she.geek.nz

things I've learned, or relearned recently about Switzerland and New Zealand

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 12:50:50 +0200

Drinking

According to this article, New Zealanders "all drank as if someone was about to take our beer away from us.”

The often used stzbr expression, which expands to Stütz Bier when you put vowels back in it (people at Liip have a habit of removing vowels for words like stzbr and hngr), apparently means "supporting beer", according to this website. We seem to use it to mean the beer you deserve at the end of a long day (or Sprint), which doesn't exactly match that definition. Leo is surprisingly mute on the matter, although offered me the verb stützen, which seems to be related to supporting.

Completely New Zealand specific expressions

These ones I've re-learned recently from watching Outrageous Fortune, or reading Wikipedia

[Adjective] as

The use of "as" with no direct comparative object following is a very common New Zealand amplifier. The third page of the article I mentioned earlier explains this:

Green fondly recounts a news story from a few years back about a young man who’d got lost in the bush overnight. “When they asked him how it was, he said, ‘I got lost, eh? So I got some ferns and stuff and lay down. Soft as.’

‘What was it like at night?’

‘Cold as.’

‘How did you feel in the morning?’

‘Hungry as.’”

This is where our prepositions are going – we’re tacking them onto the end of sentences.

A recent visit from a New Zealander has led me to believe that we've actually started appending "as" to the end of "heaps", for example, "How much fish and chips should we order?", "Heaps as". I can't decide whether this is awesome or horrific.

Choice (adjective)

Used where other people might use "cool", eg "that is a choice car". Naturally, often followed by "as". Choice as, bro.

Pakaru/Huckery

These both seem to mean roughly the same thing - something that doesn't really work properly, a cheap car that breaks down all the time, for example. Wikipedia says that Pakaru is the Māori word for "broken", but it's a bit more than that.

Slut (verb)

To be angry, for example, "that really sluts me off", or "man, I'm so slutted!"

Rip my nightie/knickers

Another expression that roughly means "to be angry". I remember saying something "ripped my nightie" in school, and I was amused to hear Cheryl from Outrageous Fortune asking someone whether that "ripped your knickers".

Of course, none of this would be at all interesting without a video of a beached whale:

Edit: I forgot "huss" (adjective) meaning slutty. As in, "that dress is totally huss"

Fragments #1: Sunday afternoon

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 14:57:45 +0200

Sunday afternoon. You're walking home after getting off the train from Zürich, and you're carrying your bag in your hand instead of over your shoulder, because you're carrying all your stress in your back right now and the weight of the bag is killing you. In your left hand, you're holding the small potted cactus that you made your boyfriend buy you yesterday for your desk, which you're almost dizzy with the significance of, because your parents used to say that your sister was like a delicate flower, and you, tough, proud and stubborn, were like a prickly cactus.

Smiling, you remember how you told your friend Chris about this, and he insisted that you were more like a hedgehog, you suspect because under their spikes, they're actually quite cute, and you remember being infuriated by this because you didn't want anyone to actually see past the spikes. Secretly though, you harboured a hope that Chris might buy you a small hedgehog for your keyring, because you are always amused by the significance, real or imposed, of inanimate objects. He never did of course, because it didn't occur to him, and asking him to would have ruined the gesture.

An old man is sitting drinking a beer on the steps leading up to a storefront, and he's noticed you, walking down the street with your cactus, smiling to yourself, and he's looking at you expectantly. Not staring, just slightly puzzled, wondering what your story is. The woman sitting beside him is talking animatedly, but you can tell he's not paying attention to her anymore, because he's looking at you, and you feel guilty about this so you smile at him. Satisfied, perhaps because he expected you, this girl dressed in black with huge sunglasses, tattoos, and a cactus, to glare at him, and you smiled instead, he looks back at his companion, and you leave them behind as you cross the street to Rue de Lausanne.

Because it's a warm Sunday afternoon and you're not ready to go inside and work, you wonder if you'll see anyone you know, perhaps sitting having a beer in the sun, but then you remember that Rue de Lausanne is not Cuba Street, and the chance of this happening is extremely low, and you close your eyes for a moment, feel the warmth from the sun on your skin and try to mentally place yourself walking down Cuba Street instead in the sun on the weekend. In your mind, you're walking past the entrance to the Matterhorn, past the statue by the bucket fountain which nobody can ever agree on, as to if it's a frog or a tuatara, which is quite bizarre, you realise now, considering how utterly different they are. Walking on, passing Plum's outside tables, in this block of Cuba Street, you are sure you would have met someone you know to have a beer with.

