or end of the key. I copied it in again, and took the cursor to the beginning and the end of the line. No extra characters.

At this point I tried various things like, making sure the first few characters and the last few characters of the key matched what I expected (they did), trying to create a wireless connection manually (didn't work) and rebooting Windows.

When it came back up, I tried again, and this time noticed that there was a newline character in my text file, at the end of the key. I pasted it again into Windows, and sure enough, there was no extra character that I could remove using the cursor and delete key. I copied it again, excluding the newline, pasted it again, and it magically worked.

The failure is threefold:

1. No error message related to an invalid key
2. No visual cue with the position of the cursor to indicate any extra characters
3. No helpful steps on behalf of windows to trim() the key you give it

Gr.

After attending Debconf 9 in Cáceres, Spain, and talking to various people about their different approaches to validating identity, I have decided to change my approach to keysigning.

In order to sign your key, I must have met you before and can recall your face or name. If I have not met you before, I must have had an interesting conversation with you during this meeting, and am relatively sure I will be able to recall you in future meetings.

I will of course still need to look at government issued identification for people I don't know very well who fit into one of the two above criteria.

Part of the reason for this change is that for the second time, someone didn't want to sign my key because my New Zealand passport has the name "Penelope" (along with all other documents like my two driving licenses and Swiss B Permit). While I can understand this, to me it shows that the traditional method of verifying identity using government issued identification is fundamentally flawed. When I think about what comprises my identity, yes, my name is a big part of it, and I consider my name to be Penny. I have never in my life been called Penelope. Not by my family, teachers, colleagues, friends or lovers. It's just not part of my identity, and anyone who knows anything about me, probably knows that. So what are we trying to achieve by keysigning then? The fact that the person you meet is in control of that key, and you've verified their identity. Sorry, but "Penelope" doesn't go a very long way to make up any part of my identity.

Identity is something I've been thinking about a lot lately for various other reasons (largely after reading Simon Grant's book about the use of e-portfolios for personal information, personal development and personal values), and intend to blog about in the future.

At any rate, conferences like Debconf are a great way to meet people and have interesting and thought provoking conversations, and me being difficult and refusing to sign someone's key because I didn't know them, or hadn't had any sort of meaningful conversation with them, led to a few interesting and thought provoking conversations. So there's an added bonus.

It seems I am the recipient of one of this year's Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards

This is really an amazing thing for me and I'm quite overwhelmed by it. Looking back over the last 5 years I've been working on this Open Source Education stuff, there are so many people who have helped me out, inspired and motivated me, and I'm quite sure that this award is a recognition of all of the work of those people as well. The list is far too long to mention, but some of the people who stand out the most over the years are Andrew McMillan, Martín Langhoff, Richard Wyles, Martin Dougiamas, Eloy Lafuente, Nicolas Connault, Nigel McNie, and Heinz Krettek.

Additionally, I am one of those lucky people who get to work on Open Source during work time - from 2004 to early this year for Catalyst in New Zealand, and now for Liip in Switzerland. I am immensely grateful that I have had the encouragement and support of my employers.

Finally, a pony!

The response to this has been immense - I have had emails, tweets, instant messages from many many people. I cannot respond to everyone individually but I am very grateful for the support from each and every one of you.

I just bought, for what I think is the first time in my life, an umbrella.

And it's totally necessary in Fribourg. There's rain, and there isn't always awnings to walk under on my way to work (in fact there isn't, more often than not), but throughout the process of shopping for one, buying it, and taking it home, I felt extreme guilt.

Probably my Wellingtonian readers are the only ones who will understand this, but for everyone else: It's completely ridiculous, as a Wellingtonian, to own an umbrella. Wellington is so windy, that if it's raining, you're pretty much guaranteed to have your umbrella turn inside out and optionally break, within five minutes of stepping out the door. So I have this internal block about umbrellas. It doesn't occur to me that I should use one, or own one, and I experience surprise when I see other people walking around with them, before I realise I'm not in Wellington, and it's quite reasonable, sensible even, to own an umbrella.

So what is my problem? Well, I feel like I'm betraying Wellington, my Wellingtonianism, if such a word exists, by owning an umbrella.

So what can I do? Assert my Wellingtonianism in ways other than the scorn towards the umbrella owner: continue to wear black, whinge about the quality of the coffee, and the lack of hops in the beer, and steadfastly refuse to believe the Matterhorn is anything other than my favourite bar.

This has just been brought to my attention and I'm still kind of in shock about it.

I mean, I get that little girls want to play with ponies. I had "my little ponies" when I was little. But there's something profoundly disturbing about the juxtaposition of barbie-like sulty characters with .. horses.

What the hell are horses doing with handbags and high heels and earrings?

There's a huge amount of work still to be done for Mahara 1.2 to be released, and Nigel and I have decided to have a formal hackfest rather than just our semi regular Saturday morning CH/Saturday night NZ irc hackfests.

We will be in the irc channel (#mahara-dev on freenode) all weekend (barring normal everyday things like eating dinner) and working on the list of things still to do for Mahara 1.2. We will ourselves mainly be working on the theming changes that Nigel already blogged about, but anyone else interested in getting into Mahara development and helping us get 1.2 out the door would be more than welcome to join in and we have many bugs on the tracker that you can help with!

I think the single most isolating thing about living on the opposite side of the world from the culture you knew for almost 30 years, was the fact that suddenly all those little phrases that you slip into conversation, without even realising how specific they are to your background, are suddenly met with blank looks.

- It's the same day, David! [0, 1, 2]
- You're not in Guatemala now, Dr Ropata [3, 4]
- O for Awesome [5, 6]
- Too many mother uckers ucking with my shi [7, *]

Not to mention: the goodnight kiwi, the tidy kiwi, the polar pop bear, nine out of ten nutritionists, jandals and togs.

I guess I should be happy there's a Facebook forum full of people howling about Same Day David, Cadbury Cream Eggs and more, to make me fell less homesick.

* This one really surprises me, after the incredible popularity of the Flight of the Conchords HBO TV Series in America, but I guess Swiss people are happily shielded from "Creeping Insidious Yankism" and this unfortunately largely includes FOTC.

I am happy to announce that Liip are now a Mahara partner! Mahara is an Open Source ePortfolio system.

In many respects Mahara is a "sister" application to Moodle, providing students with a learning environment that they themselves own, giving them them the ability to showcase their work and collaborate with their peers. However, Mahara is also well suited as a social networking system, running out of the box without Moodle.

Mahara was originally funded by the New Zealand government's Tertiary Education Commission, and has grown into a thriving open source product that is increasingly being adopted worldwide. It makes a lot of sense for Liip to be a partner, both because we're already the official Moodle partner in Switzerland, and Mahara fits very well into our existing list of projects we work with, but also because I have been involved in Mahara since the start, and wanted to continue my involvement since coming to Liip. Liip have been fantastic supporting me in this goal!