But the people around you are speaking French and you realise how misguided it is to walk down the street, even a pedestrian street like Rue de Lausanne, or Cuba Street, with your eyes closed, especially when you're carrying a potted cactus in one hand, because if you fell over dirt would go everywhere, and you would draw attention to yourself. And here in this foreign city where you hardly know anyone, you don't like people to notice you, really. So you open your eyes.

You're thinking about the word Solitude a lot at the moment, which is odd because juxtaposed with daydreaming about bumping into friends on Cuba Street, it's a concept that you feel strangely calm about. But you find that when you go home after work in the evenings, and sit by yourself in your garden, drink a beer, and read your book, you do feel calm, and for some reason this reminds you of the title of the essay by Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, which you bought but never read and didn't survive the move to Switzerland. You always had the idea that A Room of One's Own has something to do with Solitude, but struggling to recall a conversation you had about it with your friend Michelle, who is a writer, you think she might have told you that it's actually about the necessity of writers having the means to be independent, so that they are able to just concentrate on writing. You suppose Solitude is a subset of that.

As you walk past the cathedral, you ponder the relationship between Solitude and being driven, or able, to work all the time, and even though you're on your way home right now, to turn on your laptop and work, you feel almost no motivation to do so at all, and since you're thinking about Michelle, who is a writer, you decide instead to turn on your laptop and write......

the thing about homesickness

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 20:59:01 +0200

Is that it comes and goes... and it seemingly just takes one single thing to propel it into the foreground. I haven't really been homesick much this year, but I just watched this video by the amazing New Zealand band Minuit which was stupid because it made me so incredibly homesick last year:

And it was like a tidal wave of NZ iconography and homesickness and argh. But I can't help watching it anyway!

Changing my approach to presentations

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Wed, 19 May 2010 18:47:00 +0200

I gave a presentation today and I think it was one of the worst I have ever given. This confuses me slightly, because I was talking about a subject I have talked about probably a hundred times over the last 3 -4 years. So I'm thinking about the best talks I've ever given, and the worst, and what the difference is between them.

Slide layout

I used to do the bullet point slide thing. I think that slides like this are boring to watch, although they leave behind a much richer record of the presentation, although this is not so important anymore with most conferences having videos. However, over the last year I have gradually decreased the amount of content on my slides. While this means that I'm much happier with the slides, it generally means that I find it harder to stay on subject exactly, and tend to wander a bit. While not so great to look at, I have to admit that the bullet point slides provide a much needed structure to the talk.

Subject matter

People say that you give better talks when you're familiar with your subject matter. This is certainly true, but it's probably a misnomer for me, because I don't actually tend to give talks about things that I'm not familiar with.

Familiarity with your audience

I used to be much more worried about giving presentations in front of people I knew. I remember one of the first talk I ever gave at a conference (LCA 2007), and I forbade anyone from Catalyst from attending. This is the opposite from how many people feel I think, which is interesting. It's because I generally feel that when I'm doing a presentation in front of people I know, I have much more to lose, if I do anything stupid. If I'm talking in a room of strangers, I can walk away at the end and never see them again.

Language of the audience

This is an interesting one. Something I really noticed today was that because I was giving a talk in English, in a room of people whose first language was either French or German, I was forcing myself to speak much slower than I normally would (even slower than I normally try to talk when presenting to native English speakers), and using different language than I normally would too. This is very problematic for me, because it means that my brain is much further ahead in the planning of what I'm going to say, than what is currently coming out of my mouth, which means I lose track of where I am.

I think the two most important things that I need to take away from this experience are the first and last. In a situation where there's a language barrier, either with me speaking in English, or if I eventually get proficient enough to speak in German, I really need to have a better structure than I have now. When speaking in faster English, to an audience I feel confident can follow along comfortably, I can freestyle much more and don't need prompting with bullet points. However, in a situation like today, I really need them.

I'm still determined not to put bullet points on my slides. So I think the best thing to do is prepare two sets of slides. One with what I want to say, in a structured fashion, and the other containing what I want to present, whether it's full page images, or single words on a screen, or whatever. This sounds like a lot more work, but it's actually not, because I need to go through the thought process of what to say for each slide when I'm preparing them either way.

At LCA this year, I was extremely impressed with all the keynotes - not just the content and styles of the presenters, but more importantly the slides. I gave a techtalk at Liip when I returned from New Zealand, "what I learned in New Zealand", trying to follow the same slide styles, and I was really happy with it. I did notice that at LCA, some (maybe all) of the keynoters had written speeches to go along with their slides, and were reading from them on stage. That seems like far too much work for me, partially because I do like the free speaking approach, so preparing a bullet point version seems like a happy middle ground.

On loving (and hating) software, and how crippling it is to run in high heels

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Tue, 11 May 2010 17:07:56 +0200

I have a well established (and well deserved) reputation for hating MySQL and being a Postgres fan. While this is functionally true, I want to examine what is actually behind it.

I tried to find an analogy recently to explain this to my friend Michel, and the best I could come up with was (and actually I think it fits perfectly) the following:

Imagine that you are an athlete. A runner. And you have the most amazing comfortable ergonomic shoes. These shoes fit you perfectly, they are tailored to exactly your body, the way you run. They help you run faster, they enable you to excel at the sport that you have chosen. Then imagine that for whatever reason, you join a running club, and this running club has a policy of running in high heels.

"But why would you do that?!", you exclaim in dismay. "When you could use these other shoes, which are much more comfortable and actually help you run faster".
"Ah well", they reply. "We've always run in high heels and it works fine for us".

That is how I feel whenever I have to touch MySQL.

I remember having seen one of Kathy Sierra's talks about creating passionate users - not sure where, maybe Webstock 2007. 'Passionate users' is something that may seem absurd to many computer users who struggle with daily computer use (I have written about this before), but the reality is that I am a passionate user. There are certain pieces of software that I use every day, and feel passionate about! While writing this blog post, I realised that what I'm really talking about here is tools - things that I use in my daily work as a software developer.

I honestly love working with Postgres. I love working with Git. There are actually times where I need to do something, or solve a problem, and I feel like this software helps me do it. After I solve the problem I am grateful to be able to work with such tools. This is where the random "I love postgres!" or "I love git" tweets come from.

This is a really important point - it's not that I hate MySQL (although I do), or CVS or SVN (also true) - it's that I actually love Postgres and Git, and when I need, for whatever reason, to work with Mysql or CVS or SVN, I really miss the features that make me love their competitors.

Of course, this fails to take into account that different pieces of software have different purposes and features, and this is a good thing, because diversity encourages competition which makes software improve. Interestingly, I don't know if I feel this way about all software - I love Vim, but I don't hate Emacs - I just don't use it. When I have to use Emacs (it happens), I am sometimes frustrated that it's different - but I blame myself for that (not knowing it well enough), rather than blaming the software for being substandard. I'm not sure if Vim is any better or worse than Emacs - Vim just suits me better. In the case of Mysql and Postgres, I actually think that Mysql is substandard, and similarly for Git and CVS or SVN.

There seems to be a scale for my reaction to using different software:

Love: I feel that the software is predictable, elegant and helps me achieve what I want and get my work done. I sometimes feel love for it when it's particularly helpful.
Ambivalence: I use the software, but don't feel particularly strongly about it.
Hatred: Using it actively hinders me working, because it is lacking features I need, or is unpredictable and unreliable. I feel despair when I have to use it.

Obviously, the two extremes are both forms of passion, although I'm sure that the first is what Kathy Sierra was talking about. But I wonder if the software that falls into the third category only exists when there is a competing piece of software that falls into the first category. If I had never used Postgres, would I hate MySQL so much? Probably not, although I might hate it a little bit. I'm sure people that have always run in high heels and never experienced how much easier it is to run in sneakers don't hate their high heels, because they don't know any different.

So the conclusion I must draw, is that I don't actually hate MySQL or CVS or SVN - I hate being forced to use tools that I consider to be substandard than their equivalents, which I actually love. To me this is such a black and white issue I am completely baffled when other people don't see it. Considering the way that most people interact with their computers, if software exists that actually makes people feel love - why on earth would they use anything else?

HTC, Android and that awful fragmentation problem

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 09:23:58 +0200

It's widely acknowledged on the internet at the moment that Android is suffering from a serious fragmentation problem. The different devices have different Android versions, some without promise of an upgrade, some with pure Android and some with vendor specific versions. I'm only an Android consumer, so can only speak about this from personal frustration, but the situation must also be pretty bad for those developing Android applications for such a fragmented market.

I used to be a reasonably happy owner of a HTC Hero. When I bought it, it was running Android 1.5, with the HTC Sense UI. Soon after, there was an upgrade to 1.6. That was a long, long time ago now, and large chunks of the rest of the Android community have different phones, with newer versions. HTC have been promising an upgrade for months to Android 2.1, and it keeps getting pushed out and pushed out. The latest announcement yesterday was the end of June, which is interesting considering that Android 2.2 is supposed to be released in May already.

Someone asked me a few days ago why I was looking forward to the upgrade, when the phone worked perfectly well already. This is surely a valid question and there are a few different answers. Some of the applications I use aren't being developed further for the 1.x series of Android, and new versions are only being developed for 2.0. The 1.5 to 1.6 upgrade improved performance a lot, and I was hoping that the 2.1 upgrade would as well.

At any rate, the most recent delay was the proverbial last straw for me, and I ended up putting a custom rom on my phone. I would actually really like to run pure Android, for philosophical reasons, so first I tried a pure Android rom. Unfortunately, it is just really nowhere near as nice as Sense. The most obvious difference that would affect me is the exchange support (against Liip's Zimbra set up) - in pure Android, I could not find a way to specify what to sync, and I couldn't make it include Calendars. In Sense, I can choose between Mail, Contacts and Calendars (I sync the latter two but not the first). Calendar support is by far and away the most important for me. There were a few things I liked better in Android - the keyboard was much more responsive (although uglier) - one thing that has been driving me crazy about this phone is the lagginess of the keyboard.

Anyway eventually I decided the calendar support was a deal breaker for me, so I put on a 2.1 Sensish rom, and so far, I am very happy with it (although the keyboard is still laggy). They fixed the annoying issue of not being able to see the arrival time of messages older than a day (they just say "Yesterday"), but not the problem where switching to mobile network after a long wifi connection doesn't work until you turn on and off Airplane mode (interestingly, I was not affected by this with Vodafone in NZ, only with Sunrise in Switzerland). I'm not sure whether this will be fixed by the eventual Sense 2.1 release. The custom rom I'm using doesn't have the zoom out display of the home screens that I saw in the pure Android rom, and neither the ability to rotate the home screen, both of which were really cool, but again I don't know if they're in pure Android and not in Sense, or they were added on to the pure Android rom I tried, or if they will be in the final Sense release either.

The moral of the story for me is intense frustration. I don't want to support Sense and I would rather use pure Android, but it's really not as nice. I haven't looked into the licensing model of Android yet (and am writing this offline), but I assume it's some sort of BSD-ish license that means that HTC are not obliged to distribute their changes, which is incredibly annoying, both for me, and I guess any pure Android users who are aware that their phone OS is not as good as those of us with Sense.

The obvious solution is for me to start doing Android development, switch to pure Android, and write Open Source apps for the phone. It would take a lot of learning of new skills, but sounds like it might be fun, and then I would be in the happy position of being able to hack on the software that runs my phone, which sounds pretty ideal to me. So I'm thinking about it.

The state of public transport in New Zealand

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:33:29 +0200

As a person who has lived in Switzerland for a year, I have become extremely reliant on public transport. This means, that when I went back to New Zealand for 2 months over summer, I was horrified at the stark contrast between the two countries, and as a result, have become rather outspoken and opinionated on the subject (surprise!)

There are two main problems, as I see it, with public transport in New Zealand. For the purposes of this blog post I am purely going to talk about commuter public transport in Wellington, not intercity transport, which is so bad it's almost non existent.

The two main problems are:

1. The public transport system is substandard
2. As a result, people don't take it, which makes it less likely to receive much improvement.

Obviously, this is a circular problem. The worse it is, the less people will use it, the less money will be spent on it, and so on forever.

So let's examine the first point in further detail.

Why do I think the public transport system is so bad? Well first, I must of course reiterate that I have been living in Switzerland, which has an exemplary public transport system. But even so, I think that Wellington's system is appalling. Here are some of the high (low) lights:

Lack of integrated ticketing.

I need a separate ticket for the bus, train and cable car. Yes, there is the snapper card now, which can be used on all the different buses. Can you use it on the trains? I don't think so but I could be wrong. Certainly you need a separate multi card or prepay card or whatever on the cable car. I didn't try to take any boats while I was in Wellington, but I doubt that is integrated as well. I know that ticket integration is a hard problem to solve, but the fact that other cities have integrated ticketing means that it's not insurmountable.

Why does this matter? People are less likely to take public transport if they have to remember to carry multiple different cards with them, or have to buy a ticket each time they travel. In Switzerland, I am one of the lucky people to own a "GA" - this is a year pass for all trains, buses, trams, boats, in the whole country. Even before I had that, I had a "Halbtax" card, which got me reduced ticketing on all these services, even when I had to buy a ticket before I travelled.

Unreliability.

While there are certainly some good bus routes in Wellington, the majority are extremely unreliable. This is not even to touch on the trains, which are in an awful state (I was stuck in Tawa (Tawa!!) for two hours on a Wednesday night until a kind soul drove me back to Wellington). The timetables are frequently laughable. I remember getting on a half hour service to Gracefield a few years ago, which had come 25 minutes late, and I asked the driver whether he was 25 minutes late or 5 minutes early, and he didn't know. He literally didn't know what route he was supposed to be on, but was just driving in a circle while his shift was on.

Aside from the unreliability of the timetables, I could also complain about the infrequency of the buses. The number 20, for example, finishes very early during the week. I have become quite used to buses and trams coming every 5-15 minutes, so a half hour service seems extremely long to me.

Car culture.

This is really the killer for me, and the hardest to combat. I really think in New Zealand, the car is still seen as a status symbol by many people, and public transport is seen as something for the lower classes. I believe this comes from an American influence actually. I was waiting for a bus in rush hour traffic in Kelburn to go into Wellington, watching car after car drive past with a single person in it, only to get on the bus when it (finally) arrived, to find it almost empty, with only 4 other people on it.

Before I moved to Switzerland, I was completely against the segregation of classes in public transport, but I have come around to believe that it's actually a positive thing. We have a first class and second class system on the trains here - so people that want their status symbol can still travel first class, and everyone else who doesn't care (and doesn't want to spend extra money on it) walks a bit further down the train to the start of the second class carriages, and pays less. It gets the status symbol people out of their cars and into public transport, and helps subsidise it for the rest of us.

I still feel a deep love for New Zealand, and Wellington in particular, but I find this issue so depressing. I wish that New Zealand was being more forward thinking on sustainable (or at least, less unsustainable) transport, and investing in public transport infrastructure, instead of building more roads for more cars. I hate to see the country I love so much falling further and further behind in this area.

ANZAC day

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 09:20:51 +0200

Living in Switzerland, I would have thought ANZAC day would pass rather unceremoniously, but in fact I attended an ANZAC day BBQ at Lake Zurich yesterday, which was actually really good - I always underestimate how relieving it is to hear familiar accents amongst other things.

However, the most poignant thing for me about this ANZAC day was this poem I found over on Tumeke, by James K. Baxter:

The Gunner's Lament

A Maori gunner lay dying
In a paddyfield north of Saigon,
And he said to his pakeha cobber,
"I reckon I've had it, man!

'And if I could fly like a bird
To my old granny's whare
A truck and a winch would never drag
Me back to the Army.

'A coat and a cap and a well-paid job
Looked better than shovelling metal,
And they told me that Te Rauparaha
Would have fought in the Vietnam battle.

'On my last leave the town swung round
Like a bucket full of eels.
The girls liked the uniform
And I liked the girls.

'Like a bullock to the abattoirs
In the name of liberty
They flew me with a hangover
Across the Tasman Sea,

'And what I found in Vietnam
Was mud and blood and fire,
With the Yanks and the Reds taking turns
At murdering the poor.

'And I saw the reason for it
In a Viet Cong's blazing eyes -
We fought for the crops of kumara
And they are fighting for the rice.

'So go tell my sweetheart
To get another boy
Who'll cuddle her and marry her
And laugh when the bugles blow,

'And tell my youngest brother
He can have my shotgun
To fire at the ducks on the big lagoon,
But not to aim it at a man,

'And tell my granny to wear black
And carry a willow leaf,
Because the kid she kept from the cold
Has eaten a dead man's loaf.

'And go and tell Keith Holyoake
Sitting in Wellington,
However long he scrubs his hands
He'll never get them clean.'

James K Baxter
1965

Recent activities of Liipers in the Moodle Community

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:49:07 +0100

In December last year, two Liip employees Brian King & I (Penny Leach) went to the Czech Republic for a week, for the first ever concentrated Moodle Developer Conference. There were 16 attendees from around the world, participating in an intense week of discussion about the upcoming Moodle 2.0 release, with a lot of decisions being made and work being planned. The session notes are now online.

After that, I had a 6 week secondment to Moodle HQ, working on improving the Moodle Networking feature for Moodle 2.0. This was my second secondment to Moodle HQ, the first was in 2008, to work on the Portfolio API. Moodle HQ is based in Perth Australia, but there are employees working all around the world in different timezones, so communication largely happens on our jabber development chat, and bug tracker, with the occasional skype video chat.

The first step was to evaluate the current state of MNet, which was added to Moodle 1.8, but needed a lot of work to bring it up to Moodle 2.0 compliance. I created a metabug with a number of subtasks representing the different areas that need work, and then linked all the existing MNet bugs to those. Then I created a whole lot more bugs for a lot of refactoring that needed to happen. Then I rolled up my sleeves and started work. I closed many bugs, some of which affected the stable 1.9 version of Moodle as well, and will be in the next stable point release.

Unfortunately there was more needing to be done than I had time to do, but MNet is now in a much better state to be able to be maintained by more people. I will be doing a handover meeting with David Mudrák soon, and also of course continue to help with bug triage and fixing during the Moodle 2.0 beta period.

Technically, I was tracking Moodle cvs with git, making branches for each bug I was working on, committing to git and then eventually rebasing and using git-cvsexportcommit to land the work into the relevant Moodle branch. This is a workflow that David has recently described in more detail, and works very well for me, a long time thoroughly convinced git user.

Working with Moodle HQ directly is always a great experience, although doing it in a European timezone, as I did in 2008, works better than doing it from New Zealand, which is where I was this time. Even so, I had as always great support from the other core team, testing and doing code review. I hope MNet users will be happy with the improvements in Moodle 2.0.

[lazyweb] searching for a new blogging platform

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:58:53 +0100

Once again, the frequency of my blogging has become worse than erratic, and I largely blame this on my increasing distaste for both the aesthetic of my blog (which I have ideas about fixing), and the frustration of not being able to use my normal workflow to publish.

I am using Serendipity, a PHP blogging system, which is very good, but forces a web-based administrative interface. I would ideally be able to send email to a server and have it publish new entries for me. It should read the headers of the email for publication date and subject, the body of the email for the content of the post, and strip out both normal signatures and gpg signatures, and parse a line like tags: foo, bar, baz and tag entries with them.

I could certainly hack this into Serendipity, but I would really rather not.

I would like the software to be able to handle things like publishing the last n images from flickr, the last n tweets/identi.ca updates, etc, as well as blogish posts, longer articles and general content. I guess this places it as a combination of a CMS and Blogging tool. The email interface should be able to tell the difference between a new article and a new post, using something like type: blog or type: article, similar to the tagging instruction.

It has to be themable obviously, and finally, the most interesting point is that I want it to be written in a language I don't know, so that if I want to hack on it I have opportunity to learn something new. I think at this point my preference would be Python.

So dear lazyweb: do you have any suggestions for me?

Edit: 2 new requirements: the incoming mail handler should be able to check a gpg signature, and only import mail that has been signed by me. The UI should not require JS and instead use progressive enhancement techniques.

The world is bright grey

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:19:22 +0200

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:

Do I want to be a feminist anymore?

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 17:32:05 +0200

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.

mahara stand at swiss open expo

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:50:28 +0200

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!

migrating my homedirectory from one repo to many

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 07:22:42 +0200

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.

LEAP2A support coming soon to a Moodle near you!

penny@she.geek.nz (Penny) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:25:05 +0200

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:

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